Category: Fagurfræði

Kees Visser exhibition in Arion Bank

The Enigma of Vision

Seeing is not a specific way of thinking, or a specific presence in itself: it is a means that I have recieved in order to be absent from myself, to live from inside a specific division of being, which leads me at the end back into the self.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Dutch artist Kees Visser has been active in the Icelandic art-scene since the seventies, at the beginning through his acquaintance with young Icelandic artist studying in Holland at that time, and then moving to Iceland in 1976. He was one of the founders of The Living Art Museum in Reykjavík 1978, and participated in numerous exhibitions and activities until he moved back to Holland in 1992. Since then he has been a regular visitor in Iceland and his ties to the Icelandic art scene have never been interrupted. One of his most memorable exhibitions was his one man show in The Living Art Museum the year he moved back to Holland, where he presented a systematic investigation of some fundamental elements of visual arts like color and form, realized in so called wooden and coloured  „bar-works“ where questions concerning how our visual and tactile perception of colors and forms relate to our thoughts and our spoken language. After moving to Holland, Kees Visser‘s investigation into  language of forms and colors  has radically deepened so that he is now to be considered among the foremost  artists in his field.

When overlooking the career of Kees Visser you can‘t miss the relationship between his artistic investigation and the investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein concerning the relationship between our color-perception and the words of the spoken language. Wittgenstein’s investigations are always dealing with the relationship between rational thought and perception, where the perception of color and the name of the color become the key to philosophical questions about relationship between language and reality in general. Wittgenstein’s conclusion was basically that semantic discourses follow different rules than perception, and that the words we use for example about colors are a matter of consensus, but have little or no relation to our perception as such: the word “yellow” means the color yellow if the majority of a linguistic community has agreed on that equivalence, not because the equivalence is real. The rationalistic discourse of language ends up in a formal tautology if we want to make a direct connection between the word and the phenomenon it is supposed to mean. At the end language is self-referential and outside this self-referential world we have silence. Wittgenstein remains always trapped in between this impasse of words, perception and things. One of his conclusions is anyway that after all it is “experience that gives meaning to the words”[1].  That means that the experience of the color  yellow  gives the word “yellow” its meaning.  That conclusion leaves open one question: what kind of experience gives meaning to the word “experience”?

These questions of  Wittgenstein come easily to our mind when we look at Kees Visser’s works,  but through closer look we can see that the visual artist is approaching these problems from quite a different experience and using quite different methods than the artist of linguistics we can see in Wittgenstein. To simplify,   we can trace Visser’s investigation back to his “bar-works” from his exhibition in 1992, where the natural approach of the visual artist widens and deepens the semiotic discourse of the philosophical approach by connecting the colors to their form and the perception that does not rise from words but from the physical approach of the perceiver and the object perceived.  After his return to Holland Visser’s investigations have deepened and left us ever more clear statements where the silence that Wittgenstein found outside the realm of language as the world of the unspeakable, is shouting toward us in a variety of systematic series of works that lead us far away from the semantic enigma of the words to the real enigma of vision itself and the visible, which has its roots in our bodies and the being that never can be separated from its physical context. If words do nothing but describe language, then colors and forms have a direct and immediate connection to the perceiver in the paradox that makes what is outside the reach of our hands and our words become inside ourselves as a new visibility that has its intrinsic logic and magic beyond all syntax and semiotics of the words.

