Meta Isæus-Berlin: De animerade installationerna /The Animated Installations

• Meta Isæus-Berlin: The Animated Installations Torsten Weimarck At about the same time that I saw Meta Isæus-Berlin’s remarkable installation Ett vattenhem (A Water Home) at the Bo01 Housing Fair in Malmö I also happened to see Johannes Stjärne Nilsson and Ola Simonsson’s film Music for one appartment and six drummers which was shown as a supporting film in the cinema. It struck me that these works had interesting things to say about each other; that in spite of their manifest differences they had remarkable similarities that caused them to be in some strange way related or contemporary. For both of them made very drastic use of visually consummate but seriously gloomy objects and environments that seemed literally to have been taken from a straight-up-and-down reality in the immediate vicinity of time and space. These ambiguous social and temporal markers were used here as objects, as materials and as visual communicators for highly conscious modes of artistic expression with a strong feeling for the shadowy metaphors of everyday objects and equivocal emotional tensions. In A Water Home the everyday items are somewhat dismal and worn, several decades old, already almost forgotten and they seem, at first sight, to be playing their usual roles though these roles are (substantially) manipulated. Their one dimensionality – highly evident, really – has been preserved and conserved in a state in which their unfashionable integrity has even been emphasized. The furnishings or interior design may seem like animated fragments of the sets for various acts of a play in which it is we, the audience, who are on stage since the actresses and actors have abandoned the theatre, either temporarily or permanently. But the fictitious theatrical aspect is often so toned down that we might as well be looking at a section of a real apartment or interior. As the beholder one is in the midst of the objects whose offensive normality and second-hand friendliness (though this does not apply to all the installations) one can confirm with a sigh of recognition while in other works they have been accorded an elevated, almost elegiac dignity. One is frequently dumbfounded by the capacity of physical objects to absorb or to reflect the mental state of their surroundings. Is it really possible that these objects can know me so intimately? What struck me about Stjärne Nilsson and Simonsson’s film – apart from the well conceived sound and picture editing and the slapstick performances of the characters that casued them increasingly to seem as though they were taking part in a profane and joyful St. Lucy procession – was the fact that they had succeeded in finding such existentially rich and suggestive images, sounds and rhythms in such mundane objects and settings. Obviously staged yet so apparently ‘real’ that ‘reality’ imitates them too; or should that be the other way round? One soon loses one’s way among the different levels of reality which, it transpires, all exist only as medial expression: the objects are the bearers of visually coded, more or less oblique experiences and memories, and to such an extent that the objects themselves appear like overly definitive, materialized linguistic elements rather than things with primarily practical functions (whatever the differences between these are in reality). Through their unexpected entrances in such dimly varied and seemingly scattered levels of reality, in Meta Isæus-Berlin’s installations the otherwise often neglected mental visual appearance of objects and the remarkable masked social intrigues that they form part of are strongly emphasized. Their emotional characteristics and charges can seem like the intricate remains of or messengers of dim and ambiguous memories and experiences: the items were present themselves; they have been formed, infused and animated by a social and psychic cosmos (or chaos) which has gradually sunk into these things and that lives on visibly there and there alone. What then continues to be expressed and handed on by them amounts to a complete instrumentarium taking the form of – ‘reality’. The immediate, concrete or physical ‘reality’ and its objects is simply dealt with as a rich, artistic language with deep roots accumulated in many layers in our consciousness and our memory: the visually expressive language of the objects is recognizable in our bodily experiences and immediately strikes us since the objects speak the same wordless language as our bodies. * Making use of ‘reality’ as an artistic element is nothing new in itself. The frequently problematic relation between ‘reality’ and the arts has existed as an undercurrent of intellectual reflection, particularly about images, for a long time. And at least since the 19th century the issue has been acutely important in that ‘reality’ in various direct ways has invaded and mixed itself with the fictions of pictorial art – whether these have been more obviously ‘unreal’, idealizing pictures or figurative art in general, particularly that with naturalistic intentions. Jean Baudrillard writes that “we live in a world in which the primary function of a sign is to make reality disappear and simultaneously to hide this disappearance”, i.e. the task of an image is to eliminate reality and to eliminate the fact that this is happening. The result is, he continues, that “The image can no longer depict reality since it is reality /---/. It is as though the objects had swallowed the mirror that reflected them” so that they constantly “secrete copies, clichés of themselves.” ‘Reality’ can, in the view of Jean Baudrillard, not (any longer) be distinguished from the signs, images, things, etc. that we use to describe it, to give expression to it and, finally, to fill it. ‘Reality’ appears as a section of the continuous flood of representations, a constant process of multiplication in which every object is transformed into pregnant digital matrices that seem to increase merely through some sort of vibrations or echoes, thereby repeating themselves visually and materially. This links the genre to object art, of primary relevance here, which does not generally use a traditional artistic language, a normal type of symbolic or expressive language. Object art, on the other hand, works with a pictorial language whose formal elements consist of the things themselves; where the objects in their total physical aspect and materiality act as and constitute the signifying images – that is not their name, connotations or practical objectives. One can, of course, see this interest as a modernist continuation of the classical still-life tradition in which items were depicted, as is claimed, after nature, that is to say as they appeared to the painter’s sight in reality. But in object art there is something qualitatively different since artists have discovered that one does not need to make a detour over the seen and depicted object, but can use the object itself directly for an artistic end; an object that is, so to speak, ready made. Or put another way: artists discovered that all observed objects are already depicted in the sense that they are either artefacts, that is produced by human hands, or are coded cultural constructions of divinely or naturally created objects. The object – unlike the traditional sculpture – is often described as an object from an everyday human situation but that has been removed from its normal context and been transformed into an aesthetic object by being regarded with artistic intentions or expectations. In this respect the genre of object art is, in fact, supported by a classical academic reductionist aesthetic. This established itself during the period 1880-1915 when numerous artists started to show an interest in objects with this strange, opaque density and weight that so clearly distinguished themselves from traditional, figurative sculpture’s intended signifying “transparency” and dematerialization. Putting an everyday object into an aesthetically conscious visual context meant that the object was often seen as being on a special level of reality, somewhere in between a real object and an art object. Object art, with all its physical authority, its indisputably present weight and mass, is often seen as a sort of transferred object, a charged object for concentration or meditation; and it is in many ways as a consequence of such attempts – and needs – that object artists of more recent times have worked. * Meta Isæus-Berlin’s water-home installation is not included in the Liljevalch exhibition but I should still like to describe it in more detail (as it appeared at the Bo01 Housing Fair in Malmö) since it contains numerous characteristics that I find particularly illuminating with regard to several of the other installations. A Water Home consists of five rooms sited on a small, raised refuge or platform in the midst of people walking along the main thoroughfare. As a beholder one felt as though one were crossing the railway tracks and looking up at a sort of podium with a partially enclosed pavilion on it whose content and function were only intimated. The only parts of the pavilion that were open and visible from the passage beneath were the Hall and the Bathroom which were situated at the beginning and the end of the pavilion whose narrow shape and enclosed, windowless spaces were also reminiscent of the sort of fitted interior that one meets on ships with their unalterable spatial organization and limited possibilities for movement. The Hall and the Bathroom both lacked a roof. The hall consisted solely of a simple, screened space at an angle decorated like something from a Kabakov interior with a hat rack, some coats and underneath them a wooden shelf with three pairs of shoes on it. Meta Isæus-Berlin writes of this intimated room: “I hear a sound, something steadily running – in the c

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