Vigfus Sigurgeirsson, Landscape, 1929, © Vigfus Sigurgeirsson.

Vigfus Sigurgeirsson, Landscape, 1929, © Vigfus Sigurgeirsson.

Olga Bergmann and Anna Hallin, Expedition, 2007, © Courtesy of the artists.

Sigurdur Gudjonsson, Deathbed, 2006, © Courtesy of the artist.

Sigurdur Gudjonsson, Breed, 2007, © Courtesy of the artist.

Sigurdur Gudjonsson, Untitled, 2007, © Courtesy of the artist.

Vigfus Sigurgeirsson, Landscape, 1929, © Vigfus Sigurgeirsson.

Vigfus Sigurgeirsson, Landscape, 1929, © Vigfus Sigurgeirsson.

Vigfus Sigurgeirsson, Landscape, 1929, © Vigfus Sigurgeirsson.

Olafur Eliason, Jökla Series, 2004, © Olafur Eliasson.

Icelandic Love Corporation, Tent Lady, 2008, Photo: Bernhard Kristinn Ingimundorson, © ILC.

Icelandic Love Corporation, Dynasty, 2007, Photo: Bernhard Kristinn Ingimundorson, © ILC.

Pétur Thomsen, AL9_278, Imported Landscape, Karahnjukar, Iceland, 2006, © Pétur Thomsen.

Spessi, Location, 2005, © Spessi.

Sigurdur Gudjonsson, Host, 2004, © Courtesy of the artist.

Kristjan Gudmundsson, Blue Transmission, 2006, © Courtesy Galleri Riis, Oslo.

Centre for Fine Arts
10, rue Royale | Koningsstraat 10
Brussels
02 507 82 00
Terarken
Dreams of the Sublime and Nowhere In Contemporary
Icelandic Art
February 27-April 25, 2008

Dreams of Sublime
To travel north has always been a challenge, and the North, and Iceland in particular, has through the ages been terra incognita in the eyes of the outside world, a place of nowhere where “everything is possible.” As a place of rapid geological changes caused by volcanic eruptions and moving glaciers, Iceland evokes a mixture of wonder and fear, a feeling of sublime, in the imaginary of most Europeans. The glacier-volcano, Snæfellsjökull, where Jules Verne’s travellers began their journey to the centre of the earth, has always represented the ultimate mysteries while the volcano Hekla embodied the gates of hell.

A basic characteristic of the sublime is that it evokes a sentiment of pleasure and pain. Icelandic landscape in particular speaks to the Kantian ‘dynamically sublime’, where the awesome power and threat of nature calls forth a feeling for our distinctive capacities as moral beings, namely, freedom and the power of reason, as Emily Brady argues in her article The Sublime and Contemporary Aesthetics. One could also say that the wilderness of the highlands is a prime example of the classical notion of the sublime as represented in the black and white photographs by Vigfus Sigurgeirsson and described in much quoted A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke, who set out the definition of the sublime: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

The north is also synonymous of unspoiled nature, vast landscapes and changes in colours and light. The strong dynamic presence of unspoiled land conveys a strong sense of nature’s Otherness that has stimulated and inspired a number of artists, as discussed further by Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir later in this volume. As an imagined space the highlands have a long tradition in the cultural history of Iceland as being a place of darkness and death, a space on the margin of society, hosting the "Other." Although, the vast highlands had no special meaning, it had no religious, historical or mythical narrative attached to it, no interpretive context that would enable appreciation, it was pure vacuity, solitude and silence.

“One of the biggest reason for me to be here is the powerful influence of the landscape”, claims the American artist Roni Horn, who has used Iceland “as an open-air studio of unlimited scale and newness,” and as a place to “taste experience”.3 According to her being nowhere is one of the most rare, vulnerable and wonderful experiences one can have and Iceland is the prime supplier of “nowhere” in the world, which is, as she has pointed out, an endangered resource. However, the romantic striving for communion with nature characteristic of so many of the intimate works Horn has created from her Iceland experience are far from the concerns of most Icelandic artists. Her subtle interpretations are distant from the loud dynamic creativity of most young Icelandic artist who taste their experience of their unspoiled homeland with a pinch of salt. Their relationship with the island as a home, geographical space and identity is complex and not easily grasped by the foreign observer, as it is constructed around many layers if visual and literary discourses and simultaneously reacting to the changing place of Iceland in global ecological and political context.

