Between Two Spaces
by Johan Zimsen Kristiansen, art historian, mag.art
In their rendezvous with the visitors, sculptor Jóhan Martin Christiansen's (born in 1987) two large constructions of unprocessed angle bars, two sculptures, make their appearance, more than anything else, as open frames of understanding that pierce the customary way of thinking and the perception of standing on safe ground. With a percipient admixture of, among other things, white lilies, an array of set-up bottles containing peach juice, an open cardboard box and shiny cock rings of an intimate life, stationed on horizontally-lying plates of smoke-colored glass, it seems downright natural to apprehend this exhibition as a compact piece of total theater, as an accumulation, both sensuous and saucy at one and the same time. On some people’s faces, a smile might break forth when the shiny aids for maintaining a man’s potency and erection are taken into consideration. On second thought, though, the spectacle is a long way off from staged tableaus of fortuitously collected objects, small fragments taken from a reality, maybe the artist’s own, the meaning of which the visitors can freely dissect and chart out, dream their way into, muse on, construe. The sculptures are rather situating themselves, complexly, somewhere else.
Jóhan Martin Christiansen has previously been working with his eye trained on and a knowledge about older art’s motifs. And the exhibition’s lilies, as a constituent element, are similarly inscribed into an art-historical iconography. In medieval Italian painter Simone Martini’s (c. 1284-1344) altarpiece, Annunciation, from 1333, made for the Cathedral of Siena, there is a vase with precisely these flowers standing on the floor, as the archangel Gabriel suddenly reveals himself to the Virgin Mary and announces to her that she is going to give birth to God’s son. As such, the lilies represent purity in its most cultivated and symbolic form. Wreathed above by a sculpturally carved, gilded wooden frame and unfolding on a background of gold leaf, which has been shimmering in the gleam emanating from the cathedral’s many candles, this altarpiece’s religious scenery has stood forth with a presence and an evocative atmosphere all its own before the worshippers and has publicly conveyed its message.
On the other hand, the exhibition's cock rings do not figure into any extensive, clear and luxuriant pictorial tradition. Instead, these small objects are spending their own lives inside the private, intimate, and maybe even hidden spaces. In this vein, the artist is working altogether freely and simultaneously, without too many formal codes and constraints.
In the methodological use of precisely these very different extremes dwells a seed for describing and understanding the exhibition’s sculptures. In her work with literature, the semiotician and feminist Julia Kristeva (born in 1941) has scrutinized the ancient writer Menippus’s satirical texts as a so-called social activity. From ancient Greece and Italy, this distinctive writing praxis has been present over the course of centuries and has come to influence later narratives, ranging from medieval Christian and Byzantine stories to the literature our own time, with Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) and Georges Bataille’s (1897-1962) mystical dreamy writings serving as modern examples. According to Kristeva, the point of interest within the text as social activity is language, that both stages and represents on an extroverted plane, and addresses itself, in an inquiring mode, to its own inherent manner of connecting signs and creating expressions. With its ambivalent or split language, the text thus places itself between two spaces.[1]
There is a similar bifurcated artistic approach that comes to light in Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s two sculptures. Each of the angle bar constructions examines, in a certain way, both an own inner life and carries the expansive narrative forth in front of the visitor. Each of the sculptures gives rise to an immanent dynamic, by allowing the different embedded objects to work with and against each other, and simultaneously implicate and involve the visitor, who comes to be an active co-creator of the compact scene. For this reason, the sculptures cannot exhaustively be described from merely one single logical vantage point but must each, together and in extension of each other, be contemplated, sensated, and experienced as composite objects that operate in ways other than the customary manner of thinking. What has been painstakingly placed and what has been rejected? What is chaste and what is impure? What is filthy? It’s not quite possible to say as the sculptures unfold and interrogatively prod the lilies’ classic solid form and the metal-rings lack of the same. As the sculptures step out from themselves and take effect.
Another sign is the hastily made graffiti, God is Gay, which has been executed on a piece of transparent fabric and mounted onto one of the sculptures – a statement that Jóhan Martin Christiansen has also been working with, previously: for example, in a graphic work, from 2023, representing a crookedly contorted Saint Sebastian. As utterance, the graffiti roots Christiansen in his Faroese hometown of Tórshavn, which, for a period of time, established the frame around a struggle in the public space between one or more secret activists who wrote this very statement, God is Gay, on a wall, and wrote it again every time the homeowner removed the words from the wall. Just as it sophisticatedly points back to Danish gay art of the 1970s, which availed itself of a simplified agitprop strategy, which sharpened pictorial expressions and messages.[2]
In Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s version, there is no gilded, embossed medieval framing around the simplified, easily understandable words, God is Gay, but instead a fluorescent tube’s penetrating illumination, which supports and perhaps engenders a sense of presence in the visitors’ reflection. Letting life as a gay man, as outcast or outlaw, shimmer, blossom sensually, and publicly, in all its purity, between two spaces.
– March 2025
Translated by Dan A. Marmorstein
[1] Julia Kristeva: Semeiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse, p. 105. Points Essais. Éditions du Seuil, 1969
(1978).
[2] Kinna Poulsen: Jóhan Martin Christiansen: Leave Me Breathless, unpaginated. Essay accompanying the
exhibition, Leave Me Breathless, which presented graphic works by Jóhan Martin Christiansen at Danske
Grafikeres Hus from August 18 until September 10, 2023.
