Images as Emergency Exits: Crispin Gurholt’s Live Photo and the Meaning of the Fragment
Text by Hanne Hammer Stien, art historian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø.
Transelated by Arlyne Moi
By Ekebergåsen Live Photo #20 UNPLUGGED/Prosjektskolen Ekebergskrenten, Oslo 2011, Crispin Gurholt.
For 20 years Crispin Gurholt (b. 1965) has worked with the project Live Photo. In the place-based and time-limited installations in the series, he stages people and objects in real environments, combining them into more or less complex tableaux vivants – living pictures (1). They can be scenes playing out around a hospital bed or dinner table, in an artist’s studio, museum or gallery, or they can be staged outdoors, on streets or on the outskirts of a city, as in By Ekebergåsen (2011). In this latter installation, we see several young people positioned in a half circle. They wear dark clothes and it is difficult to see their faces properly. One youth holds a scythe. There is something foreboding about this scene staged in unkempt greenery in the industrial landscape of Ekebergåsen. In the background is Bjørvika, the area of Oslo where the greatest amount of development in Norway has taken place in the last 20 years. However, there is also something recognisable about the outsider position that these youths convey, something standing in contrast to the nouveau-riche Norway’s smooth surface. Since the complex scenes in the Live Photo series are set in an extended contemporary time period (2000 to the present), and since they appear ordinary in all their place-specific theatricality, we as viewers can immediately identify with, or at least recognise the people, places and situations that are presented.
Please Kill Me Live Photo #27 Galleri K, Oslo 2014, Crispin Gurholt.
Please Kill Me Live Photo #27 Galleri K, Oslo 2014, Crispin Gurholt.
For the retrospective exhibition ‘Entrapped Moments’, held in connection with Arctic Moving Image Film Festival 2020 in Harstad, Gurholt presents a selection of photos and videos that represent all the 28 tableaux in the Live Photo series. He has also made a new scene especially for the festival. It takes place in a house in the centre of town during the exhibition period. The theme of the Harstad scene centres on the father-son relationship and the cleft that time or history creates between the generations. Despite the two people being in the same picture, the father turns his gaze inward, toward what has been, while the son turns his back to the past and sets his gaze on what will come. ‘Patricide’ can be said to be a basic theme for Gurholt, seen, for example, in the installation Please Kill Me (2014), in which the artist himself plays the main role. Trapped in history’s linear or forward-moving orientation, the work is staged in an art gallery and problematises how market forces and capitalism have taken control of our lives, and art. On the wall is the tabloid tag ‘Art is Dead’, which in this context ironises the field of art and art history. It is impossible for us to liberate ourselves from our own era, our own history, or ourselves.
In recent years, Gurholt has also brought painting into the Live Photo project, as an additional exploratory layer to the scenes. In retrospect, he acknowledges that the project is just as much about himself as anything else is. He therefore describes the series of installations represented in ‘Entrapped Moments’ as his frieze of life. The exhibition title refers to catching something in a trap or to being captured, whether in a hunting situation or in a juridical sense, to entrap a suspect. It can also refer to arresting a moment in time, or to feeling caught up in some special event or experience. Additionally, the title could be interpreted to mean that the scenes are traps the artist sets for himself, or for us – the viewers. It is precisely through capturing himself (and us), that the whole Live Photo series appears as images of today. ‘My life, the society I live in, my era’, as Gurholt himself summarises it.
There is no contradiction between Live Photo’s starting point being Gurholt’s own life experiences and the project having an impact beyond the individual and personal level – as images of today. On a general level, all the scenes in the series concern the relation between social interactions, social structures and power – whether of the individual’s role in a family or society, or the artist and art’s role in art institutions or in society as a whole. By focusing on the relation between individual and collective memories, the project allows us to ask questions about the writing of history and the dialogical room that an image (art), in the best case, sets up – a room where the relation between the artist, the work and the viewer is central.
Existential Loneliness
The absence of dialogue and movement causes the scenes in the Live Photo series to be experienced as interrupted or frozen moments – fragments of something larger. What Gurholt makes visible points to something we cannot see, something existing beyond the boundaries of the picture both in terms of space and time. The visual subjects in the series thus function as gestures or intimations, not as mimetic images of empirical truths. The scene made especially for Harstad contains, for example, references to coastal culture; through these references, the scene points to a larger context dealing with the internal psychology of an individual, the environment and the place where the scene takes place, but also with historical conditions and social changes unfolding over time.
Even though we as viewers can experience the scenes live and can walk around them, it is only possible to see them from a distance, through some type of glass surface, for instance windows, as in the Harstad case. Viewed through the surface of the glass, a sense of distance to what is viewed is reinforced, at the same time as we are made aware of our own position as viewers. The relation between that of seeing and that of being seen is itself rendered visible. After a period of up to two hours, the scenes dissolve. All that remains is documentation in the form of photos and videos that emphasise the project’s filmic undertone, which at the same time – and in light of the project having entered the post-digital era (2) – remind us of the every-present mediation that lies layer-upon-layer, making it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. Gurholt’s use of painting as an extra layer of mediation functions not only as a play with media archaeology and art history, but also as a sign pointing to art’s repeated attempts to say something meaningful about the world yet without trying to determine what the world is. Viewing his art in light of the realisation that we live at a time when fake news spreads like wildfire, the art here stands out in all its imaginative power, with an ability to fabulate, like a place to return to, to re-calibrate and re-orient ourselves to the world.
Voyage Pittoresque Live Photo #13 The Art Museum of Northern Norway, Tromsø 2007, Crispin Gurholt.