Nature as a stage or a medium, as a subject to mediate, is an issue/ topic that Icelandic contemporary artists have been dealing with increasingly. The controversy surrounding the construction of a new hydroelectric power station and dam in the highlands of Iceland, northeast of Vatnajökull, the Karahnjukar project, created a public awareness of the existence of a different kind of space in Icelandic nature. This space could be called “Nowhere” or just “Something else” The public debate that followed triggered off some challenging art works that opened Icelandic art scene and made it more political than ever. Icelandic artist became aware of global questions of what it means to belong to a place, as represented in Dynasty (2007), an ironic fable told by Icelandic Love Corporation, where three society ladies enjoy privileged moments on “the Earth last snow caps”.

Confronting the viewer to the beauty of destruction through intense documentation of the “scraping off” the pristine layer of landscape, Petur Thomsen claims to be searching for representing the Kantian sublime. By visualising the gigantic intervention into the land from a neutral but monumental point of view, he is asking questions on intrinsic qualities of nature, and how to value water and land. In a recent interview, Thomsen claims to be openly political in his approach. “Images should have a purpose other than being seductive”. His aim is to deal with an issue and try to get people to ask questions about their world. However, Thomsen’s photographs representing nature transformed by industrialisation are not photographs of a crime scene, but a double-edged sublimation of a landscape in its most magnificent and frightening visions of it. By introducing a global understanding of the feeling of sublime, Petur Thomsen is contributing to a recent notion of sublime in an environmental and aesthetical context, following the steps of many critical contemporary photographic artists today delivering the fact that all around the world, even in the pristine highlands of Iceland, we have to face the invasive landmarks of global economy.

Extension
of the Human (Eye)
Over the last decade, Olafur Eliasson has explored in his multiple installations and photographic series the notion of how our bodies hold to the world. He takes as point of departure the concept of intertwining vision and movement as defined in Merleau — Ponty’s idea of the body as being both perceiver and perceived.

In his Glacier series (1999), he uses the neutral but all embracing “scientific” vantage point, experienced through a technological extension of the human eye to mediate optical and scientific distances. Limits between art and science are being deliberately blurred, the frame of visual landscape aesthetics is wiped out, as if we could only appreciate and believe in the existence of a place through technology, or as Eliasson was reminding us of the fact that nature becomes essentially knowable through the intermediary of the culture of science.

His cartographic investigation of nature through the limits of human perception, is exemplified by the aerial views of the Jökla series (2004). Here Eliasson exposes the riverbed as a simple representational layer, a fragile surface ready to be ripped off as a thin skin and disappear.

In his most recent work Jökulsvelgir (2007), Olafur continues to mediate on the “brute being” of the world. Once again prolongating the human body through the means of a complex technical installation, this time pointing his lens at natural phenomena invisible to the human eye; like a scientist with his microscope. “You never see the bottom, you only hear the sound... The water that runs through the melting glaciers is ancient — in a way you are watching time.”

In this statement Eliasson pays debt to the generation of artists that constructed their thought in the 70s. Hreinn Fridfinnsson and Kristjan Gudmundsson, key figures of the conceptual movement put Icelandic artists on the map. Preoccupied with scientific units of measurements, they started visualising and meditating universal concepts as distance, time and space, in a dry minimalist fashion that opened up different ways of making art for the generations to come. In his work For light, Shadow and Dust (2007), Fridfinnsson represents time as duration in the ephemeral transparency characteristic for his work.

“Time, or notions of time, are always compelling. I read what comes my way about physics and mathematics, but I read as one who is uninitiated...My interest in the essence of time is serious, but my dealing with time is not knowledge-based; it’s more exploratory and feeling-based.”, says Fridfinnsson in a recent interview, describing his approach of stripping time elements down to degree zero. Sharp and transparent like broken glass, his art is painful as a cutting edge, and sublime in its presence.

