Helen Marten, The Boiled in Between, Prototype
Publishing Ltd., 2020.
excerpt: https://brooklynrail.org/2020/12/fiction/from-The-Boiled-in-Between
The Boiled in Between is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, an ambitious literary work full of beauty and sorrow. It is a novel told in the action of persistence and questioning: how the rhythms of a world built upon metaphor and symbolism can collide with relationships personal and domestic.
Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement, its characters traversing the in-betweens. The psychic excitements of wind, dust and weather merge with alchemical interior voices, all of them indexes of the universe’s microscopic pornography, a fitful map of language and human systems. Philosophic and tactile, humorous and unrelenting, The Boiled in Between ignites new meaning for people and terms of living that have long ceased to astonish us.
‘This is a wildly, joyfully creative journey into the tenderness of being human, frail, together and apart. A remarkable debut from a keen eye and a deft, lyrical hand.’ – AL Kennedy
‘An incredible work of literary art.’ – Max Porter
‘The Old Victorian is new again and the dramatic poem is prose… or, in the words of at least one of the Brownings, “As goes the empire, so goes the formatting.” Helen Marten strives, seeks, finds, and does not yield in any of her media; she stands in her integrity as the burning deck becomes a darkling plain.’ – Joshua Cohen
‘Alexander Calder moved to Paris from New York in 1926, aged twenty-seven, and his visit to Mondrian’s studio gave him what he described as the ‘shock that started things’. He likened it to being slapped like a baby to get its lungs working. Writers read, and very very occasionally a text delivers the baby slap: Toi Derricotte’s The Memory Poems, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Gwyneth Lewis’ Dalton’s Geranium, Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String… The Boiled in Between slaps the reader like a baby.’ – Helen DeWitt
‘I love this book in all its wit and inventiveness.’ – Hans Ulrich Obrist
‘Helen Marten has always produced intricate, ricocheting systems, and now she has expanded this system-making into writing. She uses language in this novel like a bricoleur, where words acquire their own sticky, glued substance – brilliant explorations of ugly feelings that are also exercises in how clotted and wayward sentences can be, as well.’ – Adam Thirlwell
‘Each with their startling similes and swerves, their alarming and tender moments, I have begun to read Helen Marten’s sculpture through her writing, her writing through her sculpture. With The Boiled in Between Marten has become an insistent voice in my head, tying knots and undoing them, never the same way twice.’ – Adrian Searle
‘A cosmos emerges in the work of Helen Marten, we know it and we don’t. We know it all, but the All that it becomes, we do not know. It pulls you in and right away it pushes you back again. Everything is familiar and nothing, that is the work of this artist: Creating the Nothing, which in this case is everything. Everyone reads something else, everyone sees something else. And yet, it is familiar to everyone, just differently, and this is exactly what creates this familiarity, a trust in the other, through the other, that becomes something else.’ – Elfriede Jelinek
Helen Marten was awarded the Turner Prize in 2016 for her enigmatic work in sculpture. Two years later, the artist noted a disconcerting lack in critical dialogue surrounding her work. Marten usually works across sculpture, painting, print-making, film and writing, but decided to temporarily vacate her studio for a year to solely focus on writing her first novel, ‘The Boiled in Between’, published by Prototype in 2020. Looking back on Marten’s Turner Prize winning works, displaying scenes in which “some unknown human activity has been interrupted”, it’s hard not to think of the many interruptions caused by the global pandemic. Marten’s novel operates in that same space of undoing, where meaning and certainty are in flux, like an open-ended sentence.
As a way to tackle the density of Marten’s prose, you could decide to look to the book’s unique set of reference points. You might find that the book is a close relative of ‘A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings Constructions’ (1977) — an influential book for architects, city-planners and anyone interested in organising a co-habitable space. You may also discover that Marten is interested in poetic voices — Modernist writers such as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot — and absorbed by the spectral layout of ran-sacked cities, towns and villages, with all their neighbours, gloomy onlookers and silent interlocutors. You could find countless other connections to comment on throughout Marten’s novel, like the author’s interest in mixing colour, texture and foodstuffs with household objects and routine habits. None of these observations, however, will help when it comes to the task of interpreting the plot of Marten’s text — I’m still not sure what actually happened — but unearthing these sources is like opening a desk drawer full of carpentry tools. Each reference is an apparatus needed to fashion a novel that speaks to an interest in life, domesticity, bodies and neighbourhood watches.
The so-called plot of Marten’s novel flits between the perspective of two middle-aged people, Ethan and Patrice, and a third, more abstract narrative guided by the ‘Messrs.’, reminiscent of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, but markedly replete of category. When it comes to making her enormous sculptures, comprised of both hand-crafted and found objects, there’s rarely any linearity to Marten’s thinking. Similarly, her writing process is much like beating ideas together and building connections where there are no obvious links to make. Marten’s prose reads like a tightly formulaic, yet troublingly disorganised repository of art-logical concepts and whimsy. Much like her sculptures, Marten’s writing relies on traditions of assemblage and collage as a way to communicate an unfinished thought, or to demonstrate the constructive logic that emerges out of inconstancy and confusion. Marten roots her novel in a foundation in flux, calling into question the true meaning of words: people can exchange hyperbole and metaphor as a recognised currency in this book. ‘The Boiled in Between’ aims to uncover how “the approximate details of subjective detail become fact”, or, put another way, how the world is limited by the trappings of language.
