I IS ELSEWHERE

In her book, Installation Art (2005), the English art historian, Claire Bishop, describes different categories of installations in terms of the role played in them by the viewing subject. This option is both simple and evident, since a fundamental aspect of that discipline involves the spectator having to venture into a spatial structure, thus becoming a constituent part of the work. However, Bishop is still unique in not starting with the work (and only integrating the spectator at a later stage), as she places the subject in the very centre of her analysis right from the outset.

This slant is particularly useful for an understanding of Elín Hansdóttir’s works. This young Icelandic artist’s installations are grounded in the preconceived ideas held by the people that will enter these spaces. By contending she can only conceive of her artistic production as a process and that she does not work towards a finished object, Hansdóttir proffers an interpretive framework which is implicitly valid for the would-be spectator, too. By thus departing from the modernist advocacy for ‘instant capture’—along the lines of Clement Greenberg, for example—Hansdóttir sets the time one spends in the installation at the very heart of one’s aesthetic experience of the work.

This procedure may be construed in the tradition of James Turrell—Hansdóttir proposes spaces which she fashions painstakingly and in great detail where minimal shifts in perception are generated, based necessarily on the passing of time. While spectators may initially appear to be an active element—they have to enter the installation, cross it and decide where to head, how long to stay and when to get out—her works are actually geared to the passive spectator. The latter does not create the experience but becomes its subject. Perceptive awareness of our own body is not heightened; on the contrary, it is dulled. Consequently, the experience shakes our faith in the stability of the world around us, and the control we exert over it, bringing home an awareness of our own ‘decentralisation’ and ‘fragmentation’ (Bishop).

In a 2007 work, Hansdóttir clad a whole staircase in white-painted planks at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, shifting the vertical plane and imperceptibly constricting the walls upwards, until they practically caved in at the top, thereby depriving visitors of perceiving space naturally and leading them to an awareness of how crucial space is in viewing themselves and their body.

For her exhibition at the Maribel López Gallery, the artist has designed a tunnel that tilts downwards and zigzags across the gallery space. It has sharp edges, and light filters in at irregular intervals through cracks in the tunnel walls, which have not been properly sealed. The direction inside it changes so markedly that spectators soon lose any notion of where they are, and where the exit lies.

In this work, Hansdóttir sets out to heighten awareness of our body through the loss of our usual spatial bearings. Visitors are thus persistently exposed to a spatial experience of decentralisation, disorientation, fragmentation and insecurity. Since there is no noticeable physical difference between ourselves and the objects without, our ability to conceptualize our surrounding space becomes jaded.

In this instance our customary points of reference, those we base our security on, become disconcerting—we are unable to focus on the sharp edges and extremely acute angles that mark changes of direction. Like some optical illusion, by attempting to touch and cling to them, we end up confusing the commonplace with the real.

Ellen Blumenstein

ELÍN HANSDÓTTIR
BERLIN

Elín Hansdóttir’s installation Path transformed the cube of the gallery into a dark zigzagging tunnel that slowed your movements to those of a blind person an unfamiliar space (Maribel Lopez Gallery; March 29-May 31. 2008). As your eyes adjusted, the darkness yielded a chalky light through which you could discern no more than vague planes of white and grays. Walls and floor were painted matte white. What little light entered the installation did so from vertical and horizontal slits in the tunnel walls. Dark obverse planes recalled the angling of walls and expanses of white suggested openings. But light and shadow playes tricks and you repeatedly bumped into walls. The seventy-five-meter tunnel made thirteen sharp turns in its wending, and Path ended at a narrow inaccessible corner space. Then, you returned alond Path without the satisfaction of arrival. The work’s combination of sharp angles, matte-white surround, and minimal light generated a fog-like dissolution of edges and corners. The paradox was that an aggressively structured form resulted in an experience of the dissolution of structure.

Hansdóttir’s Path has its roots in a 2005 untitled installation created as part of Iceland’s 2005 arts festival. The Iceland installation consisted of a one-hundred-and-fifty-meter corridor zigzagging through a gutted nineteenth-century building in Ísafjörður, a fishing village in the West Fjords. You gained access to the tunnel through a door on the house’s east facade and exited out the west facade, having entered the house without actually reaching the house. Unlike the Berlin work, this tunnel was well-lit with walls and floor painted a glossy white. In addition, several sets of steps were unevenly graded so that you had to be mindful of how you walked. Despite bright reflective surfaces, you could not see where you were going, turning one corner only to be faced by another. You kept moving but were always thrown back on yourself and your expectations of arriving at something that would register as art.

Hansdóttir’s work explores perceptual experience, but the fact that the viewer is both a perceptual and an ideological subject was underscored by difficulties that arose between the Reykjavik arts community, which had commissioned Hansdóttir’s installation, and the Ísafjörður community which, out of a combination of disinterest and resentment at the work’s expense, refused to supervise it during the run of the festival. As a result, the piece required costly repairs. I had a taste of how some of the damage occured when I was taking notes on the work outside the opening hours. Once neighborhood kids realized that the door to the work was open, they started running through the piece. The game was to see how fast you could run before smacking into the walls; the delight seemed to be in outwitting the architecture. I had been walking through the space slowly, counting the corners and asking questions about how I was being carried through the space. The children however, were the ones activating the space with their bodies, taking pleasure in being thrown off trackby gratuitous corners and uneven steps- a pleasure that was not entirely at odds with the ambitions of the piece. The artist wanted the viewer to smack against the walls psychologically, to be thrown off balance as a viewer. However, the youth of Ísafjörður did not quite behave or qualify as “viewers”, and the artist’s frustrations at her piece being used as a community playground was a reminder that art’s testing of the dichotomies of inside/outside often demands an insider.

The title of Berlin’s Path evokes the image of a smooth, well-trodden route; but the image is at odds with the experience of blindly maneuvering around unexpected corners. The historical context of the work, however, is indeed that of a well-worn path. Hansdóttir’s installations exist in a context of artworld passages, one of the most pivotal being Bruce Nauman’s 1970 corridor in which the viewer walks down a passage toward a video screen that shows an image of the viewer’s back receding: the closer to the projection the viewer gets, the farther one’s image recedes. Passage is also a key term in Rosalind Krauss’ classic treatment of modern sculpture as an experience of the body in time as it responds to the demands of spatial form. There is nothing original in Hansdóttir’s use of the corridor as a form through which to tackle questions having to do with the “location” of an artwork and its entanglement in the body of the viewer. However, both the Iceland and Berlin installations raise interesting questions concerning the experience of “inside” and “outside” architecturally and institutionally. In Ísafjörður, the artist constructed a winding passage inteded to test the viewer’s expectations of both sculpture and historical landmark. The unintended effect was to raise questions about the circumference of a work’s cultural intelligibilit. A similar opposition of inside/outside occurs with the Berlin installation: one enters the gallery but is denied access to it, Path having barricated the office space and transformed the gallery’s cube into a dark maze- yet it was the gallery that provided the institutional framework within which Path was visible as art.

Eva Heisler
published in ART PAPERS, nov/dec issue 2008.