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Essay

In an era when the visual information increases in quantity, by not necessarily in quality, it might be necessary for the visual artist to prepare answering the most basic questions pertaining to the function and value of the ocular experience in the art space: Why see? How to bear seeing? Why not close the eyes? The eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy, Peter Sloterdijk writes in Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), and this gives them precedence among the cognitive organs of the body. At the same time their enigma consists in the fact that they not only can see, but also can perceive themselves as seeing. Thus, they are vulnerable to a reflective game that can go on indefinitely. Eye-reflex or eye-dialectics can therefore be a characterization of a lot of thinking. In order to think, it is therefore necessary to pull the eyes away from their own tendency towards deceit, interrupt their quest for the one looking. To not see anything but one self is, as Narscissus knows, a sort of blindness. – So how see? How to direct the eyes back towards the things, the others and the world?

One can begin by characterising the point of departure for Unn Fahlstrøm’s video art as an image critique. By focusing on the basic material principles and specificity of the video medium, Fahlstrøm’s works are played out as the definition and explicitation of visual fields in Hundred Rounds (2003), Non lo so (2004) and I Reread the Odyssey Last Night (2005). In this way she processes the perception that there exists an unproblematic continuity between the image on the film screen and the image of the video medium. Despite the fact that the artist has worked on material from the modern film canon, the images no longer convey the illusion of the screen. The visual appear as pure surface with a pronounced distance between the spectator and the motive. No visual world rises. The experience of the visible is rather presented as configured according to already existing social and medial premises. By reworking those forms the spectator usually perceive as living with geometric abstractions, information is removed from the image, but in a way so that the visual signs can be included in new meaningful relations with sound and with words.

The series Aesthetics of Separation (2006) is the mark a turn in Fahlstrøm’s artistic development. By staging the paradoxes of her own cultural identity as an ambivalent subject position in relation to her own art production, she problematizes the relation between political and aesthetic visibility. Billie Holiday’s “All of me” is sung with exaggerated sensitivity, but so that the words are in direct contradiction to the images of Fahlstrøm’s mouth. The spectator is left with an impossible dictum, a sort of performative short-circuit where the verbal enunciation appear as inauthentic and constructed. In this way the artist however shows how the act of seeing in the art space not only can be a contextual act, but that it also has to be contextualising. “All of me” operates as an equivocal supplement to the other works “DMZ” and “The short way from red to blue. The long way from blue to red” which are presented without sound. The meaning of this situation is for the spectator to create.

 Abstaining from other effects than the purely visual, Fahlstrøm continues the critical line inaugurated by Aesthetics of Separation with the diptych Illusion of A/Struggle of B (2007) where she focuses on the two stereoscopic eyes that premise the daily experience of the optic. The first video Illusion of A functions as an examination of the stability and permanence of the visible. Motives from the New York cityscape are broken down, and through a shivering effect dissolved in abstract patterns and forms that flicker on the screen. The video can be characterised as the staging of the variable possibility that the subject has to perceive an object outside of itself and through modification of the sight, to create visible forms by itself. Minimal gestures as interventions into the physiological inwardness or outwardness of the eye are here depicted as ways of changing the visible. The contradiction between the concrete and the abstract seizes to exist in a way where the visible rather appears as the variable result of a form for abstraction and a form for concretisation. The video is presented in a loop-structure, so that the absolute limits are never attained. Consequently the visible is left to manifest itself as gradual actualisations so that the difference between the organic and the inorganic forms becomes apparent.

In Struggle of B the camera is positioned as a uncompromising observer. It is handheld and directly focused on the motive. It is nevertheless impossible to discern what the bees in the window frame really are doing. Their behaviour appears as random, and as if unmotivated movements with their legs and antennas lead them to touch each other rather than seek away from the window. These bees have nothing immediately natural about themselves. The recordings are made in black and white, so that the contrasts are between different shades of grey. The high resolution accentuates the material qualities of the surroundings, so that the whiteness of the frame becomes hard and sterile. At the same time the other side of the window surface carries no promise of a more merciful environment. The dirty stains concretise the physical barrier that lock the bees inside, but hinter is just as grey. The video is presented with a soundtrack from the location; a dog that barks, fragments of a conversation, cars that honk. If this is a veritable struggle for life, it is not immediately visible. It is not before one of the bees faints from exhaustion that the other one starts examining more of the window surface. It moves further and upwards, and the buzzing resumes. This is the closest the spectator ever sees the bee reach any form of natural freedom.