Marten’s visual work is characterised by an impulse to create pseudo-realities, fictional histories or sites of excavation. ‘The Boiled in Between’ shares this impulse. In the prologue to Marten’s novel, the Messrs. tell us that “windows and propped doors” and “snapped twigs pointing the way back” are preserved by time, just as Marten’s sculptures allude to various interruptions, unexpected incursions and visits. ’18 Works on Paper’, Marten’s solo show at Sadie Coles in London, is an exhibition of brightly coloured watercolours and pencil drawings; luminescent, sometimes mottled by dark splurges of paint, and at other times featuring the delicate but flattened anatomy of a poppy and a miscellany of other appliqué objects. These are “complicit agents of re-sampling: children’s drawing, historical diagram, contemporary theft, and more.” In one of the drawings, Marten depicts a sewage line decorated with “cut and paste” scissors, splicing through clumps of hair. Faces of farmyard animals float around and above the clogged up pipe-line. With inconsistencies in size, shape and content, Marten’s ’18 Works on Paper’ are like fragments of ‘The Boiled in Between’ — however it is crucial to note that, though the drawings were made during the same period and some are inspired by the same narrative as the book, they are an independent body of work. Marten’s detailed drawings and charismatic watercolours contain characters who are difficult to read.
In ‘The Boiled in Between’, characters live in a strange world interspersed by short affirmative statements about lifestyles: “The house is a big body, a macro mass”. Marten’s fictional characters talk lucidly about nomadic life, too: mapping, camping and sleeping on pillows of “creamy ricotta” beneath a “blanket of little gem with aioli”, for instance. Marten’s novel consistently returns to closed-off spaces, specifically households, but sometimes tents. The Messrs. tell us that the house “is like communication”, something we are either entered into or excluded from entirely. The revelations of Marten’s Messrs. call to mind the theories of anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote, “The opposition between the upper and lower part [of the house] reproduces within the space of the house the opposition set up between the inside and the outside.” ‘The Boiled in Between’ pays homage to the liminality between interior and exterior spaces. The Messrs. are permanently on the outside: they are not ‘in’ the story, as it were. Meanwhile, Patrice and Ethan contemplate touching and looking at their internal organs. Patrice jokingly remarks that the impulse to “poke fingers into indeterminate holes” should have its own “classification” within language. Ironically we, the reader, are always technically inside or in between the book’s pages.
‘The Boiled in Between’ is a remarkably innovative piece of writing that resists easy definition. It is unfathomably exciting to read. More than just a novel, ‘The Boiled in Between’ contains a network of ideas, thronging with personality and humour. The authors of ‘The Pattern Language’, one of the sources for Marten’s novel, described their seminal text as “a needle following a tapestry”: explosive and unpredictable at times, but always on a some desired path or course. The lifeblood of Marten’s novel pumps through the same vein. Marten leaves no stone unturned, covering subjects as expansive as life, death, flowers, sex and birds. ‘The Boiled in Between’ is important reading. - Olivia Fletcher
http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/helen-marten-the-boiled-in-between
The Boiled in Between is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, a work of fiction that will surely be acclaimed for its author’s bold and innovative geist. The novel puts into forefront a myriad of vital questions relevant for all who tend to delve deeper into matters of both life and language. It can be claimed that one of its biggest strengths lies in that it shows, ever so subtly, the interplay of our world that is founded upon metaphor and symbolism, and the relationships we form among ourselves.
The narrative flows tenderly, and has no violent jumps even at its most heart-breaking and sorrowful moments. It is shared by three voices: the Messrs, Ethan and Patrice, and as such always partakes in a moving sequence, which made me think of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, and her magnanimous novel Flights, which, too, is a stunning feat of prose writing that is never grounded, but is characterized by always being in motion. In order to succeed in such a writing endeavour, an author must be very skilled in portraying how the voices of the characters traverse the distances between them, and how they act when their paths collide. Marten does this wonderfully, and I’d never believe that this is her debut novel, so much is she already aware of the subtleties of her craft.
Not only is this a strong narrative of movement, that is also movement itself, as we’ve already established, but it is a masterpiece of imagery, too. With its bold and experimental usage of images, it strikes a chord with readers who can do nothing else but surrender to the wonderful flow of picturesque strings of sentences that are always part of a bigger movement, and never still. Admirers of Ali Smith’s oeuvre will surely be amazed by Marten’s debut, for both writers endeavour to master creating outstanding mental pictures with language, and in that attempt they succeed, for the language flows in all its beauty and complexity, just like the strokes of a paint brush.
“The beach is not human although it reeks of entropy with its avian aesthetics so bleak and cinematic with only a few people around. A few people people and the tide and arctic giants of cloud. Holiday landscapes amaze in winter when their blackened trees write out a calligraphy against the creamy emptiness. Summer stretches bring forth cars and an agitation of bodies with their all-too-visible emergencies.
