"MEESTER" van FRANCK McCOURT

Frank McCourt is de auteur van Angela's Ashes en 'Tis, allebei aangrijpende autobiografische romans. De ene gaat over zijn jeugd in de sloppen van Limerick, je kunt je niet voorstellen dat iemand zulke armoede overleeft en er dan ook nog met zoveel humor en liefde over schrijven kan.
Het tweede boek gaat over zijn tocht naar Amerika, waar hij zich in zijn eentje vestigt. Hij probeert op te klimmen in de Amerikaanse maatschappij, maar met zijn accent, zijn uiterlijk (met twee ogen als pisgaten in de sneeuw) lijkt dat maar niet te willen lukken. Met een ongelooflijk doorzettingsvermogen weet hij bij de New York University een graad te halen waarmee hij leraar kan worden. Maar dat blijkt veel zwaarder te zijn dan hij verwachtte.

Dit boek 'Meester' (A Teacher, A Memoir), is een ode aan het leraarschap. McCourt vindt dat hij het leraarschap tekort heeft gedaan in zijn eerste boek, schrijft hij in het voorwoord van Meester.
Maar op tweederde van het boek rijst de vraag of hij nu niet een nog veel duisterder beeld schept van zijn strijd in de helse klaslokalen tegen onwillige leerlingen en een tegenwerkende bureaucratie, zijn leerlingen weet hij alleen te boeien met verhalen over zijn ongelukkige katholieke jeugd in Limerick...

Na een mislukte doctoraalstudie lijkt hij nog dieper aan de grond te zitten, zijn vrouw heeft hem verlaten en de enige lerarenbanen die hij kan krijgen zijn invallersbaantjes. Het meest ondankbare en annonieme baantje in onderwijsland.
Tot hij aan de slag mag bij de Stuijfesant Highschool, een prestitieuze school waar alleen de top 700 leerlingen van New York heen mogen. Er gaat een wereld voor hem open, hij weet zich geen raad met leerlingen die daadwerkelijk geïnteresseerd zijn in wat hij zegt.
Maar zijn creatieve stijl van lesgeven spreekt het hoofd van de sectie Engels aan, en nu begint zijn echte leven.

Hij laat de leerlingen met elkaar discussieren, hij leert met de leerlingen mee terwijl ze recepten op muziek zetten, als ware het poezie.
Hij inspireert hen en zichzelf, en al werkt hij meer dan 60 uur per week, het is fantastisch om hem hierin als lezer te volgen.
Ook zijn schrijfstijl wordt sprankelender en hij trakteert de lezer op stijl, woordkeus en inhoud die iedere taalliefhebber doet watertanden.

Tijdens een les creatief schrijven:
'Ik heb het tegen diegenen die in schrijven geintereseeerd zijn. Schrijven is iets wat je voortdurend doet, op elk moment van je leven. Zelfs in je dromen ben je nog bezig met schrijven. Wanneer je door de gangen van de school loopt, kom je allerlei mensen tegen, en je bent als een razende aan het schrijven. (...) Dan zie je iemand die je wel aardig vindt en je zegt op warme hartelijke toon Hallo. Het soort Hallo dat associaties oproept met een geplas van roeiriemen, met zingende violen, met ogen die glanzen in het maanlicht. Er zijn zoveel manieren om Hallo te zeggen. Je kunt het blaffen, zingen, snauwen, je kunt het lachend of hoestend zeggen. Een simpele wandeling door de gang roept zinnen, alinea's op in je hoofd en vraagt om een veelvoud van beslissingen. Ik praat nu als man, want vrouwen blijven voor mij nog altijd één groot mysterie. (...) Misschien ben je het koele, beheerste type; zo'n man die op Helena van Troje af slentert en vraagt of ze plannen heeft voor n het beleg; en dat je een leuke tent weet om lamsbout te gaan eten en oezo te drinken in de ruïnes van Ilium. Iemand die cool is, een charmeur, hoeft geen script voor te bereiden. Maar wij, de anderen, wij zijn allemaal druk aan het schrijven.' (enz.)

