[Manuel Valente Alves, “Andreas”, 2003]

A PATH TO RUIN by João Miguel Fernandes Jorge

1

A path to ruin tells us of an oscillation between the meaning of a dominant value and the crudeness of its disintegration. Things — if it might perhaps be valid for us to call them things — like love, honour, war or peace, which are orders of reason and sentiment and come to he who suffers them in a visionary way, in order to immediately be lost or diluted in the desistence of the subject. Oscillate between reality and dream, things – again and still – that move and live between the transitory and the timeless, between life and death.

A universe laden with dichotomy, similar to that we may find in the novel Andreas by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and which was at the origin of all of this work by Manuel Valente Alves. Photography, video and the presence of works from the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (National Museum of Early Art), for which, indeed, the project has been conceived, are part of an installation that bears a strong fin-de-siècle character – not the one that we are experiencing in the passage from the XX to the XXI century, but that which came before it, in the temporal shift from the XIX to the XX century.

The climate of Andreas is precisely that: that of one who has been a part of the raising of a civilisational edifice, in which he has always supposed that he occupied a central place, in a quiet room, between behavioural walls taken as a paradigm. But the variants gradually appeared, unexpectedly and under cover of an urgent need for a response, which the character Andreas was never able to provide. In a certain manner prepared to live out and bear a model that was collapsing around him, Andreas himself slowly turns into the model, into the new paradigm, that of his own time. Andreas was created in a manner similar to that of the central character of the libretto that Hofmannsthal wrote for Richard Strauss’s opera, The Woman without a Shadow.

In his own way, he himself was a man without a shadow. Someone who sought the world in the world with the elements of research – simultaneously ethical and aesthetic values – that he knew and thought he controlled and found to be no longer functioning. To the contrary, everything that in his eyes was of worth became undone on being named and on being invoked as the interpreter and maker of a reality. Values, habits and beliefs no longer found a correspondence in the “world” circumstance; and at each given moment they proved to be incapable of “thinking” the things that emerge directly before Andreas’s eyes.

The world that was being presented to him, his contemporary world, emerged as a hidden object, and the theoretical tools within his reach were not able to unveil it. Seizing difficulties with profundity was the difficult issue, and in the time lived through by Andreas, it was an impossible issue both psychologically and physically. Hence the sliding feeling of ruin and of an incapacity to, on the edge, go from an alchemical thought (and Valente Alves valorises this as a working stage) to an exact knowledge of science.

The need to pass on to new models of thinking is the narrative “game” that surrounds Hofmannsthal’s novel. This demand is placed beyond, far beyond the frontier within which Andreas moves. In his behaviour, Andreas keeps to prolonging the grief that was contemporary to him. His ambitions, which he had like any character interpreting an exact time, were diluted within themselves. In him, everything that moved towards a construction of that which might be unique, identical and necessary was undone, was lost, but he was unable to provide any existence for alternative possibilities.

Clearly practical things such as thrift, which are presented as his search for a job – and Andreas would have been an excellent librarian or museum curator, always being able to provide a saving gaze for a folio at risk of being lost or for a painting that for the majority of viewers would be no more than the ruins of a colour or the damp shadow of a stain – or also as his cancelling of a journey or his refusal to replace last year’s winter clothes.

This sense of the useful was lacking in him. From far off, his homeland was using diplomacy instead of war. But the diplomats were not capable of the timely giving up of a new carriage or of renewing the decoration in the halls of the legations that represented Austria. Everything was overly identified with the character Andreas. For this reason, peace was not enough to fully achieve the acting of a thought. A new weapon or fresh bread were enough to maintain the Empire. But the Empire and Andreas wanted the necessary, that is, what his compatriot Wittgenstein would call, in an appeal to entry into decline (and as someone looking at a past centred on the Ancien Régime and also as a result of the practice of a medieval and scholastic inheritance): vision sub specie aeternitatis.

2

Andreas’s dream was a dream of ruins. Not of the immediate destruction of physical things, such as the houses and squares of his cities: Vienna and Venice. But of ruins that are located in the abandonment of an empty church or of a square that no one crosses.