The two of them used to practice on the sand, walking, feet no longer feet, but extensions of a moral force, a pride in that force contained within two solid bodies. The details came out then: one leg shorter than another, a vague ache because of it; the sand itself groaning and collapsing all its billions of silicate granules, little gems between their toes.”
The Boiled in Between is a philosophic and tactile piece of writing, created by a talented writer, whose craft will surely be praised in the future. The novel is a stellar kick start, and we highly recommend it as your end-of-Summer read. - Sanja Gligorić
http://anglozine.com/review-helen-martens-debut-novel-the-boiled-in-between/
In 1935, Gertrude Stein declared in ‘Poetry and Grammar’: ‘I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.’ The rigorous thrill of sketching grammar’s architecture, the satisfactions of seeing where syntax may lead us, the sense of sense resolving, or not: this tricky prose kick is also present in the sculptures and screen prints of Helen Marten. Where the artist has spoken of her works as diagrams – maps of relation between exotic and mundane objects, luxe and grubby materials, attending ideas – I’ve always thought of them instead as sentences. Especially slippery sentences that slide through the mind and bear much pleasurable repeating before they will make known their meanings. In a ‘Lexicon’ for the catalogue of Drunk Brown House, her 2016 show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Marten wrote in an entry on cartoons: ‘The whole grammar is geared towards a state of physical change and material sensation.’ A cartoon scuffle between form and feeling: this might be one way to describe Marten’s extraordinary novel, The Boiled in Between – out next week from Prototype Publishing. There are the rubbery outlines of a story, or at least a setting. Two middle-aged characters, Ethan and Patrice, living in a frustrated, mangy suburbia, fixating on their queasy erotic and alimentary lives, the vagaries of weather and crumbling architecture, the habits of their neighbours. Overseeing all of this is the protean, immaterial ‘Messrs.’ They are a pair (or is it a legion?) of sentient, knowing atmospheres whose voices interrupt the monologues of Patrice and Ethan to comment on the characters and their universe. ‘We look down on these awful people and their endless capacity for enhancement.’ Each time they appear, the Messrs. are displaced and renamed: ‘Messrs. External &’ some new state or quality: Crumbly, Melancholy, Weary, Yellow, Peaty, Sorry. The life they observe, say the Messrs., is ‘Something like a syntactical form of mitosis, with each article of speech, each pulling of the bathroom plug, each lunch and breakfast in bed, all of it only a comma in the great future run-on unfolding.’
Language and body, in other words, are intimately involved, sentences branching and cells dividing. Impossible to quote Marten writing about sex, violence, food, age or decay without noting how much work the texture and rhythm of her prose are doing. The Boiled in Between is a novel that proceeds by image and incantation rather than much in the way of explicit plot. Here is Ethan: ‘Well what is a body anyway, when framed in words? A dough trough? A collapsing figure for poking and kneading? For baking, for burning, for pulling apart like a hot-pocketed roll?’ And Patrice: ‘I hoped for cosy berries in flabby tides of cream. The soft smell of new strained cheese.’ Elsewhere, a world of extreme violence is broached by an italicized news report: ‘a sixteen-year-old who, after throwing her newborn into a fast-flowing river, jumped in herself with a sack of stones around her neck; the outdated car-making machinery in a Mississippi factory tore the thigh and collarbone clean off one of the company’s longest serving employees.’ Marten’s sculpture also conjures a kind of machinery, sometimes sinister, frequently playful, always mysterious. Hers is an art in ambiguous love with objects and substances, which are complexly tesselated but also self-involved, singularly seductive or repellent in their own right. The stoniness of stone, the laciness of lace: these seem resolutely themselves, and also as if they might at any moment transmute, recombine, regenerate as anything else. So, too, in The Boiled in Between, where matter and things can appear more lively protagonists than Ethan and Patrice. Marten’s attention to textures is the book’s chief strangeness and achievement. Here is a novel in which a loaf of bread is ‘one of those loaves so heaped with sugar it could already be fifty years old, baked up with flory moths and pubic hair.’ In which the description of a humble garden sprinkler requires a page of infinitesimal, estranging detail: ‘Strung with tensile integrity cells amongst a web of slender tendons there is a complex network of pipes.’
To what purpose, all these oddities? The Boiled in Between starts with an epigraph from Bertolt Brecht’s Svendborg Poems (1939): ‘In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.’ The bright enigmas of Marten’s prose, like those of her sculpture, can easily be interpreted as merely formal or simply curious, as teeming celebrations of matter and movement. But, as with her art, there is a kind of wild critique at work here of the madness of production, the ubiquity of environmental neglect. The Boiled in Between is in pursuit of the most intimate affinities between bodies, earth, atmospheres, images and commodities – this is a book that will not let us forget that it is all one bruised mass of becoming, about to wink out at last. - Brian Dillon
https://www.frieze.com/article/helen-martens-intimate-affinities
‘It was a season of communal malaise. Of narrative struggle. People looked how the seasick look at maps and dream of land. How the hungry see a wrapper, a skeleton fish and trace the edges of their own bones with a slow finger feeling morose and giddy-eyed.’
