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by Phillip Van den Bossche
2022
A mountain landscape on the wall: a fine start for us rational beings – us linguis tic beings. Do I use the Dutch word muur for wall, or wand? According to the Handwoordenboek van Nederlandsche Synoniemen [Handbook of Dutch Synonyms, 1908], a muur is always made of stone; a wand can also be made of wood, reeds, peat, etc. Handy words and a handicraft book…the house is woven and not until many thousands of years later will a wall poster of a mountain landscape appear.
Kato Six talks about the weaving studies that Anni Albers (1899–1994) did on a typewriter, creating patterns on the page by alternating upper and lower case “s”s from left to right, then creating a continuous line and again typing “sSsSs”. The rhythm was reinforced by the tapping on the keyboard and the hammers on the paper. The ink was not equally bold everywhere; the lim i-tation of the technique and the material created an extra pattern, language becoming image through straight-yet-errant lines.
“Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost” (Thomas Bernhard, 1931–1989). What would that mean in visual art? And what meanings and manifestations are obscured by Bernhard’s statement? What questions, mental leaps and answers does looking at art enable? According to Maggie Nelson, the actual work begins only after picking up specifics, distinguishing between elements: “Words like nuance, uncertainty – they’re not an end point. You don’t land on them and then become done with the job of beholding particularity or making distinctions. The work goes on.” Visual art is catalogued as equivocal or ambiguous all too often, as if that were the end of the story. A friend recently told me a story about Agnes Martin (1912–2004). Someone once asked her what she was thinking about while she was painting, making abstract compositions consisting of grids and mostly hori-zontal lines that often appear on the canvas from a vertical standpoint.
In a split second she answered: “English porcelain cups.” Sublime focus. Agnes Martin did not get out of bed before she had fully “seen” a painting in her head. Only then did she go to her studio. From her window she saw the mountain landscape and the incidence of light, writing in her diary: “The silence on the floor of my house. Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world. The sentimental furniture threatens the peace. The reflection of a sunset speaks loudly of days.”
Back to earth, two feet on the ground, or rather four paws: as if mesmerised, the cat is staring at a pattern on the carpet, a fragment of a zigzag. Why so? I lift the carpet, and right where the pattern appears there is a moth. The architect Solveig Fernlund says in an interview that her spatial approach adopts a cat’s perspective: “(...) everything is ‘sense’ with cats. Their brains are really small, but they sense and hear a million things that we don’t hear.” Language is just one pattern among many. These are Six’s words. We are talking about her tufted carpets. The pattern on the back is different from the one on the front, where the lines of a carpet-beater appear forever stuck. Replacing the image metaphor with a tool metaphor: the way words are used and deployed determines their meaning. The carpet-beater as an object and as an image becomes a rhythm and a line. On top of that, the tufting gun makes a tuf-tuf sound. The history of the carpet-beater remains largely a matter of speculation. There are numerous variations on the design, woven with willow wickers and used to beat out industrial dust since the end of the 19th century. Here in the north they were brandished as an educational tool, perhaps even as a form of relaxation; for others, they recall the ancient Dagi knot, one of the Adinkra symbols in Western Africa; then again, in Suriname the knot is known as the carpet-beater. “Without women, you’ll never know what abstraction is,” Agnes Martin once told Richard Tuttle during a drive. The creative impulse, the need to make something, transcends functionality. Form does not always follow function.
Six has a background in graphic design. She then moved on to making sculp-tural work. Volumes, planes and lines: together they make up three possible categories for approaching her oeuvre, albeit with overlaps. The geometric drawings, for example, with repetitive knitting patterns applied to paper in various colours – red and blue on a white surface. They are serial and yet always slightly different for being drawn by hand. There is the repetitive action, the rhythm of the hand as it draws, almost meditatively, diagrams
of knitting patterns, and the sound of the pencil on paper. Planes that grow from lines. Six has increasingly turned to works that describe a line – the tufted carpets, for instance. The line, which consists of dots, only takes shape when the wool is “tufted”, but the continuation of lines can also be suggested by objects in a spatial context. Spinning Lines, Twisting Thoughts is the title of her 2017 exhibition in Budapest. The beginnings of lines are placed on the ground as objects and enter into a dialogue with the space. The line represents a language of survival for architecture: it chafes against interior elements, but with a certain lightness. Walking through Brooklyn, New York, Six’s eye was drawn to the metal railings in front of the windows, their variations, but also how they came together to form a line.
