Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)


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Cotten, Ann & Kerstin Cmelka. I, COLEOPTILE. Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press, 2010. 88pp. 25 b/w photos 2 ill., Softcover with French Flaps. €12

<1> Repetition is a two-folded concept: Something is projected into the future - as when we repeat and rehearse before a performance – but is also retrospective – as when we repeat what has already been. This fundamental ambiguity is one of the guiding priciples of the art of Kerstin Cmelka, Austrian filmmaker and artist, foremost working in Berlin. In short films, in installations and performances she has refined the concept of repetition: from double exposures and iterative patterns in her early films to the re-enactments of film scenes and classical street performances in the past few years, most notably in a series of micro dramas, ”Mikrodramen”. The concept of repetition and doubling is obviously also important in her contribution to the volume I, Coleoptile, which consists of poetry by Ann Cotten, and photographs staged by Cmelka. The photos are stills from a re-enactment – or repetition – of the Russian silent film Baryshna i khuligan [”The Young Woman and the Hooligan”] from 1918, directed by Yevgeni Slavinsky. The remarkable thing with the original film is that futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky has one of the leading roles, as a hooligan who falls in love with his female teacher. The stills by Cmelka, where she and Cotten act together, form an integrated part of the book, corresponding to Cotten’s poems, where several narrative or rather thematic lines correspond to each other, primarly the story of Enzo, a boy or young man, but also a story or cluster of poems concerning traveling, love and violence.

<2> Ann Cotten, born in the U.S., but raised and educated in Austria, has published some highly praised books of poetry in German; now, she has chosen to write in English, even though microscopic remnants of German linger to the texts. Her poems are marked by a dialectics between a restless, frenetic search for meaning or sense of community, and an ironic, skilled juggling with words and associations. As in ”Why you?”:

Ah, that mean sun,

he finds the point where he can hurt me

by shining and shining

he makes us be a wide surface,

a terrible expanse of time

which is as a needle

aimed at my point

and before I am forced to

I become hole.

 

Pale, sun, pale!

 

Go, Ann, go!

The title of the volume, I, Coleoptile, refers to the realm of nature. The encyclopedias tell us among other things that the coleoptile is a ”protective sheath of the young shoot and the radicle.” The coleoptile is not a simple metaphor, but for a start it can be seen as a marker for the clash between fields or discourses, e. g. the dialectics between the fragile plant and the material world with all its horrors, or the dynamics of the latent force of the seed or sprout; the sketch of a future growth, a big life encapsulated in a small one. The coleoptile and other biological metaphors do also remind us of the great repetitive schemes of Nature: conception – birth – growth – ripeness – death – conception – birth – growth – ripeness – death…. The clock works even without us.

<3> Cotten uses the coleoptile image in one of the metatexts of the collection, a poem about the project of writing I, Coleoptile. Cotten and Cmelka were sent by their publisher to Ireland for a short residency: ”And so we left. / They gave us money for the way/ and we bought coffee/ and snacks.” And the airplane is depicted:

Coleoptile of the sky,

they haul

free

and launch you,

idea of a belly

full of sluggish minds

who drag

their thoughts

by their ends

through Europé’s skies

In a sense the book deals with the conception of itself, with Cmelka’s fake stills representing the games played by the artists in order to repeat stories at hand – as the Mayakovsky film – but also to comment on the general conditions of the production of art. Kerstin Cmelka’s films deal with film as Ann Cotten’s poetry deals with poetry. But out of this apparatus of repetitions, doubling, mirroring, and irony grows sprouts of something else, maybe the reason for the artist’s work. Like the tender moments of fragility in some of Cmelka’s films, there are glimpses of a naked and vulnerable emotion in some of Cotten’s poems:

Love me, love me, run your fingers

from my head all the way down

to where I stand on the ground.

Ask me, ask where I will go

cascade of ideas and lust

do I have the guts to know

what will lie apart and what is just a blow?

Find me, find me, as your playing

ceases to be all, by chance

upon a racing corner,

comet, glance.

In the final pages of the volume there is a section of stills where all the stories intertwine. We can see Cmelka and Cotten posing in the re-enactment of the Mayakovsky film in the Irish countryside, and then they are involved in an act of violence, performing as hooligans or their victims. Ann Cotten, with her asymmetrical hairdo, is disguised as a Russian hoodlum, wearing a filthy jacket and a cap. The last epigrammatic poem says: ”If God don’t hear that faery reel/ he can take his breath and go.”

<4> I, Coleoptile is a repetition, but also a public rehearsal for a performance, yet to be seen.

Lars Gustaf Andersson

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