Notes on Gesture and Rhythm
"One of the distinct advantages of painting as a discipline is its static nature, its symbolic representation of movement by means of stillness."
-- Otto Donald Rogers
My first spring in Newfoundland, I was invited to attend an outdoor sunrise ceremony as part of the National Indigenous Peoples Day in St. John’s. There were approximately 50 of us in total, creating a large circle on an open and grassy park-like lot. A single Inuk drummer, Stan Nochasak, was poised stoically within the circle, and held a large shallow drum in his hand. When he struck it, the sound was soft and rich like humus. As he played, the world around us seemed to move in sync with the rhythm emanating from his drum, including the young women moving about the circle with smudge, the gentle sworl from the smoking sage, the birds flying overhead, the wind in the trees, my own heartbeat, my breath. Somehow, through this rhythm, we became aligned, if only for a brief span of time, and experienced ourselves as part of a larger dance.
This profound experience of rhythmic entrainment, that physical synchronisation of different rhythms, reminded me that rhythm connects us in brain and body, to the world (Minissale iii). It sparked a desire to further investigate the correlation between rhythm, embodiment, and rhythmic entrainment as a means of connection and communication. In Rhythmanalysis, Space,Time and Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre summarises the complexities of rhythm as existing everywhere there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy. This implies the existence of repetition (of movements, gestures, action, situations, differences), and interferences of linear processes (derived from human activity) and cyclical process (originating in the cosmic, and in nature). The cyclical and linear always exert reciprocal action upon one another, as do time and space, forming a “unity in opposition” (Lefebvre, 18). These reciprocal actions sometimes harmonise and sometimes create unique rhythms of compromise. Otherwise they can become disturbances which behave discordantly. Inherent within these rhythm producing interactions, is the understanding that each will cycle through a birth, growth, peak, decline, and eventually end.
I decided to experiment with Lefebvre’s theories while working in one of my favourite reconstructed wetlands. Pearce Estate Park is composed of 15 hectares of reconstructed wetland and stretches alongside the inner city community of Inglewood on the banks of the Bow River here in Calgary (Mohkinstsis in Blackfoot). It consists of a series of interconnected streams and small areas of standing water, all fed by and feeding into the Bow River. On this day, I was in search of an answer to my question. Are the rhythms of wetland grasses powerful enough to entrain my own bodily rhythms?
I must have been the strangest thing for anyone to witness. Standing calf deep in the middle of one of these streams, I attempted to mimic the movement of a specific wetland grass. I practiced this for hours, performing slow undulating movements with one arm (and body) while awkwardly documenting my actions using an iPhone with the other. Other than dancing with this particular plant, there was nothing else demanding my attention. Nothing but the mosquitos, that is. It was early summer, and mosquitoes were fat and hungry, my body a veritable buffet. Every few minutes, I would stop what I was doing and slap at myself, my arms legs and chest covered in messy blotches of my own blood released from the bodies of others.
After a few hours of oscillating between these murderous outbursts and gentle alignments, I could feel the chill of the water rippling through my own veins. I needed to step out of the stream. Once out, I remained connected to the graceful movements of the watery grasses, crouching over the stream, entranced. Then someone burst through the bushes behind me. My immediate thought was that it was a dog, and their person would be right behind them. I didn't look back initially as I was reluctant to engage with anyone, I was so much enjoying my time. After some hesitation, I thought I should probably look back and acknowledge who was there. I turned to my left and found myself only inches from the clear and present gaze of a deer. Startled by such a close and unexpected encounter, I was overcome by the acute realisation that I was being seen — and clearly. In surprise I uttered “oh, hello!”. My voice was small, my throat tightened with shock, and fear of scaring them. The deer continued to look at me unblinking, observing. They were so close to me I didn't know how to behave, how to move, how to express, how to communicate, how to be with them. I just stood still. I seemed paralysed with shock, amazement, sensory overload… we just stood looking into each other's eyes. It seemed a moment without time. But that moment moved into the next, as all moments do, and the deer very slowly turned their head and began to pass me on the narrow path that ran parallel to the stream. As they did, they remained so close, the entire length of their body pressed into the back of mine. I could feel the roughness of their coat through my light summer shirt, and their powerful, muscular form as they moved. Their energy, so close to me, left me not quite sure where the boundaries between us were. Once I could no longer feel their body, I turned to watch them, ever so slowly, walk away. From behind, it appeared to me as though they had a bit of a swagger in their walk after that encounter, at least that’s what their movement felt like in my own body. I myself, was awestruck, and continued to gaze after them until they were out of sight. I realised in that moment that had I not been successfully entrained by the rhythms of the wetland grasses, I would never have had such an encounter with the deer.
In Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism (2021), Gregory Minissale connects Lefebvre’s theories to current lines of thought found within the new materialism ontologies, while investigating how involuntary, spontaneous rhythmic connections arise in artists when they are interacting with materials, and how that very rhythm is often felt by the viewer of the completed artwork (Minissale 2). According to new materialism, everything is matter, including the artist’s body and mind. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari expand this thinking further by presenting speech, text, intellect, and even sensation, as different forms of matter (Minissale 15). Let’s also remember Barad’s theory of agential-realism and its implication that matter does not have agency in and of itself. Rather, agency arises, and identity is formed, within intra-actions between matter (Gamble et al 2019). It is through this very process that Lefebvre’s definition of rhythm finds its expression. Within every intra-action between different forms of matter, there is a confluence of rhythms, themselves an expression of the matter from which they originate.
Silke Otto-Knapp somehow depicts a confluence of rhythms in her series In The Waiting Room. I feel I could spend a lifetime learning from her.
I look to her self abstracting images, her process of working from a black surface, the slow building of layers painstakingly removed to reveal an ambiguous relationship between figure and ground (MacLeod 68). The three works in Slow Dancing, like Otto-Knapp’s, have also been about finding the edge, the boundary between the strongly contrasting shapes, asking where that boundary lies between self and other?
When placed together, you get a sense of a larger, more complex body of rhythms, the artificial stage (landscape) in the case of Otto-Knapp, and artificial landscape (stage) in the case of my own work. These ambiguous figure ground relationships challenge traditional binaries, or the myth of separation. Like many of the works from In the Waiting Room, my paintings function as part of a larger grouping. Placed alongside each other, I imagine the works from Slow Dancing to also embody the slower rhythms of the earth, expansion and contraction, systole and diastole.