This elegant novel reads like a prose poem an ode to living in contemporary society. There’s a rhythm to the text that readers will fall into, (Prototype released readings on social media that illustrate this), the pace allows us to absorb meaning. The Boiled in Between is rich and colourful and the images it conjures are vivid, almost pungent. Helen Marten is a prize winning artist. She uses words much the way I imagine she prepares her pieces carefully selecting compatible and contrasting features that come together as a whole. Here we have lives under the microscope but nothing is simply described, ideas and actions are melded, reactions observed, tested. It feels organic, constantly challenging and thought provoking although the writing must have been meticulously arrived at. Sometimes it’s what’s between the lines that are printed that matters. Thoughts are brief, fragmentary; snippets, glimpsed, sharply observed, triggers, connections and musings. There are three voices, three perspectives that add tone and texture. The reader is left to formulate the wholeness as if the text is a touch paper. Some might question whether this is a novel at all, it’s certainly experimental, Marten employs a radical approach that isn’t so common in English literature, but there’s a thread that unites the work. Statements are made, an alternative meaning suggested, debate encouraged. The Boiled in Between invites readers to taste, to see words and their impact on the story. This is a bold fiction, questioning out understanding of the modern world, our relationship to nature, (the universe?), exploring ways of seeing, exploding by pretensions, it’s genuinely exciting, a visceral and sensory adventure in which emotions are a framing landscape.
I wrote about the things the novel talks about and deleted that, readers of this review won’t get the best sense of the work from that. Briefly, it’s about relationships, about change, dealing with the things life throws up, about mortality. The best illustration is to allow the novel to speak for itself:
‘On cold brilliant days when the geese honked overhead, he knew they mocked him. Rained laughter down at him with their goose vowels and grammar dropped somewhere across the Atlantic.’
and
‘I wondered if my aura of careless spiritual lethargy would be legible. If I offered as much personality and reassurance as a crumpled newspaper. The bland visitor, me, with the silly curls falling.’
and
‘Winds frisk me to the bone, bone thoughts, all gurgling directions and great arcs of pain and geese. Leaves fall to the ground. They know their rhythms, aided by rainwater or mud, sticking fast together, gummy stalks and green moustaches, nodding off like practiced husbands.’
The Boiled in Between captures some of the absurdity of life, the spirituality and randomness of experience. Fascinating and original, a sculptural piece. - Paul Burke
https://nbmagazine.co.uk/the-boiled-in-between-by-helen-marten/
English artist Helen Marten uses an internal, cryptic logic to unpick the binary relationship between question and answer. She then wads it with simulacra, showing the riddled possibilities of the endless associations between A and B, or even C and D and E. Ordinarily, she has done this through her sculptural and installation works. Through The Boiled in Between, however, Marten’s first work of fiction, the artist enmeshes her chaotic depictions of humanity into an abstract wordscape that floats and falls and gushes with observational intensity.
With Modern Matter, the artist discusses this new extension of her practice, presented here alongside a selection of artworks inspired by the book – from Marten’s most recent show at Sadie Coles HQ, London – and an extract from the book itself.
Mazzy-Mae Green: In The Boiled in Between, you read the absurdities of humanity in flecks of dislodged earth and dirt-gashed shirts. Do you feel this is the most pertinent way to interpret our existence?
Helen Marten: I suppose in immodest failure the world survives, and it might be as simple as saying that this kind of noise is the rhythm that structures all bigger ideas. I do believe that provisional absurdities can provide deeply profound interpretation. Of course there is politics in everything – the sonic density of history and all its semantics, its objects, its matter – it folds and survives in the smallest flecks. These bigger cultural concepts – identity, economy, survival – are simply packaging for billions of smaller fractured events. Even dirt: the horizons of soil are huge! It is saturated with potential signification. Maybe I’m interested in these expulsing gestures in the same way as some people might watch the World Cup as an exercise in an expanded ‘cultural studies.’ Something like an archive of melancholy or a pre-modern sensitivity that is political without being Politics, capital P.
MG: The characters seem always to be falling. Is there something about a person in descent that is inherently more interesting?
HM: This links quite specifically to your first question – to positions of precarity. To be off-balance or ever en route necessarily forces a reclamation or re-articulation of a body’s relationship to the earth, to gravity, to itself. A character falling poses a paradox, a confusion of figure and field: falling as controlled comedic clatter or falling as unspooling psychological health. To trip up is to notice something. To fall down is to forcefully reconnect, get damaged or break. Or to mend and shrug off the blood in continuation. And if we’re thinking about descent, of course a downward plummet always has more velocity! Atoms that collide at speed tend towards transformation, and how exciting is that?!
MG: In the text, you oscillate between body, food and home, and between beauty, sex and disgust. As the story progresses, these areas seem to meld. Where are the lines between them?
HM: My feeling with all these things is that perhaps there is no line. Imagine people as points of civic ordinance all mostly existing within an envelope structure of ethical morality. People operating algorithmically: exchanging, living, dying, fucking, breathing, labouring. Then equip them with libidinal language and an ongoing system of wounding (poverty, illness, violence, etc.) – suddenly figuration is in everything so profoundly and intractably. Even garbage is alluring because it informs us of human systems. Think how quickly something monkish becomes pornographic by association. I feel a mutual devotion and disgust to all of these categories, but one fundamentally powered by an obsession with their abundantly shared incongruities. None are ever what they first seem and all have the power to possess with totality.