The linkage to real places and the use of people who are not actors render the scenes (site)specific. Each work also relates to specific cultural references, be they works of art, as in Voyage Pittoresque (2007), which is based on the painting Pastor Laestadius Preaching to the Sami (1840), by François-Auguste Biard, or popular-cultural references to music, fashion and film. The works nevertheless have a generic expression in that what is specific is raised to a general level through the now-oriented, fragmentary and condensed form. Their unfinished character invites us to become co-creators of the work, thus opening a dynamic interpretive space where diverse horizons of understanding can be sharpened by abrasively rubbing against each other. When viewing the scenes, several questions immediately emerge: What are the relationships between the people we see? Where do they come from? Where are they going? Which relationships are there between the people and the surrounding material environments?
Zimmer 9 Berlin, In Transit Live Photo #28 Mädchenkammer, Berlin 2017, Crispin Gurholt.
Oftentimes the people in the scenes seem imprisoned in their own existence, unable to reach out to or engage with others on a deeper level. In this way, existential loneliness sets a basic mood for the whole Live Photo project. In the scene made especially for Arctic Moving Image Film Festival in Harstad, this is clearly manifest. Pared to the bone, this one creates a contrast to many of the earlier scenes in the Live Photo series. It seems like a further development on Zimmer 9 Berlin, In Transit (2017), where the relationship between parents and children is thematised, and where the two faces of the liberation process – the pain and the necessity – are clearly present. In the installation in Harstad, there are only two people, a father and a son. By being physically isolated from each other, in different parts of the home environment, their psychological separation is emphasised; they appear not only disabled, but also as lacking the possibility to gain access to each other.
Emergency Exit
Like Gurholt, the philosopher, cultural critic and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) deals with concepts such as history and the image. The Tromsø-based philosopher Dag T. Andersson (b. 1947) has written knowledgably about Benjamin’s thinking, not least in the book Tingenes taushet. Tingenes tale (2001) [‘The Silence of Things. The Speech of Things]. Starting with Benjamin’s realisation that language has limitations and that there where language falls short, the image takes over, Andersson draws our attention to Benjamin’s orientation towards the fragment. Andersson writes:
Elsewhere – and much later – Benjamin says that our attempts to put into words and to ‘translate’ – so to speak – our life into words and writing, in other words, to organize our life bio-graphically, must always break down and end in images. An image is the breakdown’s, the disruption’s, form of expression. The words have a limited scope and the images take over. For Benjamin, a fragment says more than a coherent text. Like rings around Saturn, the planet of melancholia, the fragment forms a concentrated expression of a broken world.
Most of us have experienced that our sensory experiences can suddenly evoke memories we didn’t even think we had. A fragrance or a particular sound, like a stroke of unexpected lightning, triggers a feeling or a trace of an event, a mood – in what can be described as a memory image. For Benjamin, the way our memory works is inextricably tied to a concept of history and images. The concept of history breaks apart, according to Benjamin, or it dissolves into images, not into narratives or stories. This, he thinks, is because neither the course of an individual’s life nor the history of mankind can be described as linear narratives. It is at this point that Benjamin’s thinking intersects with Gurholt’s artistic practice: by presenting scenes that appear as fragments, excerpts of a life course or a moment in history, Gurholt creates images that function, according to Benjamin’s thinking, as memory pictures.
For Benjamin, to emphasise the significance of the fragment enables a dynamic understanding of history in which nothing ever ends. The past is, for him, an activity, and, most especially, a malleable material. By referring to Paul Klee’s monoprint Angelus Novus (1920), in one of the most well-known of Benjamin’s historical-philosophical theses – the ninth – he puts images at the centre of his philosophy. In his characteristic, poetic-symbolic style, he writes with the picture, instead of letting Angelus Novus function solely as an illustration or metaphor:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
Klee’s angel appears here as an image of our conventional concept of history, but together with the other images Benjamin refers to and those he creates himself, the passage promotes the idea that to create images lies at the root of all human activity; perhaps it is even a precondition for it. Images, for Benjamin, have a saving potential; they can function as emergency exits from history’s progressive orientation – an orientation that throws so many things in the dustbin, be they technologies, objects, ways of thinking, ways of understanding time, and so forth. Andersson, in a fine way, explains how Benjamin’s theory of images reveals the images’ agency and ability to instigate action. For Benjamin, images have the potential to get us to stop up and resist the tendency to conceive of history as progress-oriented.
In the image’s preservation of this core of something unresolved, postponed and unfulfilled, Benjamin sees a possibility for – if only for a fleeting moment – to reveal a layer of meaning that can bring history’s course – what for us is progress, but which for the angel is the catastrophe – to a standstill.
Precisely by directing attention to what is unresolved, postponed and unfulfilled, the visual subject matter in Gurholt’s Live Photo series can be understood as particularly effective and malleable material. The scenes are effective as portals to individual experiences and memories, but they are also effective in the sense that they transcend the individual and particular level and open up for fabulations that function on a collective level, as wedges driven into history. If we follow Benjamin’s argumentation, the scenes in the Live Photo series have the potential to function as emergency exits or alternative escape routes, for they dissolve the idea of history as given and as a linear narrative.
(1) The tableaux in the Live Photo series are, in this translated essay, also referred to as scenes, pictures, images, works and installations.
(2) ‘Post-digital era’ does not mean that the digital era has passed. It means that digital technologies have developed to the point where we are no longer able to separate analogue and digital media. The technology is an extension of the body, and the body an extension of the technology. Almost all processes in society now have digital layers. Physical books, for example, are dependent on digital processes.
Literature
Andersson, Dag T. Tingenes taushet. Tingenes tale. Oslo: Solum Forlag, 2001. Translated quotes from Andersson’s text are unofficial.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
I thank Crispin Gurholt for the conversation we had on 28 August 2020, in advance of the writing of this essay.