Le bateau ivre
Le bateau ivre is a poem by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. It’s famous, but I didn’t know it before Martin Essl’s book of the same name, so I can’t claim to know why. It’s about a boat that becomes unmoored and travels across the sea before wishing to sink. That summary is painfully thin. Reading Le bateau ivre is really a trip: frenzied and visceral, almost hallucinatory. Most stanzas end with an exclamation mark. On poetica.fr, one person even describes it as “a literary tornado”. Another comment, my favourite, “I didn’t understand anything! It’s sublime!”.
Le bateau ivre is also the latest book from the Austrian artist, Martin Essl. It’s a portrait of Paris, or, as the press materials say, a poetic photographic essay. I go back to poetica.fr, read more comments about Rimbaud (another favourite, “Meh, it’s super long”) and reread the poem, but soon ask myself why. Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre is about a boat, an allegory of life (even though Rimbaud was only 16), but Essl’s Le bateau ivre is about Paris. At first, I thought the city was the connection, but Rimbaud wrote it before he moved. This leaves two things as the thread between them:
Granted, the title pulls other things along with it; Essl has structured his Le bateau ivre like a poem in five stanzas. But it feels almost too easy a thread, and in turn, less interesting. For me that leaves blue, which in Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre is everywhere, most obviously in the sea but in other places too:
Blue in Essl’s Le bateau ivre is similar – constant and fleeting. The book’s case wrap is blue (also beautifully thick and textured) and it opens with blue: nine Ghirri-like pictures of the same blue wall, also on the front cover, with the sun slowly turning it from dusty navy to bleached azure. Each photograph a little further on in time, shadow, and blue. I love that opening. It’s unhurried like the best of mornings. Two quotes follow. First, Chris Marker (the director of La Jetée). Second, Virginia Woolf. I have to translate Marker’s, he’s French, but he talks about infinite walks that feel the same and days that blur. Woolf talks about faces that look the same, and how they drug her into a dream-like state until passers-by seem to walk through her. Both are about walking, and both are undeniably poetic. More than that though they’re wistful, which is really just another blue in feeling. I wonder if Rimbaud’s blue led Essl to Maker and Woolf? Blue also appears in other places in Essl’s Le bateau ivre:
While these are the moments, akin to Rimbaud’s blue wine, blue as a feeling and the blue wall are the constants. Essl returns to that wall few times, until it becomes a kind of refrain or anchor. In one visit, the wall is a canvas for the shadows of a tree and the people walking past it. The longest is 27 photographs, each of a different person or people passing Essl’s blue wall. I immediately think of Walker Evans’s Labor Anonymous; it has the same strange yet freeing feeling of the world passing through the camera frame instead of it being cut and fixed by it. I also think how Labor Anonymous was originally published under the title On a Saturday Afternoon in Detroit. I like this more – it’s softer, more leisurely. Essl’s refrain could easily be called On a Saturday Afternoon in Paris. I then wonder what, if anything, Essl is trying to say with that long refrain. If I was to write a section out, it may go something like this:
Young white woman in a blue top,
White man also in a blue top,
Another white person – listening to what?
Black man,
Teenager with their blue hood up,
Asian woman wearing a long white t shirt,
Mother with a child and a red balloon,
Black woman,
Three black adults,
Old white man.
Rudimentary, I know, but it’s hard not to be. Like Labor Anonymous, difference is clearer when the wall is the same. Evans said he was creating a “physiognomy of a nation”, which is an eloquent way to say the faces that represent a nation, a single portrait made of many faces. It’s unavoidably ethnographic, and on paper, Essl has made the same portrait, only of Paris. But is that what Essl has done, or is Evans just the coffee filter? Maybe in retrospect Essl has, but I doubt he saw it that way on that Saturday Afternoon in Paris.