Art as a way to thrive, or more sharply, to survive – today more than ever. Wait, both feet back on the ground. Geometric patterns may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Abstraction is to be found in the knot. The line lives in architecture, the way in which we tell each other stories, the roots below ground. Tim Ingold’s book The Life of Lines comes to mind: “Every tree is a knot, and the characteristic feature of all knots is that their constitutive threads are joined not end to end but in the middle, with trailing ends that go in search of other threads to bind with. Life is a meshwork.” The knot as the beginning of realism; the landscape as craft.
State of Matter (rope) from 2019 revolves around a bundle of ropes that are draped, knotted, hung, and extended along the ground. The limitations (weight, gravity) create possibilities, allow the artist to feel where the material takes her, to let herself be led. For Six, titles usually come afterwards, and are often grouped around one exhibition, one place, one time. They literally and metaphorically embody a “momentum” – the social dynamics of con-solidating and bringing together in a space. Heads or Tails she chooses as a title. Or, for an exhibition in collaboration with Ada Van Hoorebeke: Private Fountains, Public Baths—What a Fine Production Line. This latter collaboration started when Six and a few other artists received a jar of homemade ink from Van Hoorebeke with the message: make something with it. Six started draw-ing with the ink, but it seemed as if there were no middle. A knot can come into being from autonomy, so out of generosity she poured the ink into a form, a reflecting basin.
Six has a thing for the limitations of industrial materials. It is not a choice, just as the carpet-beater was not a determined formal choice – an object that surprises us now but had to provide an answer to the new, dusty reality of the time, changing from handicraft to mass production in the process. And most importantly, the object has a user. In other words, the object reflects a particu-lar social reality. The so-called “dust clouds” are not clouds, but geometric patterns consisting of MDF dust particles that cling to the wall. By means of a sander, Six blows them onto the wall, where she has marked the shape with a stencil. The MDF colours she works with are purple, yellow, blue, red and black. In 2020, in the Brussels art space BEIGE, she created an uneven hepta-gon on a wall between two doorways. One corner of the heptagon made contact with the corner of a wooden door frame. The heptagon, measuring 150 × 150 cm, was given the title Outer Hebrides (dust). How did it relate to the exhibition space, to the white walls and varnished parquet floor? As an island or an echo? Some dust clouds are echoes of a form that occurs in the space; they can also be a temporary shadow or patch of light. Six fixes them in an ephemeral way; points them out without pointing at them. Tiny MDF parti-cles clinging to a wall: a temporary wall on a wall.
A mountain landscape on the floor, or rather a photograph of a mountain landscape printed on wallpaper and attached to a polygonal object (in MDF): that is how Background Hum – Outer Hebrides could be described. A mountain landscape on the west coast of Scotland appears cut up, various surfaces mag-nified by a zoom effect. Like the interior, the landscape is not easy to read. MDF, cement, Formica with natural motifs, wall and floor – there is a world behind the materials, but not a well-defined narrative, rather memories of rooms, the rhythm and sound of materials. If dust clouds were adverbs, Six’s drawings would lean towards the possibility of thinking the same thought in countless ways. I am slightly twisting the words of psychologist Matthias Desmet here: “Human language constantly opens up the possibility of think-ing the same thought in countless ways and of possibly uttering it. Humans cannot but constantly doubt and choose. In that choice they realise their individuality, they exist as singular beings.” Possibly, both meanderingly and rationally, by looking at the room; rhythmically, almost meditatively, by looking for the traces, twisting the materials, just as the carpet-beater occasionally beats the carpet.
Focus Moves Aside, Objects Appear, the title of one of Six’s first exhibitions (WIELS, Brussels, 2012), evokes an image of undulating movement. Tiles are enlarged and cast in concrete…a wood-motif sticker of a geometric form is placed upside down against the same concrete form…there is a hand-turned stick that has been painted blue (an ornament, part of a bed?): ten years on from this, Six’s objects and artistic research feel “lighter”. The focus back then was already aslant, the “thingness” of things and how they are interwoven. But try carrying a 15 kg carpet! In the 1930s, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wondered: “But what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Production lines? The knot next to it? One thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight words? Possibly.