Booklet: Composition for the left hand

Ludwig Wittgenstein noted in his treatise On Certainty that “there are an enormous number of general empirical propositions that count as certain for us. One such is that if someone’s arm is cut off, it will not grow again.” The philosopher believed this as a “truism” and one drawn from witnessing his older brother, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, suffer through a debilitating injury. Less than one month after the start of World War I, Paul Wittgenstein was shot while assigned as junior officer in the Austro-Hungarian army while serving on the Austrian eastern front in Galicia on a reconnaissance mission. His right elbow shattered by a bullet, the concert pianist’s arm was amputated in a Russian field hospital in Ukraine, after which he was deported to an invalid ward within a Siberian prison camp in Omsk. While interned there, Wittgenstein strove to retrain and strengthen his left hand. With a piece of charcoal, he drew the outline of a piano keyboard on a wooden crate and practiced obsessively by tapping out the most complex Chopin pieces seven hours a day. Regarding this arduous rehabilitation, he later notes, “it was like climbing a mountain. If you can’t get up one way, you try another.” Eventually repatriated by means of a prisoner exchange program, Wittgenstein persevered with his efforts to perform as a concert pianist combining pedalling and hand movement techniques previously regarded as impossible for a five fingered pianist. Though his hand would not fully recover from his injury, his aptitude as a pianist allowed him to replicate the effects of ambidexterity with just the right hand. In 1915, he debuted an “able bodied” Concert Piece in the form of Variations for the Pianoforte Left Hand in Vienna, with a performance that resounded in dissolving the gap between apparent ability and disability to give the impression, according to critics, that four hands were covering the keyboard. Supported by the Wittgenstein family fortune, he continued to commission leading composers of the time –Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, and Benjamin Britten – to write new works for piano that required the use of the left hand alone. It was Maurice Ravel who composed Piano Concerto for the Left Hand as the most virtuosic among these, and it remains something of a rite of passage for two-handed players.

Wittgenstein’s single-handed address of “twohandedness” negotiated the complex demands of a musical score to surpass corporeal finitude and to

envision how a work of art may be expressed beyond the limits of its formal construction and internal logic of organization. Piano Concerto for the Left Hand serves to inspire Composition for the Left Hand as the title for an exhibition that plays and unfolds as a dialogue, an entanglement, perhaps even mutual mumbles, between two collections–one historical in content and built by the collector Rasmus Meyer (a Norwegian industrialist and committed “garden architect”) in conversation with a contemporary art collection built by Erling Kagge, a Polar explorer and writer on the subjects of silence, walking, and the durational. Each collection is situated on either end of a century and across a timeline whereby art has emerged in accordance with dramatic spatial and temporal paradigm shifts.

As a series of sequences and accents, the exhibition is composed as a working draft reflecting on what the writer Ursula LeGuin prefaces in her Left Hand of Darkness, as an “experiment wherein thought and intuition can move freely within the bounds set only by the terms of the experiment.” It is also a project that respects the contradiction inherent in the author/ artist who sets out on a committed trajectory within the stranglehold of techne: “I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”

Although the exhibition privileges the left-handed in its association with intuition, eternity and mysticism, and as epitomized by art, it does so by leaning the left over its counterpart, as the right-handed is aligned with the linear flow of history, as epitomized by science. This is not intended as a dialectical exercise of oppositions–between the awkward on one side, and the logical, taut, and moral on the other. Instead, the project follows the way the brain is wired to respect how its left and its right sides work symbiotically to address complimentary modes of consciousness. In this way, left-handedness stands as a way, as Jerome Bruner notes in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand–to imagine how “the left hand may tempt the right hand to draw freshly again when the task is to find a means of imparting new life to a hand that has become all too stiff with technique.”

Composition for the Left Hand is an exhibition that takes the form of a manuscript that evolves by interweaving the historical works of art from the collections of Rasmus Meyer and Kode together with works from the contemporary collection of the polar explorer Erling Kagge. Unpacking My Library , the 1931 essay by Walter Benjamin serves as a valid reference in addressing the deep dive required to explore each of these vast collections, and to find the threads and constellations for a series of shared conversations and debates in their being reassembled for the sake of an exhibition. Benjamin speaks to the voracity with which one begins to unpack and the difficulty with which one may stop this activity. Taking Benjamin’s lead in that any collection is as relevant as its parts and the relevance of those works as they stand through time and history, the motivation of this exhibition was to draw selected works from their inert repository and to bring historical works of art in correspondence with the contemporary works from the Kagge Collection to illuminate their role in helping us to understand the relevance of the wider realm of their production. As Benjamin reminds us in his essay –collecting involves desire and that that although “every passion borders on the chaotic, the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” More than that, Benjamin, adds that the chance and fate that suffuse the past before his eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these the works. He asks – “for what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”

In reconciling two very different trajectories - one in researching historical works in storage and how they might regain meaning or rather, convey meaning in being in proximity to other works, with whom they had never intended to be in dialogue with. In this sense, the exhibition is built out with the intention to be necessarily a cacophonic and dissonant composition. In understanding packing and unpacking as two separate processes, Benjamin emphasizes that each serve as two sides of the same impulse, marked by chaos at each pole, whereby meaning is gained from dismantlement, in the dissolution of set narratives, and in the reassembling and putting back together that may offer new encounters of interpretation and a revision of perspective. Benjamin denotes this very process as that which defines the “existence of a collector, as someone dialectically pulled between the poles of disorder and order.”

The presentation of historical works adjacent to those from the recent decades attempts to put side to side an address of the world according to the time in which the respective artists lived and live, how they pictured/ picture their environment and the cultural and political changes of their time, and how these artists attempted to intervene within the constraints of their institutional frameworks and immediate surroundings by combining depiction and narrative with the vernacular, while embracing the role of the artist as a modern, selfreflective subject.

The active pulling of works out of storage, the reviewing, the reshuffling, the conservation required for its reanimation, the lifting of objects from repose together with the embodied memories to be recast and reencountered anew, involves a complex process that is messy, untidy, unruly, provocative, exploratory, for the purpose of setting up new correlations, perhaps postulates, via revised adjacencies. Hence, Composition for the Left Hand offers the challenge proposed by Benjamin nearly a century ago anew - to “join (me) in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open…to join (me) among the piles of volumes that are seeing the daylight again….to provide insight into collecting rather than on a collection.”

Rasmus Meyer

Ground Floor

Lawrence Weiner

A curatorial note of memory. When I arrived as in Norway in 2005 to curate an exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo entitled Draft Deceit, Lawrence Weiner and his critical compatriot partner, Alice Weiner came to Oslo to spend some time at Ekely during what had been a very snowy winter. Throughout the installation, there was ample time for conversations and banter. I spoke to my questioning in how to enter my position as Director of OCA, in deciding what project to start with – as not a one-off exhibition but a multiyear project that might be relevant for Norwegians, within Norway, across Scandinavia, but which also linked to the country and the region to the world. As someone who has always opened the exhibition process to social and political coordinates, I became perplexed by Scandinavia’s legacy as a hotbed of liberation and free love throughout the 1970s, because it certainly didn’t seem to be that way at the time I lived there. Lawrence Weiner suggested that I watch Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious Yellow. Although a film by a Swedish director and, according to Sjöman, a film about Sweden throughout the 1960s, it opened an entire field of research that led me explore Norway’s complex history with regard to feminism, labor movements, and leftist politics. It led me to understanding it as a haven for experimental radicals such as Wilhelm Reich at a time when he was most prolific, and it led me to curating Whatever Happenned to Sex in Scandinavia? Lawrence Weiner commences the exhibition with a work in the institution’s bathroom – this as Erling Kagge, who has provided the works throughout this exhibition, choses to exhibit the vast collection of Lawrence Weiner in the entry bathroom within the Arne Kosmo villa, where he lives in Oslo. Erling reminded me of an instance when, years ago, he was visited by Weiner, who used the lavatory and upon returning stated bluntly (as he usually would), “finally, some art I can jerk off to.”

A pioneer in the Conceptual art movement, Weiner viewed language as his primary medium as a way to redefine the status of the artist and challenge, still in the 1960s, what constituted a work of art. By using language as his material, Weiner classified his work as sculpture that shared ground with philosophy, linguistics, anti-capitalist politics and poetry. Each work referred to Weiner’s generic description of their content – LANGUAGE + THE MATERIALS REFERRED TO – and his position that language itself

USE ENOUGH TO MAKE IT SMOOTH ENOUGH ASSUMING A FUNCTION

, 1999

Language + the materials referred to Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021)

Erling Kagge Collection

is three-dimensional, that the work is what it says it is. His work sought to transcend the restraints of any particular culture and context, leaving it open to the individual’s intellectual as a ‘receiver’, to read the work. In doing so, Weiner understood his work ever present, ever in flux and never ever finished. His mode of address offered a radical redefinition of the relationship between the work of art and the receiver, emphasizing this collaborative engagement that was completed by the viewer’s assimilation of their own experience.

The Rasmus Meyer Collection frames work from a kaleidoscopic historical period of social change, the late 19th to early 20th centuries – a period accompanied by spatial and temporal paradigmatic shifts that contributed to the dizzying experience of modernity – with its intellectual controversies, the introduction of psychoanalysis, its social revolutions, the formation of states, the fervor of early feminism and early labor movements, and the critical study of political economy, which would render explicit those contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production. The fin-de-siecle introduced modernity as, according to Charles Baudelaire wrote, “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.” In revisiting the collection, Nature is deemed historical –not only because it evolves and constantly changes, but because it has been profoundly, often negatively, affected by human history. Natural history reveals a dynamic and often catastrophic interaction between the planet and human history. Correlating contemporary works collected by a polar explorer and writer on subjects such as walking and silence with the historical works with works collected by an industrialist, albeit avid garden architect casts a conversation about how art is a synthesis of the political, social and economic rooted in nature (as art) and part of an enlarged field called the environment.  1

Iceberg , 2004

Mark Handforth (1969–)

Aluminum, reflective vinyl and paint

Erling Kagge Collection

Mark Handforth

According to the pack of philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and extending to teachings of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese aesthetics –beauty was conceived as something harmonious, an organic whole and an object of pleasure. Edmund Burke worked out the concept more fully in the 18th century – suggesting that mathematical proportion, usefulness, and perfection were not the attributes of beauty and the philosophers thereafter agreed that whatever pleasure arising out of the contemplation of beauty was a different experience that arising out of erotic or sexual pleasure and interest. Immanuel Kant proposed “uninterested pleasure” in that the judgement of something as beautiful does not arrive on whether it is agreeable or pleasurable or liked. And it was Theodor Adorno who swept the category under the rug altogether and evolved the category of the ugly to resist art’s ascension into the culture industry and into commercialization. He wrote: “the impression of ugliness stems from the principle of violence and destruction. The aims posited are unreconciled with what nature, however mediated it may be, wants to say on its own. In technique, violence toward nature is not reflected in artistic portrayal, but it is immediately apparent.” The term Adorno negotiated, “cultural landscape,” would be a model whereby ugliness “would vanish if the relation of the individual to nature renounced its repressive character, which perpectuates rather than being perpetuated by – the repression of the [individual].”

That particular objects and practices are not recognized by exhibiting institutions beyond their thingness and what constitutes them as such as art, is in itself, a symptom of a system gone amok, or not gone-amok enough. It is important to take into consideration Fred Moten’s writings around the “Magic of Objects” as a way to provide insight into a series of practices articulated through race, class, gender, and sexuality as to recognize the “social capacity to render life as history – necessary for any cultural product.” In this respect, Moten calls for an imagination of a context for analysis whereby race, class, gender and sexuality as four articulating structures that would be granted historicity, politics and practice in relation to one another, and as mutually recognizable.  2

Rasmus Meyer Gift Shop and Room 112

Diamond Stingily

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Wish You Were Here , 2008

Ceal Floyer (1968–) postcard holder

Edition 2 of 3 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Diamond Stingily attests to having a deep encounter with Collette Thomas and The Testament of a dead Daughter, a book that has served as a profound influence for her as a writer, performer, and visual artist. Collette Thomas, one of Antonin Artaud’s “daughters of the heart,” flashed briefly before an unsuspecting Parisian literary world in 1946 to deliver a reading from Artaud’s Fragmentations. Her book was published in 1954, under the pseudonym Rene, and was comprised letters to Artaud, accounts of her early incarceration and suffering, along with tales wrenched from her tortured being. Her mental condition steadily worsened and she was to spend the rest of her life in private clinics. As an artist who weaves together personal and social memory composed of everyday objects, Collette Thomas’ diary and an anthology of poems, Stingily’s Caption is a testimony about the cruelty of love in which the past and future are entwined, as it is a novel of death and resurrection. Stingily creates work that draws from the significance of the elephant as a mammal that communicates by touch, sight, smell and sound, and exhibits mirror self-recognition, self-awareness and cognition as demonstrated in dolphins. Excelling in long term memory with one of the largest brains in the animal kingdom, elephants’ brains hold as many cortical neurons as human’s. Matriarchy is the hub of the complex social network of elephants. The matriarch who is the eldest of the group serves as the leader of the group until death, after which her eldest daughter takes over. The elephant is also known to show concern for the dying and the dead, which supports Stingily’s interest to address death as a way to, according to the artist, “encourage to conquer your fears, so that you might as well get over that shit shat.”

Elephant Memory, a chainlink from the artist’s memories of the chainlink fences of her home town of Chicago, serves as the armature for long braids of synthetic Kanekalon hair (a signature element of her installations) – sourced from childhood memories and her mother’s doing hair for a living. Drawing from an interest to produce work that carries distinct class markers and a firm sense of place, attuned to the texture of personal memory (and the politics that underlie it).  4

Elephant Memory #2 , 2019

Diamond Stingily (1990–)

Synthetic hair, galvanised steel chain, galvanised steel hook

Erling Kagge Collection

The Eruption of the Volcano Vesuvius, 1821, is a canonical work by Johan Christian Dahl painted after his visit to Naples in 1820 having had witnessed the eruption of the volcano at Mount Vesuvius. Having painted several moonscapes before, he was compelled to continue to sketch the active volcano, ascending the mountain several times to observe the natural phenomena. His work would exemplify the Kantian category of the sublime, that within nature which elicits in the human mind alternating responses of repulsion and attraction. Dahl’s painting introduces into the exhibition a concept that the Canadian poet Anne Carson refers to as “volcano time” – as a way to address temporal plurality, to set the present condition against something ancient, something colossal and in relation to a unpredictable futurity. That is to say that being in the presence of a volcano contributes to the formation of an experience whereby the phenomena is perceived psychologically and physiologically, as lava hurdles forth with terminal velocity to dramatize the duality of the sensible experience and mental perception, modifying the former by infusing the latter with anticipation. The pastoral backdrop may remain untouched although not inevitably depending on winds gusts and internal earthly forces wherein violent and active phenomena may eventually, according to geological time evolve into an arctic glacier.

The 19th century paintings through the ground floor depict the nature as landscapes to convey the phenomenal power of waves, the fury of the storms at sea, ethereality of the clouds, the magnitude of the forests as a way to convey the experience of nature. Norwegian painters Johan Christian Dahl left Norway in order to study in Dresden – as did his pupils, Thomas Fearnley, Knud Baade, and Peder Balke – only to return to continue to depict landscapes unlike those painted by his colleague, Caspar David Friedrich. The Rasmus Meyer collection emphasizes the position of Norwegian painters in this genre also represented by works by Hans Gude, who had been based in the Dusseldorf Art Academy as an instructor of landscape painting, who commanded authority there as a teacher as did Adolph Tidemand School of Painting. Although Tidemand deferred to the genre of motifs, Gude and Dahl addressed naturalism as anchored within the realm of observable natural phenomena. Dahl attempted to transmit a naturalism of his day as real although his impression in rendering was rather a simulation of a particular realm in order to generate an atmosphere, through contemplation of nature that incorporated all the senses.

View from a Window at Quisisana , 1820

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Copy of an Italian Landscape by Jan Both , 1813

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Time , 2004

Hills near Quisisana in morning Light , 1820

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Boats on the Beach near Naple s, 1821

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Scene from Ischia , 1820

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

An Eruption of Vesuvius , 1821

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

The Casa del Portinaio in the Villa Borghese , 1821

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Moon , 2003

Roe Ethridge (1969–)

C-print

Edition 2 of 5 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Karen Kilimnik (1955–)

Water soluble oil on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

Karen Kilimnik

Karen Kilimnik (1955) is an artist who produces oil that allude to the Romantic tradition and to historical allegories, although inscribed by irony and the vaguely sinister. A strident environmentalist, Kilimnik has pro duced works that connote historical landscape paintings as a reflection of her concern with the natural world, although the oceans, skies, mountains, and icebergs, are rendered in such a way as if to be captured in decisive moments, at the juncture of imminent change or danger.

The Moon

Poetically the symbol of the Moon figures into many of the works. Traditionally associated with the feminine principle, with water, particularly with the sea, and with change and growth, while its phases, natural symbols of mutability and impermanence. The early 20th century mystic Madame Blavatsky had taught that the powers associated with the moon were responsible for the division of the sexes, for generation and for emotion, while the solar powers were in conflict with them and responsible for spirit and intellect. Later W.B. Yeats wrote A Vision as a meditation on the relationships between imagination, history and the occult. In this poem published in 1925, Yeats asserts a classification in outlining the 28 phases of the moon which represent states of the human personality. Each phase is pictured as of the spokes of a Great Wheel, which is “every completed movement of thought or life,” using geometric images to construct an esoteric system.  11

Roe Ethridge

Ethridge (1969) works with picture as document –his photographs recording just what the camera sees. Inspired by the work of Richard Prince and Paul Outerbridge, Ethridge adopts the armature of commercial photography to dissolve the distinction between no discrimination, and editorial and art, between document and construct. Etheridge seizes photography’s double life in moving fluidly between art and advertising, embracing evolving forms of technology within commercial media. In pursuing this slippage, Ethridge proposes pastoral landscapes without the intention to reference the Romantic tradition of landscape. Instead, these images steer ahead by alluding to the polemics of contemporary land ownership and to the capitalist logic inscribed by the perpetual production cycles which sustain purposeful obsolescence. Although the artist focuses on objects as close-ups, Ethridge is moreover interested the

Moon , 2003–2008

Roe Ethridge (1969–)

Archival Inkjet Print Edition 2 of 5

Erling Kagge Collection

J.C. Dahl , 1821

Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844)

Marble

Kode

underlying networks and circuits of hyper-managed systems of production and distribution that are clearest seen from a distance. In contrast to the earlier traditions in photography, Ethridge acknowledges the impossibility of photographic originality, leaning into the popular culture of photography in employing as tropes astro photography, motion photography, editorial and fashion photography, portraiture and landscape. He notes: “Images are redundant. I am implicating myself as part of that redundancy.”

The curator Kate Bush wrote about his series entitled the Moon , to explain that Ethridge sourced images of the moon from the roof of his home in Brooklyn, using an 8 inch Meade LX90 telescope to make original photographs of an unoriginal subject. Ethridge’s “moon” is digitally repeated, twice or more, within the frame of a single photograph – rather like the sequential chronophotographs of Muybridge or Marey – in order to suggest the trajectory of the moon’s movement across the sky. “The moon moved through the frame in a perfectly straight line.”  13–14

Rasmus Meyer Room 110

Cultural Landscape as a Domain

By the 19th century, the landscape of modernity was populated by steam engines, factories, railroads, and cities transformed rapidly by industrialization. The widened distribution of print media – daily newspapers, telegraphs – and eventually telephones sustained larger networks of communication within mass social movements. Composition for the Left Hand seeks a dialogue with the collection’s works from the 19th century to underscore how the nature of that time has been eroded by pollution, toxins, and by the century long effects of climate change exacerbated by human negligence, avarice and militarization. As Walter Benjamin wrote in the aftermath of first world war, “human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled in the open country, high frequency currents coursed through landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts dug into Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale” – that is, in the spirit of technology. Yet, technology, harnessed to the capitalist imperialist purpose of mastering nature, “betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath.” By the early 20th century, nature entered into an enlarged domain, a hybrid of the environment and the political – a field manipulated by private interests of profit and consequently of political affiliation and political ideology.

As technology intervened to mediate nature in response to the interests of capitalist development, the 19th century experience of nature as simultaneously threatening and majestic, as envisioned by Kantian aesthetics, was enlarged into the domain referred to by Theodor Adorno as “cultural landscape”, as “an artifactitious domain that must at first seem totally opposed to natural beauty to challenge if not denounce environment merely as a depiction.”

Torbjørn Rødland

The 19th century brought forth an interest in animal studies with the introduction of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. This instantiated an indissoluble link to the natural world that would later be accompanied by a humanitarian address of animals and animal reform. As scientific inquiry advanced, animals became incorporated as objects to be investigated to learn more about the human body, its actions, illnesses, and pathologies. Animal behaviour lent more to the understanding about human behaviour and eventually, to an exploitative animal experimentation, genetic engineering, dog breeding and training, beyond the traditional hunting of animals for food and hunting.  32

The Elbe in Moonlight , 1841

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Breakers with the Top of a Mast and Tackle , undated

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Dresden by Moonlight , 1843

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Fjord at Sunset , 1850

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas mounted on wooden board

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Shipwreck on the Coast between Larvik and Fredriksvern , 1846

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

View of a Birch Tree in Hallingdal , 1845

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode

Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway , 1830

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas Kode

No Title (We grow them) , 2005

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

Mountains on Hardangervidda at Sunset , 1840

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rasmus Meyer Room 109

View from Stalheim over Nærøydalen , 1836

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

River between steep Rocks , 1825

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Birch Tree in a Storm , 1849

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas Kode

Rabenauer Grund , 1836

Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

The Beast and the Sovereign was written by Jacques Derrida as two volumes, a natural history which considers the living being with the treatment of the so-called animal life in all ot its registers – his own motivation to organize into logic the submission of the beast and the living being to political sovereignty. Derrida explores the contradictory appearance of animals in political discourse, where at times, the political subject and the sovereign state appear in the form of the animal, and at other times, superior to animals. According to Derrida, “Just where the animal realm is so often opposed to the human realm as the realm of the non-political to the realm of the political, and just where it has seemed possible to define man as a political animal or living being, a living being that is, on top of that, a political being, there too the essence of the political, in particular the state and sovereignty, has often been represented in the formless form of

Forest Stream , 1825

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Collection

Untitled (Illness) , 2005

Torbjørn Rødland (1970–)

C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper mounted on aluminium Edition 2 / 3 + 1AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Pork said the Bear , 1900–10

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Oil on cardboard Kode

The lower Falls at Trollhättan , 1826

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

River between steep Rocks , 1825

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Puppy , 2010

Lutz Bacher (1943–2019)

Painted plaster and metal, circular glass top

Erling Kagge Collection

Rocky Coast near Bergen , 1834

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Coastal Landscape at Sunset, 1819

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Study of two Calves , 1830

Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

animal monstrosity, in the figure without a figure of a mythological, fabulous and non-natural monstrosity, an artificial monstrosity of the animal.”

