Some Notes on Anne Daems
Michael Tarantino
I. An Empty Shopping Basket House # 297C. A slanting roof, a door, a light, two windows, one of which is only partially visible. An identical house next door, from which we can presume that the fragment in the left hand corner of the frame is yet a third house made from the same mold. One could go on describing and imagining this scene:
How many other houses are there?
Is the bush/tree in front of 207C in front of every other house?
What is the black line running along the side of the house?
Why does the grass look so scrubby? Was it put down as pieces of turf?
And yet, when one is through enumerating all of these mundane details, one’s attention returns to the object just to the right of the door: an empty shopping basket. Was it stolen from the local supermarket? Is it used over and over again for the same purpose…..like transporting a three-legged dog? Why is it parked so efficiently next to the door? Why does it disturb our sense of equilibrium in this photograph?
II. Describing Absence
A drawing shows two ties hovering over two glasses of beer. One tie is pointed at the bottom and has spots. The other is squared at the bottom and is plain. The title of the drawing is “Two businessmen having a few beers.”
Descriptive, simple, a direct relationship between what is seen and what is written down. And yet, most of the scene is left out. For what we actually see could be described as “two ties floating above two glasses of beer”. We don’t see the businessmen. We don’t see them drinking. We make a leap of faith and can easily fill in the blank spaces. Just as we can imagine what that shopping cart is doing outside of 207C. What the artist describes is what is not there.
III. Snow
“The furthest point of abstruce virtuosity, perhaps, came in January, 1494 when, after a heavy snowfall in Florence, the Medicis commissioned Michelangelo to make a snowman. No record of it survives, but there is not a doubt that what they had was, as Vasari subsequently said, the ‘most beautiful snowman ever built’.” Anton Gill, “Il Gigante: Michelangelo, Florence and the David: 1492-1505”
He had been to visit a therapist. His nerves were shattered. As he let loose with a string of complaints and ailments, the doctor told him to close his eyes and to be quiet for two minutes. When the time had elapsed, she told him to think of a place in nature that he found relaxing, calm, comforting. And to think of a symbol that he could retrieve whenever he found himself in the midst of a whirlwind of stress and tension. Immediately, it came to him. Snow. Not only because it was pure, because he associated it with breathing fresh air, but because it was the perfect covering. All of the landscape, all of what he remembered from yesterday, covered in a white blanket when he drew apart the curtains in the morning. And, a few days later, it would be gone, like flicking the light switch on and off. He awoke from his reverie and went out into the rain. And was covered by the snow.
IV. The Lack of the Ordinary
There is an enigma that lies at the heart of Anne Daems’ work: the descrepency between what is shown and what is described. The photograph of the house and the shopping cart describes one kind of absence, which may be defined as narrative. The two ties described as men drinking represents another absence: the limits of representation and, at the same time, its infinite possibilities. Both---lack and excess---leave the viewer in a quandry. Where to go when the thing described is not the thing seen.
One finds this absence----which one can describe as a narrative freedom or as a straitjacket----in a variety of works. In another photograph, a group of people---seven of them---are standing at a traffic light, waiting to cross the street. One could describe the composition of the shot, the clothes that each person is wearing, the pattern of shadows on the street, etc. But that doesn’t seem to be the point. The point is why has this particular image been chosen as a moment of representation? On the surface, it is completely banal. We cannot imagine any kind of Hitchcockian scenario, for instance, such as a sniper picking off these pedestrians one by one. The image does not invite those kinds of leaps of faith. It merely invites a reflection on the image itself, on the notion of what is important and what is not.
Another drawing invites a different kind of response. A face without features is topped by straggly hair, falling down the side like haphazard pencil marks. The description is “grizzly hair”. Here, the lack of narrative purpose, the lack of completion is compounded by a pun. This pun is based upon a previous knowledge of the viewer, who immediately equates “grizzly hair” with “grizzly bear”. Translation: I woke up this morning and my hair was a mess. Again, we imagine a scenario which is barely (sic) traced by the artist. The play on words, the missing elements, the uncanny objects, the sense of time being stopped: all of these absences in Daem’s photographs and drawings become a magnet for the viewer’s imagination.
V. Blank
She was faced with a blank piece of paper. She could write. She could draw. She could watercolour. She could fold the paper up into a pattern. She could fold it into a ball and try to throw it into the trash can.
Finally, she took a pencil and made a mark on the page. It was a line, of sorts. Not straight, slightly curved. It was off-centered. It looked like a mistake. A rip in the page. A violation of the pure whiteness of the page. Like a hair on a newly cleaned bathroom sink. Like a body on a field of snow.
