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Asset 1

croatian pavilion at the 60TH

international art exhibition

la biennale di venezia

vlatka horvat

by the means at hand

A Waiting Game

Tim Etchells

I

I want to start with your hands.

They are bending sheets of aluminium as you kneel or squat on the floor of a stone building in Tunis in January 2024. Or typing notes for a project into a phone. Dragging a battered folding measure as you walk, so that the end scores a line through the mud of a path. They are tearing paper, fabric, or card, your hands. They are cutting plastic. They are carrying planks or a single heavy wooden door for eight solid hours.

In this last case, I was there, in Lisbon in 2010, taking photographs of the performance. All I could see of you most of the day, my love, was the tips of your feet and your hands. You as a hybrid creature, door-woman or woman-door, a kind of mobile question, wandering the building, a free-to-roam portal stripped of function and specific architectural context. A door floating free, neither denying nor granting access to any part of the space, since one could always easily walk past or around it. A door that could follow a person, that could offer a momentary prospect of escape, that could become a temporary barricade, that could sit down to rest. I remember your hands as they held the door from behind, the force of their grip bonding human and object. A door-woman or woman-door in some daylong process of becoming or unbecoming.

Hands. With residues of paint, ink, marker, rust, glue, graphite, glitter, charcoal, blood, grime, earth. With tenderness, with certainty, with hesitation. With paper cuts, grazes, cat scratches, splinters, callouses.

Your hands holding the weight of your body as you hang suspended in the centre of a football goal, an action by which, through your own exertions, you make yourself a target. Or your hands limp as you hang over the largest branch of a tree, an abject rag-doll form, or as you hang once again, arms and legs splayed this time, body thrown over an archery target.

Or your hands guiding a pen to copy the form of the Japanese characters meaning “person,” “street,” “drink,” or “dog” in our performance at the Aichi Triennale. I think that was the time, in Japan in 2010, when you had some kind of leg injury—I seem to remember strange journeys in the city where you couldn’t walk but could ride a bike . . . ? That doesn’t seem right, but it’s what I remember.

Your hands. Moving things from one place to another. Balancing one thing on top of another. Using one thing to hold another in place. Placing one object alongside, around, or behind another. Placing objects to support other objects, to lean on other objects, to prop, crush or balance one another.

Or your hands, their movement in the zone between deliberation and speculation, stranding objects on a table’s edge, a precarious moment staged with delighted yet anxious expectation of their fall. I love the mixture of mischief and violence in this work, and I’m reminded how often your arrangement of objects places them in implicit danger, where stillness is an anticipation of, or call to, disaster: your romance with the dynamic potential of imbalance.

Hands. Arranging leaves on a sidewalk in a small town in upstate New York in 2008 to spell the words HERE TO STAY. Later in the day, and on subsequent days, you will return repeatedly to photograph what remains of these arrangements, and again I am thinking about precariousness, about the fragility of your labour, the labour of your hands, and how this work, like so many of your other projects, is doomed already to disappearance.

Or your hands lifting a chair from out of knee-deep water. Or lifting the phone to take a picture of the landscape, the sky, the horizon, an abandoned mirror, a wrecked piece of furniture discarded in the street.

Or your hands clutching for eight hours a bunch of roughly sawn sticks that have been bundled together with dirty rope, as you stand by a statue at the side of the road in 2018. People come and go: curious onlookers, informal collaborators, friends. Cars pass, their drivers occasionally honking. This statue you keep vigil with—at the entrance to the shipyard 3. Maj in Rijeka—presents a larger-than-life-size heroic male figure, a titan who cradles a huge model ship in his own oversize hands. Through the hours you’re standing there together, a dialogue of sorts emerges between the model ship the statue-man carries and the items and materials you and your sometime visitors have chosen to hold aloft in this place. His ship speaks, perhaps, to the work of the port and the labour of the hands, while the burden of your own hands, that clumsy bundle of wooden sticks or slats you are holding, is either raw material or unidentified detritus. His stone hands carry a “thing,” while yours—your hands—carry only “stuff”: an idea, a dream of something, a state of potential. Or an echo, an aftermath. A “what will be,” or a “what has been.”

