The Dangers Of Happy
Sonia Shiel's paintings for The Dangers Of Happy depict the simplest of human endeavours: an adult climbs a tree with a child; neighbours navigate a large object between houses; somebody is arranging flowers - while an ominous tone of fragility lurks in the urchin grey shapes, bare limbs, and uncanny translucencies that penetrate these moments of hard-won connection. Glimpsed here, and shrouded in light - the action is always on the move, so that even the abiding seems to exist as a perishable and mysterious thing.
See below, for the exhibition text. 'Zoom, or What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Love' is an excerpt from correspondence between Chris Clarke, curator of The Glucksman Gallery, Cork, and the artist Sonia Shiel, during a Covid lockdown that prevented the usual studio visits involved in commissioned gallery texts. The exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh gallery, Dublin ran from June to July in 2021.
exhibition text
Zoom, or What we talk about when we don’t talk about love.
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Dear Chris,
At the beginning of the process, I started with Viktor Shklovsky's special essay Art as Technique but got distracted by this - “While exiled in Berlin, the (literary/art) critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with the writer Elsa Triolet. He began sending her several letters a day, a situation she accepted under the condition he not write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, was published in 1923, in which his reflections on everyday life are obliquely consumed by the very thoughts he has pledged to constrain.” and this crux, “Occasionally Shklovsky breaks down. “I love you,” he says, and then apologises.”
S
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Dear Sonia,
Yes, in his 1923 epistolary novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, Viktor Shklovsky was instructed by Elsa Triolet that, in order to continue their correspondence, he must refrain from declaring his affection for her: “Don’t write me only about your love. Don’t make wild scenes on the telephone. Don’t rant and rave. You’re managing to poison my days. I need freedom - I refuse to account for my actions to anyone!” So instead he writes about the weather, the publisher Zinovy Grzhebin, the animals in the zoo ("In Berlin, as everyone knows, the Russians live around the zoo."), ocean liners, the painter Ivan Puni ("Paintings devour him. It is so hard to work! These things are born like children."), different models of automobiles, the ability to hold a fork, and, of course, inevitably, love.
Your conditions for writing about this new series of paintings aren’t quite as stringent; rather, in pointing out their connection to Shklovsky, you say: "please don't feel any pressure to write about the show in any specific or definitive way [...] don't feel like you have to explain the work." I was thus momentarily tempted not to mention this story, to abide by and incorporate the restrictions imposed upon Schlovsky in my own way. But the anecdote felt too appropriate to the works, too serendipitous in their affinity with Triolet’s criteria. Like the book, they skirt around the edges, alluding to particular scenarios and situations, inferring and insinuating without saying anything straight out. Are these titles propositions - when we are big, when we make plans, when we are hopeful - with the repetition of speculative imaginings recalling the sense of yearning, of promises held close, that runs through Zoo’s letters? They seem to forecast - and wish for - a shared future, an eventual reconciliation or reunion.
Shklovsky is also known as the proponent of defamiliarisation - ostranenie - from his 1917 text Art as Technique. Here, he encourages artists to ‘make strange’ the mundane, the everyday, the known, and, in the process, to break with habitualisation, “an effect of dulled perceptions, perceptions which have been clouded by routine, by culture.” (the quote is from Simon Watney’s essay ‘Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror.’) There is a hint of this in Letter twenty-two of Zoo: "At the next stage in art, psychological motivation wears out. It must be changed, 'estranged.'" This tactic also finds form in your canvases, as detached limbs, distant bodies, and glimpses of hands and legs disturb placid fields of pattern and colour. Two pairs of hands, tantalisingly visible from the edges of the frame, draw ripples in the painted surface, carving out streams that reveal the deep green water below. An oblong cloud of cobalt blue connects opposite fingers stretching out from symmetrical window frames. Legs dangle from above, bisecting an array of angular objects and parallel lines. Veils of transparent colour and half-formed figures are vaguely perceptible and cut off at their wrists and ankles. I peer into the skim of diaphanous pinks and browns, the elongated geometry of concentric blue rings, and the scuffed, mottled background of earth tones, and pick out a pair of kicking legs, as if partially occluded by a beach umbrella.
