Below is the transcript from Nicholas's talk Sat 2nd 3.30pm Booth 45 Aotearoa Art Fair
*The poems read are by Poet Matvei Yankelevich from his collection titled Dead Winter 2022.
Kia ora, thank you all for being here. Big thank you to Erin and Railway Street gallery for asking me to show here and talk. It has been so good aiming toward this and I am super grateful. I have given a couple of artists talks and each time shared some poetry (not my own, don’t leave) and it has served me well as the research pushes my projects on.
I thought today I could share a few poems with you from a poet who I found I couple of years ago, whose strategies really struck a chord with me. I want to relate the poems to how they influenced this project, all in aide of giving some explanation to these paintings.
Just as in the poems there are many references to forebears, progenitors. I also want to say that whatever you were thinking before- that may have been positive still holds. However, it works that all negative attributions, aspersions will be null and void after the talk concludes.
So the Poet I want to share with you is Matvei Yankelevich- He Is a Russian born American poet and translator and small press extraordinaire. The project I fell in love with is called Dead Winter. Published 2022.
In the project there is a rule, a plotted restraint- all the poems must have winter in the first or last line. It is a parodic cliché and the main mimetic constraint anchoring the work. It puts the reader, and the writer in the mind of winter. But also, it establishes a remove. Mimesis as a collective imitation, this is how I have moved through the making of these paintings. Sort of deforming imitation. Monstering it often…
As you can see, I have chosen board game counters as my constraint. Each painting made with the addition of counters. I saw in the counters, an object with the chance to act a lot how Winter works for the poet Matvei Yankelevich. The counters, I hope, put you in a place of both very serious play and artistic parody. Tiddlywinks, ludic, ludo (I play) where imitation, exchange, value, and play collide. Counters allow this infinite regression or expansion.
What else is in the counter? in games they are place holders for a self. Here though I see that inversed. The objects are themselves. Agents and Actants in their own right. Objects in a painting. Move it, risk it, celebrate its landing... Cheapness is their freedom, as it is mine, that goes for the boards too- not the paint unfortunately. I have loved finding bags of the counters in the button drawer at the Op Shop on trips to the Bay of Plenty. Or a weirdly heavy ludo game with a haul inside in G.I where one Dove shop store I scored 6 sets.
Counters also make you think of the colour coded rival. These paintings meanings shift so quickly with just the addition of another red. It has been so fun seeing where I think they will sit right, oscillating between signals. Fearful polysemy. Flag painting for example- is this 90’s commonwealth looking thing, verging on Walters speaking to the power in those simplicities.
Counters are also an agreed fiction, agreed fiction as trap or rules of game. I like that they are boxed in, objected and that the titles could be board game titles also. Some stupid –“its Pikachu” referring to a popular meme- and others funny and unlikely- “Choice narrows down the lane” ( another Matvei Yankelevich quote) Most obviously, they are eyes, plastic disks, often with little pupils where the mold kissed away.
I have tried to, like Yankelevich’s Winter, have the constraint as present but not tyrannical. I have done this by always playing with the how and when they are inserted into the work. I have tried to use the paint like density, prosody in the language of a poem. Mimicking, sending up and leaning into different styles. Butting them up against each other. Yankelevich does this using phonemes, colloquial slang, dense reference and by varying the size and levels of depth to his winters as they land.
Now then, a couple of Matvei Yankelevich’s poems. He plays with us so please enjoy! For example, this one starts- Winter have I lost your thread? Kind of a hard thing to do- to loose the thread of Winter-
Bathos comes up in the poem –he loves a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous. This sums up the project’s tendency well. He doesn’t reach for you with pathos- he reaches with a sincere irony. Something I have tried to do here.
Winter, have I lost your thread?
Downwritten whole around you?
I laugh at my poems, scare
my friends, see carefree moments
in the distance, at what cost?
And if I write this backwards,
stay time’s goosestep march, with this
superfluos smoke, one more
glass of claret, one fragment
of a poem- all too poor
copy of wild abandon.
Without your thighs to burrow,
I smell the passing age, quick
era passing over me
to where it proudly hurries,
cold of heart. This penmanship
delights in its own decay-
downgraded to scribble, a
palliative effacement,
bathos sutured to my hand.
I like the doubling down- the laughing at his poem, the scaring of friends. I am sure I do this too.
“This penmanship delights in its own decay- downgraded to scribble”
This is a line that I have connected to research on Fluxus artist John Armleder, even Miro when he says he needs to sign it angry. The affectation of the application of paint is something I have played with. As you can see in my work “I’m not pro anything” – another Matvei line.
It is a voluntary loss of status. Downgrading as I go along. This erasure is not tragedy. It is palliative—a relief, a comfort, a making-bearable of the condition of painting itself. Not arguing for these things. Enacting them in the very lines that name them. The paintings delight in their own decay is the palliative effacement.
And now my favourite poem in the book -No-21-
In a disjunctive age, disconsolate, without connection,
I lick this postage stamp — a thing that you may not have ever licked.
Pulp paper trails the color of cracked walnut shells and cork boards.
To write this is to stay up till tomorrow cannot be a day
to read about the dead, tear further troubles to have later
seams to mend, put forth exhaustion from which to recover, tame
rhetoric in its wide, trembling circus tent. Word for word for word
I change to pass through night in pace with night, time as if bravely
lost, but lost, lost all the same. There’s no decision left to make
for those who feared deciding — once, twice, a third, until it was too late;
choice narrows down the lane, in time the brooks and soldiers run away
from tinny villanelles. Even your name, your status update —
divorced, vacating job, collecting dust, disheartened, now deceased —
means little if at all a thing it is to be. Compared to what?
Compared to winter’s day? The heat of these laughable plastic keys?
