Island Life
Member of nameless art group consisting of Nanna Starck, Annesofie Sandal, Charlotte Bergmann Johansen and Christina Hamre.
Contemporary Art as a Market Place
On social exchange in the installations of Christina Hamre, Charlotte B. Johansen, Annesofie Sandal, and Nanna Starck.
The market place, the amusement park, the funfair, circus acts, carnival, trade, entertainment, mass culture, the grotesque, and the obscene are some of the themes addressed by the artists Christina Hamre, Charlotte B. Johansen, Annesofie Sandal, and Nanna Starck in their joint projects and exhibitions. The themes point to a multi-faceted field within contemporary art and in art history, bringing a wealth of issues and discourses into play. The themes and exhibitions, then, bring a new topicality to the relationship between high and low culture, art and kitsch, and also take a critical approach to the museum institution, the optics of conventional exhibition formats, and the mythology concerning the male artist-subject.
Christina Hamre (b. 1974), Charlotte B. Johansen (b. 1970), Annesofie Sandal (b. 1977), and Nanna Starck (b. 1976) have worked together on a number of exhibitions over the course of the last four years: Island Life at the Kunstmuseet i Tønder, 2007, Echo Park at Toldkammeret in Elsinore, 2008, Sideshow at Art Centre Silkeborg Bad, 2008, Rialto at WAS – Wonderland Art Space in Copenhagen, 2009, and Blind Caravan at the Round Tower in Copenhagen, 2010. The four artists are all graduates from the School of Walls and Space at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and their collaboration originally arose as a response against the (continued) hegemony of male artists’ paintings within contemporary art. Through a series of spectacular sculpture exhibitions the group seeks to dispel the inherent contrast, when viewed in art-historical terms, in the term ‘woman sculptor’; the term retains a paradoxical quality of something self-contradictory even today. The formation of the group can also be viewed as a rebellion against the mythology surrounding the artist subject or The Great Modern Master, unfailingly defined as a masculine figure; when four women artists working with sculpture band together, this blurs the edges of the stereotypical notions concerning the masculine artist subject and the work as an indexical imprint left by his potent creativity and urge to produce. The four artists have each retained a separate, independent practice concurrently with the projects created as a group, and thus the group can be more accurately viewed as a common platform capable of expanding on individual practices and of creating an open forum where different approaches can be explored. The exhibitions arise out of the artists’ meditations and reflections on a common theme, with individual works intermingling to form an overall total installation. The group does not prompt individual artists to dissolve their own identity; rather, it becomes a place for social exchange and interaction. The exhibitions, which can be said to constitute works in their own right, stand as densely composed entities full of references, discourses, and intertextuality.
The group’s method can, then, be defined as a kaleidoscopic, gemmating, rhizomatic encircling around a theme where associations and references are broken, displaced, shifted to form new patterns depending on the perspective applied. The exhibitions are site-specific, relating directly – in both physical and metaphorical terms – to the location for which they have been created. For example, trade and the marketplace are the themes addressed at Toldkammeret (The Custom House), butchery and decay are the issues covered in the old butcher’s shop/WAS, navigation and misdirection are explored at the observatory/Round Tower. The group makes a break with the museum institution and the mythology of the white cube in their total installations; anything but white and clean-cut, they are more akin to an expanded marketplace for interaction, trade, and social exchange. Their choice of exhibition practice also involves an internalised critique of the mega-exhibition and the museum as commodified entertainment and mass consumption, for even as the group borrows from the realm of entertainment culture, they also comment on it. By ‘kidnapping’ familiar material from our visual culture, replanting it within a distorted context, the group creates all-new significations, thereby also shaping a space that facilitates a critical reassessment of our habitual view of reality. The appropriation and reformulation of the mechanisms of mass culture establish a constructive inherent critique of representation in which the rather more obscene, furtive, and absurd aspects of our culture are permitted a space. This countering of the neatly polished, smooth surfaces of the entertainment industry is established through the group’s choice of materials; viewed within an art historical optics, the media selected are often unconventional, unpretentious, associated with low-status fields. Animal skins, readymades, ceramics, cardboard, and fake stucco ornamentation conjure up a certain level of decorative overload and hyper-aestheticism reminiscent of a cabinet of curiosities, of a funhouse, an escalated masquerade or a free-for-all candy shop where the trashy and the precious, the low and the high engage in ceaseless negotiations.
