THE STAMMERING CIRCLE

Curated byMarta Kuzma

The Stammering Circle is an exhibition that addresses disruption as dysfluency—a “stammering” that makes room for the pause essential to the exhibition of art in the context of war. A noisy business, war is voluminous, invasive, and serially destructive. It ruptures the suspends our understanding of cause and effect, violently occupies the everyday, and challenges the basic tenets of existence.

What constitutes art in times of conflict? How is it possible to find refuge from war’s perpetual state of contingency to make room for creative reflection? What are the forms and expressions—beyond mourning, loss, and requiem—that seize on instability to make a generative space to create resonantly? The Stammering Circle draws inspiration from the writings of Paul Celan to respond to these questions.

Celan, born Paul Antschul, in 1920, into a secular Jewish family in Czernowitz, had been studying medicine and writing poetry when, in 1941, the Germans occupied the region and he was forced to work in a labor camp until liberation in 1944. Having learned at the war’s end of his parents’ deportation and murder by the SS during his internment, he left the country and emigrated to Paris where he wrote Mohn and Gedachtnis (1952)—a volume of poetry that featured “Todesfugue” (Death Fugue), originally written in 1945, and became a paradigmatic piece of Holocaust literature. The poem centered around bearing witness as a lifelong matter and not merely an encounter with the past to be overcome—“no one bears witness for the witness.”1 Celan’s decision to write in German was also striking; a testament to the writer’s avowed devotion to his mother tongue under the tyrrany of the murderers of, literally, his mother.

In the aftermath of the war, Celan argued for “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” (the radical calling-into-question of art) as a probe into what art is by critically challenging it.2 That is, art had to be subject to profound interrogation in order to call other things into question—and come to terms with—the past.

“The Meridian” was the speech Celan delivered on the occasion of receiving the Georg Buchner Prize in 1960 in which he posed the question of how to address art after the war. Celan wrote, “art is an eternal problem,” and he proposed, as the metaphorical tool to help steer through it, the Bukovinian “meridian,” which according to the poet’s translator, Pierre Joris, “transforms the main characteristic of Bukovina’s culture into a structural principle and it’s legendary Bukovinian receptivity to heterogenous ethnic traditions which Celan then infused the rich intertextuality.”

“The Meridian” served as Celan’s manifesto for art that revolved around the search for a poetic space and language that is immaterial “yet terrestrial, as something circular that returns to itself across both poles while ultimately finding … a meridian.” The exhibition borrows from the stammering that emanates from this extraterrestrial journey; the resounding passage of rhythms and repetitions charting a route previously untraveled. Celan’s meridian, however, did not chart a physical territory, rather it represented the rupture and the will to be suspended, to welcome the existential state of placelessness, as if one had been expatriated or exiled.

In “The Meridian,” Celan introduces Atemwende,” or the “breathturn,” to propose a way to describe what, perhaps, art could be, as if a turning of the breath. He writes:
Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route —also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn?....
Perhaps the poem is itself because of this…and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes thus also the routes of art—time and again?
Perhaps.3

It is uncanny that Theodor Adorno’s posthumous Aesthetic Theory, published in 1970, began with the sentence: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” 4

It is as if Adorno continued Celan’s poetic reflections on suffering in the aftermath of war and with reference to the feasibility of the aesthetic form and aesthetic representation after the war. Celan emphasized the pause: art’s need to roam unbound and unrestricted in an “art-less, art-free manner,” enabling alternative routes of lived experience. Wrestling to find a way to position art following destruction and desecration, Celan adapted his own approach to form, content, texture, and sound to conceive a postwar composition interconnected with a darkness acknowledged by all.

The Stammering Circle encompasses the visual, the auditory, the performative, and the dialogic. The project embraces testimony, historical material, archival documentation, and myriad discussions that acknowledge the lived experience of war as posited within art production. It proceeds with Celan’s suggestions—in constellations of fadensonnen or “threadsuns” as his proposal to measure the world out in new ways—into elongated lines of light that radiate unto a multiplicity of centers. Amid this “swimming sun,” nature is addressed as political as the political is approached as natural, and wherein landscape abandons its aspiration as utopian or dystopic, and disperses instead into a new visual language with a new set of spatial and temporal relationships to shed light.

Marta Kuzma
Curator

1/ Paul Celan, “Ashglory,” in Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).
2/ Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version – Drafts –Materials (Stanford University Press, 2011), 5.
3/ Ibid., 7–8.
4/ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.