Several of her pictures take their motifs from fairy tales, referring to folk notions but as it were turning them inside out, uncompromising in their grotesque corporeality, which in turn has to do with something of the same, the collective myths and images that exist above us, if not beautifying then harmless, whereas what is within us, or what we exist in, is acute in a whole other way. She has made a series of pictures of drowning people, they exist in that same span between ourselves and the stories and images we relate to and which serve to maintain a distance, a distance which Baird’s pictures alternately thematise and breach. She has made many pictures of animals, badgers and foxes, where the logic of fairy tales – animals who are like people but also always animals – brings human nature into play. In one striking image a badger snuffles the crotch of a reclining girl. Baird’s pictures are often large, while the motifs can be small, the surface of the picture swarming with details, and the tension between the two levels echoes that between the overarching and the acute.
What do her pictures have to do with Munch?
If one considers his paintings from the 1890s, the answer is not very much, for Baird punctures any attempt at solemnity and wholeness. But Baird has also painted landscapes so radically simplified that they seem close to children’s drawings, while at the same time the atmosphere and the colour harmony remain more or less intact, and it feels as if she has taken Munch’s landscapes down a level. And the sketchiness, the effort to reach a place that whirls up significance without the painterly or visual perfection of this place mattering in the slightest, this too has something in common with Munch, as I see it.
A couple of years ago I asked her to contribute some illustrations to a book I had written, Autumn. She said yes, and after a while during which nothing happened I suddenly received a flood of pictures. One of them was a classic madonna with child, where the madonna’s face was blotted out by something that looked like faeces. That became the back cover of the book and was a reality check for me while I wrote it, for if the beauty of the iconic image of mother and child is true, and if the world is at times unbearably beautiful, the opposite is also always the case.
* * *
* * *
I met Vanessa Baird at a restaurant in Oslo just before Christmas, together with Kari Brandtzæg. They already knew each other, Kari had included several of Vanessa’s pictures in exhibitions she had curated. I was a little nervous, since I had heard that she could be difficult, which is perhaps simply another word for uncompromising, but not necessarily, and I also hadn’t made a plan or thought out any questions beforehand. That whole day I had spent sitting in Villa Stenersen, the functionalist house that belonged to Munch’s patron, helper and eventual biographer, Rolf Stenersen, talking about Munch with Joachim Trier for a film his brother Emil was making. We had talked about the really big emotions and about the existential foundations of art, and after a few seconds at the same table as Vanessa Baird it became apparent that she was unlikely to do the same. She gave me a book she had made, containing self-portraits, where her face, always recognisable, swelled, became distorted, bloated and ugly in wild and ever-changing ways. She has an illness which means that she has to be hospitalised from time to time, and which can make her face bloated – whether this is caused by the medication or the illness I didn’t quite catch – but the suffering in those pictures didn’t have to do with the soul or with existence, or it did, of course, but not in any solemn way, it was concrete and physical, and the pictures related to it with irony and humour, while at the same time the pain was always present in them too. The pictures appeared to have been made by an anti-myth mythomaniac. Someone who was totally down to earth, but allowed the down-to-earthness to escalate.
She had come into the crowded little fish restaurant downtown, which was full of people attending Christmas parties, sat down and pushed the book into my hands. After leafing through it for a while, I switched on the recorder on my mobile and asked her a hesitant and half-apologetic question about her relation to Munch.
– Munch is a subject everyone knows something about, she said. – Everyone knows his pictures so well, and you feel it so strongly when you look at them, but it’s difficult to say anything about them because the stuff he makes is all emotion. And it’s embarrassing to talk about. But easy to recognise. There isn’t much more to say about it than that he’s good at that particular thing, is there? Even when he paints hands that look like a pile of twigs. For most of his pictures have a lot of weaknesses. And then there are some which are very well articulated. But they don’t need any explanation. When he paints someone who is dying, they are so awfully dead, because the people standing next to them are so red in the face. And you feel a kind of exhaustion. Because it’s so embarrassing.
– What is embarrassing?
– To say it. You see the pictures, you recognise the feeling, and that’s it, really. Jealousy is a pretty intense picture, but all it really consists of, is that everyone recognises it. So what are you supposed to say? Like, these are good pictures?
– I brought the list of works for the exhibition, if you want to have a look at them, Kari said. Vanessa nodded, and Kari placed a folder with the pictures on the table in front of her, which she flipped through from time to time while she talked.
