Art by Jingyi Li
In Review: Seeing Further (Esther Kinsky, Fitzcarraldo Editions, August 2024)
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Ottilie Ethel Leopoldine Herbert, Countess of Carnarvon, had knockout feet. Few who saw them in action would deny it. Trained at the Vienna Opera, they danced their way to married bliss; their owner, more widely known as Tilly Losch, elicited a proposal from British millionaire Edward James with just a pirouette. The union was passionate, if not protracted, and is preserved in thread on James’s carpet at Monkton House. So entranced was he by his new bride’s feet that, upon seeing a wet trail of steps winding their way from her bath to her bed, he commissioned embroiderers to sew them into immortality.
The couple’s explosive divorce impelled James to relocate to a different house, the flooring of which was defiantly stitched with the footprints of his dog. Sewn onto a bare stretch of carpet, the prints seemed to mark an absence, rather than a presence: a momentary void where Losch’s feet had been, and would be again, but currently were not. This empty space was, to James, a more compelling piece of art than a filled one.
Inhabiting the same non-space is Esther Kinsky’s autobiographical Seeing Further (2024). The book, like James’s stairwell, is sparsely populated. Its villages are ‘empty’, its ‘shops and bars closed’. Its very prose respects the stillness of the landscape it evokes: slow and poised, at times to the point of stagnation, Kinsky’s sentences refuse to move too quickly.
Nor does our protagonist populate the book in a typical way. Instead of a human, we are proffered a derelict Cinema on the Great Hungarian Plain. Kinsky discovers it abandoned, notes how
the wood exuded the smell of summer, of absorbed warmth, the dust of all the years that had pulverised the varnish.
The ensuing account of her frustrated bid to repopulate the Cinema is, ironically, fascinated by this initial lack of audience. Years after Kinsky relinquishes her project, she returns to relive this first encounter, and inhales the scent of disuse anew:
the wood oozed this familiar, unique childhood smell, which […] had imprinted itself in my memory so strongly back then, the first time I touched the door.
These moments are Seeing Further at its most potent. Though Kinsky seeks to fill emptiness, both she and her reader are transfixed by the artistic possibilities it breeds. Just as Losch’s embroidered footprints represent an empty moment more interesting than her actual footfall, so too is the middle interlude in which Kinsky revives the cinema eclipsed by the flanking footfalls of its abandonment.
Esther Kinsky’s photograph of the Cinema
What is so attractive about a space filled with nothing? Kinsky figures this question as a perplexing enchantment. She wants to
get to the bottom of what it was exactly about the aura of […] empty space, what spell this region of deprivation and the absences in themselves had cast.
With just ten pages of the book to go, it is a valiant mission to undertake. The question introduces an upwards inflection awkwardly late in the day. It lodges, unanswered, and begins its work after the book is finished.
Perhaps the Cinema appeals to Kinsky as a struggling patient might do a nurse. This is how she characterises the relationship, at least; she writes of a compulsion to ‘help a cinema back onto its feet’. Scattered across Europe ‘some years back’ are Cinemas who have not been so fortunate: corpses, whose death Kinsky observes with solemnity.
After the cinema summer in the Hungarian lowlands, for sixteen years I watched cinemas die. They died in London, in Berlin, in Budapest and in Trieste and in Paris; some went quietly, others more loudly, some went quickly and others with a grinding slowness.
This is a catching sickness, Kinsky’s syntax tells us. If abandonment is a plague, Seeing Further ought to be read as a gripping illness narrative. And if Kinsky is pulled to the empty space as a philanthropic medical professional, we are pulled to it as a voyeur to a hospital scene. We watch, engrossed, as her treatment fails.
Alongside the morbid, though, there is fertility. This inheres within the empty space: blankness invites breeding. Culture has always flocked to have this artistic philosophy at its soirées. A 1929 diary entry of American illustrator Wanda Gág’s, for example, sees it inked into its pages:
There is, to me, no such thing as an empty place in the universe – and if Nature abhors a vacuum, so do I.
