In memory of static: Helen Molesworth on the art of Klara Liden.
Molesworth, Helen
IN EARLY JUNE 2000, I visited Art Basel for the first time. I was
naive, which meant that I was subsequently shocked and dismayed. The
convention hall was filled with stalls, many of which were displaying
objects I knew and loved (works by Piero Manzoni, Marcel Broodthaers),
pieces made by people I admired from afar (Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham) or
by artists of great historical merit (Piet Mondrian, Ed Ruscha). Then
there were pieces by artists I knew personally. All of this gave me a
charge of recognition mixed with a creeping sense of sadness; by the
time I reached my hotel, unironically called the Hotel du Commerce, I
realized I was suffering from a kind of equally unironic, decidedly
old-fashioned heartbreak. For, more than being an assortment of proper
names, the objects themselves had, up until that point, represented
constellations of ideas to me, their primary form of exchange taking
place in books and in journals, in buzzed late-night conversations in
bars, and, increasingly (in ways that were deeply exciting), in the
space of exhibitions. To see all those ideas hung up on the trade-show
walls ready for sale was just short of crushing. The next day, as I made
my way back to the Messeplatz to take another stab at this new form of
art viewing, I ran into an artist I knew. She was one of the very few
artists there, and on hearing that she had just arrived, I cautioned her
not to go in. This was no place for artists.
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Needless to say, a lot has changed in the past ten years. Art fairs
have had their apotheosis. They rival, and often exceed in prestige,
large-scale group exhibitions; and, in a perverse reciprocity, many
exhibitions now replicate the look and feel of the fairs--rabbit-warren
arenas in which art is densely installed, where the thrill and velocity
of the search for the next new thing is privileged over the slower
temporality of the forming of consensus. One of the biggest changes has
been the role that artists have been asked to play in this new
formation. They are no longer expected (or allowed?) to stay away.
Rather, these trade shows increasingly thrive on the presence of
artists, who are routinely asked to make "special projects"
specifically for the fair and to perform their ideas in the guise of
lectures and panels. For many artists, the fairs are as viable and
legitimate a form of exhibition as a museum show. While this makes me
uncomfortable, I can't pass judgment. Artists are workers too, and
the state of employment has changed dramatically,across the board. My
father has a pension; 1 don't. Shit happens. Capitalism rules.
SEVERAL YEARS LATER, while attending a fair, I scrawled "Klara
Liden/Reena Spaulings" in a small notebook. But because I am a bad
archivist, I didn't write down the name of the fair where I saw the
work, nor did I write down the name of the piece. Recently, thumbing
through that book, I found Liden's name in smudged graphite, and it
was mnemonic enough for me to he able to summon my first impression of
the piece--"cute baby butch, wielding a steel pipe, smashing up her
bicycle good." This short, low-tech video, Bodies of Society, 2006,
seemed like the perfect early-twenty-first-century riposte to Pipilotti
Rist's joyful girl-smashing-cars video Ever Is Over All, 1997.
Bodies of Society is affectless, rather than delightful; it is situated
in a shabby domestic interior, rather than outside; and, counter to the
random destruction on display in Rist's video, the way Liden stalks
the bicycle is very precise and controlled. She toys with it at first,
stroking it almost lovingly with the steel pipe, and then slowly she
comes down hard, picking the bike apart bit by bit. In some ways the
video is an erotic masterpiece--an s/m scene of inference, delay, and
slow gratification. Another salient difference between Liden's and
Rist's destruction is that we assume Liden is doing damage to her
own property, rather than to other people's, and that in doing so
she is doubtless making her daily life just ever so slightly more
difficult.
Watching Liden pulverize her bicycle in the middle of an art fair
was pretty great. Clearly indebted to the punk ethos of destroying your
instruments, the video suggests a deeply ambivalent relationship to
possession and use-value. If Rist's video celebrates the 1990s Riot
Grrrl's ascendancy, and can retrospectively be seen as part of the
latter's ultimate commodification, then Liden's video heralds
the muted, nearly autistic sensibility of the postgender, postcritique
artist that may be the mien of our moment. The romance of crime (or
guitar smashing) is not what is on offer, nor is the fantasy of rage
turned to glee; no such redemption is imagined. Rather, the artist at
work is imaged as silent, sullen, solitary, and quite possibly
self-defeating.