One of your hands, rested on the table in front of you, the index finger hooked around a pencil, the point of which is placed on a sheet of large paper. There’s also my hand, touching the same pencil, my finger wrapped around it from the other side—the counterbalanced pull of our digits keeping the pencil upright, albeit in a fluid, unsteady state. As the balance of our energies and impulses changes over the next hour, the pencil moves across the paper to create a ragged meandering line, its trace a seismographic record of our copresence, our interaction and exchange, as we work to keep the pencil steady and making marks at Aichi Triennale.

Hands. Wielding scissors, knives, blades, needles. Touching your face. Moulding clay. Stitching paper, mending a tear in the page that the same hands have just made—the stitches marking a neat line of black thread, suturing the surface, rejoining it by means of a cartoon surgical scar. Breaking and mending. Ripping and fixing.

Your hands. Moving in the air as you speak as part of a discursive panel or talk event somewhere, or here chatting in the kitchen or the bedroom, searching the space and the time between spoken words. As you talk, your hands are caressing, cutting, compacting, slicing, sieving, probing, holding, parting, pinching, weaving, and weighing the air, searching and sifting it for doubts and promises and, above all, for possibilities. Speaking, but also listening and waiting, things that are also an important part of speaking.

II

I am thinking about the studio table you worked at in 2021—the blue Formica table upon which you were making the 365 daily collages that would eventually comprise the project To See Stars over Mountains. Over the course of the year, this table slowly accrued a thousand fragments of discarded cut and torn materials, papers, images, threads, fabrics, ribbons: a thick landscape of detritus from which it was always nonetheless possible that you might salvage something at any moment, picking out a leftover element for use in one of the works.

I’m thinking also about the many PDFs you’ve sent me over the years, your end-of-install-day photographs that summarise the perspectives or approaches you have tried during a period of making and installing in some faraway city. You have a tirelessness in that kind of iterative process—a commitment to the poetics and semantics of arranging things—not making or building or even combining things necessarily so much as distributing them in a given space to create new articulations. What strikes me is that for every show or work you’ve produced in this way, there are always multiple abandoned versions, ghost arrangements, buried possibilities that are generated and photographed but never shown—arrangements that haunt the room unseen, their presence felt only in negative, since of course only because those other versions are not here do we see the version that is present. Indeed, we see the work that is presented with a clarity, a dynamic or particular spatial energy that is made possible only by the experiment (relative “failure” and rejection) of those earlier incarnations. All dated, the PDFs I am speaking of typically comprise phone pictures of several different installation solutions for a show, rearrangements as well as multiple possible versions of works or combinations of works. Looking at them might serve as a kind of time-lapse of your process, which, in late night calls, I’m sometimes asked to comment or even vote on. I like this part of the work, even if—by definition—I don’t always understand what you are doing or what you are looking for, my role (such as it is) being limited to offering thoughts, sentences, questions, throwing language at what you are doing in some provisional attempt (shared with you) to make or put a frame around the emerging work or to create a ground upon which that work might be seen with more clarity. Sometimes these conversations between us seem to bear direct fruit in the work itself, but just as often the progress and direction of the work appears fully independent of any discussions we might have—pursuing its own agenda, so to speak, in its own language, as the discourse rumbles on in the background. That’s just as it should be, I think. However much we are talking about ideas, however much we are drawn to framing structures, conceptual approaches, and so on, we are both firm believers in the material aspects of our work—in the eloquence of actual arrangements or constructions and how they sit in, occupy, or develop in space and time. The ideas are nothing without the articulacy of the objects, processes, and events. “No ideas,” the poet William Carlos Williams says, “but in things.”

There are also the mental images I have of you here in the house, testing the properties of materials or the behaviours and presences of various objects. The living-room floor covered in drawings you made with your feet, the kitchen table a precarious playground of sticks, tape, foam, and small round objects, the space outside the front door inhabited for months by objects collected in the park for some later possible project, a holding zone in which numerous scuffed, deflated footballs, a bent metal fork, a large wooden cable drum, or the separated legs of a number of chairs might be found.

