LUCK AND CHANCE. An approach to the Femme fatal-platonic loves project

“Do not ask a philosopher about luck, they will not answer you, perhaps, however they will answer you if you ask them about something that we tend to identify it with: chance. They will give you the example of the plant pot that falls into your path. Aristoteles talked about chance, referring to it as an inscrutable part of human existence, relating it to relevant or accidental aspects that occur in our day-to-day lives. However, chance is not as popular as luck. Good or bad luck is ever present in our day-to-day vocabulary, and it can often be used to explain our journeys in life or even to give opinions, without hesitation, about things that happen to others. Perhaps luck is somehow related to a type of personal assessment of our own existence, with the belief that the circumstances which have provoked this luck will have appeared as if gifted, contributing in this way to our happiness, or why not, our misfortune. Here the question lies in whether luck can be found in what one has, or in what one desires.

When looking for a way to explain this mystery, a link of the internet brought me to a page called “femme-fatal”, and on this page, I discovered the “Justice & Police Museum”, which was related to Sydney’s history. There I found images from the nineteen-twenties archives in a folder named “women prisoner”. There were dozens of police reports in which the faces of women of all ages, which had been photographed with a disturbing and heart-breaking clarity, were accompanied by a brief text, their police report, which told of their crime. These images sparked an interest within me, resulting in something that I like to define as a platonic love for each of them, and I felt compelled to tell their “other” story. Rather than just inventing a simple fictional story, I decided to imagine what their lives would have been like, if only they had come across some “good luck”. I did not want the single photographs taken of their faces at that exact moment to become the only evidence of their passage through the incredible anonymous experience that every single human being has contributed to in their journey through our history.

Femme fatale-platonic loves is a series of nine 180x150cm pieces produced on paper, using a mixture of techniques (watercolours, charcoal, graphite and collage). In this project, my work as an artist and my work as the “hidden” writer come together. Nine short stories accompany each of the pieces in an indivisible manner to create this complete display. When producing this collection, there were two factors that I decided not to modify in any way order to ensure that story was conceptually related to the germinal idea; the name and the photograph of each of their faces. Mary Harris, Eileen O´Connor, Jean Wilson, Alice Clarke, Dorothy Mort, Clara Randall, Phyllis Carmier “HUME”, Nellie Cassidy and Annie Gunderson, are my platonic loves and the protagonists of this work. When choosing which faces I was going to include, I looked at the way in which their faces inspired me, these tired faces, and in many cases sad faces, all gave off the impression that these were women who had been overcome by bad luck.”

Eduardo Gruber

A CREATIONAL MOMENT

“Jan Asselijn and Carl Orff have nothing in common. Jan was a Dutch Baroque painter from the seventeenth century, while Carl Orff was a German composer from the twentieth century who formed part of the musical neoclassicism movement.

Artists tend to be remembered by the legacy that they leave behind them through their works. The artistic sensibility of others is what allows their work to become immortal. Perhaps both artists did have one thing in common; they were both artists of one single piece of work. In reality, we know that both of them produced numerous pieces of work, but while Jan Asselijn is known for the magnetism of his painting, The Threatened Swan, Carl Orff found his alter ego, his equal, and practically his pseudonym in Carmina Burana.

I remember visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam many years ago. I was visiting for a fundamental reason: I wanted to look closely at Early Age, a self-portrait of a young Rembrandt as I was going to discuss it in a chapter of the novel El devorador íntimo which I was writing at that time. And, as often happens when you visit a museum, without really knowing why, I found myself engrossed in the painting of The Threatened Swan, which from that very moment became one of my favourite paintings, and since that day, the image of this powerful painting has had a permanent place on the wall in the corner of my studio, alongside other clippings and notes.

Everything, absolutely everything that surrounds you in your studio will influence your work one way or another. Two years ago, my eyes looked at the swan in a different way, and as my work motto has always been, ‘if you have a good idea and you can do it, do it’, that is exactly what I did. My initial idea was to make a natural-sized sculpture of the Threatened Swan as portrayed in this painting. In the world of art, or more specifically, in the world of artists, chance occurrences can often have a significant impact on the final result of a piece, and this is a good example of this. Painting while listening to music is very common in studios. That day, the image of the Threatened Swan and the music of Carmina Burana aligned like two stars. In that instant, the image of the swan led me to recall something that I had once read about Orff’s work. Carl used a collection of Goliard songs from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as his inspiration, choosing a series of raw songs for soloists and choirs at random, which, when accompanied by instruments and magical images, allowed the listener to experience music as a primitive and overwhelming force.

One of the Goliard songs, which is perhaps most representative of Carmina Burana is the Cignus ustus cantat:

…Once on placid lake I floated,

Once I of great beauty boasted,

A snow-white swan…

Look served up on a platter

My bones the diners scatter

Their teeth gnash, mash, gash…

The swan complains with a certain comical tone, which is rather surprising in a twelfth century text.

Ten diners is a vocational sculpture, in which the swan is the victim of violence and this is used as a metaphor for the frequent ignoble relationship that exists between humankind and nature.”

Eduardo Gruber