Every section of a Gág print whirrs with life. Blank walls, etched with hair-like lines, morph into a kind of animal hide; empty corners are shaded into dynamism. A German contemporary of Gág’s, Käthe Kollwitz, calls on her viewers to do this work: leaving important portions of paper provocatively white, she invites emptiness to have significance projected onto it. Her work invokes the Japanese term ‘ma’ (間, negative space). Translated literally as ‘gap’ or ‘pause’, globally, an artist’s blank page has a time limit.
Wanda Gág, Philodendron Pertusum, 1944 (printed 1947)
The artistic itch to fill emptiness runs wild in Seeing Further. Kinsky is not satiated by the act of populating a page with ink. She is, after all, a film lover: projection is part of the job. Towards the book’s beginning, she wanders through a piece of land inhabited only by anthropomorphised ‘grass standing tall behind the yellow paled gate’. Onto this, she cannot help but project a population. Her imagination surrounds her with
uncertain employees biding their time behind closed shutters – perhaps a lure, placed by the border guards, who might have been burrowed in the rushes, their sights already on me.
We get a reprise when she first discovers the abandoned Cinema.
In the empty, dirty entrance room I imagined eager visitors crowding in, the air full of the smell of their jackets wet from rain.
For Kinsky, as for Gág, a space is never really empty. Her very use of the word is negated by the end of the sentence, which tells of ‘full’ air and ‘crowding’. The Cinema, though deserted, bustles with potential animation. Her imaginings are embryonic versions of the book’s most developed projection: the moment at which the Cinema’s projector is fired back into action, and beams out a ‘cube of wonder with its own concept of time’.
Esther Kinsky’s photograph of the projectors
But if a cinema in use cultivates its own temporality, so too does an abandoned one. How does the passing of time mark a space in which nothing happens? Dust amasses, perhaps; the smell Kinsky notices builds. Apart from that, though, there is a unique stasis in the emptiness. Time slows, just as it might do when watching a film. Man Ray, entranced by the orphaned structures left in Marcel Duchamp’s empty studio whilst he spent a year in New York, set up a two-hour-long exposure to capture the gradual accumulation of dust in an otherwise paralysed environment. The length of exposure wrestles any movement in the studio into one static image as the process of ‘breeding’ is immobilised. Ninety years on, Hiroshi Sugimoto pulled a similar trick. Abandoned Theatres (1970-present) embodies the Kinsky-esque in a series of photographs of ghost cinemas whose screens remain eerily bleached. The white-hot square at each image’s centre is a result of an exposure as long as Man Ray’s: Sugimoto left his shutter open for the duration of a screened film, producing, as the stills accumulated, blankness.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Proctor’s Theatre, Troy, 2015
There is something mesmeric in the temporal inertia of an empty space. Kinsky treasure her cinema as a time capsule; she records how
the projectors gathered dust, for weeks, for months, and the posters, unchanging in the display boxes, continued to reference days and months long past.
The steadfastness comes as a longed-for reprieve from a world in which updating is the modish currency. Gone, she laments, is the characterful ‘old Everyman in Hampstead’ with its uncomfortable seats – gone too are those like it.
Today there is an Everyman chain that operates under the illusion that it is possible to replicate a small, one-of-a-kind reel cinema where you can hole up inside Ozu’s Tokyo Story on a dreary Christmas eve.
These cinemas are, in their own way, empty – their cinemas as needful of nursing as Kinsky’s own.
With her expression of a desire to understand the ‘spell’ cast by the empty space, Kinsky sets her readers a task that outlives their consumption of the book. She sends us out into the world as researchers, charged with learning as much as we can about this rare form of magic. The answers are myriad. Empty space is a hospital room; it is an artist’s studio; it is a time machine. It can be nothing, or anything. It is a little world unto its own – a little kingdom, in which art reigns supreme.
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