III

Hands again, using a knife to cut into photographs of your father and his besuited work colleagues, taken in the 1970s or ’80s during socialism. Guiding the blade carefully around the figure of your father, your one hand grasps the paper while the fingers of the other pull his head forward, bending that part of his form out of the image and folding it downward. This gesture conceals his face, revealing in its place the hole in the paper’s surface (that hole in the image where his head used to be) and the back side of the paper (the other side, so to speak, of his head, of the image). Or else you are cutting around the whole group of your father and his colleagues, treating them as a single object, mass, or group shape, meanwhile folding the paper away from them. It’s an action in which the context of your dad and his friends or coworkers is effectively removed or erased, replaced by the back side of the paper, the figures themselves obliterated or disfigured in the process.

These gestures, and others like them in your collage or drawing works, are comical proposals, pieces of carefully improvised mischief. But they are also more than that, since as often as not, with all their cuttings-out and foldings-in of and around the human figure, they double as instances of totemic cruelty, enactments of displacements, transformations, destructions, or erasures of context.

For another work, your hands carefully use a paint brush and ink to alter the image of your mother on a photograph that shows her as a young woman, a university student. Here again you are somehow erasing the setting in which she’s been photographed. The ink you apply is a form of mandated forgetting, akin to that which history has already enacted on the Yugoslav socialist era, its social structures and values. The black fluid you apply is a shadow on a brain scan, a dark, floodlike memory loss or ocean of forgetting, a spilled oil in some pervasive slick, rendering the surroundings to zero, blanking out everything it touches—context, human figures. FORGET EVERYTHING/FORGE EVERYTHING, one of your text works says, and I often wonder if these repeated gestures—of erasure, of bodily rearrangement, of figurative decontextualisation—speak in some way to your own experience of displacement, actual and psychic.

IV

When you went to America on a high-school exchange program in 1991, you did so as a citizen of Yugoslavia, arriving in the US as a foreigner in that sense (of nationality), as well as in a second sense (that of economic system), since anyone born and raised outside of capitalism will always be a foreigner in it, where being a foreigner means having access to another frame of reference or another realm of possibility for the organization of society and relations. When Yugoslavia dissolved and the country that formed you ceased to exist as such, the pages of your then passport defaulted to their material status as mere paper—to co-opt a phrase from Mladen Stilinović. Stilinović wrote that just as a gallery is a room, so money is paper—or maybe he says it the other way around—although of course money is not paper anymore. Money is just numbers now. Or data.

Over the twenty years you lived in America, you might have become a kind of a foreigner at home, too, the way people do over time, as their senses of belonging and nonbelonging become multiple, shifting, confused, compounded, or overwritten.

Perhaps foreignness is always doubling or complexifying in this way. In recent years, you switched from being a foreigner in America to being a foreigner in the UK, arriving here on a visa in your American passport. With your move, you got geographically closer to your parents and to Croatia, which soon after joined the EU. But Brexit swiftly underscored your foreignness again. These days, you’re at home here as an EU citizen through what the UK calls “settled status/leave to remain.”

There is a double reading of this phrase “leave to remain.” For the bureaucracy—and in terms of the practicalities—you have leave (permission) to remain. But there’s also the implication (unintentional, one assumes) that a person might have to leave (in order) to remain. Leaving and remaining are either simple or extremely complicated. You have to leave in order to remain. But leave what, or where. And remain what.

No one can go home because the world knots itself around home or flips it out of existence. Or because home is always relational, a spatial but also temporal construction, and time has always passed, will always pass, will keep passing.

V

I am thinking now about a particular project of yours, an installation you made in Rotterdam in 2016 called Means and Ends. It’s a work I never saw in real life, though I might well have seen in-progress PDFs as you were out there working.

In any case, I admire the simplicity. It takes only a moment to see the principle that guides the work. There is an unruly collection of planks, sticks, lengths of wood, and other materials, each of them arranged so that one end rests on the gallery floor while the other is propped up against the wall using an object to raise it up. This gesture of trying to gain height is then repeated in roughly twenty self-evidently improvised iterations. These forms are positioned, informally if at more or less regular intervals, around the edges of the gallery.

