Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Plantinga

You reach a stage where they ask you for a biography or a CV. Sometimes it’s for a catalogue. Sometimes it’s for a grant application. And of course, if you’re a photographer, this is alien to your practice. It doesn’t matter whether you use a darkroom or digital manipulation; the image always develops over time, in ways beyond your control. So what does it mean to put a label on this or that event?

Plantinga was born in Berlin in 1956 to an Estonian mother and unknown father, thought to have been a journalist.

You can say that she was given her first camera at the age of 17. That she was working as an au pair in Amsterdam. That it was a Leica; that it was the prized possession of Maarten, dead brother of Matthias, father of the family. It seems as though you should say, she was bitterly disappointed, because she wanted a Polaroid: it’s definitely the case that our timebound relation to technology has been a preoccupation. She has 100 cameras and lenses beyond count. The name Plantinga marks the acquisition of the mechanical eye.

This is the case: when she uses the Leica, she always wonders what dead Maarten would have made of what she sees.

She had read Stanisław Lem’s Bajki robotów in German, Robotermärchen. Robot tales. She could not find it in Dutch. She told the stories to the children, playing robot games. This would turn out to be important.

This is the case: if she had done a degree she could put down the degree.

She took a job as au pair with a family in Oxford. The husband was a barrister, the wife a solicitor. They told her for £30 she could go to lectures at the university. Her English would not have been good enough to do a degree. If she had been doing a degree she would have been tied to a syllabus. When the children were at school she went to lectures on philosophy, on Linear B, on the Umayyads.

There was a Czech dissident, Julius Tomin, who lectured on Plato. He had given illegal seminars on Aristotle in Prague, where he had had to dodge the secret police; a group of Oxford philosophers had rescued him. At first the lectures were crowded, he filled a big hall. Later he was ostracized. He was stubborn in the way that dissidents have to be. He could not teach to the syllabus. He had a controversial theory that the Phaedrus was Plato’s first dialogue. He would give a class in the Philosophy Sub-Faculty and maybe two people would come. The rest of the time he would do something no professional academic could do, he would sit all day every day in the Bodleian. There are signs saying no photography is allowed, but the staff are not always in every room; she could get pictures of this wrongheaded Platonist at work. She could go to all these lectures on philosophy because she was an au pair, and he could give them but nobody would come because they were not useful for the syllabus.

Of course she took pretty pictures of the pretty town. She sold them for postcards.

She read Calvino’s Invisible Cities. She read Goffman’s Interaction Ritual. She read Crozier’s Le phénomène bureaucratique. It was in the Philosophy Sub-Faculty that she found A. C. Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. She took pictures of graduating students; she talked about Linear B, the Umayyads, interaction rituals. She would say: How is it possible for physically indistinguishable objects to be different works of art? The students had lively, engaged, yet poignant expressions: destined for Arthur Andersen, for merchant banks, they discovered too late their lost chance to learn Linear B. Of course these were popular photographs. Of course it was easy to get more commissions. Of course it was easy to be asked to weddings and bar mitzvahs. It was not so easy, of course, to know what dead Maarten would have made of it.

The Woodfords taught her to play bridge. This would turn out to be important.

An economist taught her to play poker. This would turn out to be important.

This could go on and on but it can’t go on.

In 1988 Plantinga rented a room in East Dulwich from the Estonian minimalist Liis Rüütel. Rüütel had squatted a house in Bermondsey with the installation artist Andrew Hopkins; had learnt construction techniques (plumbing, wiring, plastering, carpentry); had taught at Goldsmith’s and Central Saint Martins; had bought a condemned house for peanuts, restored it, rented out rooms, and given up teaching. She would say that her painting got all this energy from the fact that she was not teaching, she was not putting all this energy into the students. Because Plantinga was not a student, because she was just living in the house, she was there at this burst of energy. The attention was directed entirely at the art and not at her, so that’s paradoxical, that she would get more than she would get from the thing you put on a CV. She could go to the studio and hear the words that happened to come, words hitting the air the way paint strikes a canvas, not congealed to the illusion of authority, of definitiveness, that you get from a text on a printed page. She could see something you don’t see so much in a gallery, the historical development of the artist, the work the artist has left behind next to the new. And then there was this other thing, there was the transmission of the praxis of Andrew Hopkins into the plumbing and a kitchen cabinet and a light fixture and after a while a conservatory at the back, you would have these dense minimalist paintings next to the fixture, these different flows of things going through the hands. It goes without saying that you can take pictures. Of course after a while they want you to take pictures for catalogues.