Derrida notes several specific animals as their anthropomorphic figure within fables. The wolf, he notes, be it in fantasy, narrative, fable or in rhetorical treatment, serves as the animal that is most referred to in relations to questions of animal and the political, of the politics of animal, of human and beast in the context of the polis and the social body. But Derrida also emphasizes that it is the she-wolf that is the symbol of sexuality and sexual debauchery. The monkey - inpenetrable in terms of communication,the dolphin – intelligent as humans, and the elephant – as the phenomenal beast who is both the subject and the object of the gaze of the Sun King, a ≈ king of light and source of light.  32, 145

Theodor Kittelsen

Theodor Kittelsen’s formal education as an artist was hindered by economic hardships although the patronage from a wealthy townsperson allowed him to attend Wilhelm von Hanno’s drawing school and the Royal College of Art and Design in Oslo. He proceeded to continue his studies in Munich together with Erik Werenskiold, Christian Skredsvig and Eilif Peterssen although his professional success as an artist was hindered by his departure from the standards for Realism in the day. As he struggled to support himself as an artist, he was eventually hired to illustrate folk tales for an Oslo zoologist P. Chr. Asbjørnsen – a productive professional engagement that continued for 30 years. It was in this period, that Kittelsen had illustrated fairy tales and trolls, as appearing in his 1899 classic edition of Norwegian Folktales. In addition to this work, he continued to paint and to produce lyrical prose with drawings that were published in Fra Lofoten (1890), Fra Lofoten II (1891), and Troldskap (1892).

 35, 43–46, 48–49

38

Bear lying on its back , 1825

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on cardboard

Two German Sheperd Dogs , 1827

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on paper mounted on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Collection

44

Croak! Croak! , 1907

Illustration for Trangsviks posten , Vol. 3, No. 15

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Donkey with a Chair-saddle , 1820

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Wolf , 1828

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

The Little Elephant , undated Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Two Salmon , 1844

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

A Wreck , 1900–1907

Illustration for Trangsviks posten , Vol. 3, No. 6

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

40 46

Aeolian Harp , 1905

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Olje på lerret Kode

In the Lion, s Den

John Savio

John Savio was born in 1902 into a Sami family – his father participated in the South Pole expedition. Upon the death of his parent, he had been raised by grandparents who were wealthy traders, reindeer owners and fisherman, that supported Savio’s middle education in Vardø where he became acquainted with the Sami member of parliament Isak Saba who became his teacher. Savio continued his education in Oslo where he attended the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry. Throughout the 1920s, Savio travelled extensively throughout Norway to places like Karasjok, Lofoten, and Romsdal, although with meager means. In order to support himself, he traveled door-to-door selling his woodcuts of Sami folklore and cultural imagery. He continued to travel into Europe with exhibitions in Paris in 1936 where he received critical praise, although he died impoverished.

Traditional Sami spiritual practices and beliefs are tied to animism and the belief that connecting to the enrionment therein would produce great spiritual benefits. Under this framework, all bodies, human, animal or otherwise, are animated by a spiritual component or soul, which is endowed with intentionality.

Throughout the 17th century, Sami individuals were burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft in shamanistic traditions in using drums and practicing sacrificial rituals related to healing, fortune telling, finding lost objects, the absolution of sins, and

Rasmus Meyer Room 108

Rasmus Meyer Room 107

Standing Clock, Régence Oak with intarsia

Kode, Rasmus Meyer Coll.

The Contemporary Bird Eben Selbius, who Sings with Others’ Beaks , 1912

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Taj Bag , 2008

Roe Ethridge (1969–)

C-print

Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Mister Rheder Jørnsen and the Spitting Lama , 1900-07

Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Two Cousins , 1912

Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Big Cock 1 , 2020

Heji Shin (1976–)

Inkjet print

Edition 1 of 3 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Cormorants on Utrøst , 1912

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Untitled , 2008

Lari Pittman (1952–)

Del vinyl and aerosol enamel on canvas over wood panel

Erling Kagge Collection

Al Dente , 2003

Isa Genzken

Italien ceramic, lacquer, plastic.

Edition 41 of 74

Erling Kagge Collection

weather magic. Attempts at effacing these practices from the country continued through the early part of the 19th century, when Norway adopted policies to dislocate the Sami minority population, involving forced assimilation and language policies. Throughout the 1920s, if anyone wanted to buy or lease state lands for agriculture in Finnmark, families had to be fluent in the Norwegian language and due to schooling requirements schooling, many families had to abandon a traditional and nomadic way of life.  56–64

Woodcut Kode

Confirmands

( Rihppaskuvllas) , undated John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut

Kode

The Cult of Ruin

Woodcut Kode

Within the cultural landscape, nature is doubly and paradoxically connotative of both the dominant and the dominated. Adorno tells us that this conflict of meaning resides by a disenchantment with the world, constituted by an impulse, a motivation, a longing, an insistence. With the collapse of romanticism and the rampant introduction of industrialized capitalism, natural beauty becomes merely an image, as exemplified by now-kitsch icons, Matterhorn and purple heather: “natural beauty, in the age of its total mediatedness, is transformed into a caricature of itself.” With the stronghold of organized tourism, it is telling that in the 1960s, Adorno foresaw that a feeling for nature was starting to amount to a “moralistic narcisstic posturing

Lollipop (Soaddenjálggis) , undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Girl (Nieida) , undated John Savio (1902–1938)

Rasmus Meyer Room 106

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Boys with lasso Gaudak suopanin (Gutter med lasso), undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut Kode

Good weather (Shiega dolke) , undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut Kode

Nærøy Fjord , 1834

Knud Baade (1808–1879)

Oil on cardboard Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Wolf Pair (Gumpe guoktas) , undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut Kode

Lasso (Suopan) , undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut Kode

Coffee Break (Káfe vuoššá) , undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut Kode

Wolf and reindeer (Gumppet ja bohccot) , undated

John Savio (1902–1938)

Woodcut Kode

Moonlight , 1869

Knud Baade (1808–1879)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rockaway (Spring‚ 08) , 2008

Roe Ethridge (1969–)

C-print

Edition 3 of 5 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

as if to say: What a fine person I must be to enjoy myself with such gratitude – then the very next step is a ready response to such testimonies of impoverished experience as appear in ads with personal columns that claim sensitivity to everything beautiful.”

In conclusion: “the essence of the experience of nature is deformed.”

Lars Hertervig

Hertervig had been born into poverty, his family adhering to Quaker traditions that valued essentialism and the pursuit of inner light. The Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz provides further insight with respect to this idea of light as specific to the Norwegian context: “the Norwegian term for weather (vær) is related to være (to be). ‘To be’ signifies being thrown into a changing and unpredictable world, i.e., a world that provides no fixed point of view, a world in which we are unable to accept the given and act freely.”  68–69, 74

Seascape , undated

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Oil on canvas Kode

Forest Landscape , 1830

Thomas Fearnley (1802–1842)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Mountain Lake, undated

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Oil on canvas Kode

Landscape with a church

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Oil on canvas Kode

The Gulf of Sorrento , 1834

Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Grindelwald , 1835

Thomas Fearnley (1802–1842)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Königssee in Bavaria , 1830

Thomas Fearnley (1802–1842)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Monte Vesuvio , undated

Thomas Fearnley (1802–1842)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Peder Balke

Shipwreck

Peder Balke was revolutionary in the pictorial context within the context of 19th century landscape painting. His sea- and mountain-scapes were more attenuated and less lustrous than of his peers in the Romantic concept of nature. In his mature work, Balke rejected the view of nature as immense and unruly sublime, and opted instead for radically reductive, almost monochrome renderings. According to Per Kirkeby, Balke used “…an orgy of dirty tricks, worthy of any stunt painter: waves executed as marbling, sponge-dubbing, combing wet paint and whatever worked.” Kirkeby’s interpretation was not intended as critique, rather as a candid reflection upon Balke as an artist, staking out the modern by making painting transparent: “a wave is a wave, and already rolled to nothing, like so much water, and a painting is a painting.” Balke was, after all, working in the wake of an industrial age, after which trust in natural beauty had succumbed to its total mediation, in the form of pollution, exploitation, and commodification.

In this sense, Balke abandoned the meticulously executed composition and the blue and brown tones that predominated in his earlier work, to employ simpler techniques to capture light against darkness. The main forms are developed by the bold, sweeping movements of rags, course brushes, and even with his own fingers. His fingerprint is left as a mark that makes the artist’s process and presence transparent.

Balke’s unconventional techniques led contemporary critics to hold him in contempt. A review in Morgenbladet described the work at the time as:

“…devoid of all artistic interest – his paintings with terrible colors, just black and white and few garish touches of blue and yellow here and there, with no

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Tree Lamp , 2020

Urara Tsuchiya (1979–)

Glazed stoneware Erling Kagge Collection

View across Fjord , 1859

Hans Gude (1825–1903)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Eidsvoll Church , 1855

Joachim Frich (1810–1858)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Chest of drawers, Empire Mahogany with intarsia Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Waterfall , 1856

Gustav Adolph Mordt (1826–1856)

Oil on paper mounted on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Welsh Landscape , 1864

Hans Gude (1825–1903)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Table clock, classicism Bronze Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Dying Trees , undated August Cappelen (1827–1852)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Bodensee, Bavaria , 1882

Hans Gude (1825–1903)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

question of a grandiose, poetic perception; not even in the simplest technical requirements of drawing, perspective, clarity, strength, and depth of color have been observed. The fore and middle grounds appear to have been drawn with a ruler…”

Born on the island of Helgøya in Ringsaker in 1804, Balke was raised in a humble family, and developed a clear awareness of the disparity between social classes. Throughout his life, he was drawn towards the political, economic, and social realities of his time. Art provided him with the means to live a life free from servitude to the state. His compositional technique remained unusual for his time, and this eccentricity, coupled with his increasing activist role in the pursuit of workers’ rights, complicated reception of his work. He became the Chairman of the Workers’ Union in the 1850s, and was regarded as a radical idealist, set on improving the material and institutional conditions of the workplace. When he died, his obituary credited him as a socially aware and committed citizen.

Peder Balke went so far as to abandon the brush substituting his finger blending black and white pigment so as abandon color and grand scale, in feigning nature, to abstractly and reductively, attempt to convey its true force.  90

Richard Prince Cowboy

Richard Prince (1949) manipulates means and products of mass media from the American advertising culture of the late 1970s. During the 1970s and as an aspiring painter, Prince worked in the tear sheet department at Time-Life Inc.in Manhattan, helping to oversee several separate magazines. While there, Prince began to rephotograph those pages, often cropping the shots to obscure text or logos, intensifying their artifice. In doing so, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness of the images, revealing society’s desires as hallucinatory. Untitled (Cowboy) among his most renowned series as a deconstruction of an American archetype at a time, as profiled in the 1960s ad campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes. Prince’s Cowboy conjures another illusion, one specifically associated with the excesses of the 1980s and the conflation of materialism and nature as manifested by spectacle. That decade in America was defined by President Ronald Reagan who promoted neoliberal policies which largely benefitted the wealthy. A former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan was stage managed, acting out the role of a cowboy, appealing to a romanticized notion of masculine authority.  85

Untitled (Cowboy) , 2003

Richard Prince (1949–)

Ektacolor photograph

Edition 2 of 2 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Mountain Landscape , 1892

Hans Gude (1825–1903)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

From Asker , undated

Hans Gude (1825–1903)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Forest Interior , 1873

Hans Gude (1825–1903)

Oil on canvas Kode

View from Bøverdalen , 1868

Johan Fredrik Eckersberg (1822–1870)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Ship in Surf , undated

Peder Balke (1804–1887)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Oscar Tuazon

Wreck

Oscar Tuazon (1975) is a sculptor who works with natural and industrial materials to create objects, structures, and installations that can be used, occupied or otherwise engaged by viewers. With an interest in deconstructivist architecture, Tuazon produces environments that reconnect humanity’s connection to habitat and objects that promote reflection upon the potential of architecture digressing from its allegiance to the Fordist values of global capitalism.  91

Seth Price

Mother and Child

Mother and Child is composed of yew wood, one of the oldest native tree species in Europe, and also attributed as a symbol of death and doom as it also provides shelter and food for woodland animals. It is coated with diamond acrylic plastic, a bulk industrial material used for plastic sheeting and multiple uses. Price integrates industrial plastics for a host of cultural associations, including as symbolic of modernism’s belief that technological progress may be an embodiment of the modes of production, distribution & proliferation, collapsing the distinction between the handmade/organic and the massproduced.  92

Klara Lidén

Paralyzed

Klara Lidén’s Paralyzed, an uninhibited dance performed on the metro in Sweden, reflects futility as a pervasive condition of contemporary life. Helen Molesworth has written of the work that Liden is doing damage to her own property, rather than to other people’s, and that in doing so she is doubtlessly making her daily life just ever so slightly more difficult.” The soundtrack in Lidén’s film is Paralyzed, by Legendary Stardust Cowboy, an outsider to be a musician who considered to be incapable of playing an instrument, singing in tune, or keeping in time. Released in 1966, the song was considered unintelligible, even said to be one of the worst songs ever recorded. Despite this labeling, the song made “the Ledge” a cult figure. In 1973, a team of NASA Mission Control technicians picked the song to wake up members of the astronauts aboard the Skylab space station, who, in turn, found the song so disruptive that they forbade it from ever being played again on any mission.  94

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Wreck , 2007

Oscar Tuazon (1975)

Folded digital C-prints

Edition 2 of 2 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

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Paralyzed , 2003

Klara Lidén (1979–)

DVD

Edition 10 of 10 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

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Untitled (Mother and Child) , 2008

Seth Price (1973–) yew wood and diamond acrylic plastic

Erling Kagge Collection

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From Königsee, Bavaria , 1832

Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842)

Oil on cardboard Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rasmus Meyer Room 104

Significant Others

Gerhard Munthe

Sigrun Sandberg Munthe

Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929) was a landscape painter who played a pivotal role in the 19th century revival of pictorial tapestry in Norway. Bewitchment – the transformation of one world to the other – was a common theme both in folk tales at the time and in Munthe’s tapestries. From the 1890s into the 1920s, Gerhard Munthe designed many weavings with images of underworld creatures and scenes of people being bewitched. However, it was in 1888, that Munthe designed his first tapestry for his wife Sigrun Sandberg to weave. Sigrun Sandberg Munthe (1869–1957) was inspired by traditional weavings that she saw in farmhouses in the countryside where Gerhard had been painting and she continued to weave many of his watercolors into designs including Three Princesses (1905). The theme for the tapestry may be a reference to The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain - a tale which begins with three sisters, normally kept inside the castle walls for their protection, successfully pleading with the guard to let them into the garden. They collect beautiful flowers in the afternoon sun, but after picking a large rose are swept away on a snowdrift. There were other weavers who realized Munthe’s designs including Augusta Christensen, the head of the weaving school at the National Museum for Art and Design in Trondheim, and the first weaver after Sigrun Sandberg to translate Munthe’s watercolors into woven wall hangings. Later tapestries had been woven also by Ragna Breivik.

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From Elverum , 1879–80

Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Landscape with cattle , 1870

Anders Askevold

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

The Proposal , 1873

Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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The artist‘s home in Elverum , 1880

Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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The Fairy Garden , c. 1894

Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929) and Sigrun Munthe (1869–1957)

Tapestry, wool Kode

Study Head, An Italian , 1842

Adolph Tidemand

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Rock and Heather , 1862

Anders Askevold (1834–1900)

Oil on cardboard

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Isabella Ducrot (1931) is an artist devoted to woven cloth as the founding material of her artistic practice. Earlier in her artistic career, Ducrot assembled a collection of antique textiles from her travels to Asia, primarily from Turkey, India, China, Tibet and Afghanistan. Her first source of inspiration comes from the weft of these fabrics, with the aim to reveal the original architecture of the material, composed of crossing threads and voids. Works like Tendernesses portray godlike figures inspired by Persian miniatures, or Pots, still life arrangements made on parchment like sheets of handmade paper and thin cotton, to reflect the artist’s enduring interest in pattern, and in the capacity for memory and narrative to be refracted into schematic form – ‘rewoven’, that is, via an array of repeating marks and motifs.  103, 105, 212

Ann Cathrin November Høibo follows a simple pattern of warp-and-weft in weavings are part of a lineage of textile art within her native Norway. Mentored by Else Marie Jakobsen, the pupil of Hannah Ryggen, to Frida Hansen who established the Workshop for National Tapestry Weaving in 1892– to follow in the tradition of weaving with respect to social, political coordinates.

Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough (1919–1999) started out her career working in mapping and graphic design for UK’s Ministry of Labour before she committed to painting in the early 1940s. Among her first works to be exhibited, Equinox from 1947 designates the line in the year when the Earth’s axis is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun and also denoting a new start in astrology. It was also the year in which provisions for self-governing Pakistan and India came into existence. Throughout the 1950s and onward, Clough found subjects for her paintings in London’s industrial wastelands and bomb sites, docks, power stations, factories, and the scrapyards of the city. The painter described her forays into what she described as “collected awkward facts” as reassembled into paintings to hover between figuration and abstraction. As she noted: “art is as realistic as activity and as symbolic as fact.”  106, 134, 181

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Staircase in the Rosendal Manor , 1903

Marcus Grønvold (1845–1929)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Small Tendernesses II , 2022

Isabella Ducrot (1931–) Collage, pencil and pigment on Japan paper

Erling Kagge Collection

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Untitled , 2014

Ann Cathrin November Høibo (1979–) Textile Erling Kagge Collection

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Teiera Verde IV , 2019

Isabella Ducrot (1931-) Collage, pencil and pigment on Japan paper Erling Kagge Collection

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Equinox , 1947

Prunella Clough (1919-1999) Oil on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

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Kitchen Interior , 1879

Frits Thaulow, (1847-1906)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Untitled (Jar) , 2003

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968-) C-type print Erling Kagge Collection

Wolfgang Tillmans

The Body Politic

The early period of the Industrial Revolution was one which evolved the body politic – that is the body that had previously been linked to the natural (and the supernatural) became merged with political economy on various levels – a body politic that was interwoven with the social relationships of production and reproduction. Donna Haraway has written extensively around this topic in “Animal Sociology and the Body Politic, 1978.” As early capitalism evolved, the body politic became separated from natural knowledge – the body, that is, split away and increasingly alienated from the understanding of the human and the interplay of the surrounding world in the satisfaction of organic and social needs to succumb to systems of control that was embedded in the marketplace. Sex gets equated with affliction, something that is physically and psychologically stressful, damaging, what it is to bear the mark of others. Sex is pain and a somatic phenomenon.  107, 136

Christian Krohg

In the 1890s, neither Oslo nor Kristiania could be called metropolitan – rather, these were bourgeois provinces of about 135,000 inhabitants situated in among Europe’s least developed countries. In 1890, Knut Hamsum published Hunger (Sult) as a semiautobiographical chronicle of physical and psychological hunger experience by an aspiring writer in late 19th century. Marx has addressed hunger in Capital (1869) that suggested that physical want was an integral element of the labor market. The book also spoke to the collision of metropolis and mental life. Sex reform as a wider movement of social reform took hold throughout Europe at the start of the 20th century –one that reflected a public debate around equal rights for women and men, as well as for those historically marginalized on the basis of their class or sexual orientation. Norway was at the forefront of those early reforms as reflected in the more radical position on the part of the cultural community referred to as Kristiania bohemen located in contemporary Oslo. Following Henrik Ibsen’s address of such unspoken topics as venereal and sexually transmitted diseases in Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881), an emerging Norwegian literary and artist community generated wider discussions around the legalization of prostitution as proposed by the Kristiania Arbeiderforening (Kristiania Workers’ Society) in 1882. The writer Hans Jæger published the novel From the Kristiania Bohemia in 1885, a story that

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Twelve Different Courses

Illustration for “ Trangviks posten Vol. 3, No. 16

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Mr. Jens Træby , Illustration for “ Trangviks posten Vol. 3, No. 9, 1907

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Wedding Procession Through the Forest , 1873

Adolph Tidemand (1814–1876)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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No Title ($5000 for the) , 1983

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

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Safe , 2006

Kirsten Pieroth (1970–) Safe tipped forward Erling Kagge Collection

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The Devil at the Feast , undated Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

Pen and pencil on paper Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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No Title (She made no) , 2001

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pen and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

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Operetta , 2006

Lari Pittman (1952–) Cel vinyl and aerosol enamel on gessoed canvas over panel Erling Kagge Collection

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Struggle for Survival , 1889–90

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas Kode

recounts the experience of two young men in relation to dominant social and sexual mores of the time. The novel marked Jæger’s foray into sexual liberation and social justice. A year later, the painter Christian Krohg published Albertine, a novel that referred to prostitution as a way to tell of the greater exploitation of the lower classes by the Oslo bourgeoisie.

By 1910, the rights recognized onto women by the Norwegian state were progressive by international standards. Married women in Norway were among the first in Scandinavia to hold independent legal status, and by 1913, they gained the right to vote in national and local elections, marking Norway as the first state within Europe to do so. In this way, the pursuit of civil, social, and political rights had been inscribed into the political agendas of the Labor Parties to reflect what Herbert Marcuse would refer to as an aim to develop “a social wealth for shaping man’s world in accordance with life instincts.”