The exploratory approach is also the characteristic of many of Kristjan Gudmundsson’s works. His painting of the Earth’s specific gravity reveals his desire of materialising distances and measurements. “I read in a pocket book that the specific gravity of the Earth is 5,52 and thought: wow! — it would be nice to paint a picture which had the same specific gravity because then I would have painted all the countries and the oceans in one picture— the whole lot so to speak.” Or like in Once around the sun, the book that contains as many dots as it takes seconds to takes the Earth to make a single orbit of the sun. In this case he is dealing with the movement of the unlimited.

While interested in the nature of things, Gudmundsson is not interested in natural places or in nature per se, but in the space where all emotions have been drained out. But even though emotional expression is excluded in most of his works, the absence of emotion, it’s apparent straight forwardness and ironic undertone, creates the opposite effect, and takes the viewer into the unlimited dimensions of cosmos and questions of life and death.

A contemporary memento mori, the monumental Blue transmission (1988) is an example of his interest in basic raw materials of drawing, paper and ink. The work consists of five rolls of white industrial paper, each measuring 126 x 90 cm. Above the end rolls hang two bottles of blue ink that slowly drip into the rolls. The ink is liberated and after some 35 hours the bottles are empty. By introducing the element of time including the classical symbolic meaning of the hourglass and the modern institutionalised clinical transfusion, Gudmundsson creates a strong metaphor of life and death.

Drama and Disguise
Interdisciplinary practice, diversity of expression, has been read as one of the characteristics of young Icelandic artists. They have even been called “intrinsically hybrid” being forever on the move. Crossover of individual art genres and interaction between art, theatre and music is not only the hallmark of young artists like Ragnar Kjartansson, Sigurdur Gudjonsson and the art collective Icelandic Love Corporation, but also a characteristic of many of the older generation like Halldor Asgeirsson who was inspired by the Fluxus way of blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 60s and 70s.

Even though Asgeirsson’s lava performances are influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s introvert theory of the phenomenology of the poetic imagination and his analysis of the imagination of matter and the shape of things, the way Asgeirsson stages his performances and attacks the matter, the lava itself with a burning flame, is more performative than philosophical. Conceptually dealing with creativity of alchemy, his actions are situated in the realm of the performance, with the artist in the role of the alchemist transforming the essence of things.

Ragnar Kjartansson, who grew up in the theatre, slides like an actor into different identities, claiming his favourite paintings to be stage sets. In his month long installation The Great Unrest (2005) executed in an abandoned youth clubhouse few steps from the busy road nr 1, some 150 km distance from the capital, he staged one of his favourite characters, the troubadour Rassi Prump in a colourful dreamlike broken TV set. Sitting on a broken stage, where so many local performers have been playing through the years, dressed as a knight, he screams his melancholic pain.

The abandoned appearance of the place is mixed with an uncanny feeling oscillating between melancholy and sublime. His use of the solitary human exposed on a deserted stage evokes a feeling of ironic loneliness, like in his most recent video loop God (2007). There he performs the role of the sad clown, the lonely crooner framed by his orchestra and a pink satin backdrop. His tender lines Sorrow conquers happiness become insupportable in their endless loop.

Repetition is an element that also assumes a crucial role in the work of Icelandic Love Corporation (ILC), a collective of the artists, Eirun Sigurdardottir, Joni Jonsdottir and Sigrun Hrolfsdottir. Their body of work fluctuates from one genre to another, performances, video installations, photographs, sculptural objects — always left open for further experiments, where “everything can happen”. Through the concept of masquerade, distinction between documentation and actual works are being blurred and props and costumes used in performances flap between being art objects and just props. Costumes are always the key element of identification, like in a theatre performance as well as a way of equalizing their status as individual artists, underlining the symbolic function of dress as well as the idea of being an extension of skin.

Ready to be reused and reshaped, their different actions are linked into each other like the crochets that have become one of their visual emblems. The Tent Ladies are a logical continuation of the idea of the wearable art piece that can be transformed, dislocated, relocated and refashioned like an old dress. Even though many of their actions seem light hearted and humorous their works always yield deep personal critical believes in the positive force of creation and the power of mind. “Here we can photocopy money if we run short on cash,” Eirun says and points to a photocopy machine in their recent retrospective at the Reykjavik Art Museum.