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The more I encountered Liden's work, the more I was intrigued
by it and the quality of the affect it exhibits. In Paralyzed, 2003,
Liden does a wild, uninhibited dance on a train in Sweden, mildly
terrifying her fellow passengers as she tries to squeeze into the
overhead luggage rack and hurls herself into and out of seats. At the
Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009, she built an enormous white
cube and placed it in the center of a small room so that it occupied the
majority of the floor space, leaving only a narrow passageway around its
perimeter. Carefully placed on top of the cube were scaffolding, tar
paper, and large bundles of cardboard for recycling, instantly
transforming the useless cube into a humongous plinth. It was hilarious:
a white cube in the ultimate white cube, used as a base for a
"sculpture" composed entirely of trash. Take that, MOMA! And
yet it's clear that Liden understood that the work was still
bounded, even precisely delimited, by the gallery. She didn't break
huge holes in the wall a la Urs Fischer or Kate Gilmore; she just riffed
on pedestals and garbage--Manzoni and Arman--in the White House of
modernism.
All three of these works traffic in a kind of high school
rebellion: Trash your bike, spaz out on the subway, and flip the bird to
the biggest museum in the land even as you accept its constraints. In
this sense, the pieces also share a deep, almost repressed, feeling of
bodily frustration. Things are bound, folded, and tied up, or they are
propulsive and borderline violent--they shift between the restraint and
immobility connoted by the title of Paralyzed and the wild behavior that
ensues. The difference between Liden's work and a temper tantrum,
though, is the former's knowing allusion to the history of modern
sculpture and dance, early cinema, and the practices that compose
site-specificity. The rage is so tightly controlled, so precisely
sublimated, that instead of evoking exasperation (the parent in the face
of the small child), it provokes a kind of empathy ("Dude, I know
how you feel, but you know how it is, you've just got to keep it
together").
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These pieces led me to recommend Liden for an Artpace residency in
San Antonio last year. There, she presented two works. One was a short
video in which we see the artist at a spare desk, her back to the
camera, in what we assume is her studio. Nothing much happens until she
gets up and, very deliberately, begins to fold herself up into the
adjacent garbage bin, as if her body were no more than a crumpled piece
of paper. The work is laugh-out-loud funny, and as if to counteract its
outsize emotiveness, Liden showed it on what was certainly the most
modest television monitor available at the local Best Buy. Meanwhile,
upstairs, she had constructed an elaborate installation out of tar
paper, within which were projected three videos, each of Liden
performing a completely futile but nonetheless arduous physical
activity. In one wall projection, she climbs down a concrete column
outside. All we can see are her legs and arms gripping the pole, her
head a good twenty feet above the ground. On the other wall, we see her
on top of what looks like an abandoned parking lot. It is the dead of
night, and she is rocking slowly back and forth on her feet until she
hurls herself into an athletic somersault, hits the asphalt hard, and
bounces back up. The ensemble, from 2010, was given the title Corps de
Ballet, the term for the dancers in a ballet company who, despite their
inestimable skills, are not the stars of the show--the dancers whose
role it is to remain in the background, filling the stage with
plenitude, thereby allowing the soloist's star to shine ever more
brightly.
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WHILE THE FIRST THREE PIECES I had seen by Liden had traces of
humor in them, the San Antonio works amplified her slapstick
sensibilities in ways that brought to mind the silent performances of
Buster Keaton and that still indispensable text of Henri Bergson's,
Laughter. Keaton's work is frequently seen as emblematic of a
crisis of masculinity in early-twentieth-century representation. His
persona developed around his physical diminutiveness and the fact that
he never smiled on camera. His films repeatedly trap him in bodily
dilemmas in which the classic Hollywood use of suspended time not only
creates a kind of physical tension in the viewer but also brackets the
codes of masculinity as such. Long before Judith Butler's Gender
Trouble, there was Keaton's exposure of masculinity as a set of
conventionalized responses to stimuli, responses that could be performed
either well or badly. The badly part is where Bergson comes in. In
Laughter, Bergson observes that things are funny when they break down or
don't work properly. This is the language of slapstick, and the
malfunction of either a device or the body is the basis for much of
Keaton's mournful form of humor. But I would add to the list of
"malfunctions" here Keaton's failure to properly inhabit
the conventions of masculinity, indeed of agency itself; in this
failure, he shows us masculinity's very constructedness.
