The edition “Site Visits”, work that was in progress from 2012, is now available at Galerie mbeck, Homburg/Saar. This joint work with the American poet Brian Johnson contains 17 pairs, each consisting of an image and a poem, or a poem and an image. In nine of the pairs, the poem existed first and inspired the image. In eight of the pairs, the images existed first and inspired the poem that relates to it.
17-05-001
17-05-002
at a reading
in Trier, Germany,
in 2013
17-05-003
17-05-004
17-05-005
17-05-006
Foregone Poem by Brian Johnson
You bar me. You remember the time I cried in your presence. The times I cried in your absence belong to the bench and a leaf-sheeted pond.
Where will I find it, old light, old shaking flesh, memento-clasp? If I am barred from you, I am barred from every book, and every couch, and every chamber-to-chamber ramble, the love of myself not being myself.
I forgot to eat. I forgot when to need you, and when to leave you. It was that kind of love, dissident, undutiful, like hiding in the whiteness of a half-life that darkens the moment you recognize it, the instant you think it’s yours, a stone come to life, a cloud made to speak.
No space is made to be entered; to be beheld, looked-for, circled, retraced, is the nature of it, and this long waiting at the shore, at doors, over and over. I come out of the wind at night. I stop, turn around, and sit down. I expect something in the stillness. A reunion with green. A bit of red. You standing in the water, fish-pale and wet-haired. I can make you out, so clearly.
The territory of a rabbit, the territory of an eye. Every dawn, a brush in the hoarfrost. This old road like all roads, populated for long stretches and then vacated, moon-evacuated, scoured clean of its meetings, of you, of me, of every creeping and flitting and broken thing, a long time ago.
Glimpses of white: snow-white, paper-white, cloud-white. But how to breathe it, how to parade around it, like we’d finally been given the place, like we’d gotten beyond beautiful, and beyond isn’t it?
We are ghosts now, in a black forest. You lead me through the trees. It snows. It keeps snowing, and we stay.
"7 Priene St"
17-05-007
"7 Priene St"
17-05-008
"7 Priene St"
17-05-009
"Writer's Rooms"
17-05-010
"A Few Ideas"
17-05-011
"Testament"
17-05-012
The Bride Poem by Brian Johnson
Amidst laid-out books and weeping heads
All the dreams where she is a princess
And needs to be alone again
Facing the big moon with small breasts
And the mirror with gray eyes
And the closet with knee-length hair
She reaches the end
And composes herself
Like a glass of the finest milk.
"Convertible Scene"
17-05-019
"The Itinerary"
17-05-020
"The Itinerary"
17-05-021
The Itinerary Poem by Brian Johnson
Corner where the light is warm; corner where I winter out, where I lean in to your endless face; mute corner, deaf corner, corner of the begotten age and of the old thoughts; corner of the park where I sit often, corner of the square surrounded by buildings, their public stone, their private eyes in every storey; corner where I feed the birds, and seek them, their ether for myself, their ledges for mine, the birds that colonize dawn, the empire-birds; corner where I am invisible, where I lose my birth-face, become an antiman, an anonym, which cannot be called or traced or recollected; corner where I am colored in, spotted by light, irradiated phase to phase until I am past phases, a boulder, a shell in repose, a still-life without a year, without Amsterdam or Paris to give its position, the school it belongs to, its more or less famous siblings and their flowerings and the crowds passing them in the museum, in the long afternoons; corner where someone must be placed, facing out, facing in, facing the spring bodies and the sounds of bodies, facing the room and its gathered furniture, a part of the total, yet apart from the total, this one breathing away the hour; corner where the vase ends up, where the visitor goes, must go, spare corner, bare corner, corner of the picture the night is disintegrating.
"One Night"
17-05-022
"One Night"
17-05-023
"Tuesday Musical"
17-05-024
17-05-025
"The Snow's"
17-05-026
"The Snow's"
17-05-027
"The Door"
17-05-028
"You interest me
like a sea..."
17-05-029
"You interest me
like a sea..."
17-05-030
“You interest me like a sea…” Poem by Brian Johnson
You interest me like a sea, like a view of the water widening out of sight. You live in the blue, in that far-reaching unbreakable stillness. You can be there what you cannot be here: part of the future, one of those peoples, the image of those peoples, the sea-people, the island-people, horizon dwellers who never move, who remain when the post is left. You’ve become this presence, a dry wind scouring the grasses, a scent out of season, the sun-hammered point—sea-bright, hazy—a face turning up, a body washed away. If only I could touch you, where the map-dots intersect, where the running from place to place ends, and the little underthings that hold me to it, the past, the past, slide off, like the make-believe ghosts of troubled children. I inherit you when I am most alone, when there is no lunch but the window itself, or the gate long since rattled into shape, ornate, unmoving. And all these glimpses of the sea, the sea through the trees, the sea in the guidebook, in the museum wing devoted to sea-paintings, the sea earlier and the sea later than I remember it, these glimpses become you, leaning into the glass, saying words I can almost hear.
The folder “Site Visits” consists of 17 pairs
of poems by Brian Johnson
and fine-art prints by Burghard Müller-Dannhausen
with an introductory text by Christopher Naumann.
Format of the sheets: 40 x 30 cm
Size of edition: 20 copies Arabic,
14 copies Roman,
2 copies dtb, and 4 copies hc
by the author and the artist
numbered and signed in the colophon,
the prints additionally
numbered and signed by the artist.
Printing of the images and texts by
Shahryar Nateghi
in Lucida Bright on 170 g Clara Bulk
Edited and published by Mathias Beck.
edition mbeck, comebeck publishing
Schwedenhof, Am Römermuseum, Homburg/Saar
www.comebeck-publishing/edition-susanna-beck
2014