The series of paintings by Visser are all extremely simple in their appearance, and might at first seem to eco the tautology of words that many followers of Wittgenstein introduced in conceptual and minimalist art of the last decades of the 20th century. Those artists maintained that just as the word does no longer mean anything but itself, the same would do with form and color.  But as we look closer at Visser’s images, those series who appear at first glance to be monochrome squares or stripes, we are caught by an unfamiliar stimulus: the squares are not “perfect” and the colors proof to be more complicated and deeper than at first sight, they have a rough surface of pure pigment, and looking at the surface we see the light reflecting in various ways and the color dissolve at the edges, all depending on our distance and direction of perspective. Suddenly we are directed into a world of color and forms  whose reference is outside the spoken language aiming directly into our bodies,  where not only the eyes but the whole body receives a message in the form of a new visibility that dwells beyond the words. We experience the most subtle variations in rhythm of forms and colors that call for our deepest attention. Visser is unafraid to show us his working processes and his systematic way of proceeding, exposing his working papers as  musical manuscripts with lines and measurement standards designed as scores for form and colors. Here we discover that behind all the simplicity in the appearance of the work lies a complicated theoretical work,  aimed at provoking the perceptive stimulus  that slowly becomes an illumination: the color isn’t just color and the form isn’t just form and their context results to be a conclusion of complicated calculus that provoke harmony in our perception, similar to what we can find in serial music where the notes are arranged according  to certain arithmetic rules.

The characteristic of language is that we use words to discern things and ideas in order to master them. That kind of discernment is often implicit in language as almost an unconscious act. We often say for example:  “I can’t believe my own eyes!”  By using that phrase we have distinguished the eyes from ourselves and distinguished our body from the self and our consciousness, as if it was a crystal clear and immaterial thought. But everybody should know that our eyes are not sufficient means for seeing. In reality we do not see with our eyes at all, as they are a part of an opaque and complex  net that makes our body and being in its totality. Often this misunderstanding is supported by the way language discerns our perception of what we see from “the thing in itself” as if we were dealing with two different entities. But as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has pointed out, our perceptions in general, and especially our visual perception is a reciprocal cross-action based on  communion  and identification of the perceiver and the perceived. Besides Merleau-Ponty has doubted if things have a being “in themselves” as if things were given a “self”[2].

Instead of investigating the relationship between color-perception and language, as Wittgenstein did,  Ponty studied the relationship between the colors and our body: the fact that color can affect the motorial intentions of our body. Thus we know that yellow and red colors have an “expanding” and exciting effect but blue and green have the opposite effect.  These simple phenomena do not tell the whole story, because we can experience how the colors in Visser’s works change according to our physical position and movement.  Our distance from the object and our movement have a direct effect on our perception. The same goes for the subtile variations in forms that we find in his works, we perceive them according to our own physical movements. In the end our perception of these works is not conditioned by our understanding of the complex  systematic preparatory calculus, prepared by the artist as a basis for our understanding of his work;  what happens is the contrary: these variations in colors and forms create an echo in our bodies, and this echo becomes a new experience which is not based on a calculus or a system, but rather on direct perception without words and without logical analysis. In the same way we can understand the work from the point of view of the artist: the strong and systematic framework that he creates is not there to block the expression. Certainly we are not seeing traditional expressionistic brushstrokes or formations, rather we perceive  suspension magnified by the strict rules set to expression. Every brushstroke in these works  eliminates the underlying one and creates layers or sediments of  the artists efforts to stay within the restraints. The same goes for the formal variations that affect us at closer looking and creates an echo inside ourselves as if listening to music.

As Kees Visser’s art has been strictly abstract from the very beginning it comes as a surprise that recently he has been showing, along with his strictly geometric abstract works, images of flowers  which  appear at first glance to be of the most simple kind: a single flower opened up on the middle of the  canvas with different shades of gray color in the background. At first sight they look like normal photographs, but at closer watch we see something strange. The depth and sharpness of the image doesn’t fit completely with the distance we are used to see between the digital or analog image and its object. We feel some uncommon physical closeness in these color-images which almost brings the flower itself into presence. By closer investigation we discover that these are not traditional photographs, but images made through direct hyper sensitive electronic scanning process transferred into a digital print. Beyond all debate on “abstract” and “figurative” imaging,  Visser is here dealing with similar problematics as in his abstract paintings, a problem that Merleau-Ponty called the enigma of visual perception:

“This shows us that the question of figurative or abstract art is badly proposed: it is true, and not a contradiction, that no grape has ever been what we see in a painting, also in the most figurative painting, and it is also true that no painting, however abstract it might be, can never be withdrawn from Beeing, and that Caravaggio’s grape is the grape itself. These statements make no contradiction. The preference we give to what is, against what is seen or shown, the preference we give to what is seen or shown, against what is, is vision itself. “[3]

Ólafur Gíslason (November, 2011)

English translation: Sarah Brownsberger

[1] L. Wittgenstein: Remarks on color, 1977

[2] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception, 1945

[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty L‘Œil et l‘Espirit, 1964Image

Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir at ASI museum, Reykjavík

The Trails, Tracks, and Traces of Art

 Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s exhibition of drawings at the ASÍ Museum in Reykjavík 2012

Trail is the name that Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir has given her latest series of charcoal drawings, abstract drawings that indeed show a trail: something has marked the pictorial surface in the course of passing on. These are drawings that echo some kind of handwriting or calligraphy in nature, repetitive patterns that might bear friendly attribution to the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms. Yet this is not a case of direct portrayal; these are a kind of reference to the roots of the handwriting, testament to the artist’s vital relationship with the natural kingdom, not through objective imitation of it but via the “trails” the handwriting traces through live contact between the hand and the pictorial surface, in a dialogue as transient as the passing moment. The questions these drawings are apt to raise may sound something like this: What has been and gone and left a trail on this ground, what is this ground, where did the path start, and where does it lead?

These are not easy questions but it is precisely the magic of significant art to present us with conundrums.

Let us consider the first part of the question: What has been and gone here and left a trail? The simplest answer is perhaps to say that it was the very artist, that these pictures show her fingerprints and nothing else. One might say in support that these drawings all attest to a hand’s bodily contact with the pictorial surface. There is a distinct bodily presence/absence in these pictures, which we clearly feel. But why then does the artist not let it suffice to leave the tracks of her palms and feet on the pictorial surface? What is the errand, in this work, of this calligraphy, these constantly repeated marks that perhaps call to mind indeterminate natural phenomena? Here is a clouded issue that needs clarifying.

When the police wish to identify a culprit, one traditional means of investigation is to take the suspect’s fingerprints and compare them with corresponding marks found at the crime scene. The accused dips a finger in ink and presses it on paper; it leaves an indisputable imprint, indisputable proof that the accused has left this trail, traversed this ground. The difference between the police’s fingerprintmaking and Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s calligraphy is that the fingerprint is not an artwork in any traditional sense, so that our question leads to another still-more-difficult question: What sets an artwork apart from fingerprints, if both evidence the trails of their “authors”?

“Art is the sensual manifestation of the Idea,” said the German philosopher Hegel, and few have disputed this sharp definition: art concerns ideas. This can scarcely be said of fingerprints. To see a fingerprint gives us small notion of the relevant person, his thought or ideas; the fingerprint’s evidential value pertains to mechanical comparison.

An artwork is another matter, isn’t it? We need see only a small fragment of a Van Gogh to see his “imprint” or fingerprints in the brushstrokes, imprints that form part of a whole image that is recognizable to us from our endless trips though Van Gogh’s oeuvre. But this does not apply to all art in equal measure. Pioneers of abstract art such as Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky wanted to erase the personal imprint, the fingerprints, from their art, so it would display itself and nothing else. The same goes for Byzantine iconographers, for example (cf. the Image of Edessa or the Veil of Veronica). It also applies to many contemporary pop artists, minimalists, and conceptual artists (Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Lawrence Weiner); examples are innumerable. This definition of artworks as marks or fingerprints of their authors’ personalities and subjective beings is thus insufficient, to put it mildly. Placed in the broader historical context it is nearly useless, for who would think of searching out authorial personality or self-awareness in the cave paintings at Lascaux, the Venus de Milo, the carved doors at Valthjófsstaðir, or even the Mona Lisa? Whose tracks mark Malevich’s work of 1914-15, his “supremist” Black Square? What trail was blazed in that work? If in this case it is the trail of an idea, it depicts something other than the personality or subjective being of the artist.

