Breath in, Breath out
in The Russel Chantry, Lothar Götz/Duncan Grant
In the recent past I was sitting in a field in Norfolk with a friend. We were watching the sunset and the colour scheme, designed by artist James Turrell, slowly shifting the Palladian architecture of Houghton hall through a cycle of L.A. pinks and yellows.
The impressive technical light set up, falsifying the warm L.A. four o’clock light onto the façade, itself referencing architectural styles from the European continent, seemed a pertinent convergence of times and spaces.
The conversation turned to how art functions, its use. My friend said something that has resonated with me since. ‘Art is a breath.’ As a Curator in a public institution, a large part of my relationship to art is with its display and interpretation, I work with art all day and it is a huge part of my life, but a breath? What did this mean?
We are constantly encouraged to discuss art and creativity in terms of its ‘use,’ it’s relation to society, health, politics and economics; to force it into the realms of the social sciences or philosophy. Something easily measureable but we all know the emotional or physical response to great art is far more complex than that.
I started to think about breath, or breathing. The process, we inhale an invisible substance, there is a transformation by osmosis, we take oxygen from the air and replace it with carbon dioxide, we breathe out and life is sustained.
Breathing out we create waves that can reflect and bounce from their surroundings. This can create sound, speech, singing, it can communicate. This all happens almost invisibly unless we are aware enough to pick up on the slight signs, the chest rising, or we place an obstruction in the way such as glass which makes the breath visible.
I then started to consider breathing more esoterically, a breath, or breathing is universal, automatic, when you concentrate on breathing it can be meditative or a sign of trouble. But in language, to take a breath is to stop, to relax, to focus, to be given life. When things get too much you are told to take a breather, to calm and focus. A breath of fresh air is a new start, a new way of thinking. So it struck me what could be more vital, more important than a breath. This all came back to me when thinking about the work of Lothar Götz.
Much has been written about Lothar’s work in relation to his interest in Palladian architecture, porticos, and wall coverings.One might say there is a connection between Turrell projecting lighting onto the architecture, using its columns and domes and Götz working from architectural spaces, doorways and features to create his colourful painted interventions. Yet for me the real question was how did Lothar’s artwork, why did it excite me?
I decided to use my own personal understanding of this notion of art as a breath to discuss Lothar Götz’s practice.I know this is rather esoteric and removed from the apparent objectiveness of art history, but for me this more poetic understanding only does more justice to a series of works which bring up pertinent questions for how we relate to art. Using breathing and breath as an analogy allows me to more easily describe the way in which this work functions.
The project we presented to Lothar was that of The Russell Chantry. A small, private chapel located close to the Choir in Lincoln Cathedral.Since 1959 this has had three walls adorned with a Mural by Duncan Grant depicting St. Blaise the Patron Saint of wool workers. We rebuilt a set of this chapel in the gallery and invited Lothar to produce a new mural for this new space. The museum setting highlighting the many readings of the Chantry space being both private and public, sacred and secular. Personally the church and the Gallery have often had the same effect on me. The cultural importance placed on the spaces create a situation whereby I am made ever more aware of my own mortality. As you walk round both spaces, which are instilled with the expectation of contemplation I instantly become aware of every noise of my shoes, ruffle of my clothing and noise of inhaling and exhaling.
It could be said that both the sacred space of the chapel and the secular space of the gallery/museum inherently have a relationship to the act of breathing. Sacred spaces are covered in images of Jesus on the cross, the ultimate symbol of the final breath, which is then instilled with the story of the resurrection, maybe the most iconic instance of the first breath. But also the sacred space is a space of contrast, between life and death, known and unknowns, sound and silence, inhaling and exhaling. The spaces are either silent or personal, assisting your own inner reflection or filled with singing cantation and oratory, controlled forms of breathing, public displays of spirituality. The Gallery in the same way encourages silent interaction or public oratory, only in recent years has the idea of discussions entered this space.
The inherent activity of the museum is the prevention of decay, the keeping in stasis of objects which once belonged in the world of the living. It can be said that an object in use breathes and lives. Objects in the museum are placed on life support. Their breath is held.
