The forest, what is that? Freedom? Yes, but freedom as disappearance, freedom as death. The figures are oddly clumsily drawn, almost as if by a child, but the picture has a roughness about it, something unrefined and wild, which contrasts with the clumsiness and turns it into something tender and frail. So much longing on such a small surface. And so much force, so much of the forest comes to expression here, in that the texture of the woodblock on which the image is carved and then pressed against paper is so visible. This is something Munch sought to get closer to in his art, the material aspect of the pictures he made, and something similar is found in Kiefer, who goes one step further and incorporates materials such as ashes, straw, sand and bits of wood directly into his pictures, and lets the arbitrary patterns and forms taken by poured molten lead form part of the picture. That for Munch the picture was also an object in itself, independent of what it represented, in other words its material and physical aspect, became especially clear during the final phase of his life, when he exposed his pictures to the elements and in that way let them be marked by nature – which was also part of the carelessness which characterised his relationship to his own pictures, that he painted quickly and often failed to complete his paintings, leaving them sketchy and unfinished.
Later Kiefer said that he had Munch’s catalogue raisonné and that he had been surprised the first time he looked through all the paintings, since so many of them, perhaps close to 70 per cent, were weak. He moderated his stance at once, saying that those paintings were more of a process, they were on their way somewhere, in contrast to the finished ones, the good ones, the masterpieces.
Kiefer also said that his assistant had been instructed to destroy certain of his works if he were to die suddenly, pieces that were unfinished or second-rate.
This made an impression on me, perhaps since I was unable to evaluate his pictures myself, all of them were so highly Kieferesque, so closely related to each other. Munch had evidently thought differently, in his will he left all of his pictures, the whole lot, to the Municipality of Oslo, and it is impossible to know how he viewed his own paintings, what in his eyes were failures, unfinished, what was below par, and what he was pleased with. Based on what I know about him, I think he didn’t really care, at least not during the final phase of his life, when he simply painted.
When I watched Kiefer work on that day in December and saw him pouring molten lead over an exceptionally beautiful painting of a snow-covered forest landscape, I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of ruining the pictures, whether he ever felt he should have stopped the process earlier. He laughed and said that all artists are iconoclasts.
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Two kilometres from where I am sitting and writing this, a British photographer has his studio. His name is Stephen Gill, and I was just up there visiting him, he wanted to show me what he has been working on for the last three years. Although Glemmingebro is a small village with around 300 inhabitants, I had met him just a couple of times before, at the kindergarten where we both had children and at a new year’s party. I knew that before he moved here he had lived and worked in London. I had been meaning to contact him for a long time, I don’t know very many people in this area with whom one can talk about art and pictures, at least not on his level, but I hadn’t figured out how to, I’m not very social and it is not in my nature to simply call someone. So I was happy when he called. He had sent me a text message with instructions on how to get there – drive up onto the low plain just outside the village, turn off on the gravel road at the end of it, after a kilometre the house would be on the right.
I drove for several kilometres inland without seeing any house that fitted the description, turned round in a driveway and drove back the way I had come. The fields stretched as far as I could see in every direction, pale yellow, winter green, wet brown. The sky was white, as it had been for several days. I had never driven this way before, and that alone, to find myself beyond the place I usually drove past, changed the landscape or gave me a different impression of it. It was as if the landscape belonged to the road and was laid out in particular fields and angles which my new position suddenly suspended, so that the feeling of plains, of kilometre-long flat fields, was resurrected in me as I sat behind the wheel peering in every direction as I drove slowly along.
It is often windy here, the great sails of wind that build up over the ocean meet no obstacles and come rushing in over the land, but today it was perfectly still, the light stood motionless in the air, and all the muted colours unfolded calmly in it.
Usually I don’t notice the light when it is as neutral as it was now, and I am nearly always busy with something at this time of day, so the sight of it while I was out of my usual setting reminded me of other mornings elsewhere, especially some mornings in Bergen when I had come home from a night shift and sat for a while in the apartment before going to bed, the light over Danmarksplass could be as calm and neutral as it was here now, when the jumble of cars, people and buildings didn’t suck me in but left me in peace.
A dark-clad figure stood outside one of the houses holding a cup. As I approached I saw that it was Stephen. I rolled down the window and asked where I could park.
– Anywhere you like, he said.
There were several buildings on the property, all of them slightly decayed.
– I’m so glad you could come, he said when I had parked and climbed out of the car.
– Good to see you, I said.
We went into a room that looked like a workshop and up the stairs to his studio on the first floor. It was large and open, with a ceiling several metres high. Bookcases full of photography books ran along the lower part of the walls, a huge table covered with books and photographs stood in the middle of the room, on the floor to the right of the table a large number of photos were laid out.
– Sit down, he said and pulled out a chair from a bench in front of the window.