McCourt schrijft in dit boek bijna net zo goed als in Angela's Ashes, maar met meer afwisseling. Regelmatig verandert hij van toon en perspectief, zoals hij in het tweede boek had moeten doen, dat wat mij betreft heel goed was, maar teveel zijn schrijftruck van Angela's Ashes herhaalde. Met de drie boeken bij elkaar krijg je een goed beeld van zijn leven, en hoe hij veranderd is. Hoe hij zijn trauma's overwon, maar ook hoe hij erdoor gevormd is, hoe het zijn leven in de weg zat en hoe hij het tegelijk gebruikt heeft als masker.

Ik kan slechts één minpunt vinden: Het boek brengt niet wat de achterflap belooft: 'In Meester vertelt McCourt zijn spannendste verhaal tot nu toe: Hoe hij schrijver werd'
Het eerste en tweede boek zijn absoluut spannender, en in dit boek schrijft hij weinig over hoe hij schrijver werd. Het gaat bijna helemaal over zijn dromen, teleurstellingen en zijn werkelijkheid van het leraarschap. Wederom vol zelfspot en ironie, stijlvol en aangrijpend. Een goed boek, maar wie wil lezen hoe hij schrijver werd heeft veel meer aan het tweede boek.
Vertaler: M. Eggermont, E. Feberwee

Paperback | 303 Pagina's | Prometheus | november 2005 ISBN: 9044607448

© Hendrik

Bekijk het interview met Frank MCourt over dit boek, uitgezonden door Nova, klik op de afbeelding.

NOSTALGIA

ANDREI TARKOVSKY VERSUS BAS JAN ADER, DAVID CRONENBERG (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE), Francois Couturier(music), Douglas Gordon, Gerhard Richter, David Bate, Susan Hiller ( http://www.diacenter.org/hiller/ )

ANDREI TARKOVSKY

Stalker, 1979

ANDREI TARKOVSKY



“What are you reading?” asks a man’s voice.
“Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems,” answers a woman in Italian.
“In Russian?”
“No, it’s a translation... quite a good one.”
“Throw it away,” the man says.
“Why? The translator’s a very good poet,” she responds.
“Poetry is untranslatable,” he continues, “like all art.”
“You may be right that poetry is untranslatable," she says, "but what about music? Music’s for example...”
He interrupts her speech and begins to sing a tune in Russian.
She smiles cynically: "What do you mean by that, what do you want to say?”
“It’s a Russian song,” he replies.
“But how could we have got to know Tolstoy, Pushkin (without translation) and so understand Russia?”
“None of you understand Russia,” the man exhales.
“Nor you Italy then," she says, "if Dante, Petrarch and Machiavelli don’t help."
"It's impossible for us poor devils," he utters.
"How can we get to know each other?" she asks him.
"By destroying frontiers."
"Which frontiers?"
"Between states," he replies.


BAS JAN ADER





BAS JAN ADER






DAVID CRONENBERG - CRIMES OF THE FUTURE



DAVID CRONENBERG

BORIS RYZHY - dichter (1974 - 2001)



BORIS RYZHY

POST-COMMUNISM

BORIS MIKHAILOV, born in 1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine lives and works in the Ukraine and in Berlin. Case History documents Mikhailov’s perception of social disintegration ensuing from the break-up of the Soviet Union – both in terms of social structures and the resulting human condition. Case History documents the social oppression, the devastating poverty, the harshness and helplessness of everyday life for the homeless

“What happened on the ruins of the ex-Soviet Empire is still unique. Motivations are different. These guys’ shabbiness is the mirror of the ruin and disappointment of a much larger number of people, most of whom no longer feel safe and wealthy as in the Soviet era; many people’s ideals are gone forever, others have simply gone mad! I have taken pictures of them and I have enjoyed it, and maybe the whole world has a better understanding of the post-communist dramas through these sequences taken directly after nature.”
BORIS MIKHAILOV