But what of Delacroix, Van Gogh, and all the Expressionists from Munch to Jackson Pollock: Is their expressive “handwriting” not “fingerprints of the soul,” to use the common metaphor? The ready answer is that, just as a name objectifies the phenomenon it names, this “handwriting” is also an objectification, and the subjective being that renders an object as its own image is always elsewhere, beyond the picture. If the subjective being wishes to reveal itself in the handwriting, it is always “another,” as the poet Rimbaud said, of himself. A unity of the self and the handwriting can never be rendered, even in the automatic writing of the Surrealists, who always set themselves rules for rendering chaos. Just as language “speaks us,” as Lacan put it, handwriting is a “rule” that gives objective form to its subject, whether that is the invisibility of the “subjective being” or Platonic transcendental forms. The subjective being instantly vanishes from its rendered image, is elsewhere.

But what was “the Idea” that Hegel discussed and what is its relation to the artist’s person? Is “the Idea” something that has deep personal and subjective roots, or something connected to language and the laws thereof, or is it perhaps the absolute and immutable idea of the divinity that dwells beyond the personal, a kind of Platonic idea of universal truth? French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy speaks to this question:

The [Hegelian] Idea is the presentation to itself of being or the thing. It is thus its internal conformation and its visibility, or in other words, it is the thing itself as vision/envisioned…(the thing seen, envisioned, grasped in its form, but from within itself or its essence).

In this regard, art is the sensual visibility of this intelligible, that is invisible, visibility. The invisible form—Plato’s eidos—returns to itself and appropriates itself as visible. Thus [art] brings into the light of day and manifests the being of its Form and its form of Being. All the great theories of “imitation” have never been anything but theories of the imitation, or the image, of the Idea (which is itself, you understand, but the self-imitation of being, its transcendent or transcendental miming)—and reciprocally, all thinking about the Idea is thinking about the image or imitation. Including, and especially, when it detaches itself from the imitation of external forms or from “nature”….All this thinking is thus theological, turning obstinately around the great motif of “the visible image of the invisible God” which for Origen is the definition of Christ.[1]

This analysis of Hegel’s “Idea” is not easy to grasp, for Nancy is guiding us away from conventional definitions of “things” toward a meditation on being as a temporal event, on being’s paradoxical manifestation as both event and image. This account seems to lead us to an unexpected place, the field of pure theology.

Our original question was: What has been and gone here and made a trail? Then is the answer that it was Christ? No, obviously not, but the myth of the paradoxical appearance and disappearance of the Godhead as a condition for its existence can perhaps explain for us the nature of this riddle of the sensual manifestation of the invisible: just as God, as the image of the invisible, needs the sensual and visible image of Christ in order to be himself, the Hegelian Idea (the idea of the universal and of the absolute unity of vision and the seen) needs to emerge from its invisible husk and become sensual in order to be itself.

In our day, however, ideas about universal qualities (and the absolute unity of the name and the named) have undergone many devaluations, and though it might be possible to discern a search for universal ideas in a Malevich’s supreme black square of 1914 (as if it were a Byzantine icon), that image is equally and perhaps above all testimony to the disappearance of such an idea. The black square depicts disappearance and nothingness no less than the fullness of the Idea. Possibly Hegel too had sensed this devaluation of “the Idea” when he proclaimed the end of art as an arena for the manifestation of universal ideas. He was referring not least to sacred art and the disappearance of its sacred core. Thus Hegel’s proclamation of the end of art has premises akin to those of the iconoclasts, who wished to forbid images in order to keep the idea of an invisible God separate from its sensual manifestations.

