Ars Electronica in early September — heavy rain pounding the expanse of sand dumped on the cobblestones of the Pfarrplatz.

A makeshift beach, then, but more to the point an art installation, easily identified as such by its sheer ridiculousness: for in addition to the wet sand, there were dripping sun umbrellas, drenched beach chairs, and frequently malfunctioning electronics — an art gesture born of the main conceit (hardly new) of the Second City exhibition, which was the merging of the physical with the virtual world, demonstrated here by the online replication of the beach in Second Life.

The exhibition, which started in the Pfarrplatz square and ran up two narrow streets adjoining it, was to have Pedestrian projected on the pavement both at the start and the end of this route, and Arrival illuminating a desktop inside a small office near the end of the route. Alas when we’d given permission for these two works to be featured there, I had no premonition either that the context would be so silly and heavy-handed or that the actual installation of the work would be so incompetent. For, in the event, the festival was unable to get either work up in time for opening night, and Pedestrian wasn’t to be seen even by the third night, at which point I quitted the festival in disgust and returned to New York.

But all this didn’t occur before I’d had a chance to explore Linz extensively and even to happen upon a profound and heart-rending art experience nearby. So please read on; things will gradually look up. But not right away.

 

Science experiments

Three blocks from the Pfarrplatz is The OK Center museum, where this year’s CyberArts prize winners were displayed far more handsomely than were the public artworks outdoors. There the festival showed a decided predelection for biologically inspired art, or at least the idea of it. The main winner in the hybrid category was an Australian “artistic laboratory” called SymbioticA, but I couldn’t tell (either by looking or by reading) whether they had an actual artwork on display (perhaps the test-tubes hanging from the ceiling in one gallery were theirs, but I didn’t think so); that left only the extravagant, academic, inter-disciplinary claims of their website to go by. Fortunately the other winners did have artworks that you could examine, many of which took the form of science experiments framed as art (a few tongue-in-cheek, but the majority very much in earnest).

But while you could indeed see such works, still you largely had to take the artists’ words for what you saw — on faith, really — since these kinds of pieces don’t prove themselves in your perceptual experience of them. For instance, the translucent pock-marked asteroid-like sculpture in a room installation called Biological Habitat: Breeding Spaces Technology, Made in Space was a pleasing piece to the eye, but the artist Zbigniew Oksiuta’s notes on its principles went far beyond what the eye could see:

1. Creation of spatial forms in the state of weightlessness — isopycnic systems. 2. Use of biological polymers as construction material — spatium gelatum. 3. Generation of forms as a pneu-biological containment.

And so on. This I found in the neutral tone of the gallery hand-out, where presumably the curator paraphrased the artist. But above the gallery door there was also a more bombastic text direct from the artist himself, announcing his intention to create radical new lifeforms by propelling DNA into the weightlessness of space. This text took the regrettable form of a single-line video crawl, a most uncongenial way of reading, better for headlines or slogans than for reasoned arguments — which signified to me at least, as I stood there peering up at it, that it wasn’t meant to be read that closely or in its entirety.

(I don’t mean to imply that artworks should remain pure of accompanying texts; indeed, I think the authorship of these really ought to be up to the artist rather than the curator. I remember years ago encountering Robert Smithson’s gallery installations of the Site/Non-site series, and of course my experience of them depended heavily on my having read the amazing essays he’d written, especially “The Monuments of Passaic,” which transformed the way I saw the landscapes flowing past me during long bus rides to and from Manhattan.

In other exhibits, the idea of mapping, so common in digital music and dance, was made biological. A piece entitled Host consisted of an audio lecture on the sex lives of insects, with an accompanying soundtrack derived from “a direct recording of the electrical activity in the aural nerve centre of a Cricket which is listening to the sex lecture.” Unfortunately, like so many other contemporary works, this artwork is consumed in its description: to experience it gives you nothing more than what you’ve just read.