– Since I live in Oslo, I’ve been to the Munch Museum a lot, she said. – I’ve seen many of the exhibitions where they try to give a new twist to it by juxtaposing Munch with other artists, but the straight exhibitions are much better, then you can relate to what you’re seeing, and then it becomes clear or visible what he’s doing. Many of his pictures aren’t very good, and it doesn’t matter. It allows one to appreciate one’s own excellence now and again, right. Walking around looking and finding all these feeble paintings he hasn’t succeeded with. It makes one feel a little freer, suddenly you see the green skull, all these things that are so full of that punch he has. It hits you every time. That’s not always the case with the artists they juxtapose him with. I saw Egon Schiele there once, he was an artist who was important to me when I was younger and had started drawing. But I never saw the originals until they came here, it took a long time, I was forty-five when I saw that exhibition. And they miss their mark. They’re a little amateurish, Schiele died when he was twenty-eight, so what he comes up with is stuff you’re already through with. It’s very sexual, very physical and erotic, and very pubertal. Viewed against Munch it seems so small, so puny. It’s nice, it’s beautiful, but it stops there, and maybe that’s what lets you accompany Munch the whole way, because he lived such a long life . . .
She held up the sheet with the exhibition pictures.
– This cabbage field, for instance, she said. – It works, though you can’t really say why. It’s just so simple. Technically it’s so easy. He does it almost as an extension, what you see is what you get, and that’s exactly what you want, since it speaks to you. All the time. It has that elegance. The best part about his pictures is precisely the simplicity, that he knows how to loosen it up. That there isn’t this sense of being blocked. That it isn’t stuck. Whereas what is stuck is what he’s describing. Am I right?
– His best-known pictures are so charged, I said. – But then more and more he paints without that charge. What happens to quality then?
– Do you mean whether it’s good enough, is that it?
– No, but what I’m thinking is, What is good? What makes a picture good? When the emotional charge is gone, what are you left with?
– Yes, I see what you mean, I’ve seen it many times in Munch’s pictures. Since his production was so large, since there are so many pictures, it’s easy to start looking for those that don’t have that energy or that force, or those that are nothing much in themselves. When it’s just a limp tree in purple and it doesn’t really have what it takes.
– But what does it take?
– You know that when you’re making something. It’s not just
this vague feeling, you yourself know when what you’re making is good. It’s like something has been solved. The pictures have it in them, they’re a kind of total extension of oneself.
– Does a kind of freedom enter into it too? When it’s just something being painted, and there is less and less ambition, when painting is almost all that’s left?
– I struggle with that myself, I’m always trying to drain what I do of content. It’s very demanding to be constantly stuffing so much into it, and the punch is there anyway if it’s well articulated. Emptying the picture of content is often a very good idea. Not to be so strained. And often it’s much more successful, I see that afterwards. Emptying it out. But I can’t do it, I worry that it won’t be enough. So I kind of screw my head into my arsehole. But when the pictures are good anyway, even though they’ve been emptied out, it’s because they have it in them. They are an extension of what’s in the body.
– Have you read Stian Grøgaard? Do you know him? I said.
– I don’t like him.
– Right, I see. So you’re antagonists, then. But I’ve talked with him, he had a lot to say about Munch, and he also looked through these late pictures. We talked about the ways in which these paintings are good and bad, and he pointed out the weaknesses of several of the ones I had chosen.
– That’s always a useful exercise, walking around and finding the faults. I’ve done that many times.
– Yes, but to me, since I’m not a painter, it’s interesting to hear how the pictures are judged from that point of view, how quality is viewed from there, from the other side. But actually I don’t know what is good when it comes literature either, even though I write myself. Especially what I write myself. I like long descriptions of something which almost isn’t there, long empty descriptions, if you can imagine such a thing, but I never know if one’s any good, or how good it is – compared to a more psychological narrative with close-packed scenes, for instance.
– There’s almost nothing there?
– Yes.
– But it’s good anyway?
– In a way.
– Yes, and Munch has this ability, to put it up there and make it work, since the articulation is so good. Nothing is more difficult than that. It’s not like pictures contain anything beyond what you see. It’s actually very simple. Only a very few can manage that. Only a very few have it in them.
– Have what in them?
– A flow.
– A flow?
– Yes, a flow to get it all the way out. Even living a stationary or staccato life it can happen. It’s like Tarjei Vesaas, who writes well sitting on a rock, without moving. And then it hits you anyway because it’s a good way of seeing it, and then it doesn’t matter so much what comes out on the other side.
There was a silence, we looked at the pictures among the glasses and plates on the table in front of us.
– I find that many of Munch’s drawings can be quite trying. The way he sets them up, so graphically, can be annoying. They’re so romantic. And they look constructed, and they don’t harmonise musically.
She shook her head as she leafed through the folder.
– No . . . she said. – No . . . No . . . Many of the large pictures are tiring too, for there he has to solve it. And then you see the solution instead. It’s fine, of course, I’m not saying it isn’t, Jeez . . . that sun is quite nice. No . . . No . . . That one? What’s that? A naked man in the forest? That’s a very weird picture. And something about it doesn’t work. But the pink trunks are good.