It doesn’t go without saying. When she was a child she blocked out Estonian. If her mother spoke to her aunt she would disunderstand, because her mother spoke comical German and it was embarrassing. But Liis Rüütel had this mastery of English, she could articulate a point about the Kantian sublime and explain how to disconnect the water supply to a sink and then effortlessly use words like wally and boffin and bollix, if she wrote an advert on eBay to sell a toaster you were completely transfixed. So it was as if Estonian had been developing for 30 years in the brain of Plantinga, if Liis got on the phone to her sister comprehension would click into place, Liis would get off the phone and Estonian words would come suddenly to the mouth that would not speak to its aunt or its mother, and at the same time it was as if the brain had been waiting for concrete proof that English was possible for an interloper, it clicked into place — if you are a photographer you notice when something teaches you about time.

And then there was a different period. Rüütel’s gallerist took 20 paintings to Frieze and it was a sensation, they all sold within hours, so of course Liis thought it would not be necessary to rent rooms. But the gallery kept not sending money, there were these long conversations on the phone, and each time Liis would go into the garden and dig and plant and put down paving stones. Plantinga wasn’t living there any more but each time she went back there would be this new transformation of the garden or maybe a new upstairs kitchen. So of course these are pictures that have to be taken before you know what to do with them, you come back and there is a pond with a natural waterfall and a rocky basin and carp and a Japanese maple. It’s like, if you go to the Colorado River you see where the water has cut down through the layers of rock through the millennia.

She played poker at the Vic on Edgware Road.

She played bridge at the Young Chelsea Club. She really did.

You have to remember that she had gone to seminars on the Philosophical Investigations. She could develop her thought on language games and interaction rituals. She could pay the rent and buy kit without schmoozing her gallerist. She had posh friends who played Flannery Two Diamonds & thought nothing of buying 5 prints.

This was a bit mischievous. Well, it was bad. It was bad. Ivo is not on speaking terms with her, so yes, it was mischievous.

She got a place as artist-in-residence at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. There is a big Polish population in Pittsburgh, so what she did was, she got people to make recordings of Bajki robotów in Polish, and then she got a guy at the institute to make robots that would tell the stories, and then she made a video of autistic children interacting contentedly with the robots.

So Pittsburgh, as maybe you know, is built at the confluence of three rivers; you can take a trolley car up to the bluff overlooking the city and you get a view of the rivers and these dozens of little suspension bridges which you have to love. She ran into a girl who said someone had offered to pay her rent for a year. He wanted to take a photograph of this view as seen from the interior of an apartment in which someone was living in a completely natural way. All she had to do was move in and furnish it the way she would naturally. His idea was that she would be engaged in some kind of activity, ironing napkins or something like that. What he wanted was to juxtapose this ordinary, everyday activity with the traces of this steel town.

Ordinary! Everyday! She could see that the girl was completely gobsmacked.

The girl was an art student. She did not even have an iron. She did not even have paper napkins, if she had people over for a meal she would tear off paper towels. But as soon as she moved in she bought an iron and an ironing board, and she bought some cloth napkins, and if you are going to have cloth napkins maybe you need a tablecloth so she bought a matching tablecloth. And maybe she would have reverted to natural behavior, but Ivo kept saying, I just want you engaging in some ordinary, everyday activity, something like vacuuming, or dusting. So of course then she had to buy a vacuum cleaner and a dust cloth, and of course Ivo would come over to experiment with the light at different times of day so she would feel the apartment had to look presentable for the kind of person who thinks vacuuming is an everyday activity. So she became fanatical about housekeeping, she would vacuum, she would wash all the dishes and put them away, she bought a teapot and a creamer and a sugar bowl and a little tray and a glass plate for cookies.

It was like an extreme form of this phenomenon that’s really common, which is that when you have gay friends to dinner you suddenly remember that they had hand towels and scented soap in the bathroom and you are conscious of living in squalor. Or at least, she thought it was like this phenomenon, but that was just the perception of the possessor of the mechanical eye. She had some money at this point. She rented an apartment, and she found a girl to live in it, and she said she would leave her assistant to handle the details. One of the reasons she loved gay bars, of course, is that there is this fanatical attention to detail, and they cosset you, so you become aware that you can ritualize looking after someone and that doesn’t devalue it. So she asked Ed Vittorini, who ran her favorite bar, if he would take care of this; she said she was going to want the inhabitant engaged in some ordinary, everyday activity, and he should just get her to act naturally, live naturally in the apartment. And of course, as it turned out, the end result was these two girls in an apartment with an ironing board and cloth napkins and a matching tablecloth and a tea tray and something in a clothes bag that had just been picked up from the dry cleaners and a vase of fresh flowers.