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LINK
TO REVIEW FROM ADRESSA 09.01.2010,
BY SOLVEIG LØNMO
UNFLUID
WERE THE WAVES, TEXT BY WOJCIECH OLEJNIK
The hand-written
letter seems now to be an archaic form of communication. It is
time-consuming and impractical, its mark making slow and awkward.
Yet as words start to flow and the pen accelerates into wavy loops
and rhythmic punctuation, this experience can become sensual,
perhaps even novel, a kind of fluid telescoping to another time
and place. Maja Nilsen’s exhibition Unfluid were the waves
at the Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, offers a similar
experience. It is comprised of a series of twelve black and white
digital collages and a sculpture. This work seems to be from another
time, from a distant, monochrome reality, the reality of the collage,
the reality of contradictions. In collage 1 a woman, who appears
to be stranded on a deserted island, sits atop of a beached whale,
eating a banana. Her head tilts contemplatively towards the surrounding
ocean, but her face, though fringed with curls of hair, is absent,
invisible. In the background, warships cut through the turbulent
waves, appearing to be on a collision course with the island,
as a tripod and camera stand to the side capturing the whole event.
The different elements of the image seem precisely cut out and
pasted on; like an obsessive film director, the artist carefully
choreographs the image. Even the lighting seems to be well considered,
as the foreground is sharp, full of contrast and depth, while
the ocean is faded, pixilated and gray. The image is vaguely reminiscent
of an early Hollywood production, as though shot on a studio set
with a projected backdrop, and featuring a familiar subject-matter:
the conflict between the untamed beast, the savage island and
the manmade naval marvels, where a faceless token woman is placed
in their midst, torn, timid, perhaps even exploited. Yet in following
such a possible narrative, the image begins to unravel, revealing
its own inner logic, its own convincing reality.
Originally this body of work was conceived as a film - an art
form measured in time, with a beginning and an end. Together these
individual pieces are like film stills, without a concrete sequence,
or actual continuity, but with common imagery and shared stylistic
incongruities that allude to an overarching narrative. Each work
is a cluster of activity, set in a detailed, fantastical setting,
designed to entice the viewer’s eye into the scattered action,
to move across its plane. In collage 2 a man with his back to
the viewer is pasted into the foreground of a forest landscape.
In the distance, a white dove struggles with a cloth that partially
obscures the face of a woman lying on a black casket. In the back
of the image, camouflaged by branches, another face peers in.
It is also part of the spectacle, but as a foreign eye, or perhaps
the eye of the forest. Each of these entities faces another, each
one of their gazes creating openings or paths to the next. The
gaze, like a thread in a piece of cloth, ties these entities together
into an unstable whole. This whole is composed of objects and
figures, which in themselves carry strong symbolic significance
(i.e. black casket, white dove, forest), alluding to many possible
interpretations and readings. As each one demands attention, other
content is inevitably overshadowed, creating competing points
of focus and thus syncopation and discontinuity.
The issues of continuity and discontinuity that are fundamental
to collage are also fundamental to Nilsen’s practice. When
working in different places and communities, she often incorporates
elements of these environments, such as existing epistemologies,
local histories, tradition or myth into her practice. It may be
that an artist is only capable of offering a translation, an interpretation
of what already exists, that an artist always finds oneself amidst
a pre-given context. In Nilsen’s case this is a conscientious
choice, it serves a strategic purpose, it allows her to analyze
and question the formation of the relationship between the artist
and the context in which they situate their work.
The reference point of this exhibition is Zoo, or Letters Not
About Love (1923), a book written in Berlin by the exiled Russian
writer and formalist Viktor Shklovsky. The book is in the form
of a letter correspondence between two ex-lovers: Shklovsky and
Elsa Triolet (another Russian writer, referred to as Alya in the
book). On the surface it may appear that Nilsen’s work stages
some excerpts from the book, acting as its secondary support.
Though her work often involves an illustrative style and occasional
direct references to passages from the text, these works are not
simply visual elucidation to the book. Rather they explore some
of its predicates, attempting to continue what has been left open.
But how can one provide a continuation to something that is already
completed? Shklovsky’s book in fact, also explores this
topic of continuation, of reaching out. The correspondence with
his ex-lover is only upheld on the condition that he will not
write to her about love. But Shklovsky wants only to profess his
love for Alya, and as the letters discuss a variety of different
topics they all invariably end up being metaphors for his unrequited
love. Sometimes one can sense disillusionment, powerlessness,
even desperation in Shklovsky’s language as he breaks the
agreed upon arrangement, as he overwhelms his letters with obvious
allusions to love. It seems as though in his vulnerable state
he can only express himself plainly and directly. Nilsen shares
this tendency to attempt a direct approach to the other’s
heart. In collage 3 several baboons unsuccessfully attempt to
climb scaffolding built out of fallen, discarded trees, in order
to reach an opaque window mounted on a woman’s torso in
the place of her heart. It seems that it takes extraordinary effort
and skill, but also a higher form of thinking to reach the other’s
heart, something beyond one’s intrinsic abilities.
