ABRAHAM DAVID CHRISTIAN

ABRAHAM DAVID CHRISTIAN
DIE SPRACHE DES MENSCHEN | THE LANGUAGE OF MAN


Abraham David Christian: Travelling-Painting
H a n s - J ü r g e n H e i n r i c h s

Despite the existence of contemporary artists such as Fritz Morgenthaler and Herman de Vries, despite such prominent
movements as Primitivism and “Spurensicherung” (securing traces – an artistic trend of the 1970s) and a few isolated masters
like Paul Gauguin and August Macke, the wondrous connection between travelling and painting occupies no fixed position
in Western culture comparable to that of the one between travelling and writing so multifariously shaped by ethnologists
and writers like Victor Segalen and Michel Leiris.
If only for that reason, Die Wege der Welt (The ways of the world) which Abraham David Christian trod, traced and invented,
pencil in hand, deserve our undivided attention. And especially if these paths are travelled so light-footedly, imaginatively
and wilfully, there should be nothing arduous about going along ourselves. As a matter of fact, doing so will enrich
our usage du monde, to borrow the title of a work by the travel writer Nicolas Bouvier, a title that could serve as a subtext
to Christian’s catalog title Die Wege der Welt: If we pass through the world with our senses, with open eyes and ears, we
will gather all the experience necessary for life.
At the same time, the most irritating questions connected with travel already begin to arise: Couldn’t we just as well
stare at the wallpaper for five hours, as the great traveller Henri Michaux suggested? Is it necessary to travel at all? Is the
journey around the world really the shortest way to the self, as the philosopher Count Hermann von Keyserling proposed?
Isn’t it much more restful — and more enlightening in the bargain — to experience Tibet. Land Between Heaven and Earth,
The Wanderings of the Monk Ippen and Everyday Life in a Kyoto Monastery leaning back in an armchair or sitting crosslegged
and straight-backed on the soft carpet of one’s own home? To journey In Africa (a book that comes complete with
music), and relive The Travels of Arthur Rimbaud (an entire life of travel is ours for the perusal) within the confines of our
own four walls? Do we not experience the strangeness and diversity of cultures much more intensely surrounded by such
books, or by films and music, than we would on the actual journey? Are not Christian’s nomadic, improvised studios (all
with the same simple furnishings) an indication thereof?
There are manifestos and declarations of purpose which zealously advocate travel in the home, lauding what they call
the “art of the best excursions,” for which one requires no other vehicle than an “adventurous imagination” and a “horse,”
i.e. a book about travel, on which one allows oneself to be conveyed into a “strange, never-before-seen world.”
And there one partakes of an “electrifying sense of the world,” the magic aroma of faraway places and the magnificence
of the unattainable.
But is that not one of the aspects Christian’s sculptural images acquaint us with: the magnificence of the unattainable?
In this sense, the works are anything but copies of travel experiences, anything but reproductions. They are independent
symbols.
But let us persevere just a bit longer: “Through our knowledge, the world is shrinking,” Alfred de Vigny once remarked
tersely. Modern technology — trains, airplanes, television, internet — kills space. Heinrich Heine already saw it coming
years before de Quincey. The shrinkage can progress to the point where travel appears superfluous. Does the stay-athome,
plugged into the information channels, ultimately know more of the world than the globe-trotter?
Christian once stated in all decisiveness: “I am not a globe-trotter. But I do expose myself to certain conditions” We will
return to this thought later…
In his study entitled Vom Verschwinden der Ferne (On the disappearance of distance), Peter Weibel traced several of the
stages of this development that ultimately leads to the “zero journeys.” In as early as 1795, Xavier de Maistre contented
himself with a “voyage around my room” (as his story was entitled) which took him 42 days. By way of comparison, a later
journey would “round” the world in only 80 days. Other writers settle for stories about “why I don’t like to travel” (e. g. Paul
Vibert, 1901). Joris Karl Huysmans’ novel Against the Grain, in which the narrator resolves never to leave his house again after
a number of journeys gone awry, also enjoyed quite some popularity. He immerses himself in the joyful anticipation of
the journey, in the imaginary state of being on the road. The works of Alain de Botton — who attained fame with his Art of
Travel — are written in quite the same spirit: “Why do many of our journeys disappoint us? Because we all too easily forget
one very essential thing: that we must take ourselves along to these places. We will be there with ourselves.”
