(Com)passion |
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Installation, photography and textile. During the Second World War the small village of Djupvik in Kåfjord was central to the Germans’ control and defense of Lyngenfjord and Kåfjord, as a part of “Festung Norwegen”. Using Russian prisoners-of-war a large fortification was built at Spåkenes by the mouth of the fjord. For four and a half years the villagers were invaded by almost two thousand German soldiers and a Russian POW camp. In november 1944 the civilians were forced to evacuate, becoming refugees in their own country. Through this project I wanted to illuminate the three groups of people living in Djupvik during the war, and what relationship could possibly exist between them. I have searched for any form of humanity in extreme situations like this. Even if you do not act compassionately, you are still human.
Grethe Gunneng | ||
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Author: Torill Østby Haaland The art of healing a trauma It seems like a specific calm descends as we enter the rooms housing Grethe Gunneng’s project, even if the background events are brutal enough. For this is about war, and about how to face the enemy knowing life must go on as usual. The location is Djupvik in Northern Troms. The period of time is the Second World War. The village was dragged into the Germans’ project “Festung Norwegen”, and the drama imposed on 350 inhabitants by the presence of thousands of German soldiers and their Russian prisoners must have been formidable. So where does calm enter into it? The artist as researcher In many ways Gunneng takes the position as historical researcher, as she is empirically analyzing actual events and situations. Her method is. among others, interviewing surviving people from the village, and going through written and photographic material. She has viewed places, found objects; aiming to create an image as full as possible. However, she is differing from being a researcher in significant ways. Her starting point is part of her own family history. Gunneng’s mother grew up in Djupvik, and Gunneng herself has spent much time there from her childhood on. In that way she is approaching the autobiographical. Another circumstance making her different to a researcher is the way she is developing these historical and personal events, transforming them into aesthetical objects appearing as more than cultural and historical artifacts in a museum. She has made use of materials specific to Djupvik’s history, but she has not only collected objects to be exhibited like an ethnographist would, and like a number of artists have done, since Duchamps’ introduction of the Readymade. At times Gunneng’s project remind us of Robert Smithson’s location-specific Land Art projects. But with Smithson, the original location itself remained more important than its image in the gallery. His Spiral Jetty is, however, difficult to access physically, but is still considered the real work of art. The photos and texts describing the project, as well as the materials taken from the location and placed in the context of the gallery, were the spectator’s first, and usually only, encounter with the work of art. Still, they only point back at the location, and do not function as art by themselves. With Gunneng, they do just that. The materials are transformed into something new. For instance, this is the case in the work Child’s Play. This consists of two reliefs made from peat. One shaping a gun, the other a sled. In this work both the material and the shape carry a symbolic function. The gun points to the local boys’ relations to the German soldiers. The young boys played war games after watching the soldiers. On one hand the work is bringing us unpleasant associations by combining two uncompatible realities: The war, and the children’s world. On the other hand it is turning the German weapons into something harmless. The material opposes the functionality of the gun. Peat is light, and will dissolve in water. All you need is a rain shower to make the brutality of war go away. The sled points back to a slope in Djupvik where the children played while the Germans practiced skiing. Gunneng has been told that the Germans often made a bad figure with their skiing skills. Thus the hierarchy was turned upside-down; the children became, for a moment, superior to the soldiers. Thus the shaping of these two peat reliefs tell a story, as does the material. Peat was important to the locals during the tough wartime. It was used as fuel, and was also sprinkled on the floors of the cowsheds and barns. To fetch peat at “peat hill” you had to cross through the Germans’ defence camp. The material’s symbolic theme points to the absurdity of the war: the continuity of everyday life in the presence of the enemy. Like an impression of something almost forgotten. Everydays and the poor Working from inexpensive materials and recycling them, like Gunneng does with peat, was a central principle to the Italian Arte Povera movement in the sixties and seventies; a group of artists that has strongly inspired Gunneng. Arte Povera, directly translated into Poor Art, was named by art critic Germano Celant. Celant used the term for a trend in art where inexpensive materials like twigs, steel, glass, concrete, rags and the like were central. Using these materials, traditionally not associated with art, expressed a strong rebellion against both institutional art and the capitalistic consumer society. To Gunneng, these materials also hold a specific historical anchorage, a symbol-laden content. A way of expression not unlike the German artist Anselm Kiefer who, in the seventies, raised sensitive questions about Germany’s dark past. In Arte Povera the craft-based practice was seen to be central. The artists wished to distance themselves from contemporary