– What do you think of that one? I said, nodding towards Girls Watering Flowers.
– Good God, no! It’s embarrassing, really. But this one is very good. It’s lovely, it’s fantastic. Three Men, 1927. There he’s really going for the jugular, right. He’s out there raising hell. And this is a magnificent cabbage field. No one does cabbage like he does, as my mother says.
– So what do you think Munch himself was after, then, walking around at Ekely painting these pictures?
– Filling his life with something. What else was he supposed to do? I mean, I do it myself. It takes three days to get into it, if I have to travel somewhere and do something else, but I know what I need to do, I’ve been practising for so long. You just have to endure it. And then at first it’s dead, right? Not necessarily bad, but it seems affected. Before it sort of starts to flow and you become a part of it yourself. And that’s the only good place to be, really. Art isn’t a therapeutic project, at least not to me it isn’t. It’s a way for me to get away from being therapeutic, and be free, do something else. It’s a separate place. It’s nothing other than that. So I don’t find it strange that an old person like him did that. What else was he supposed to do? It’s a way of being in the world which makes it possible. It can get very empty without it.
– And he cleared a space for himself so he could do it, didn’t he, he didn’t have any children . . .
– When I was studying at the art academy people were always telling me it was stupid to have children. There was a lot of talk about not having children, that it would get in your way. I totally disagreed. As if you could get in the way of yourself. But there is a conspicuous absence of children in contemporary art. How do you tackle it? When you have children yourself? They have to be there, right? When I had my first child, I made an exhibition with children, because it was such a huge part of my life at the time. It was troublesome to begin with, and then it became easier after a while. She was so lovely, you see, I just had to look and look at her. She would lie there next to my table, and on the table and under the table, and then it ended up as a huge exhibition. That children should stand in the way of an artist is a strange attitude. As if you’re not supposed to be in touch with certain parts of yourself. And it’s maybe that kind of idea people had about Munch, that he was this totally dedicated person. That we should somehow renounce, make sacrifices for him. But that’s not what art is! You have to shove meaning into it and turn it into a possible place. Maybe not even meaning, after a while. Or maybe meaning. I don’t know. I don’t know what meaning is. That’s always been a problem, telling a story. Because it gets seen as a literary project. It was a huge problem way into the 2000s. I went to the art academy when I was seventeen, and attended it for two and a half years. Then I got kicked out, and I moved to England and went to art school there. When I came back to Oslo in the 1980s, it was a problem for art to have content. What I think they meant by that was that you were supposed to get far away from yourself. The entire art world of Norway back then revolved around the relation to abstraction and form. They would talk about colour as if it had its own inherent value and stuff like that. The way they talked about art was abstract, the way they looked at art, and what you definitely shouldn’t concern yourself with was recognisability. And what you did should absolutely not be a part of your self. So what do you do? That was one of the times I really struggled, one of the situations in which I didn’t feel like painting.
– Why were you kicked out?
– Not because I wasn’t working, it was rather that we disagreed about my project, what I was really trying to do. What I was doing had been unclear because I was a child, really. I was seventeen years old. Anger and frustration and all the things you go through, sex and terror and all that. But to return to a conversation after having been to England, where what I did was part of a tradition, where one had a language for it, where one talked about it, where one had writers come to visit – that would have been quite impossible here – and then to come back to this distanced and almost entirely abstract conversation, that was difficult. I mean, I understood what they were saying, but I disagreed with them about how something should be articulated visually. The rules were very strict. ‘Literary’ became a bad word, the moment a picture became literary, it became a problem. You could paint like Gerhard Richter, you could paint like the great important German painters,
that was fantastic, but you couldn’t bring anything personal into it, it couldn’t be private, that was a big concern to them. It was almost a mantra. Or not almost, it was a mantra. Grøgaard was one of them. He was very particular about this. And there were many others like him. Professors who spoke of themselves as the way and the light. They were very preoccupied with Germany. But they didn’t read. Well, maybe they read Hegel and stuff like that, they did, they related to what lay behind, in there in the darkness, as if it was another place. But it had nothing to do with the physical life. It was an impossible conversation, that wasn’t what I was there for, I thought art was supposed to be an extension.
– Did you feel as if you were the problem?
– Oh yes. Definitely. But I still had my project that I kept going, I had had it since I was a child. Always, really. It was a separate place, in a way. But it was complicated because there was no room for it. The whole time I had to keep that inner pressure down, right, get rid of it. How do you do that? Abstraction doesn’t come naturally to me, I don’t recognise any of it, there was no purpose to it. Things just poured out of me. It was awful. The terror. Those were ugly years. And then Per Inge Bjørlo came along, he saved us. And Lars Vilks. He’s an incredible guy. Extremely caring. He came in like some kind of prince and saved us. The ugly prince.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 14