MG: On page 104, you write: ‘Ethan held a pistol once and felt how irrelevant true or false was in the pursuit of knowledge.’ Why is that so?
HM: Ethan is a committed nihilist. Perhaps he is also something of a clown who rejects the morose logician, who rejects the idea that the rigid alternatives of ‘true’ and ‘false’ are relevant to the pursuit of knowledge, to life or death, or the philosophical wormhole of trying to understand a binary action with a binary answer! In short, perhaps Ethan recognises through all his relentless performance of misery and ridicule, that multiplicity is essential to understanding, that the form of words symbolises an indefinite number of diverse propositions.
MG: Contrary to your other characters, which appear to be embroiled in the mess – implicated – The Messrs. sit above the story, looking down. Who are they?
HM: As the Messrs. themselves suggest, they are instruments of psychic observation. I suppose they are something of all people – an audience, constructed always and forever by whomever and whenever, by time and spirit. I know that sounds impossibly enigmatic – a riddle! – but what I mean is that their presence is designed to be a simultaneity: as omnipotent as the cosmos and as evidence, more and more, that simplicity doesn’t exist. They are so many things: amazed conspirators; egos adjusted; staggering ghosts; feelings; admonishments. They are in and of many of the things they discuss: wind, weather, animal, blood. They are always changing. Perhaps they might even be akin to chemical stimulant, something like the way caffeine rips you out of yourself and carries your pulse off darting in thousands of angles of pursuit and commitment!
MG: You begin in a heightened conceptual place, writing through a wider lens, before narrowing the story. What is this effect in your work?
HM: When I first started writing the book, I had emerged from a madly busy period of making exhibitions and I was frustrated with the conventional retinal way of looking at things: eyes-forward-straight-ahead-right-now. I wanted to brutally twist that, not make a space of indeterminate collage, but really wring material process, image digestion and language intent into something else. Perhaps mostly for myself to short-circuit and start afresh. I can’t help but see concept or metaphor in most things. The world is impossibly fat and full of information. And stupid images can be absolute. So between those two poles, there is an enormous amount of scope for reflexive play.
MG: The linguistic rhythm of the book is like dreamwork: the words are soft and elegant, distorting the frictions and unpleasantness experienced by the protagonists. While you were writing, did you think first of language or plot?
HM: It will sound maddening, but I try to think with whatever the ambient tone for the day is! So always movement, clogged or facilitated by language, always a vehicle of sorts, and always plot but perhaps not always conventionally surfaced. They’re all like their own micro-surfaces that give and receive, are improvised, unmoored. If you were to conceptualise the impulses of this book, one way might be to imagine language and plot like furious animated heads engaged in the continual process of trying to drown one another, surfacing and drowning on terrible repeat.
MG: What was the process of creating a work like this?
HM: I sat at a desk every day for about a year and when things didn’t pour out, I opened other books and used their words like lakes to swim in. Like dominoes. It was a deeply pleasurable process of translation, bouncing back and forth between all the things I might claim to know about image and all those I might claim to know about language. - Mazzy-Mae Green
http://amodernmatter.com/article/the-boiled-in-between-in-conversation-with-helen-marten/
The artist on taking a break from visual work to turn to writing, life changes under lockdown and her favourite audiobooks
The titles of Helen Marten’s sculptures have long suggested a literary mind at work: Puddlefoot, digging, Limpet Apology (traffic tenses), Brood and Bitter Pass (all 2015). These portmanteaus and locutionary couplings stimulate the mind’s tongue. The British artist approaches language as she does material: lining up familiar signifiers, end to end, until their meanings negate themselves. Images form, momentarily, but refuse to solidify. What remains is a series of sounds.
Marten is well known for her distinct vocabulary of objects, which oscillate between digital and handmade, sleek and unwieldy. Recently, she took a break from her visual work to write her first novel, The Boiled in Between (2020). Its form shares the multifarious aesthetic of her visuals, nesting intimate and corporeal moments within the cold chassis of some kind of reference manual. Its sentences explode the DNA of her titles into a swirling, unreal narrative, reminiscent of the Gordon Lish school of wordplay: ‘I dream of sleeping inside a hollowed-out white loaf with lots of same self, same sex, heartless passion and headless chase’. Another: ‘There were no ordinary espressos, just everything blown up big enough to keep caffeine and virtue in one breath’.
I interviewed Marten over several days of emails. Since the pandemic began, she had been away from her home in the UK and was living in Holland. In her emails, she gave small glimpses into her life there, with anecdotes about her morning walks and the animals she observed, including ‘something long and red, low to the ground, like a hairy frankfurter with legs’. By the end of our exchange, the language of her fiction, correspondence and interview had conjoined to form a unified verbal world.
Helen Marten, Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Lewis Ronald. © the artist. Courtesy The Hepworth Wakefield and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Ross Simonini What kind of process did you use for writing this novel? Did it unfold in a straight line or, as the structure suggests, through a kind of collage?