“It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling. This "fauna" is specific especially to the period of quasi-general diffidence, specific for most of the post-communist world.”
BORIS MIKHAILOV

EXILE

Nostalghia was a film by an exile: Tarkovsky in Italy, feeling his way through a new landscape, a new iconography and history. The love-hate relationship with the West, being surrounded by the West (a constant theme towards the end of his diaries, Time Within Time) translates into a film from the Russian-Italian border. The final shot, a three-minute long take, is an image of operatic incongruity: "the Russian house inside the Italian Cathedral." Maybe it is along this border that Nostalghia's Andrei, also a temporarily exiled Russian, walks with his candle. Does he walk on behalf of Tarkovsky?

RELIGION

Caviar-Icon, Alexander Kosolapov.







Mickey Mouse journeys through art history, Alexander Savich.

ANCESTORS

SOCIAL INPUT

ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI

Born May 26th, 1966 in Warsaw. In 1990-1995 he studied in Grzegorz Kowalski's studio at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Associated with the Foksal Gallery Foundation. Lives and works in Warsaw.

Artur Zmijewski is a radical artist, realising extreme artistic concepts. In his works, in a nearly obsessive manner he thematises the human body perceived in the context of its physicality, its base biological functions. This perspective imposes questions about the relationship between the body, susceptible to illness and decay, and the sphere of human mind and spirit. What the artist finds most interesting, are cases, where heavy bodily dysfunction and severe disease foreclose any possibility of participation in social life and even destroy the mind. At the same time, he admits, those defects create a kind of otherness, seductive and much more telling than anything we consider normal. And this is Zmijewski at his most poignant.

The early works of Artur Zmijewski, realised during his studies, are constructions - machines or humanoid mechanisms, whose actions mimic one somatic or mental human aspect, such as fear, the stench of decaying flesh, the circulation of bodily fluids etc. His graduation project, 40 SZUFLAD / 40 Drawers (illustrations), is a photographic object, consisting of forty black-and-white photographs of a nude couple, who knead and deform each other's body. The artist placed the images in an arc-shaped library catalogue cabinet. The drawers have been equipped with a spring mechanism, so one has to overcome a certain resistance to open them. Zmijewski's interest was in the forms, a body subjected to oppression can take on. The video POWSCIAGLIWOSC I PRACA / Temperance and Work, (1995) was a continuation of that approach. In 1996 he presented the film JA I AIDS / Me and AIDS (illustrations) showing nude men and women, crashing into each other violently, in slow motion.
For the exhibition PARTEITAG (1997), devoted to the phenomenon of evil, Zmijewski realised the video OGROD BOTANICZNY/ZOO / The Botanic Garden/Zoo (illustrations). He filmed a group of mentally impaired children in the botanical garden in Birmingham, and juxtaposed those images with footage of animals from the zoo nearby. This film was a specific kind of experiment whose aim was to test predispositions to release base and evil tendencies inherent in human nature, and, what follows, the instinct to do evil.

The disabled body and corporal defect are subject of interest for the artist as figures of mental or spiritual disability. The juxtaposition of a defective body and a healthy one allows for a metaphoric account of human relationships. In 1998 the artist realised OKO ZA OKO / Eye for an Eye , a project consisting of a series of large-format colour photographs and a video. They depict posing nude people with amputated limbs together with physically fit ones, who "lend" them the missing members. The naked bodies of the pictures' protagonists have been arranged by the artist into amusing compositions, forming corporal hybrids - people with two heads, two pairs of arms, etc., and, at the same time, new healthy organisms, where the healthy offer relief to the disabled.

Questions about socially approved "norms" of humanity and about our relation to people functioning or looking different recur in Artur Zmijewski's work. Infirmity, disability or illness are embarrassing problems that do not fit into the image of young, beautiful, and healthy people, as promoted by mass culture.

In 2000 the film KR WP was released, featuring soldiers from the Polish Army's Honour Guard Unit. In the film, at first they practise military drill in full uniform, and then do the same nude in a ballet room, equipped with rifles, boots and caps only. This work also touches upon issues of the body, this time entangled in the forms imposed by military training, appropriated by military ritual.