Through the appropriated materials, the contorted pieces of reality, and the frequently grotesque scenes the group’s installations evoke a pseudo-monumentality that might be described as ‘everyday life subverting the pathos of tradition.’ The notion, so firmly embedded within modernist art discourse, about art’s grandeur and force is deflated here through the use of humble materials. One might, then, say that the group’s installations evince a tendency – in terms of the materials selected – towards a postmodern vein of wry comment on the tense relationship between low and high culture that seems so dominant within modernism and which, if we are to pursue the matter a step further, also reflects the fundamental hierarchy between the feminine and the masculine. According to the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen and his social-historical analysis of the aesthetic principles of modernism, the hierarchy between art and mass culture is gendered, meaning that the realm of mass culture becomes ‘the feminine’: Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other, is how Huyssen puts it.1 ‘Femininity’ is traditionally posited as the antithesis of culture and art, a fact which feminist art historian Griselda Pollock points to as giving rise to the discursive construct of femininity as the essence of triviality, decorativeness, sentimentality, easy pleasure, and romance. In a word, kitsch.2 The post-modern art practice challenges modernism’s negative evaluation of its ‘other’ by deliberately appropriating the rejected mass cultural media, making them the very material employed for a self-ironic and critical creation of art. In the words of literary theorist Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is a kind of ‘aesthetic populism’; it is the effacement (...) of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern.3
In the exhibition Blind Caravan the group picks up threads previously employed, expanding on a range of themes already treated. The title refers partly to the Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous work Parable of the Blind from 1568, where a ‘caravan’ of miserable-looking blind people lead each other to their own ruin. The group, however, revise the conventional reading so that being blinded and blind is not necessarily a negative trait, just as Bruegel’s interest in the low, the primitive, the obscene, the grotesque, and the covert is incorporated to become an important element of the exhibition universe. In his doctoral thesis Landscape as World Image, professor of art history Jacob Wamberg highlights Bruegel as an example of the Netherlandish Renaissance which differed from the Italian Renaissance and its classical, timeless world image by taking a far more down-to-earth, everyday-like and narrative approach. Harvest and snow appear in Bruegel, but not in Michelangelo, says Wamberg,4 and this dichotomy between the primitive, low, and secular on the one hand and the religious, mythological, eternal, and exalted on the other hand, a dichotomy embedded in Bruegel’s work, is a recurring theme in Blind Caravan. Another woman sculptor has also worked with reinterpreting Bruegel’s painting of the Parable of the Blind, the grand of lady of contemporary art herself: Louise Bourgeois. Her Blind Leading the Blind from 1947–49 consists of a row of ‘legs’, locked in place and painted in red and black, evoking associations of something militant and fascist where the individual is dissolved in the blindly marching crowd. It should, however, be noted that according to Bourgeois herself, a later, pink version, C.O.Y.O.T.E. (1947–49), named after a trade union for prostitutes, refers to feminist solidarity. A similar dual-sided signification of Bruegel’s theme appears in Blind Caravan, too.
The caravan theme is also associated with the group’s previous projects where the market place, trade, and Venice have been pivotal points. Furthermore, it shapes and determines the physical manifestation of the exhibition theme, for the exhibition itself – and the spectators’ movement through it – can be viewed as a kind of ‘caravan’ or ‘procession’ into the Round Tower’s Library, the site of the exhibition. The caravan trope points to themes of exchange, trade, and interaction, thereby establishing a sense of coherence between the themes addressed by the group and the group identity as such: The group in itself is exchange, negotiation, and interaction – an exchange between the individual artists, exchanges between the works, themes, and discourses involved; and finally an exchange with the audience, the people who are physically drawn into the total installation.
This concrete integration of the audiences within the exhibition universe is a recurring trait of the group’s shows; an integration which, in a phenomenological move, requires the spectator’s body to move. It is generally accepted that the blind develop their other sensory registers as compensation for the absence of sight, honing them to a more acute sensibility, and thus the group’s incorporation of blindness as a theme can be read as a break with the hegemony of sight within art history, a sphere where priority has been firmly given to visual appreciation from a single, specific, fixed locus. According to feminist art historian Amelia Jones the hegemony of the visual is an ideologically founded development that is specifically Western; this is to say that a wealth of potential lies in wait within the suppressed sensory registers, just waiting to be woken up, stimulated, activated, and interpreted on a par with visual media.5 The group’s exhibitions represent such a diversity of modes that involve the entire body and its full sensory register, not just the faculty of sight.
