FIONA CONNOR, Drawing something under itself —2023— Düsseldorf, Germany

prova d’orchestra – text: rosanna albertini

photo credits: Cedric Mussano

Which one is the perfect verbal dress for Fiona Connor’ art pieces is almost impossible to say. I stick to my experience. She recently installed at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, five bodies of work. On February 20th she presented the whole project in a lecture at Art Center, Los Angeles. The event was memorable for unexpected reasons: her words could be counted, che le parole tue sian conte, we say in ancient Italian to avoid long explanations that spread from the lips like broth spilled on the tablecloth, sbrodolate. That evening, Fiona Connor counted her words, surprisingly and wittingly, wissentlich. The wittiest art speech possible. 

Intermittently, she threw little fistful of words in the air, projected plenty of photographic images and the video images of the Continuous Sidewalk, (her previous piece in Los Angeles). Pausing the show four times like a music conductor, she asked some students to read the words of apprentices from a German school of construction in Düsseldorf, those who had built the five unfinished squared constructions that seem to grow from the Kunstverein’s floor like ideas frozen in geometry. 

To call them unfinished is arbitrary. Maybe they are what they must be: a designed ridge, a landscape of the mind? Along with the hooks on the wall and the shoes on the floor (cast metal painted black, too rigid to walk away) the brick open cubes do not move. I’m comparing them to Giacometti’s heavy feet, the only part of the human body bringing safety and balance to his sculptures. The only one that is not gradually destroyed. Would the open cubes be the physical figure of the major, steady ridge in Connor’s mind? 

Hung on the hooks, invisible underneath her jacket, hides the story of Fiona’s father going to Germany in the mid 70’s to compare European to New Zealand modes of construction, especially how to organize the various elements of making buildings. True enough, the artist is obsessed by materials and process details no less than her father. I saw his eyes in a photo of that time: an intent look lit from inside, a contained  interior smile I observed many times in Fiona’s eyes when conceiving a project.  But honestly, to unveil such sparkle would risk to push the viewers toward a cause-effect logic: she made the ridge because… I would be the first screaming NOOOOO. This is history, art is something else.

An absolute Truth is in each art piece. And yet, unlike a flower we pick up breaking the stem, Truth, “like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery.’ JOSEPH CONRAD, Lord Jim.

One should sit on them and think. Both on the words and on the bricks.  It goes with the title of Connor’s piece: Drawing something under itself, 2023. 

The most movable component of the Düsseldorf Installation is the artist herself: she spent the whole time of the exhibition going every morning into the lofty room, alone, looking at the ceiling that opens in stripes to the sky, moving the chairs around, then sitting on one or more than one and drawing small imperfections of the wooden boxes, other chairs, details, whatever her eyes wanted to pause on. Consequence: the frenzy and unrest in her own mind, helped by skilled hands, changed every day the sculptural configuration of the show. The installation is many views, and a mixture of different, implicit moments or decisions. Fiona seems to question her own process at every day. My impression, or something odd she said in her lecture (—her words from my notes on paper): “the metal chairs belong to the Kunstverein, they were available. Which is a failure, obviously.” “The fonts of the new alphabeth with a different style for each character were one of the five bodies of work. The public used the ink blocks to make posters. They were successful, another failure.” 

The artist covered with a nervous little laugh her secret irritation in front of the most obvious usage of her piece. Silent still clouds her mind obnubilating a simple contentment. 

In my view Fiona Connor made in Düsseldorf the most important piece of her journey as an artist. I tried to look at the whole process simultaneously in my mind, so I could see the images all together at the same time, not one after the other. A beautiful carousel appeared where the center is displaced horizontally —and why not, non-Euclidean geometries have existed since the 19th century—, the chairs are skinny horses incapable to trot having the four legs blocked in their industrial shape. They are meubles, mobili, furnitures made to be moved by somebody. And the artist does it in many ways: transporting them, sitting on them and drawing them. The drawings, afterwards, sit as well on the chairs and stay. Lighter, black and white, they can pretend to be butterflies, or graphic scores of a silent music.

 ‘Drawing’ is the first word of the title. I wonder: was the artist playing the conceptual symphony to the point she felt expropriated, as a person looking down at the implacable order of inanimate object, lifeless? To the point she needs to put her hands at work, the black and white papers become more and more convinced, rubbed, full of de-signs, as if “massaged” (her word) by the graphite.

Here, forgive me, I must distinguish ‘concept’ from ‘thinking.’ To think is to let the world flow into our self, and respond by uncertainty, feeling the borders between self and non-self as a buffer zone. Both influencing each other. (Forget quantum mechanics, let’s stay in the art world). Concept is grabbing, appropriation. Here the artist lets the presence of the damned chairs influence her hands. The act of drawing might be the buffer zone. I’m not attributing to the artist this idea, which is only a vague impression, a questioning totally mine.

“Hang ideas!  —always Joseph tormenting me— They are tramps, vagabonds,  knocking at the back of your mind, each taking a little of your substance,  each carrying away some crumbs of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy.” (Lord Jim)

Therefore Fiona Connor set on her own art piece. 

In 2017 she wrote about an artist she admires that she was “mapping the world, being out there exploring at her modus operandi, choosing a little thing  to help make sense of it.” Could these words be the present top of her awareness?  Like a forefinger pointing at the 2023 Drawing something under itself. Hard work, today, to map a world technologically altered, produced and reproduced as if the easy way was universal. Not so in this case. The crime is personal, the absence of the last word is beautiful.   

Allan Kaprow would praise this piece as lifelike art, not just intellectually, as a moment of experience only accidentally in a Kunstverein. 1979, more than forty years ago. Fiona Connor, today, has been brave enough to expose the low and high ebb of her intent in the questionable lack of a final definition for her piece.

Art is not a perfect myth anymore, nor a symbol. These reassuring words, just words, only verbal emissions would replace with a caricature the complexity of the living. Art can be unaccomplished and cracked and beautiful like the secret life of each human. 

A hundred years ago, a blur in Robert Musil’s notebooks: “…apparently a world in itself, the world of beauty is nonetheless incomplete, marked off, and secretly negative.” … “Nonetheless, art as a form is probably a special limiting and grouping of her contents of ordinary life, but remains within its compass.”

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