Who Is Speaking?

'Je est un autre,' wrote the poet Rimbaud - 'I is somebody else.' At the beginning of her career, even before she left her postgraduate course at the Slade School in London, Rosa Almeida likewise noted that 'there is something confessional in the work, though the written phrases are not confessions, as they were not written by anyone.' They are not personal, but neither are they collective and nor are they anonymous; furthermore they are not fictional, though they may be or perhaps simply seem (how could one tell the difference between being and seeming here?) personal or collective or anonymous or fictional, variously, from moment to moment.I'd like to speak, for a moment, not as an art critic but rather (if it be permitted on this occasion) as a poet, because as a critic I can speak of my admiration for Almeida but as a poet I must speak of my envy of her. In their origin writing and painting are indistinguishable - when aleph was an ox, was it a letter or a picture? and who can say whether the pictograms on cave walls should count as inscriptions or images? - in fact their creation precedes the division between the two. Even once the two activities were definitively differentiated they remained intertwined. A Renaissance Annunciation will bear the text of the Archangel's greeting to the Virgin; a Cubist still life will lend you a scrap of its morning paper to read. But these texts-within-the-picture remain secondary. It's really only been since the 60s that language has reclaimed its full rights within the work of art. And the recentness of art's repossession of language seems to allow the language-artist (if that's the right word) a greater degree of freedom, a greater sense of ease and possibility, than is possible for the poet, burdened as he is by so many centuries of history - or at least that's the case when the language-artist is Rosa Almeida.Almeida takes her liberty with language and runs with it. That's what I envy. Perhaps it's not only the freedom of handling language as an artist rather than a writer that comes into it. I suspect it also has something to do with her choice of which language to use - the fact that the language in her work is English, not her own native Portuguese. If I could write this essay in Portuguese, which I can't, perhaps it would be written with a simplicity that would allow only the most urgent parts of what I want to say. That there is a freedom in the limitations that come from using a second tongue I know firsthand: As an American who once lived in Italy, I remember how my very awkwardness and limited vocabulary allowed to take refuge, at times, in a seeming naivete; and how this enforced simplicity, like the three simple chords through which a garage rock band must express their all, allowed me the utter clarity of utterance that's been lost, I fear, in the nuances of my own language. I remember, too, how when a girl laughed at my funny accent or artless phrasing, I knew I was getting somewhere, knew that she liked me. And so when my eye lights upon a curious phrase in one of Almeida's drawings or wall works that a native speaker of English would be unlikely to have hit upon - 'each time lets be more simple'; 'we have a skinny relationship' - or when I notice how she uses song lyrics as readymade vehicles for communication (don't foreigners really learn English from songs more than from books? No wonder Almeida's video 'More Respect' gives props to Aretha) I am reminded that here that a certain passion is being made to pass, as it were, through an opening that is just a bit too narrow for it - and therefore emerging with all the more force. And I don't laugh, but I smile, and I know this art is getting somewhere with me, that I like it.There are really two ways to look at any of these works - but those two turn out to be one, or an infinity. You can look at them on a molecular level, starting with particular little fragments of language that catch your eye and letting their visual and semantic tone and weight sink in before starting to let your brain go to work on linking them up. Or you can take in the whole 'field' comprised by the work at once, as a network of varying visual and semantic tones and weights that segue in and out of each other, and then start letting your brain pick out particular fragments to focus on, rolling around in your mind as you might roll a hard sweet candy around in your mouth. But really you inevitably do both of these things at once - and having done so, you inevitably come up with something a little different each time you look at the same work, because (taking it from the point of view of the fragment and working on up from there) these are stories that you have to rewrite for yourself each time you read them - or (this time seeing the work starting from the whole and then finding one's way down to its molecules) they are maps that constantly change according to the constant mutation of the territory they represent, which is the wondering, wandering mind.Whose mind, though? The inclusion of the artist's 'signature' within the drawings - but not at some secondary level of representation as in the traditional artwork but in the guise of one more language-fragment like all the others - might seem to settle the question: This is art in the first person; the voice is that of Almeida herself. But not so fast. Incorporating the name into the work this way does not accord it any special status; the point is precisely that it exists on the same level as everything else. Remember how the artist cautioned us: 'They were not written by anyone.' But they - the phrases and their relationships - are constantly being rewritten every time I look at them. The constellations of thoughts reconfigure themselves, according my perceptions and desires. Suddenly another French author's dictum comes to mind - that of Flaubert who, speaking of his most famous character, remarked, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi!' Likewise, each time I see and thereby recompose a work of Almeida's, I have to admit, 'Rosa Almeida, c'est moi.' As I enter into the feeling of the thing, it makes me its own.