BY SARA FANELLI
Tate, 2007
ISBN 978 1 85437 728 9
Review by Richard Battersby
The book is introduced by writer and mythographer Marina Warner, who points out that its title ‘Sometimes I think, Sometimes I am’ has been borrowed by Sara from Paul Valery, who was himself echoing a famous statement about consciousness and existence. This signposts, she adds, its resemblance to a so-called ‘commonplace book’, in which children and adults used to keep quotations and mementoes. Originally, when someone like the scholar Erasmus was urging people to keep such records of their thoughts, the objective was improvement (cultivating a sense of self in relation to God). Gradually these transformed into idiosyncratic personal hoards of private moments of delight, something akin to Fanelli’s book.Fanelli has selected quotations from a number of thinkers through the ages and set them within five themes; ‘Devils and Angels’, ‘Love’, ‘Colour’, ‘Mythology’ and ‘The Absurd’. A considerable range of thinkers has been included, but a remarkable number lean towards the absurd:
‘Life is a horizontal fall’ (Jean Cocteau)
‘I confess I do not believe in time’ (Vladimir Nabokov)
‘Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ (Samuel Beckett)
On many occasions commentators have pointed to Fanelli’s interest in Dada, Surrealism, Matisse and Picasso, and the writer Calvino. Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada manifesto might serve as the book’s soundtrack:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal,
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge,
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
The Cabaret Voltaire’s events were in part a reaction against the perceived inhumanity of WW1, suggesting humour, spontaneity, and an appreciation of the absurd were a better armoury for survival. Fanelli’s characters might well enjoy a night out in 1919 Zurich: leaping across the pages in a shambolic display of excited delight, they suggest we can see the funny side of pretty much anything if we keep our tongues firmly set in our cheeks. Hand painted in a select palette of bright primary colours, we are left wondering if it is possible to be sad, as we glance at a crying girl who might well be smiling behind it all. Perhaps like Morrissey she might ‘die with a smile on her face’.
When asked what his aim was, Martin Kippenberger once explained it as wanting to ‘spread a good feeling’. From the evidence of this book, we might expect Fanelli to answer similarly. Initially negative-sounding quotations are illustrated in a positive, whimsical glow. Oscar Wilde’s pronouncement ‘We are each our own devil and we make our world our hell’ is illustrated with a drawing of little devils wandering in space shooting each other in vain. Their guns appear impotent, benign, even charming.
Talking Heads’ film Road To Nowhere suggested we perhaps cannot rely any longer on the success of grand Modernist ideals, and that instead we should lighten up a little, using humour as a means of survival. A similar mood sings through this book. Steven Heller remarks at the book’s close that Fanelli’s work might be just what we need in our current climate of fear. For, as the environmentalist James Lovelock has it, we might only have 50 years left.