trends like the American Minimalism. To them, the minimalistic sculptures appeared too slick and industrial. To Gunneng, as well, the craftsmanship is important. Her background is textile art, emerging clearly in the work 7 Days. She has knitted cloths from hemp and cotton, and set them in frames. Onto the cloths are fastened objects gathered in the village: a fishbone, a piece of vertebrae from a sheep, a button... All are remains of everyday life in Djupvik during the war. Each weekday has its own cloth. The Sunday is made of cotton, a finer material than the hemp of the workdays. Like in Child’s Play the material is symbol-laden. However, what is just as important are the connotations lying in technique, in craftsmanship. According to the modernistic ideals prevailing in the world of art until the sixties, textile art was second to painting. The fact that important modernists from the beginning of the 20th century like Kandinsky and Delauney were strongly inspired by textile art, was more or less ignored. Institutional art was reluctant to include this kind of craft into an art context. It was related to daily life and thereby opposed to art, which was supposed to be autonomous and separated from the real world. Textile art was also perceived as folk craft and as a feminine pursuit. During the 1940’s and 50’s the abstract, modernistic painting confirmed its masculine connotations through artists like Jackson Pollock. The ideal was grand formats and paintings almost being the results of demonstrations of strength. In the seventies textile art became the means for female artists to rebel against the masculine, elitist tradition. To American artists like Miriam Shapiro and Eva Hesse, using textiles was a way to criticize the hierarchial ranging of crafts versus arts, and feminine versus masculine. In Norway textile artists fought their own struggle to be recognized as visual artists alongside painters and sculptors. In Gunneng’s project the focus on the “feminine pursuits” has worked to straighten another hierarchial condition. The writing of history has, like institutional art, been excluding. Traditionally the great political events and the battles in the fields have been chronicled. These are arenas where women more or less have been excluded. The everydays, and how they have been upturned, are often ignored. Gunneng is telling a different version of war history, other than the one usually found in history books. Traces of humanity and compassion Not only does Gunneng show us a new image of the war by focusing on the women’s situation. She is also trying to show the German soldiers in a new light. She brings forward how the situation does not appear only in black and white, and that there are traces of compassion everywhere, in spite of the seemingly hopelessness. In the title work (Com)passion Gunneng has put together objects and photos. The work consists of three parts. The first, Bon bon, is made up of a photo of German soldiers marching in Djupvik. The image has been transferred onto a large, light textile hanging from the ceiling. Since the image is suspended in the middle of the room, an not on a wall, it enters the viewer’s reality. At the same time the thin, transparent fabric transforms the hard reality into something fragile and soft. In many ways it contrasts the brutality of the barbed wire that Gunneng has found in Djupvik, and which is placed underneath the image. The German soldiers were not brutes, the title claims. They gave sweets to the children, an unexpected luxury in wartime. This ambivalence marks the whole of Gunneng’s project. The good in the bad. Humanity in an inhumane situation. We see signs of compassion in another part of the work: They needed it more than you did. Again we see an installation made of an image transferred on a textile hanging from the ceiling, plus a readymade on the floor. The photo shows villagers at the time of the war. The readymade is a kettle on a tablecloth made of handmade paper. The title was uttered by Gunneng’s grandmother. The Russian prisoners had stolen cream from the family. Even though the locals had a difficult time, they knew the Russians were worse off. The combination of real objects and photos raise interesting questions around the subject of authenticity. The photography has been considered a witness of truth. Especially the kind of documentary photos Gunneng has put to use. In this context the found objects are superior to the photos in terms of authenticity. Here, the reality of the past is literally brought into the space of the gallery. It is as if the artist insists that this has actually happened. As if we didn’t know. By bringing up the story of Djupvik, it is as though Gunneng is bringing up a trauma. Not a trauma experienced by her. Rather the trauma of the village. Gunneng has told of how many people refused to speak of the events of the war. It was hard to make them open up. In this way the artist becomes a kind of therapist to the village. She unearths old memories and displays them. Freud described trauma as being two-part, where the original, suppressed childhood trauma could only be comprehended and accessed through a similar trauma experienced as an adult. Even if we, in Norway, have not experienced war close at hand since the second world war, an obvious interpretation of Gunneng’s preoccupation with war and compassion is not only as a historical comment, but also a current commentary to a world where war crimes fill the headlines. For the trauma is universal. It is human. Maybe that is why this aforementioned calm descends. Does compassion exist out there, after all? Torill Østby Haaland has a masters degree in Art History from the University of Oslo. She is working with the teaching of art, and as an art critic. Translated by Erik Hofsten
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