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It's interesting to try to think about Liden as operating in
the "tradition" of Keaton. (1) For what failures or breakdowns
are on offer here? Liden's work is so resolutely low-tech that
mechanical failure itself isn't the engine for laughs as it is in
traditional slapstick. While it's true that her spasms of
performance are interpellated by the mechanical and technological (the
train, industrial products, the structure of cinematic and video-based
motion) and are in dialogue with them, failure as a specific term, a
designation for screwups and mishaps, is only part of the issue.
Futility, here articulated as a pervasive condition of contemporary life
in general and of cultural production in particular, is what's
really at the heart of the matter. It's not that the bicycle
doesn't work, but the very idea that it should have a sole
efficient function at all is what appears to be on the chopping block.
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This failure/futility nexus is seen again in Liden's video
Kasta Macka, 2009 (Swedish for "throwing a sandwich,"
idiomatically translated as "skipping stones"), in which we
watch her on three different screens, at the banks of three different
rivers, skipping stones. But the childhood pleasure of this activity
soon changes tenor, as Liden begins to throw increasingly large objects
into each river in an almost desperate, and resoundingly futile, attempt
to return all of the materials washed ashore to an ultimate resting
place in the water. In Ohyra, 2007, we see her in a cramped, dingy
kitchen, facing the camera as she berates herself for things not done
(seeing her grandmother) and for things not done well (doing the dishes,
keeping her mind off girls). Wearing an old-fashioned leather helmet,
she punctuates this litany of negative self-assessment with punches to
her head. She has failed at some of life's most rudimentary tasks,
but watching the video, I can't help wondering: Even if she
succeeded ... what would it matter? What would "success" in
these arenas mean? For Liden, the futile action and the productive
action are essentially one and the same. The cumulative effect of these
petty failures is the staging of what may be the central dilemma of
today's emerging artist: the futility of being one in the first
place.
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The other breakdown that Liden's work flirts with is her own
failure to occupy any kind of conventional gender assignation. Writing
this piece, I feel hemmed in by the pronouns she and her, as Liden never
appears to perform any characteristic typically associated with either
women or the feminine. At the same time, as her diminutive butch body
moves through cities draped in the everyday camouflage of jeans, tank
tops, and hoodies, she hardly appears masculine, either. But the
ruthless binary of gender still haunts the work. This intractability is
apparent in a photograph taken on International Women's Day in 2008
that shows two people wrestling on the ground in what looks like a
street fight. The caption in the exhibition catalogue explains that one
of the figures is Liden, but there's no way to prove it, and
neither person's gender can be ascertained from the picture.
Because Liden makes an issue out of the bodily effort and expenditure
involved in the work's own production, I feel tongue-tied as I try
to sidestep the grammar of gender in describing it. This jamming of
language isn't limited to my own critical efforts; the work's
concentrated, brute physicality makes it seem deeply mute. Indeed,
muteness operates on several levels here, both as tactic and as affect.
There is the pronounced lack of spoken language, which when combined
with the droning noise of the post-punk sound tracks indicates a
mandated or enforced silence. And there is the foiling of gender's
linguistic imperative, which seems, in turn, to squeeze out the
differences between bodies and between actions. Just as the voice is
mute, the body, despite its aggressive force, is routinely denied the
agency we typically afford artistic presence--which is to say, there is
no physical action that is unmediated (by either video or photograph).
The conflation of mediation and muteness is not an attempt to stay
outside of language or of representation (the work is far too canny to
imagine an "outside" of anything); it is only maybe, and just
maybe, a way of staying one step ahead.
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For Liden, staying a step ahead has, up until now, meant one of two
things: ducking out of view or controlling the space in which her videos
are displayed. In Untitled (Back Room), 2007, she built a room in an
art-fair booth (later replicated in a gallery) where only a handful of
people could be at a time. The door to this hideaway was occluded behind
a "painting" composed of an approximately ten-inch-thick layer
of old billboards, which Liden had cut out of their street frames,
topped with a snow-white layer of paint (leaving only the borders of the
posters showing), and hung on the wall. Or there was Hus AB (House
Inc.), 2003, a small subterranean shelter built along the banks of the
river Spree in Germany. Unmarked on the outside, the space was only
large enough to accommodate two people and was invisible to passersby.