It’s important that none of the materials used in the work appear new. All of the planks and sticks leaned against the wall bear diverse though unspectacular signs of discolouration from use and wear and tear, while the propping objects for these makeshift ramps are evidently recycled, an unruly collection, more so even than the planks and sticks themselves. Among these “props” are sundry blocks or lengths of wood, a bucket, an old chair, a discarded bicycle tyre, etc. All are the kinds of things that are often left lying about—urban, workshop, or domestic detritus. Some items (blocks, pieces of wood, foam) are more or less abstract—if not “useless,” then at least without an apparent specific function. Others, meanwhile, suggest a clearer intended use (bucket, box, chair, bicycle tyre). In any case, the two classifications of objects (those with a specific purpose and those without one) are effectively rendered equivalent in your work because everything here is confined to, or asked to demonstrate, only a single form of utility: namely, the ability to hold another thing off the ground. The arrangements—twinned objects, balanced in symbiotic relation—seem to vary in terms of their stability: some look relatively solid, others entirely precarious.

The space for this installation is a rather pristine white room accessed via a single staircase, the diagonal swath of which appears to prefigure or invite the numerous diagonals of the installation itself. Descending the staircase one sees, in effect, a series of crude alternative “stairways” below, none viable: mere echoes of the functional structure one has already begun to descend.

At the very top of the walls on each long side of this room is a line of small windows, serving to let natural light into the space, the light a sign of the world outside—an up and out there—that otherwise remains unseen. In this context, the repeated gesture of the ramps, more or less all of them “reaching” ineffectively for the windows, offers itself as an essay on escaping, on the thwarted desire to climb out made manifest by these improvised constructions. Here and there, though, we see a few exceptions to the “rule” that otherwise appears to govern the work—in one place a swath of foam runs along the floor, meets the wall, and runs up it for a while, its partial route out unsupported by any propping object. Elsewhere, in a couple of places, planks or sticks point away from the wall, leveraged back into the space to lean instead against its pillars. In yet another place, an almost vertical plank leaned against a pillar provides a precarious propping point for a second plank, which then runs back to the outer wall, reaching it at the giddy height of the window.

An essay on the possibility of escaping. A work and at the same time an abandoned experiment or construction site. Like many of your works, it gives off such contradictory signals. On the one hand, one senses immediately its improvisational quality, its apparent arbitrariness, its apparent engagement with whatever was as hand—the materials, the space itself. It’s easy to imagine that the things you made use of were lying around, here or hereabouts, before your act of salvage pulled them into the informal economy of your project. It’s also easy to imagine that the whole scene we are looking at could have been otherwise. That changing it would be simple. There are no specialist processes at work in what we see, no “fabrication,” no skills beyond the quotidian—its creation is clearly a matter of simple arrangement rather than of construction. It’s evident that the large foam block could have supported a different stick, that the long brown plank could have gone higher or reached toward a different window were it so arranged. One can also imagine—if one’s prone to telling stories—that the arrangement we discover in the gallery might in fact all be different tomorrow. Or that it was all different yesterday or the day before. One can think that these works are fluid, somehow temporary iterations. Waypoints or gestures in an ongoing process or exploration.

At the same time, however, it is emphatically a work. A kind of still life. An experiment in which there has been a temporary or permanent suspension. It’s possible to imagine it otherwise, but one is struck nonetheless by its particularity. By the state in which this system has come to rest. By the specific qualities of the arrangement we are presented with. These particular twinnings of materials and objects we see, these particular balancing acts, these particular attempts to scale the walls. This particular sequence of elements one encounters when navigating the room.

I said I admire the simplicity, but what I mean really is that I admire the complexity. The way you open the space between the two.

I appreciate also that this work, as with so much of what you do, rests between a kind of simple sculptural materialism and metaphor. In the first sense, we can say that it is what it is what it is: around forty items of certain kinds placed, balanced in pairs, in relation to an architectural space. Not more than that, really. And not less. And yet metaphors are always calling to us from the materials, their arrangement, and their relation to space. This idea of escape, of the ramp, of the “reach” for the light, the window, the outside world. And with it, the idea of the objects acting in temporary combination or collaboration with one another, as if together they might reach out further and with more stability, as if together they might form an actual pathway, or else together prototype a route toward the outside world. Or the idea of failure suggested by the work: your invocation of a desire—to make a way out—that lacks appropriate means (materials and tools), and that perhaps lacks the requisite understanding of the physics, the engineering principles necessary to craft an actual stairway or exit ramp. Or perhaps the work speaks of yet another human impulse—that of mimicry—such that the structures making up your work all seem to offer a kind of inadequate distorted mirror of the staircase itself. An investigation of its visual code, or of its spirit rather than its functionality.