(Dead Winter PG, 21)
It starts with a send up- and send in- It is a Shakesperean era type prologue really.. a diagnosis of its own age: "In a disjunctive age, disconsolate, without connection." This is not just description. The line announces the conditions under which this poem will be written —the failed connection that the poem will perform rather than transcend.
Matvei then quickly turns to the generational- placing the lyrical I of the poem as behind the times
“I lick this postage stamp, a thing you may not have ever licked”
This is a generational noticing. Seems a Terrance Hayes reference also (Ars Poetica with Bacon) It places the makers obsolescence into the work- The stamp is a dated connection. Like these counters, found in op shops from the games of my youth. I like this lyrical I behind the 8 ball. Arriere Garde.
“Pulp paper trails the color of cracked walnut shells and cork boards”
Pulp paper trails- a lyric turn, a breathlessness enters along with The sensory world: This is ancient, in poetry I like to think of it as picking up speed, Makes me think of Elizebeth Bishop’s poetry- Her poems gather to a pace and in the end she is off the ground, away. Painting can be like this. He plays with this rising, but he jars it up- something I have tried to do in the paintings.
So he, picks things up a gear. But it’s not grand nature, its office supplies. “Pulp paper trails the color of cracked walnut shells”– You can imagine how this sort of lyrical work could look in a painting. Oil dashes where you see the brush stroke can portray a similar pace and intensity.
“To write this is to stay up till tomorrow cannot be a day / to read about the dead, tear further troubles to have later / seams to mend, put forth exhaustion from which to recover”
“till tomorrow cannot be a day” to read about the dead
How beautiful a turn. This is anastrophe- a putting of things backwards in a sentence. This makes the work seem like translation or foreign. I have tried to other world these paintings also, tried to give them there own world inside their frames.
A technique adjacent to Matveis anastrophe- I've used- is combining different paint sets with different intended meanings. In the same painting, I'll use Williamsburg modern colours alongside Williamsburg landscape sets. I found this opportunity at a recent Gordon Harris clearance sale. I have done this to try and achieve a similarly jumbled language as we see in Matveis work. This is the first time I have given this sort of thing as much thought. In the past more just straight out of the tube, use everything in a Cobra art movement sort of a way.
What has Matvei done in these beautiful lines, well, the very concept of tomorrow is breaking down. The twisted words create a twisted reality. You hear "till tomorrow cannot be..." and your mind races to complete it ("be here," "be real"). The delayed completion "...be a day" disrupts expectation with this Mercutian return and repeat. “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man”. The grammar of ordinary time collapses.
I see this poetry as anti-polemical poesis- The sentence enacts the breakdown of tomorrow's meaning. It doesn't argue for a position. It shows a reality where ordinary time no longer holds. The "argument" is not with a listener—it is with the very structure of expectation. And that struggle is not rhetorical combat. It is closer to linguistic suffering or wonder.
In another poem from the collection he writes “I’m no pro anything, im just speaking” I love this idea of simply occurring in language while letting yourself soak in all the chat. Yankelevich's speaker is not pro disengagement. He is not anti commitment. He is just speaking—and the speaking is the poesis. It is rigor of another kind—the rigor that refuses to let language be reduced to position-taking.
I do see these works often as oscillating readings, faces and a fearful polysemy. Where the brain moves with the eyes trying to grasp between signs, turning signs into a sort of tone or looking out.
This meta modernist angle is still not quite right. I feel there is something , am quite sure there is something more basic here. I have loved sending up the idea of rarity. And me as alchemist. I take the glitter and blow it on as a mock magician. The influence of rare trading cards , Prismatics and Refractors with their sparkle. I have really enjoyed how they often look like monsters from the 90’s.
Back to the poem-
“tame / rhetoric in its wide, trembling circus tent”
A sudden image. That really suits this showing, and each artists attempts here- to tame Rhetoric in this circus tent. —performative, excessive, barely controlled. “Wide, trembling” gives the tent vulnerability. The poet wants to “tame” rhetoric, but the line’s own rhetorical flourish (the trembling tent) suggests the attempt is already failing. I think of Marcus Lepurtz tent paintings from 1965.
The next line in the poem - “Word for word for word” could be counter for counter for counter=
“Word for word” would be enough. The third “for word” pushes into excess. It marks the labor of composition as iterative, obsessive, stalled. The phrase is both a description of writing and a performance of its tedium.
Lines 9-11: “There’s no decision left to make / for those who feared deciding — once, twice, a third, until it was too late; / choice narrows down the lane”
Each refusal to choose, makes the next choice smaller. Once, twice, a third time—until, finally, there is no decision left to make. The lane narrows. I linked this idea to this painting with the title- as it reminds me of an American football attacking plan as seen in a madden game. This convolution of runners and angles hoping the timing hits just right.
This is why so much work ends up in the bin. So much paint. So narrow a space.
Fear is not intellectual. It is bodily. Visceral. Shame-adjacent. So the lane narrowed—but
I like that The lane narrowed, but the poem or painting happened within that narrowing.
And the end of the poem- “Compared to what? / Compared to winter’s day? The heat of these laughable plastic keys?”
Shakespeare again- mixed with the. “Laughable plastic keys” that are the computer keyboard. “plastic,” “laughable,” but they generate the poem. This is the sort wobble effect I like, the poem knows its own materials are inadequate, but it uses them anyway.
One last poem from Matvei Yankelevich’s Dead Winter with no effusive attachment after.
Winter and once more mine is the other guilt.
From sounding syllables, my head is splitting.
All my allotted time it seems I’ve wasted
On being thorough where no one would notice:
Dishes, examining the rain, slowing my prose,
And rounding down the line against my crooked
Leaning to fill the void with borrowed rhythms.
Like all others, this book, too, will I regret;
Not for what I missed in order to make time-
For the way it ended.
