Haraldur Jónsson and Steingrímur Eyfjörð @ AceArtInc
Haraldur Jónsson: The Gap, the Wound
There are those who view art as being separated from reality and artists as the true exiles. However, in the case of Haraldur Jónsson’s artwork, one could make the opposite observation, viewing art as reality, or as the medium that brings about the only possible reflections of reality. Far from in exile, the artist is here and now, his perception being of a moonlike quality, stimulating the ebb and flow of the countless reflections of reality, as if reality itself gravitates towards this human attribute. Thereby, one would not wish to disregard the human condition. Reality is hard to grasp, in particular the one that can only be perceived from within, or the reality of inner experiences. One is separated from oneself on pretty much every significant front, ranging from emotions to belief. Language is known to express the desire for a different condition. It is in and by language where the war against separation is fought. On rare occasions, language succeeds, creating a dreamlike state of belonging where I know who I am, what I feel and how to live, as if at home within myself. More frequently, though, words shine through as injured attempts, creating the sturdy bridge within, forever separating one’s perception from the reality of all the most desired things. Still, without the failed attempts of language, without the building of the bridge, the ocean of lost opportunities could not be perceived, moving constantly beneath its surface. What we have is language. It is true. But there is always more to the gap between perception and reality than language can account for.
Far from being in exile from the desired reality, the artist draws the map from above and beneath the bridge, acknowledging the interplay between language and perception, allowing, as it were, for the gap to express itself. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy’. Was it Haraldur who said this? He might have. Being both a poet and an artist, the enterprise of the empty yet vital language is carefully drawn by the unspeakable force of his perception. In his artwork, the gap expresses itself in different forms and colors, often as fragile, fleeting glimpses of reality that cannot but be carried away, again and again, in the constantly moving ocean of the beautifully doomed opportunities. A little boy reading aloud in an alphabetical order the names of emotions; a person projecting the vast darkness inside onto a piece of crumpled, black paper; a set of drawings, framed under transparent film, hanged on a wall in the form of a French window, allowing us to view the inner landscape of emotions and their immediate effect as a form of hypersensitivity, or even a certain allergy.
‘Experience is not to be searched for in a dictionary. It falls out of the range of language.’ ‘The gap’, also in his own words, ‘is the wound’. If so, the bridge within that separates one’s perception from all the desired things might thus be washed with the ocean, the color of blood.
Birna Bjarnadóttir
Steingrímur Eyfjörð: Psychological Staging
The kind of information, story, or detail that might become the foundation for one of Eyfjörd’s projects may seem difficult to discern since it entirely depends on what event or factoid the artist’s mind has retained from the daily flood of events in the world. His gaze and attention fixes on texts or subjects as diverse as: the web of associations that can be spun from the image of a soil hut, the case of a girl who was forced to live in a henhouse and began to think she was a chicken, or a series of lonely men’s barroom descriptions of their ideal woman. Emerging from these real-life tales are artworks that explore national identity (the degree to which Icelanders deride their primitive origins), human behavior (a questioning of whether nature or culture most determines who we are), and the role of metaphor and idealization in relation to sexual difference. Still, however different the original sources or their translation into artworks may seem, they and Eyfjörd are fundamentally bound together by their probing of our collective unconscious, popular legend, and history alike. If this relentless questioning has lent a dark undertone to some of his projects, it remains that floating hearts, cute creatures, strange protuberances, religious figures, Nordic mythological characters, and Wagnerian heroes, are also everywhere present the artist’s comic strips, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. They make up a cosmos that mixes melancholy, playfulness, theatricality, and poetry in a way that is remarkably original and personal without being autobiographical in any strict or self-centered sense. Perhaps this is because Eyfjörd’s work often involves others in crucial ways. On several occasions the artist has consulted fortunetellers or mediums, friends or other artists and collected their impressions, narratives, memories, and predictions, which in turn constitute a structural element of the artwork. One recent example can be seen in a series of sculptures he composed in 2004 of plaster and lead covered in ceramic and positioned on pedestals (each glistening and awkward form is distinct yet looks like a cross between melting ice-cream and a ghoulish figurine).
Each of those sixteen pieces, or “pawns” as the artist refers to them, is an element of a larger ensemble, which also includes sixteen pendulous constructions (these look like constructivist mobiles gone wrong with a gangly mix of tape, wooden knobs, and drumsticks, with one mobile hanging above each pawn), sixteen glossy white depictions of the silhouette outlines of each of the suspended constructions, sixteen cartoon-like drawings grouping the elements in each set as if arranged in an exhibition space, and finally, sixteen individual titles and texts about each pawn written by another artist or friend who was asked to speak about what they thought they were looking at. These words—a title and an interpretation, which gave the works names like The Fool or Emotional Accident— “bring the artworks into existence” according to Eyfjörd (he thus extends Duchamp’s oft cited dictum that it is “the spectator who completes the work of art”). Look at the pawns and read what others have said about them and you will see that like Rorschach inkblots, the sculptures provoked the projections of each narrator’s own fear, anxiety, memory, desire. And perhaps therein lies the crux of Eyfjörd’s entire oeuvre: in his hands the work of art is a vehicle for the artist but also for the spectator (whether that spectator is in the exhibition space or sees the artwork in an earlier stage) to exorcise unconscious memories and give voice to unarticulated thoughts. As such, Eyfjörd’s body of work tells us that the art work is rarely a singular, completely finished thing; it is often a process, serially repeated, layered in its construction, and as much a product of materials as it is the product of the ideas and interpretation that it inspires.
An exerpt from A Projected History: On the Work of Steingrimur Eyfjördby Elena Filipovic
Steingrímur Eyfjörð. National Gallery of Iceland, 2006.