“He went into the church; no one. He returned to the square, found himself on the bridge, examined the houses and saw no one. He walked away, went along several streets, came back to the square again, went into the church again through a side door, passed under the arch again… no one.” This is the last paragraph of the novel. It ends in a particularly intimate manner; a sort of desert inside the very heart of the character. A slow ruin. Similar to the slow death agony of the dual monarchy of the House of Habsburg, much less spectacular than that of Wilhelm II’s neighbouring Germany. This ending reflects the theme of the fleeting and the eternal. Fleeting: the houses, the square, the bridge, one or another street, the church. Eternal: a single expression: no one. And “no one” at the same time reflects the heroic, the idyllic and human destiny. “No one” holds within it, between a city and a deserted empire, the extremely lively notion that “life is a dream”.

We can easily see Andreas coming out of the Café Griensteidl. He gives his arm to his creator, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and to Stefan Zweig. They are members of the Jung Wien. They emerged in a society that thought it very natural to centre one’s life on the theatre. The stage configured their outfits, a great part of their lives and their subjects of conversation. In a patriarchal society, as was the Viennese, the notion of “art for art’s sake” to which the Jung Wien devoted themselves, scandalised the world for whom “business is business”. Andreas is created in the manner of an aesthete. He himself intends to be understood as an artistic vehicle that, in himself, could bring together all the arts (poetry, music, the theatre), in a unit that might produce an effect identical to that which is found in ancient theatre.

As a character, throughout the novel we see him slowly, word by word, with the meekness of the vanquished, take on the sense of a catharsis. That characteristic of publicly known yielding presents none of the great German virtues staged by Wagner, in the (purifying) continuity of the Nordic myths, as instead of this Andreas carries out the imitation of destiny and of (ruinous and also) tragic flight that we find in the libretti that Hofmannsthal wrote for the operas of Richard Strauss.

Not only in The Woman without a Shadow or The Cavalier of the Rose, but also in Hofmannsthal’s adaptations of Greek tragedy, with Elektra, Alkestis, Ariadne on Naxos and Oedipus Rex, all set to music by Strauss, a contemplative process is present — Andreas’s wanderings around the empty streets and square and church and his gaze and the houses that were also empty, indicate this in the novel — which introduces a Christian agape. This new element in relation to Greek tragedy introduces into the disastrous egotism of the individual the notion that what accompanies him not only at the end of the novel, but also throughout its whole development, is “no one”. A rash illusion that, on being enunciated, brings with it the realism of wishing to intervene in a sick society, as was that of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

3

Traditional aesthetics probably made a more just idea of beauty than do ours. The XX century began beneath the musical tone of Franz Lehár, with his Merry Widow and The Count of Luxemburg, but it soon evolved towards a latent aesthetic sense that, on being enunciated by Karl Krauss (Werke, vol.3), held up a division between moral art and immoral art. The latter was the negation of art and bore with it a degree identical to an “ugly truth” -- falseness. The art that would contain a “true” truth and would slice through to its public from its creator would be the art that Richard Strauss, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Georg Trakl, and Wedekind constructed, between the nature of man and the limits of its own language. And which was connected to its immediate expression and communication.

They were accompanied or followed by a long list of creators who practised, or who would come to do so, that mode of intensity between the baroque inheritance of the Habsburg and the despair guided by the irrational nature of the existence that would dominate the whole of northern Europe. As final points of civilisational order, the social, moral or political steps that led to the first world war and, years later, to the second, govern the latency of art, which is always the expression of a continuity between harmony and beauty, even when its limit does not go beyond – has it ever done so? – the product and the idea of an eyeless statue.

The ultimate meaning of the work of art would come to have, due to the needs of the expression “art” itself, a logical structure of the projects; a logic that was inflexible in a certain manner and was determined by the materials themselves.

What the artists contemporary to Hofmannsthal did was, to some extent, to set aside a certain (and pleasant) sense of decorativism – which ahs never stopped existing to this day – replacing it with a more esoteric “ornamentation”. (And in this work by Manuel Valente Alves we may find a programmatic intent for the alchemic formula of the preparation of the philosopher’s stone, of which a solve et coagula, added to by the stages of purificatio, separatio and conjunctio keep the several aspects developed: the photographs, the video and the descent from the name Andreas to the works of the holdings of the National Museum of Early Art present in the installation.)