The Women’s Federation of the Labor Party (Arbeiderpartiet) had campaigned as early as 1901 for sexual reform to arrive as a key political issue build into the sovereign statehood of Norway. The movement’s key protagonists – Elise Ottesen Jensen and the feminist Katti Anker Møller, each lobbied for the emancipation of motherhood by facilitating welfare benefits for mothers and for assistance for single mothers. The political activist Henrik Berggren as part of the Norwegian Youth Socialists, was noted for Kärlek Utan Barn (Love without Children) a speech that landed him with a short prison term, and contributed to the adoption of a law that made any lobby advocating birth control illegal. Nevertheless the continued efforts of Ottesen Jensen and Anker Møller continued to lobby for the legalization of abortion so that motherhood was a voluntary choice, and to educate young women as to reproduction and birth control. Ottesen Jensen made these views public authoring a column within the Swedish newspaper, Arbetaren, that reached out to a larger community that included Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist and activist for worker’s rights in Germany. A feminist and socialist, Kollwitz was deeply influenced by August Bebel’s pioneering treatise on feminism – Woman and Socialism (Die Frau und der Sozialismus, 1879). These sociopolitical achievements on the part of the early women’s movements, and which had been part of the wider political agenda for statehood as a social democracy, were eventually challenged by a the widening rift between socialist and non-socialist women, following the Soviet revolution in 1917. The project of early feminism was also hindered further by the introduction of psychoanalysis and cinema – both disciplines imparting new perspectives in relation to interiority and in placing women, once again, in subordinate roles.  117, 161, 164, 188, 191, 193–195

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Young Girl in the Lap of Death, from the series Death, 1934 Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Crayon lithograph

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

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Death is recognized as Friend, from the series Death , 1937

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Crayon lithograph

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz was an artist who expressed a political commitment to social change that reflected the changing political landscape of her time. She gained recognition through her series, A Weaver’s Uprising (Ein Weberaufstand) in 1898 followed by The Peasants’ War (Der Bauernkrieg) series (1902–1908) which further demonstrated her commitment to the plight of the oppressed and disempowered. The Peasants’ War served as a sociopolitical pictorial manifesto that depicted strong female figures, leaders of a revolt. Kollwitz’ portrayal of women in acts of suffering, rebellion, revolution, became prominent at a time after when World War I was dramatically changing the lives of women.  118–123

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A Mother protecting her Child against Death, 1934 Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Lithography

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

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Woman Entrusts Herself to Death, from the series Death , 1934

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Crayon lithograph

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

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Death on the Road, from the series Death , 1937

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Crayon lithograph

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

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Death in a Crowd of Children, from the series Death , 1934

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

Lithography

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

1st Floor

Rasmus Meyer

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss wrote Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: A Philosophical Approach in 1977 as a treatise to connect ecological concern with self-realization to become synonymous with “deep ecology.” Næss argued for the individual to see themselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, to care for the “environmental self.” He advocated for an understanding of things in nature as part or extensions of the individual, and in positing one’s authentic being in nature as a key part of one’s selfrealization. Næss drew from two key thinkers – Erich Fromm and Baruch Spinoza. Whereas from Fromm, Næss drew the idea an authentic love and care for ourselves will inform our concern for the environment, from Spinoza, Næss culled the need to strive for self-realization, as a way to integrate environmental concern into the development of what it is to be human. For Næss, he made no distinction between those who wanted to cultivate a garden and those driven to wild places in nature. His own preferred place was a mountain hut above the timberline beneath the Hallingskarvet Mountain in central Norway –a three-hour walk from the closest train station.

Erling Kagge regards Arne Næss a teacher. Having located a stripped-down cabin on the mountain range upcoming book on the subject of the Arctic, he is reminded of the sentence that Naess iterated to him – that “philosophically there is a chasm between the impossible and the fantastically unlikely.” And if Naess proposed to Kagge that, “two plus two can equal five if something changes,” that was enough to motivate Erling to keep walking and climbing, beyond the reasonable limits of human habitation.

Although Rasmus Meyer may have been unfamiliar to the writings of Næss, he was closely connected to gardens having been trained as a gardener. He designed a large park at his summer residency at Åstveit in addition to designing a city garden in Fjellsiden, with a preference in cultivating different types of tulips. That he decided to end his life in the year of 1916 referred to his Norwegian history as “when the dead was calling” is not a story told.

In this botanical room, the two meet for the first time, as Alex and Lutz, piggybacking one atop the other within the makeshift winter garden.

Nobuyashi Araki

Flowers figure into Araki’s work as symbols of Eros and Thanatos. Having been raised nearby Jyokanji temple in downtown Tokyo, a place where spirits of courtesans from Yoshiwara were enshrined, Araki used to watch the cut flowers offered at the graveyards. To Araki, arranging decayed flowers is a form of revival, and photography records the beauty of brevity as eternal in Eros, representing the confluence of all those tendencies within us that aim to preserve life, and Thanatos, representing the impulse toward death, as central forces in human existence.  126

Frida Hansen

Frida Hansen (1855–1931) was a Norwegian artist who had been trained by prominent artists such as Kitty Kielland in private lessions. Earlier in her career, she was an avid gardener and as an artist who sourced dyes for color palettes and scents for her textiles from the flowers and plants in gardens. In the early 1870s, when she and her husband faced bankruptcy during the economic depression, she learned how to weave and in 1890, she established a thriving business in the Studio for Handwoven Norwegian Tapestries. Later, she opened the weaving studio in in Tullinløkka in Oslo in 1892 for the wider production of textiles with a team of assistants. During this time, Hansen extended the studio into a teaching platform for women in weaving so that they might learn a trade and earn a living. Her commitment to such endeavors led her to weave a large scale tapestry for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, entitled Løvetann (Dandelion). The tapestry, which had been commissioned by the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights, became an important symbol for the early women’s movement in Norway and for the expression of women’s struggle against oppression. In 1897, Hansen patented a special technique for weaving transparent tapestries – wool weft for the pattern would be woven on the warp of plied wool, leaving portions of the warp unwoven and allowing light to transmit through the open thread designed for textiles as room dividers and curtains. Hansen went on to receive critical acclaim for the tapestry Melkeveien (Milky Way) at the Paris Exposition in 1900. In 1897, Hansen established the Norwegian Rug and Tapestry Workshop – later renamed The Norwegian Tapestry Studio (DNB), which would become one of the most important weaving studios in Europe.  127–128

Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Marc Camille Chamowicz (1947) explores the dissolution of boundaries between art and design and between the public and private. Born in Paris in 1947, he was drawn to the interiors of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard in his home city for their embrace of the decorative and the domestic. Inspired by his mother who had been a dressmaker in the couture House of Paquin, he was motivated to work within the spectrum of textiles as both landscape and interior. Interested in the historical alignment of color with gender, Chaimowicz explores what Johann Wolfgang Goethe projected onto girls and women with respect tints and shades: “The female sex in youth is attached to rose color and sea green, in age to violet and dark green.” Through emphatically colored, ornamental prints and objects, the artist explores femininity as fantasy aligned with what Simon de Beauvoir would characterize as “all the fauna, all the earthly flora: gazelle, doe, lilies and roses, downy peaches, fragrant raspberries … precious stones, mother of pearl, agate, pearls, silk.” Chaimowicz is received as an understated pioneer who examines intimacy and domesticity, to explore a broad visual language that includes wallpapers, screens and curtains with paintings, collages and wall murals, and ceramics. He has noted: “We should resist the tyranny of linear time for one which is much more elusive, labyrinthian, gracious and once understood, perhaps even kindly. Once we recognize that it can fold in on itself – wherein, for example, recent events can seem distant and more distant ones seem closer – we then have a greater fluidity of means.”  129

Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough (1919–1999) started out her career working in mapping and graphic design for UK’s Ministry of Labour before she committed to painting in the early 1940s. In the the 1950s, Clough found subjects for her paintings in London’s industrial wastelands and bomb sites, docks, power stations, factories, and the scrapyards of the city. The painter described her forays into what she described as “collected awkward facts” as reassembled into paintings to hover between figuration and abstraction. As she noted: “art is as realistic as activity and as symbolic as fact.”  135, 182

124 125

Portrait of Rasmus Meyer, 1930

Hjørdis Landmark (1882–1961)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

June, 1918

Frida Hansen (1844–1931)

Tapestry, wool

Kode, West Norway Museum of Decorative Arts’ collection

Untitled #398 , 2008

Haris Epaminonda (1980–)

Polaroid

Erling Kagge Collection

Bluebells , 1901

Frida Hansen (1844–1931)

Det norske billedvæveri

Tapestry, wool

Kode

Untitled

Nobuyoshi Araki (1940–)

1 color print

approx. 100 x 120 cm

Erling Kagge Collection

129

After PB. (1) , 1985–1990

Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1947–)

Oil and charcoal on board and canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

Bing & Grøndahl

Bing & Grondahl was a Danish porcelain manufacturer founded in 1853 by the sculpture Frederik Vilhelm Grøndahl and merchant brothers Meyer Hermann Bing and Jacob Herman Bing, who were art and book dealers. In 1889, Grøndahl won the Grand Prix prize during the universal exhibition in Paris. The technique realized by Bing & Grøndahl invented by Fanny Susanne Garde and Effie Hegermann-Lindencrone, included an underglaze that provided for the application of the enamel before cooking so as to avoid a second cooking of porcelain. The technique resulted in shades comparable to the transparent colors achieved in a watercolor. Garde and Hegermann not only developed the signature underglaze for Bing & Grøndahl, but in sharing a studio in the factory, they became the female exceptions to work that had been traditionally to men.  131

Fanny Susanne Garde

A Danish porcelain painter who graduated in 1876 from the Arts and Crafts School for Women in Copenhagen before working as an artisan at Bing & Grondahl. Her first projects included decorating the company’s Heron dinnerware set, rendered by the underglaze painting technique. Garde’s signature work had been vases decorated with flowers or fruits, sometimes working with crackle-glazed porcelain.  130

Effie Hegermann-Lindencrone

Effie Frederikke Nicoline Octavia HegermannLindencrone (1860–1945) was among Denmark’s most notable porcelain artists who studied at the Arts and Crafts School for Women in Copenhagen. It was here that she met Fanny Susanne Garde who would become her lifelong partner. She committed her entire professional career to decorating porcelain for Bing & Grøndahl’s factory. She adopted the Art Nouveau style producing works that sculpted forms replicating aquatic plants, seaweed, birds and fish into the porcelain work. Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Denmark, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and at the Art Institute of Chicago.  132

130

Vase, ca. 1900

Fanny Susanne Garde, Bing & Grøndahl Porcelain Kode

133

Vase, 1918

Fanny Garde, Bing & Grøndahl

Porcelain Kode

Alex & Lutz am Strand , 1992

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

Chromogenic print

Edition 8 of 10 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

131

Vase, 1897-1900

Effie Hegermann- Lindencrone, Bing & Grøndahl Porcelain Kode

134

Snow Melt , 1987

Prunella Clough (1919–1999) Watercolor and collage on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

132

Vase, ca. 1908

Effie Hegermann- Lindencrone, Bing & Grøndahl Porcelain Kode

135

Snowfall From the Roof , 1900–1907

Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) Ink on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

136

Tosh Basco

Tosh Basco rose to prominence in the drag scene in San Francisco in the 2010s. Known for her movementbased performances under the name Boychild, Basco’s photography and drawing accompany the performance practice. Viewed as a whole, Basco’s work attempts to enfold language, becoming, and representation together in spaces where they are presumed to exist as discrete entities.  137

Laura Owens

Over the past 20 years, Owens has created a body of work that examines painting as a process and its visual possibilities. Throughout the 1990s, Owens became known for figurative compositions that drew from decorative motifs, Shaker furniture, Japanese kimonos, Chinese tapestries, tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils rendered in the traditions of abstraction of neo-geo, Color Field, and pattern painting.  139

Farah Al Qasimi

Farah Al Qasimi has spent the last decade documenting the Persian Gulf, focusing on images of objects within interiors located within the region where she was raised, as a way to enter into a social critique of the structures of power, gender, and social norms in the Gulf Arab states.  138

Rasmus Meyer Room 201

Caves and Vortices: The Centrifugal Force of History

As inferred by Walter Benjamin, the lives of collectors are imbued by a “dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder” – with an ambiguous relationship to ownership and to a mysterious relationship to objects that do not, as the author notes, emphasize a functional or utilitarian value, but nevertheless an intimate one. What is it for someone to enter into some private realms to infer a transgression as a type of violence – to pull apart and interrupt narratives and to established orders of registration and presentation, to usurp memories for the development of another plot. Although this strategy was canonized by artists as came institutional critique of one sort of other, the organic cooperation interpenetration of the historical and contemporary world tends to be,

137

Tangle (bouquet) , 2022

Tosh Basco (1988–)

Oil, pastel, and pigment on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

138

Dragon Mart Still Life 6 , 2023

Farah Al Qasimi (1991–)

Inject print on Canson Cotton Rag 210g

Edition of 50 + 5 AP

Erling Cagge Collection

139

Untitled , 2004

Lara Owens (1970–)

Watercolor, gouache and acrylic on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

140

Peat Marshes at Jæren , 1898

Kitty Kielland (1843–1914)

Oil on canvas Kode

141

Landscape from Jæren , undated

Kitty Kielland (1843–1914)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

142

Reading Girl , undated

Unknown artist ( assumed early work by Harriet Backer [1845–1932])

Oil on canvas Kode

justifiably, restricted by regimes of conservation and preservation. Although it would be sufficient to write that such standards all too often become the default settings for the bureaucratic technocracies of museums, academies and schools, to simply, as Bartleby would put it, “to prefers not to.” Yet, it is this jarring opening up from a vaulted stance, the encounter of rhetoric of yesterday to meet the banter of the present, as a meeting ground for reconciliation and re-negotiation. The privileging of such encounters could allow art to stumble along paths where it may have no right to be to seek a wider field of correspondence, because it is, as Theodor Adorno wrote: “it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is selfevident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” This, to the effect, historical trauma persists, and collective experiences of trauma persist, so as to enforce the centrifugal force with which history bleeds into the present.

Gustave Courbet

In 1855, Gustave Courbet published the Realist Manifesto to claim the need for artworks to “translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation […] to create living art” through its faithful portrayal and artistic independence. This living art considers all manifestations of the visible world as equally worthy of depicting. In this sense, Courbet maintained, realism is “in its essence a democratic art.”

Courbet paintings of the Grotto of Sarrazine, the primordial cave in his native region of the Jura Mountains in eastern France (Nans-sous-Sainte Anne) rendered by textures that swirl around a tunnel like entrance as a vortex. Courbet’s various depictions of the grotto stemmed out of interest in geological formations and as a way to explore composition and technique rooted in lived experience. Courbet’s approach to Realism was the “denial of the ideal” and to reject the classical subject as an altered style of refinement.  144

Kitty Kielland

Kitty Kielland (1843–1914) was not permitted to embark onto serious study as a landscape painter until she was thirty years old, after which she traveled to Karlsruhe to study under Hans Gude as her professor and as his private pupil. She moved to Paris in 1879 exhibiting regularly at the Salon where she earned a silver medal. After returning from Europe, Kielland

143

Hole , 1998

Torbjørn Rødland (1970–)

C-print on aluminum Erling Kagge Collection

146

Halvard Stub Holmboe , 1887

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

149

Des Esseinte’s Wonky Launch , 2001

Hanneline Røgeberg (1963-)

Drawing on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

144

Landscape, undated Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)

Oil on canvas Kode

147

Balzac II , 2007

Hanneline Røgeberg (1963–)

Oil on canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

150

1st and 2nd Hand Deferral , 2002

Hanneline Røgeberg (1963–)

Oil on canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

145

Andreas by the Window , 1883

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

148

Woman Combing her Hair , 1892

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

151

Julie’s , 2004

Hanneline Røgeberg (1963–)

Drawing on Paper

Erling Kagge Collection

continued with realism in landscape painting, initially focusing on the Jæren moorland in southwestern Norway depicting the broader expanse of the skies, dark peat bogs and waterways. In addition to playing an important role as an activist for women’s rights in the art world and engaging in public debates, Øystein Sjåstad explores Kielland’s role as a queer pioneer in the essay Kitty Kielland as a New Woman . Sjåstad points out that the painter had been one of the founders of the Norwegian Women’s Society in 1884, and author of one of the more important European feminist texts, Kvindespørgsmaalet (1886; The Woman Question ) to pose if women’s talents are too limited to reach high intellectual or artistic levels:

“Their evidence is that there are no first-rate female historians, no [female] Beethoven or Mozart, and at the very best, there is occasionally a good actress. That the woman is incapable of achieving the height of talent, of developing genius, that, I think, might very well be the case. But none of us knows this. I do not think that women working in any field have as yet had the same facilitating conditions, yes, the crucial conditions, that men have had, to study and develop themselves. Either the home sphere has been a hindrance, or the external conditions have not yet been put in place for women. For women painters, there are now, in France, almost the same opportunities as for men to study [at the private art academies]. But the public academies, with their scholarships and free tuition, are closed to women, and everywhere, the tuition that women must pay is much more expensive, which is a great hindrance.”  140–141

Harriet Backer

Harriet Backer (1845–1932) was an important figure in the history of Norwegian painting. She moved to Paris in 1878 where she met Kitty Kielland, a fellow artist and painter with whom she shared a home and studio for nearly 40 years. In 1888, she founded a school of painting in Kristiania (now Oslo) which ran until 1910.  142

152

A Small Apple Tree, 1966

Jakob Weidemann (1923–2001)

Oil on canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

Hanneline Røgeberg

Hanneline Røgeberg’s work is drawn from studies around the social psychologist Stein Bråten’s The Root of Collapse of Empathy and upon listening to Martine Sym’s podcast Mirror witha Memory that spoke to AI and facial recognition technologies behind surveillance camera lens, and its starkly predetermined choices regarding who and what is seen and what remains invisible. The artist’s book project accompanied by blind contour drawings are according to the artist “unprepossessing and set up to fail.” They also reflect Røgeberg’s dominant left hand, that make visible offcentered symmetry.  147, 150–151, 205

Jakob Weidemann

Jakob Weidemann is a mid-century Norwegian painter who nearly lost his eyesight in an explosion accident. His altered sense of vision provided him with a new relationship in depicting light and nature in his paintings, coupled with his deep knowledge of the vegetation of the forest floor and the meadows of flowers growing on the farm where he lived. Weidemann’s significance to Erling Kagge extends beyond his regard for the artist’s work to something deeply personal. Weidemann gifted the expedition team of Erling Kagge, Børge Ousland, and Geir Randby with fifty signed prints for the purpose of sale as a way to underwrite costs of the trip. The resulting sale underwrote nearly the entirety of the team expedition to the North Pole in 1990 which, in turn, cultivated easier sponsorship of Kagge’s first solo expedition to the South Pole in 1992/93.  152

Rasmus Meyer Room 202

Bergljot Bratland , c. 1892

Hans Heyerdahl (1857–1913)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Portraiture in the 19th century was based on a principle of endorsement or of corroboration of a social position and stature. To have one’s portrait done serve as the validation of an elitist and social rank and rendered in a fully complimentary way – with flawless skin, luminous eyes, and stately gaze. The “portrait” room has been rehung and introduced by a painting of the woman thought to be Albertine, the main character of novel by Christian Krohg written in 1886 and confiscated and censored thereafter. The novel centered around Albertine, a seamstress who was forced into prostitution.

Richard Prince

Richard Prince’s Untitled (Couple) is an appropriated image, rephotographed from a magazine page, with all the former captions and indications removed. However, the photograph is one of that includes Renaud White, the first Black model to appear, in 1979, on the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, a magazine founded in 1931 and which had previously catered exclusively to a white male, “metrosexual” readership.  158, 160

Untitled (Couple) , 1977/1978

Richard Prince (1949–)

Photography

Erling Kagge Collection

Hedvig Hauge , 1884

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

159

161

160

153

Red Hair , 1907

Ludvig Karsten (1876–1926)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

156

Karen Bjølstad , 1885–86

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

162

Hans Heyerdahl , 1875

Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

154

Old Woman , 1888

Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928) Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

157

Thoughtful leader , 2022

Issy Wood (1993-) Erling Kagge Collection Oil on velvet

155

Untitled (Mirror Bell) , 1992 Marijke van Warmerdam (1959–)

Mirrored glass Erling Kagge Collection

158

Dress , 1979–1980

Richard Prince (1949–) Ektacolor photograph Erling Kagge Collection

163

St. Maria Magdalena , 2014

Michaela Meise (1976-) Glazed ceramic and ink/ Wooden plinth and wool Erling Kagge Collection

164

Pensierosa , 1884

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rasmus Meyer Room 203

The magical realism pursued by the Norwegian painter Nicolai Astrup were characterized by works with an intense colorful palette of brilliant marigolds and bright yellow marshes, that captured the light of summer evenings suspended in light. His landscapes, with the flattening out of perspective and with patterning, intermingled with Norwegian folklore were inspired by his homestead – an old farm at Sandalstrand in western Norway that he purchased in 1913 to sustain his family but also as an early manifestation of ecological conservation as well as a means to sustain his family. Astrup was a horticulturalist who planted many varieties of rhubarb to harvest on his farm and cultivated native species in his gardens. He painted the theme of a spring garden, the bonfires set along mountain-scapes, and captured the the mountain Kollen as the Barren Mountain. He had been raised reading Norwegian folk tales with books illustrated by the Norwegian painter Erik Werenskiold that portrayed trolls and goblins. At the time of his production, Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts were entering into the European markets and the influence of Hokusai and Hiroshige may have been an influence for his works.

Asger Jorn

In the early 1950s, Asger Jorn painted ghostly creatures, spirits and vision of dripping, phantoms. Despite the fact that he used bright colors, his pursuit of the melancholic was reminiscent of the work of Edvard Munch, generations older.  172–173

Franz West (1947–2012)

Franz West’s abstract sculptures, collages and largescale works are purposefully crude and irreverent. In the 1960s, West was regarded as an outsider artist who produced his first drawings as “Mutterkunst” (mother art) or according to the artist, art that was made to please his mother. In 1971, he adopted her maiden name West as his own surname. As a selftaught artist, West spent the mid 1970s developing small sculptures like the Passtucke or Adaptives as playful papier-mâché pieces intended to be moved around easily, and as extensions to the human body. The poet Reinhard Priessnitz named the works Passstucke and West later named them Adaptives, suggesting that they adapt to viewers as viewers adapt to them. By the mid 1980s, he produced works under the title of Legitimate Sculptures, merely because they were placed on pedestals. Having lived in Vienna, West was drawn to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein

165

Model (Alraune) , 2005

Franz West

Papier-maché, acrylic paint on acrylic glass, wood, acrylic paint, cardboard, 2 wine boxes

Erling Kagge Collection

168

Study of a Reindeer , 1850

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

171

Trolls Telling Jokes , 2016

Matias Faldbakken

Pen on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

166

River , 1892

Frits Thaulow

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

169

Pen on paper

172

Composition With Owl and Fantasy Creature , 1953–59 Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Oil on canvas

Long term loan from Canica Collection

167

Orange Grove # 6 , 2004

Roe Ethridge (1969–)

C-print

Edition 2 of 5 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

170

Trolls Telling Jokes , 2016

Matias Faldbakken

Pen on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

173

Gofs-Lygybri , 1943

Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Oil on canvas

Long term loan from Canica Collection

and to Viennese experimental literature, as well as to Sigmund Freud and the legacy of psychoanalysis, specifically in the clinical tradition of reclining and talking. Into the 2000s, West produced Outdoor Sculptures that were made of sheets of aluminum, bent over an internal sculpture and welded together, with the joints made visible, their forms based on doodles, turds, phalluses, or twisted intestines. These works were monochrome, rendered in gaudy colors, sourced from children’s pajamas.