Then what remains? Again it is Jean-Luc Nancy who picks up the scent, by stating that the “vision” that stimulates all creative art is a vision of nothingness, a view into the void, a kind of negative image of the universal ideas. All images spring from anxiety in the face of nothingness, says Nancy, but this negative image of the Hegelian idea also conveys an awareness of its reverse; it harbors what Nancy calls almost nothingness. This he chooses to name ‘vestige’, a Latin word with many derivations pertaining to tracks, trails, and traces.[2]

And here we come back to Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s Trails. Nancy says that in order to understand this trail, this vestige, we must abandon Hegel’s notion of the “sensual manifestation of the Idea” along with the theological framework it belongs to, though the latter can serve as a means of illumination. To embody an absolute idea of the sacred was never the real task of art, Nancy says; only the theological iconoclasts held this position, based on misunderstanding. Art has certainly had ties to religions and their histories, but art is not religious practice nor does it entail belief. Nancy’s conclusion is that art is the vestige of itself and nothing else, its own trail or track; its meter and measure are that of a wandering gait; its imprints attest to vanished foot soles, bodies, and hands; its steps are a temporal event, the action itself without being the act, the vestige or path that being traces while it lasts. The trail or vestige thus becomes the manifestation of the disappearance of that which has been and gone, traversed this ground: What remains when someone or something has passed by.[3]

Who, then, has made this trail? It is not the trail of the gods, says Nancy, but rather the trail of their disappearance. The steps of this passage are transient events that possess no form once they have been taken; they are the path left by being while it lasts. It is not the universal footprint but the emptiness that remains: The trace or trail is not the image of a tangible object, a finger- or footprint, but rather witness to the traverse itself, which is constant and unceasing; movement not stasis; the image of what vanishes not what is; the arena of being, ceaseless in the flow of time; a trail left by a traveller whom we don’t recognize, for it could be anyone, one or all. The traveller’s name is still a name and “the Idea” still an image, but Nancy renounces their metaphysical meaning. This renunciation that Nancy proclaims is perhaps not good for nothing: it goes hand-in-hand with a rejection of the iconoclasts’ despairing opposition to imagery, an opposition based on “the Idea” of the image of man and God (and the analysis—separation of elements, division—entailed in that idea).

It was Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s chosen name for her series of drawings, “Trail,” that led us into Jean-Luc Nancy’s complicated meditations on art as its own vestige. They tell us that the “trail” is that of art itself and that the ground is art itself. Art’s traverse has no start or endpoint that is “off track,” out of the way, or out of sight; art finds its goal and meaning through its own action. If imitation or “mimesis” is in play, its purpose is not to teach us how objects familiar to us appear, but rather to let what is shine forth in all its power. Thus Jónsdóttir’s “trails” depict themselves: the trace that is the vestige of Art and Being, the being that has to do with time and event rather than with object and definition. The power of these images therefore derives not from an imitation of natural phenomena or an expression of a given personal subjective being, but in a game that is justified by its own rules. In this respect we can liken these drawings to child’s play. Whether in Double Dutch, Follow the Leader, or Wallball, all rules and motions in child’s play are justified by the game itself. The game reveals itself and nothing else; it seeks its meaning and goal in the play and nothing beyond play. A child jumping rope or playing hopscotch depicts nothing but those motions, motions which obey their own set rules and compel us to watch, learn the rules, and respond with direct or indirect participation.

Thus it is of little avail to search these Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir drawings for likenesses, either of natural phenomena or of Jónsdóttir’s own personality or character. The meaning of these drawings rests in themselves, the action of their making, and nothing else. What happens as we experience these drawings is an experience of sympathy closely akin to our sympathetic response in watching child’s play. There are few things more human than such sympathy, and when the artist has succeeded in arousing it,  the aim of art has been achieved, for art requires no extraneous justification. Art is in and of itself a justification of the human.

 Ólafur Gíslason

English translation: Sarah Brownsberger

 

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, transl. Peggy Karmuf. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 89.

[2] From Latin vestigium, footprint, trace. Cognate with the Icelandic root of stígur (path), vestige always carries the implication of something having gone by, disappeared.