The directly Mozart-influenced esoteric leanings run through, insinuate themselves and disturb not only the cities chosen for the final statement of Hofmannsthal’s novel — Vienna and Venice — as well as the very name Andreas, which in its graphic presentation and its sound contains the correspondence, in Greek, to the word “man”; as well as establishing an aspect of occultation, of shifting and of metamorphosis through many of the statements on the two photographic panels (each 297 x 420cm, and each made up of 100 photographs measuring 297 x 420cm). Just as the territory of drawing and painting in the works of the Museum contains a notion of intensity hidden by the slow undoing of time. These latest works represent the seduction and the achievement of an idea and form of art that is intended to be (and more than in the lesson by Kraus or by Walter Benjamin, in Wittgenstein’s thought) neither mythological, nor historical nor naturalistic.

Let us return briefly to a passage from Andreas, only to demonstrate the fracture between the “new ones”, who will not be able to maintain, more than the Empire, the idea of Empire, and the “older one” who burdened it with the price of the Krausian “ugly truth” and who, themselves, were also unable to organise the capacity of response towards the challenges that the contemporary world demanded of them.

Karl Kraus vehemently argues against the decadence and the lie of sexuality in Viennese society, in which man played an extremely egotistic and common egocentric role. As a counterpoise to that sexual “realism” that plundered male-female relations, he presented a sexuality that might be impregnated with a mysterious poetic and creative element. A sense that we may observe in a great many passages from Andreas:

“she was in front of him. But her position in relation to him, facing each other, was very different. He dreamed and felt this other way, as if he were not an occasional visitor who started at each clicking of a door, or like that person whom has finally been granted a quarter of an hour of distracted presence ... no, he was rather the declared friend, the master of this enchanted garden and the master of his Lady. He was lost in a confused sentiment of happiness, similar to a chord from a harp vibrating throughout his whole being.”

4

Let us now look briefly at the five works present in the National Museum of Early Art. They are not exactly paths to ruin; they are the ruins that are at the side of that path. Edges of a past language, despite two of these works belonging to the century in which the author of Andreas was born, the XIX. One is even an excellent landmark marking out the path. This is a painting, which still has some visibility, which presents us with a “Composite Chapiter”. A ruin stone, that the traveller on the path could mistake for the part remaining from some late romantic ruins; what remains of a column that might have supported a pergola resting on a high point in the path, or at the way out of a dense woods.

A stone that might have been part of a point from which the traveller could see as far as the eye could see and rest. Andreas, if he were the traveller from somewhere to nowhere, would conclude, as he undid the ties of his boots, themselves a ruin of old-fashioned taste and of dust and with almost worn out soles, would, then, say: now one can only live in silence. Andreas, at that time on the journey, would not read Rilke nor Kafka; he would know, precisely, that if he wished to bring himself close to the incapacity of language in order to explain to others the intimate nature of his contemporary men, his own intimate nature, he would have to turn to the pages of the book that he might be carrying in his pocket, Musil’s Young Törless. There he would indeed find intense sentiment; the most real, but also the most impossible, the most ruinous of all. “Things that always remain in the depths of the subjectivity of something.” And he would stretch out one of his hands to clutch the last rose of the late autumn. The one that remained, fallen, intensely red, next to the fallen chapiter.

That painting is signed: Neves. Its author is as unknown today as the imaginary beautiful princess in the Castle of Pormberg, who populated Andreas’s uninterrupted dream. It is an art school canvas. With its abacus badly set up, face on. Some functionary or other has written on it in chalk, “Public Works”. Someone has tried to rub out that chalk, but didn’t manage to do so. Erasing on erasing. Ruin on ruin. But would that not be the ideal way for someone who walked between the Jewish usurer and the Catholic pawnbroker, as happens in another part of the novel?

On the back of the painting one can see the royal crown. (The royal crown, that in those eighteen hundreds carried a part of its legitimacy in the exiled Princes of Braganza, very close to the Viennese court. One can imagine that Andreas, granting him the fact of existence that I have done since the beginning, might have sighted King Dom Miguel, behind the glass of a modest carriage, in Dorotheer gasse. But who recognises a king in exile? Pardon me for this legitimising deviation on the Portuguese XIX century.)

The other work present from the XIX century belongs to Domingos Sequeira. It is quite the opposite of a ruin, both in its state of conservation and in the visibility of its elements, and also in the ultimate sense in which it, in itself, represents and contains.

This is the charcoal and chalk on paper drawing “The Ascension” (1829-32). A subject that Sequeira develops both in other ink drawings and drawings in charcoal and chalk on paper, and also in oil on card and on canvas. Domingos Sequeira’s “Ascension” — in its mass of people at one moment illuminated in their own disfiguration and at another laden with a liquid nebulosity and at yet another being presented in the plenitude of their faces, which means that of the great fabric of the human body there is a stressing of the expression of the word and of sight — holds, in the elegance and clarity of the figure of Jesus rising up from the ground where his tomb was, a terminology of mystery.