In the emergence of industrialization in the late 19th century, women were increasingly confined to reproductive labor while also building the labor force, although at a fraction of the wages earned by men. In Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici writes to this discrepancy noting that the “separation of production from reproduction created a class of proletarian women who were as dispossessed as men but, unlike their male relatives, in a society that was becoming increasingly monetarized, had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers.” Christian Krohg depicted these exhausted mothers and their barren and clinical surroundings.

 176

The Parsonage Garden in Moonlight , 1905

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

181

Untitled , 1990

Prunella Clough (1919–1999)

Oil on board

174

An Outlaw by his Fire , 1909

Henrik Sørensen (1882–1962)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

177

Mountain Farm in Moonlight , 1903–09

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

182

Midsummer Eve Bonfire , 1915

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

The Savings Bank Foundation

175

Farm in Numedal , 1897 Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

178

Spring Night in the Garden, 1909

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

176

Sitzskulptur (Sitting Sculpture) , 2004

Franz West (1947–2012)

Lacquered aluminum Erling Kagge Collection

179

Grey Spring Evening with Fruit Trees in Bloom , 1909

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

Long term loan, private collection

183

A Night in June and Old Farm Buildings , 1902–08

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

The Savings Bank Foundation

184

Barren Mountain , 1905–06

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

185

Shiny Sea , 1904

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

The Savings Bank Foundation

186

Farmstead in Jølster , 1902

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

The womens’ suffrage movement throughout the late 19th century was motivated by a coalition of women from the middle and upper classes, who came into eventual confrontation with the socialist aspirations of the proletariat by the early 20th century. As an artist, Munch empathized with women from the working classes often portrayed within their repressive conditions, or as mothers afflicted with venereal disease in contrast to the libidinal Madonna and sexually devouring vampires from the bourgeoisie. The work, Old Woman in the Hospital, 1902, was perhaps based on a painting Women in the Hospital, 1897, exhibited in the Paris exhibition of 1897. Munch’s interest in those afflicted with syphilis may have also been inspired by his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal (1857) and its interweaving of sex, erosion, and death.

Nina Beier

Nina Beier is a Danish born artist who defers from a representation of landscape as mythological to emphasize the artificial construct of nature as idyllic according to historical definitions of beauty according to the prosaic economy of communal signifiers. Framing the clothes produced by third world makers, Beier makes apparent the social and political implications of the garment industry as an untransparent place of exploitation and repression and colonialism.  196–197

Tuda Muda (Samrridhi Kukreja)

Tuda Muda turns to the self as medium within a medium, as a narrator/protagonist/performer/ storyteller in a video/drawing/installation/sculptural

Rasmus Meyer Room 204

187

Rainy Atmosphere beneath the Trees at Jølster Parsonage , 1905–07

Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928)

Oil on canvas

The Savings Bank Foundation

188

Village street in Grez , 1882

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

191

Old Woman Cutting Bread , 1879

Christian Krohg, (1852-1925)

Oil on canvas Kode

189

Greeting , 1892

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) Etching on zinc Kode

192

Head of a Child , 1910 Ingebrigt Vik, (1867-1927)

Marble Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

190

Man and Woman , 1911

Ludvig Karsten (1876–1926)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

193

In the Bath Tub , 1889

Christian Krohg (1852-1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

format. Themes of loss, perseverance, and resilience have been underlying tones in artist work, but she would like to introduce ease, joy, humor and hope as means to propagate, and manifest breakthroughs (for herself) as well as others.

Using self-portraits as a medium within a medium, the female gaze presents how it perceives itself in charcoal, experiencing vulnerabilities, where the body is a symbol of disgust and conflict but also newly accepted complexities, comfort, and abundance.

The artist notes: “The hateful words inwards and outwards have little power when my gaze observes its reflection with a hint of kindness, and that smallest gesture begins to emit a light at the end of the tunnel. Ultimately, who else can love me the most, if not myself?”  203

197

Portrait Mode [Oslo #8] , 2011

Nina Beier (1975–) Found garment in wooden frame

Erling Kagge Collection

202

Death in the Water, from the series Death , 1934 Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945)

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

198

Distress Signal , 1896–98

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas Kode

203

UnTtitled , 2021

Tuda Muda (1991-)

Sepia pastel on acid free paper

Erling Kagge Collection

194

Sleeping Child (Maren Sofie

Gaihede) , c. 1892

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

199

Woman at the Crib , 1897 Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) Etching on zinc Kode

204

Resting Models , 1912

Henrik Sørensen (1882–1962)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

195

Sleeping Mother , 1883

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

200

Need , from the series

A Weaver’s Revolt , 1893–97 Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945)

Lithograph Kode

205

Diptych , 1996

Hanneline Røgeberg (1963–)

Oil on canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

196

k@ , 2011

Nina Beier (1975–)

Second-hand clothes, frame Erling Kagge Collection

201

On the Look-Out , 1889

Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

206

Female portrait , 1898–99

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rasmus Meyer Room 210

208 207

Seated Nude with her Back Turned , 1896

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Munch Rooms

Old Woman , 1901

Christian Krohg (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

“I do not paint what I see. But what I saw.” E. Munch I write not from what I see. But from what I saw… The one foot clad in one striped sock. The diaphanous veil of white across the body, the head, the face – the portraits of women in repose rendered as recollections rather than as observations, in a way that Roland Barthes recounted a detailed image of his recently deceased mother without making visible the material photograph. A testimony to the absent presence.

One thinks about what Munch was thinking – in what rabbit hole did he burrow through? His questioning as an artist at time when the bearing of one’s interiority was virgin territory and yet one that was being probed. Living through the profound impact Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House had on introducing Nora as the modern subject in complex situations amid complex characters, whose motives were made explicit. As retrospective realism, Ibsen embarked on a taboo subject – a woman trapped within the institution of marriage while a long standing legal practice of coverture was still in place. Coverture – whereby no female person had a legal identity, whereby at birth, a female child was usurped by her father’s identity and once married, by identity of her husband, as one entity. Without any legal status, married women could not own or work in business enterprises, they could own nothing, not even their own clothes, nor hold rights to their children, nor to their bodies. Munch was at a formidable age when the domesticity of the urban middle class was challenged by social and legal efforts to reform marriage, divorce, and sexuality – all lobbied for by woman who were gaining agency.

209

Old Women in Hospital, 1902

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Etching and dry point on copper plate

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

211

Summer night. Inger on the Beach , 1889

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Morning , 1884

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Young Girl Sitting, 1904-1910

Ingebrigt Vik, 1867–1927 Marble Kode

White dress , 2023

Isabella Ducrot (1931–)

Silk and pigments on Japan paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Inger in Sunshine , 1888

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Sisters , 1970

Vito Acconci (1940–2017)

Black and white photography

Erling Kagge Collection

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Ibsen pushed the envelope further in writing Ghosts in 1881 in a renewed critique of family and gender relations to address sexual desire, psychic repression, and social shame. The play brought to the public the topic of venereal disease, although it was not mentioned by name, but was referred to by the French vermoulu which means worm eaten. It was a permissive time sexually, and syphilis was rampant as a societal affliction among the bourgeoise. Although Ibsen was thirty-five years older than Munch, he recognized the relevance of Munch’s pictorial imagination in grasping what he himself sought to depict in his plays. Munch addressed the subject in several of his works including Woman with Venereal Child where he describes his work and the predicament of those afflicted:

The woman bends over the child who is infected with the sins of her father. She lies in her mother’s lap. The face of the mother who bends over her has become purplish from crying. There is a strong contrast in color between the red, tearful, swollen face contorted into a grimace, and the ashen-white face of the child which contrasts strongly with the green background. The child stares with huge deep eyes into the world it has involuntarily entered. Sick and frightened and questioning it looks out into the room – surprised at the realm of a pain it has entered, and already with the question why. Why.

In 1906, he was commissioned by Ibsen to create the stage sets for Ghosts.

Rasmus Meyer Room 209

Untitled , 2008

Josh Smith (1976–)

Oil on canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled (Palette Painting #4), 2007

Josh Smith (1976–)

Oil on canvas

Erling Kagge Collection

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“Art is crystallization,” Munch wrote to collapse the past, present, future within one space called the modern condition and the subject within it, conflicted by a drive toward and yet by one’s recognition of imprisonment, the acknowledgment that one does not have the will to proceed along that path to freedom. Munch attested to this predicament in his diaries: “The mystery lies in the collective development. Woman, in all her diversity, is a mystery to man –woman, who is simultaneously a saint, a whore and unhappily devote to man.”

Marie Helene Holmboe , 1898

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Untitled (Abstract Painting #4) , 2007 Josh Smith (1976–)

Oil paint on canvas/wooden stretcher Erling Kagge Collection

Rasmus Meyer Room 208

Munch

“From time to time, either in a shattered state of mind, or in a happy mood, I would come across a landscape I wished to paint. I collected my easel – set it up, and painted directly from nature. It was a good painting, but not the one I wanted to paint. I was unable to paint the landscape as I saw it, in that unhealthy state of mind, or in a happy mood. This happened often. In such circumstances, I began to obliterate what I had painted. I searched in my mind to recollect that first picture – that first impression, and I tried to re-establish it.” E. Munch  218, 220–237

221 222 220

Spring Day on Karl Johan , 1890

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode

Summer Night , 1893

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode

The Women on the Bridge , 1902–03

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode

Sunday in Åsgårdstrand , 1891

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Children playing in the Street in Åsgårdstrand , 1901–03

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

From Nordstrand , 1891

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Four Stages of Life , 1902

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Seated Young Woman , 1892

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Melancholy , 1894–96

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

At the Deathbed , 1895

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Evening on Karl Johan , 1892

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rasmus Meyer Room 207

Nude in Profile towards the Right , 1898

229

Jealousy , 1895

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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House in Moonlight , 1893–95

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

230

Moonlight on the Beach , 1892

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

235

Mand and Woman , 1898

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

231

Beach with two Seated Women , 1904

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

236

Woman in Three Stages , 1894

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Rasmus Meyer Room 206

Although the Skrik (The Scream, in its many incarnations made between 1893 and 1910) remains the visual symbol for alienation in a developing industrial society, Munch was playful with conveying himself as a painter of madness even if he would eventually contest the association. As early as 1908, The Scream was reproduced within Psychotherapie und Kunst, illustrating what hysteria might look like, as validated by Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann, a clinical psychologist and specialist in nervous systems with a focus on hypnotic therapy. Stadelmann correlated key works of art by Francisco de Goya, Aubrey Beardsley, Marcus Behmer, Pol Doms, and Edvard Munch to illustrate the symptomatic language of psychological neurosis. His publication was released at the very early stages of psychotherapy’s development and as a treatment wherein the “analysand” verbalizes thoughts, to speak about fantasies and dreams in free association.

Although Munch was agreeable in having his work illustrate the medical references to hysteria, he would qualify his associations with the psycho-sexual in the autobiographical sketchbook, Den gale Dikters dagbok (The Mad Author’s Journal) drafted during his stay at Dr. Jacobson’s clinic in 1908:

When I write down these accounts with drawings – it is not in order to narrate my own life – For me it is a question of studying certain hereditary phenomena that are decisive for a human being’s life and fate – such as insanity in general. It is a study of the soul that I have (conducted) when I can actually study myself – use myself as an anatomical spiritual compound – Yet when it mainly has to do with a work of art and a study of the soul (I) have changed and exaggerated – and have used others for my investigation – It is therefore a mistake to view these accounts as confessions.

Emotion served as a powerful motivational, conceptual, rhetorical, political, and practical tool of investigation into alternative forms of knowledge within the sciences in the latter part of the 19th century and Munch wrestled with ways to render fear, anger, jealousy, joy, apprehension, anxiety, palpable desire, and sorrow. He drew elements and figures from his real life without relying on their verification, and as such he enacted what Baudelaire wrote in The Painter of Modern Life (1859) as the “consciousness of the new”, whereby the artist as flaneur held “a kaleidoscope of gifted con sciousness asserts and ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the non-I.” Munch’s self-portrait … conveys the primacy of the psyche that may be viewed as mirroring the artist’s mental state. As noted in his sketchbook, Munch was influenced by the writings of his con temporaries – by Søren Kierkegaard who

238

Ducks and Turkeys in Snow, 1913

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

241

Youth , 1908

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Untitled , 2023

Anne Imhof, (1978-)

Pencil on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

239

Winter Night , 1930–31

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Bathing Boys , 1904–05

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Soldiers , 2023

Anne Imhof, (1978-)

Pencil on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

240

Winter Landscape, Thüringen , 1906

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Untitled , 2023

Anne Imhof, (1978-)

Pencil on paper

Erling Kagge Collection (new acq.)

Olga and Rosa Meissner , 1907

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

243

242

245

244

246

Rasmus Meyer Room 205

in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843) explored the division of the self as a philosophical category. Munch noted that he was impressed by Kierkegaard’s elaboration around “dividing the work – into two – the painter and the overwrought friend of the Author,” implying a distancing between the artist and the work of art. In his novel, Kierkegaard denoted choice as being as much about the possibility of change, portrayed as two life views – one consciously hedonistic, and the other based on ethical duty and responsibility. Munch drew from this dichotomy as much as he did from Kierkegaard’s engagement in multiple impersonations and his proclivity toward melancholia: “I have an intimate confidante…my depression is the most faithful mistress I have known… no wonder that I return to love.”

To accommodate Composition for the Left Hand, the storage was created to house those master works that had been dismounted for the period of the exhibition. In the far corner hangs a portrait of Walter Rathenau, painted by Edvard Munch. A collector of Munch’s works, Rathenau was a Jewish industrialist, intellectual, as well as rumoured homosexual who eventually became foreign minister of Germany’s Weimar Republic. After WWI, he became left leaning in his politics and was criticized for concluding the Rapallo Treaty with Soviet Russia on April 1922 where the two countries would resume diplomatic relations. In 1922, Rathenau was assassinated by members of the far-right nationalist and anti-semitic Consul Organization.

Self-portrait in the Clinic , 1909

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Mrs. Schwartz , 1906

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

248

Weeping Woman , 1907–09

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

249

Morning Yawn , 1913

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

The Shoa!, 1897

Christian Krogh (1852–1925)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Walther Rathenau, 1907

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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This booklet is published by Kode in connection with the exhibition Composition for the Left Hand, with works from the Erling Kagge Collection.

Curated and composed by Marta Kuzma 16.02.-09.06.2024.

Kode Bergen Art Museum

Exhibition design Erwin De Muer

Graphic design Petra Hollenbach

Editor Isaac Arland Preiss

Producer Espen Johansen

Registrar Annett Schattauer, Sølvi Akhoundzadeh

Production manager Erik Markestad

Technicians Ketil Bratlid, Thomas Taylor Bugaj, Frank Christensen, Tim Ekberg, Marek Rostecki, Ole Morten Schau

The exhibition is organized by Kode

Permanenten Etage 1 Foyer

To compose for the left-hand is something of a metaphorical process and one by which to dissolve preconceptions and myths so as to enable a route less encumbered. In this respect, left-handedness is a way to understand difference – a difference with respect to thinking and functioning within a matrix that is not necessarily wired to accommodate such a differentiation. Left-handedness is also a way to find the way amid other routes unavailable. Although hand dominance has been widely accepted as anatomically and genetically rooted, it remains a mystery, an evolving field of research with ample evidence to suggest that although a genetic basis may have some foundation in its determination, environmental and cultural factors modulate which human hand dominates. The left-handed, as a minority, operates within a world built for the right-handed by virtue of the fact that the Latin adjective for the left is sinister. Plagued historically, those inclined to the left (manually speaking), have been compartmentalized into evil subdivisions – women to be assigned as witches, and the others as Devil subordinates. As burning and banishing became less customary as punitive methods, lefties persisted to be denigrated as southpaws, gallock handlers, chickie paws and scrammies. Children among this set were often punished and caned for using their left hand, subject to intense re-education programs that started with basic exercises of retuning fine motor skills, starting with drawing a circle and advancing to a forced recircuitry in handwriting, without an evaluation on what impact such re-indoctrination might have in terms of concentration, cognitive performance, and capacity to learn. Eventually the left-handed arrived in yet another mythical matrix – one in which they corresponded with suspected genius. Artists, inventors and scientists among which had been rumored as Aristotle, Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Rembrandt van Rijn, Michelangelo, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, legitimized the left-handed anew - as highly creative others who relied predominantly on the right brain, but who, nevertheless, were predisposed to neuropsychiatric disorders and schizophrenia.

The scientific community remains unresolved as to the biological determinants of left handedness. No gene has been shown to give rise to a lefty phenotype. The only reliable anatomical marker of handedness is handedness itself. Indeed, though examination of the body offers little insight into the production of sinistral (or dextral) orientation, the opposite may be true. Inquiries into the body and — how does it orient? What does it produce? – by way of the left hand and those for whom it is dominant can lead us towards new

and intriguing ways of understanding how relations of bodies, minds, and worlds are produced and maintained. Amid the enduring myths, the persistence of the left hand maintains the upstanding truth that the human body is irremediably asymmetric: its brain consists of one left and one right cerebral hemisphere, each of which controls the opposite side of the body. Each is perpetually communicating with the other in an operational dialogue, to and fro. The left brain maps spatial information onto the temporal order and the right brain inscribes the temporal information onto the spatial order in a co-dependence of transmission that lends to a kind of stereoscopic depth cognition. This debunks the assumption that minds are differentiated by the domination of one sagittal bisection of the brain over the other. That artists are right-brain dominant, for example, is a myth without any evidentiary basis.

When we open this discussion to the field of art, the hand/hands hold distinction as mediators, producing art objects manual deliberation, ostensibly, with the creative mind. What if the hand’s role here is overdetermined? The premise that the hand and mind are at odds subtends age old banter — mind over matter, making over thinking — fermenting these old wives’ tales into positions of default where there is a lack of interest in arguments as to what art is and what art was. The brain is art’s central nervous system as it is involved both in the perception of art and in reception of art. That is, the brain’s ability to take form, and for that matter, to annihilate form, is the basic functional opposition that has plagued philosophers as Hegel and Kant in the past. To apprehend means to grasp something and to give it form. In the 18th century, the sublime was a term referred to that reflected a new cultural awareness as to the limited nature of self. The encounter with the sublime constituted that which we do not have a clear mental concept for in terms of the experience we encounter, leading to an active interplay of imagination as a way to conjure the something wild beyond one’s precognitive grasp. This meeting with the indiscernible, the unnamable, the undecidable, the indeterminate, that once consumed artists throughout the 18th and 19th century, was not only wound around the inability to perceive of what was there but also about about an awareness of lack. Current thinkers as Catherine Malabou reroute this traditional interpretation of circuitry of nature and self, to ask, instead, what is the relation of the neuronal and the mental? That is, what to make of this vast system of codes, protocols and dispatches as the material which not only mediate sensory encounters between the body and the world, but which are themselves the material analogs to the

concepts of “mind” and “intellect?” How does this open one up to non-systematized thinking and/or for that matter, feeling? It was Rousseau, after all, who explored how it is possible to live in harmony with one’s nature without being constrained by societal expectations or external pressures to posit the question – why is it, that given the brain is plastic and free, that we are still always and everywhere in chains?

What Malabou would propose is that we jostle our consciousness from not only its routines and patterns but from a slumber she would refer to as the narcolepsy of consciousness, a kind of hypnogogic state, to understand how the brain, and the hand (left or right, as determined by the brain) is molded by the economic, political, and social organization with which it interacts. What is the relationship between the brain, the sociological, and the ecological when a neutral position is no longer tenable. Malabou would propose that to understand these relationships necessitates coming to terms with the way human subjectivity is constituted by a split. We may be agents endowed with free will and the capacity to self-reflect, but between our organic capacities for movement, growth, creativity, thought, communication, death, etc., we remain, at our constitution, at the level of particles, of the same matter that has existed in various material forms for terrestrial eons and tied to the unbearably finite and intractable experience of ourselves. Malabou posits the human as a geological agent. This takes seriously critiques of terms like “human,” or “subject” that subtend much of today’s philosophical discourse, but stops short of forgoing the value of agency as an operative term. Malabou suggests that we might share in the quality of agency – that is, not only with other species but with other categories of existing things. It is in this sense that we are coming to recognize our sameness with the rest of universe and “whereby “human subjectivity is in a sense reduced to atoms without any atomic intention and has become structurally alien, by want of reflexivity.”

Although this may infer a predicament that we find ourselves, so to speak, stuck in our skull, the brain has the capacity to profoundly transform. While Henri Bergson may have approached the brain as a central telephone exchange whereby a command center governs functions in a hierarchical order, Malabou disavows this hierarchical vision of the brain toward one more democratic - as an organ, she notes as more “supple, adaptable, and plastic.” The brain’s inability to shift, for example, is subject to an individual’s lack of social flexibility, which is then paralleled by a lack of neuronal flexibility in the brain. This means that

where the conditions of life and work are themselves calcified, our neurons follow suit, in becoming rigidly adhering to further stultify the cerebral network. This seems to represent a paralysis of the social mind, that Malabou understands as the very condition of modernity, as the brain’s contemporary modification in its inability to be nimble and to adapt.

What does it take for to restore an acrobatic brain or for that matter to restore the brazen continuity of the neuronal and mental – between the biological structure of the brain and what may be understood as the autonomous structure of vision? An abandonment to the entire concept of continuity, to privilege instead the “creative bursts” that might disrupt these prefabricated configurations that Malabou trusts may break the static transmission to transform something like nature into something like freedom, to allow for what Bergson understood as a reconnection between stimulus and response through a deeper experience of reflection and memory so as to set in motion what Malabou describes as a “dialectical play between emergence and annihilation of form” as a way to “create resistance to neuronal ideology in responding to what the brain wants, and what we want for it” in the form of perception images, action images, affect images, time images, recollection images.

Vision (by definition):

1. the act or power of seeing.

2. something seen in a dream, trance, or ecstasy.

3. the act or power of imagination.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans has been fascinated by the study of the stars and their formations from a young age when he rigged a camera to his home telescope as a way photograph the night sky. He proceeded to travel to areas optimal for observing solar eclipses – partial, annular and total – among various astral phenomena. Tillmans recalls that at the age of 14, he foresaw that he would be 36 years old when Venus’ transit would next be visible from Earth – a rare astronomical phenomenon that would not take place for another 128 years. Venus transit 2004 is the artist’s witness of this event – “a disk of Venus moving over the duration of six hours over the disk of the Sun. The pink circle is the Sun, the spot is Venus… For me, this was a moving experience to see, like the mechanics of the solar system right in front of your eye.” The artist and friend to Tillmans, Julie Ault has written: “the installation system with which Tillmans authors his exposure of continuity and change is structurally evocative of a constellation or universe. His sense of space comes from his passion for astronomy. (Ault, The Subject is Exhibition).