[3] Here I am reminded of the altarpiece in the Quo Vadis Chapel on the Via Appia in Rome. It displays St. Peter’s footprints, which appeared in the paving stones outside when, fleeing Roman prison, Peter encountered Christ. The image shows the hollow imprint of the apostle’s feet in oversize; the apostle himself disappeared long ago. According to theology, the image is nonetheless evidence of the apostle’s existence, and the revelation that conjured the tracks in the stone. According to Nancy, these tracks are not the “vestige” of art, for art has no need, and never has had need, of proof or any such unity of image and model/ideal. Nancy, wishing to guide us out of this theological discussion, calls the trail “smoke without fire,” a course without a river, footprints without an apostle. This requires a new thinking, which is under discussion here.

Gretar Reynisson at The Living Art Museum 2013 – English

Gretar Reynisson Geymt en gleymt 2001-...
Gretar Reynisson: "Kept but forgotten" -used objects in wooden boxes 2001 -2012

The Gate of the Moment

Addressing Gretar Reynisson’s art exhibition in The Living Art Museum 2013 and remembering Friedrich Nietzsche

‘Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The centre is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.’[1]

This is how the animals speak to Zarathustra in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical allegory about the prophet who is ‘the teacher of the eternal recurrence’ and who talks metaphorically about the human spirit, first as the oppressed camel, then as the lion of free will in the desert, and finally as the boy, a child who is ‘innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes”.’[2]

The unique exhibition that Gretar Reynisson has now installed in the Living Art Museum is the logical progression of exhibitions from 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000, and corresponds in a surprising way with Nietzsche’s haunting riddle about eternal recurrence, where time ceases to be a linear narrative pointing towards a determined goal, according to Judeo-Christian tradition, but instead becomes a circle, as ‘All that is straight lies … All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.’[3]

Gretar’s exhibition spans the first decade of the 21st century, showing us ‘eternal recurrence’ in a variety of forms, to create a single, unified work of art about time and existence in its tangible form, unrelated to any transcendental utopia, be it heavenly Paradise or the wordly delights of the consumer society. In the exhibition, we see the plywood plates with graphite inscriptions revived from previous exhibitions, but now in a new sequence, and also numerous corresponding forms, such as shirts, pillows, glasses, doormats, scales, kept-but-forgotten boxes, crumpled papers, photographs and video sequences, all of which bear witness to time and existence in its naked, material form. How can Nietzsche help us to understand this work?

The allegory that becomes the key to Zarathustra’s mystery is found in the chapter On the Vision and the Riddle, at the start of the third part of Nietzsche’s complex and equivocal narrative. Here, the prophet is travelling with a dwarf on his shoulder, and they arrive at a gate with two faces. Two paths meet at the gate; the way back, which ‘stretches back for an eternity’ and the way forward, which is ‘another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: “Moment.”’[4] And Zarathustra says to the dwarf, ‘“From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? And if everything has been there before – what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? … must we not eternally return?“[5]

As Zarathustra is contemplating the gate Moment he hears a sheepdog howling in the moonlight, and then notices a shepherd lying on the ground, ‘his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth’. The shepherd is suffocating and Zarathustra tries in vain to pull the snake from his throat, before commanding him to ‘Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!’ The shepherd does as he is asked, then spits the serpent’s head far away from himself and leaps to his feet, ‘No longer shepherd, no longer human – one changed, radiant, laughing!’ Never has Zarathustra heard such laughter: ‘My longing for this laughter gnaws at me: oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!’[6]

These are dreamlike images and riddles, which Zarathustra asks the reader to solve. Readers have searched for solutions ever since, as Nietzsche himself speaks only in metaphors.