Lothar was very aware of this when approaching the project; he was bought up in a Catholic family and talks of a childhood staring at the baroque ceilings of churches, an experience that has instilled in him a heightened sense of spirituality, and the idea of architectural spaces having connotations beyond our scientific understanding of the world.
Lothar was then taught and influenced by a generation of German post war artists, for who abstraction was the only mode of painting that was untainted by recent German history.
Representation was inextricably linked with notions of acceptable,versus degenerative art during the 3rd Reich, who used representation, especially portraiture to project an imagined and troubling future, rather than representing the present.
Artists such as Josef and Anni Albers, and Gerhard Merz, who taught and influenced Lothar in Düsseldorf , were just a few of a wide group of German artists whose abstraction has an inherent relationship to the architectural space and to the body. Artists for whom abstraction was a sharp intake of breath, a gulp for air in comparison to the recent suffocation of the war.
Lothar has a strong affiliation with the approach; he talks of never being interested in representation. At least not in the notion of creating an ‘image’, although interested in architecture from youth, he never wanted to draw an image of the architecture, or of the space but to present how it made him feel, what a building said, how it breathed. A large traditional building may find its language in a colour or a shape as opposed to a floor plan.
Lothar’s work is problematic. They are readily seen as abstract, as in that they do not set out to obviously represent something, but to the artist clearly represent either spaces or characters and personalities. Many of the wall drawings take as their starting points the architectural space in which they are sited. The wall works often playing off of the architectural features and personality of the space. In this way the works are not abstractions at all, but resoundingly based in and of the world. This relationship to the space in which the work is sited jars against traditional histories of wall coverings, which either aim to decorate or adorn,magnify or reduce the natural form of the room, or as in representational mural painting, remove the room altogether to present a different reality entirely.
Lothar in contrast, draws from the space something which is present but unseen, more akin to a spiritual understanding of a space.So when Lothar started this project he approached it as he has many projects before, he shied away from room plans and architectural models,and was insistent on being in the physical space before he could start to design and work on the mural. In this case, this meant time in the original Chapel.
Over a period of days Lothar sits and ‘breathes’ in the space, taking in the architectural motifs, the geometries and the inconsistencies. As in eastern spirituality we are taught that we can become enlightened through meditation, something ‘other’ can become apparent through slowing down and concentrating on the self, often starting with attention to breath.
Lothar seems to meditate within these spaces, focusing on the space in and of itself.
Lothar talks of the spaces showing him the colours and shapes that will come to fill them. The Artist breaths in, and in a process close to osmosis Lothar picks up the features of the room and translates them into colours, shapes and patterns. Oxygen becomes dioxides. The particles shift into something completely different but have the ingredients of their original concoction.
The process is internal and ungraspable in logical terms. Even though the works will utilise architectural proportions and details such as lights and electrical fixings, it is less a case of these informing the works, but more Lothar’s ability to feel the space, to draw out the invisible patterns and forms the architectural space consists of. The geometric patterns and shapes he adorns the space with display a part of the room we were unaware of, but was always present.
When a choir enters a space, takes a breath and sings we become aware of the acoustics and timbre of the room through the introduction of sound. Often the architecture of the space can be responsible for the sound we here as much as the singer. It is a combination of them both, which presents to us the quality of the sound.
Lothar allows spaces to sing, to display to us their timbres, resonances,through colour not sound.
Like an acoustician being able to hear the timbre of the room before the choir has sung, Lothar can read the spaces inherent personality and makes it visible. He breathes colour into the space and the space, along with the colour produces the work concurrently. One does not lead nor overpower, as with the choir and the room, both are integral to the final outcome.
This is where I feel Lothar differs so greatly from Turrell and the beginning of the text. Turrell was simply lighting the architecture, highlighting,or pointing it out. As if he was taking his breath and breathing onto a glass to make it visible for us all to see, this was an illustration making the overlooked visible through colour.
Lothar on the other hand goes further, he takes a deep breath and projects, sings into the space, using colour, architecture and the innate resonance of the room to transform all the elements together, when you enter the work you can still here the highest notes ringing as in the best concert halls.
Most excitingly he has removed the life support from our museum space, he has taken the architecture of the past and allowed us to hear its voice today, and like all the best artists, invites us to breathe deep and sing along.