This was not true of White Lives on Speaker, Yoshimasa Kato’s installation, a sort of sculptural form of biofeedback, in which the viewer’s brainwaves are translated into vibrations that bounce a pan of potato-starch mixture, forming very odd gloopy forms in the distressed white surface. When I was there, two Japanese girls were trying to suppress their giggles as their friend’s brain drove this odd spectacle. The connection between the girl’s neural activity and this turbulent white viscidity was undeniable, but then the picture it formed was certainly no picture of her real thoughts. Instead it became a sort of parody, as if it had stripped away the innocence of the girl’s fresh and fashionable appearance to reveal the alien being bubbling inside — like something out of one of those light Murakami novels.

 

Cloaca

From the festival brochure:

Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca is a complex installation that simulates the human digestive process. The machine is fed with everyday foodstuffs. The mechanically produced end product is—even under scientific examination—impossible to differentiate from human excrement.

Scheiß! — the perfect installation for a Germanic museum, given the scatological obsession associated with these lands. This artwork also consumed itself in its description (a very good thing, under the circumstances).

Inspecting this gallery brought back memories from years ago, when MASS MoCA had first taken over the mill factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, to make a huge new museum there. We had Ghostcatching there; another gallery in the opening show was devoted to large brown sculptures by Joseph Beuys, part of his installation Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. As the townspeople rushed in to see how their mill had been transformed by art, they encountered the Beuys, which looked to them like nothing other than pieces of shit — a reaction their astonished remarks did nothing to hide. For they found themselves confronted by these turd-like forms, modeled in bronze, positioned on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. They of course were unacquainted with the dubious personal mythology of Joseph Beuys, which begins with the story of his service in the Wehrmacht, his crash landing in the steppes, and his survival supposedly owed entirely to the Tatars who on discovering his scorched body, wrapped it in multiple restorative layers of fat and brown felt. Without such stories, not to mention the legendarily charismatic man who told them, these works don’t work.

(In other words, you have to be in the know to get them. A bad thing? That depends. For a very few works, like Duchamp’s Large Glass, such demands are worth it.)

 

Culture Capital

The Linz city map, free for the taking at the tourist office, had a plug on its flipside for Linz 2009: Application for European Capital of Culture — “capital” to be understood in both senses of the word, for the aim of such cultural renewals is to bring cash infusions in the form of rebuilding, expanded tourism, etc (Bilbao is perhaps the most successful example of this). It’s the same strategy I’d seen with MASS MoCa’s state-sponsored attempt to resuscitate a moribund mill town, and in fact I was also already familiar with the EU policy of designating cultural capitals. Bruges was one such capital; the city wanted to balance its storied medieval past with a vision of an active electronic future, which led its arts council to project Pedestrian on the cobblestones of the main market square.

So Linz is now making the same kind of pitch, but this has an unfortunately ominous echo to it. For Hitler, too, intended to make his home town the pre-eminent city on the Danube — the cultural capital of the Greater Third Reich, the empire he proclaimed after the 1938 Anschluss brought him to the cheering Austrian crowds of Linz, a triumphal homecoming.

 

Factories

The plane from Frankfurt to Linz puts the peaks of the Tyrol in tantalizing view before it dips down over the city. The curves of the Danube come into view, as does the enormous steel factory on its southern bank, which sends up plumes of smoke. This plant was originally the Hermann-Göring-Werke, named by Hitler after his Luftwaffe commander and right-hand man: an emblem of the industrial renewal that continued to endear Hitler to the citizens of Linz well into the disastrous war.

About a half-hour bus ride east of the city lies another gigantic factory, this one not only dead but sealed off unobtrusively underground — the Mauthausen-Gusen slave labor camp, where in the dying days of the war the Nazis rushed the production of Messerschmidt fighter planes, boasting the first jet engines the world had seen.

 

Audioweg Gusen

By far the best artwork I encountered at Ars Electronica was the lowest tech. This was Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp: Audiowalk Gusen, which consisted only of an IPod and headphones.

