This is really about truth, which I believe to be both unchanging and at the core of all art. I think the essential thing about truth is that it must be experienced, and in order for it to be experienced, I think it has to appear nakedly, not woven into inherited notions. The driving force for all art is to find an expression that is true, and if you are a twenty-four-year-old painter in Kristiania in 1888, you notice if the set of painterly methods at your disposal is inadequate, you notice if you feel blocked; and if this is not a part of a conscious process of thought – it rarely is, truth is something one senses intuitively, and artistic work occurs through intuition – it still presents the young artist with two choices: either strangle the sense of inadequacy at birth and find the paintings satisfactory even though they are distant from the impulse which compelled them into being, or scrape, paint, scrape, paint, discard, start afresh, seek, search, paint, scrape, until the painting ‘answers’ and a kind of unity or congruence arises between the driving force and the result. Perhaps this never happens, perhaps it happens after ten years, perhaps it happens after ten days.
Munch’s The Scream relates to Krohg’s Albertine at the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room in much the same way Hunger relates to Garman & Worse. In The Scream the world is not a stable space in which an event unfolds. The event in itself is neither notable nor scandalous, there is no prostitute about to be examined for venereal disease by the police surgeon, but a person with an open mouth standing by a railing on a height above a city, covering his ears. What is shocking about the picture, and what was considered scandalous when it was exhibited for the first time, is that the entire space is subsumed into the face and the state of mind it expresses. The space is recognisable, it is Oslo with the Oslo fjord, probably seen from the ridge of Ekebergåsen, but it is greatly distorted, the cityscape has been reduced to some undulating blueish strokes, the fjord is a few yellow lines, the sky powerful waves of red and orange. If one looks first at one of the realistic paintings from the 1880s and then at this picture, it is difficult to believe that they belong to the same time and culture, The Scream looks like something from a different world. But all that has happened is what happened in Hunger, the perspective has been moved into a single person, and the work’s main concern is the place from which the world is viewed, reality as experienced by this single individual is the world. Everything seen is coloured by emotions and moods, which are continually changing. But what makes Munch’s painting so powerful and strikingly effective is that it leaves the viewer defenceless. The emotions it expresses are transferred instantly and with full force. This defencelessness arises precisely through there being no space to lessen the force of the scream, that there is no before or after, the now fills everything we see.
Space – both the geographical and the temporal – is reconciliatory, since it guarantees perspectives of continuity and alternative courses of development. But in The Scream the space is closed, we cannot escape what is happening in the picture, there is no distance to be had. This must have been the most provocative thing about Munch’s paintings from this time: that the distance which the prevailing pictorial idiom entailed and which made it possible to relate not only to disease, prostitution and death in public without involving oneself or one’s own life, but also to the sublime, the beautiful and the exalted, this distance was no longer there. The distance to the painted was suspended too – in The Scream the brushstrokes are visible, and the painting is sketchy, it has an unfinished air, not least the broad reddish-purple line running down along the entire right edge of the picture. In any other picture it would have broken the illusion, but The Scream is painted so wildly that it intensifies instead. Imagine what such a broad, closed brushstroke would have done to the precisely painted and realistic paintings from the same time, for instance Werenskiold’s beautiful paintings from the Setesdalen valley – their entire magic, which lies in the credibility of the pictorial space, would have been ruined.
The titles Hunger and The Scream resemble each other, both are short, almost primitively simple, both denote something bodily, something that expresses itself before words, something primary and almost pre-human, in the sense that the wordless scream and hunger are also animal. They also share the thing that was new about them at the time of their creation, namely their extreme subjectivity, the reality of the single individual. And both totally destroy, or completely ignore, the stable, collective space. They entailed a new art, a new space, a new time.
But they did this 130 years ago, so the crucial question is perhaps why they still seem relevant, why they remain such a living part of the culture. As I write this book about Munch, relating so directly to his pictures, it is as if a writer of Munch’s time were to write about a Norwegian painter from the 1760s and relate to his paintings and the history of their creation as if they were still relevant. Which I suppose quite simply means that the new era which Munch’s pictures heralded and were a part of is still the era in which we live.