Chrysanthemum, 2006

The Chrysanthemum, as a botanical and iconographic specimen, has had a long history of veneration. Its taxonomic name, a straightforward compound of Ancient Greek terms for gold (Chryssos) and flower (Anthemon), betrays the same augustness its symbolic usage centuries prior in the crests of Japanese imperial families. In cultures spanning millennia and continents, it has been a token of comfort to the bereaved, symbolic not only of death, but of mourning in all its particular, living profundity.

In 2016, Tillmans would stage Benjamin Britten’s epic dirge, the choral work War Requiem. First performed in 1962, on the occasion of the London Coventry Cathedral’s reconstruction, the composition remains as a paragon of 20th century opera. Under Tillman’s direction. Rewind ten years, descend from the high thematic altitudes of God and Nation, kneel down on the ground and attend closely to the chrysanthemum. We catch it serendipitously in full bloom – which, for this flower, means it’s already begun to wilt.  2, 5

Daidō Moriyama

Shinjuku, 1973

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1938, Moriyama started his career as a graphic designer. Influenced by the work of photojournalist Shomei Tomatsu, Moriyama was part of a generation deeply affected by World War II, the American occupation, the resulting Americanized

westernization and gradual erosion of Japanese tradition. Drawn to the nation’s grittier corners, Moriyama began his career documenting city life of Shinjuku. When he first started photography, Moriyama felt that a rotary press (like those from high-speed printing machines used for printing newspapers) would be better suited for his images than the high fidelity reproductions circulated in popular print media. These grainy, out-of-focus, abstract images follow what is referred to in Japan as Wabi-Sabi: fidelity in representing the reality of a given time by accentuating its accentuation of flaws and imperfection. In the early 1960s, Moriyama joined as one of the founding members of Provoke, a journal made up of politically left leaning photographers who sought to redefine Japanese photography for the post-war era. Provoke’s photographers understood the medium as time-based, inscribed with memories of tragedy and guilt. In printing works for the magazine, the collective’s photographers eliminated information, record, and narrative from their work to create what they understood to be a “pure image.” The first volume of the journal issued a manifesto that stated something equivalent to the concept of pure mathematics: “the image by itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable with language. Yet it is irreversible materiality – the reality that is cut out of the camera – constitutes the opposite side of language, and for this reason, it stimulates the world of language and concepts.”  3

Isa Genzken

Weltempfanger (World Receiver), 1999

Isa Genzken’s practice has explored the concepts of architecture, space, and ruins as they relate to postwar Germany. Weltempfanger or World Receiver, as a concrete cast block, references the cold, raw material of postwar German reconstruction. In extending the block grid with outstretched aerials, the artist noted: “my antennas were meant to be feelers, things you stretch out to feel something, like the sound of the world and its many tones.” The antennaed receivers’ silhouettes recall portable radios of the cold-war era, whose wide frequency ranges enabled listeners to tune in to stations from all over the world. In this period, radio waves could not be blocked by borders or walls, and hence became the preferred medium for propaganda transmission.

To Genzken, the constitution of Weltempfanger includes sound among its material components — including sound that is not audible or otherwise unheard. It seems that

it is along these axes of audibility between that the World Receiver imposes its eeriness unmistakable in the artist’s anamnestic, antennaed account of how the object was “meant” to be a sensorium. And it is indeed the antennae that produce the recognizable figure of the radio amongst colors, shapes and textures, namely concrete, all chipped and patinated. The ghost presumably encased in these carefully poured concrete molds has probably heard too much in its endless confinement in the ankylosing material. Still, liveliness is uncannily present in the scene, its signal unencumbered. To put it in simple, binaristic terms, the World Receiver is at once barred by the weight of domination and ruin from speaking, while paradoxically teeming with signification. It recalls the signature material of crumbled monuments, bunkers, and the Berlin Wall as much as it was for modernism as rendered by Ludwig van der Rohe (or Marcel Breuer, not to mention Le Corbusier). But, machinated, mummified, and operating on noisy channels with faulty hardwired functionality as a radio and as a participant in any signifying context is on the fritz.

In Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver , the art historian Lisa Lee noted that Genzken’s My Brain , 1984 served as the biological analog to the Weltempfanger series, as a clump of plaster with a thin metal wire extending out “inclined toward a world, figuring what consciousness of and in the world entails: vulnerability and readiness to be impressed. This cerebrum suggests a double receptivity: to sonic waves but also to traces of the artist’s hands imprinted in the form, suggesting works that adopt a mode of alertness and openness toward the world not to imply that they passively “reflect” their times. Her artworks are receivers but they are also transmitters of a distinct perspective that is always personal, always incisive.”  1

Ceal Floyer

Unfinished, 1995

Ceal Floyer’s work projects two hands with circling thumbs, a humorous wink to the saying “twiddle one’s thumbs”, which means to to do nothing for a period of time, usually while you are waiting for something to happen. It is a widely accepted moving gesture that tends to communicate impatience and while aspiring to fill time – rendered as a meaningless gesture. A work addresses time and how it is contextualized – be it as free or gauged (against labor time) – and how, in Floyer’s film, one is repeating a gesture as a manifestation of anxiety with respect to spare time.  4

1

Weltempfänger (World Receiver) , 1999

Isa Genzken (1948–)

Concrete, metal

Erling Kagge Collection

Unfinished , 1995

Ceal Floyer (1968–)

Projection/installation, no sound

Edition 5 of 5 + 2 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

2 3

Venus Transit , second contact, 2004

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-print

Chrysanthemum, 2006

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-print

Erling Kagge Collection

Shinjuku 1973 , 25pm, 1973/2006

Daidō Moriyama (1938–)

DVD transferred from 8mm film, 16 min 29 sec

Edition of 8

Erling Kagge Collection

Diane Arbus

Department store Santa Claus at the training school, Albion, N.Y. 1964

“Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.”(Diane Arbus from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph ).  6

Elevator: Seth Price

Essay with Knots, 2008

“Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur?” Price posed this question in his essay Dispersion in 2002, when digital technology was beginning to fundamentally change the way art and ideas are distributed around the globe.

Dispersion is an artwork in the form of an art historical essay. Originally released at a time when the internet was beginning to affect all aspects of culture, Price argued that distribution, rather than production, was the primary way in which works accrued meaning, and that artists needed to find ways of harnessing the enormous capacity for meaning-making inherent in communications networks.

In keeping with the emphasis on distribution, the work was released in various formats and versions over many years, including pages on Price’s website, widely circulated PDFs, print publications, and sculptural objects. Although deeply engaged with the net Dispersion specifically addressed the art system. This page as page in an essay has circulated in various forms including as a printed book, and a PDF available online at http://sethpricestudio.com/writing archive/ Disperson.pdf, and as this work in which Price’s Adobe InDesign files are printed on plastic formed around knotted ropes using industrial packaging technology.  7

Department store Santa Claus at the training school, Albion, N.Y . 1964

Diane Arbus (1923–1971)

Gelatin-silver print Erling Kagge Collection

Essay with Knots pp. 14–15 , 2008

Seth Price (1973–)

silkscreened vacuum formed high impact polystyrene Erling Kagge Collection

Mental Pictures

Clouds, it goes without saying, are everywhere. Indeed, their ubiquitous presence in the landscape makes them the epitome of what is “mundane” – a word whose Latin root, Mundus, refers to things on earth. At the same time, we can think of clouds as profoundly distinct from the world as it is perceived “down here,” in its low atmosphere where ground meets air, the troposphere — albeit clouds in the very distant atmosphere aren’t visible to us.

Clouds are exceptional in that, as far as they do disclose themselves to visual perception, they are the most abundant, if not the only, indicators that there is anything in the atmosphere at all, anything between our planet and the nearest celestial body, that could be disclosed. Deceptively familiar, it takes only a nudge of critical consideration before the benign, pillowy figure yields to something else, foreboding, electrified, and deeply opaque.

The cloud, as a mediator between ourselves and the unsurpassable verticality of our world, is at once indeterminate and constitutive. From this, we find ourselves able to appreciate how little can be determined at all by human perceptive faculties, especially when it comes to our fragile relationships to nature. To do so requires that we reckon with those small acts of deception which we facilitate the production of something called “reality.”

As reality tends to be understood as that which is available to access as sensory input from our surroundings, we tend to forget that our surroundings are broadcast on a different channel as recipients of the program. In Apostrophe: Clouds , the poetry scholar Anahid Nersessian has written about this paradox: “clouds have a present tense existence but a body whose density has been spread out over time and grown thin.” As metaphors, clouds make us aware that things that are invisible may not be merely mystical and enigmatic phenomena, but real and covert and harmful to point to, as Nersessian writes, “the clouds of climate change as oracles and overlords of slow motion but ever accelerating disaster.”

As our relationship to our surroundings, to nature is still inscribed by the 18th century, our “habits” with relation to seeing are out of step with reality. Before the philosopher Immanuel Kant, it was widely believed that individuals and reality corresponded with one another in mutual perpetuity. This had been a mirror theory of knowledge. But for Kant, we can

only experience reality, understand it as a “truthful” representation of the world, in the context of mind , a faculty somewhere between intellect and sensorium, mediated by imagination. That is whatever we see “out there” is mediated both by the randomly determined qualities of the natural world and by our own neural, psychological or otherwise unwavering penchant for imaginative prediction. The color red, for example, differs in optical wavelength throughout the day. The imagination, to bring the manifold of sensation into an image, requires a cognitive capacity to process sensory inputs and synthesize them with “concepts,” space and time. This faculty, running in perpetuity, are driven by a self-rewarding cooperation between the left and right cerebral hemispheres: the reward, an experience of aesthetic pleasure – a harmony between concept and sensual perception.

Kant’s theory of mind, drawn further, might hold that the organization and maintenance of the visual faculty should represent the dynamic neuronal, synaptic environments which support visual perception, memory, processing and so on. The world seems represented to the mind, and the mind in turn generates its own creative reproduction of the world. We can see this notions of “environment” or “nature” which picture it as a cornucopia of extractable material. Spilling from this abundant well include not only materials excavated from mining, drilling, agriculture, etc., but also immaterial output in the form of ideas and frameworks of thought. To consider something as beautiful or pleasing may be a type of visual input that corresponds to the processing rules of the central nervous system. However, the realm and spectrum of visual experience make aesthetic preferences unpredictable. This, in turn, makes static deductions of beauty, among other ideals, unreliable. After the tragedies of the Second World War, Theodore Adorno inverted the categories noting, “to say the art is not identical with the concept of beauty, but requires for its realization the concept of the ugly as its negation is a platitude.” Adorno integrates the category of the ugly as an ideal to represent the contemporary as dissonant, repellent, raw, towards a final capitulation of beauty. In this respect, Adorno commences a revision of Kant’s aesthetic theory, eroding the sanctity of 18th century ideals of harmony and symmetry, which no longer held: “it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”

Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans’ photography absorbs visual, cultural, and political stimuli and transmutes them into artworks which bear an optical relationship to material truth. In his body of work, these processes serve as a conceptual thread, a preoccupation one finds evident in his publications and installations. Since 1998, Tillmans has slowly unsettled the terms by which photography distinguishes itself and its mechanisms from other print forms. Freischwimmer is an integral part of a series of nonfigurative works which evoke a liquid state, and of which Urgency X and Mental Picture are also part. These works were created without a camera – having been fed through a printer and in the absence of an electronic signal that would be triggered to re-create an image, a swirl of ink in the machine or any artifact or debris lodged within will coat the paper to yield unintended information and effects. The architectural historian and writer Keller Easterling has written about the work to note “when things are released from their names and chemicals are released from their boxes, you can work not only on each individual thing but also on the matrix or medium in which they are suspended – where medium returns to its root, medius , meaning “middle.” This medium is the mixing chamber for forms of interplay.”  8, 9, 12

Gruppe 10 , 2007

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

C-Print

Erling Kagge Collection

9

Freischwimmer #118 , 2005

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

Inkjet print

Edition 1 of 1 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

12

Forest , 1868

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Oil on cardboard Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Forest , undated

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Oil on cardboard Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Mental Picture #63 , 2002

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

C-print

Hertervig’s paintings of ghostly figures on horseback produced throughout the 1890s evoke slippages of the mind from memory that recalls (scenes or figures which are “called” from the consciousness as obedient artifacts) and that which compulsively, painstakingly recollects, taking memories as objects, degraded first into images and then further, in time, by neuronal and psychological corruption. These retro-images, dissolved as they are outward, into repetition, rhythm, and resonance, were painted while the artist was in a state of psychosis. The figures, ethereal, elusive, veiled and riding in the distance, are constituted in a flat spatiality incompatible with animacy. Hertervig, working in his native Stanvanger in 1858, conveys the mutual dependence of psychosis with defamiliarization, where spaces and objects are warped, contorted, into strangeness, but never do they seem entirely foreign or new – indeed, the not-quite-rightness of psychotic space is so alienating precisely becauase the scene is so deeply but irretrievably familiar. Despite accounts of schizophrenic experience rarely describe hallucinations in the strict sense: perceiving an object where there is not one. More often, the psychosis acts within an otherwise intact peripersonal space. In this distortion of objects and persons in space, the perception of flesh and blood may yield to perception as image.

The Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse has worked extensively with the 19th century landscape painter as a subject of his books Melancholy I , II and III in an exploration of Hertervig’s paintings as a way to recover the painter’s possible first-person experience of psychosis, hallucinations and delusions. Fosse commences his first part of the book with Hertervig’s arrival at the Dusseldorf Art Academy where he experiences, throughout one day, a psychotic breakdown.

Fosse writes from the perspective of the artist to indicate the circular inference that results in hallucinations and delsional beliefs: “I’m going to be a landscape painter, trained at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, and Hans Gude, he is my teacher. I am Hertervig the painter. I was born in Hattarvag. I am the painter Lars Hertervig, with his long wavy black hair, with his brown eyes. And I am Hans Gude’s student. I can paint. And today Hans Gude was going to come and see the picture I am painting, but I couldn’t make it to class, I lay in bed at home, lay in bed in my purple velvet suit, I lay in bed instead and waited for my darling Helene to come to see me. I look down the street, I am walking down the street. I don’t know where I am going….”  10–11, 13–30

Landscape, 1863

Lars Hertervig (1830-1902)

Watercolour Kode

16

Landscape with Barn , 1870–80s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers

Landscape with Riders , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Shipwreck, 1880-90s

Lars Hertervig (1830-1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers Kode

Beach with Fishermen, before 1854

Lars Hertervig (1830-1902)

Watercolour and pencil on paper Kode

Landscape with Meadows and River , 1870–80s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers

Riders in a Forest , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Gouache on two compiled papers

Two Riders in a Marshy Landscape , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers

21

Landscape with Six Riders , 1880–90s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers

Four Riders , 1880–90s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping paper

Horsemen and People in a Square , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour, gouache, and charcoal on wrapping paper

Two Riders , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on paper

Landscape with Seven Riders , 1880–90s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Gouache on combined papers

Two Riders , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on paper

Landscape with a Row of Female Riders , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour, gouache, and charcoal on wrapping papers

Riders in Front of a White Hous e, 1880–90s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour

Grassy Hills and Sky , 1870–80s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers

Landscape with Three Riders , 1890s

Lars Hertervig (1830–1902)

Watercolour and gouache on wrapping papers

Permanenten

Johan Christian Dahl

Johan Christian Dahl had been born into poverty with his first training as a house painter and decorative artist in his city. Upon being recognized by a wealthy elite, his education at the Art Academy in Copenhagen was subsidized, where he studied before moving onto Dresden. It was here that he met and became close with C.D. Friedrich, forming a friendship that resulted in a shared approach to landscape painting in the years thereafter. Dahl’s Cloud Studies from the 1820s and onwards were produced at a time when a visual imagination was combined with a fascination with natural science in areas of geology, minerology, palaeontology, anatomy, botany, optics and astronomy, that had taken hold in the early 1800s. Carl Linnaeus had already contributed Systema Naturae (1735) by introducing an order to the chaos of nature by way of a naming system for plants and animals, a system still used today. Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803) followed to establish the 4 categories of clouds – stratus, cumulus, cirrus and nimbus to contribute to a cloud theory that had significant influence on the writings of Goethe and on Ruskin. Romantic and post Romantic references to the sky and to the clouds probed new ways in thinking about the lived environment. Dahl, who foregrounded his paintings of nature in Norway adopted a realistic approach to landscape so as to capture atmospheric phenomena, taking care to distinguish these types of clouds within cloud studies.  31, 37–39

31

Cloud studies, 1820-1860

Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857)

Oil on paper and cardboard Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Concorde was first published as book of 64 photographs around the supersonic airliner that had intrigued Tillmans who noted:

Concorde was perhaps the last example of a technoutopian invention from the sixties still to be operating and fully functional today. It’s futuristic shape, speed and ear-numbing thunder grabs people’s imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969. It’s an environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit. It flies at more than double the speed of sound, at a maximum of 2333 km/h in an altitude of 16000 m. Its empty weight is 85900 kg and it takes up to 94750 kg fuel at a capacity of 100 passengers. Due to rising fuel prices and environmental pressures, supersonic travel never really became a reality. Only fourteen Concordes, excluding prototypes, have ever been built and are currently flying between Paris or London and New York in just under 3 ½ hours. For the chosen few, flying the Concorde is apparently a glamourous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst it in air, landing, or taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology

All Concorde aircraft were retired in 2003, 27 years after commercial operations had begun.  32–36

Urgency X , 2006

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

C-type print

Erling

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-print

Edition 1 of 10 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Johan

Oil on paper Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Concorde L433 , 1998

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-print

Edition 2 of 10 + 1 AP Erling Kagge Collection

Concorde , 1997

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-print

Edition 2 of 10 Erling Kagge Collection

Concorde L444 - 9 , 1998

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

C-print

Edition 3 of 10 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

Clouds over a Coastal Landscape, undated (Præstø, Denmark)

Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857)

Oil on cardboard Kode

Oil on canvas Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

Concorde L440 - 2A , 1998

View of the Elbe, 1841

Christian Dahl (1788-1857)

View of the Elbe with the Bridge, undated Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857)

Permanenten 1

Ground Floor Gallery

Martine Syms

Relax Your Jaw follows Notes on Gesture (2104) whereby the artist drew from the British physician John Bulwer’s 1644 text Chirologia: On the Natural Language of the Hand , to suggest a complex vocabulary of movements (or coded set of gestures) some of which may resonate across centuries and others that remain specific to a time. The image of a left hand outstretched above a sun lit swimming pool and printed on a floor mat may appear a portrayal of the freedom drive tenuously extended and performed, by virtue of its title, by instruction. What is at stake by relaxing your jaw is a question that is posed amid an extended gesture from constraint. Syms notes that she “uses a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” and that is acknowledged, while Syms also adds” But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.” Syms co-founded a bookstore called Golden Age as well as started an artist-book imprint called Domenica. Referred to as an artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker, DJ, influencer, she wrote in 2013, The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto to propose “the chastening and hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptians kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”  40

Permanenten 1

Ground Floor Gallery

Peter Fischli & David Weiss Airports, 1987–2012

The artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss produced a series of airports between 1988 and 1999 to include more than eight hundred photographs to elevate airports as mass transit spaces to the rank of photographic objects with a contemporary iconic status. And yet these images followed a previous decade wherein airports were plagued by activism displayed – be it in protests held on their outside premises, or in hijackings on the part of radical political factions that took place on their tarmacs, or in scenes of violence that took place within the airports. Narita Airport in Tokyo as depicted in this image had a particularly tumultuous history with respect to state’s relegation of agricultural land owned by a coalition of farmers to the development of a new airport. Students protested

Relax Your Jaw (23) , 2018

Martine Syms (1988–)

printed dance flooring, coloured tape

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled (Tokyo) , 1990 (printed 2000)

Fischli & Weiss (1952–and 1946–2012)

C-print

Edition of 6 + 1/1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

the government’s decision to build an airport and the transgression of farmers’ rights to form the Protestors from the Fourth International Japan faction – who raided and barricaded themselves within the control tower in 1978 and proceeded to damage the equipment within, postponing the opening of the airport. Protests ensued into the 1980s against the state’s efforts to open a second runway and to expand the airport.

Marc Auge’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity and published some years after the initial printing of this work introduced the distinction between the place and the non-place as derived from the opposition between place and space – place defined as “relational, historical, and concerned with identity and non-place, produced by supermodernity, which are spaces which are not themselves anthropological places, and which, unlike in Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate earlier places.” Auge, in 1992, defined the non-place as the “real measure of our time” to include air, rail, motorway routes, airports, railway stations, hotels, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and the “complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purpose of communication.”  41

Permanenten

Etage 2

Central Apse & Right Hemisphere

Central Apse

You might think a solar eclipse would have no color The word “eclipse” comes from the ancient Greek ekleipsis, “a forsaking, quitting, abandonment.” The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on color What after all is color? Something not no color. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind? There is a moment of reversal within totality. “Reverses Nature,” Emily Dickenson mutters. As the moon’s shadow passes over you—like a rush of gloom, a tornado, a cannonball, a loping god, the heeling of a boat, a slug of anaesthetic up your arm (those comparisons occur in literature)— you will see, through your spectroscope or bit of smoked glass, some of the spectral lines grow lighter, then a flash and the lines reverse—to a different spectrum with some lines removed and others brightened. You are now inside the moon’s shadow, which is one hundred miles wide and travels at two thousand miles an hour. The sensation is stupendous. It seems to declare a contest with everything you have experienced of light and color hitherto.

Anne Carson, from Totality: The Color of Eclipse in Decreation

Sensation and perception are closely related but distinct processes. Sensation describes the body’s neuroelectric response to the external stimulation of its sensory organs, including the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and cochlea. Having received these signals, perception occurs as the brain selectively organizes and interprets them. The poet Anne Carson is drawn to the influence of the psyche in perception. In the essay quoted above, Carson works through the phenomenon of the solar eclipse as a counter against an accepted perceptual encounter. In the absence of color or light — which alone marks a rare event for the human eye — color of an entirely different variety occurs. She extends optical possibilities by reading beyond hue, to understand other ways to perceive color – through wavelength, for example, with longer wavelengths producing warm, arousing sensations, and shorter ones, relaxing or cool.

