In the room with Camus
Paulo Reis - 2008
“In your inner retreat, rejoice with him, for he is very close to you.” (St John of the Cross)
There are two Albert Camus; one is a poor and tuberculous pied-noir, born on November 7, 1913, in a small town in Argelia called Mondovi; the other one is the essayist, novelist, outstanding philosopher, dead on January 4, 1960, in a samall town in France called Villeblevin. Which one shall we choose? Both, for one would not exist without the other. It was this man bridging two cultures that stated once that “without culture and the relative freedom it assumes, society, no matter how perfect it may be, is nothing but a jungle. That is why all authentic creation is a gift for the future”. Thus lived the poor Albert that fighted against the bodily disease and for the fulfilling of spirit through reading. Thus died the awarded Camus – a stupid death on a road, three years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. Between birth and death, he practiced journalism, always in an audacious way. In 1940, already living in Paris, he joined the resistence against the German invasion, acting mostly in the newspaper Combat. In 1942 he is acclaimed with the novel The Stranger, an icon of existentialism, and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus. His next major work is the novel The Plague, published in 1947. Afterwards, he intensely devotes himself to theathre, writing The Misunderstanding; Caligula; The State of Siege; The Just Assassins – fundamental experiments for a philosophical theatre. In 1951 he publishes The Rebel, writes The Fall and the short stories from Exile and the Kingdom.
On the basis of his fictional and essayistic work is the reflection on the absurdity, with the concern for suicide, loneliness and death, steadily heading for hope and human solidarity as possible resolutions for the drama of the absurdity. On the other hand, his writing’s crystal-clear stylistic perfection and the sobriety of his novelistic inspiration contribute in a large measure to the effectiveness of his literary expression. Some of his books would be published after his death. Among them, the most peculiar is Voyage Journals, assembling together journalism and philosophical-anthropological essayism on a journey he made to Brazil. In a passage among a handful of short, acute and lapidary statements, he says: “my life in this country is the most important thing that happened to me in a considerable number of years. What a cruel land!” ... “No use for skyscrapers, they still haven’t won the spirit of the forest, the immensity, the melancholy. The sambas, the true ones, express better what I want to say”...
The beginning of the book is in itself an epiphany in which the writer tells the terrible attacks of sickness he felt while crossing the Atlantic from Marseille to Rio de Janeiro. “There is no homeland for who desperates, and as for me I know the sea precedes me and follows me, and my madness is always ready. Those who love each other and are set apart may live on their pain, yet this is not despair: they know love exists. That is why I suffer this exile with dry eyes. I still hope. There may come a day, at last...”, he wrote on the sense of feeling like an exiled man, or in an everlasting journey, crossing the Atlantic bringing with him the Mediterranean melancholy. In Brazil he saw candomblé, soccer, the modernist poets, children on the streets, prostitutes, and he hated the turistical side of Rio, with its ubiquitous Christ the Redeemer. He walked through Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and went as far as Porto Alegre, a city that has pervaded his memory. One only day – August 9, 1949 – was enough for him to outline observations such as “the light is beautiful... lack of air... the city is ugly... in spite of its five rivers...”
Almost fifty years have passed since Albert Camus’ visit to Porto Alegre, and now this visit is revisited by artist Karin Lambrecht (Porto Alegre, 1957) in an exhibition reviving the short time the essayist has been in the city. The artist shows an installation in which time – the essential matter that embodies Existentialism – also embodies the work of art. The environment is a small sleeping room – perhaps the very place where the writer may have written a few lines – in the form of a cross outlined on the floor, whose center is occupied by a bed and a table. This space without “true” walls is traversed by an intense blue light, reminding the observer the city’s sky (“a lumière est belle”, says Camus in a passage of his journals). Yet it also brings to mind that intense metaphysical blue which is present in Giotto’s skies, Cézanne’s and Matisse’s marines, Yves Klein’s infinity, being them all Mediterranean, just as Camus. The artist mixes the writer’s real existence with his work’s existential sense, evoking the accomplice sky of Meursault’s act in The Stranger, or even the writer’s childhood in a distant Algery, by means of a projection. There is a copious amount of blue matter, such as lead linen and overseas satin, besides other cobalt-blue materials. These are for Karin “like a cluster of planes from an unpainted painting. In an equation painting is body and light = matter + light...” In the general space, almost in half-light, shines a beam of light on Camus’ handwriting.
