Dennis Hollingsworth

Atlantis

Our week in Z?rich was simply fabulous. Mark was a wonderful host, we met a great number of wonderful, generous, attentive, intelligent and informed people: artists, writers, collectors, students, movie directors, cooks, designers, old friends...

Here's a few keepsakes:

We arrived home after a six hours travelling door to door, Z?rich to Barcelona. And coming home after five or six days of a constant high, my metabolic pendulum was swinging towards hibernation...

I tell you that the most wonderful feature of traditional Mediterranean building is the ability to control the interior light with the shutters and blinds that accompany all window openings in these thick walls. Sleep deprived. A little R & R. We went for a swim after Spanish (Castelleno) class early the next day after we had arrived and the contrast of Switzerland next to Spain was still on reverb as we plunged into the waters of the cove, the memory of a similar plunge into lake Z?rich was fresh and vivid.

Mark had taken Stephanie and I for a swim soon after we arrived. After a walk through the streets of the Bonhoffstrasse of the dentral island, a kind of Beverly Hills of Z?rich, we checked into a bath house on the lake. A rare sunny day, crowds of Swiss were soaking up the pale sun of the high summer. We changed into our swim suits and the initial plunge into the pure lake water was like jumping into the bottled water regularly served at the local restaurant dinner tables. Treading water, the lake filled with sails as the image you see at the head of this post crowned the horizon.

Back in Tossa, the sea was so salty and briney and filled with all kinds of lifeforms and debris and froth. Evian and brine. After so much swimming this summer, it's not uncommon for me to experience a loss of balance when I arise from a prone position, sometimes the room will spin when I close my eyes in bed. Coming out of the salty Catalan water, we plop down and dry out, sopping the last rays of the waning summer, the world spinning from the whirlwind of it all. It's so amazing being here.

I had camera problems, first with my little spy camera crapping out and the batteries of the backup too weak (chargers were too hard to find on the fly), so I offer this meager foto album of the trip. Besides, I feel like a geek if I whip out the camera as we meet so many new people.

Z?rich is a fantastic city... it's like a combination of Tossa and New York, for the intimacy of urban human scale (the village feeling) and the high metabolic cost of living (the place is very expensive) that delivers an acme in modern living. The best of human endevour at your disposal, at a price.

Z?rich is big on the dramatic arts, the pics above are from a summer theater festival staged in improvised camps at the lake's edge. That night, we go to take in the scene and eat some food such as we had, plates of Cameroon cusine from one pavillion. Elsewhere in the city, movie theaters are everywhere, people have to make reservations to get in and often people belong to movie clubs, some watching three or so movies a week.

And they're no slackers when it comes to the visual arts. I talked to writers, so many by type and with so many in depth. It is rare for me to have the same careful concentration of interchange with "ink stained wretches" in the states. Collectors often take the conversation into deeper water, other artists are very open and often volunteer to open their studios to us, eager to exchange thoughts about art. No fear.

Marina (Mark's number one at the gallery) took us to see the Giacometti at the police station. On the way, I was anticipating the Giacometti I knew of, the elongated mottled and modeled Existentialist figures, I was thinking that the police would be able to protect the work from thieves. Then we arrived and I was flattened by the experience... I wasn't that aware of the family story:

Here's a snippet form a quick google search:

Turn left to Werdm?hleplatz, continue towards the Limmat River, and make a short stop at the Police Department. This building used to be the biggest convent in Z?rich, and later became an orphanage (financed by the same Pestalozzi) before being converted into the police station. Don?t be shy--enter the police headquarters to have a peek at an amazing wall painting by Swiss artist Augusto Giacometti. The vault was painted after World War I. The famous ?hall of the flowers? (Bl?emlihalle), awash in bright colors, reflects the relief and joy the artist felt when war was over.

This, a shot with a flash to show how the color shifts. The place was amazing, a police station, no less! And painted in 1926! the colors reminded me of the artist I was showing with, Judy Millar had installed a couple of large paintings in the second gallery, the juxtaposition of primary hot against muddied colder colors, often one over the other, all rigorously organised and yet freehanded too, fantastic.
Judy is from New Zealand and she's been in Berlin for a little while. (She has built a house for herself on a cliff near Aukland I think... she'll send me pics...)

Everybody is talking about how great Berlin is. Everybody.

Artist, painter Reto Boller walked with us along one of the rivers coming off the lake into the city. Reto was working on a competition for an installation in a public space. He took a break to have dinner with us. This time, we happened upon a canoe-football match:

Fun stuff.

To tell you the truth, I had expected a Hollywood version of Z?rich before I first arrived last year: stainless steel and glass, perfectly cast concrete and beautiful people everywhere... and yes, all this is present there, but the city is wonderfully diverse and human scaled and shaggy in a good way (plenty of strip clubs to offset the bank district), and at the same time, the swans are big and healthy, the fish are fat and plentiful and there is both an absense of trash, a presence of grafitti and occasional -yet still rare vandalous shennanigans (smashed storefront glass) in the streets.

Sorry, no pics of the opening are available, the desire to lower the paparazzi factor and overtones of preying on the offhand moment being too large to ignore. However, I did manage to squeeze off these after opening party shots, the city had hosted three coordinated nights of opeings with collective parties for each.

Time after time, people would say: "...please don't put this in your blog..."... yes of course, we must be discreet. Many things don't get posted anyway, the impression of transparancy is a false one by and large. I do think this shot of Mark (he's on the right, Marcel Isler is on the left, I got to talk to his brother Peter) is a good one. A great guy to collaborate with, lucky man that I am.

And Atlantis? Floating in the Mediterranean water once again, I was resting from a series of deep dives, floating on the surface. I was looking over a rock formation with memories of Z?rich reverbing in my head. And in the offhanded moment, a thought of Atlantis came to mind... how the rocks could be a foundation for a house or an Atlantean road... and I then thought about how the people in Switzerland could be Atlanteans, that perfect place far away, long ago.

Posted by Dennis at August 28, 2004 9:01 AM