The French philosopher Georges Bataille has also worked with how the dominance of sight and the visual might be overthrown within Western culture. In his reading, Bataille marks a break with a paradigm which, in a Platonic sense, has placed the exalted domain of spirit and luminous vision above the low materialism of the body and the heterogenic – a paradigm in which sight and language are inseparably linked to our cognition. In overall terms, Bataille – acting in accord with the project of Surrealism – works with a breaking down of discourses, systems, and paradigms. One expression of this is Bataille’s own text, which evades the discourse of classic philosophy and creates its own space for writing beyond the boundaries or for a shattered language. One example would be Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which might be defined as a pornographic, eroticised novel at first glance, but whose visual and metaphorical chains displaces it to another plane where, through its bodily transgressive images, it becomes a transgression of the discourse itself. Continuing along the tracks laid down by Renaissance optics and the stargazing observatories, humanity strives to know and see everything, but according to Bataille this desire takes humanity to the outer limit of knowledge where we must venture into the darkness of the inner gaze where sight rediscovers its sensuous orientation in an ecstatic experience.6 – A journey to the far extremes of the humanly possible, which implies laughter, dizziness, vertigo, nausea; loss of self to the point of death,7 a ceaseless oscillation between the possible and the impossible. To Bataille, poetry and art marks an opening in and reaching beyond discourse itself as a shift from the known to the unknown, leading to non-meaning. Art seems, then, to be operating in a space of blindness or blinding glares, in a place where the eye is ripped out and the body left behind to fumblingly rediscover a hidden and forgotten sensuous insight into our relationship with the world.8 This blindness and its potential for a revised experience of the world is precisely what the group is redefining in Blind Caravan.
The location of Blind Caravan in the Round Tower continues the bodily, sensuous approach to art insofar as the spectator’s body must move up the main walkway, a ramp spiralling upwards to the exhibition. The exhibition itself sprawls across the 900m2 Library Room situated on top of the Trinitatis Church, meaning that it has the ground plan of a basilica. Churches of this kind have central naves suitable for processions, and taking its cue from this fact and from the caravan theme, the exhibition unfolds itself like a line through the space. The elongated room creates a flow or course for the spectator-body to navigate, but the spiral can also lead you astray, cause the spectator to forget direction, space, time, and place; spin the spectator round, as it were. The Round Tower was built in 1642 by King Christian IV during what could be termed the Danish Renaissance, which means that it corresponds well to Bruegel’s Netherlandish Renaissance in terms of ideology and overall spirit. The Trinitatis Complex brings together a church, library, and observatory in a single building. Here, the observatory and library’s striving for knowledge previously reserved exclusively for God marks a schism within the ‘trinity’ of the building, a schism that is picked up on in the group’s site-specific exhibition. The fact that the Trinitatis complex is located in Købmagergade, originally a butcher’s street, enhances the contrast between the sky-soaring and the low, between the sacred and the earthy, the grotesque. Reaching for the sky, the observatory references the Tower of Babel, a true castle in the sky and a symbol of how human folly and transience will bring down to earth everything that strives upwards. Thus, a single building unites the low and the exalted, and the group continues this dichotomy in their exhibition, expanding it to an oscillation between high and mass culture. Bruegel, too, has worked with the Babel Tower, the butcher, and the marketplace as themes in his paintings where heaven and hell collide and where the basest elements of the body, its excreteable aspects, form a shrill contrast to art history’s classic white marble body.
