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Linn Pedersen

Published by Lord Jim Publish 2010 © Linn Pedersen Design by Ole Martin Lund Bø Essays by Maxa Zoller and Printed by Ausra, Lithuania ISBN Norsk Fotografisk Fond Vederlagsfondet

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It’s got a few oohs and ahhs (oooh aaah) And it takes a little pause Just before I sing the F word Thora Dolven Balke Linn Pedersen’s photographs, collages, films and sculptures are humorous in the most gravely serious way.

Feelings are treacherous, and desire touches the prosaic situations we happen observe whilst going about our day, promising something more, or some secret system we are not sure we are grasping but still almost understand. Pedersens work has something of the child’s logic, non-logic and a child’s creativity, which is also that of the artist, able to see connections in disconnection, chance, the chaos of nature being as there is no harmony in the universe (Werner Herzog). Where one sees eroticism, another sees brutality. Where one sees logic, another sees chaos. Everything is discontinued, ungraspable, hidden. It evokes the desire to turn it around, lift it up, and tare it down. Her sculptures and the built structures in her images are uncalculated, genuine, like someone working from a mind not yet educated in the meaningful ways of building sustainably. It is as if she refuses to see the world in its boring structure, as it is, laid out for our purposes, predictable and practical. The world she proposes is unstable and slightly damaged, keeling to one side as if the children, or the child’s position, possesses the power to start a revolution, to make the structure collaps from within, or from the natural base so to speak.

The cluster, or the clump, is a central image in Pedersen work. ‘Midlertidig klump’, or ‘Temporary Cluster’, stands for me as one of the central titles in her

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production, as it describes a way of thinking I closely relate to when looking at Pedersens work. There is something absurdly humorous about, about a cluster in itself. Being as it is something amputated, unuseful and ungraceful. At the same time, Pedersen makes it look beautiful and useful in its construction. Fabricated, not for purpose, but for something else, like sculpture is.

It is as if every work inhabits a desire to break free, of itself, its form or its purpose. References to Fernando Pessoa’s writing keep occurring in her works. Where Pessoas first heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, might see a stone as a stone, another might see it as a symbol, or a feeling, thus as a sculpture or a monument. Pedersens work has both those angles, the categorical and the incredible. This enables her to tell us that this is the world as it is, but at the same time not to trust it. Realism, structure, and form balance metaphysical anxiety. This factual approach could also reflect Pedersen’s fascination with scientific nature. Her collages are layers of facts, samples from various sources. Clumped together and torn, built up and destroyed to give way to the new work.

Pedersen’s images are brutal in their haphazardly natural look, as if their ‘being’ is just a cover. Images like the horse with its head cut off, or the bronze deer-statue, one leg missing, underline the humour in violence. Like any other transgressional activity, it forces you out of the ‘normal’, evoking either laughter or hysteria, closely related. Images like the rabbit that promises to tell your fortune are in this category. A snapshot, perfect for a youtube-generation of one-liner geniuses, but in Pedersen’s context it is more than that.

Its reality, if you just want to see it. At the same time as

this violence-in-silence, other of Pedersen’s images are dry and factual in their humour, deadpan.

Recently, I heard a radio program about the use of ehh, and uhh in language. The question was, do we use it out of uncertainty and lack of words, or to prevent interruption. For some reason this occurs to me now, writing about Pedersens work. This way of speaking is both handicapped and intuitive at the same time.

Precisely this unveiling of the genuine and perfectly human lack of perfection manifested in a strange unintended sound, irritating but beautiful in some ways when singled out. Similarily, some of Pedersens chosen objects for photographs are unintended for use, and definitely for glory, but here they are given importance.

This is true for many artists chosen subject matter, but the sound of uhh, and its undeniable importance as a bearer of subliminal meaning, seems a good metaphor for these particular works.

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The Death and the Maiden: Linn Pedersen’s photographic practice as an act of transgression Maxa Zoller Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden (p. Death and Lust), 1517 Experiencing the rhythmic ebb and flow of the photographic glimpses into Linn Pedersen’s world the reader of (The catalogue) is invited to engage in an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the work, which I shall attempt to enter in the following pages. It is not the intention of this text to pre-empty Pedersen’s work through academic analysis, but rather to offer one of many possible entries into her artistic practice. In the following I shall use the art historical topos of ‘The Death and a Maiden’ as a compass to navigate through the myriad of her photographic wanderings. In historical Death and the Maiden paintings a macabre skeleton with a gruesome skull-face stands behind a young girl whose beautiful naked body is barely covered with a transparent scarf. Often the figure of death grips or kisses the girl from behind; sometimes he holds a mirror up to her face. Emerging as an artistic response to the horrendous epidemics of the Middle Ages, such as the Black Death, the theme of The Death and the Maiden has not lost its significance within the present.