These structures, along with other provisional interventions into
gallery spaces, usually composed of fitted pipes and rudimentary
drywall, have led many to write about Liden within the framework of
architecture (she studied as an architect before going to art school).
While it would be silly to refute the architectural impulse in her work,
I don't find myself particularly engaged in the idea of Liden as a
maker--or attacker--of space. Her blocked and stuffed rooms and secret
passages are more interesting to me as morphological analogues to her
obstruction of the grammar of gender than they are as a critique of
architecture and its institutions. Are Liden's hidden rooms and
curious constructions a proposition about what a room of one's own might look and feel like today, eighty-two years after the need for one
was first made public?
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If they are, then it would seem Liden is suggesting that it might
not be a discrete place complete with a steady source of income. In
Virginia Woolf's day, the maintenance of gender and class
distinctions was transparent and unabashedly top-down. We, on the other
hand, operate within a society in which the policing of these categories
is typically invisible but always nimble. To stay one step ahead of this
game, the artist needs to be nimble, too.
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LIDEN NEVER STOPS MOVING; she continually reuses and reformulates
her own work, for example by creating new contexts for screening her
videos. In Unheimlich Manover (Uncanny Maneuver), 2007, she studiously packed the entire contents of her Stockholm apartment into a dense
sculptural form in the center of the room, within or around which a
video was displayed. She has repeated this installation, as well as
others, elsewhere and frequently changes the videos she shows inside
them.
At her recent solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London,
which travels to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm this May, she
drastically reconfigured the videos originally made as part of the
environment at Artpace. The footage of her clinging to the concrete pole
and inserting herself into the studio garbage pail were folded into a
new work, Toujours Etre Ailleurs (Always to Be Elsewhere), 2010, which
comprised two parts (and which was first shown at the Jeu de Paume in
Paris). First, there was a room completely filled--floor to
ceiling--with folded billboards, which made entering the space
impossible. These obstructions were echoed by billboard
"paintings" also arrayed throughout the show. In an adjacent
room, three slide projectors shuttered away, each projecting
large-scale, degraded black-and-white images so ras-terized that they
were almost illegible. Slowly, as you got used to the pace and the
atomization of the images, you could begin to glean Liden--or, rather,
you could discern a figure in relation to a ground, a slightly denser
accumulation of black dots of ink (and, let's face it, it's
particularly perverse to go about ascribing gender to ink spots)--in
stop-motion, folding herself into the garbage pail, climbing the pole,
and, in the third projection, riding her bicycle into the Seine. In
order to achieve the pixelated effect of the images, Liden took
photographs of frame grabs of each video, greatly enlarged them, and had
the images printed onto clear acetate, which she subsequently fashioned
into homemade slides. The click-clacking of the slides added a
metronomic dimension of time to the videos, thereby neutralizing their
original belly-laugh comedic pacing. Sure, they were still funny, but in
that "I'm laughing on the inside" kind of way. This
feeling of suppression was exacerbated by the works' inhabitation
of a medium that no longer exists--Kodak stopped producing its legendary
Kodachrome slide film in 2009. It's one thing to be low-tech, but
another to have to reinvent a once low-tech technology via DIY means,
the effect of which was to render the work a kind of slapstick for the
digital age.
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The temporality of Toujours Etre Ailleurs points everywhere to what
has been--the disused billboards, the documentation of performances
past, the ghostly summoning of the slide projection, and the previous
iterations of Liden's own work. In other words, while the title
implies a constant dislocation of place (the global nomadic art worker,
forever on the road), the piece is also incapable of being fully present
in either a temporal or a spatial way. (So much for the "You had to
be there" immediacy of performance or reperformance). Once again,
Liden degraded the frames of art's production and distribution,
building into its network such a vexed relationship to functionality
that I wouldn't be surprised if the next iteration of this work
were invisible.
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I approached Liden's Serpentine exhibition already intrigued
by the quality of embodied silence in her work. Discussing it with a
friend, I was steered toward Roland Barthes's penultimate lecture,
The Neutral, in which he meditates on the neutral as the third term that
disrupts the binary logic underwriting Western civilization. "As
everyone knows, speech, the exercise of speech, is tied to the problem
of power," (2) writes Barthes, and hence "Neutral = postulates
a right to be silent--a possibility of keeping silent." (3) I read
this with delight. I should just stop talking forever, I thought.