How does one become “rooted,” or attain contact with reality when guided by a somatosensory matrix that is both highly sensitive and increasingly suspect? To counsel her speculation on the matter, Carson references “decreation,” a neologism of the French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil.

Carson references the term “decreation,” drawing inspiration from Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, to describe how this rooting might occur. For Weil,

Untitled , 2012

Trisha Donnelly (1974–) Digital Video, Projection 3:59 min. Color, no sound Edition 1 of 5

Erling Kagge Collection

it was the perpetual event of self-annihilation, especially by means of sinking, embedding oneself beneath the earth. It was also the sole objective of existence: to give up one’s existence and, by means of submersion and dispersion, yield oneself to the supernatural latent within the real. In order for the individual to be in full contact with reality is, according to Weil, to come to terms with the supernatural that is constitutive of reality. This is the point when the real begins to get real, where the divine and the terrestrial, each in the orbit of the other, produce something harmonious, sublime. The “real” Weil refers to is not a historical or social reality, but a revelatory one. Its subject is incompatible with the finality of the I, as it has been produced and refined over centuries. It is a precondition of decreation that this I be extinguished. This is not to speak of a requirement for destructive which can only emerge once the I has been extinguished. Decreation doesn’t indicate the destruction of the physical self, but that the mind, sensorium and flesh be embedded in and among others in an extreme process of social awareness and active compassion – attuned to the obligation for recognition, inclusion, justice, whereby, “justice is the exercise of supernatural love.”

In this sidestepping of self by way of Weil, maneuvering through perceptual experience read from a great distance, Carson to the sublime scene, “from inside the moon’s shadow, which is one hundred miles wide and travels at two thousand miles an hour.” From here, she restores great women writers to the Romantic tradition of the sublime, too often dominated by men. Here, she cites the work of another great woman writer –Virginia Woolf, whose The Sun and the Fish was a record of celestial events of 29, June 1927. For Woolf, referring to the total eclipse of the sun as “disembodied intercourse with the sky” served as an epiphany on the level of self, with major repercussions for the collective consciousness and literary imagination. Attesting to what she characterizes as the defeat of color, she recalls, “and as the fatal seconds passed, and we realized the sun was being defeated, had now, indeed, lost the race, all the colour began to go from the moor. The blue turned to purple, the white became livid as the approach of a violent but windless storm. Pink faces went green, and it became the colder than ever. This was the defeat of the sun.”

And yet the defeat of the sun is a regenerative force, whereby Woolf locates the “revolution of the cosmos” which carries with it, and through its aftermath, the potential for a revolution of the senses, the way forward to a transformed collective vision, and in stimulating a transformative relationship between nature, sensorial perception and aesthetic representation.

Trisha Donnelly

Trisha Donnelly, throughout, has opted to have her work carry no titles, her exhibitions have no names, her press releases be reduced the very essential facts and information. Viewing her work is reading her work in respect to that connection of psyche to perception, to understand, as Anne Carson writes, the sense of color as a “flow” that is accompanied by perceptual changes, and subject to one’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli – perhaps as a flash through the filters of red, green and blue mechanisms of color vision, analogous to the channels used for communicating signals on color television, or experiencing and seeing the world in different bands of spatial frequencies.  42, 58–64

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer mastered the portrayal of a the miraculous and imaginary as visions of the supernatural event in works such as The Annunciation (1503), The Ascension (1510) and The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin (1510). The art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his treatise on the art of Dürer, explained that to “realize” a vision in a work of art –that is, to make it convincing as divine – Dürer had to fulfill two contradictory requirements: “the artist must be an accomplished master of naturalism to convey a world controlled by the laws of nature and at the same time to make the viewer aware in the suspension of those laws to convey the essence of a miracle. Dürer achieved this portrayal of the miraculous event from the level of factuality, in contrasting this naturalistic rendering of visible things while depicting a non naturalistic mode of representation.”

Dürer believed that the stars influenced an individual’s intellectual and physical predispositions. He collaborated with cartographer and mathematician Conrad Heinfogel on the first celestial maps of the Northern and Southern Hemispher created together with the cartographer and mathematician Conrad Heinfogel, and based on the work by the imperial astronomer Johann Stabius. These star maps were distributed at local markets and sold by peddlers in Dürer’s ambition to reach beyond the cultural centers.

The early 16th century had yet to see the fine arts distinguish itself in the public eye from other crafts and skills, and yet Dürer steered printmaking into an art form without subscribing to an elitist position with respect to its accessibility. Regarded as a heretic for his digressions from the conventions of the day, he rejected, as Panofsky wrote, an “idealism which requires an artist to embellish or, or to amend, reality, and not

Annunciation , from The Life of the Virgin , ca. 1503

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

42

The Visitatio n, from The Life of the Virgin , ca. 1503 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

41 44 43

Rest on the Flight into Egypt , from The Life of the Virgin , 1504 (1511)

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

Ecce homo , from The Passion , 1512

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Engraving Kode

The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin , from The Life of the Virgin , 1510 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

Christ Carrying the Cross, from The Passion , 1512 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Engraving Kode

The Flight into Egypt , from The Life of the Virgin , 1503

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

The Holy Family with Joachim and Anne under A Tree , 1511

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

Untitled , 1998 Beatrice Caracciolo (1955–)

Zinc on wood

only to give lifelikeness to all the parts but also to add beauty because in painting loveliness is not so much desirable as necessary. He felt, on the contrary, that the crude, ugly, the fantastic, and even the monstrous had their legitimate place in art, and he attributed a peculiar virtue to those who can display their skill in coarse and rustic things.”

Dürer preferred graphic media to painting for its economic expediency, and because of his his confidence in the former craft. Lines had more meaning for him than colors, and graphic media were the most appropriate means of expression for a mind dominated by the idea of originality. In this respect, Panofsky understood that Dürer was among one of the first artists to insist that the chief requirement of a good master was inventiveness in image-making, along with talent in replicating one’s own mental image: “pour out new things which had never before been in the mind of any other man.” As a graphic artist, Dürer had a greater amount of freedom in terms of self-expression and, at times to be unconventional – within the specific conditions of possibility for print-image production. Panofsky notes that one of Dürer’s great interventions in woodcut practice involved “lending varying degrees of luminosity” to the negatives, such that prints would convey the living dynamics of lit space. A temporal quality would emerge as well, as the process by which “black lines and white intervals” transform into “negative and positive symbols of the same entity.”

Influenced by the Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer who mastered the ability to express though the line achieving an intricacy that had been unprecedented previously. Dürer also mastered a level of detail and intricacy: a competence for naturalism thus unseen. Intaglio printmaking involves the ink pooling into the grooves that the steel tip of the carving tool, the burin, incised. The excess ink on the surface of the metal matrix is wiped away with the remaining ink transferred onto paper through the printing press. Within an otherwise restrictive system in which artists only had a limited number of options at their disposal for the lines and forms they could convey. Tonal gradation would have been achieved through a process called hatching which had artists bring about illusive depth and light effects through a process called hatching, where very small lines fill in spaces tightly, distorting the shape of their containers. Dürer’s address of perspective was influenced by Leon Battista Alberti and by the geometric construction of shadows as practiced by Leonardo da Vinci. Dürer built upon these Euclidean principles to develop a series of mechanisms that extended the representation

The Ascension , from The Little Passion , ca. 1510

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand , 1496–97

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Woodcut Kode

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist , 1510

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) Woodcut Kode

Landscape with a Cannon , 1518

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) Etching on zinc Kode

Saint Christopher Facing to the Left , 1521

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) Engraving Kode

Ship in storm, undated Peder Balke (1804-1887)

Oil on wooden board Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Untitled ,

Untitled , 2009

Untitled , 2007 Trisha Donnelly (1974–) Enamel on fabric Erling Kagge Collection

2003 Trisha Donnelly (1974–) Framed silver print Erling Kagge Collection

Trisha Donnelly (1974–) Ink and pencil on paper Erling Kagge Collection

of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface. Dürer introduced the Painter’s Perspective in contrast to the older theory of vision which had been called Prospectiva naturalis . Adopting Piero della Francesca’s definition of perspective – perspective is a branch of painting which comprises five parts – the first is the organ of sight, viz. the eye; the second is the form of the object seen; the third is the distance between the eye and the object; the fourth are the lines which start from the surface of the object and to the eye; and the fifth is the plane which is between the eye and the object wherever one intends to place the objects. Dürer’s drawings deal with the problems of perspective adding a technical invention by con structing a device that consists of a needle driven into a wall and a piece of string, but the piece of string has a pin on one end and a weight on the other and which had been elaborated upon within his painter’s manual from 1525.

Works

The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand displays a scene of martyrdom of Christian soldiers on Mount Ararat (modern day Turkey) by the Persian King, Shapur I, who stands in the lower left-hand side of the composition. Amongst the carnage are two figures standing isolated in the middle of the work. These are believed to be the artist himself and a close friend, Conrad Celtes. The placing of the artist within one’s work was also later employed by Diego Valazquez in Las Meninas and by Gustav Courbet in 1656, lower left of the work, overseeing the torture of Saint Acacius, who had led the soldiers to convert. The positing of self within the work may have been Dürer’s impulse of non self-identity to allows him to emphasize his own mortality in the face of his impulse in draftsmanship that remains timeless.

Interested in theology and philosophy, Dürer produced The Great Passion and The Little Passion as a series of woodcuts depicting the Life of Christ ; The Apocalypse , as a series of 16 woodcuts representing the prophecies of the Apocalypse according to Saint John, and in 1511, Dürer completed a series of twenty woodcuts entitled The Life of the Virgin depicting the life of Mary. Published in the form of a book, these woodcuts illustrate Dürer’s technical mastery and his powers of narrative invention in depicting the details of the activities of the participants. This series also illustrates Dürer’s knowledge of midwifery as practiced in early 16th century Nuremberg. The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin combines both major events in the life of the Virgin Mary in a two-part composition featuring heaven and earth, angels and mortals as God the Father and Jesus simultaneously crown her among the clouds in a gray middle tone as the events on earth are pictured against a black background.

59

Untitled , 2008

RC Prints

60

61

In Landscape with Cannon , 1518, Dürer creates one of the most notable and extraordinary landscapes of the early 16th century with an encounter between the Orient and the Occident that takes place on the outskirts of a village, modeled after the rural setting of Nuremberg, the artist’s hometown.  43–50, 52–56

Beatrice Caracciolo

Beatrice Caracciolo experiments with a variety of materials, starting with charcoal drawings in which collaged elements come to the fore. Her work is evocative of fluctuations between solid and fluid states of matter, a way of declaring her obsession with quasi-alchemical processes. Caracciolo’s work is concerned with ways to depict displacements of energy, yet their surfaces have the same tactile quality as the drawings. This is ingrained in the very fabric of the zinc rather than “applied” to its wood surface, but the peculiar mixture of raw and refined consistencies is present in both forms. The art critic and art historian Donald Kuspit writes, “in Caracciolo’s more-or-less completely abstract drawings, instinct is alive and well, while in those that suggest landscape it becomes self-contained and civilized and, in the sculptures, diffuses into melancholic atmosphere alleviated by beatific moments of light.” Caracciolo, however unwittingly, retraces the development of gesturalism from the free play of what postFreudian theorist Anton Ehrenzweig calls nongestalt form(lessness) through more formally controlled imagery to a final stage of gestalt-form(alization) and system(ization).  51

62

Untitled , 2010

Trisha Donnelly (1974–) Marble

Erling Kagge Collection

Trisha Donnelly (1974–)

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled 1 (Double Alpha) , 2007

Trisha Donnelly (1974–) Inkjet print

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled , 2007–2008

Trisha Donnelly (1974–)

Photography on fibrous paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Peder Balke

Peder Balke was revolutionary in the pictorial context of 19th century landscape painting. His depictions of sea- and mountain- scapes were more attenuated and less lustrous than found among his peers who sought to portray a Romantic concept of nature. In his mature work, Balke moved away from the portrayal of nature of the day – as an immense and unruly sublime, to render radically reductive, almost monochrome, portrayals of landscape. He abandoned the meticulously executed composition and the blue and brown tones that predominated his earlier work, to employ simpler techniques to capture light against darkness. The main forms developed by the bold, sweeping movements of rags, course brushes, and even with his own fingers. His fingerprint is left as a mark that makes the artist’s process and presence transparent.

Balke’s unconventional techniques led contemporary critics to hold him in contempt. A review in Morgenbladet described the work at the time as: “… devoid of all artistic interest – his paintings with terrible colours, just black and white and few garish touches of blue and yellow here and there, with no question of a grandiose, poetic perception; not even in the simplest technical requirements of drawing, perspective, clarity, strength, and depth of color have been observed. The fore and middle grounds appear to have been drawn with a ruler…”

The painter and poet Per Kirkeby wrote a book dedicated to Balke to note that he resorted to “an orgy of dirty tricks, worthy of any stunt painter: waves executed as marbling, sponge-dubbing, combing wet paint and whatever worked.” Kirkeby had not intended his interpretation as a critique, rather as a candid reflection with regard to Balke as an artist who staked out the modern by making the process of painting transparent. Kirkeby observed his techniques –“a wave is a wave, and already rolled to nothing, like so much water, and a painting is a painting.” Peder Balke went so far as to abandon the brush substituting his finger blending black and white pigment so as abandon color and grand scale, in feigning nature, to abstractly and reductively, attempt to convey its true force. He was, after all, working in the wake of an industrial age, when an innate trust in natural beauty succumbed to the effects of early industrialization in the form of pollution, exploitation and commodification.

Born on the island of Helgøya in Ringsaker in 1804, Balke was raised in a humble family, and developed a clear awareness of the disparity between social

Stormy Sea , undated Peder Balke (1804–1887)

Oil on wooden panel

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

63 64

Sea and Mountains , undated Peder Balke (1804–1887)

Oil on canvas

Kode, The Stenersen Collection

classes. Throughout his life, he was drawn towards the political, economic, and social realities of his time. Art provided him with the means to live a life free from servitude to the state. His compositional technique remained unusual for his time, and this eccentricity, coupled with his increasing activist role in the pursuit of workers’ rights, complicated reception of his work. He became the Chairman of the Workers’ Union in the 1850s, and was regarded as a radical idealist, set on improving the material and institutional conditions of the workplace. When he died, his obituary credited him as a socially aware and committed citizen.

Processes, Prisms, Spectrums

Color tends to be understood as a property, possessed by things, and yet, colors are sensed and experienced and not the objective property of an environment. Colors are experienced through an extremely complex path of neurophysical, -chemical, and -structural processes, as well as the external variables in electromagnetic current, the behavior of photons. As early as 1672, Isaac Newton found the refractive separation of sunlight by a prism into the various parts of the visible spectrum. Newton also demonstrated how a recombination of spectral colors gave the sensation of colorless light or white to the human eye. But in 1810, Johann Wolfgang Goethe published a book entitled Farbenlehre ( Theory of Color ) to contest that white light was actually a combination of all spectral colors. Goethe’s position had served as the foundation for the Kantian position that the physical world offers the substance of sensations while the mind organizes this substance in space and time and provides concepts to interpret this experience. In this mode of address, the eye is understood as the active agent rather than as a passive recipient. Color vision deals with one of the major sensory receptors, the eye, and its primary stimulus, light. Humans possess a highly developed perception of color and despite the amount of research done in the area, there is still relatively minimal known about the nature of perception as the basis of cognition, and more specifically, in the interplay between the perceptual and the cognitive system when it is complicated by experience and emotions.

 65–66

Oscar Tuazon

The protruding mirrored hexagon hung from the wall of glass with panels E – J (composed of panels E, F, G, H, I, J) to infer that there is an instructional aspect to the construction, and yet with a malfunctioning functionality inferred as the mirrored object resists reading the viewer’s reflection of anyone, resistant to its gaze, and hence resistant to be reduced to a psychoanalytic object, to an object that functions as one in service to vanity, and in its ambiguity, steers away from deduced as art. By virtue of its geometry, an opened ended hexagon, it spatially and mathematically represents balance and equilibrium. Symbolically, it refers to to a geometry of cooperation, and collectivity in contrast to the vanity of self. Its mirrored surface produced through silvering, a chemical process of coating glass with a reflective substance.  70

Wolfgang Tillmans

“Photography itself is a mystical practice. It is alchemy. It is a medium of approximation, measured chance, and impermanence, which my Silver works evidence most literally. The moment a picture comes through the processing machine it begins to deteriorate. Again: Permanence is impossible. Entropy is our condition.

To show the fragility of a print is to show its strength. The concepts of permanence, impermanence, materiality, authenticity, value, and fragility are central to my practice. These ideas are layered throughout my work, from choices made long before printing, to the tape technique I developed to mount these picture objects to the wall, to the certificate of renewal. Underpinning it all is a profound appreciation for the potential of this ‘simple’ piece of paper – an old lithograph, a concert poster, a magazine page, a freshly ejected photocopy. It all leaves a lasting impression.”

Wolfgang Tillmans, from To Look Without Fear Silver is a nonobjective image, part of a series of works produced since 1992, that relies on a fixed process by which the paper goes through a developer that the artist has purposely not cleaned or barely cleaned, so that the residue produces chemical reactions on paper. W ith metallic reflections, the work is realized through a mechanized process that relies on light and on chemistry. The realization of an image as an object –to make apparent the physical presence of the paper upon which it is printed, its fragility, the light fastness of the dyes required and constitutive of making an

Untitled , 2007

Trisha Donnelly (1974–) pencil, ink, colored pencil on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

EK-072AB

E-J (Mirror) , 2007

Oscar Tuazon (1975–) Mirror, adhesive tape, and metal clips

Erling Kagge Collection

Lighter, magenta/red I , 2008

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-type print

Erling Kagge Collection

Transient 3 , 2015

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) Inkjet print on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Silver 84 , 2011

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) C-print mounted on Dibond in artist’s frame

Erling Kagge Collection

Silver 147 , 2013

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–) emulsion on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Vacuum blue , 2005

Trisha Donnelly (1974–)

Pencil and colored crayon on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Lighter, beige I , 2007

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

C-type print

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled , 2023

Antonio Tarsis (1995–)

Guarany Fósforos de Segurança matchbox balsa wood and paper

Erling Kagge Collection

image – chemical images of photography versus that of painting – that arrive out of synthetic formulas that are applied in magazines, photocopies, laser prints, in a myriad of image and surface relations. These works are mechanical, digitally reproduced materializations that are read in chemical and material terms, and yet posited by the artist as a relationship to history of art production.  66, 69–72, 179

Tauba Auerbach

The notion of seeing colours outside the standard human RGB spectrum has been a subject of research for Tauba Auerbach for many years. In an exhibition held at the Bergen Kunsthal and curated by Solveig Øvstebø some years ago under the title ‘Tetrachromat’, Auerbach referred to the speculative theory of tetrachromacy – which allows some to see colors that are not visible to others and is a condition that results when an additional type of color receptor cell is present in the eye. Those who are tetrachromatic can perceive an estimated 100 million color variations. It is common in the animal world, and yet it is a rare genetic phenomenon that is believed to affect only females, and approximately 12 percent of the women in the world population (the same percent that claims the world population of the left-handed). This differs from synesthesia, a neurological condition whereby a person experiences one sense through another – for example hearing music and seeing coloured shapes, associating certain numbers or words with color. Through explorations of chromacy and topology, Auerbach’s work proposes an analogy between the spectral fourth dimension and the spatial fourth dimension – both of which are beyond normal human perceptual capacities and thus remain in the realm of the hypothetical. She is drawn by by objective systems that involve the applications of mathematical structures and repetitive actions in testing the limits of individual perception. In this work, the artist stretched the canvases flat so that the dimensional folds became lines in a gradient of color, staging uncanny illusions of light and shadow across the works’ surfaces.  78

Antonio Tarsis

“After my mother’s death, I felt an enormous desire to paint, but I had no money to buy canvas, paint, or brushes. So, I started to collect materials in the favela, picking up what was left over from the wall-paint shops, along with objects and various materials in the Sete Portas trash. I collected everything that I could use in my painting

Untitled , 2023

Antonio Tarsis (1995–)

Guarany Fósforos de Segurança matchbox balsa wood and paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled , 2021

Antonio Tarsis (1995–)

Guarany Fósforos de Seguarança matchbox

balsa wood and paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled (Fold) [ Gwangju #2] , 2010

Tauba Auerbach (1981–)

Acrylic on canvas/wooden stretcher

Erling Kagge Collection

process. The matchbox was one of several items that I collected in my neighborhood. The area where I lived was basically a crack land where drug users used the matchboxes to store cigarette ashes that they mixed with crack. Between 2013 and 2015, I produced the first works with matchboxes. At that moment, I understood that I was articulating a work that connected with the whole historical context of Salvador and Brazil, including Indigenous and African references, landscape, the domestic environment and houses in the favela, memory and handicraft, fire and purple, sky and sea. From this understanding, I started to analyze my practice better. The matchboxes opened my eyes to develop a deeper and more conceptual research without losing the poetics that painting brought me. … When I started collecting the matchboxes, I was very interested in their purple color. The different shades of purple of each one caught my attention; they varied according to the exposure to sunlight, to rain, to the open sky. They were unique tones, a kind of natural painting; the light printed on papers that time has modified are like pieces of fallen sky. At the same time, the matchboxes I use are of the Guarany brand, the name of an ancestral Indigenous people, prior to Portuguese colonization. The matchbox is present in most of the popular houses in Brazil, especially in the favelas. My work consists of connecting all these references, subverting the meaning and form of these objects. When composing the work, I seek to re-signify the matchboxes, transforming them into landscapes, through an extremely meticulous handwork.”  75–77

Asger Jorn

Asger Jorn’s (1914–1973) art was framed within a wider constellation of production, aligned to his Marxist ideas about society and its future. In reimagining the role of art in society, he became closely aligned with architecture and urbanism. As a central participant in the formation of CoBrA, Jorn shared in the group’s values to be collaborative, international, as a small free society without any pre-established standards or requirements to pursue ideas of freedom that did not discriminate between architecture and decoration in aspiring to create a communal painter’s language. After the war and as CoBrA began to dissolve as a formalized group, Jorn gathered Karel Appel, Enrico Baj, among others to experiment collectively with ceramics through acts of play and openness. In 1953, he became involved in the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB), which he initiated in 1953, an international movement to find “a justified place for artists in the machine age.” It was here that he was introduced to Guy Debord and the Letterist International with whom he became a close collaborator on texts and books. In 1957, IMIB merged with the Situationist International to adopt the watchword, “pscychogeographical action.” In a letter penned by Jorn, artistic research was set as “identical to human science,” and by which should be carried out by artists with the assistance of scientists. Jorn frequently took Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity in physics as a metaphor for mobility and movement.