No travelling writer of the 20th century expressed his aversion to outwardly controlled stimulation – his radical rejection
of any and every influence on his writing through the experience of travel – more strongly than Raymond Roussel. Having
arrived in China, he remained in his mobile home — heaven forbid he should be exposed to even the slightest distraction!
Both he and Blaise Cendrars — the latter for other reasons — recommended closing one’s eyes while travelling. Jochen
Gerz, adhering strictly to this tradition, leaves the question unanswered as to whether he really took his “blind” trans-Siberian
voyage of 1977 or imagined it as a “journey of the mind.”
From there it is only a small step to sending merely a ticket, or signs and syllables, on a journey and staying home oneself.
The artist stays where he is; “the signs travel.” The space is full of holes.
Actually, faraway places come to us; telemachines bring them into our homes. The intensity is experienced not so much
via physical means of transportation as by way of connection to means of telecommunication. Domestic immobility in the
telecommunicative situation and the tendency to cut down on speed or “mark time” (in the latest races, the start and finish
lines are nearly identical) are characteristic of a new interface. Here, acceleration no longer merely aims for the point far
thest away but simultaneously relates back to the point of departure, as though the paths to distance and to vicinity both
went in the same direction.
In Christian’s works this experience finds expression in the sense that the forms he plays out have been exposed to
strangeness, on the way to foreign realms, and re-examined in realms familiar, in relationship to the self. The multiplicity of
forms in his sculptured images shifts our gaze into the distance and into propinquity; in a (still to be more closely investigated)
way, the forms are equally concrete and abstract. His pictorial journeys take place outwardly and inwardly.
The tents he has pitched in the world and his tentatively furnished rooms are an indication of this inward-outward,
rooms that remind me of Paul Bowles’ studio in Tangier, Paul Nizon’s ateliers in Paris, Chatwin’s and Cees Nooteboom’s nomadic
existences. Christian: “The place where we work in the world – the culture we work in – is of no consequence but
rather the awareness with which we live and work and the context. I expose myself to certain conditions in order to make
what is inside me visible.”
Outward journeys essentially differ little from inward, imaginary ones. It is merely the impact of the foreign that has a
more tangible, visible effect. Everything we experience abroad can theoretically also be experienced at home. In other
words: Away from home, we will only experience what we are inwardly capable of absorbing. It is simply that the routine of
everyday life in our own culture all too often prevents us from being open to something different. Access to inward experience
is often impeded and obstructed.
We require a change of viewpoint, a change of scenery. Sometimes we feel like a new person merely by going from here
to there. We are still the same person we were before, but enlivened, and open for an exchange of energies, for the tension
between things and the images in which they have been wrapped.
No experience – regardless of how commonplace it is – consists merely of that which appears here and now, before
our eyes. It is superimposed and influenced by our own and collective experiences and by traditions, symbols and clichés.
To experience something is already a form of travel: constituting itself from countless images and pre-established notions,
paths and movements – Wege und Bewegungen in der Welt. “Life is a journey,” says Christian. Sometimes arduous,
overwhelming. There are journeys on which the traveller threatens to break down under his load: “I had a green wardrobe
trunk which became more and more of a burden until I left it behind in Persia,” notes Vita Sackville-West in Passenger to
Teheran. Such cumbersome pieces of luggage are better left at home. Then the journey has a better chance of becoming
the adventure of a light, erect gait, the sojourn in another culture an exercise in the unencumbered simplicity of being.