It's the only way "out" of the unbearable way in which we
have all been turned into consumers, "voting" with our
dollars, most of us unable to live according to our own internal code of
ethics (all those unavoidable Chinese imports, frequent-flyer miles,
cell-phone batteries, and casual drugs). And yet any reliance on silence
as a "position" would become unbearable. Such silence, as
Barthes argues, "congeals itself into a sign (which is to say, is
caught up in a paradigm): thus the Neutral, meant to parry paradigms,
will--paradoxically--end up trying to outplay silence." (4) And
therein lies the rub; to transform silence into a strategy is to risk
turning it into doxa. This helped me think through the ways in which
Liden is always morphing her work into something else. Her restlessness
is not in the service of producing novelty but is yet another (futile?)
attempt to avoid congealing into an image, to avoid successful
deployment in art's current modes of circulation: the art fair, the
survey show for an artist in her thirties, the endless residency
programs ... all of which appear on her resume as markers of her
increasing success and legitimation. By never settling into any one of
these channels of distribution, she tries (and fails?) to outrun the
congealment system itself.
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THE TWO MENTAL PICTURES I carried away with me from the Serpentine
exhibition were of blankness and of static. The beauty of the billboard
"paintings" is undeniable; I felt immediately covetous. I
wanted to own one. To make plain, to erase, to white out all the noise
of the spectacle culture's mind-numbing address in a mixture of
petty vandalism (is it a crime to steal out-of-date ads?) and artistic
autonomy (ah, the monochrome), was to condense punk and modernism in a
way that thrilled a girl like me, who came of age in the 1980s believing
that art and criticism were still arenas in which change could happen.
But Liden went to art school in the years after 9/11. And spending time
with her work, one realizes that the twentieth-century paradigm of
art's Utopian aspirations is not what's at stake. Liden offers
blankness--and its aural handmaiden, muteness--less as a critique or a
way out than as a condition, less as a program than as a given (reduce,
reuse, recycle). In her work, I sense a tacit acknowledgment that the
jig is up, that being an artist is just another way of getting by, a
coping strategy for living under late capitalism.
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Liden's reinvention of static, on the other hand, may function
slightly differently. Her projected "slides" look remarkably
like the kind of snow that used to appear on analog television. Seeing
the slides made me realize that one of the things missing from the
digital age is this kind of static. Without question, interrupted
signals and interference happen all the time today: We need only think
of the degradation of the image and sound on cell phones, slow
bandwidth, and watching YouTube videos amid stuttered buffering. But
there is something different between watching the download circle spin
around indefinitely on your handheld and being immersed in the archaic,
televisual version of downtime: an allover composition of moving lights,
complete with accompanying white noise. For me, there is something about
that experience that is tied to the time when I fully believed in
art's redemptive potential--not as transcendence but as the
possibility of alternate paths, other worlds. Liden's makeshift
static foiled my laughter and gave me a glimmer of (something less than)
hope; it slowed me down--visually and cognitively--so that rather than
being frustrated by technological delay, I had to adjust my internal
temporality of perception. I had to wait for myself to catch up to the
image, rather than wait for the image, its concentrated transmission, to
catch up to me. Liden's static offered a dispersed energy that was
far from unmoving or unchangeable. It was trying, modestly and
continuously, to outplay (dejouer, a favorite word of Barthes's)
art's contemporary conditions of speed and density. However somber,
then, her exhibition managed to be my primary antidote to the art fairs
of fall 2010.
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"Klara Liden" travels to Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May
14-Oct. 9.
NOTES
(1.) John Kelsey mentions Keaton in passing in his catalogue essay
"Klara's Moves," in Klara Liden, exh. cat., ed. Sophie
O'Brien et al. (London: Koenig Books, 2010), 15.
(2.) Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E, Krauss and
Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 22. My
gratitude to Marina van Zuylen for knowing that I needed to read this
lecture.
(3.) Barthes, op. cit., 23.
(4.) Ibid., 27.
HELEN MOLESWORTH IS CHIEF CURATOR AT THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY
ART, BOSTON. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