On a dismal afternoon of rain and wind, there were only two of us taking the tour. The bus had dropped us off at the small town that was built after the war on the site of the camp, which as a result is little known for its past horrors. The woman’s voice on my headphones started me walking along what used to be the perimeter of the Gusen I site, now lined by neat houses with green grass and nice gardens.

I had worried that the English version of the tour would provide a diminished experience, but it was perfectly done: I could still hear the particularity of the voices underneath giving testimony. These began with the survivors, one of whom remembered the SS telling him that his only way out was as smoke through the chimney. I timed my steps to the ones in my headphone, and so I was at the right intersection when the woman’s voice told me to turn. I headed down a small street, bounded on either side by what had once been a brothel for the guards, an infirmary, and so on — but after just thirty steps or so, I was brought up short by a new No Entry sign: Privat. This, the woman’s voice informed me, had been erected recently by local citizens, blocking the original audiotour route. A telling dead-end, however, for it matched precisely the experience I was having — of the impassable barrier between mundane present and unimaginable past.

The audiotour had me retrace my steps towards another route into the town. The testimonies started to shift from survivors to townspeople, both those alive during the war and those born afterwards. By now the wind had torn my umbrella to shreds and I was soaked. At one point I fumbled for my phone camera and took this meager snapshot of the pavement:

I could see that in finer weather children did play on these streets, as well as in the backyard playgrounds behind many of the fences — and what did they know of those who staggered to their deaths here long before them? What responsibility could they possibly bear? A young man remembered his childhood swims in the nearby quarry, fantastic times cut short when a tour of somber foreign dignitaries came upon these Austrian kids romping in the water — a carefree pleasure thereafter forbidden them. How were they to have known it was an act of sacrilege and desecration?

An old woman recalled her girlhood there — her flirtations with the charming young SS soldiers who were so polite and so engaging. And then of her suddenly encountering one of the horrors they perpetrated: young children tied into burlap sacks and hurled against a brick wall, and she having to step around the blood pooling on the pavement.

I was peering through this orderly village to make out the dim outlines of what had stood there before, my eyes attempting a kind of x-ray time travel. At the back of my mind, I wondered what my gaze felt like to the present-day occupants whom I imagined looking back at me from behind gauze curtains. I stumbled along the route distractedly, but was it only my imagination that the occasional passing car didn’t slow down in the slightest as it overtook me? Maybe even accelerated a bit as it sped past me in the narrow lane?

Another citizen spoke up defiantly over the headphones (a nice place to live, my hometown…). And then started to come the voices of the perpetrators themselves, the old men who were once the young guards there. One the voice of a kind of automaton, saying that he had no guilt, had merely done his duty, followed his orders, had lived a “schizophrenic” existence, now long gone and scarcely remembered.

I crossed a small bridge, which I learned as I crossed it had been built by slave labor. On the other side had been a railroad spur, now just a slightly elevated ridge overgrown with trees, a little muddy path leading into it.

As directed, I made my way along the little ridge, where I was soon enveloped by trees. I came upon a little wooden tower to my left, erected so that deer hunters can train their rifles over the field beyond. In the pouring rain, there was no one there now, and feeling myself finally alone and out of sight, I started crying, overcome by a feeling of utter abandonment.

But the tour continued and took me further. I found myself at the edge of the vast underground factory, where a row of new townhouses had been erected on a little rise. The woman’s voice told me that this was the only part of the former factory that had been filled in, for no sooner had the townhouses been built than they had started to sink and faced the danger of caving in.

The voice of another old SS veteran now took over, unrepentant. His words were to the effect that we could not understand his experience at all, and said that he had tried many times to do so himself so that I am always a step ahead of you, okay? This brought us to the end, where the artwork executes a vivid doubling. As the SS man spoke of a door to memory that we can’t go through together, our footsteps had taken us to the locked gate which is the only remaining sign of the underground factory lying dormant under the green countryside.

