Pale Fires
"When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation."
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, The Captive
Growing up one of my chores was looking after the fireplaces at my mother’s parent’s houses. Summers were spent splitting wood, piling logs in their driveways and stacking the kindling on their porches. In winter their fires were going all the time, at my grandmother’s house I would shovel the ashes out from under the grate into a metal bucket then take the bucket outside and throw the ashes in the snow. I remember the mark it made, a dark powdery gash into the pristine blankness of the backyard. I liked being outside alone, breathing in the cold fresh air, how it stung my face, the silence and stillness of the pines against the white sky, and then going back into the house to warm up again by the fire. My grandfather when he was old would sit and stare into the fireplace, “It makes you brood,” he'd say, a consequence of the well known hypnosis of the flames and crackling wood. For my mother, it was the cigarettes. Staring into the one or dragging on the other are both moments outside of time, where the dreaming mind casts off.
After David chose the works for the show I told him that everything is burning, or was made by burning something. Crackle & Drag, the film, starts with a flame in a mirror, there are burning photographs throughout the film, and each work on the wall is made either in part or entirely from something being burned, by light or by heat. Pale fires. Sophia was in New Zealand caring for her mother and passed a bookshelf, Nabokov's Pale Fire stood out to her and she suggested that as a title. I’ve read Nabokov, but not Pale Fire, adding the s, seemed to take it somewhere else. Everything worked like that—the show was an accumulation of intuitions, where the present or future made sense of the past.
The same thing happened with the axe. When I made it, I was thinking of my grandfather, the smoke stained interior of his house in Ohio, and the winter landscape of my childhood. I used carbonized soot and white muslin to make the work, and later wondered if maybe, unconsciously, it was all driven by my memory of throwing the ashes out in the snow. This backward clairvoyance continued when David chose the axe for The Shadow show at the gallery. We had just finished lunch together in Brooklyn and were standing out on the sidewalk, and I had a sudden and intense moment of clarity where I understood a profound similarity between us—it came out of nowhere and I was very moved by it. Coming home that afternoon I looked over the notes I had made months prior about the axe work, and I found the following fragment of text from a letter Franz Kafka wrote to a friend in 1904:
“I think we ought to read only books that wound or stab us…we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” Kafka’s text perfectly summarized the feeling I had after lunch. A shared sensibility not driven by trends or the market place but by a more urgent and inward necessity.
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