In the visual arts, for example in the case of Richard Long, Marcel Broodthaers, or Johanes Zechner, objects of nature
and objects of everyday life – such as a suitcase – play a special role.
Usually the traveller fills his suitcase before he departs. When Johanes Zechner went to Bay City, he took an empty suitcase
with him and filled it in the course of his search. The suitcase contained only canvas, primed in preparation for an intellectual,
emotional and painterly encounter with the art-life experimentalist Forrest Bess.
The journey as an exploration and a search for traces. In a sense, the suitcase determines the scale. Like a photo album.
Except that photo albums have something of a grave about them. Zechner’s suitcase, on the other hand, more closely
resembles a surprise packet. Or an archive of memories, but memories that can be revitalized at any moment. It comprises
past experience not as something stiff and numb, but as a range of possibilities.
Travel as an option for possibilities and realities.
Or, in the case of Christian, for sculptural transformation, for the interplay between concrete and abstract forms which
sometimes – as in the drawings Graphit auf Papier – thin out into complete impalpability, formlessness, in a manner comparable
to Michaux’s mescaline drawings.
Phantasmal adventures.
Travel itself is like a phantom or phantasm: We chase an illusion or an image; what we finally catch up with is reality,
which often turns out to be something different altogether.
Like a lover, the traveller is all too often aware that he is pursuing an illusion, but that doesn’t stop him. He is incorrigible.
That is why we speak of passion (the German word for passion – “Leidenschaft” – is unmistakably related to the word
for suffering – “Leiden”) or even of obsession (alluding to the traveller’s desire to take possession of the strangeness and
the strange, or his being obsessed by something or someone).
Travellers occasionally depict themselves as victims of their desires and fantasies without having a clear concept of the
object of their longing. They follow what is more an underground trail than a visible current.
The underground trail in Christian’s images reminded me of the story recounted by the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
in his later years: As a child he claimed he could read. To prove it, he pointed to two signs bearing the words “boulanger”
and “boucher.” He recognized the sameness of the first syllables. And that was exactly what he did throughout his life as a
structuralist: identify the invariant within the diverse.
Is that not precisely what Christian does in so powerful a manner? Does he not also point out “Necessary relationships”
(in which structures communicate with one another)? What interests him is the question as to what the cultures have in
common, the variations on a theme.
In view of the development of travel as something constantly gaining speed – the landscapes zip past at an ever faster
rate –, Christian’s works are like sources of tranquility.
The futurists (especially those working in the visual arts) and early 20th-century writers (particularly Blaise Cendrars)
who made use of new technologies were united in their intoxication with speed. And nevertheless: Upon closer inspection,
a good proportion of this travel actionism, this apparently very-far-outward-reaching movement, reveals itself as inward
movement as well.
We recognize in all of the great travelling poets – Rimbaud, Cendrars, Chatwin, and their heirs – sensitive, seismographic
observers of inward and outward sensations. They reach out and touch the strange and allow the strange to touch
them. Some of them, especially Bruce Chatwin, appear as the ultimate representative example of the traveller. More than
any of his contemporaries in the second half of the 20th century, he cultivated the myth – of travel as the fulfilment of desire,
of the traveller as a soldier of fortune, of the wanderer as a representative of man’s fundamentally nomadic constitution,
of the poet as a teller of stories about the basic conditions of human life and survival – to the point where it disintegrated
from within like a withered blossom. Travel and the traveller (and thus the places the traveller seeks) became
chimeras of an old idea of something altogether different. The fascination of being “away” must rely to a greater degree
than ever before on journeys through landscapes of the soul. And, as Christian’s works demonstrate, on changes in the
formative, in forms and structures.
In my contemplation of Christian’s imagery, I sometimes had the impression that the concreteness was looking straight
at me from within the structures: For example an African stool or a mask, a colonnade, a crossing, paths and labyrinths,
palaces and windows (to the world), or concrete-abstract forms like suns and planets. Sacred places also, not to be mistaken
for pallid exoticism. Christian: “This is not an exotic project.” (It is at the most “precise exoticism” as defined by Victor
Segalen.) Art lived, on the trail of the invisible.
