A Different Art Experiense – About Jóhan Martin Christiansen's exhibition TRACES
by Nils Ohrt
Autumn 2016 will see an exhibition of works by young Faroese artist Jóhan Martin Christiansen at The National Gallery of the Faroe Islands. These are, however, not artworks in the traditional sense. The materials are humble, plaster and cloth diapers, and given that the form is simplicity embodied, the pieces present as soft-spoken bordering on the self-effacing. The cloth diapers that have been stitched together are dyed in shades of grey and soft hues, and the plaster reliefs hold impressions of materials as humble as cardboard, canvas, PVC pipes, corrugated metal, grass and branches, which, furthermore, are often worn or weathered.
The ‘works’ on show also differ from the traditional in other ways. They were created in the course of spring 2016 and were tailored to the museum’s special exhibition space, Listaskálin. More significantly, however, the exhibition has a clear spatial air thanks to the three large patchwork ‘sails’ of diapers, which in a staggered arrangement hang free in the room separating it into smaller, yet undefined sections. This lends an air of installation to the exhibition, a characteristic that is further underscored by the unorthodox display of a series of plaster reliefs placed leaning against the wall on legs made out of rebar.
Installation as an art form dates back to the early 20th century, when it was launched by modernists such as Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky. In its nature installation is related to sculpture, but embodies a paradox compared to the traditional arts. Given that you walk into an installation and move around in it, visitors are no longer spectators in the usual sense at a suitable distance from an individual, delimited piece. The installation constitutes an artistic whole, which envelopes the visitor, it stands as a modernist heir to the romantic dream of the world as a piece of total art.
As the visitor becomes part of the installation, the attention dedicated to each individual component is weakened. And this constitutes the other side of the paradox of installations. As the focused gaze, which characterises the traditional experience of art, recedes into the background, the experience becomes more reminiscent of our acquisition of architecture, which we take in habitually and absentmindedly, meaning through regular and unfocused transit in and around it. Of course architecture, especially of the spectacular stripe, can be experienced as an aesthetic image, however, when we start to use a building, the image changes as the room slowly, but surely takes over.
There is, of course, a limit to how much habit one can build up over the course of one or two visits to an art installation at a special exhibition. Nonetheless, given that the space of the exhibition room is also brought into play, there is more of an appeal to the visitor’s movement and orientation than to concentrated acquisition of an individual piece by standing still in front of it. When you wander around an installation in this manner, acquisition takes on more of the characteristic of a nearly imperceptible deposition of layer upon layer of impressions, emotions, moods and thoughts.
The leisurely experience of the installation is especially evident in Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s case, where the soft-spoken and fleeting traits invite to a drip-by-drip acquisition. The humble materials in the grey tone scale are paired with rectangular shapes. Although they possess a certain irregularity, there is still an insistence on them, as they are expressed in the large irregular and ripped sails, which are made up of numerous squares, and that also contributes to making their size less overwhelming. Moreover, as there is also plenty of space around each individual component of the installation and plenty of white wall in between, the whole can only be described as highly minimalist.
The traces of material
Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation is reminiscent of American post-minimalism from the latter half of the 1960s. As the name indicates, this current viewed itself as an extension of minimalism, however, it distanced itself from the predecessor’s clean geometry, machine-like surfaces, industrial serialisation traits and pure formalism. Post-minimalism, represented by people such as Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, sought to include the world as art material without jeopardising the tightness of minimalism and thereby its message of an impersonal and autonomous expression. Anchoring in concrete reality was expressed in the use of alternative materials such as textile, felt, plaster, rubber, metal, glass or soil in a raw and unprocessed state. Actual experiments with materials were also on the agenda in post-minimalism’s more dynamic and sensuous furthering of minimalism.
In Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s earlier art, the post-minimalist air was not as pronounced as in the present exhibition. His works from 2011-12 are characterised by readymades, artworks as a combination of everyday utility objects, and thanks to their fantastical traits storytelling became part of the artistic expression. Since 2013 Jóhan Martin Christiansen has increasingly shifted to working materials such as plaster and cotton, he thereby acts as an artist in a more traditional sense. The diapers are, of course, readymades in a sense, however, they have been worked in a manner that is related to the way in which the canvas of a painting is worked.