 

Pope’s SMS

Planted in the grass near the entrance of Gusen I’d seen a large poster bearing the face of the German pope, Benedict XVI. It was raining too hard then for me to dare take out my camera phone, and back in Linz the closest I could find was this:

Benedict was conducting a three-day tour of Austria, trying to rally the mostly lapsed Catholic state back to the church. The poster I spotted at Gusen was part of his marketing campaign: it urged people to get the pope’s word directly via their cellphones.

The placement of the pope’s image in the grassy field by the concentration camp was no doubt accidental, but its presence chilled me nonetheless, given the impassivity of his predecessor Pius XII in the face of the Holocaust. A day later I read that Benedict had just commemorated the Holocaust victims in the old Jewish quarter of Vienna; but then again, there’d also been reports a month or so earlier of Benedict’s having granted a private audience to the Polish priest Tadeusz Rydzyk, whose rabble-rousing radio network fans the seemingly inexhaustible flames of anti-semitism in his homeland.

 

Stadtwanderwege

From the airplane over first Germany and then Austria I’d remarked once again on the European landscape, where you find forests so often adjacent to cities. This I could see was true of Linz as well, for it was surrounded by green hills which I quickly determined to explore.

And so there were pleasanter walks for me than the harrowing one I took in Gusen. The first day I headed off for a hilltop beckoning to me in the distance, twin church steeples on its top. After a game of pedestrian snakes and ladders, in which I was continually brought short by unexpected dead-ends and curving detours, I happened upon a stadtwanderweg sign — “wanderweg” (literally, wander way) a term I remembered fondly from Switzerland, where my wife and I had spent part of our pre-honeymoon traipsing through the network of public trails crisscrossing the nation. Now, in Linz, I could find similar escapes, and the best parts of my days there found me amid trees and the sound of water streaming down the hillsides towards the Danube.

The astonishingly efficient Train de Très Grand Vitesse, which whisked me from Charles de Gaulle airport to Lille in just over an hour, reminded me again of what I’d observed last month over Germany and Austria — how quickly in Europe the urban landscape gives way to countryside.

My railway passage north was through a ragged fog which had been much thicker a bit earlier, on my arrival: I had thought us still descending through the clouds over Paris when our wheels hit the runway with an unnerving jolt. Now the blurred landscape spooling by the train window was of wide farm fields bounded by stands of trees and the occasional stream, with flocks of sheep here and there in the distance.

But even when farmland yielded entirely to forest, you would never mistake this kind of countryside for wilderness. Everywhere it bears the imprint of long cultivation, of continuous habitation over the course of many generations, which endowed the land with its pleasingly human scale.

And so this cultivated countryside is gentle on the eye even as it rushes past, a welcome respite for the soul — for the French soul in particular, for here the land is still said to exert a strong emotional pull.

The power of this allegiance, however, is exacted politically, the French farmer staunchly defending his land and his way of life by means of high governmental subsidies and even higher trade barriers. So that the landscape you enjoy here comes at a heavy price elsewhere — in Africa, for example, whose farmers suffer from the markets (and mouths) closed off to them to their north.

This kind of perspective clouds our visual view of the land, and rightly so, for what your eyes cannot see is often truer than what they can.

These reflections put me in mind of Fred Camper, who was my mentor and guide for the best part of the 1970s (and a key lens for me of the sort described in mental economy). A film critic (and, at that time, filmmaker), Fred’s unparalleled devotion to film was belied by the same kind of fundamental doubt about what is given by the world to the eye.

This, as he once explained to me in a long letter, came from a fundamental revelation of his childhood, triggered by his realization that the beautiful blue of water seen in the distance did not signify its purity — that all the water surrounding his island of Manhattan was in fact grossly polluted. Oh, he explained all this much more eloquently than I can remember, but his point was a kind of existential grief over the fact that what he saw was so much at odds with what he might touch or even taste (should he dare).

Only in true wilderness, he said, were the senses not betrayed by each other like this, and so when he could afford it he would arrange to be dropped by small pontoon plane in the wilds of Canada, where he would spend a week or two hiking back to civilization.