What does all this blue do? I think, more than anything, it colours Essl’s book, in the same way that listening to Bill Evans while shopping for eggs will change how you look at the shelf. Or maybe it’s more like wispy blue fog or a thin blue curtain. Whatever I think of, it’s gentle – watercolours not gouache – but it is felt everywhere, even when there is no blue in the picture. There’s plenty of this. Bright, Haussmannian walls; more graffiti; boarded up shops; an apple-green facade; a smashed car window; people sitting, looking, and smoking; and as a sharp, dark, couplet amid everything — Notre-Dame burning. But it all passes through Essl’s blue, and that by proxy through Rimbaud’s blue. Others have said a similar thing: that Rimbaud’s poem shapes the work tonally but not much else. I agree, mostly. The more parallels I try to draw between Essl’s book and the story of Rimbaud’s poem, the more tenuous they feel. But I’d also say that it is the blue in Rimbaud’s poem — the sea and the blue wine — that has coloured Essl’s walks, not the whole thing. The whole is too frantic, too much of a rough and unpredictable sea.
I’d also say that blue helps Essl navigate Paris. It’s a guess at best, but the way it appears predictably yet without warning makes it feel like waypoints. Or small flashes of recognition, a way for Essl to orientate himself via Rimbaud over the four years it took to make the book.
I twig that I’ve written a lot about blue, but not a lot about Paris, which is what the book seems to be about. It’s tempting to read it through politics – homeless shelters, new developments, and graffiti cursing cops make it low-hanging fruit – but it feels like a red herring. Cities are always political (just as they are social, cultural, and lots of other -als). What politics Essl’s Le bateau ivre is involved in is just what happens if you walk around Paris for four years and then make a 240-page book. I see Essl’s book then more as a map and a portrait of Paris, and a map and a portrait of his infinite walks. Both less biting (and depressing) than any political comment, and one never ahead of the other. This punt is partly selfish. I want to hold onto this idea that Le bateau ivre is just Essl, walking, looking, and deciding to stay for a while when he feels the sun on his back. I think again of Rimbaud, and if he wrote Le bateau ivre with an intention. Or was he really the boat, adrift and at the whim of invisible currents. If so, maybe there is more between the poem and Essl. Maybe Essl was also adrift, in Paris, at the whim of invisible currents.
Essl ends Le bateau ivre with another sequence of that same blue wall, only this time in reverse. Bleached azure to dusty navy. It’s just as beautiful as the opening, made even more so by Kehrer Verlag’s printing. I love it just as much too, unhurried like the best of evenings.
Le bateau ivre is a poem by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. It’s famous, but I didn’t know it before Martin Essl’s book of the same name, so I can’t claim to know why. It’s about a boat that becomes unmoored and travels across the sea before wishing to sink. That summary is painfully thin. Reading Le bateau ivre is really a trip: frenzied and visceral, almost hallucinatory. Most stanzas end with an exclamation mark. On poetica.fr, one person even describes it as “a literary tornado”. Another comment, my favourite, “I didn’t understand anything! It’s sublime!”.
Le bateau ivre is also the latest book from the Austrian artist, Martin Essl. It’s a portrait of Paris, or, as the press materials say, a poetic photographic essay. I go back to poetica.fr, read more comments about Rimbaud (another favourite, “Meh, it’s super long”) and reread the poem, but soon ask myself why. Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre is about a boat, an allegory of life (even though Rimbaud was only 16), but Essl’s Le bateau ivre is about Paris. At first, I thought the city was the connection, but Rimbaud wrote it before he moved. This leaves two things as the thread between them:
- The title
- Blue, the colour
Granted, the title pulls other things along with it; Essl has structured his Le bateau ivre like a poem in five stanzas. But it feels almost too easy a thread, and in turn, less interesting. For me that leaves blue, which in Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre is everywhere, most obviously in the sea but in other places too:
- Blue wine
- Blueness
- Blue awakening
- Blue wave
- Blue immobility
Blue in Essl’s Le bateau ivre is similar – constant and fleeting. The book’s case wrap is blue (also beautifully thick and textured) and it opens with blue: nine Ghirri-like pictures of the same blue wall, also on the front cover, with the sun slowly turning it from dusty navy to bleached azure. Each photograph a little further on in time, shadow, and blue. I love that opening. It’s unhurried like the best of mornings. Two quotes follow. First, Chris Marker (the director of La Jetée). Second, Virginia Woolf. I have to translate Marker’s, he’s French, but he talks about infinite walks that feel the same and days that blur. Woolf talks about faces that look the same, and how they drug her into a dream-like state until passers-by seem to walk through her. Both are about walking, and both are undeniably poetic. More than that though they’re wistful, which is really just another blue in feeling. I wonder if Rimbaud’s blue led Essl to Maker and Woolf? Blue also appears in other places in Essl’s Le bateau ivre:
- Blue jeans
- A blue checked bag
- A blue lorry
- Blue water
- Blue graffiti
- Blue steel
- Blue skies
- Blue plastic crates
While these are the moments, akin to Rimbaud’s blue wine, blue as a feeling and the blue wall are the constants. Essl returns to that wall few times, until it becomes a kind of refrain or anchor. In one visit, the wall is a canvas for the shadows of a tree and the people walking past it. The longest is 27 photographs, each of a different person or people passing Essl’s blue wall. I immediately think of Walker Evans’s Labor Anonymous; it has the same strange yet freeing feeling of the world passing through the camera frame instead of it being cut and fixed by it. I also think how Labor Anonymous was originally published under the title On a Saturday Afternoon in Detroit. I like this more – it’s softer, more leisurely. Essl’s refrain could easily be called On a Saturday Afternoon in Paris. I then wonder what, if anything, Essl is trying to say with that long refrain. If I was to write a section out, it may go something like this:
Young white woman in a blue top,
White man also in a blue top,
Another white person – listening to what?