Given that Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s earlier readymades consisted in utilitarian objects from his everyday, they had quite subjective and hermetic traits, which in themselves made them more difficult to assimilate for the broader public. On the other hand, these were very ordinary objects, which the rest of us were also familiar with from our own lives and that meant they could trigger memories, feelings and moods and generate a platform for our own fantasies. This subjective perspective has now been exceeded and made more accessible with the present installation’s work with prints from the surroundings on (nearly) unprocessed materials such as plaster and cotton.
Most concretely, these prints apply to the plaster reliefs with traces of assorted materials from the surroundings of the artist residence in Tórshavn where Jóhan Martin Christiansen, by agreement with Listafelag Føroya (The Faroe Islands Art Association), lived and worked in the spring of 2016. The imprints the plaster received from cardboard, corrugated iron, branches etc. have resulted in both traditional ‘flat’ reliefs as well as more sculptural versions, which, mounted on rebar stakes, bring to mind primitive army standards. Given that most of the relief materials are worn and weathered, it is not merely their more or less dilapidated structures, but also stains and discolouring that have been transferred to the plaster. Precisely this air of decay brings to mind the Italian ‘pauper’s’ version of post-minimalism, Arte Povera, from around 1970; its use of objets jetés, waste materials, was also a critique of consumer society’s use and discard culture.
Traces of the surroundings are more indirectly transferred in the part of Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s sails made from cloth diapers – though these actually have the very concrete function of absorbing the bodily effluents of infants! Or rather had, because with the advent of single-use diapers old fashioned cloth diapers have become more neutral, at least for people under the age of 40. In Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation, the diapers have departed even further from their practical significance and become parts of a sail. On the other hand, it is precisely their absorbency, thanks to their loose weave and dual layers, that makes them well-suited to dying. Here it has been done with liquids such as ink, tea and cooking oil with a pinch of salt. Yet it is not the liquids themselves that are referenced in the various degrees of colouring in the areas in between or within each area.
Traces of light
So, what kind of imprints are they then? Given that the various sail patches flit between a whole spectrum of hues ranging from white to black, it is light that to a greater and lesser degree has left its traces. And light is also more immediately present with the way it clings to and shimmers on the surface of the loosely woven cotton cloth. The world that peeks through in the otherwise highly abstract installation contains a polarity, given that it sets the physical material, even in its worn and battered state, up against the intangible and immaterial light. Nevertheless, this polarity does not get the last word, because the sails are indeed all about light, but their soft colours and grey-tone scale constitute a gradual transition from black to white and thereby indicate a whole that unites the two opposites.
The reliefs too with there traces of the surroundings are part and parcel of a greater whole. Given that the impressions are so weak, the light acquires a decisive role, when its changing play across the surfaces creates new and shifting patterns. The physical imprint is hereby transformed into the more diffuse impression in the dissolution of material, which the white plaster is already hinting at. This imbues the reliefs with a kinship with French ‘imprint art’, impressionism, from the late 19th century referenced by Jóhan Martin Christiansen himself. Claude Monet’s late works, in particular, dissolve physical reality in a shimmering atmosphere created by the coloured comma strokes hues and contrasts.
If you stand between the installation’s sails and look up, you might feel transported to the passages of a Middle Eastern bazaar covered by sun sails. According to Jóhan Martin Christiansen, such inspiration has indeed been at play, it dates from a trip to Damascus in 2009. Regardless of such inspiration, the sails are abstract in nature, given that they consist in a compositions of greyish squares and squares in soft hues, and are also part of a spatial arrangement of a strictly formal nature.
With their considerable height of about four metres, the sails have an emotional impact of a sublime nature, which inserts itself into the otherwise unobtrusive installation. Spectators do, after all, find themselves moving down between the tall sails and are forced to look up. And then perhaps recognisable reality rears its head again, because against the backdrop of the historically close ties between Faroese art and landscape, viewers are easily tempted to see ‘ravines’ between greyish ‘mountainsides’ in the sails and the surrounding space. Or in the torn sails’ potential reference to shipwrecks and untimely death.
On the other hand, Jóhan Martin Christiansen belongs to a generation who, understandably, distances itself from the ‘Faroesefication’ to which even contemporary Faroese art is subjected, especially from the Danish perspective. The sublime dimension of his installation absolutely holds its own without mountains or storms, and that the contents is not necessarily Faroese is also expressed in the cultural reliefs’ barbaric ‘army standards’, which transport us out into the wide world and deep in history. This also applies to a series of reliefs standing at nearly two and a half metres tall with an air verging on something out of a cult.