In this installation, Karin Lambrecht embodies all of Albert Camus’ tension as a sharp-eyed traveller, enclosed in this metaphysical space, meditating about a city where the light is the only thing he finds beautiful. It would fail to refer to Bill Viola’s work Room for St. John of the Cross (1983). In it, the videoartist creates a space-time work. The mystical St. John of the Cross is forced to inhabit a cubicle where he can’t stand up, with no more than a table, a jug and a glass of water. In such a place, he writes Dark Night of the Soul (1578), the beautiful poem on “enduring and later dying”. In Bill Viola’s environment, besides these objects there is a small video screen showing the image of a mountain and the sound of the wind only. Behind this box-dwelling-prison one sees the image of the same mountain projected in a wide size, creating a dichotomy of the space as it was lived and seen, a phenomenology between the eye and the spirit. With this work, Bill Viola inaugurates his aesthetical-religious period, recreating central works of the history of Western painting. Karin Lambrecht’s room is impregnated of Albert Camus’ existence, just as Bill Viola’s is impregnated of St John of the Cross – two mystical writers that knew how to rejoice in their inner retreats. In the room with Camus, by Karin Lambrecht, is to be in front of the existential and conceptual duality of a work of art.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
Paulo Reis - 2008
“In your inner retreat, rejoice with him, for he is very close to you.” (St John of the Cross)
There are two Albert Camus; one is a poor and tuberculous pied-noir, born on November 7, 1913, in a small town in Argelia called Mondovi; the other one is the essayist, novelist, outstanding philosopher, dead on January 4, 1960, in a samall town in France called Villeblevin. Which one shall we choose? Both, for one would not exist without the other. It was this man bridging two cultures that stated once that “without culture and the relative freedom it assumes, society, no matter how perfect it may be, is nothing but a jungle. That is why all authentic creation is a gift for the future”. Thus lived the poor Albert that fighted against the bodily disease and for the fulfilling of spirit through reading. Thus died the awarded Camus – a stupid death on a road, three years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. Between birth and death, he practiced journalism, always in an audacious way. In 1940, already living in Paris, he joined the resistence against the German invasion, acting mostly in the newspaper Combat. In 1942 he is acclaimed with the novel The Stranger, an icon of existentialism, and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus. His next major work is the novel The Plague, published in 1947. Afterwards, he intensely devotes himself to theathre, writing The Misunderstanding; Caligula; The State of Siege; The Just Assassins – fundamental experiments for a philosophical theatre. In 1951 he publishes The Rebel, writes The Fall and the short stories from Exile and the Kingdom.
On the basis of his fictional and essayistic work is the reflection on the absurdity, with the concern for suicide, loneliness and death, steadily heading for hope and human solidarity as possible resolutions for the drama of the absurdity. On the other hand, his writing’s crystal-clear stylistic perfection and the sobriety of his novelistic inspiration contribute in a large measure to the effectiveness of his literary expression. Some of his books would be published after his death. Among them, the most peculiar is Voyage Journals, assembling together journalism and philosophical-anthropological essayism on a journey he made to Brazil. In a passage among a handful of short, acute and lapidary statements, he says: “my life in this country is the most important thing that happened to me in a considerable number of years. What a cruel land!” ... “No use for skyscrapers, they still haven’t won the spirit of the forest, the immensity, the melancholy. The sambas, the true ones, express better what I want to say”...
The beginning of the book is in itself an epiphany in which the writer tells the terrible attacks of sickness he felt while crossing the Atlantic from Marseille to Rio de Janeiro. “There is no homeland for who desperates, and as for me I know the sea precedes me and follows me, and my madness is always ready. Those who love each other and are set apart may live on their pain, yet this is not despair: they know love exists. That is why I suffer this exile with dry eyes. I still hope. There may come a day, at last...”, he wrote on the sense of feeling like an exiled man, or in an everlasting journey, crossing the Atlantic bringing with him the Mediterranean melancholy. In Brazil he saw candomblé, soccer, the modernist poets, children on the streets, prostitutes, and he hated the turistical side of Rio, with its ubiquitous Christ the Redeemer. He walked through Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and went as far as Porto Alegre, a city that has pervaded his memory. One only day – August 9, 1949 – was enough for him to outline observations such as “the light is beautiful... lack of air... the city is ugly... in spite of its five rivers...”
Almost fifty years have passed since Albert Camus’ visit to Porto Alegre, and now this visit is revisited by artist Karin Lambrecht (Porto Alegre, 1957) in an exhibition reviving the short time the essayist has been in the city. The artist shows an installation in which time – the essential matter that embodies Existentialism – also embodies the work of art. The environment is a small sleeping room – perhaps the very place where the writer may have written a few lines – in the form of a cross outlined on the floor, whose center is occupied by a bed and a table. This space without “true” walls is traversed by an intense blue light, reminding the observer the city’s sky (“a lumière est belle”, says Camus in a passage of his journals). Yet it also brings to mind that intense metaphysical blue which is present in Giotto’s skies, Cézanne’s and Matisse’s marines, Yves Klein’s infinity, being them all Mediterranean, just as Camus. The artist mixes the writer’s real existence with his work’s existential sense, evoking the accomplice sky of Meursault’s act in The Stranger, or even the writer’s childhood in a distant Algery, by means of a projection. There is a copious amount of blue matter, such as lead linen and overseas satin, besides other cobalt-blue materials. These are for Karin “like a cluster of planes from an unpainted painting. In an equation painting is body and light = matter + light...” In the general space, almost in half-light, shines a beam of light on Camus’ handwriting.
In this installation, Karin Lambrecht embodies all of Albert Camus’ tension as a sharp-eyed traveller, enclosed in this metaphysical space, meditating about a city where the light is the only thing he finds beautiful. It would fail to refer to Bill Viola’s work Room for St. John of the Cross (1983). In it, the videoartist creates a space-time work. The mystical St. John of the Cross is forced to inhabit a cubicle where he can’t stand up, with no more than a table, a jug and a glass of water. In such a place, he writes Dark Night of the Soul (1578), the beautiful poem on “enduring and later dying”. In Bill Viola’s environment, besides these objects there is a small video screen showing the image of a mountain and the sound of the wind only. Behind this box-dwelling-prison one sees the image of the same mountain projected in a wide size, creating a dichotomy of the space as it was lived and seen, a phenomenology between the eye and the spirit. With this work, Bill Viola inaugurates his aesthetical-religious period, recreating central works of the history of Western painting. Karin Lambrecht’s room is impregnated of Albert Camus’ existence, just as Bill Viola’s is impregnated of St John of the Cross – two mystical writers that knew how to rejoice in their inner retreats. In the room with Camus, by Karin Lambrecht, is to be in front of the existential and conceptual duality of a work of art.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
