FUTURES

En plein air
Hanno Millesi
I recently found a letter from René Magritte on my nightstand.
This is nothing out of the ordinary, for my nightstand, I have come
to realize, functions as a dead letterbox of sorts, establishing a
connection with the netherworld. From time to time, individuals who
reside there use it to communicate with this world. I am certain
that there are any number of such interfaces, and I don’t pretend
to be particularly gifted or chosen. There is nothing unsettling
about a dead letterbox, at best perhaps something conspiratorial
and secretive.
I have long agonized over whether I should make the
contents of this letter public, and if I have decided to do so, it is only
because I consider secretiveness the enemy of communication.
If you are wondering why the Surrealist master has decided
to write to me, of all people, I will call to mind a phrase which he
is said to have uttered frequently: “No object is so closely attached
to its name that one could not find another that fits it better.” This
can also mean, in essence, that no person is so closely tied to one
particular point in time that they could not also appear at another
point in time, or at least make themselves heard there. Now if
painting is the visible description of a thought, then writing – in
following this thought – can be regarded as its invisible description.
The visible thought becomes the text of the world, where it loses
itself instantly, for the mysterium of the world is indescribable.
At the heart of Magritte’s letter is his request for a space
where he could work uninterruptedly. The maestro goes on to say
that the significance of the ideal workplace for an artist’s oeuvre
simply cannot be overemphasized. Regardless of whether or not
this artist still resides among us. Why, you might ask, have I chosen
to share this request in a publication brought out by a Munichbased
institution that provides work spaces for artists and curators?
Because, as the recipient of Magritte’s letter, I consider it my responsibility
to call to mind the urgency of this request, with the hope that
someone might tend to it.
Magritte confides in me that he maintains a very personal
connection to those places where his pictures were once created
and are perhaps still being created. This circumstance is based
on a bitter experience that he was unable to avoid on his path to
becoming a mature artist.
For most of his childhood, René lived in a sprawling housing
development adjacent to an industrial site somewhere on the
U3 subway line. Unfortunately, I was unable to decipher the name
of the subway stop mentioned in the letter, but it seemed quite
far from the city center. The housing development consisted
of disorienting buildings and high rises filled with hundreds of
thousands of apartments, including a shopping mall and a club
for retirees (House of Silverbacks). For the children of the housing
development, the white-coated architects with their miniature
yardsticks had allotted nothing but a few narrow strips of grass
that lay between the park areas and the garbage dumpsters.
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