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“Drawing Breath follows the hermetic coding of Rimbaud’s famous vowel poem in which he attempted a “synaesthesia of language”, with each letter and word assigned an alchemical significance.
To intone the vowels, Clark has recruited film-maker Nicolas Roeg, another figure who has an obvious affinity with Rimbaud. His films – including Performance, Eureka, Bad Timing and The Man Who Fell to Earth – touch on many of the same themes as Rimbaud’s best-known verse: sex, grief, nostalgia and estrangement.
Standing outside a Soho S&M parlour listening to a recording of sighs, groans and whispers doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to pay tribute to Rimbaud. But Clark insists that Drawing Breath is not some surrealist, Duchamp-style prank. Explaining the piece, he solemnly quotes Georges Bataille: “My purpose is to illustrate a fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism – and in particular sadism.” He also points out that one critic claimed that Rimbaud’s vowels stood as “graphic representations of a woman’s body in orgasm” – hence the decision to mount the piece in Janus.
Given the sadomasochistic nature of his relationship with Verlaine and his delight in shocking the bourgeoisie, Rimbaud would surely have appreciated the “homage” in a sex shop. What passers-by make of it is, of course, quite another matter”.
Extract from Loose Vowels Geoffrey Macnab finds Rimbaud’s legacy in Soho. © Guardian December 2002.
“Sound art responds to two contrary tractions in the practices of making and displaying art. One is the desire to burst boundaries, to tear down the walls, to break out of the confined space of the gallery. Sound is ideal for this because of its well-known expansiveness and leakiness.……Between 1st November and 14th December 2002, Michael Clark set up a sound-sculpture entitled Drawing Breath, consisting of a loop of panting sounds outside the Janus sex-shop in Soho. Since the shop specialised in the arcane of spanking, the reference was perhaps to the folkloric link between the midwife’s slap and the breath of life”.
Extract from Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art, Professor Steve Connor, a talk given in the series Bodily Knowledges: Challenging Ocularcentricity at Tate Modern, 21 February 2003.
“Leaving my glass of absinthe on the bar I headed back into Old Compton street. This time I made my way to S & M shop Janus at number 40 where a strange tribute to Verlaine and Rimbaud had been installed. Michael Clark’s sound sculpture Drawing Breath. Verlaine and Rimbaud who so delighted in shocking the bourgeoisie could hardly have hoped for a more fitting tribute”.
Muriel Zagha presenter Prisoners of Albion produced by Sarah Jane Hall. Broadcast 19.03.04 BBC Radio 4.
“As Diary stood in the doorway of Janus, one of the most startling things was the reaction of the public, who looked concerned and intrigued by the guttural and nasal intonations emerging …”
West End Extra 19th November 2004
Bacon’s influence threads through his works, reappearing even in his conceptual pieces. Be it in the appearance of wounds in his paintings, or in the location of a ‘ sound sculpture’ outside a sex shop that Bacon used to frequent (only in part to cash his cheques), his ghostly spectre appears again and again, if only obliquely, in his figurative and conceptual works. For Clark is not a portraitist, although he has created many portraits of people ranging from film directors to the characters of Soho of yesteryear to Royalty to Pop royalty. He is a conceptual artist, for whom the painstakingly accurate depiction of the human face is only one of his or media, and conversation with him ranges from the diverse influences of Rimbaud and Nauman as well as Holbein and Rembrandt.Extract from Christie’s catalogue, The Collection of The Late Miss Valerie Beston - Artists from The London School – 8th and 10th February 2006 © Christie’s
“It is 134 years since Rimbaud and Verlaine, fleeing the suppression of the Paris Commune, walked these streets in search of a gin that didn’t taste (in their words) like “concentrated sewage”. Drawing Breath is a homage to Rimbaud, arguably the only poet who would have welcomed being immortalised in a sound installation in a sex shop.”
Extract from, “Take a deep breath … say ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaa’, Charles Darwent, The Independent on Sunday 29/10/06 © The Independent on Sunday |