The first time I looked at the catalog Die Wege der Welt in the company of my girlfriend Kathrin and her year-and-a-halfold
daughter Friederike, I pointed at the various pictures and asked the little girl what she saw. She said: “Oke” (German
pronunciation:
_
o-ke) picked up a pen and started drawing. (Maybe she also saw herself in the figures: She speaks of herself
as “Ike,” pronounced
_
e-ke.)
Thus: travelling-writing-painting.
Once having set out travellingly-writingly-paintingly, one is torn in two by the hope of ultimate self-knowledge on the
one hand and discouraging disillusionment on the other, by the alternation between the persistence of structure and its
flight.
He who travels constantly, Cees Nooteboom noted, is always somewhere else, yet is also constantly and always somewhere,
namely within oneself.
Nooteboom’s motto – “Travelling around in the world and meditating and getting closer to the riddle” – applies to nearly
all travelling writers and artists, if in varying shades and with varying emphases. Nevertheless, the omnipresent experience:
“Voyages are no solution.” Travellers are only “ludicrous testimonies to human impotence,” as Paul Nizan, the author
of the small cult book Aden, wrote at the beginning of the 20th century. And Michel Leiris insisted that travel was the expression
of both a longing for death and the illusion that the process of aging could be delayed or, to an extent even an escape
from oneself. But no matter how far onto the periphery of the world and our own life we venture, we always take our
self and our longings and cravings with us.
Language exposes the writer’s strangeness to himself and urges him on, makes a wanderer and discoverer out of him,
an archaeologist and explorer of the terra incognita.
For every passionate traveller, the terra incognita is unique; it always has a special shape of its own. The first contours
of strangeness and unfamiliarity already begin to emerge in the fantasies of the child who dreams of one day going on a
journey. For Bruce Chatwin, for example, it was an animal skin from Patagonia. All poets who have been fascinated by travel
and all ethnologists who have not ultimately allowed themselves to be restrained by academic notions have allowed their
childhood fantasies great scope. The imagined fantasy worlds surface not only at the thought of later Travels Around the
World, but also at the thought of one’s return.
“When I come back from my travels I will start a circus,” the nine-and-a-half-year-old Walter Höllerer wrote in a composition
for school. The motto he formulated in his first volume of poetry was: “Always prepared for departure.” In the words
of Christian: “Life is a journey.”
It is my conviction that we travel only when we harbor an unstilled longing within us, and the hope of experiencing
something altogether different. To travel or not to travel is hardly a question of arguments, but rather one of urges, ideals,
and inner agitation, of uncertainty.
Many of the people we meet travelling are like a foreign land in a poorly written guidebook: a place consisting merely of
climate, geography, and hotels. It is a stroke of luck to meet travellers who declare their luggage to be their childhood and
their dreams, and people like Abraham David Christian, who do not cling to a fiction of “identity” (it is no coincidence that
the Japanese regard him as a “Japanese sculptor”), who are interested more in the peripheral than in what is putatively
central.
No distance is travelled in vain. On journeys nothing is lost – except perhaps a bit of the superfluous load one has been
lugging around for decades. Christian reduced his luggage to one small bag. Not least of all in order to be able to set off
again anytime, on the spur of the moment.
The desire to return a different person.
Move on, or stay? Allow our thoughts to go on alone? “In order to stay” – When we allow this line by Konstantinos
Kavafis to melt in our mouth like a ripe fig or papaya, our head begins to spin in a confusion of question and exclamation
marks. How must places be to make us stay? Perhaps all travel is a postponement of the desire to stay and become a person
who “rests within himself,” as it is taught by the ancient doctrines of the East.
I am – contains leaving and staying, indivisibly and undoubtedly. To Abraham David Christian I would like to call out –
You are.



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