As if the elevating of the man, after ending all of his activity as a living being, wished to demonstrate a beyond human nature and language, which are the art of the senses and of reason. As if the raising up to the heavens of the name Jesus, as a human, could prove, to man and to his historicity, that he was part of another side; thus, Christ, son of God.

In this leap over the field of rationality there is a great deal of the notion of Schopenhauer’s quadruple root, which is a starting point to a true logos, foundation of the a priori of language itself. In this ascent to the heavens there is a breaking with man’s historical past. A depth is established, similar to a passage from feelings to sentiment; the territory in which is so much inscribed that which was, also, the foundation of all of this installing vision of Manuel Valente Alves’s photographic and filmic space — Andreas.

But with his notion of will, Andreas, in his attempt to flee from all criticism and, indeed, more man “without qualities” than man of will, carries within him residues that are things (attributes, not necessarily qualities) tied to the superstition of the word. More than knowing what he wanted, he knew what fate kept dealing him; he kept reading, with some difficulty, the epigraph of a headstone or other and the sense of fall of some composite chapiter, in an attempt to connect physical law to some interpretation of a soothsayer’s. It is time to leave Andreas, once and for all, to his own fate; which, as we have seen, corresponds in the novel to the destiny of no one. As if this were not the destiny of all of us, as sort of surprising result, which always geometrically falls between the ratio and the oratio which Cicero tells us of in De Officcis.

Reflections in Valente Alves’s images of these two works from the Museum’s holdings? Next to a knocked down chapiter there will be, not too far away, a tank full of calm waters on which there is the drawing of the passing of golden red carp; and the opening of water-lilies or the presence of other water plants will be part of that habitat. In a garden of ruins there is always an image of placidity ready to be captured and which is subjected to the wandering appearance of a black cat or to the circumscribed vegetable beauty of an agave leaf; while a criss-crossing of dry branches will lead us to the representation of a feeling of pain and of its overcoming, as may have happened in the drawing of the “Ascension” by Domingos Sequeira.

The two other paintings from the Museum here present are indeed ruins in their state of visibility. Both are from the XVI century. What is known about them from the register in the Museum’s holding is a great deal more than what one can see in them. One deals with a representation of the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew that tells us “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”. The still clearly visible presence of a Latin quo allowed the art historian who was in charge of this painting to come to the in quo mihi complacui from the passage from Matthew. Which led him on to supposing the representation of God the Father, the dove of the Holy Spirit and of an absent figure of Christ. There seems to be the drawing of an angel and also another angel. But all of this will go no further than a ruin of ruins; a hypothetical face; face of a face, as an ectoplasm is not enough to make a face.

The last painting, I have been assured, shows a “St. Jerome”. One sees no lion, or skull, nor cave, mountain range, desert, cardinal’s mitre or convent office in the perfect manner, similar to what Antonello provided for him. None of this is visible. Only ruin; it is the remains of a painting in red (enough to lead to Jerome?) and one or another tone of grass at the foot of the panels.

Its best part is in what is not shown: the reverse of the four panels that support the (allow me to state the non-existent) painting. The swallowtail that holds together the central panels is, indeed, very visible. When in the Museum archives they turned the painting around so that I could see its framework, I also saw a powerful spider that was very similar to the Castilian brutalism (or perhaps it was only in its Estremaduran or Andalusian declination?) in which I dealt with the reified “St. Jerome”. And passing on from these two sixteenth century paintings to the methodology of the work under consideration in the almost Cyclopic raising of an extensive cement construction, we are led to divine pleasure in the brutal and Babylonian raising of property and object. Matthew’s speech is laden with this other meaning, perhaps closer to the impossibility of truth in man: “This is the work, the pain, the suffering of my beloved Son” — see how he is drawn in the photographic succession, the only man; one understands that he is working with all the sensorial trappings of his contingent nature; around him no one (which is a sort of necessary ruin), except the metaphysical will of a metaphorical expression: the apparition of human self-awareness — “in whom I am well pleased”.

5

Let us now look at Manuel Valente Alves’s images. Setting aside elements from which he may have started, whether they may be those that refer to Hofmannsthal’s novel or to the works belonging to the National Museum of Early Art. Let us lose ourselves somewhat in the paths of their language, of their perception and of their reality.

