ANSUYA BLOM
Book Review for Contemporary Visual Arts no.30 2000
LET ME SEE IF THIS BE REAL
NAi Rotterdam, 1999.
ISBN 90-5662-137-8
http://www.galerievangelder.com/artists/blom2.html
Published in the Netherlands to accompany an exhibition, this is an English-language book. In a large, nearly square format, with its red binding and neat lettering, it has a formal, textbook-like feel, yet the contents, aside from the meticulous details of exhibitions and bibliography, are far from that: Ansuya Blom’s work slithers from the unconscious. The book is divided into several sections, each titled to reflect a recurring theme; there’s also an interview, and a final section taken from a recent film. Blom has made films from early in her career, and these pop up in film festivals and various screenings (recently at MoMA in New York) sometimes separated from her other work in drawing painting and sculpture. This film sensibility is reflected in the book’s design: installation shots (mostly taken from her Ikon Gallery show in 1994, her first in the UK) have been computer-altered (I think) to form ghostly and cinematic images (they remind me of seeing a large movie screen from very close) each spread over two pages and carrying a title to the next section of the book. Each section is then closed by a quoted text.
The format “in conversation with” is a bit of a bastard: by which I mean it’s the uncertain progeny of TV and text. Though I’ve used the device myself, I do wonder whether readers really prefer a unified text - a constructed monologue by the artist, or an essay by someone else - albeit both are likely to be derived from a conversation. Regardless of that, Blom says a number of interesting things here in the course of her talk with Stuart Morgan, both about her own work and about being an artist in a more general sense.
Blom makes beautiful yet disturbing work. Her drawing line evinces a kind of blind certainty - wandering yet knowing where it’s going, often with an obsessive repetition, lines being re-drawn, over and over. Thus simple domestic structures (a chair, a bed) or any kind of initiating image for that matter, receive a going-over, a repeating of line or maybe a flow of ink, which become engulfing: in The Secret Life series, for example, structures (rooms, furniture) are created by lines burnt on to the paper but these are all but swamped by drawn lines like tresses of hair. “Heart, liver, brains, kidney … it’s about secret things, as in Woyzeck” - so Blom says of her drawings which include images what Morgan likes to call “offal”… There’s an aura of expressionism in her work without any steaming dish of personal trouble being brought too obviously to the viewer’s table.
We need always to be reminding ourselves how approximate “reproduction” is: I found myself wanting to experience the work in reality. Wanting the chance for close scrutiny of a surface, seeing how marks are made … Blom herself says “I like close-ups.” So it’s necessary here just to let the images on the page work as they are. There’s a cross-referencing to enjoy, a successful unification, between photography design and text; in addition, Blom generously pulls in quotations - both visual and textual - from things outside her own work: because she likes them, because they illuminate.
Dreams are clearly involved here, and it’s noteworthy that the artist quotes from songs derived from Native American sources (one of which supplies the title of the whole book.) There’s a feeling in her work, it seems to me, that a dream is a physical thing; perhaps that “bad thoughts” might be a physical thing, that “madness” might be tackled by taking a knife to the sufferer. Alternatively, he might be worshipped. Victim or shaman: it could go either way. The final section of the book carries text from a 48′ film. The words are laid over a series of film stills. Reminders of Beckett here, and James Joyce; the suggestions of psychiatric pathology (obsession, paranoia, retreat into isolation) seem a little odd - I’m less sure here quite where the artist is , but perhaps that’s because I’m deprived of the filmic narrative. It’s a well-sustained piece of writing nonetheless. Writing is clearly a significant part of Blom’s practice, and words feature in many drawings and paintings. All in all, this book is a good hybrid, a good trinity - a catalogue, a book created by an artist, a book about an artist. In her mid-40’s now, Ansuya Blom deserves this fine publication; it will widen the audience for her work.