Traces of art
In the installation movement, and hence our body, is the starting point for taking in the piece. Taking in this art does, however, not have to be limited by the museum visitor’s sedate and deferential wandering. The movement can certainly be more imaginative, perhaps like a tableau, ballet or dance, indeed, Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation practically invites this type of activities. Given that its character is not merely spatial, but even suggestive ranging from the textural ripples in the materials’ surfaces to the more dramatic elements consisting in the ripped sail and the army standards.
It was therefore also from the outset Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s intention to supplement his installation with an epic dimension consisting in a 15-minute video work titled Hidden Faces. The artist came up with the idea and scenography, while the performers are two dancers: Faroese Búi Rouch and Italian Alfredo Zinola, who Jóhan Martin Christiansen asked the Danish stage director Christoffer Berdal to instruct. And the video piece is, of course, in black and white, partly out of consideration for the installation’s grey-tone scale, and partly because the absence of colour confers a distance between the video piece and visible reality. Finally, it was important for Jóhan Martin Christiansen, as an eager cineast, to signal kinship with the film-noir tradition, from Robert Wienes’ Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet (1920) to La Jetée (1962) by the instructor Chris Marker, who is among the artist’s favourites.
In his scenography Jóhan Martin Christiansen has limited himself to textiles, and though it probably draws on the installation as a starting point, they are not identical. The most significant difference consists in that one of the sails in the video piece is spread out on the floor as a billowing landscape setting a scene for symbols and curious actions. For the same reason, the video work has no illustrative character in relation to the installation. As a stand-alone piece, the video builds on and explores in a mystical-poetic manner the space created by the textiles, just like the work to an equal degree is all about the cloth itself both as material and riddle. This occurs in a process that spans four ‘acts’: The Passage, The Conflict, In the Riddle and Melancholia – and here the final one contains a nod to the famous copper print (1514) by German renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer.
This allusion to the old master is not the exhibition’s only art history reference. Another is found in the bicycle handle one of the ‘army standards’ is fitted with, and which refers to Picasso’s readymade of a bull’s head (1942). And speaking of art history, the post-minimalism Jóhan Martin Christiansen draws on has also become part of that history with its nearly five decades of existence. That post-minimalism is relatively new in the Faroe Islands is another matter, where an artist like Oggi Lamhauge (b. 1971) has practiced it with a hint of land art. In the international context, post-minimalism appears to have been enriched with textile installations in recent years and thereby have acquired a spatial aspect. In this context the relatively major role the sails play in Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation is entirely in line with this trend.
When a young artist like Jóhan Martin Christiansen works within an aged frame, which we are forced to admit that post-minimalism has become, it is of course because he is drawn to its aesthetic. But it has also become more than acceptable to rummage around in the toolbox of art history, now that it is no longer the purpose of art to express the future in images of a continually new, unseen and preferably shocking nature, as was the ambition during modernism up to the 1960s.
Shock has today become part of the everyday in a world that, thanks to the ceaseless deluge of information in the media, is experienced as increasingly impenetrable and opaque. For the same reason, contemporary art has given up on its educational, even prophetic role, and in its ‘post-modern’ incarnation it is imbued with a touch of sophisticated play and double-entendres. It means references to other art play a central role, along the lines of literary intertextuality, as first put forward by French scholar Julia Kristeva in 1969.
Art has, of course, always referenced other art, this was also the case with modernism, though it may not have been willing to admit it. Today, however, image references have been elevated to the central device of art, which in principle could lead it to close in on itself. On the other hand, what is interesting is not the references in themselves, but what they can be used for. To a degree, Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation constitutes a post-minimalist experiment in materials. At the same time, this piece of artistic basic research is of a highly stylised and fleeting nature and, ultimately, all about the light.
Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation is, however, more than a stage. It is a space where we encounter the essence of the world, one that is all about materiality and the immaterial, about impressions made and impressions received, about matter and light. Not as opposites, but as a whole, as a harmony even – a harmony of aesthetic nature, which turns the experience of Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s installation into a meditation.
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Nils Ohrt, Mag.art. in Art History, Aarhus Universitet
Director of the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands2011-19
From the SPOR [TRACES] catalogue, published by the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, September 2016
