Rut Blees Luxemburg in the Forum I
A reviewew of Rut Blees Luxemburg, Commonsensual, 20 November 2008, Forum
Rut Blees Luxemburg seized upon the lecture at Spring House as an opportunity to explore and reflect upon a forthcoming monograph of her work over the last fifteen years. The collection explores a series of thematic and formal preoccupations that have evolved in her work over this period, and in doing so both establishes unexpected relationships and seeks to explore the idea of an overarching narrative or attitude.
The monograph’s title ‘Commonsensual’ introduces Luxemburg’s delight in visual and linguistic ambiguity or multiplicity, and the significance of the relationship between image and text. The word ‘common’ establishes a knowing duality: her work considers what is shared or communal, but also explores our perception of the more pejorative meaning of that term, and so suggests a social and political critique. Her images consider afresh the everyday, the ‘unsolicited’, the leftover or forgotten spaces of the city, and enriches them through the golden tonality her image making, in turn evoking medieval icon paintings or the work of Gustav Klimt.
Again and again she returns to the ground as a way of navigating and reading the city, and then, through reflection, to the sky. The presence of nature in the city is a powerful recurrent theme; trees cast shadows or disrupt the smooth imposition of a tarmac surface, and so re-establish the equilibrium between nature and culture. Luxemburg celebrates water and fluidity as a feminine softening of the urban environment. Above all, ‘Commonsensual’ constructs a powerful universal narrative, drawing out historical, cultural and lingustic relationships that link Dakar, London or Nantes.