Helen Marten Well, there wasn’t really a process! I took a year out of the studio, physically removed from it. Partly because I was besieged with a mouse infestation I was pathologically tormented by, partly because I’d had a relentless year with virtually no critical dialogue and I was frustrated. I needed a conceptual rearrange. The stubborn adhesive blobbing all the parts together in the work I make is often made from language, and I suppose I wanted a new, more visible relationship with it. I always write, but I’ve never fully given in to it before. Nothing I do is in a straight line! I like to find wandering concepts and beat them until something else inevitably falls out. The book was written in that strangely virtuous sitting-down-at-a-desk-all- day-every-day kind of way. Something just kind of burst, and I loved it. It was never about encountering a single empirical problem, but allowing ideas to multiply at great speed until their mutual rhymes of both image and language arrived and found me somewhere else. I would comb away at sentences, smoothing them down, and then blow them out of place again, rumple them, violate them! I always tackle writing like a plotting of a diagram – holding individual abstractions in mind together, exercising them together, adding and subtracting until there is something algorithmic at work and everything has a place. So yes, I suppose collage in a sense, but more staggering; something more like snooker – a knocking-on of things but done within an envelope of distinct logic.
RS What do you mean when you say a ‘year with virtually no critical dialogue’?
HM Well, I had worked very intensely on several large exhibitions, and rather than feeling like I’d thrashed out conversations about everything I was doing, there was just a great vacuum of silence. Of course I talk relentlessly to myself, making notes, pushing pieces around, but it was sad that, for whatever reason, the dynamic existence of these works outside my own space was so fleeting.
RS Would you call it an indifferent response? Did it affect how you feel about your work?
HM I think indifference is wrong – there was great joy and satisfaction that unfolded with making the work public, sharing it with all the different people I work with. I just wanted something more hardcore! A critical response in the sense of unstitching or shredding – something volatile and elemental like finding the basic pattern, diagramming it, naming the parts, renaming the parts, making them feel uncomfortably scrutinised, all the better to understand why they are there. Of course you do this for yourself, and I don’t really expect someone to shepherd me neatly along with congratulations and tender questioning! This year has done something similar, and the feeling is something like: now I know nothing, I can begin to learn again. Under every rock-bottom there is another infinitely long and dark descent!
RS How do you generally use language or narrative to support the visual work? At what point does language contribute to the process?
HM I love when material is enabled and then undone. Logical, graphical relationships are embedded in sculpture, because a large part of the enigma is right in front of you, visually evident. The more formal elements of colour or texture or balance are conditional, generative parts that have their own semantic grammar. Language is part of this circuitry, but more in the way that electricity enters a house – it is part of the muscular, driving engine, but its invisibility renders it a more speculative, conceptual element. Linguistic habit means we inherently understand many visual things without having to think too hard about them – they are learned or social or innate. And this is where the strange tautology of material opens up, precisely because the known qualities of it – the clayness of clay, brickness of bricks – is part of an ancient vocabulary. Suddenly the clay becomes extra clay-y and slips beyond tactile recognition; language both holds it in and emancipates it simultaneously.
It is compositional, rhythmic, like music or speech. It’s a system of translation, and the wonderful thing about literature is that this twisting around in the mouth is how a picture emerges. You invent your own imagery and propel it forward. And I love that linguistic strategies can fiddle so much with idioms and certain turns of phrase that common objects or systems of emotion are brutally anthropomorphised: self-satisfied or political milk; an empathic orange; wind that caresses, snacks, gurgles, yawns, beats about the head. You have to pay such close attention, or another wriggling metamorphic cycle happens, and there you are off-piste again…
RS Were you making any work outside of the novel during this period?
HM I made some drawings and little sketches for bigger works, but other than that I made nothing else. And it was so liberating to momentarily extinguish the problems of logistics and gravity!
RS What are your reading habits?
HM Rabid and overambitious. My book-buying vs reading-capacity ratio is sorely uneven, so I’m surrounded by pressing stacks. I listen prolifically to audiobooks when I’m doing other things, and it feels like a miracle.
RS What audiobooks in particular have you enjoyed? Any trends or patterns in your listening?
HM This is difficult… most recently: Crime and Punishment! I spent a very hot week drawing despicably hairy animals and a clogged U-bend with very soft pencils in constant need of resharpening. Boiling sun mashing my head and eyes, and that incredible story of ethical paralysis and egotism drumming in. Some penance for my sins, I’m certain. I’ve just been on a Cormac McCarthy binge. Right now Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed with some Diane Williams and Colson Whitehead alongside. Trends seem to be the dark triads of psychology: narcissism, manipulation and psychopathy! I also just love a winding story.
RS What was your writing practice like before the novel?
HM Nonfiction! I’ve always written about substance and material, about other artists’ work, about ‘concepts’. I love the long-form essay. I have two ongoing writing projects – one a grubby lexicon (rats, floor plans, shadows, blood) and another currently titled ‘collage vs inlay’. One day perhaps they’ll become something.
RS The history of novels is so weighty. I personally had some resistance to the term novel around my book but relented due to the publisher’s request. What brought you to fiction? What about the form of a novel interested you?