Debord intended to provide an open structure for a free society with the publication of a International Situationiste manifesto that proclaimed to work towards “collective and anonymous production, the objective of these experiments to prompt revolution in behaviour and create a unitarian, dynamic urbanism, with the ability to spread over the entire planet and then over all inhabitable planets.” Debord and the Situationists coined the word detournement and as written by Jorn in an essay titled Detourned Painting in 1959: “detournement is a game made possible by the capacity of devaluation and that all elements of the cultural past must be reinvested or disappear. As a signature of the situationist movement, examples of the use of detourned expression include Jorn’s altered paintings, Debord and Jorn’s book Memoires, composed entirely of prefabricated elements in which writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably incompleted. Jorn’s altered

Untitled , 2009

Sergej Jensen (1973–)

sewn cloth

Erling Kagge Collection

The Skater’s Waltz , 1965

Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Untitled , 2004

Sergej Jensen (1973–)

Burlap on linen, framed

Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled , 2005

Sergej Jensen (1973–)

Sewn burlap

Erling Kagge Collection

Le futur qui passe , 1962

Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Oil on canvas Long term loan, Canica Collection

Composition , 1967

Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Composition , undated

Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

paintings or “modification” paintings where works in which the artist altered thrift store canvases with evocative brushwork and grotesque figures.

In 1961, Jorn established the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism, an institution the activities of which had been outlined in Jorn’s lecture, What is Comparative Vandalism? from 1963, addressed to the student union in Copenhagen as a study of all forms of culture seen as ‘barbaric’, vandalistic, or underdeveloped to show that they are no less worthy than elitist works of art. Together with Jacqueline de Jong, he launched the first issues of The Situationist Times . Issue 3, 4, and 5 out of total of 6 of Situationist Times was a collaboration that drew from the images from the archive of Jorn’s 10,000 years of Nordic Folk Art coupled with de Jong’s research in the Bibliotecque Nationale. The issues were focused on the discourse of topology in areas math, history, literature and other fields. The third issue opened with a discussion of knots as a basic topological trope, a discussion around the mathematical problem of the Hoppe’s Curve, and a description of the Mobius strip, the diagram of a twodimensional figure with only one side which may be modeled in three dimensions by cutting, twisting, and re-gluing a strip of paper in a closed circle. This was the initiation of Jorn and de Jong’s investigation of topology as a discourse of multiple dimensions and the transformation of forms linked to a broader context. Eventually, Jorn sought to publish fifty theoretical volumes to provide the first complete review of the philosophical system he had been proposing.  81–84, 105, 107

Sonja Ferlov

Sonja Ferlov (1911–1984) was known within the Danish avant-garde scene as a sculptor. In 1935, she undertook assemblages from wood scraps and later modeling with clay and plaster worked into objects reminiscent of ancient ritualistic totems. In the early 1930s, Ferlov became a member of the Surrealist movement and part of the circle around the Danish publication Linien, 1934–39. The Danish magazine was launched in 1934 by a group of abstract surrealist artists, the first two volumes to feature the surrealist poets Gustaf Munch Petersen and Jens August Schade. The writers argued for blurring the distinction between artistic practices and efforts in other cultural and non-cultural fields with a commitment to explore art’s ability to bring about social change. In 1936 Ferlov moved to Paris and got

Étres vivants , 1935

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984)

Bronze

On deposit at Kode from The Canica Collection

Untitled , 1966

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984)

Bronze

On deposit at Kode from The Canica Collection

Untitled , 2008

Sergej Jensen (1973–)

Sewn linen Erling Kagge Collection

Bowl, 1960–1969

Kari Rongved (1925–2005) and Alf Rongved (1924–2015)

Earthenware Kode

Jar, 1955

Eva Børresen (1920-2022) Earthenware Kode

Untitled , 1951

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984)

Bronze

On deposit at Kode from The Canica Collection

Vase, 1966

Eva Børresen (1920-2022) Earthenware Kode

Jar, 1955

Karin Björquist (1927-2018), Gustavsbergs fabriker Stoneware Kode

a studio in the same building as Alberto Giacometti, with whom she shared a long friendship. It is also where she met the South African painter Ernest Mancoba, whom she married while both had been interned at a detention camp outside Paris during the German occupation. After the end of the war, both artists relocated to Denmark to join as founding members of the Danish branch of CoBrA. Both Sonja Ferlov and Ernest Mancoba were active vying for social change and for racial equality within the work and within their community. Feeling discriminated against in Denmark, they returned to Paris for work and to a community of artists connected to the community of African expatriates including the Senegalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor.  86–88

Egil Røed

Egil Røed (1932–2017) was a Norwegian painter and graphic artist born and raised near Arendal and resided in Bergen. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, he studied graphic design under Povl Christensen and Asbjørn Brekke. He also studied briefly with Jean Clerte who, in turn, worked closely with Pierre Alechinsky, a founding member of the CoBrA movement. This period led him to experimentation taking motifs from industry and working life socially and politically critical. He helped found Galleri 1 and Finnegaardskretsen in Bergen in 1968.  101–104

Sergei Jensen

Sergej Jensen’s works are comprised of found textiles stitched and sewn together to form abstractions, often with only subtly applied elements or subtractive materials such as bleach. They foreground the material qualities of the textiles themselves: their texture, weave, fibrousness, and their warp and weft, as well as residual marks accumulated through their circulation. As some of the works are described by the artist as “painting without paint”, Jensen asks to forsake an emphasis on surfaces with which he works – burlap, linen, jute, silk, denim – to focus instead on what he does with these textiles – spreading them over stretchers, in resewing, fraying, bleaching, staining, and dying them, and merely extending them over vast wall area, commenting on the way the social system deals with these goods, which tends to corrupt them of their usability.  79–80, 85, 89, 108

Dish, 1960

Kari Rongved (1925–2005) and Alf Rongved (1924–2015)

Chamotte stoneware Kode

Vase, 1966

Eva Børresen (1920-2022) Earthenware Kode

Jar, 1966

Kari Rongved (1925–2005) and Alf Rongved (1924–2015)

Earthenware Kode

Dish, 1961

Kari Rongved (1925–2005) and Alf Rongved (1924–2015)

Chamotte stoneware Kode

Jar, 1966

Eva Børresen (1920-2022) Earthenware Kode

C I , 1966

Egil Røed (1932–2017) Collage Kode

Vase, 1955

Karin Björquist (1927-2018),

Gustavsbergs fabriker Stoneware Kode

Dish, 1962

Kari Rongved (1925–2005) and Alf Rongved (1924–2015)

Chamotte stoneware Kode

Balance , 1966

Egil Røed (1932–2017) Collage Kode

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98

100 99

92

Klara Lidén

Klara Lidén has written about her process – “part of me is this poor architect dealing with the problem of existing structures in the city, part of me is this amateur dancer or performer who wants to return ideas of rhythm to the activity of building, or of reappropriating the built environment….The question of re-appropriating privatized, urban space always somehow begins with the body, its ways of moving and the temporalities it engages when it goes to work or opens up spaces of non-work in work….I have done things like set up a year-long, free postal service in Stockholm, built an underground house on city property in Berlin, removed advertisements from downtown areas, made music with my house keys, and moon-walked Lower Manhattan.

Klara Lidén (1973) studied architecture and art in Stockholm to constitute a multidisciplinary practice that addresses urban dystopia through a process she has referred to as “unbuilding.” Lidén explores social constructs and urban objects, seizing patterns and things that make up a restricted public stratosphere and reintroducing them as shadows of their once futile and functional selves. By re-animating the relationship of the inhabitant/habitat, Liden reperforms the urban to break with the banality of its former existence and by enacting political subjectivity through sovereign action, habitation becomes invigorated rather than incorporated.  110–111

101

C VI , 1966

Egil Røed (1932–2017) Collage Kode

Town hall under stars , 1965

Synnøve Anker Aurdal (1908–2000)

Woven natural fibers Kode

Night, 1967

Synnøve Anker Aurdal (1908–2000)

Woven natural fibers Kode

102

C IV , 1966

Egil Røed (1932–2017) Collage Kode

Black Diamond, Undated Asger Jorn (1914–1973)

Watercolour Kode, The Stenersen Collection

Untitled (Poster painting) , 2010

Klara Lidén (1979–) Posters and paint Erling Kagge Collection

103

Rural Foolery , 1968 Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Oil on canvas Kode, The Stenersen Collection

106

Untitled (Vorhang) , 2006

Sergej Jensen (1973–) Money on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

109

Self Portrait with the Keys to the Cit y, 2005

Klara Lidén (1979–)

C-print

Edition 3 of 10 + 1 AP Erling Kagge Collection

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104

107

108

Permanenten Etage 2

Left Hemisphere

The Language of Desire, Disorder, Anxiety and Aggression

Francisco Goya and Anne Imhof

The works of Francisco Goya and Anne Imhof are exhibited in conversation with one another around themes of disorder, imbalance, human foibles, the game as nightmare, lightheartedness on the brink of recklessness and human existence amid the vortex and vectors of life and time.

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) worked throughout times of relative peace and prosperity, as well as through war, chaos and famine. He made his first single sheet etchings in the mid 1770s, a decade into his professional career, and he continued to make independent prints throughout his life, some regarded as album drawings in a private undertaking that allowed him to create without censorship and limits of imagination in a radically liberated space of production. The work, although referencing historical events, transcends mere documentation to symbolize various psychological states.

The violence that pervades Goya’s imagery takes many forms – literal and metaphoric wherein destruction seems to be at the core. The artist’s etchings known as Disparates (translated as Follies, and also Los Proverbios) is perhaps most accurately translated as Irrationalities, were composed of twenty two images produced around 1816–1819, and are the last known etchings by the artist. As a series that relates to nonsense, absurdity or fantasy, they were not published during his lifetime (as were not the Disasters of War) due to their critical themes. If publicly exhibited, it is likely Goya would have been indicted and may have kept them private for fear of the Inquisition. The grotesque creatures and inexplicable phenomena that are featured constitute this series as ominous and foreboding. Evoking a repressive world and connected with the Black Paintings that Goya painted, at approximately the same time, on the walls of his house on the outskirts of Madrid.

The Disparates

A Way of Flying

Five men are portrayed wearing helmets in the shape of a bird’s head. They fly aided by wings strapped to their wrists and feet. The image has been interpreted as a metaphor for the political and philosophical currents of Goya’s later life, which had been largely opposed by the more conservator sectors of Spanish society. Goya’s image, contextualized within early

Dancing Giant , from the series Los Disparates, ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching on zinc Kode

Loyalty , from the series

Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) Etching

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper Private Collection

Untitled (Goya) , 2001 Anne Imhof (1978–) Inkjet

What One Does to Another , from the series Los Caprichos , 1797–1799

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

Men in Sacks , from the series Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching on zinc Kode

A Way of Flying , from the series Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1816

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching on zinc Kode

There isn’t Time Now , from the series The Disasters of War , 1810–1812

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

It serves you right, from the series The Disasters of War , 1810

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching

18th century, featured aerostatic balloons and parachute descents that had been popular in Madrid in the 1810s. The contraption utilized by these figures also recalls a machinery for flying invented in 1808 by the Austrian clockmaker Jacques Degen.

Feminine Disparate

Goya turns to the theme of women scheming in manipulation, symbolized by their tossing of dolls or straw figures by way of a blanket. The theme of blanketing or manteo, wherein a social gathering of play is transformed into a nightmarish scene. Six Amazons in Empire dresses bend and pull, laugh and gasp, as they sustain the weight and load of the blanket. Two dolls twist helplessly to appear unreal.

Fool’s Folly

In this etching, bulls tumble as if against gravity.

Familiar Folly

The image shows a man turning away from two scarecrow like figures in mock terror as a way to entertain a crowd of onlookers

Punctual Folly

An acrobat balances on a horse, balancing, in turn, on a tightrope and yet this does not register with the spectators, who have their eyes closed. It is unclear if this is a document of an actual circus act or if sourced from the artist’s imagination. In this work, Goya suggests a poignant metaphor for the pitfalls of blind faith.

Animal Folly

The elephant is based on a drawing Goya made in the 1800s, possibly upon arrival in Madrid of an Indian elephant. Conveying the wonder with which animals from other places in the world were regarded in the early 19th century Spain, this work has been largely interpreted as a reference to the so called Persian Manifesto that led to the annulment of the constitution and the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814. Here, men in Eastern robes hold open a book and a harness with bells, in an attempt to lure an elephant standing in a circular space that recalls a building.

General Folly

This etching, inspired by Goya’s reflections on the repressive political environment in Madrid during his lifetime – is joined by the proverb “the claws of the cat and the dress of the devotee,” or “Vice is often clothed in Virtue’s habit.”

119

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

122

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

125

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

120

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper Erling Kagge Collection

123

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

126

The Custody is as Barbarous as the Crime , ca. 1815

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching Kode

121

Pepe Illo making the pass of the ‚recorte‘ , from the series

The Art of Bullfighting, 1815

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

124

And this too , from the series

The Disasters of War , 1812–1815

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

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What Courage! , from the series The Disasters of War , 1810–1812

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

Dancing Giant or Babalicon (Simpleton)

Goya depicts a childlike giant dancing toward two smaller figures, a frightened man hiding behind a taller female figure. Clicking castenets, the colossus grins as two demons emerge from behind him. Goya highlights the demonic smile, large chest, and castanets so that they appear white against the aquatinted plate. In a preparatory drawing, the small man is depicted as a monk hiding behind what may be the image of the Virgin Mary. The artist altered the detail so as to print with intended ambiguity.

Merry Folly

Trio of three balding elderly men attempt to hold their own while in a circular dance with three overdressed younger women. Allegre, translated as merry, may be translated as lively and lighthearted but it may also infer tipsy and reckless in a conveying a parody. The group are dressed in popular fashion of majos and majas, dance in a circle while playing castanets, in what evokes the Spanish saying “merry like a pair of castanets.” The mismatch between the two alludes to mutual deception in relationships between men and women, a theme also explored in Goya’s work.

Disasters of War

Goya’s Disasters of War is a series wherein the artist had been inspired by the Peninsula War and serves as documentary in nature. Largely understood as a private project, Goya had not published this series during his lifetime. The works depicting mutilation, torture, rape, forced migration and other atrocities convey Goya’s will to evoke the true barbarities of war. The scenes depicting caravans of those fleeing their homes, a then familiar occurrence, as citizens left in anticipation of the enemy’s arrival in fear of coming under the occupying authority. They also provide a compelling visual testimony to the effects of violence, its horrible consequences, through relentless fights, acts of resistance Goya may have witnessed around the time of the second French assault on his hometown of Zaragoza, in late 1808 and in 1812, when he lived outside of Madrid.

The Custody is as Barbarous as the Crime (The Little Prisoner)

A prisoner crouches with wrists and ankles restrained. Goya emphasizes his contorted posture, tangled hair, and the reflection of the light onto chains binding the arms.

Los Caprichos (The Caprices)

Eighty aquatint etchings address the human condition in Los Caprichos – a series by which Goya explored themes of superstition, sensuality, greed, and violence with scenes set in Spanish brothels, salons, and

128

General Folly , from the series Los Disparates, ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching on zinc Kode

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Animal Folly , from the series Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

134

Punctual Folly , from the series Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

129

Well-Known Folly , from the series Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching and burnished aquatint Kode

132

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

130

Little Bulls Folly , from the series Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching, aquatint Kode

133 135

Compadre , undated Francisco Goya (1746–1828) Red chalk on paper Kode

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–) Inkjet on paper Erling Kagge Collection

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Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

Anne Imhof (1978–) Inkjet on paper Erling Kagge Collection

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prisons. In yet another part of the series, Goya portrays fantastic images from the artist’s dreams and nightmares. This, as with works in the other series, was made less public by the artist as he may have been concerned of judgment by the Inquisition.

Los Caprichos provide the earliest concentrated evidence of Goya’s preoccupation with dreams and dreamlike states and nightmares – the varying states of consciousness that allowed him to explore allusive subjects. He conceived of the 28 drawings of dreams or suenos. The works represent a kind of nebulous space, with absent detail or groundline, to situate the figure in an intermediate zone, suggesting a psychological hiatus that is revolving to convey disorientation and despondency.  112, 114–115, 117–120, 123, 126, 128–133, 136–137, 139–140

Anne Imhof

Anne Imhof’s collective endeavors are physically robust, libidinally charged, and elusive in adhering to any one genre of cultural production. The artist’s previous production of Faust for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale consummated Goethe’s tragedy within the framework of affects of radical consumerism. Part German legend whereby a magician and alchemist sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, Faust delves into the ethical and practical implications of our quest for knowledge, including whether technology is our magical savior or our destructive master, and, whether zeal for “control” of nature is part of the human domain or an effect of our environmental demise. Imhof’s works are entangled with those by Goya to address those topics anew to reflect on despondency as the aftermath of the zeal to embrace and conquer the contemporary condition of technological control. Reflecting the artist’s reference of accrual as appearing in previous works – Rage (2014–15), Deal (2105) Angst (2016) and Sex (2019–21), the process of accumulation and consequently, of repression, manifests in a ruinous entropic process –as ruins in reverse.

Imhof’s sculptures – the sex pedestal and the protruding tongue had once been integral to an environment performed. Contrary to the body of work produced over the last two decades that addresses the cult of post-industrial, postcapitalist and post Fordist society, Imhof addresses the what may Mark Fisher termed post capitalist desire within the context of peripheral social hubs existing in what Theodor Adorno would refer to as Nachbilder or “after-images” of “the empirically living, inasmuch as they offer to the latter what outside is denied them, and thus liberate from

137

Merry Folly , from the series

Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) Etching

140

Misawa (Stray Dog) , 1971/2008

Daidō Moriyama (1938–)

Gelatin silver print

Erling Kagge Collection

143

Cruelty , 1905

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Etching

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Collection

138

Feminine Folly , from the series

Los Disparates , ca. 1815–1824

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Etching on zinc Kode

141

Harpy , 1894

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Etching

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Collection

144

Untitled (Sex) , 2019

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Steel, foam mattress

Erling Kagge Collection

139

Untitled (Goya) , 2001

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Inkjet on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

142

Salome II , 1905

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Etching

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Collection

145

Habt ihr euch , 2014

Anne Imhof (1978–) oil, rabbit glue, charcoal, pastel on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

their objective-external experience which shapes them.” Imhof at once performs (albeit collectively) and then offers the residual of those performances so in referencing the one living, the once experienced, peripherally and masqueraded.  113, 116, 121–122, 124–125, 127, 134–135, 138, 141, 146–154

Edvard Munch

The biblical story of Salome, the stepdaughter of King Herod of Judea, whose object of desire had been John the Baptist, is a story that ends in an act of necrophilia, as Salome kisses the prophet’s head.

In the one-act century opera debuted by Richard Strauss in 1905, Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome is staged following his trial for indecency in 1895. In the opera, women dominate in a production that eroticizes John the Baptist – in doing so, reverting the male gaze. The intellectual historian Sander Gilman, in an essay titled Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siècle , argued that the sexual bizarrerie of Salome is designed to conjure an unflattering picture of degenerate society. The musicologist Peter Franklin, on the other hand, in his Music and Camp , writes that “Strauss permits an alternative discourse of pleasure and experience whose actually transgressive nature was defined by the female subject.” Salome’s desire is an outlaw desire and falls outside of sexual convention.

 143–145

Daidō Moriyama

Perhaps among the more recognizable of Moriyama’s images, Stray Dog, Misawa (1971) assumed the status as a symbol for post war Japanese culture to allude to the alienation, darkness, self-loathing, and despair in an increasingly global capitalized society that valued profit over tradition. Moreover, Moriyama referred to himself as a “stray dog” as positing his vantage point in relation to his subjects and in respect to modernizing Japanese society. Moriyama noted: “When I go out into the city, I have no plan. I walk down one street, and when I am drawn to turn the corner into another, I do. Really, I am like a dog: I decide where to go by the smell of things, and when I am tired, I stop.”

 140

146

I Remember , 2013

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Alabaster, plaster

Erling Kagge Collection

149

Untitled , 2023

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Pencil on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

152

Untitled , 2023

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Pencil on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

147

Untitled , 2023

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Pencil on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

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In God we trust , 2023

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Pencil on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

148

Untitled , 2023

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Pencil on paper

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

151

Swan , 2023

Anne Imhof (1978–)

Pencil on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

The Logic of Sensation

The title of a profound text by Gilles Deleuze around the work of Francis Bacon, addresses the athleticism implicit in works of art – that is, the deformations, the contractions, that manage to portray an extensive organic body – as the figural in movement toward abstraction, and as middle path between two extremes routed through sensation, rather than in perception. Deleuze develops an important differentiation, that between the perceptual and the conceptual, which he aligns with the difference between geography and landscape. The geographical world is primarily conceptual. We move within its abstract yet stable system of coordinates. Landscape, on the other hand, is perceptual because it is determined by perspective. Space, framed by a horizon that shifts as we and the planet move, moves with us. The body, within this schema, is aligned with the geographic: it is the imagined context and contingency for spatial perception, permitting movement along its predetermined pathways. Painters provide the material framework that sustains a sensation. This logic may be considered within the larger frame of art production whereby an artist set up a diagram as, Deleuze notes, an operative set of nonrepresentational lines and colors, a type of exoskeleton, to pass through their own catastrophe as a way to “undo the optimal organization of the synthesis of perception, but which at the same time functions as the pictorial order to come.”

Jana Euler

Jana Euler’s work is steadfastly located within the domain of the libidinal, expressed by a language of emphatic figuration which lampoons the body as evolving “under the perspective” of the patriarchal capitalist structure. Recalling the crassness of the late paintings of Francis Picabia, Euler satirically reconvenes the conventions of figuration, conjuring a palette for contemporary cultural production that is marked by mass cultural aggression, social enforcement, and contorted inconvenience. Euler’s work speaks to the “second nature of the individual”, per the philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s Essay for Liberation , which arises as a product of “the so called consumer economy” into which subjects of late corporate capitalism are embedded: “The need for possessing, consuming, handling, and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a biological need.”

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Under this perspective, 1 , 2015

Jana Euler (1982–) Oil on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

156

Les bons Bourgeois (from Le Charivari ), undated Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

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The Vintage of 1854. This is all I could find in the entire vineyard, 1854 Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

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The Contortionist , 1907 Illustration for Trangviksposten , Vol. 3 Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) Ink on paper

Kode, The Rasmus Meyer Coll.