The film NA SPACER / Out for a Walk was realised in 2001 with the help of paralysed people, in a rehabilitation clinic. Those absolutely torpid people with all their limbs paralysed, were taken out for a short walk by healthy, strong men, operators, who animated their bodies, imitating normal movements.
In the same year the first part of the project Lekcja spiewu / The Singing Lesson, was realised with the participation of deaf-mute youths, was finished. The film was recorded at the Holy Trinity Evangelical Church of the Augsburg confession in Warsaw, where the a choir of deaf-mutes "sang" the KYRIE by Jan Maklakiewicz. The work was presented among others at the Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt am Main. The second part of the project was realised in 2002 in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where deaf-mute and heavily hearing-impaired youths sang Bach's cantata HERZ UND MUND UND TAT UND LEBEN (Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life). The "deaf choirs" were accompanied by organ music. The singing Lesson is another work with disabled people, in which the artists transgresses a seemingly impassable boundary, he takes up the challenge and tries to change an irreversible situation. The miracle does not happen, one cannot transcend disability, but the transformation can occur in the reception of the work, providing the viewer accepts the otherness of the world of the disabled and acknowledges their right to self-expression. "Art is a hard fight for human consciousness", claims Zmijewski.

Updating - October 2006

Author of photographic objects, photographic and video works; independent curator of group exhibitions (among others JA I AIDS / Me and AIDS, 1996, exhibition series PARTEITAG, 1997, 1998, 1999, SEXXX, 2000, POLSKA / Poland, 2002), editor of the artzine "CZEREJA", appearing on an irregular basis in 1992-1998 (six issues), author of theoretic and critical texts. In 2000 he was awarded the first prize at the exhibition "Guarene Arte 2000" in Guarene d'Alba, Italy and represented Poland at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2006.

As early as during his studies, Artur Zmijewski developed a theoretical stance concerning art and its relation to reality, whose point of departure was the question about the place and role of the artist in society. In his graduation paper, "Moja teoria sztuki" / "My Theory of Art" (1995), the artist formulated his theses most extensively. In his opinion, art should influence social consciousness and stimulate reflection, hence his demand for a corresponding strength of impact and provocativeness of art. As a consequence, in his "favourite theory" art is intimately bound to the time of its conception, and, at some point, it has to become obsolete. At the same time, what Zmijewski demands of art criticism is to resign on evaluation in favour of an "adequate answer", that is, a discursive elaboration of the ideas imminent in the work.

The strategy most frequently used by Zmijewski is to arrange situations and look, how the protagonists would behave. That is why his video works often remind fictionalised documentaries. BEREK / The Game of Tag, 1999 is one of the best examples. Zmijewski filmed a group of people in two rooms: a symbolically neutral space and the gas chamber of a former Nazi death camp. Naked men and women of various ages play the game of tag - some of them are ashamed, others engage in the game. According to the artist, this film is an example of a kind of therapy, used in psychology: the re-enactment of a traumatic event with a simultaneous shifting of its meaning.

In the film SZTUKA KOCHANIA / The Art of Loving, 2000, Zmijewski recorded people suffering from Parkinson's disease, who, as a result, cannot fully control their bodies. Nevertheless, the unwanted impulses, tics and uncontrolled tremors are used to show their feelings to their loved ones.
In Karolina (illustrations), a film from 2002, we see a bedridden young woman suffering from osteoporosis. Her broken bones cause incredible pain with every move. Watching her suffering is a hard task, but
"The world is a dangerous place - says Zmijewski - and 'KAROLINA' is also about that."
The woman tries to commit suicide by overdosing analgesics. Her demand for the right to die in this extreme situation is an expression of her courage in deciding upon her own life. Through his film, the artist makes her voice heard.

