Vanishing
into the white/lost kites/at sea
Reed McConnell writes here on white interior design, escape and the void. She explores the bourgeois craze for white homes as a luxury lifestyle trope signalling supposed purity but also the need to cocoon, or disappear.
She talks about this ‘whiteness’ as a portal to nothingness and disappearance and she is hugely sympathetic because, as we know, everything is fucked. The overwhelming white-out of so many interiors, she says, is "perhaps the only possible response to the phantasmagoric, engulfing sweep of the media, architecture and machines that characterize everyday life under late capitalism" – a version of psychological refuge when it is possible nowhere is safe anymore.
The fortified house where all inside is white (or beige), pure, hygienic, immune; a game for the rich, so troubled after another troubling day on earth. Her interiors also play with being ‘missing’, ‘lost’, or gone. If we accept that white interior = lost or gone, then we must also accept that lost implies being found. In this specific case the lost (cocooned & marooned within white) are actually still there, in the place they got lost in and will also be found in, in the home they have to go to. It’s a funny one.
Also, there's our inbuilt instinct to not get lost, to be able to find our way home. In this way, global positioning systems have feelings. We fight against this urge to be lost, most of the time; it's like battling a moontide. We want to be able to find our way out of the forest.
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I go motor-scooting with the intention of getting lost, which is easy here far from home, to savour the buzz, to withdraw from the phantasmagoria. Off the main roads with the tropical trade winds carrying burnt clove and blue petrol, the kites up in the sky for the ancestors - so high and so apparently still and so much closer to the eternal – it becomes a sort of dice throw, turn left, turn right, do the opposite to what instinct demands.
I ride, and ride on. Heading north then east then north again, and find a long straight stretch between towns with light poles all pasted-up with stickers and street-arty things. A sticker catches my eye, seven pink-and-black faces intersecting, with the Insta tag of the artist, a tattooist from Johannesburg. I tag him in my post of his image on a pole: spotted. I should have said found. I do this on my phone which contains GPS, which doesn’t want me lost.
The tattooist replies and agrees his image is far from home but it’s there to be found, that is its sole purpose, so I figure he knows it’s always ready, always lost but always found again and again and always breathing and bright pink on the black.
I can hear the kites and the offshore winds underneath but the kites are just coloured specks in the sky, high above. I like that the Indonesians claim to have made the first kite, as depicted in a rock painting in a cave in Sulawesi, on Muna Island. But the painting hasn't been scientifically dated. The claim is it was drawn around 9000BC. Either way it's in the Guinness Book of Records under 'First Kites'. A nearby cave has a painting of a horse which has been dated to that general era.
The Chinese had mad kites and are generally accepted as the actual inventors of kites despite cultures all over the planet using kites to commune with the spirits. In China there was a master builder/inventor guy, Lu Ban, around 500 years BC. He invented the saw and the shovel, and possibly the umbrella, but he also made a huge bamboo bird kite which stayed up for three days.
Japanese kiters in the Goto Islands, off the coast of Nagasaki, a little later, made brightly coloured kites as big as trucks depicting warriors fighting ogres, and sometimes these kites had flutes attached to their tails.
There’s a Māori myth from New Zealand, written down in the 1500’s. A chief loses a pair of twin kites he uses for spiritualism, into the ocean. His son thinks about the wind and the sea and tells his father to sail to an island to the south. The locals have seen the kites and tell the chief where they are. Each is huge, and the twin kites stayed together and, in the myth, they are found.
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The French surrealist poet Paul Éluard vanished. It was assumed he was lost and gone. Rumours of his death circulated amongst the Paris art scene to the point where it was taken as fact because, as time wore on, he never came back.
But then he did, not dead; he had been at sea, out of Marseille to Sri Lanka then south-east Asia and the South Pacific. He hadn’t told anyone and had in fact funded his trip by ripping off his father. He met Gala, Salvador Dali’s future wife, with Max Ernst, in Singapore, and they hung out there for a bit then went to Saigon. Then back to France, in their surrealist boat.
Éluard wrote a poem called ‘Obsession’, about how he knew nothing of the other worlds and the things that are not here – ‘... more than a red lip with a red tip, and more than a white leg with a white foot, where then do we think we are?’ He wrote about his friend Picasso often. He considered Picasso a painter of these other places, exploring ‘the solemn geography of human limits.’ Eluard was not lost.