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Oh´absolument comme si on y´etait, la grande ôte son corset, et la petite cherche une puce, 1840 Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)

Engraving Kode

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Terrine , 1912

Karen Anna Hannover (1872–1943)

P. Ipsens Terrakottafabrik Faience Kode

155

Filled (capitalisim) , 2016

Jana Euler (1982–) Oil on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

158

Le maraudeur, undated Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

161

Untitled , 2007–2014

Torbjørn Rødland (1970–)

Chromogenic print on Kodak

Endura paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Euler’s work extends Marcuse’s commentary on the pro duction of biologized subjects into a discussion of trans feminism, which Paul Preciado has written about with regard to the body constantly reinventing itself, whereby all the dichotomies are blown to pieces… there are not two, rather a multiplicity of genders and even clitorises. Subjects of capitalism’s “pharmacopornographic era” never do have gender. Rather, gender “has the subject, putting them into motion like a machine. The machine is the network of logistical, biomedical, and cultural norms that systematically disrupt the heterosexual order.”

 155, 157, 188, 205

André Kertész

The Hungarian photographer André Kertész had long been interested in mirrors, reflections, and optical distortions of the human figure, as in the refraction of light upon a swimmer’s body, captured in 1917. Although he had never become formally part of the Surrealist group, he began to investigate the distortion in photography in 1933 when he had been commissioned by the men’s French magazine to make a series of figure studies. (Originally published in 1899 by Paul Gaughin as a satirical magazine, had been revived in 1930 as a risqué magazine featuring covers with pin-up style art and jokes). For the assignment, Kertész, who had not previously shot nudes, spent four weeks shooting over two hundred negatives with the aid of a convex mirror from a Parisan amusement park, in whose reflection the model’s body was at once foreshortened and elongated, rendered concrete and abstract. The portraits were published alongside a text by the writer A.P. Barancy, entitled “” (window open (on) to the other side), which reads the series as a meditation on what it means to defamiliarize the ordinary by extracting objects from their surroundings. In this way, Kertesz’ work was seen to explore percep tion, and the relationship between subject and object. Whether the women models Kertész photographed were photographic subjects or objects under an optics of patriarchal domination has been the subject of criticism. The series appeared at a time of radical changes in the visualization of the human figure in painting and sculpture in the 1930s, although in photography, was without precedent.  166

Untitled , undated Francis Bacon (1909–1992) Lithograph Erling Kagge Collection

165

162

Francis Bacon

Deleuze

163

164

“It is a characteristic of sensation to pass through different levels due to the action of forces. But two sensations, each having its own level or zone, can also confront each other and make their respective levels communicate. Hence we are no longer in the domain of simple vibration, but that of resonance. There are thus two Figures coupled together. Or rather, what is decisive is the coupling of sensations: there is one and the same matter of fact for two Figures, or even a single coupled Figure for two bodies. From the start, we have seen that, according to Bacon, the painter could not give up the idea of putting several Figures in the painting at the same time … to concern the possibility that there may exist relations between simultaneous Figures that are nonillustrative and nonnarrative (and not even logical) and which could be called, precisely ‘matter of fact.’ … What is painted is the sensation.”  165, 167

From Couples and Triptychs in The Logic of Sensation

Torbjørn Rødland

In, the literary critic Sianne Ngai writes about Torbjørn Rødland’s work to describe the way it holds a “tension between what appears mechanically recorded by an apparatus and what looks to have been purposefully contrived by a human agent. The tension between the ‘automatism,’ of say dead labor, and the ‘agency’ of lived labor, reflects the interlinking variables of the capitalist valorization process, in which radios of dead to living labor embodied in an artifact (the organic composition of capital) are pegged to the movement of historical time” (p. 209). In this particular image, Ngai’s remarks contribute that “Rødland’s attraction the look of the stuck on finally seems to have something to do with how it captures this intersection of the contrived and the contingent. It is here that we also come to see the ambivalence elicited by the overperforming/ underperforming gimmick, and photography theory’s obsession with automatism/agency, as twin reflections on the ambiguities of capitalist production.” (p. 213)

 163

Untitled , undated Francis Bacon (1909–1992) Lithograph Erling Kagge Collection

Untitled , 1933

André Kertész (1894–1985)

Vintage gelatine silver print Erling Kagge Collection

No Title (Pulling De Kooning‘s Women) , 2003 Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

Its Children Cannot Get Out

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon has a long relationship to punk, in its address to culture after the utopianism of the 1960s dissolved. About his process in this aftermath, Pettibon writes: “I’m improvising. I don’t know how much room I’ll motherfucking have. Sometimes it gets so small you can’t even read it with glasses. You can’t tell the whole story. Sometimes the more you go on, the more ambiguity there is. There are different stories.” Pettibon is not out to tell one story – and it is for this reason his works may be re-assorted in correspondence with one another to build your story as you may. With respect to the surfing works, Pettibon explains “there is no outside out here. Outside in surfing language means that the wave that you’re paddling to is breaking outside. The big wave you’re paddling to even just to get over rather than catch the wave. In this situation, the surfer is in a precarious position, basically.” In relation to his works, Pettibon notes “when we put different things up they magically fit together. It’s the same thing with a maze; who can seriously see its outcome, the topological design, the central plan. No one, or almost no one. It’s like Henry James’s short story: ‘The Figure in the Carpet.’ Say you’re on LSD or whatever, or you’re in some state of mind, or you’re looking from afar, or you’re looking up close, you see patterns…”  164, 168–177, 179, 195–199

Gardar Eide Einarsson

Gardar Eide Einarsson addresses subcultural signs as they came to the fore throughout the 1990s and 2000s, citing the relationships between these signs and the organizational structures of social engineering in which they emerge. Einarsson notes: “As with much of my other work, I am interested in the history of the initial found object and in a delayed realization of the contents of the work, and I feel the abstraction is reminiscent of the way the actual violence that our institutions rely on is obscured in our society.”  178

166

No Title (The ocean had) , 2005

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

169

No Title (But to return) , 2003

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

172

No Title (Its children cannot) , 1997

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

167

No Title (On the wide) , 2003

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

170

No Title (Is there a) , 2001

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

173

No Title (A mother polar) , 2008

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) Pen, ink, gouache and acrylic on paper Erling Kagge Collection

168

No Title (Palinurus, a skillful) , 1999

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

171

No Title (Following my own) , 1998

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

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No Title (From his sac) , 2006

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

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175

No Title , 2005

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

Tehching Hsieh

176

Untitled(wave) , 2007

Gardar Eide Einarsson (1976–)

Acryl paint on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

In 1973, Hsieh leaped from the second floor of a Taipei building, breaking both ankles. He documented this exploit in what is now the work, While working as a seaman in 1974, he jumped from the ship onto a pier on the Delaware River and made his way to NYC where he remained as an illegal immigrant, working in restaurants and construction jobs. In September 1978, Hsieh initiated a one-year performance entitled, in which he sealed himself within a cell in his studio with a commitment not to converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television until the end of the designated term of the mentally and physically demanding performance which he determined as September 1979. Robert Projansky, a NY lawyer documented the entire process to oversee the artist’s requests of self-isolation was Hsieh’s second one-year performance in which he punched an office timecard every hour, 24 times a day, throughout the entirety of one year. The artist noted: “I turned wasting time into art.”  189

Sadie Benning

Sadie Benning employs constructed moving images from found objects, drawings, text, performance and from her personally shot footage. was part of a body of work in a project entitled, addressing being signified within a binary gender system, to explore the complicated relationship between the body and how it is named within the culture, and their own interminable desire to exist outside of the constructed polarities of male and female.

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No Title (In your heart) , 2003

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

179

Positive Outlook , 2003

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968–)

C-print

Edition 1 of 1 + 1 AP

Erling Kagge Collection

182

Boble Monotype , 2017

Matias Faldbakken (1973–) monotype on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

178

La pêcherie 1 , 2021

Matthew Langan-Peck (1988–)

Erling Kagge Collection

180

Untitled , 2005

Birgit Megerle (1975–) Gouache Erling Kagge Collection

183

Untitled , 1968–1971 John McCracken (1934–2011)

Ink on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

181

Trajectories , 2013

James White (1967–)

C-print with collage aluminum tape

Erling Kagge Collection

184

Untitled Plank (green) , 1985 John McCracken (1934–2011)

Resin on wood

Erling Kagge Collection

Integrating painting, photography, drawing, and sculptural components, resists their work being defined as medium-specific as much as their body being defined as gender-specific. The feminist scholar Karen Barad writes about the constraints of Euclidean logic for feminist understandings of positionality, social location and embodiment in the essay Re(con) figuring Space, Time, & Matter in: Barad argues: “where issues of positionality are figured in geometric terms, intersectionality is still considered in Euclidean geometrical terms as a mutually perpendicular set of axes of identification within which marked bodies can positioned” wherein the Euclidean is flat and congruent and requires a framework the explores, as Benning’s process does – dimensionality and depth.

Benning produced Pixelvision works in the 1990s –extreme close ups of the artist’s face as they speak to the camera diary live actions cartoons that explore the loneliness of an androgynous young teen. (1992) informed by the underground Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s that espoused female empowerment through art, music, zines and activism – a work that expresses the artist’s opinion, in their own words – “I survived because I created my own heroes.”  190

John McCracken

John McCracken started to develop his signature “planks” in 1966– as works that leaned against the wall and rested on the floor, occupying both the site of painting and the site of three dimensional sculpture. An avid believer in extra-terrestrials and time travel, he saw his works as possible models of artistic production to be carried out by an alien population and he saw his work as a connection between two worlds –the floor as the physical world of bodies and objects and the wall, the space of illusion and imagination.

 185–186

Papercrete Prototype #1, 2008

Oscar Tuazon (1975–)

Mixed concrete and newspaper Erling Kagge Collection

187

Double Eposer , 2016

Sadie Benning (1973–) medite, aqua resin, casein and acrylic

Erling Kagge Collection

185

From private to public painting and the streetlight on the way, 2013 Jana Euler (1982–) oil and eye shadow on canvas Erling Kagge Collection

186

Jump Piece1973/2017 , 1973

Tehching Hsieh (1950–) framed archival pigment print mounted to 4 ply museum board

Erling Kagge Collection

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Honore Daumier

Honore Daumier was one of France’s most renown caricaturists as well as one of the country’s most profound realists – someone who drew from the conflicts between industrialization and the developing bourgeosie. After the relaxation of the censorship laws after the Revolution of 1830, Daumier had been hired by a popular publicist Charles Philipon as a cartoonist for a newly founded journal of political satire, La Caricature, which launched his career as a caricaturist. He ridiculed the crown, initially targeting the government of King Louis-Philippe, and for this he would be indicted with a jail term. He nevertheless continued to draw for La Caricature and also for another journal, Le Charivari where his caricatures evolved around the erotic and fiduciary dramas of the petty bourgeoise of Paris – ranging from the urban middle class, to fraud speculators, to attorneys, selfdelusional artists, landlords and members of the upper class. His citations were sourced from an invented vernacular that was intended to bewilder the reader/ viewer. Throughout, he kept a close circle of colleagues who included Charles Baudelaire, Eugene Delacroix and Charles Francois Daubigny.  158–161, 191–194

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Gaia Ascending into Abstraction

Amid the disorder, the disbalance, the vice saturating the day, the role the human species holds as the dominant geological force has been stripped of its credentials. The philosopher Isabelle Stengers reassigns the figure of Gaia, the living planet with an ecofeminist sensibility, as a way to consider political practices that might open for a life beyond the grip of capitalism. In re-fathoming the enclosure of social production and nature’s productivity framed by science, Stengers reintroduces Gaia, although as the intruder, rather than the maternal figure, who may contend with the Anthropos in the domain of the Anthropocene – as the epoch of human influence on the planet that began with industrialization in

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Croquis de chasse par Daumier, undated Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

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Oh´absolument comme si on y´etait, la grande ôte son corset, et la petite cherche une puce, undated Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

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Croquis de chasse (from Le Charivari), undated Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

190

I’m Not Going in There Anymore! - I Think There are Crayfish Down There…, from the series

Les Baigneurs, undated Honoré Daumier (1808–1879)

Lithograph Kode

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Raymond

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Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

194

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

No Title (I was a) , 2009

Pettibon (1957–) pencil, ink, gouache and collage on paper Erling Kagge Collection

No Title (gotta small one) , 2000

Not Title (It does mean) , 2003

the 18th century and which, after the second World War, accelerated in terms of extraction of human labor and natural resources to the point of arriving as geophysical phenomenon capable of altering the biogeochemical processes of the earth. This embodies a shift away from nature as available and subject to human manipulation and extracted from the frame of Wendy Brown refers to as “stealth neoliberalism” entails a retraction from the ethos of managerial planning, technical forces, and risk assessments in a disentanglement from the experts that affirm their influence over making us all deprived of say, and power, to further the exploitation of gendered and racialized subjects amid the infrastructure for rabid and global capital accumulation.

Matias Faldbakken

Matias Faldbakken sources images from advertising, literature, art history, and popular culture to recontextualize how visual information is endlessly subject to multiplication, transmutation, and to its ultimate conveyance as conundrum, rather than coherence. As a visual artist, Faldbakken works across media working with distressed or fractured industrial materials – trash bags and discarded sacks to assemble a kind of threedimensional concrete poetry, the meaning of which is gained from the arrangements of the individual components that lend to a field of linguistic signifiers. As an author, Faldbakken has written several novels among which are The Cocka Hola Company, Macht und Rebel, Unfun, and most recently, The Waiter. In his writing, Faldbakken addresses the mainstream and Scandinavian conservatism. as a way to criticize the fine line between conservatism and nationalism and the implicit racism connected to it.

 184, 208, 211–212

Gruppe 66 made some of the first action art and happenings in Norway with events that saw a mix of poetry, new music, jazz, films, Co-ritus, concrete music, Laterna Magica shadow and puppetry theatre performances using light projection and slides, and participatory events. The motive forces behind the initiative were Jens Jørgen Thorsen from Copenhagen and Lars Grundt. The group was inaugurated at a “living” exhibition in March-April 1966, followed by another ground-breaking exhibition Konkret analyse in October 1970, both at Bergen Fine Art Association [Kunstforeningen]. The latter exhibition also involved public debates with politicians.

195

No Title (Forever Young...) , 1991

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) ink and watercolor on paper Erling Kagge Collection

198

Page from the Journal of Imperialism II I, 1971 Per Kleiva (1933–2017)

Silkscreen/Screenprint

Kode

Untitled , 1960

Gunnar S. Gundersen (1921–1983) collage Erling Kagge Collection

196

No Title (No sooner had) , 1996

Raymond Pettibon (1957–) pencil and ink on paper Erling Kagge Collection

199

Page from the Journal of Imperialism II , 1971 Per Kleiva (1933–2017)

Silkscreen/Screenprint Kode

197

Page from the Journal of Imperialism I, 1971

Per Kleiva (1933–2017)

Silkscreen/Screenprint Kode

200

American Butterflies , 1971

Per Kleiva (1933–2017)

Silkscreen/Screenprint Kode

202

Headless Into Abstraction , 2017

Jana Euler (1982–)

Acrylic on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

203

Heat Current V , 2020

Tauba Auerbach (1981–) C-print on archival grade paper, face-mounted on TruLife Acrylic with aluminum back Erling Kagge Collection

201

Olav Herman-Hansen

Gruppe 66

The artists’ group, GRAS had been a politically committed and radically left, with ideas rooted in Mao Tse-Tung’s thoughts and leaning toward a MarxistLeninist model, the artist movement founded by the Oslo based artist Willibald Storn who took the initiative to create a collaborative artist workshop. Morten Krogh and joined by Per Kleiva (1933–2017), Willibald Storn, Anders Kjær Victor Lind who engaged with socio political subjects and anti-authoritarianism, and focused on the print medium as it was most appropriate for wider distribution. The movement and its wider constellations in the Students’ Movement grew in a fight against the European Economic Community (EEC) and in the lead up to the Norwegian referendum on whether to join the EEC in 1972. Per Kleiva’s American Butterflies from 1971 is among the better known of his production as a silkscreen series focused on the critique of the USA and its involvement in the Vietnam War.

Similar to earlier activist artist movements (such as the Scandinavian situationist), the poster and medium of print served as a way to reach wider audiences and was in itself the way art may be more egalitarian while commenting against imperialism and exploration that concerned leftist student circles at the time. GRAS arrived as a graphics workshop with member artists who shared a camaraderie with the international struggles against oppression. With a strong socio-political mission, Storn and Per Kleiva explored serigraphy and silkscreen printing in a cooperative that served as a Socialist workshop for young artists located in 1969 in a commune located at Hjelms gt. 3 – to be joined by Anders Kjær, Morten Krogh (the grandson of Christian Krogh), and Bjorn Melbye Gulliksen, and Victor Lind. Their particular areas of focus politically and visually had been the environment, the Vietnam War, the campaign against Norway’s entrance into the EEC and Norwegian artist’s rights. By 1973, GRAS moved to a larger space was extended to a wider artist member base into what became known as NORA GRAS. (For a detailed history, read A Place for Growth – GRAS and the Political Silkscreen Workshop, by Anna Sandaker Glomm.  210

204

Untitled (from the series Gestalt des Bewußtseins) , 1997–2004

Nader Ahriman (1964–) mixed media and collage on paper

Erling Kagge Collection

207

The Fight , 1965

Olav Herman-Hansen (1935–) Linocut Kode

205

untitled (post bag) , 2013

Matias Faldbakken (1973–) canvas, frame, paint Erling Kagge Collection

208

Untitled (MDF #7) , 2008

Matias Faldbakken (1973–) Aluminium tape on grey MDF board

Erling Kagge Collection

206

Portrait du marionnettiste , 2007

Valentin Carron (1977–)

Tiflex on tarpaulin, copper tubes, plastic straps

Erling Kagge Collection

209

Magazine Picture # 05 , 2007

Matias Faldbakken (1973–) Lightjet print on Fuji Crystal archival paper

Erling Kagge Collection

Tauba Auerbach

“Representation,” writes the feminist and physicist, Karen Barad, “masks a failure to take account of the practices through which representations are produced. Images and representations are not a snapshot or depiction of what awaits us, but rather condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement.” (from Meeting the Universe Halfway)

Tauba Auerbach’s process explores the spectral possibilities and hyper-spatial territories that are inaccessible to our senses but might be made accessible to the imagination. In merging the properties of two- and three-dimensional states, her work makes room for thinking into four-dimensional space – and four-dimensional color space – even if perceptual experience of this remains a physical impossibility. The woven canvas monochrome is a work by Tauba Auerbach in which she burrows into the material of the pictorial surface to facilitate the co-existence of two planes that continually intersect and change places. By creating optical distinction where normally none would exist (on a blank white canvas), these monochromes return to the idea that the tetrachromat can see great variation in colors that look the same to us. In consideration of the fourth dimension, Auerbach notes:

I like it as a model or armature for thinking about all kinds of things. It’s a bit like pressing the sustain pedal on the piano – an extension that changes the texture.

I like the idea of extruding in a direction we can’t see and can hardly imagine … I think the wave-particle relationship is probably at the heart of all things, so its relevance would extend everywhere into everything. I’m in love with music because it hasn’t been – or can’t be – reduced to words as easily as image. When I listen to music, I don’t have a bunch of isms and names of colors flying through my head. For me, music carves out abstract thinking space that’s specific and visceral.

Auerbach’s Grain alludes to the operation by which something irreducibly material stimulates the cerebral circuitry of perception to explore the foundation of non-verbal activity existing prior to verbal articulation. In doing so, Auerbach posits who is it possible to grasp something as real if it exists only indexically. The artist cites the importance of Waclaw Sierpirski’s theoretical

210

A Worker , 1901

Ingebrigt Vik (1867–1927)

Bronze Kode

213

Extended Object , 2021

Tauba Auerbach (1981–)

Acrylic on canvas/Wooden stretcher and wooden frame

Erling Kagge Collection

Rupture I, 2011

Tauba Auerbach (1981–)

Woven canvas /Wooden stretcher

Erling Kagge Collection

211

CMY 04 , 2008

Tauba Auerbach (1981–)

Airbrush on paper Erling Kagge Collection

214

Slice/Wave Fulgurite III-I , 2013

Tauba Auerbach (1981–) Sand, garnet glass and spray, lacquered wooden plinth

Erling Kagge Collection

Static 01 , 2008

Tauba Auerbach (1981–) C-print on archival grade paper

Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP Erling Kagge Collection

212

Il canto di Santa Cecilia , 1968

Synnøve Anker Aurdal (1908–2000)

Woven natural fibers and copper Collection of Grieghallen, Bergen

Grain , 2018

Tauba Auerbach (1981–)

Acrylic and paste on canvas/ Wooden stretcher

Erling Kagge Collection

work. The Polish mathematician is known for illustrating a set of fractal triangles generating in an ad infinitum process by which to intuit an exponential notation in a geometric context.  206, 214, 216–220

Synnøve Anker Aurdal

Synnøve Aurdal (1908–2000) was a leading figure at the forefront of modernism in Norway from the 1940s through the 1990s, who embraced elements of abstraction within her tapestries, woven from unconventional materials such as copper thread, polyester, glass fiber, nylon, and metal chains, to produce surprising textures and surfaces. Anker Aurdal’s work makes use of formal experimentation to integrate motifs and textual references into a sociopolitical critique charged with nuance and irony. She frequently found inspiration for her work in poetry. Words and phrases would sometimes trigger creative processes, either by taking the atmosphere of a poem as her point of departure, rendering it as poetry of her own in threads and colors, or by weaving sentences directly into the work itself.

Il Canto di Santa Cecilia had been produced by the artist in 1968, a most contentious year for the world, and exhibited within the Biennale de Venezia in 1982. It is a work dedicated to the patron saint of music and musicians. Legend has it that Cecilia was a Roman noblewoman married against her will with a vow of virginity. She suffered martyrdom in 230 under the emperor Alexander Severus, having enraged the authorities by the distribution of her property and belongings to the poor. She was beatified for the miracle of surviving three days after just as many attempts at her beheading. Since the Renaissance, Santa Cecilia has been portrayed by a viola or small organ.  106, 109, 215

This booklet is published by Kode in connection with the exhibition

Composition for the Left Hand, with works from the Erling Kagge Collection.

Curated and composed by Marta Kuzma 16.02.-09.06.2024.

Kode Bergen Art Museum

Exhibition design Erwin De Muer

Graphic design Petra Hollenbach

Editor Isaac Arland Preiss

Producer Espen Johansen

Registrar Annett Schattauer, Sølvi Akhoundzadeh

Production manager Erik Markestad

Technicians Ketil Bratlid, Thomas Taylor Bugaj, Frank Christensen, Tim Ekberg, Marek Rostecki, Ole Morten Schau

The exhibition is organized by Kode