On the contrary, as I shall show, it not only relates to the themes in Pedersen’s photographs, but interestingly it also serves as a metaphor for the artistic act.

Closely related to the theme of the Dance of Death, the Death and the Maiden paintings by 15th and 16th

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century Northern European painters such as Hans Baldung Grien or Niklaus Manuel Deutsch served as a moral reminder of life’s discontinuity and the ephemeral nature of youth. If life is nothing but the joyous dance with the grim reaper, the ultimate outcome of this act of pleasure is the latter’s consumption of the maiden, hence life. The Death and the Maiden genre intertwine beauty and fear, creation and loss, sexuality and death in a dance of sensual cyclical movements.

It is this intimate entanglement of death and beauty, or nature and art that is central in Pedersen’s photographs. Central here means ‘significant’, as well as ‘compositionally located at the centre of the photograph’, since Pedersen structures her images around the middle point of the photographic frame. We can ask ourselves what is it that sits at the centre of all of these images? Despite their diversity I shall seek to propose a visual vocabulary for these photographs in order to tentatively identify the recurring symptom in the work, which gives it its form.

We can observe two recurrent structures or forms in Pedersen’s images. First, there is the crumble or the cluster, an accumulation of material in the sense of George Bataille’s ‘informe’: one of her favourite objects are wind-swept crumbled plastic bags (pp. 15, 16, 32, 39), there is also a pile of dry leaves swept against a glass door (p. 22), a abandoned wrinkled duvet (p. 29), the scattered remains of a snowman (p. 37), heaps of scrap metal (p. 63), a bag of ice cubes (p. 79), two ‘heads’ of long grass growing in the snow (p. 92). When there are people in the photographs, they are either ‘folded’ creating rounded bodies (p. such as the round back of a person squatting in a white fur coat (p. 17), a naked boy crouching knee-to-chin in the corner of a

house (p. 23), and the back view of a person bending over into a bush (p. 49), or scattered bodies, like the picture of a group of people lying in crumbled sleeping bags by the sea (p. 90). There are animals, too, a stag cast in bronze (p. 59), and the long bodies of two lynxes photographed from a bird’s eye view (p. 61). We could also include the various tree houses into the field of the cluster (pp. 36, 34, 44). Consequently, I would suggest that these clusters, however fragile or broken, represent the body.

The second form is the line as it is represented in the wooden board cutting equally through the mud and the picture plane (pp. 27, 60), a series of dead tree trunks (pp. 33, 36, 45, 62), a thorny branch stubbornly sticking out of the surface of a lake (p. 47), the line of a rainbow rising up beyond the horizon (p. 51), an axe slammed into a chopping board (p. 77), and finally a trilogy of lines in the last three pages of the book: horizontal folds of plastic waste in the water (p. 94), the raised arm of a young man (p. 97), a collection of wooden sticks proudly presented in front of a rocky landscape (p. 99). These lines stand erected in physical space or cut through the centre of the flat photograph, which is why I associate them with the symbol of the phallic. I dispense from a gendering of these forms, whereby the body would be located within realm of female creation, while the phallus stands for male destruction. I use the categories of the body and the phallus not in order to engage with a simplified blackand-white psychoanalytic interpretation of Pedersen’s work, rather they are useful in setting up a dynamic relationship of creative forces within these photographs, a dance as it were of death and the maiden.

In the famous slitting eye scene in Salvador Dali and Lois Bunuel’s 1929 film Chien Andalou a women’s eye signifying the body is sliced with a razor blade symbolising the phallus in order to cut beyond optical vision into a surrealist space. By penetrating the physical eye, it is the third eye of the camera (p. or more precisely the film technique of montage), that can finally disclose the repressed condition of human existence. Similarly, Pedersen allows a different kind of narrative to emerge from what we call ‘reality’. In the photograph on p.