As a result of a trip to Israel in 2003 there emerged a series of films, in which Zmijewski makes use of the documentary mode of film making and also of interviews, touching upon delicate issues of memory, the complicated situation of the country's inhabitants, and the not always easy Polish-Jewish relations. In PIELGRZYMKA / PILGRIMAGE, realised together Pawel Althamer, the artists take part in an organised journey to the Holy Land. Mingled with the Polish group, they accompany the pilgrims on their way to places of cult connected with the person of Christ, and to places of Jewish martyrology (Yad Vashem). Religious experiences mix with expressions of an ambivalent relation to the Jewish nation, verging on xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In NASZ SPIEWNIK / OUR SONGBOOK Zmijewski evokes in the memory of Polish Jews, who left for Israel tens of years ago, songs from their childhood and adolescence. The memories, rarely brought to mind, seem to be merely scraps of once popular songs. The monologue of the protagonist of he film Itzik, full of religious references, is a manifestation of his hatred towards the Palestinians. According to him, the Holocaust gave the Israelis the licence to revenge upon others. By contrast, the title protagonist of Lisa is a German woman living in Israel who claims that in her former life she was a Jewish boy shot by a Nazi in the back of his head (she claims to feel pain there). As a result of God's revelation she learned that she had to move to Israel. In the new country, however, she feels lonely and alien.

The issue of the Holocaust memory reappears in the film 80064 from 2004. Its title is the camp number of a former Auschwitz prisoner, Jozef Tarnawa. Zmijewski persuades him to have it re-tattooed. The artist wanted the film to be an attempt at "opening the door of memory", a sudden "eruption of recollections" through the reminding of a past humiliation. The man hesitates, but finally, gives in to Zmijewski's strenuous persuasions. The scene in the tattoo shop depicts (and re-enacts) the conformist mechanism of the total acceptance of fate and of subjecting to inhuman rules, which gave the camp prisoners a slight chance to survive.
In 2004, Artur Zmijewski made two works featuring Wojciech Krolikiewicz - an actor suffering from Huntington's chorea. The disease deprives the man of control over his body, causes difficulties with speech, and makes the most trivial everyday activities serious obstacles. Zmijewski portrayed him in the film entitled Rendez-vous. Krolikiewicz prepares to go out, and then meets in a pizzeria with Danuta Witkowska, also suffering from Huntington's. Their behaviour attracts other people's gaze. On the occasion of the exhibition at Centre d'art Contemporain in Brétigny, Zmijewski recorded a CD with Shakespeare Sonnets read by Krolikiewicz (WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SONNETS).

Artur Zmijewski's project Powtorzenie / REPETITION was chosen to represent Poland at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. The artist decided to re-conduct the experiment of Philip Zimbardo from 1971, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo, a specialist in the "psychology of evil", analysed the behaviour of ordinary people, placed in the roles of prisoners and wards in a set up prison. The experiment was to prove that human behaviour is predictable and depends on the circumstances people find themselves in. Over thirty years later, Zmijewski quite exactly recreated Zimbardo's experiment in Poland. The experiment, however, took an extremely different turn - the participants (both prisoners and wards) together decided to leave the prison, revolting against the author of the project. Zmijewski's film aroused much controversy in his home country.

In autumn 2005, Artur Zmijewski was invited to participate in an opening exhibition of a series of shows at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, entitled W SAMYM CENTRUM UWAGI / AT THE VERY CENTRE OF ATTENTION. The aim of this project was to assess the actual situation of art in Poland. Together with Pawel Althamer, Zmijewski resigned from an individual project in favour of the curatorial project WYBORY.PL / [S]ELECTION.PL. In the gallery space they decided to reconstruct a creative exercise from Grzegorz Kowalski's studio - OBSZAR WSPOLNY I OBSZAR WLASNY / COMMON SPHERE AND PRIVATE SPHERE - at the same time, revising some of its assumptions. Hence they invited their former colleagues from Kowalski's studio. The CSA's exhibition spaces became the locus of unrestrained artistic activity and creative dialogue. Zmijewski and Althamer performed an anarchic deconstruction of the institutionalised exhibition space by replacing exhibition with process.