8 / 30 Breaking Patterns

This post reaches you with a delay. I had to leave Salzburg for the first time during my residency to go to an ice cave. Yes, you read right: an ice cave. This is where the first excursion of Bernhard Martin’s painting class went yesterday. For an hour the Eisriesenwelt close to the village Werfen became their studio.

“It is all about breaking your own patterns as an artist. To do something that you would not do usually and then see what happens.”

For Bernhard Martin moving your workspace to unusual places is such a strategy. Coping with the very own working conditions of an unfamiliar space leaves traces in your work. The space helps to break your patterns.

We arrive an hour before the official opening of the cave. We want to have the tourist attraction to ourselves. A heavy iron door protects its entrance. When it is opened a strong wind blows out of its maw. Inside it is pitch dark. The only sources of light are our torches. The figures and domes of ice are an impressive foreign landscape. Their features are in constant motion as only our torches illuminate them. Everybody brought their canvases and a selection of colours.

When you start to paint, you have to decide if you cast light on your canvas or on the object that you are painting. However, also the lights of your neighbours determine what you can see yourself. Observing the group and painting a little myself is a metaphorical experience: the process of catching the instable and fleeting appearances of a reality with too many layers to grasp. For a few moments it seems as if the ice domes have a life of their own. Maybe I understand for the first time what Plato means in his cave allegory, when scribbling the shapes of an icicle into my notebook: seeing is seeing appearance, not substance.

Again I realize how much there is an ‘art of exercise’ and how instructions can be artful themselves. Just as Harun Farocki’s instruction Labour in a single shot brings forth an entire archive of documentary, the ice cave studio has an aesthetic quality independent from the artistic products that result from it. Is not the exercise an embodied re-enactment of Plato’s allegory? And a re-connection to the oldest form of painting: the cave painting? Tomorrow the course will paint on a traffic island.

You cannot bear much more than 45 minutes in the coldness of the ice cave. Afterwards Bernhard Martin throws a round of Jagertee, a fatal after-cave drink consisting of mulled wine, rum, a fruit schnaps, a tea bag and a tiny bit of boiling water. It for sure is as much of pattern-breaker.