– Would you like some coffee?
– Yes, please, I said, sitting down.
– Go ahead and smoke, if you want, he said. – I might have one myself.
His eyes were brown and warm, his body language eager. He was conspicuously kind, it was as if I was being enveloped in attentiveness, at the same time he talked continuously. He told me he had worked constantly when he was living in London, every day, completely absorbed in his projects, and that eventually he had had a breakdown. That’s when he had moved here, with his wife Lena and their two children. He also told me that he was unable to filter out information, it was a condition that had only been diagnosed relatively recently, until then he had thought it was like that for everybody. He explained it by giving an example. If he was withdrawing money from a cashpoint, he said, he wouldn’t be paying attention only to the text appearing on the screen, but to everything that was going on and being said in the vicinity. Everything was given the same weight, he was bombarded with information, relevant and irrelevant side by side, which he now believed he had used photography as a way of containing.
– In one of my books I tried to tone down all the information, to take mute and slow photos, that was in Japan, wait, let me show you . . .
He brought out a book and handed it to me. The title was Coming Up For Air. The photographs were truly muted, the colours were soft and the boundaries between them diffuse. There was something sub-aquatic about them, also in actual fact, for some of them depicted creatures in aquariums, and the gliding nebulousness that surrounded them was carried out into the streets of Tokyo, there was a pale pink umbrella, a light blue jacket, a gentle stream of people, a reddish seahorse suspended in the water.
The photos were beautiful but also unsettling because the beauty came from a world that was depicted accurately yet still wasn’t realistic, wasn’t the way things looked to me. It was like seeing images from someone else’s dream of Japan. Or perhaps images of how a deaf person would experience the country. Muted,
soundless, colours floating around in the streets.
– But that’s not what I really wanted to show you, he said. – I’ve been working on a project ever since we moved here, and I think it’s finished now. Would you like to have a look?
– Please, I said and was handed a large book with original photographs. They were exclusively photos from the area, taken within a radius of maybe ten kilometres, all of them pictures of nature. They offered no overview, had neither horizon nor sky, just dense forest spaces and motifs photographed at such close range that they often dissolved into patterns and surfaces, establishing striking correspondences between snails, stones, bark and the pelt of a wild boar, between antlers and branches, or between a stag’s legs and tree trunks, between leaves and currents in water, between currents in water and snails, stones, bark and the pelt of a wild boar. There were night-time photos of animals and birds, photographed with no human presence, so that a feeling that they had been seen as they were when they were by themselves arose and in a way spread to the other pictures, which thereby not only revealed a secret and hidden world – for I live here and have seen this landscape every day for more than six years without ever realising that this too existed here – but also opened it out towards the past and the future, that is as it was before we arrived and as it will be after we have gone.
A world of its own, complete in itself, independent of us, that is what he had depicted. But it wasn’t unaffected by us of course – one can imagine hikers barging in on the scene, loggers operating chainsaws, cars droning past on the roads, helicopters and planes whizzing over the trees. Humans were present but did not participate, they were like shadows from a shadow world, a noise, a rush.
This independence from us of course applies to all things, even those that are closest to us, but it is almost impossible to perceive and thereby acknowledge, since as soon as we see something, we filter it through our experience and understanding and in that way make it our own, a part of ourselves. Stephen’s photos re-established the distance to things by moving so close to them, and by upending our visual hierarchy, by circumventing the centre we automatically establish when we look at something.
The world devoid of humans, the separate reality of things, this is what the Norwegian author Tor Ulven so often wrote about. That I saw Ulven in these photographs may mean either that Stephen and Ulven were seeking the same thing, or that Ulven has influenced my view of art and nature so deeply that it was his gaze I saw and his thoughts I was thinking as I stood looking at Stephen’s pictures. For that is an essential feature of all significant art, it not only shows us something but simultaneously teaches us to see what it shows us elsewhere and in other objects and phenomena.
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Although photography is different from painting, and to an even greater degree from literature, the problems it raises are essentially the same. How form determines what can be shown or said. Stephen talked about how classic photography selects what is important, how it makes something central, and the coercion this entails. And how the photographer himself so easily comes to occupy a place in the photo, through its composition, at the same time that composition is an unavoidable element of the picture. I realised that nearly everything he did had to do with getting away from this. He sought to get away from the centre, away from himself, and he sought out the accidental, processes he couldn’t control. He had buried a series of photographs of an area of east London and left them in the ground for a few days; what happened to them became a part of the physical photographs and connected them to the place in a very different and more concrete way than the light did. In another series he had filled the camera body with dust and debris from the place he was working, including ants, and these appeared as shadows in the resulting photos. A third series was taken by a pond, and as with the forest photos there were none that provided an overview, merely parts and fragments. Some of the parts were microscopic, of life within drops of water, others were of people who lived by the pond, they were blurred and dim, for he shot the photos with the lens covered in water from the same pond. From a book entitled Archaeology in Reverse he showed me photos of things which still haven’t come into being, the motifs are from one of those peripheral parts of London where nature, industry and the streets lie side by side, and which in themselves seem unfinished or indeterminate but which Stephen has opened up still further by focusing on concrete objects or events which aren’t objects or events in themselves but on their way to becoming so. Another book he showed me was made by a Russian artist, it was really an exhibition catalogue, and it showed pictures of objects being used for something other than what they were originally intended for. Forks which have been turned into an antenna, a fur which has become a hat, a metal pipe which has become a toy pistol.
