Nim Kruasaeng: Effects of Distant Attunements

May 13, 2010 - PRLog -- By Pier Luigi Tazzi

Physically I could compare this condition to when drops of oil fall into water: the oil does not mix with it, but more or less lenticular lumps rest on the surface, some dispersing whilst others unite in larger formations, though there is never a proper combining of the two elements. Thus one can say that Nim's shapes float on the surface of our consciousness and create dispersion.

Sometimes in the hours of the early afternoon in Thailand I have been transported by car outside of town. I have, often if not always, fallen into a kind of watchful torpor: words fall into a pregnant silence, attention to the particular is dimmed.

Absorbed in an intense warmth, mind and body drop their guards, their reciprocal rigidity, and render themselves porous and malleable to all that surrounds them on the outside: light becomes fluid, colours melt beyond their borders, and it all ends up agglutinating into a diaphanous softness. And so in those moments I can say that my own consciousness became dispersed in the countryside around Lamphun, or heading south-west from Thonburi.

That alteration of one's state of consciousness is something akin to a trance, as psychologists put it, similar to sleep, but characterized by electrical-brain activity not dissimilar to that of a waking-state. During trance, which the Germans call Verzuückung, psychologists believe that one loses consciousness and contact with reality until returning to a normal condition accompanied by amnesia.

For me, during those hot afternoons in the car passing through the Thai countryside, there was no amnesia but, I repeat, a dispersal of awareness, a loss of speech, an inability afterwards to precisely define that state, which I still remember, even though I was incapable of defining its effects.

In his study of shamanism, Mircea Eliade attributes shamans with a capacity for concentration, strength and control, which is exactly the contrary of what I experienced in those moments of altered consciousness, and he speaks of a voyage into disorder with a subsequent and superior return to order. For me it was not disorder that prevailed as much as a diluting, as I have already said, of consciousness.

Just how this state is comparable to the conditions in which I have described the works of Nim is, all considered, somewhat difficult to explain. To better understand this association I wish to compare the work of the other artists in which, this time consciously, I recognise a certain resonance with the work of Nim. In particular, Montien Boonma and Palermo.

Both are strong figures, not so much for the quality of their respective works, and for the 'glory' attributed to that quality, but for their reciprocal belonging to systems which by their very nature, formation and domain of work are strong.

First of all the male sex, which until a few decades ago dominated the art system, originally that of the West and so from this model to the rest of the planet. Thus, the Thai artist Montien was able to bring together in his domain of work two contrasting threads in opposition to one another: that of Western modern art and the aesthetic and spirituality of Thai art inspired by Buddhism and popular arts.

And then, the actual system of Western art of which Palermo was, in the years between the second half of the 60s and the first half of the 70s, one of the most sensitive exponents, given his individualistic position — one cannot say that he belonged to any specific trend — and which ended up emphasizing one of the characteristic traits of this art: individual solipsism.

In fact, his biography should not be forgotten: born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig in the middle of the Second World War, in 1943, adopted with his twin brother Michael they were given the surname Heisterkamp; later, when at the Düsseldorf Academy and already the favourite pupil of Joseph Beuys, the shaman-artist who spearheaded the Germany rebirth, he chose a third name, this time by himself: Palermo.

The name of an Italian-American mafioso, Frank "Blinky" Palermo, a top promoter of boxing matches — in 1949 he was manager of Billy Fox in his bout for the World Middleweight Championship against Jack LaMotta, the 'raging bull' celebrated by Martin Scorsese, who was forced by the mafia to let himself be beaten, and when Frank Sinatra, well-advised by his mafia friends, placed his bet on Fox.

Under the name Palermo the young German artist began to exhibit in the middle of the 60s, and having fallen in love with New York he opened a studio there in 1973, dying four years later in the Maldives at only just 34 years old.

In Montien's work a fine thread spun from Buddhist spirituality and his domain of work draws on many diverse elements from western contemporary art, and weaves them into a solid structure, the artwork, even though this is no longer hermetically closed within the monolithic compactness of so much western art, but is open to "the other", englobing it in itself.

Thus, in his case this is an enlarging of consciousness, not its dispersion. In Palermo everything unfolds on the surfaces, expanded or partial, of painting, of walls and environments; and there, emerging on the surface, is a kind of suggestive call for attention, of unknowable abysses, profound states of consciousness, in which aesthetics and spirituality, sense and the substance of being and appearance end up creating in the momentum of their materialization incisive, original, almost ancestral unities.

And it is in this that the German artist responds to that idea of the absolute which in various forms and epochs has taken shape in the long and glorious history of western art and, together with the concept of Sehnsucht elaborated by the German Romantics, as overpowering desire towards something undefined and unreachable.

Nim Kruasaeng is a woman, from Isan moreover, without any canonical education, that is, self-taught, and so free of every system. Her work is like an overhang without protection, a bridge without railings spanning an abyss, over the gurgite vasto like the rara avis of the Latin saying.

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Reinhart Frais of Asian Textile Art (http://www.asiantextileart.com/) has many essays relating to rare, antique Indian and Southeast Asian textiles.