TANGENTS: A MINDSCAPE IN A LANDSCAPE (2004)

Tangents: A Mindscape in a Landscape (2004) opens with the views of Castlefield’s Viaduct in Manchester. The camera traverses metal columns, criss-crossed guardrails and the propulsive rhythm of trains over tracks, hallmarks of the structure’s heritage as a once-key agent of the industrial revolution in the north, before taking us through fields of wheat and red poppies far from the city. Here we follow sculptor Cecile Elstein into the Cambridgeshire countryside, where she has been invited to exhibit a site-specific installation at the Wimpole Estate’s gardens. 

Together with Tangents (1997), as the work itself is called, consists of white rope threaded through metal poles driven into the grass, held taut above the ground in an intersecting arrangement. Elstein's notebook reveals that the work’s angled linear array derives from Zohar’s commentary on Noah’s Dove, the radiating diagonal cord recalling outstretched wings of a bird in flight. Elstein was invited to submit a proposal for a site specific sculpture for the 1997 Summer Sculpture exhibition at Wimpole Hall. Having initially been refused permission to grow a sculpture of wheat on the estate’s grounds, the work’s succeeding form hovers above the soil without disturbing the heritage turf.

The soft elasticity of the rope allows for both re-arrangements and haptic response by visitors while holding its shape. Like the work’s physical form, meaning here feels more unfixed, perhaps reflecting Elstein’s philosophy of non-interference which she developed as a pupil under the surrealist artist Catherine Yarrow. Non-interference is the belief that creative authority should rest with the individual rather than with any outside force, where collective proximity may enable a deeper form of inward looking where each person could access their own voice precisely because others were present alongside them. Like Elstein describes about the work, the viewers are ‘plugging into an artistic process with their own experience of life’, subverting the traditional hierarchy of meaning-making surrounding an artwork.

Kendal’s filming attends to the work’s full duration from installation to deinstallation. We see the rope being taut and pulled through the metal poles to take their shape by way of the labour of Elstein and her assistant. Footage during the summer’s sculpture show, depicts visitors engaging with the work through a distinctly haptic immediacy, touching and inhabiting its open structure against a soundscape of chattering and shoes on gravel. Two children explore the rope, feeling the structure and weight of the thread while combing it through with their fingers.

Such invitations to touch and understand the world through the senses brought the tactile and its ability to orient us brings to mind the theorist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interest in ‘the body is the vehicle of being in the world’. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945, p.95) In his concept of flesh, Merleau-Ponty argues that the body that senses is simultaneously felt in a collapse in the boundary between the self and the world through a kind of mutual encounter between body and material. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1964, p.248). A woman sitting inside Elstein’s installation says it reminds her of the sea, of being above and below a surface, the undulations of the rope evoking the weightlessness of water. These are moments of meaning primarily made through the ‘flesh – in feeling the fibres of rope tickling the palms of our hands or perceiving the firm rooting of the poles in the grass – opposed to understandings arrived at through cognitive reflection or interpretation alone. Kendal’s imagery extends such an experience digitally through slow-motion scenes of the rustling of a white horse tail and the ambient sound recordings of birds and wind blowing.

Interpretation as a form of ‘reading’ of the work here also becomes a form of writing of the body by staying with what may be seen as the ‘tangential’ to knowing. The poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous offers a writing through, with and of the body as mode of recognising our bodies as the locus for knowledge rather than simply a motor to facilitate cognitive processes, saying ‘it’s with her body that [the woman] vitally supports the “logic” of her speech. Her flesh speaks true…In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body’. (Cixous 1976, p.881)

The film’s attention to tangential elements and their sensory capacities at the threshold of ourselves and the world invites such close engagement with the corporeal by shifting our attention inwards. Against an image of Gustave Courbet’s Corn Sifters (1854), Elstein says in a voiceover that ‘rootedness, connection with the earth is extremely important for our time because we are going up into other planets…and…we mustn’t forget where our roots lie’. Responding to the painting Elstein speaks from a rooted attention to presentness and to the things we can make acquaintance with on a skin-level. As the body of the woman of the Corn Sifters is bent in a concentrated rhythm, her labour devoted to each grain falling down the sift held in her hand, Elstein’s words evokes the need to slow down and attend to the specific in front of us. A logic of interpretation produced through the hands and the body, subjective experiences of the world and our position in it.

In an interview art historian Shulamith Behr compares the metamorphic form of the site specific sculpture to Ana Mendieta’s temporary Silueta imprints in soil and mud, both works inseparable from their rootedness in a specific moment and place. In The Lure of the Local (1997), the art historian and curator Lucy Lippard engages with the idea of rootedness in site-specific artwork. Against a backdrop of increased globalisation and placeness in the late 90s, Lippard articulated a notion of being grounded in place which rather than locating itself in a conservative idea of permanence, attends to a specific location and its particular history and ecology. Lippard defines place here as being ‘about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened here, what will happen here’. (Lippard 1997, p.7) Being rooted in this sense is to resist the circulatory forces driven by consumerism, unable to be bought and transported as commodity circulation or being reproduced for profit. A scene of the film depicts a tractor working the grounds of the estate, moving around the Elstein’s installation where the grass has grown high and lush. By staying in the turf, Tangents as a site-specific work resists commodification and Elstein’s expression of the importance of rootedness in our time becomes an invocation to reorient ourselves to know the world through the local and subjective experience of it.

Since 2022 Castlefield's viaduct is an elevated park. A palimpsest of industrial innovation and our ecological present, the tracks that once carried the products of industrialisation now form a bridge into new relationships with nature and place. It is perhaps this kind of rootedness Elstein speaks of, attentive to the ground from which we grow.

Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and  Paula Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239

Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 1997, The New Press

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, reprint 2002, Routledge

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 1964, reprint 1968, Northwestern University Studies.