It was as if what I had been reflecting on these last few years with regard to art and literature had suddenly been made visible, as if that was what Stephen was showing me. For where something doesn’t yet exist but is coming into being, that is the essential place in all creation, that is where you have to get to, and the job consists as much of getting there as of the actual work done once you are there. And one thing becoming another, transformation, that is art’s method. The blue pigment mixed with oil which becomes the sky, the sentence which becomes the motionlessly suspended cloud formation, the actor who becomes Macbeth. It is also the method of physical reality – a smooth and round cell divides and divides again and turns into the mane of a horse, a horse dies and rots and turns into soil. And it is the method of our categorising gaze – a wooden board gets four legs and becomes a stool, the stool gets a back and becomes a chair. The chair is painted and becomes a throne which in all its ordinariness there in the painting still signifies God, by the same logic that in Kiefer’s work turns a hospital gown into an angel, a bathtub into an ocean, a table with coffee cups and the remains of a meal into the ship of the Argonauts.
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Eventually we went over to the other house, along a three-metre-long bridge connecting them and down into the kitchen, where Lena was, and where we ate chicken soup for lunch. They told me that their neighbour had died the day before, an older woman who had lived in a dilapidated house just beyond theirs. A huge black dog pushed its head against my knees and tried to lay it in my lap. They let it out and it ran down the road, but soon it was at the door on the other side and came into the house again. I told them about our dog, which we finally had to give away, what a relief that had been. Then I told them about the Munch exhibition I was preparing and invited them to the opening. They had seen a fantastic Munch exhibition in London, they said, the self-portraits in particular had been striking. I told them this exhibition wouldn’t be fantastic, that it contained only unknown works that didn’t look like Munch’s.
As I was leaving, I stopped in front of a picture on the wall, a print.
– It’s Peter Doig, Stephen said. – Do you like him?
I nodded.
– He’s interested in Munch, Stephen said. – Have you heard of the Group of Seven?
– No?
– They were a group of Canadian landscape painters who broke with naturalism in the 1920s and who were influenced by Munch, among others. Doig grew up in Canada and many of his pictures were inspired by the Group of Seven. So Munch may have had a kind of third-hand influence on him.
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The first thing I did when I got home was to browse through my books of Peter Doig’s pictures. I had never thought before that they had anything to do with Munch. Perhaps mainly because Doig’s pictures belong to our time, I thought as I leafed through them. They relate to our reality, a world I have in common with them, that is what I saw and felt: I saw a picture of a house on a grey day, and a Sunday mood of emptiness and housing developments rose in me. There was little separating what the picture represented from my own experience of it. But what did that qualit
y, the contemporaneity of it, consist of?
I looked at a painting entitled Blotter, from 1993. It depicts a boy dressed in a quilted jacket and mittens, he is standing on an ice-covered pond, the landscape around him is covered in snow, a narrow road leads past the pond and behind it stands a forest, sparse as deciduous forests are in winter. There is water on the ice, and the boy is standing with his head bent staring down at the surface.
It was very recognisable, I might have stood the same way as a boy, and I must have seen many boys standing like that, although I couldn’t remember anyone specifically, for a central aspect of this picture is that it shows something from the world which we don’t remember, one of the moments that don’t stick in our minds but we still recognise when we see them. Typical of many of Doig’s pictures from the 1990s is that they are emptied of information; they might depict empty houses or empty landscapes which at first glance don’t seem to have anything noteworthy about them, as if they sought to discover just how little information is needed in order for a feeling to arise. Due to the lack of information the pictures are mysterious and often faintly menacing, many seem connected with meaninglessness and loss of the past or death. But also with boredom and triviality. If you look at them for a long time, however, things might start to happen, often in the planes surrounding the motif, for example the verticality of the tree trunks, a shape found in so many of Doig’s pictures, or the materiality of the painted snow – or, as in this picture, the materiality of the painted water. The patterns, the distortions, the irregularities. The picture moves between the commonplace and the foreign without the foreignness becoming unusual, on the contrary it merges with the emptiness, or perhaps is the very thing which expresses the emptiness.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 6