HM There are narratives that project a careful language for their subjects, ones that proceed colloquially even lyrically with little difficulty. And then there are narratives gleefully heavy with their own dissonance. I would much rather fall on the dissonance side, because I worry that with all writing there is an inertia that comes by trying too hard to explain. I don’t want to see too many flags hoisted that attempt to make you feel better as the reader by signalling out a more careful route through it all. I love the metaphorical struggle you might have with a gruesome text where you attempt and fail to peel away the glue keeping it all together and realise it is all over you – that image, language, all of it is stuck to you and you are part of the animation machine making it happen! How wonderful that potatoes or the current of a river might be more alive than the characters themselves. The novel can be a newly disembodied agent of narrative in so many ways – it has so many names, so many terms, so many alternating metrics of speed and storytelling that I suppose I feel unburdened by terminology. What I most love about a ‘novel’ is that it is a minute cosmos, and within that space is a loose scaffold upon which scraps of truth and imagination hang – you can choose to wallow in it, or chase it in another direction.
RS What novels have functioned this way for you?
HM A remarkable book is Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (1995). It’s a genius narrative built using a totally perverted set of technical terms for common taxonomical things: food, sleep, God, animals, society. It’s somehow like a recycled handbook that understands how our world is one where image is the meta-event. It defies physics and language but keeps its reader close because it is built precisely from things that we intimately understand. The great dark comedy of this book is that we are served, in various guises, steaming thematic lessons for existing within a democracy of space. This book realises that nature, television, the supermarket, even an estate agent’s ‘for sale’ sign offer macro templates for living.
RS For you, do language and material express different aspects of yourself? Or do you consider them translations of a similar fundamental impulse?
HM I think with both of them I have a compulsion to associate, to twist and wind things so obstinately and deliberately together that they have no choice but to become something else. As both producer and receiver, I feel like my only job is to turn on the tap and already that is a linguistically creative contribution! Perhaps you are filling, scrubbing, bathing, cleaning, rinsing, cooling – already that is so many different turns of translation for the water that is released. And then you only need to paddle a little further and suddenly you are thinking more theoretically about the greater system of economics and infrastructure to which tap-function is connected, the copper mined for plumbing, the problematic idea of even having a tap when considering the current drought in Zimbabwe or Southern Africa. And then there is the hyperbole of biblical rain. Or the surrealism of an architect suddenly explaining that there is a hidden swimming pool under your kitchen table. The translation impulse for both art and literature, for me, is very similar. And of course some things work and some don’t. Although somehow both still tell the truth, albeit against their will.
RS Fiction is often a chronicle of passing time, which isn’t so glaringly true of sculpture. How do you think about the movement of time when you write narrative?
HM Time and love share a great deal – their wide arc that is full of incomprehensibility, with horror and hallucination! Good stories deal in that, I think. If I imagine time, I’d group it also with wind and dust. They are corroborating motifs. Dust appears again and again as a gruesome object, as a material that flecks its antique glaze over everything, that coats the body – that is of the body – that pitilessly falls on all manner of material stuff and cannot be removed. Both are everything and nothing, a kind of luminous nonmatter. Time is something like a collection of little flags that mark the direction or journey of language, except in this instance the intricate patterns of behaviour and action move the narrative within a very limited space. Time really rubs your face in it when all that has been achieved is a melancholy soliloquy on self-loathing, on the odd joyousness of having nipples, or the morbidity of believing the mirror has poisoned the heart! Language protects and wounds. Time does just the same. And there are so many different kinds of time: the time of rain, the time of God, of family, of domestic content or political malaise. Time lures you in only to kick you in the mouth.
RS The book is largely concerned with architectural spaces of homes. How would you describe your home? What’s its personality? What effect does it have on you?
HM I usually live in London, but for the last four-and-a-half months I’ve been in the Netherlands. I am by the sea, so that sense of everything gaping or luring you toward the coast is always there. This is the land of big sky, of cute cumulus clouds like merry dumplings, so domestic building seems almost secondary to that – houses are fashioned to accommodate light and sky in a way that London’s carbon dankness never was. My London life literally stinks. Trains rattle, I can hear my neighbours piss or open a can. Everything in the book revolves around this metaphoric obsession with ‘the home’ – the objects of it are let loose, even abstract processes feel part of the plot. I work in bouts of fanatic tidiness and manic chaos, extremes that force me to deal with being a body in a predetermined space. I’m interested in this structural or physical violence that architecture performs on us, how it indexes or emancipates. I suppose that is the difference now, looking at my displacement: I’ve swapped a metropolitan somewhere for a verdant nowhere.
RS Do you feel that architecture is always a force of violence? Obviously, shelter is also a kind of luxury. Have you encountered buildings that manage to express antiviolence?
HM I suppose anything that toys with an inside and an outside harbours potential for violence. To be let in or shut out. Shelter, certainly, is a luxury. I suppose I mean violence as a kind of oppositional idea to protection – the moment of seeing through any camouflage and recognising a duality, that what keeps you dry and safe can also turn over and over in your mind to become something newly cold and unappealing. Something like letting the animal of language in through the back door and seeing suddenly how it renames everything! The beginning thoughts for the book were thinking of buildings as weapons or bodies, with all the same galvanic, liquid or atomic circuitry as a breathing figure.
RS In the book you mention an ‘enlightened house’. What is that?