What about the title? The Dangers of Happy, in its marriage of two, seemingly incompatible, grammatically unwieldy, descriptions, is ambiguous. Is this what Shklovsky would have felt, issuing his indirect declarations of love without anticipation of response or reciprocity? Is the happiness, then, comprised of not knowing? And isn’t this condition integral to any act of communication, of making something and putting it out there, and then seeing what happens next, how it is received?
Chris
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Dear Chris
In all the works there is something to loose. Mostly, you are right .. it’s love, of one and other, and of life itself. In all the works, the very thing celebrated by the title and in the image is always what’s at stake. These are the dangers of happy.
1. When we make plans
Here, two pairs of hands collaborate in a process, hand plucking blades of grass, and blue flower seeds, until they reach water, underground. They furrow towards each other in earnest and yet diverge. Their focus on the small individual details perhaps distracting from their intentions. In the end the paths they make together do not seem to meet. Yet the task is thorough, enduring and done in earnest. Perhaps divergence is intentional, part of a bigger acre that only time will reveal.
2. When we are big
Here, adult legs carry a child’s legs up into the crown of a tree. They climb ahead while another adult’s arms stretch after them, below them and in a continuum. In a sense this relationship is looping the image and even the generations. When we are young we want to be all sorts of things. We are ambitious and determined and talk about being big - as in fully grown but also big - as in full. All along the way however we are taking risks. The climbers are in a precarious position.. they might fall, but they strive nonetheless and so will the next person and the person after that, ad infinitum.
3. When we are hopeful
Here, two windows are breached by outstretched arms. They carry an unknowable object - a rock, a geometric shape, a cloud? They carry something that can never be either of theirs without breaking. They hold onto it tenderly, carefully - but whatever happens next will mean the end of this thing. They are too far away from each other to pull it to safety either side. They are too high off the ground for anyone to help. And the little window below exaggerates this height. Perhaps they could drop it and it would float. It seems to have weight. It seems to be reflective - but it is also penetrated by their fingers. It is an unknown connection and a temporary one - if life is to go on. Why have they not already let go? Only one thing keeping them - hope.
4. When we have shelter
Here, what’s at stake is shelter/ protection. The image depicts big and small legs.. adult and child. The are half covered. The umbrellas are being dragged and distorted in shape, like the rest of the scene - and it melts like a vortex in places. Light is enhanced and the stark shadow of a bird appears to create an arial view. Presumably, we are in between the real bird that we cannot see and the land. We are looking down on the beach, a scene perhaps ravaged by the tide, and from this point of view the family are as much a part of a vast shoreline as the ageing brollies. We live permanently threatened by time and nature, but live nonetheless. Little legs play with a beach ball, presumably a child wrapped tightly and safely in a mother’s lap.
5. When we summer
This is joy. It’s two pairs of youthful legs splashing in a fountain. It is wet in giant blue drops and saturated in sun. Something is being celebrated- perhaps freedom. The legs appear at once to be dancing and falling. They cannot be both. But here they are. Like their dance, summer is only temporary, it’s a joy we know will end. The monumental type fountain is crumbly and old in contrast with the young supple legs, but it will outlive them. New dances will happen by new legs every new summer. The colours are bright and deep, disturbing the rusty bowl. Like summer, the dance is worth having.. even with the fall that comes next.
6. When we remember
On a tartan blanket, three pairs of legs picnic. A glass on the top left corner spills over the whole scene, blurring the tartans rigid linear design to cascade beyond its measure. When we remember, ‘it’ is never clear. ‘It’ is unreliably good or bad, true or false. Here, the components of tartan are all there still but in disarray. They fuse in a kind of collective happy or a collective weep. Only the colour stays the same. A hue of yellow-pink, the colour of nostalgia, summer holidays, childhood and Wibbly-Wobbly Wonders ... where did they go?
S
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