Desire for Continuity
In a period of intense global shifts, abstractly mediated through international media and mobile networks which are radically reforming our contemporary notions of places, it is not always easy to get a grasp on the deep social and geographical changes happening in front of your eyes.

When Daniel Thorkell Magnusson asks ironic, critical questions in his photographic series of Icelandic landscape about national identity, language and national symbols, Spessi is observing places, with quiet subtlety, in the role of the invisible photographer who traces the frail border between the ordinary and the extraordinary. However, pointing the lens at the ordinary makes it already extraordinary as it actively disrupts the balance between art and non-art, between everyday and imaginary.

Spessi’s photographic series Location is indeed a very real and at the same time dream-like travel into the nowhere. His images reveal strong desire for continuity, for linking things and places together, avoiding narrative mechanisms, and just following his own visual pattern that could be described as based on the staccato rhythm of modern architectural spaces, belonging to the visual formalism inherent to Nordic latitudes.

Hrafnkell Sigurdsson intertwines natural elements with the urban and plays with visual confusion between those two in seductive images that seem to be taken in the middle of nowhere, but are usually shot just in the middle of the street or taken at the peripheries of the city. In his much acknowledged Tent Series he played with confusion between nature and culture in western societies, how we have to start the wilderness hike in the department store.

The urban human creates 1,5 kg of detritus per day. The monumentality of garbage, seductive surface of the carrier bag that ends as a container for our waist, glossy surface of the photograph, and the loaded symbolism of the triptych are the elements the viewer has to deal with in his recent photographic series Conversions. Always focusing on the seductiveness of surfaces and our fascination for the computer screen, Sigurdsson throws at us all the contradictions of contemporaneity and the hypocrisy of ecological discourse and takes us to places we might not want to go to.

Inspired by science fiction and the iconography of scientific literature, Olga Bergmann’s Panorama leaves the doubt; is it a humorous or frightening dream like vision of future landscapes, or is it a visual exploration of what Bruno Latour calls the life supports that make our existence possible? In Expedition, a video sculpture made in wood with incorporated screens, created with Anna Hallin, for the Seal Observation Center at Hvammstangi in North Iceland, the artists are taking further their exploration of the hybrid world of natural science extended through technology.

Dreams from Nowhere
Things do not remain in place in Steina Vasulka’s floating video patterns, which turn liquid making patterns as running water. “My love affair with lava comes from early childhood, when elves and trolls were still a part of reality”, evokes Steina Vasulka, who with her husband Woody Vasulka, they pioneered in the development of video art in the 1960s. “I remember if I stared long enough at a lava field, it started moving, even making sounds. Many years later I took some potent mescaline in Herdisarvik, and was able to revoke those childhood memories and the immense exuberance that goes with it. It is a great challenge to get landscape, frozen for centuries to move, yes dance. If god is everywhere, his presence certainly is most tangible in lava and moss.”

Sigurdur Gudjonsson also uses music as an important element in his broken narratives. He plays on the whiteness and the darkness of Icelandic landscape and the violence of the weather as setting for his dreamlike video episodes vibrating between the timid and temperamental.

“The experience of the sublime is, almost by definition, one that subverts order, coherence, a structured organization.”

Is the North, the last place on earth where mysteries and dreams are taking place? “Politics from now on, will be a selection of the technology of climate-control”: Bruno Latour is citing Peter Sloterdijk who is asking us “to radically modify our point of view on what it means to inhabit a place.” Icelandic artists have moved fast. Blurring the limits between objectivity and subjectivity, between genres and expression, documentation and performance, their works are opaque images and objects surrounded by ambivalence and doubt. Even Gudmundsson’s monumental installation is not an object; it is a drawing, ink on paper.

— Æsa Sigurjonsdottir

Sigurjonsdottir is an art historian, living and working in Paris and Reykjavik.
Independent curator and researcher, she is currently Dr. Kristjan Eldjarn Research Fellow, National Museum Iceland and lecturer at the University of Iceland and Iceland Art Academy. She published with Olafur Pall Jonsson Art, Ethics and Environment. A Free Inquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.