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It is ice cold in the room where I am writing this, the heat pump has stopped working while at the same time the outside temperature has fallen sharply, and the small wood-burning stove is only able to heat the air within a one-metre range, no matter how much wood I feed it. So I am sitting here dressed in a heavy outer jacket, wool hat, scarf and boots. Yet it doesn’t look like winter outside, the temperature is just above zero and the lawn is still green with streaks of yellow, here and there almost covered with leaves, which autumn and the first month of winter have turned mostly dark brown and reddish brown, still not rotten but heavy and wet. Beyond the lawn the boards of the house wall shine red against the whitewashed foundation wall.
In such a world, so full of colours playing against each other and appearing in new ways every day, sometimes unfathomably beautiful, full of mysteries one can ponder for a lifetime, one might ask what we need art for. Art is of course itself a part of the world, like everything we make, but art distinguishes itself from objects by always being more than them, in that besides being an object in reality, it also creates a reality of its own, next to or beyond the one we usually see and inhabit.
What kind of a phenomenon is that? And of what use is it to us?
At the end of November I visited an exhibition in London of the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. The title of the show was Walhalla, and it comprised various objects, installations and paintings. It opened with a long corridor full of beds, as in a hospital ward or an army camp. The beds were made of lead, so were the duvets and pillows, but despite the resulting colossal weight, all the little crinkles, folds and imprints left by the moulds created a sense of lightness and careless chance, like the impression a recently abandoned bed can give, while at the same time the weight and immobility of the material fixed the lightness of that moment in something else, something immutable – in a place without time. And where are we then? Time is the space in which our lives unfold, life is one long continuous movement, it never comes to rest, never pauses. Even when we sleep, our eyes move beneath our eyelids, our ribcage rises and falls, our heart beats and thumps, our blood trickles and gurgles, and even while we are sitting still on the sofa, exhausted by the day’s work, our thoughts glide through our consciousness, never the same, never identical, as our days are never the same, never identical. We cannot escape time, it is a fundamental condition of our existence, and we are therefore excluded from non-time, from timelessness – it doesn’t exist for us. We may be able to see it, or to imagine it, but only as something on the other side of an abyss. The leaden beds in the London gallery were outside of time in the sense that the moment they represented, through the folds and irregularities in the material, would never be succeeded by another moment, but would remain thus, unchanging, for all time. A human being in a bed is moreover a vulnerable human being; I am thinking of my youngest daughter as I write this, she is three years old, and every morning I lift her out of her cot and into the day, where she takes up ever
ything from the previous day in a continuity which must never ever be broken – but if it is, that is what I will see, the imprint of her movements on the sheet and the duvet. It was imprints such as these, of absent bodies, that Kiefer’s lead intensified, and it did something to the sense of time; these beds had not been abandoned just now, this very instant, they had just been abandoned a long, long time ago, and perhaps, it struck me as I walked alongside them, they had belonged to gods or heroes.
A room opened to the left, in the middle stood a huge spiral staircase from which hung shirts and dresses. These were the Valkyries, who in Norse mythology chose the warriors who would die on the battlefield. A little further on, the main gallery opened up, in it hung several enormous paintings of towers rearing up from a desert-yellow expanse, in one of them what looked like columns of smoke were rising.
Only a few days earlier I had been sent some photographs by Paolo Pellegrin, who had accompanied Kurdish forces through Syria towards Aleppo. In these photos too enormous columns of smoke rose from a flat and sandy landscape, and it was impossible not to link Kiefer’s paintings to the photos, while at the same time the paintings also opened on to a world of myth, that of the Tower of Babel and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Apart from a photograph of Kiefer himself there wasn’t a single image or representation of a human being in the entire exhibition, it consisted exclusively of beds and bedclothes, spiral staircase and shirts and dresses, desiccated trees and rocks, and paintings of desert landscapes empty of people. A bed and a spiral staircase are articles of daily use, so are shirts and dresses, they belong to the everyday and aren’t loaded with much of anything – nor are desert landscapes or trees and rocks. But here, juxtaposed in this way in this gallery, they almost collapsed under the weight of significance.