And then there’s the metaphoric force—present in so much of your work—of the act of repurposing itself. We sense that just as these objects have had another life before this installation, they may well pick that life up again once the exhibition is over. The air-bed pump. The paint can. The bucket. Even the various planks could so easily reclaim a former utility once released from their sojourn in the realm of art. It speaks—this repurposing—to a shift in priorities or necessities. A sophisticated object like an air-bed pump is not needed in the situation you have concocted, except insofar as it may be used to lean a plank on. Likewise a pot of paint. Or a length of four-inch-wide timber. In this situation you have made, these objects, these items, are asked to do new things, their generally acknowledged properties ignored in favour of a set of apparently more-urgent qualifications.

The repurposing seems to speak of several things. There is indeed an urgency—a changed situation, an expediency, let’s say. A change in the world or circumstances that appears to demand immediate innovations to the use of things in it, changes to one’s action. There is a playful, wrongheaded energy to some of these constructions, as if—as well as escape—this were a small essay on human resourcefulness, on our ability to find ways and means: means to connect one point in space or location to another, means to get out, perhaps, to dream a way of escaping our predicament.

VI

Final hand.

It is in the end sequence of your film Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done, 2021. Your hand is at the height of your hips, and your fingers hold one end of a short length of ribbon, letting the wind in what we call “the big field” of the nearby park take the tattered miniature sail of the material.

The ribbon moves, and as it moves, it performs a makeshift reading of the weather, a test of its own materiality, and an act, perhaps, of clairvoyance. We are watching a collaboration of object, body, and forces. Your hand feels the ribbon’s motion in the wind, its twists and turns, its flutterings and tremblings, its bending back now and then upon itself, its self-caresses, its tentative unfurlings and almost knottings.

You have set up a simple situation—a performance, if you like: to stand with this ribbon as you stood with the statue and a bundle of sticks in Rijeka, with the unhinged door in Lisbon. And in this situation, you are listening. Not more than that, really; not less. A kind of waiting game. You are listening with your body, with your hand holding the ribbon. Waiting to see and feel what will happen (to it, to you). What will come. Waiting (as you must in Venice) to see what will arrive, to see who will come to the door, to see what message or signal or call will come in on the wind.

Standing in the field, you are attending to the materials and their behaviour. Waiting. Seeing what they do, how they do in relation to the wind. I think the movement of the ribbon in the wind is war and peace. It is excitement and hesitation, ecstasy and agony, thought and sleep, change and steadiness. It is doubt, it is certainty, it is abandon and apparent collapse, and it is resilience.

Tim Etchells is a UK-based artist and writer whose work shifts between performance, visual art, and writing. Living and working in London and Sheffield, he has produced major commissions for public spaces and has exhibited in museums, galleries, and biennials in many international contexts. Etchells is the leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment, with whom he has been making work since 1984. He has also collaborated with a wide range of musicians, artists, and performance makers, including Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Marino Formenti, Tony Buck, Taus Mahakacheva, Vlatka Horvat, Ant Hampton, Aisha Orazbayeva, Hugo Glendinning, and Elmgreen & Dragset. Etchells’ monograph on contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, Certain Fragments (Routledge, 1999) is widely acclaimed, and his publications include Endland (And Other Stories, 2019), While You Are With Us Here Tonight (LADA/Tate, 2013), Vacuum Days (Storythings, 2012), The Broken World (Heinemann, 2008), and Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened (Spector, 2023), a monograph focused on his neon installations and text works. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2019 and his experimental writing pamphlet Amends was published by Monitor Books in 2023. Etchells was a recipient of The Live Art Development Agency/Tate Research Legacy: Thinker In Residence Award in 2008, Artist of the City of Lisbon in 2014, and the prestigious Spalding Gray Award in February 2016. Under his leadership, Forced Entertainment were awarded the International Ibsen Award 2016 for their ground-breaking contribution to the field of contemporary theatre and performance.