Almost every image in this exhibition contains a vast space, an
open terrain, the indefinable outside. Sometimes this vast space
simply creates a sense of place as the forest does in collage
2, in other work it is interrupted by windows, or surrounded by
a dam of organs, seemingly caging in its expansive realm. Consequently,
these spaces often appear as cultivated enclosures. But they are
never fully constrained, refusing to be tamed, they spill over
the edges, span until the horizon, perhaps representing the irreducible
other. Sometimes the other is like a desert, harsh, turned away,
its terrain unmanageable, inhospitable. One can only witness its
permanence, and try to maintain a set distance in relation to
it. In collage 4 such a desert has the lover naked, turned away
on a recliner, as flower pots stand behind her and seem to float
on the sand, their roots incapable of penetrating the uninhabitable
ground. Shklovsky, unable to persuade or coerce his ex-lover into
returning his love, is left to a kind of prolongation of the inevitable
rejection, where the maintenance of the present situation is sustained
because it allows for a postponement of the final closure. In
one of his letters he exclaims that he wants to “write literarily,”
yet more than anything, his letters evoke the inexhaustible vastness
of language, of its endless nuances and terminology, of its avoidance
of closure. Their correspondence sways back and forth like gentle
waves, like a soft dance; it is a kind of stationary movement.
In collage 5 a small lake in the mountains is converted into a
ballroom where couples dance, making their way across its surface,
from one shore to the other. The shoreline, that pulsating border,
once water, once sand is an entry, or a disembarkment, a moment
of change. But how easily the shore dissipates into a horizon,
into the impenetrable itself.
Ultimately, what seems to be at issue in this work is how to bring
the horizon to the shore, how to make the closure into an opening.
In collage 6, water bursts from windows in an apartment block,
flooding a street in Berlin. Strangely, the gushing water hangs
suspended, stretching but not quite reaching the ground. Shklovsky
writes: “The water is rising. It has flooded all Berlin;
in the tunnel, a subway train has surfaced belly up, like a dead
eel. It has washed all the fish and crocodiles out of the aquarium.
The crocodiles float without awakening, though they whimper because
of the cold, but the water keeps mounting the steps. Eleven feet.
It’s in your room, Alya.” Water, the substance that
overflows, that floods, that enters every crevice, cleaning out,
taking away, but also leaving a sediment where it passes. In one
smooth motion, in one simple gesture it causes an exchange, in
this moment with its force it brings together the most unlike
elements, it establishes a continuity, where there was distance.
From the left bottom corner of the image a hand reaches out, as
if about to touch the water, bringing a sense of optimism in the
reconciliation with the other, with Alya. Water is a substance,
which symbolizes purification and renewal. When it springs out,
when it rains down it causes radical change, it becomes an otherworldly
force, the substance of myths.
A myth involves the many and so it takes the form of a story,
it is a form of communication. Myths are a mediation that can
communicate that which was incommunicable otherwise. They rely
on rituals, on chants, on sacred clothing and masks. Perhaps this
is why in all of Nilsen’s work the face is always covered,
turned away, cut off, tucked away into the pillow of a recliner.
The face must disappear; it is too immediate, too familiar, too
complete. One can only gain access to the other through a mediatory
person or object, an amulet, or something with symbolic value,
special significance or powers. Perhaps in the exhibition this
object is kingdomphylumclassorderfamilygenusspecies, a sculpture
composed of long, rib-shaped plaster tubes hanging in the middle
of the space, surrounded by the other images in the exhibition.
As if in an archeological museum these tubes hang like the remaining
bones of an unrecognizable ancient animal. Bone reconstructions,
computer generated models may help in visualizing what such an
animal might have looked like, but none of these methods can completely
recapture an animal’s appearance or behaviour. Like the
vast spaces in some of the images in the exhibition this skeleton
represents the irrecoverable other, that knowledge which is in
some way inaccessible to us. Simultaneously, this rib cage of
bone-like beams also appears to be in the shape of a boat, an
object that has a strong cultural history, being an integral part
of human activity, whether for functional, recreational or economic
purposes. In its double articulation this skeleton-boat structure
functions like the mediation between culture and nature, but also
between the measurable and the immeasurable. This is also how
Nilsen treats Shklovsky’s book. For although it is an already
completed book, by creating a mythology around it - which always
presents the world in a state of becoming, at a moment of formation
- the text itself becomes an open passage, an unfinished sentence.
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