The butcher’s street setting corresponds well with the caravan’s merchant theme, and the ancient trade routes also have a natural link to the stargazing aspect of the observatory, as observing the skies was originally a navigational tool for travellers. Stargazing and navigation inserts yet another contrast to the group’s preoccupation with blindness, so perhaps the navigation theme should, to continue Bataille’s train of thought, rather be regarded as a bodily journey into an unknown sculptural universe and sensory register. A previous exhibition staged by the group, Rialto, took place in a former butcher’s shop in the shopping street of Absalonsgade, where glimpses of internal organs and skeletons, painted animal skins, meat hooks, butcher’s knife, and exquisite, yet strange decorations and arrangements in the shop window made up part of the exhibition setting. The butcher’s shop as locus indicates, yet again, a place of trade and social exchange, but also a place of death, decay, and eeriness. The exhibition title, Rialto, refers to the area around Rialto bridge in Venice, which was originally a market place. The city of Venice itself immediately evokes links to the caravan as well as to decay, dionysiac behaviour, the carnivalesque, death, and obscenity. The poster for the Rialto exhibitions shows the four artists posing with their hands covering their eyes, with eyes drawn onto those hands. The poster is based partly on a fashion photograph and partly on Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film Don’t Look Now, which takes place in Venice. Here, too, themes of blindness and being blinded are evinced in the group’s universe, meaning that blindness can also be read as a sign of the covert, the traumatic, the hidden – that which we do not wish to see. References to mysticism and the occult enter the scene with the connection to Roeg’s thriller, which also addresses the realm of the psychic, a blind woman seeing what others do not. Blind Caravan is about both navigation and misdirection.
The poster as medium is a recurring feature in the group’s shows. In addition to being works created in unison by all four artists, who always pose for them, the posters also set the overall mood of the exhibition. The poster becomes a kind of performance where the group stages itself in theatrical, often humorous and grotesque poses. The poster for Blind Caravan shows painted plaster casts of the four female artists’ faces, presented here as Greek warriors. The group appropriates a sculptural, masculine symbol of power, using masquerade to play with identity in a game that partly points towards a non-determined, liquid, ambiguous gender awareness and partly to the group’s overall break with the myth of the masculine artist subject. Codes become diffuse, and the artificial moves on to become a game between high and low culture – classic, ancient, pure (masculine) figures versus festive, carnivalesque, and androgynous masks. The poster from Island Life also plays on the staged, on multivalent gender and identity, with its pose and title referring to Grace Jones’ iconic androgynous, theatrical appearance. Within psychoanalysis, masquerade is concerned with a play with identities, and through the different posters the posing and self-staging becomes a potential that opens up opportunities for playing with otherwise firmly defined roles and codes, perhaps for donning a new disguise. Masquerades, the grotesque body, and the dissolution of the body are recurring themes in the group’s works, and by challenging notions about the fixed, firmly defined subject the group points to how our identities are very much built around a range of socially, culturally, and politically defined roles and stereotypes.
The caravan is a journey in more senses than one – a journey through gender, time, space, and bodily processes, excesses, and exchanges. The exhibition in the Round Tower also becomes a journey for the spectator – a journey into the group’s dark and gloomy universe where we, blinded, must sense and experience with our bodies, where the low and the exalted, the grotesque and the articulate collide and offer an experience beyond established discourses.
Inger Marie Hahn Møller
MA (Art History)
Endnotes
1 Andreas Huyssen: ‘Massekulturen som kvinde: modernismens Anden’, Marie-Louise Svane & Tania Ørum (eds.): Køn og Moderne Tider. En antologi, Tiderne Skifter, Copenhagen, 1991.
2 Griselda Pollock: Looking Back to the future. Essays on art, life and death, G + B Arts International, Amsterdam, 2001, p. 59.
3 Fredric Jameson: ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Verso, 1991.
4 Jacob Wamberg, Landskabet som verdensbillede. Naturafbildning og kulturel evolution i Vesten fra hulemalerierne til den tidlige modernitet, Passepartouts Særskriftserie, Aarhus Universitet, Århus, p. 14.
5 See e.g. Amelia Jones: Body Art: Performing the Subject, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998, and Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
6 Karl Erik Schøllhammer: ‘Batailles Billeder’, Asmussen & Sørensen (eds.), Excesser – af og om Georges Bataille, Modtryk, Aarhus, 1994,
p. 168.
7 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, translated by Leslie Anne Boldt, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1988, p. 37.
8 Karl Erik Schøllhammer: ‘Batailles Billeder’, Asmussen & Sørensen (eds.), Excesser – af og om Georges Bataille, Modtryk, Aarhus, 1994,
p. 173.
9 See e.g. Mary Ann Doane: ‘Film and the Masquerade’ (1982), Femmes Fatales. Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York/London, 1991.