87, for instance, the simple act of opening a metal fence by widening its bars creating a diamond shape turns urban vandalism into a metaphor for sexual transgression. The rigid symbolic order of the vertical bars representing structure and law in the service of protection-by-exclusion is undermined by the unlawful act of un-doing, trespassing, shortcutting, and diverting. This subversive gesture becomes even more powerful as one discovers that this urban setting is filled with an almost absurd combination of barriers, railings and walls. Pedersen investigates the political, personal and even sexual paradigm of the modern condition as she forces open its third eye.

True creation is the production of a transgressive space, a hybrid form embodying the male and the female, a sur-reality of in-betweens states. It is obvious that Pedersen’s practice is embedded in the legacy of surrealist photography. From Eugène Atget’s photographs of urban situations, which inspired the surrealist concept of the everyday as a crime scene, to Dora Maar’s psychologised spaces, the desire to reveal the (p. troubling) unconscious in the banal is clearly palpable in the photographs in this book. It is interesting that it opens with the image of a couple of full rubbish bags

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squashed against a glass door (p. 15). Why take a photograph of this situation? First of all, there is a formal tension between the heaps of black plastic chaos, a form produced entirely haphazardly, and the calculated intentionality of the straight white lines of the wooden doorframe, which is far from the chance object character of the bags. The rubbish bags are opaque, the glass door is luminous, almost transparent. We could even go as far as aligning the rubbish bags with the ‘informe’, the abject and the touch, while the door represents the rational, a clear subject-object relationship and optical vision. Bataille used the concept of the informe to undermine the limitations of academic rationality governing modern thinking. He believed that the universe did not have a clear form, but that it resembled the informe shape of a ‘crachat dans la soup’ (a spit in the soup). Inspired by his words, Julia Kristeva developed the notion of the ‘abject’, which is that which cannot be contained by the human body, that which sits outside (or between) subject and object, that which erupts and spills over, such as the excremental. These theories developed as a reaction to early modern Cartesian philosophy and the centring of the subject, which arguably had found its artistic form in the perspectival system of Renaissance painting (the painting as a window onto the world). In this light the picture on p. 15 can be interpreted formally and philosophically in relation to the politics of human perception. I asked above ‘why take a photograph of this situation’? The transgressive gesture of ‘shooting’ the visual world already presupposes the artist’s suspense of belief in it. The artist photographer, then, switches her dance partner from the death to the maiden and back again interfering with what we consider ‘natural’ while sublimating his/ her fear of mortality. Returning to my initial question, I

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would propose that what lies at the centre of Pedersen’s photographs is the luminal space of void and plenitude brought together in the transgressive act of art practice.

As a young female photographer inspired by the morbid photographs of Weegee and the uncanny work of Annika von Hauswollf and Rineke Dijkstra, Petersen displays an interest in the relationship between life and death, nature and artifice, that could be considered typically Northern European. As the lyrics of the song Hunter by the Islandian singer Bjoerk read: “I thought I could organize freedom. “How Scandinavian of me! ”. In this self-ironic, almost confessional line Bjoerk humorously observes in hindsight the impossibility of taming and disciplining nature. Without wanting to stereotypically categorize Pedersen’s art as ‘Scandinavian’, it is helpful to contextualize her artistic sensibility in relation to the overwhelming all-consuming vastness of the Norwegian countryside. Consider for example p. 32; the wind-swept shreds of plastic accumulating like a black stain against the horizontal lines of a field, followed by the blue belt of the sea, topped by a fragile white line of icebergs and finally, the faint Northern sky. In Pedersen’s world there is little space for the romantic notion of the pure otherness because in her images the natural is always already inscribed in the artificial, the other is always part of civilization and visa versa. Pedersen’s ‘noble savages’ are consistently surrounded by fur (wearing it (p. 17)) or lying on it (pp.

23, 67)). Their eyes are turned away from the gaze of the photographer in an animalistic act of camera-shyness, and also as a means to conceal the most human part of our body, the face. Could we consider this a metaphorical image for Bjoerk’s song? Does the seemingly troubled coal-faced man on page 52 represent our

constantly frustrated desire to give meaning, to frame life’s flesh represented by the maiden standing in front of him?