Where was the significance? The objects and the paintings pointed to it or opened a space where it could appear. But where was it before it was invoked?
Myths are precisely timeless, they are not tied to a specific moment but concern that about us or within us which never changes. They are set in motion at a specific time, but as soon as the exhibition ends or the book is closed, they again disappear out of time. All works of art open up such spaces, they knock down a wall where we are standing and cause another reality to emerge. What they open on to are not necessarily old myths or archetypal notions of course, but – and this is an essential feature of art – over time they themselves come to resemble myths, since an artwork in itself is unchanging, outside time. An artist paints a portrait of a person, twenty years pass and the artist dies, thirty years pass and the person in the portrait dies, three hundred years pass and we see the painting in a museum in Madrid. What we see is a moment in time, the moment when a particular artist applied particular brushstrokes of paint in a particular room. Everything else has changed and disappeared with time, but not the painting. When we stand in front of it, we realise its significance, we bring it to life, we draw it into our own time and our own reality. Art works with the living, it attempts to grasp life in time, as it is in precisely this moment, and when it succeeds, life in time becomes timeless.
Kiefer approached it from the opposite direction, he sought to grasp the timeless, to install it here among us, and the effect this had, at least on me when I saw the exhibition, was to render current events in the world, in particular violent and destructive events such as the ongoing war in Syria and the unceasing terror in Iraq, suddenly no longer just a distant and irrelevant flickering in which people were no more than numbers, eighty dead here, five hundred dead there, but present. This was achieved through Kiefer’s often criticised monumentality, because it makes death so vast and history so deep, and thereby life so fragile and irreplaceable, not just mine, not just yours, but everybody’s.
That is how myths function. They deal with a few people placed in a few situations – think of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad, or Cain and Abel in the Bible – who are given such exceptional weight that, several thousand years after the stories about them were told for the first time, they are still present in culture. A fratricide that occurs now, say in Malmö, will go unnoticed, the local newspaper might devote a few lines to it, but for everyone not directly related to the brothers it won’t mean anything, it won’t leave an impression, it will be almost as if nothing had happened. Or take any single event in a war, a soldier killed with a knife, a corpse dragged behind a jeep, it will vanish from the world in the same way for everyone except those directly concerned. But if one hears about the fratricide while thinking of Cain and Abel, or about acts of war with the Iliad in mind, one comes to understand that all events carry the same weight, that everything that happens between people is equally significant. One also comes to understand that everything has happened before, that being human was the same five thousand years ago as it is today. Myths are communal experiences, and what they do is give our lives a space other than that of time in which to unfold. Myths have no existence in themselves, they have no place of their own, but they enter the world every time they are activated, as in the Kiefer exhibition in London.
Art resembles myth in the sense that it gives individual people and single events the same exceptional weight, and in a similar way places them in a space beyond time – think for example of the scene in The Godfather II where Michael Corleone arranges for his older brother to be killed, how many emotions converge on that particular point, and how simply the extremely complicated relationship between brothers is represented yet without diminishing its complexity and emotional depth. Or think of Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, the mild gaze of the dying girl, full of concern for the grieving woman who is sitting beside her. Or think of Maggie Nelson’s novel The Argonauts, in which the birth towards the end is described as if it were happening for the very first time in the world. And so it is for the woman giving birth, and through her description of it, for us reading about it. I have never ordered the killing of my brother, I have never lost a sister, and I have never given birth to a child. But because of that movie, that painting and that book I have been present in those spaces, and those spaces are a part of my experience as a human being. It might not be important in itself, but it is important because it tells us that every moment is really like that, that every relation is really like that, something in itself, with a significance of its own, which must be acknowledged and given space to exist within us.