Eternal recurrence was a nightmarish discovery for Zarathustra and it serves a vital purpose throughout Nietzsche’s philosophy, where it is inseparably related to the concepts of ‘Nihilism’, ‘Death of God’ and ‘Will to power’. Time that runs in a circle has no aim and therefore has no historical purpose. It is in fact the image of nihilism, which Neitzsche explains thus: ‘What does Nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “Why?” finds no answer.’[7] Eternal recurrence is the recurrence of the void and it horrifies Zarathustra. What the story of the shepherd reveals, however, is the way out of the nightmare that Zarathustra discovers: the snake stuck in the shepherd’s throat is a metaphor for time consuming itself, and the biting off of its head becomes a liberating act of the free will. Confronting the enemy, the eternal recurrence of the void, becomes an act of transformation that awakens superhuman laughter.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman has nothing to do with the domination of others, as is often maintained, but rather concerns the man who, through his voluntary act, manages to rise above his existential state in the hellish circle of repetition, thus achieving a superior existence that belongs to the Earth and human society, and not to heaven and the dominating power of the Godhead. What Nietzsche is preaching in this story is not the elimination of nihilism, but rather its transferrence to a new setting where it acquires a positive value. This perhaps is the essence of the paradox that Nietzsche continually struggled with; the story of the human soul, which existed first in the submission of the camel towards its master, then rose up to the spirit of the lion in the barren desert, before transforming itself into the forgetfulness and innocence of the child, reclaiming the laughter and joyfulness of the shepherd that bit off the head of the snake.

With an incredible resilience that comes close to obsession, Gretar Reynisson faces the existential conundrum that we sense simmering beneath all of Nietzsche’s writing. His work not only tackles the void with relentless realism and honesty, not only challenges the nihilism of the black snake, but also challenges all aesthetics that seek to conceal or shut down uncomfortable thoughts of how ‘the highest values devaluate themselves’ in contemporary life, to use Nietzsche’s definition of nihilism. His works surpass traditional aesthetics, at the same time opening our eyes to the existential contradictions in contemporary life, where ‘the Gate of the Moment’ greets us anew each day, and the snake is beheaded through this artistic performance in its eternal recurrence.

Ólafur Gíslason

English translation: Sarah Brownsberger

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Portable Neitzsche (Penguin, 1982), 329-330

[2] Ibid. 139

[3] Ibid. 270

[4] Ibid. 269-270

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Portable Neitzsche (Penguin, 1982), 270.

[6] Ibid. 272

[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power (Kaufmann, Vintage Giant edition)

Gretar Reynisson 52 towels 1/1-31/12/2000Gretar Reynisson: 52 towels, 1/1-31/12/2000.

Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir: Water, 2013

 The Psychology of Water

 A short essay on “Water”, the installation of visual artist Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir in Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavik, inaugurated the 16th of August 2013.

On a burning face/ falls the blue rain/ of blue-winged days.

Into the mind’s nullity/ night comes/ like an untitled story.

And the nakedness of that which is/ loses the nearness of itself/ in nights and days.

The image that poet Steinn Steinarr sketches here in the thirteenth poem of his series Time and Water is meaningless to conventional reason and falls flat if we try to explain its meaning using logical rules. The language addressing us here points beyond the rationality that tells us raindrops are just water, a face just a mask, a day a number on a calendar. This is a language that points beyond prior definitions of words, to speak the language of images. Moreover, the images formed by these words are not based on any definite model that we can rephrase or refigure for purposes of explanation. The poet’s words and images penetrate our consciousness and leave behind an imprint or wound which we can’t define without falling into a purely banal mundanity from which the fantasies of dream have been excluded, all danger zones fenced and designated off-limits. Nonetheless we are moved. Moved because we feel this image echo inside us; it discloses to us a previously-hidden inner world of our own. This image, so simple that it almost comes to nothing, nevertheless becomes something infinitely big, like the drop that fills the bowl of our consciousness and ruffles the water clear out to infinity…