On a bookshelf in my studio I still keep a prized box marked Camper correspondence, which for some reason I have not perused in scores of years. But in that box there exists the forty-or-so-page letter that Fred wrote to me over the course of the longest (and perhaps even the last) of his wilderness trips. I remember that when I opened this letter I immediately noticed that its pages were oddly smeared and stained. The reason for this became apparent about two-thirds of the way through Fred’s chronicle, on a page written just after he’d extricated himself from a patch of quicksand that had briefly threatened to swallow his body and backpack whole.

Had an overhanging branch not been within reach… — but it had been. And so survived his most dramatic proof of the unreliability of sight.

October 2 – 9 At Le Fresnoy I have found myself immersed in a sea of French discourse, the waves of which mostly splash right through my outstretched hands. My attempts to speak the language have been equally sorry, try as I might to draw on a dimly remembered high school vocabulary never large to begin with.

I told my Garden-of-Eden / Fall-from-Innocence story in the Belgrade section of Trace. This may (or may not) explain my ineptitude with foreign tongues, a shortcoming I share with most native-born Americans though not with three members of my own family, each of them fluent at various times in multiple languages (my father in seven, my mother in five, and my brother in four).

 

Baby steps

At the heart of my present difficulty is that I balk at reverting to that state of near-infancy demanded of you as you make your first teetering steps in an unfamiliar tongue. I can’t bear hearing my thoughts come out in such a faltering and babyish fashion — a sin of vanity, I suppose.

But if I hate to be childish among adults, among children it’s a different story — which made speaking French much easier on two isolated occasions a long time ago. There was the week I stayed with a wonderful family in Jouy-en-Jousas, whose toddler conversed with me freely, and I equally so with her, since we were both more or less on the same joyful level.

And then there was the earlier time in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec, where I was honorably inducted into a small troop of Québécois youngsters, whose backwoods French sounded deliciously rough even to my untrained ear. I remember that during a lively game of hide and seek, one little girl kept repeating the word «bouaze » to me, stressing the s/z sound that is omitted in the “proper” pronunciation of the French word «bois».

Only when she pointed to the trees did I understand she meant the forest nearby — and then I acted on her suggestion immediately, dashing into that «bouaze» to hide behind a big old tree whose roots I now picture pushing deep into the rich loamy soil of colonial and even of pre-colonial times.

 

Code-switching

It was by chance that I had found myself in the Laurentians, a spur-of-the-moment side-trip following my brother’s wedding the week before in nearby Montreal. My new sister-in-law, now ex-, Monica Heller, was a brilliant sociolinguist then writing her doctoral thesis on French/English relations as observed over the course of her fieldwork at the Molson beer factory there. A particularly telling linguistic move, which she tracked and analyzed carefully, was that of code-switching — that is, when an interlocutor suddenly switches in mid-conversation from one language to another .

How ironic, then, that code-switching later played a role in the attitudes of her two children, my beloved niece and nephew, towards the Old World in general and towards the City of Light in particular. Having grown up completely bilingual, their hopes for Paris were dashed when the Parisians they met there were evidently so offended by their barbaric Canadian accents that they would code-switch on them derisively, shifting from fluent Parisian French to broken but condescending English.

 

Lingua Franca

In the aftermath of World War II it was code-switching on a global scale as American soldiers, bureaucrats, businessmen, and tourists fanned out across the world, turning American English into the second language of most countries, and certainly of those of western Europe.

Here, however, the situation was not purely the consequence of the Marshall Plan, cultural imperialism, etc, etc. — for Europeans themselves seized upon English as a neutral tongue with which to communicate across their borders, thus avoiding the strife that would have arisen had any one country (e.g., France or Germany) tried elevating its own tongue to the status of lingua franca.

Significantly, the accent the Europeans chose to learn and use was not the one across the Channel — never England! — but the one across the Atlantic.

 

High-mindededness

This linguistic situation accounts for the odd role thrust upon me in conversations at places like these. Rather than being infantalized as I struggle to speak in a foreign language, it’s quite the opposite in this realm of international English.