In retrospect, the aim of Aesthetics of Separation appear to be the localisation between the political and aesthetical positions that the subject is into forced in order to appear at all. Fahlstrøm let the spectator doubt the representation itself, the authenticity and sincerity of the artist subject by presenting a contradictory, but self-enclosed circular monologue, balancing towards parody. Through Illusion of A/Struggle of B it becomes apparent that she opted for the claustrophobic enclosure of the art space: One cannot enter when one already is inside. Here she questions the permanence of the point of view and counters the Western philosophical perceptions that the eyes serves as windows to the world by demonstrating how the body of the individual itself can affect the visible. This diptych logically leads up to her last work Vision Listen #2 as an examination where it is like changes in the sensory space, as the over all basic physiological premise of sensory experience, take place.

The raw footage for the video has been produced in Linum, a marshland north of Berlin, where different bird species meet every autumn before they migrate south for the winter. The area is particularly known as a gathering place for cranes, and as many as 80 000 of them have been registered during a single day. The visual materiel for Vision Listen #2 is thus assembled at a place where the rhythm of nature is still perceptible, a place where cyclical time still exists. It is the collapse of this understanding of time that here gets a visual expression. Accompanied by Mads Claesson’s electronically reworking of Arne Nordheim’s piano piece Listen from 1972, Fahlstrøm moves in a well-known territory. Opposed to earlier works where the artist has worked with sound as the emotionally articulated counter-weight to the pictures, the music, performed by Trond Schou, is here used as an expression for something more brutally distorting. When different ways to create meaning collide as the confrontation of different systems of signs, it can be experienced as different sensory impressions are in conflict. Something primary and purely affective that one normally is prevented from perceiving, is touched upon as the basis of sensory experience.

It is like a cosmological worldview is here descending. The spectator is pulled into a confusing interplay between temporary form and chaos, between surface and depth, between transparency and darkness. In other times the sound of these birds maybe represented the limit of what the human ear could bear. This is how Homer starts the 3. song of the Iliad:

When the companies were thus arrayed, each under its own captain,

the Trojans advanced as a flight of wild fowl or cranes

that scream overhead when rain and winter drive them over the flowing

waters of Oceanus to bring death and destruction on the Pygmies,

and they wrangle in the air as they fly

With sensitivity to the interweaving of the discursive and the figural this is presented as a movement where the circular nevertheless figures in its most elementary geometrical form. The technical effects of the visual treatment remain however quite simple, because Fahlstrøm mainly employ the same elementary as for previous productions. The horizon here turns on its own axis with a vertiginous rotation, and it is like even the birds fall in flock. By setting the contrast to maximum so that the pixilation vibrates, the motives are dissolved into white noise or snow. There is no visual neutrality in Vision_listen #2. One perspective does not immediately replace another one, because the artist approaches the problem more fundamentally: Sound and image meet in a violent confrontation so that each visible form becomes an actualisation of something that has already been. It appears like Fahlstrøm is interested in the change of state that occurs just when the sight loses its pre-eminence in the hierarchy of senses and lets it be played out in time. In this way Vision Listen #2 becomes an anti-platonic and anti-essential examination of the madness of vision.

Maybe one can characterize Fahlstrøm’s way of working in this piece as the brutal re-enactment of the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Through the confusion of the senses Vision Listen #2 rather becomes a synaesthetic celebration in a disoriented space. As Sloterdijk says, all critique commences with a critique of gravity, so that the dimensions and direction of space is here dissolved. By letting the myth become practice, almost a method, the artist assumes the role as the seeing part. Thereby not only one form of blindness is dramatised, but two. The visual blindness has a discursive parallel, so that the artist at the same confronts the verbal blindness. Because talking, is not seeing either. With words there is also blindness. Even though it often appears differently, as if language is related to something that once has been seen, as if there are places in language with light and darkness, words that illuminate or light up, or as if some words themselves carry colours, words are also blinding. The electro-acoustical piano music of Mats Claesson is therefore the element that disrupts this configuration. Thus the myth is prevented from being emblematic to the collapse of dialogue. This work rather incarnates the knowledge that when the breakdown of meaning first becomes visible, it has already happened. In this perspective Vision Listen #2 can be understood as a critical approach to the Greek personification of tragic self-absorption and the representation of sensory incongruence. The video functions as a critical stance towards the form of positioning the subject traditionally has been required to take on in the art space and to approach the ideals of clarity and distinctiveness of the Western philosophical tradition.

Camilla Shim Winge