The heavy unchanging lead, the light and arbitrary imprints we leave, the inviolability of life, the inescapable nothingness of death. These are entities we all know and sometimes stop to consider, but to confront us with them, letting us be filled with them and making us understand them through our feelings is something only art can do. Munch closed up space to make it more acute, in The Scream the only thing that matters is the feeling of the moment, while Kiefer opens space up to link the acute and the immediate with history and in that way gives it depth, not least because the sheer mass of suffering continually being conveyed in our media-dominated age has turned the acute into a permanent state and thereby almost eradicated it as experience. The time lag between an event in the world and our awareness of it has become so short that it is as if we are living in the instantaneous world of The Scream, and the demands of art have therefore become the opposite of those which Munch set himself; time must now be given a new place in space.
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A week after I saw the exhibition, I met Anselm Kiefer in person, in his studio outside Paris. I went there to interview him and to watch while he worked. The studio had once been a department store warehouse, it was gigantic, both Kiefer and his assistants used bicycles to get around. He lived there, at one end a separate floor had been built with three large rooms where he painted, plus a library, several living rooms and a kitchen. He worked every day all year round, it was a way of life, and although he was seventy-two and I had turned forty-eight the previous day, after eight hours of watching him work I was exhaus
ted, while he was still in full swing when I left. The hall, much larger than a football field, was filled with pictures and installations he had made. The only other artist whose pictures I saw there, in Kiefer’s strange and in its separation from outside reality almost sub-aquatic world, was Edvard Munch. In the library, on the sides of some of the bookcases, hung Munch’s woodcut Towards the Forest and a couple of other pictures I immediately recognised, including the one of a man and a woman who seem to hover about each other in outer space.
It seemed a little odd, for Kiefer’s and Munch’s art are strikingly different in appearance. Kiefer’s theme is myth, history, time and destruction, death and annihilation, but also destruction as a new beginning, and a notable feature of his art, at least at first glance, is that he himself is not present in it. Few would call Kiefer’s art personal. While Munch painted his personal traumas in a symbolistic expressionism where the outer was only there to give form to or illustrate the inner, and where the historical or the social was almost entirely absent.
I asked Kiefer about his relationship to Munch, he more or less dismissed the question with an impatient gesture of his head while saying that Munch was a good graphic artist. I have heard several artists say the same thing, that Munch’s greatest achievement was as a graphic artist, and that his real talent lay in the line. That Kiefer felt a connection to that part of Munch’s art isn’t so strange, and that precisely Towards the Forest hung in his library makes sense – Kiefer’s art is full of trees and forests, throughout his artistic career he has returned to that motif. One of his masterpieces, Varus, depicts woods covered in snow, with bloodspots and the names of German romantics written across the canvas – it is the battle between the Teutons and the Romans in the Teutoburger Forest, it is the Nazis’ use of the historical event and of the forest as a myth of origin and claim to authenticity, it is the woods surrounding the extermination camps, but it is also Kiefer’s own childhood and youth in the Black Forest and the significance of trees in religion, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the world tree Yggdrasil. Another, never-exhibited work of art I saw there consists of boxes with cut-out trees as if on a stage, with photographs from his personal life dangling from them, of the first ball he attended, of an aunt who died young, of close friends. Kiefer has said that our stories begin in the forest, and it is this kind of forest Munch depicted, a dark jagged field towards which a man and a woman are walking, closely entwined. We see them from behind as they head towards the forest, there is something infinitely fragile and vulnerable about them, it is as if they are supporting each other, holding each other up. Man and woman entwined is of course a familiar Munch motif, with the woman as vampire sucking the blood and life out of the man. Here the relationship is one of equality, yet not uncomplicated, in one version of the motif the woman is naked while the man is fully clothed, as if unable ever to come quite near her.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 5