Here I find myself widening my eyes, broadening my smile, amplifying my gestures, and of course exaggerating my enunciation — a parent addressing a child.

This is obviously truest when my interlocutor’s command of English is uncertain, but it’s still subtly the case even when he or she is perfectly fluent. The language we instinctively adopt is still slightly simplified, as are our expressions and even our emotions.

What emerges is a high-minded, Family-of-Man idealism in which we are all at pains to underline our common humanity and lofty aspirations, kind of like kindergarten circle-time, a tone very different from, say, a typical New York City exchange.

 

Low life too

American English connotes low-mindedness too, if there were such a word — a sense of the low life and the down and dirty. Or at least of these stereotypes.

This can lead to poignantly ludicrous situations in which Europeans rely on English both as lingua franca and as rebellious expression. Some years ago I sat with William Forsythe in what was then the grand hall of his Frankfurt Ballett, where we were watching a renowned Flemish dance troupe perform their latest and unendurably long work of dance-theater. It was sad enough that the Flemings felt compelled to deliver their lines not in their native tongue, nor even in the German to which it is a close cousin, but rather in English. However, what made this spectacle — that is, the spectacle they made of themselves — so truly sad to me was their expressing their edgy world-weariness in poorly accented American slang punctuated by the occasional harsh obscenity. Unintended quotation marks hovered over their every exclamation, and gave the lie to any sincerity that may once have sparked the would-be spirit of the piece.

 

Visual language

It’s not just the words and phrases of exported American English that took such odd root in Europe and elsewhere, but also its visual language. In the bitter campaigns of World War II, American grunts had marked their unexpected presence on foreign land with their wryly anonymous Kilroy was here. Afterwards, though, it was European kids who started tagging the continent themselves as if it were Harlem, the Bronx, or Bedford-Stuy. Their spray-painted scrawls were stylistically indistinguishable from those across the sea (so much for regional difference).

Even American political graffiti made its way over into this odd cultural irrelevance. Aarhus, Denmark, must be one of the blondest cities on the planet, but I remember encountering down near its waterfront a spray-painted Free Mumia (give link) slogan executed in identical fashion to those seen in the States a years before. Meaningless solidarity, empty gestures — no doubt there are now anti-globalism-&-wto slogans on that wall as well.

Such borrowed attitudes are often worn on one’s sleeve, as it were — as clothing. On a Friday night last month in Linz I saw a troop of young teenage boys, each wearing huge baggy pants that sagged well below their unbelted waists. To be fair, in this they were no different from their us suburban counterparts. It was as if milk-fed boys the world over long for a more desperate and edgy world — one in which their black fathers and uncles have brought home from prison not only a flair for wearing ill-fitted state-issue clothes but also a disdain for belts prohibited there as possible instruments of suicide or escape.

 

Visages

Visage is one of those Norman words that to my ear never succeeded in embedding itself snugly in English, or at least in American English. At least when I pronounce it in the correctly Anglicized fashion [viz ij], the last syllable seems clipped too tight for me and I picture myself instead as an English colonel, a well-trimmed mustache on my stiff upper lip.

My contemporaries and I tend to pronounce visage in the French way [viz ahje]. When we do use it instead of face, we do so ironically, with raised eyebrows and implicit quotation.

But visage is absolutely the mot juste for certain eminent faces I saw on my first evening at Le Fresnoy. This was in the lovely cinema there, where Allain Fleischer, who founded and now runs the place, was premiering a documentary. The films consisted of interlocutions with Jean-Luc Goddard, the filmmaker to whom the term enfant terrible has always stuck like glue (now necessarily preceded by the word “aging”).

The faces of all the interlocutors, several of them now also present in the flesh at the front of the cinema, were indeed magnificent visages. They cut a profile as sharp as Voltaire’s, and I could almost imagine myself back in an earlier time of declaratory eloquence.

My limited French kept me from following the lively interchanges both on screen and, afterwards, off — but I couldn’t fail to remark on the fluency and unstoppable flow of phrases, nor to observe the tremendous pleasure these older men (for no woman was among them) took in their discourse.