This occurs when poets reach the point of making living symbols, symbols that live not for their meaning but for their efficacy alone, the effects they elicit. As the psychoanalyst Jung said, a living symbol is always ambiguous; it points beyond the world of definitions toward the unconscious and unknown and ultimately back toward nothing but itself, since nothing else can elicit its effect. It is characteristic of all poetry to breach the previously-defined outer limits of language; the poet is always situated in the danger zone of delerium in which rationality dwindles and the demons of insanity become imperious, demons of the madness that dwells in each of us, that we know, for example, from our dreams. This is the madness that psychology has called the unconscious core of humanity’s natural urges. “The Ego is not master in its own house,” said Freud, and each person’s daily life is strictured by tension between rational regulation and those fantasies of desire that the poets alone can give form to in their symbols, symbols that lend wings to our desires and dreams. Desires and dreams are the other side of psychic want. We desire not what we have but what we lack. Our desires are the driving force we feed upon; poets lend them wings and help us to perceive them. To recognize our desires and dreams and know how to pursue them is the way to become ourselves. This roadtrip lasts as long as life itself, so long as the desire to live remains. To understand and perceive our desires and dreams we need symbols. Hence poetry is a vital necessity for humankind.

When we have defined a symbol’s meaning it ceases to be a symbol, for definition devours the unconscious and unknown part of the image, strips it of its efficacy and makes it into a sign. It no longer discloses the danger zone of our world of hidden desires, no longer points the way to ourselves. Hence it is vitally necessary for us to renew language, breach the defenses and security systems that stagnant social language locks us into.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has written remarkable books on the psychology of the material world, especially with regard to the elements. At first a title such as his Psychoanalysis of Fire seems provocative; we have been taught that the material world is inanimate. Yet Bachelard proclaims that in relation to humankind nature is a living being, for man not only identifies with nature but is part of it and thus psychoanalyzes water as naturally as he does his neighbour. And in truth, from time immemorial, man has personified natural forces and psychoanalyzed them in myth and religion.

In his book Bachelard makes an important distinction between what he calls the formal and material imaginations. Formal imagination concerns the outward appearance of objects, their decoration and surface; material imagination concerns deeper and more inward material properties, which may concern gender, personal qualities, or an obsession, for example: fire is masculine, like sky, earth is feminine, like water; water tends toward the level, fire toward the vertical; a sunset on the ocean rim joins sky and earth and conveys death and rebirth, and so on.

Contemporary technologised society tends to regard nature and the material world as raw materials for human processing and consumption. In accordance with this view we have been taught that nature is inanimate matter. Steinn Steinarr’s poem series Time and Water, quoted above, shows by contrast a deep understanding of the psychology of water: waters manifest man’s fate. Living water from a spring never rests until it reaches its goal in level ocean: “the pain of water is infinite,” says Bachelard, adding, “In the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; black flowers bloom in matter’s darkness. They already possess a velvety touch, a formula for perfume.”[1] The philosopher reaches for poetic language to illustrate his case and might equally have said, with Steinn Steinarr: “but my dream glowed/in a veiled life-ripple/while the depths slept on. And my hidden sorrow/ catches up with you/ like a blue-distant sea.”

The water in Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir’s round glass bowl rests on black sand on the floor of the narthex of Hallgrímskirkja and is ruffled by drops falling from the ceiling to murmuring notes composed by Daníel Bjarnason. The blueness of the walls envelops it and draws us on through the church itself to the apse  where the blue of the windows carries us on out into daylight.

Let us not ask what this installation means, for it is not an explanation of anything, no more than is the poem about time and water. We can search the mythology and theology of waters and spin from them countless parallels and references that might be historically informative: stories of purification, death and rebirth, stories about the water of life and milk of earth, stories about water as the image of anima and the bowl as maternal womb or milk-swollen breast, stories about ruffled water as the spirit stirring from above, about the healing springs of Asclepius and Mary and the pool at Bethesda in the Gospel of John: all these stories of the psychology of water are relevant to this image, and yet this image ultimately refers  to itself. It is an attempt to fathom the imaginative power of matter that ultimately is our own imaginative power, a signpost on the way toward becoming ourselves.

Ólafur Gíslason

English translation Sarah Brownsberger

[1] Translation E. R. Farrell, Water and Dreams, 1993.