Initially, it will be difficult to conceive the stages of the solve et coagula of the process and of the alchemic intention as a path to ruin. But if we bring these images closer to each other, alternating those of the panel showing the cat, the fish and the plants with the other panel showing the cement mass, the scaffolding, the iron and the figure of the craftsman, we will destroy that which might provide harmony; and the image will be exercised as a path to ruin, a circumstance to which the “making” will not remain unconnected, as the ruin bears with it an operating and transforming nature. And where there is the black, the orange, the magenta, the grey and the green there are moments that, beyond their physical mass, express properties intrinsic to luminous rays.

A great extent of iron: firstly a vertical mesh, then, rising up, extending in a square over the length of the wall. Standing back from the image, it looks like steel that has been placed over a thrust of an iron bar.

Here we find an idea and a presence of ruin, as the ruin does not necessarily have to be the growing of grass around a fallen chapiter, now only the outline of the supports of a house, a body decaying through disease; the ruin may well be in a pacifying drop of water geometrically placed on the leaf of an agave. The drop of water and the leaf, in the intensity of the green, may be or become perfect instruments of darkness and of fear. They are not far from the eye of a serpent, in the rest period of its long digestion, but always attentive to the fate of any possible future prey.

The very water of a lake is like the circumvolving bodies of young eels, capable of devouring any dead animals that falls into their aquatic medium; on this fêted death in the silvery liquid of the lake red carp evolve and water-lilies flower. (I know I am using dead metaphors or only sleeping one, but for this very reason they are capable of leading us closer to a purificatio.)

A metaphor may even contain no visual image (a sort of “no one” from Andreas — I come back to him), but it always contains, even if it is only as an allusion, the most simulated comparison and transference of ideas that result from it, such as the (comparative) moving forward to the structure of agricultural fields, from the envisaging of a simple very amplified leaf of grass; as the lines of the fertility that lead to the water are contained in the images of the stems, of the white threads existing in that leaf.

In these images of Valente Alves’s photography and video the stairs over the ruin are set up; over a distant Babel; far off, in a crescendo; one flight of stairs after another. And the person who set them up is also the person who goes up them following a mathematical analogy, segment by segment, proportion by proportion, step by step. Even if one step is missing, the comparison that deals with measurable greatness remains, even if it is in the tortured iron that is stretched over the storeys, storeys of “no one” that contain a whitewash white, a white of off-white, burnt in the dizziness of a colossal work, raised by no one, for no one.

(I find similarities, particularly in relation to the video, with the idea of the treatment of obliqueness and also of the descent and “fall” of one’s gaze, in Catherine Yass’s films, Descent and Flight, present in the 2002 edition of the Turner Prize.)

Comparisons are always ingenious. For this reason, a thick tube runs through a (form of) technological pain – and is this not now the manner of all pain that is felt? There goes the operator, the engineer of the confines. He also gets lost in the mesh of the tubing. He travels the flatness of his own paces. Bucket in each hand. The cement plasterwork wounds the dark cloth of his trousers. Let us abandon him. This is an Andreas who is very contemporary to us, among iron bars joined to other iron bars, connected by double rings of the same nature. Fractioned iron bars are juxtaposed to these other ones. Wooden beams. Everything stretches out over a tarpaulin surface; it emerges, wet, in the form of a little lost wave from the larger body of the Atlantic low tide. Perhaps this evoking of a wave might again cast Andreas into his exact time and make him a whale hunter (something impossible for an Austrian) in the Hudson estuary.

In the image the water becomes undone in the water itself, laying itself out for close examination, a prisoner between two lamellae. What structure of ruin will it reveal? Compartmentalised, closed-off, between cannulated sheets of aluminium. On the other side there is a road, signalled, at intervals, by yellow lines; they divide it, so that it may receive a subterranean traffic. Andreas follows that path to ruin. He is dressed in our time: white t-shirt, yellow hardhat on his head. In his pocket he carries, line by line, a poem by his master Hofmannsthal: “The Death of Titian”. A sort of rhythm pursues him, an undulating emanation of the nature of iron. He knows, better than any of us, that beneath a simple colour there is an infinity of vibrations.

[FERNANDES JORGE, João Miguel, “A Path to Ruin”, in VALENTE ALVES, Manuel, FERNANDES JORGE, João Miguel, Andreas, Lisboa, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga/MVA Invent, 2003]