Black man,
Teenager with their blue hood up,
Asian woman wearing a long white t shirt,
Mother with a child and a red balloon,
Black woman,
Three black adults,
Old white man.
Rudimentary, I know, but it’s hard not to be. Like Labor Anonymous, difference is clearer when the wall is the same. Evans said he was creating a “physiognomy of a nation”, which is an eloquent way to say the faces that represent a nation, a single portrait made of many faces. It’s unavoidably ethnographic, and on paper, Essl has made the same portrait, only of Paris. But is that what Essl has done, or is Evans just the coffee filter? Maybe in retrospect Essl has, but I doubt he saw it that way on that Saturday Afternoon in Paris.
What does all this blue do? I think, more than anything, it colours Essl’s book, in the same way that listening to Bill Evans while shopping for eggs will change how you look at the shelf. Or maybe it’s more like wispy blue fog or a thin blue curtain. Whatever I think of, it’s gentle – watercolours not gouache – but it is felt everywhere, even when there is no blue in the picture. There’s plenty of this. Bright, Haussmannian walls; more graffiti; boarded up shops; an apple-green facade; a smashed car window; people sitting, looking, and smoking; and as a sharp, dark, couplet amid everything — Notre-Dame burning. But it all passes through Essl’s blue, and that by proxy through Rimbaud’s blue. Others have said a similar thing: that Rimbaud’s poem shapes the work tonally but not much else. I agree, mostly. The more parallels I try to draw between Essl’s book and the story of Rimbaud’s poem, the more tenuous they feel. But I’d also say that it is the blue in Rimbaud’s poem — the sea and the blue wine — that has coloured Essl’s walks, not the whole thing. The whole is too frantic, too much of a rough and unpredictable sea.
I’d also say that blue helps Essl navigate Paris. It’s a guess at best, but the way it appears predictably yet without warning makes it feel like waypoints. Or small flashes of recognition, a way for Essl to orientate himself via Rimbaud over the four years it took to make the book.
I twig that I’ve written a lot about blue, but not a lot about Paris, which is what the book seems to be about. It’s tempting to read it through politics – homeless shelters, new developments, and graffiti cursing cops make it low-hanging fruit – but it feels like a red herring. Cities are always political (just as they are social, cultural, and lots of other -als). What politics Essl’s Le bateau ivre is involved in is just what happens if you walk around Paris for four years and then make a 240-page book. I see Essl’s book then more as a map and a portrait of Paris, and a map and a portrait of his infinite walks. Both less biting (and depressing) than any political comment, and one never ahead of the other. This punt is partly selfish. I want to hold onto this idea that Le bateau ivre is just Essl, walking, looking, and deciding to stay for a while when he feels the sun on his back. I think again of Rimbaud, and if he wrote Le bateau ivre with an intention. Or was he really the boat, adrift and at the whim of invisible currents. If so, maybe there is more between the poem and Essl. Maybe Essl was also adrift, in Paris, at the whim of invisible currents.
Essl ends Le bateau ivre with another sequence of that same blue wall, only this time in reverse. Bleached azure to dusty navy. It’s just as beautiful as the opening, made even more so by Kehrer Verlag’s printing. I love it just as much too, unhurried like the best of evenings.