The Double Life of Arthur Schnitzler
Gabriel Rolt Gallery, Amsterdam
Installation view, The Double Life of Arthur Schnitzler, Gabriel Rolt Gallery, Amsterdam, 2015.
Installation view, The Double Life of Arthur Schnitzler, Gabriel Rolt Gallery, Amsterdam, 2015.
In turn-of-the-last-century Vienna, Dr. Sigmund Freud went to great lengths to avoid ever meeting the celebrated Austrian playwright Arthur Schniztler, as he felt that actually meeting this, his intellectual doppelganger, might have fatal consequences.
Max Ophuls 1950 iconic film La Ronde, was also based on an earlier work by Schnitzler, the 1897 play Reigen, which consists of ten interlocking scenes between pairs of lovers, with each partner appearing in 2 consecutive scenes and therefore creating a sequence of sexual encounter played out across class lines and against the backdrop of a syphilis pandemic in Vienna.
It is hard to say who was more influential on whom, but Freud after keeping a safe distance until the age of 66, wrote the following in a letter to Schnitzler:
I have gained the impression that you have learnt through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.
For his solo show at Gabriel Rolt Galerie, Shezad Dawood takes his conceptual starting point form an imaginary letter that he likes to think that Schnitzler might have written back to Freud:
Dear Dr. Freud,
I should like to thank you for the numerous impulses I have found in your work. The Interpretation of Dreams in particular, in its illustration of the inherent sexual pathology of the bourgeois, has afforded me much amusement.
But perhaps your desire to avoid our meeting, represents something of this pathology too, and takes too seriously the affect of the waking state? Rather fear Schadenfreude than your double revealing the fragility of the house of cards that is the human mind. As our Russian friend would have it:
‘In the doorway of the next room, almost directly behind the waiter and facing Mr. Golyadkin, in the doorway which, till that moment, our hero had taken for a looking-glass, a man was standing - he was standing, Mr. Golyadkin was standing - not the original Mr. Golyadkin, the hero of our story, but the other Mr. Golyadkin, the new Mr. Golyadkin. The second Mr. Golyadkin was apparently in excellent spirits. He smiled to Mr. Golyadkin the first, nodded to him, winked, shuffled his feet a little, and looked as though in another minute he would vanish, would disappear into the next room, and then go out, maybe, by a back way out; and there it would be, and all pursuit would be in vain. In his hand he had the last morsel of the tenth pie, and before Mr. Golyadkin's very eyes he popped it into his mouth and smacked his lips. "He had impersonated me, the scoundrel!" thought Mr. Golyadkin, flushing hot with shame. "He is not ashamed of the publicity of it! Do they see him? I fancy no one notices him . . . "’
Yours Faithfully,
Arthur Schnitzler
Shezad Dawood’s solo exhibition The Double Life of Arthur Schnitzler can be taken as a sequence of asymmetric doublings that also builds a chain of references. From the Brion Gysin-inspired unfurling of the Dream Machine in The Pattern of The Plan, to the quantum theories of Robert Anton Wilson explored in both Why Depend Upon Space and Time – which attempts to pick up the legacy of Futurism by attempting a quantum portrait of Anton Wilson. And Elliptical Variations III which looks at the wave-form of particles operating in multiple simultaneities that also loops back to the Alpha wave-form generated during dream sleep. To the doubling of a painting based on the same digital image, yet rendered as two very different times of day and seasons of the year. A cumulative building of a chain of pairs that in turns plays on the sequence of relationships in Max Ophuls La Ronde, while playfully admitting the membrane between dream and reality that allows for the science of quantum mechanics, and multiple lives lived on multiple earths.
Godstown (Autumn Evening), 2015. Acrylic on vintage textile, 189.5 x 265.5 cm.
Godstown (Winter Morning), 2015. Acrylic on vintage textile, 189.5 x 265.5 cm.
Installation view, The Double Life of Arthur Schnitzler, Gabriel Rolt Gallery, Amsterdam, 2015.
Elliptical Variations III, 2014. Wall-mounted neon, 160 x 400 cm.