After the film, this fluency was interrupted only by cantankerous outbursts from the back of the cinema, where a cigar-chomping old fellow loudly inveighed against the men at the front. He turned out to be the irascible director Jean-Marie Straub, who seemed himself to have stepped out of the pages of a 19th century novel, perhaps by Zola. His harsh remarks were gently returned, and even this spirited debate seemed part of an old and even courtly ritual of vehemence.

 

Talk shows

I couldn’t help but think of the contrast with public figures in America, where even artists tend to present themselves to their audiences with the casual flip cleverness of a guest on the Johnny Carson (or now David Letterman) show.

My thoughts then turned to my dear departed aunt Doris, who had been the most devoted of Francophiles. She would tune in the television to Bernard Pivot’s talk show «Apostophes », where literary types would hold forth in precisely the same way I saw at Le Fresnoy. For Doris, this French exposure helped her endure the long months of fall, winter, and spring that kept her in Manhattan rather than in the beloved Provence of summertime (admittedly a world apart from the industrial landscape of Lille).

Just as by law all non-French films must be voiced over before being projected in French cinemas, so too must all foreign programs be dubbed before being broadcast on television. Though the government also limits the proportion of such shows, you do come across a fair number of them as you idly change channels — Law and Order and CSI Miami rendered peculiarly disembodied by the robust French voicings and the mismatched lip syncs. Only once have I had the reverse experience, back in the 70s when I saw Chabrol’s «Le Boucher» dubbed into hearty American English, a distraction that destroyed my viewing of it.

This was brought back to mind just now, on my return flight to New York, when my eye was caught by a related headline in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal:

On Polish TV, familiar voices. Viewers like dialogue done deep and flat; husky ‘Housewives.’

American shows aren’t dubbed by actors mimicking the original, English-speaking actors. A lektor, the Polish term for voiceover artists, reads all the dialogue in Polish. Viewers hear the original English soundtrack faintly in the background. ¶ The approach is popular in Poland, where viewers still feel comfortable with a style deeply rooted in the country’s communist past. Lektors, traditionally men with husky voices, pride themselves on their utterly emotionless delivery, their craft honed through thousands of hours in recording studios. Fans appreciate the quality of voices, often tempered by years of cigarette smoking.

A better solution to the problem of voice-overs, unwittingly Brechtian.

 

Bucharest

This article in turn took me back to my time in Bucharest, where I lived for a year after college. There I devoted myself to writing pieces for my tape-recorded voice, a long effort that yielded only one decent result, a 20-minute composition called Thoughts on erasing blank tape, a few fragments of which later re-emerged in Trace.

It was oddly appropriate, then, that by some odd circumstance I was pressed into service as a voice-over actor for a mamaliga western («mamaliga» being the Romanian national dish of polenta). With me were three other Americans — the Air Force attaché and two Marine corporals serving in the embassy guard.

A mini-bus took us to the cramped movie studio, where the director, speaking through a translator, explained the gist of the film: Romanian cowboys emigrate to the Wild West.

My character was an American cowboy whose edgy rashness was to end his life almost immediately. I stood at the microphone watching the looped projection of my double, who reclined in a barber’s chair, his face covered with a huge lather of white shaving cream. In the facing mirror he spotted his Romanian adversary entering the barber-shop, upon which I was to deliver my two lines of American insult. These triggered my —or rather his — immediate death in the next shot (so to speak).

Little did the Romanian director or his eventual viewers realize that this cowboy’s accent was a far cry from John Wayne’s. No, it was with a diffident prep-school accent that my voice performed its odd imposture.

 

Subtitling

Fortunately, in America foreign films are subtitled rather than dubbed. The quiet of Bresson and Mizoguchi is almost heightened by the act of silent reading with which we translate the music of their unfamiliar tongues.

My many hours of watching subtitled movies must have led to the idea of Housebound, one of the two sections of Depth we’re making during our residency at Le Fresnoy this year. Here dialogue and even action are dispensed with, for everything is told through the lines of text.