HM Haha! Perhaps the enlightened house is a parody of the conventions of any kind of heteronorm! That is to say, an enlightened house wears its shame on the outside and takes pride in its cracks.
RS Do you have any interest in working in the field of architecture?
HM Absolutely not! I will leave that to the kinder, more carefully processed citizens! - Ross Simonini
SCHQ Electric presents Helen Marten’s Orchids, or a hemispherical bottom, 2013. The digitally animated video forms the focal point of an eponymously titled room-sized installation, conceived of for the 55th Venice Biennale.
Through digital animation, Marten generates a sanitised and alluring landscape of free-floating and fragmentary objects. Set against abstracted, tonal sceneries, glossy pseudo-real forms are excised from their usual contexts and rendered in colours that range from the surreally heightened to the deliberately banal. Opening with a procession of toy-like objects – a train, a giraffe on wheels, an artichoke, a boat – gliding along on an impossibly rich blue plane, the video unravels between a shifting two- and three-dimensional veneer of reality that is at once seductive, absurd and formulaic.
Mimicking the aesthetic sur-reality, the accompanying male voiceover draws the viewer along a surreal journey in which evocative images mass together into a heady melange of resonances, suggesting a sensual kind of catastrophe. Veiled by a brittle air of politeness, the narration is delivered in a cross-section of registers and intimations that grow increasingly frantic and euphoric towards its close; incongruously weaving together episodes with phrases such as: ‘you tell an octopus “be an elephant”, and the octopus becomes an elephant… The ridiculous ostrich is next to the logical hen… The kangaroo mocking the future Madonna…’.
As with previous works such as Evian Disease, 2012, the video reflects an impulse – discernible throughout Marten’s practice – to distil the make-up of everyday stuff, and to skew, suspend or deconstruct ingrained meanings.
With Helen Marten’s Turner Prize win last night, Britain’s major contemporary art award has finally got its mojo back. The artists shortlisted in recent years have meant the prize has, thankfully, broken free from a tabloid-baiting rep cemented in the 90's by enfants terribles YBA nominees like Tracey Emin and her unmade bed. Yet the lineups since then have also veered from disappointingly safe to overly obscure. Marten, by contrast, makes work that is thoroughly zingy, as playful with ideas as it is materials. And with her recent win of the first £30,000 Hepworth Prize for Sculpture in November and a major solo show having just closed at London’s Serpentine Galleries, this is clearly the 31-year-old artist’s moment.
That’s not to say that her brain-teasing puzzles of everyday flotsam and meticulously handmade objects were a lock to take the prize. Michael Dean’s downtrodden abstract cement sculptures and gigantic pile of pennies — one penny less than the amount the UK government decrees a family can survive on each year — was the bookies’ favorite. Josephine Pryde’s slick conceptual games with photography might have made her the art world insider’s choice. And it’s hard not to love Anthea Hamilton’s giant butt. It’s been a vintage year, in fact.
Nonetheless, when it comes to singular vision and an evident pleasure in nitty-gritty objecthood, it’s Marten who stands out. Her Turner presentation involves three sculptural collages that in various ways make you think of what archaeologists might excavate, like burial chambers and shrines — though this is just one way of looking at it, and in Marten’s work the suggestions keep multiplying. It’s the first of many visual and verbal games, a possible analogy for the way we dig down into her work, excavating metaphors and meanings.
There’s the giant casket with a doll’s house-type front and little drilled holes suggesting a speaker, through which its hidden contents might make themselves heard, perhaps. Before this, objects have been laid out on a pallet marked with colored lines, like offerings or useful things for the afterlife found in a Pharaoh’s tomb. These include an engraved knife and embroidered glove with rubber-tipped fingers as well as moldy cotton buds, oxidized copper, a dried fish skin and skeleton, and delicate arrangements of nails. Everything is tactile, intricate and very appealing.
For Turner jury chair and incoming director of the Tate Britain Alex Farquharson, Marten is “a kind of poet." Attempting to pin down her work with language though is a bit of a fool’s errand — there are just too many elements, for a start. The show functions as a series of interconnected fragments, micro-worlds to get lost in. Among the items on a kind of ad hoc plinth-come-coffee table, there’s a pair of cartoonish stuffed fabric legs (for fleet-footed mental games?). Rolls of snakeskin and more fabric embroidered with tiny pearls provide other luxuriously ornate surfaces. A pair of clay hands offers up tiny teapots and shiny marbles. It all begs you to consider the familiar anew. A huge painted ceramic resembles an overgrown chimney pot. Squint a little, and the welded steel sculptures could be old-school CD racks.
In past interviews Marten has implied she’s not a fan of the attention prizes like the Turner or the Hepworth inevitably bring. She used the public platform her acceptance speech afforded to talk about global issues, from cuts to arts education in the U.K. to the rise of the so-called alt right and homophobia. Nor does she like the idea that art can be competitive, with one artist ranked above another. “I could not think of a more brilliant and exciting shortlist of artists to be part of,” she said of her peers. She’s even pledged to share the prize money with the other artists, making this a Turner year where everyone is literally a winner. - Skye Sherwin
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/what-you-need-to-know-about-turner-prize-winner-helen-marten/
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