Homage to Sebald
Jonathon Brown WATERLOG: JOURNEYS ROUND AN EXHIBITION edited by Steven Bode, Jeremy Millar and Nina Ernst Film & Video Umbrella, 8 Vine Yard, London SE1 1QL, Tel: 0207 407 7755, f12, pp. 110, ISBN 9781904270249 Despite its pun, Waterlog is not quite a catalogue of an exhibition; rather it documents, expands — and in some cases might seem to seek to justify — the contents of an exhibition held first in Norwich and now in Lincoln to honour the East Anglian resonances of the writer W. G. Sebald. It clearly would like to be judged in its own right. Just the fact that it speaks of the exhibition in the past tense, even though published between the two dates, gives it that vividly elusive quality so admired among attributes of Sebald that always demand similarly oxymoronic description.
Sebald seems to inspire in others a frustration not to have been him, or a need to be him again, an energy akin to Sebald's narrator's sense in The Rings of Saturn, of having lived the late Michael Hamburger's life himself. (Hamburger is celebrated in a film by Tacita Dean briefly documented here.) These are dangerous waters to log, as treacherous as knocking off your own Matisse sketch, and as often with homage, its subject might himself wince at it all. He might have preferred — I add to the book's many suppositions about him — his admirers not to follow his footsteps, but to find their own resonances elsewhere. In his text, for instance, he used photographs, but usually inadequate ones in need of voice and devoid of the albeit blank beauty of the big images by Guy Moreton in Waterlog, yet it feels terribly literal to follow his steps and click the diminishing camera where his soul may have clicked so expansively. Waterlog is after all also a state of saturation. Still, it is an intriguing measure of how lost and entranced we would like to be, that so many of us find ourselves so secure and definite with him.
Waterlog can be seen at The Collection, Lincoln, till 16 December.
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