NATURE, TRACES AND MEMORIES
By Kim Simonsen
Sentence 10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art (1967)
Land art was part of the conceptual art environment in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. The piece Spiral Jetty (1970) composed of six thousand tonnes of rock shaped like a spiral in Great Salt Lake, Utah, is Robert Smithson's most legendary work. What characterises this example of Land art is that it carries within another time, that the time when our culture no longer exists is woven into its fundamental structure.
In parallel, Land art often consists in creations that decay and perish before our eyes, many are on a massive scale and have a longer perspective than is the case with traditional art works. These pieces are not exclusively anthropocentric, they are also marked by an environment where timespan and forces of nature are preconditions for their existence. These pieces remind us that our perspective is short, that we humans have been allocated but a brief moment on Earth. The works bring into focus that all was here before humans came into existence, and all will remain after we are gone.
So how is Land art linked to Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s pieces? Closely, in my opinion, although Jóhan Martin does not engage directly in Land art. He does, however, work with objets trouvés, found objects, dying and sewing together cloth diapers and making plaster casts of cardboard boxes, which, just like the diapers, were exposed and weathered in Faroese nature.
Jóhan Martin’s works are often hypertactile and poetic, they are not merely about patina they are, like Spiral Jetty, minimalist concept pieces that engage with the surroundings. They are prints of environments, landscapes and nature, which speak to our feelings without compromising. Both Land art and Jóhan Martin’s works remind us that landscapes are not static, they are fragile and influenced by everything that comes into contact with them.
MATERIALITY
Jóhan Martin’s tactile and poetic textile works are made out of unusual materials. He dyes cloth diapers with ink, acrylic paint, tea, red wine, rapeseed oil and salt, and the plaster works are casts of cardboard, plastic, gras, rust, stone, canvas and so on. This artistic attitude and form can readily be related to what art and culture researchers today term the materiality turn. Materiality appears to be on the agenda again and can be traced within visual art, literature, film and other art forms where the interest in textiles, both as exploration and art configuration is on the rise.
This trend has already expanded the scene and our worldview. For example, the human is perhaps no longer the anthropocentric origin or culmination of everything. We are in the process of turning Leonardo da Vinci’s famous symbol on its head - the human is no longer the world’s axis and the centre of everything, but has become part of nature again.
LANDSCAPE
Nature and landscape are on the agenda again, and we can see a renewed and more sensitive interest in nature and landscapes stripped of pastoral or romantic notions. We see this in both international and Faroese art, where Jóhan Martin is the most tender shoot on the branch. The trend has fostered increased interest in the history of nature, perhaps because we are nearing the end of the age termed the Anthropocene by environmental science. This is the period that starts at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the early 18th century, during which humans have influenced and changed nature more than ever before. Within Anthropocene thinking some are working on the understanding of how humankind is in the process of dismantling itself, while others predict a future with a post-human machine input, which extends to our body. A generation of authors and artists around Jóhan Martin’s age are fascinated by these trends. There is no national romantic sheen over their approach to landscape as a theme. We must rethink our position in the world and we have to realise that the material is neither dead, passive or a fixed entity.
POETRY AND THE TACTILE
In the work Desembermorgun, [December Morning], which is a collaboration between Jóhan Martin and the undersigned images and poems are in dialogue. The book focuses on sensing what is in front of us here and now. The images and the poetic self in the poems explore perceptions of time, and how place and landscape are felt. This is conceptual poetry-making intertwined with Jóhan Martin’s conceptual works. The book zooms in on images and poems. Dramatisation and dedramatisation occur at the same time by looking at everything through closeups. Jóhan Martin’s works are intensely lyrical. Using layers of simple materials, his floating images of square textiles manage to generate a tactile sensation, in which we can all recognise ourselves.
With his works, Jóhan Martin thinks beyond the framework of art; he brings philosophy and literature into his practice, for example the thinking of German cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin. The large-scale textile work Repeated Passages. Hanging Landscapes. Was created in conjunction with Desembermorgun. The work references Benjamin’s famous Arcades Project on the dreamscapes of urban culture, and it also points to landscape as a theme, or rather hanging landscapes. Jóhan Martin’s theoretical interest is a conscious use of modern tradition where knowledge of the tradition works in harmony with the work of fantasy. There is plenty of room and the spiritual has free rein. It is a false dichotomy to construct a clash between reason, thinking and feelings: Intellectual exploration of an area in a piece does not necessarily make the piece academic, if the piece simultaneously remains poetic and sensitive.
CLOTH - TRACES
Another conceptual artist is Christian Boltanski. I saw the installation No Man's Land, which took up 1550 square metres of Park Avenue Armory in New York. One component of the piece was a 12-metre-high mountain of used clothes weighing 30 tonnes. In a hall reminiscent of a hangar a crane nearly as high as the ceiling would grab garments from the pile, lift them up and then release them to float back down again. Just as Boltanski, Jóhan Martin works with installations and objects he finds and places in different contexts.
Boltanski explains: Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt. Jóhan Martin’s works generate a powerful connection between feelings and memories. He works with what is erased from our memory, or what we have never noticed. That landscapes and humans disappear along with the traces – if there are any traces at all – and perhaps they are even all wrong or false! By their presence, by triggering our attention and heightening the intensity of our presence Jóhan Martin’s pieces set our body and soul in motion. They remind us that we have to risk something ourselves, because the limit between what is inside and outside, culture and landscape, what is staged and what is chance, requires constant revision.
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Kim Simonsen (b. 1970) is a Faroese author, publisher, and scholar.
The essay is from the exhibition catalogue SPOR [TRACES] published by the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, 2016. Translated by Marita Thomsen in 2024.