The twist is that these lines are not flat superimpositions on the bottom of the image. Instead, they hover within the wavering space of each hand-held shot, as if both word and picture are being taken in by the same subjective gaze.

I’m late in posting this, for it’s based on notes I took during my stay at Le Fresnoy from October 2 to 9.

«Le Fresnoy – Studio National» is an unusual institution plunked down just south of Lille in the north of France — a post-industrial landscape of abandoned factories, boarded-up warehouses, and disused canals, where the old small-town life is still lived out on old streets and houses, with old shops, schools, and graveyards interspersed among them. Busy highways and efficient mass transit (trams, trains, and metro) hold out promise for its future, as does the presence of the many immigrants who have found refuge among the ruins, provided they can all find jobs somehow within the rigid French economy.

Physically Le Fresnoy looks to be another cultural reclamation project, with the original building on the site now partially reclad, in familiar postmodernist style, in an ironwork exoskeleton of ramps, catwalks, spiral staircases, and roof extensions.

My first impression was of a factory repurposed, but this proved wrong. In fact the place was once part of a grand amusement park, built during the Depression and shuttered several decades later. The present exhibition, cinema, and post-production spaces were once given over to indoor roller rink, amusement arcade, dance and dining halls, and the like, as I could see for myself in a few old photographs:

The «espace d’artist» where I was put up proved to be a most eccentric living quarters. I opened the door to a small dining-room/kitchen with enormous windows reaching way up above. A spiral staircase took me the long way up to bath and bedroom overhead, where small windows gave on a view of the eaves and catwalks of the elaborate roof structure. But I was drawn back down the staircase to the large windows again, where I gazed out past the busy highway right below to the small canal running through a woods just beyond it.

 

Canal Robaix

My first four days were filled with work, and I was able to venture out onto the canal towpath only briefly and always in the persistent fog so characteristic of the Lowlands. But the weekend was my own, and since the fog now gave way to bright blue skies, I decided to explore the Canal Robaix fully.

On Saturday I followed it southeast for four and half hours until it reached the River Duelle which in turn took me down into Lille proper; on Sunday I traced it north for two hours till I imagined myself to be at the Belgium border, though there was no sign to tell me so, such is the present trusting state of the European Union.

The canal no longer seems to function commercially, though its many locks are in good working order and the water itself free of debris (not, however, of pollution). There are barges to be seen from time to time, but these are all moored in what looks to be a near-permanent state. Two boys I saw had the right idea about them. Having boarded one, they were busy peering down into its hold and imagining an alternate existence for themselves, new lives lived along the water in long-departed past.

The canal is still by used fishermen, who line certain banks singly and in bunches, sticking their exceptionally long fishing poles way out over the water. On neither of my long walks did I see any evidence of any catch — a good thing, for with the frequent smell and sight of effluent pouring into the canal, I held out hope for the continued futility of their pursuit, with which they seemed content enough anyway.

In some places, a thick green scum carpeted the water. So thick did this seem that one time I thought I saw ducks somehow standing upright on top of it, though actually they were perched on a branch suspended in the green growth.

So it’s an odd kind of nature that persists in and along the canal. Wherever there’s a chance, though, the urban element imposes itself via spray-paint. Graffiti springs up at the earliest sign of desertion, so that even on a seemingly ordinary street of houses I was surprised to see one house, garden still flourishing, painted over with the same universal tags I’d seen on bridge pylons and underpasses. Other than the graffiti, a single broken window was the only sign of the house’s abandonment.

There are other acts of repurposing the landscape, applying a different kind of label to it. Towards Lille, I came across a model farm on the banks of the canal, with chickens and horses and vegetable gardens and an old stone farm-house complete with courtyard (and retrofitted with a small cafe). This was a working farm, but its work was educational: built for school groups and family outings, it provided a kind of sign-posted demo of a way of living now long gone.

I forgot to snap a picture of it, though your generic mental image will do just fine.