London-based Maxa Zoller is a lecturer in moving image art. She completed her Ph.D. thesis on European experimental film in 2007. In her capacity as a film curator Maxa has presented experimental film screenings at Tate Modern, Tramway in Glasgow, Berlin Kunstverein, Rekord Gallery in Oslo and numerous London galleries. She also runs film workshops and works as a writer and art critic.

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The power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

Kristian Skylstad Beauty is surely a taboo cause beauty is commercialized. What is commercialized is seldom successful in the arts, because the arts are revolting to the preferences of normality. The public view. So how to alter beauty? By redefining it, reduce the premises of it and confuse the reception of it. The it. The beauty. All is horrendously beautiful, but dull in their interceptions.

Mostly we are dulled by how the 2 dimensional picture, especially the ones that are exposed correct. The image as we see it. Pedersens pictures are dealing with the abnormal without being wicked, the diffuse without being blurred and the romantic without losing their realistic edge. There is a dullness in this scenery. But not the anxiety driven proletarian dullness, boredom, more a view of the world gathered in tiny small fragments, distilling out materials of coincidence, mounted into the reality of everyday life. A documentation of what happens over time when we neglect, alter carefully.

Clichés, gaps and holes. Sometimes the pictures are awkwardly ordinary. In sum showing affection for the glimpses of alteration in what we leave behind. If you look long enough all kind of things will happen, instead of using modern techniques like digital manipulation or setting up sceneries, she gives up control over the image by showing what it is for what it is. The egocentrical photographic language, where the scream «Let me show you how I look at the world» (witch is mostly a lie) is discarded for the sentence «Look at the world, come closer, and you might find something new.» Since the beginning of photographic time we have been obsessed

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with the extraordinary, the romantic photograph manipulating the mind with trepidation, horror and awe or the realistic photograph – mostly assembled to show you some kind of documented «truth» are intertwined, combined and gives birth to a sublime experience of the world. This demands patience both from the artist and the audience, wich is not a very common nor trendy, in a world where the image and reality is finally separated, divorced and perfect strangers. wich cannot be done, because the world is surely extraordinary in its simplicity. The pictures have no history related to «the history of the world» nor any agenda besides rendering everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects in a true to life manner. How does a cross with a dollar sign leaning to a tree, a horse hanging with its head into a plastic bucket or an unmade bed say something relevant in an esthetical or meaningful way? It depends on the eye of the beholder. There is something familiar, but quite alien in the photographs, moments ignored both in a proletarian life, but a viewpoint wich is often neglected by the conceptual eye in confrontation with the world. An ignorance of an intellectual viewpoint on the subject in matter, while at the same time giving an infinite room for interceptions to the «reader» of the images. Nothing is confronted here. Nothing is exposed or revealed here. Nothing is extraordinary except the small traces of life - of modern life – in relation to nature. What is beauty? Beauty is something which is being in harmony and balance with nature. By picking out traces of fabric in a tree or a piece of plastic in a pond Linn Anita Pedersen is altering this perception, making the unusual – the exception, the center of the attraction, and the immensely beautiful landscape the theatrical drapery, turning mall traces of human intervention into the dot that signals the end of a sentence.

The paradoxes of meaning, of what’s meaningful, for what is life but an assemblage of weird experiences in a life always less ordinary? Pedersens pictures are like removing your headphones and sunglasses after a long day in the sun, revealing the significance of what the early dusk reveals. A frozen pond, a crouching female, a palm weighted down by snow, a shopping cart barely visible underneath the surface of something that looks like water. It sounds romantic when described with simple words, but in its vacational photographic simplicity they have almost a therapeutically ambivalence, the attitude of leaving no moments scattered. Ancient techniques like using the childs eye, building symmetry are the technical glue in her project, even though the cloud covering the middle part only reveals the top of the mountain. The axe is laying there, seemingly no use for it. The fence is bent and destructed creating a shape not understood. The girl is biting an apple, gazing out at the landscape.

Everything is quiet, everything is peaceful, everything is perfect. An inner beauty is a revealed here to describe the positive aspects of something that is not physically observable. Tendernes to detail. ingly troubled coal-faced man on page 52 represent our constantly frustrated desire to give meaning, to frame life’s flesh represented by the maiden standing in front of him?

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Thanks to Jan Freuchen, Ole Martin Lund Bø, Thora Dolven Balke, Kristian Skylstad, Maria Veie

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