So Much Longing in So Little Space

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  – What did he do?

  – Talk with us. We talked.

  – So who were the artists who met these criteria, then? Who were considered good at the time?

  – Oh, I guess the best was maybe Bård Breivik. Tom Sandberg was more of a weirdo. A. K. Dolven. They filled out the whole field, and actually that was a relief, since I was never ready. I never wanted to make my debut, I was always anxious it wouldn’t be enough. The first exhibition I had filled all of Bergen to the brim. That was in the Bergen Kunsthall. Not a single thing was written about it. This great big debut, and then there was nothing but silence. Dead quiet. Two hundred and twenty-eight pictures. I mean, huge ones. I wallpapered all of Bergen. But no one saw them.

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  *

  As I left Vanessa and Kari and walked from the restaurant over to the hotel, all I thought about was that Vanessa Baird had been so critical of so many of the pictures I had selected for the exhibition. That she had used words like bad, feeble, shameful, embarrassing about them, and often laughed too, in a way I felt to be contemptuous. Next morning I was so full of shame and anxiety about the pictures that I could hardly get out of bed. As a writer, in the actual moment of writing, an absolutely necessary precondition is to be able to disregard what other people might think, and to be entirely alone with yourself, your thoughts and what eventually manifests itself on the page. For it isn’t just the notions that you yourself have which exist before you begin to write – the equivalent of Deleuze’s ‘the painting before painting’ – but also what others might think of those notions, that influences you too, and has to be fought. And yesterday and today, while I have been transcribing the recording of Baird, I have come to realise that that’s what she was really talking about. The difference between the expectations that people around you have about what art is and should be, and the art you create. She brought what she had inside her to an art world that sought abstraction and considered art something fundamentally separate from the artist. She had children, she brought that experience with her into her art, and if it wasn’t unheard of, it was still considered wrong. Her key word for art had been ‘extension’. The conflict was similar to the one Munch had faced in 1885, almost exactly a hundred years before Baird began her art education, he too wanted to bring his own experiences into the art of his day, which in no way corresponded to what he had inside him. ‘How can art be an extension?’ – that might be one way to articulate the problem Munch had faced in his time.

  How could I not have heard that as we sat talking in the restaurant before Christmas?

  I had identified myself with the exhibition to such an extent, not with the pictures in themselves but with what they represented, that I was full of anxiety about how it would be judged. If the verdict was that it was weak, I would be humiliated, it would become obvious that I didn’t know what I was doing, that they had handed over an entire museum to an idiot. If the verdict was that it was good, I could go on working on other things as if nothing had happened. To me, that was what the conversations with Grøgaard and Baird had been about, deep down. What I myself really thought about the pictures, or what I thought they were, no longer mattered, it was something blowing in the wind, drifting in the sea.

  This was the opposite of integrity, the opposite of an act of art, for an act of art is precisely seeking something that can’t be said or done in any other way, and which disregards the thoughts and opinions of others, is in fact entirely independent of them. Munch could not have painted The Scream, Ashes or for that matter Elm Forest in Spring if he hadn’t disregarded what others might think of them. If he had paid any attention to the wind that was blowing, he would have painted Morning and variations of that until his death, like others of his generation in Norway. He had to take a risk, he had to dare the unknown, which entailed the danger that he would be ridiculed and humiliated. It sounds like a small risk to take, but it isn’t, not if what we’re talking about is your soul. That is why shame and doubt are a part of the artist’s profession, but not of the work of art. That must be shameless and free of doubt. Doubt and shame are social mechanisms, they come into play when a boundary has been transgressed, when something is done or said that shouldn’t have been. Art lives by transgressing boundaries, by going beyond what has been collectively decided, beyond what everyone has agreed to see and think. Shame is the sanction, but in order for it to be applied, there must first have been shamelessness. That the reactions to Munch’s pictures were so strong initially, when a common reaction at the exhibition of The Sick Child was that people stood there laughing at it, was precisely because it had been painted shamelessly, with no thought of how it would be judged, entirely on its own terms. To Munch it was about a sister he had loved who had died when she was fifteen, and an attempt to keep that pain and those emotions open in the painting. Once one person had laughed, it was easy for the next person to laugh along, for if it isn’t always comical when someone fails, it is when the distance between intention and result is so great – that is what they saw, a format and a motif which entailed something sublime and solemn, executed in a clumsy and amateurish way. They saw pretension, they saw someone who thought he was more than he was, and that’s what they laughed at. Look, they said, the emperor has no clothes! That the emperor was in fact trying to arrive precisely at nakedness, they lacked the prerequisites to understand, how could they have known, such a picture had never been seen before. And laughing at failed pretensions on a grand scale is delicious.

  The whole point of Munch’s art when he made his breakthrough was that it was uncertain, there was no scale to measure it against – at least not in provincial Kristiania – there were no fixed criteria that could be employed to determine its quality. And that is when art is at its most interesting, when it is still uncanonised, still undecided. To judge it positively then demands as much integrity of the critic as creating it demanded of the artist. That is why almost the only people in Kristiania who didn’t ridicule and humiliate Munch publicly were other artists and writers, like Krohg, Thaulow and Sigbjørn Obstfelder.

  Now, in 2017, it’s hardly a feat to point to Munch’s greatness, there is no longer anything controversial about his pictures. That is why the exhibition with Bjarne Melgaard at the Munch Museum was so interesting. For even though Melgaard is an established artist in the global art world, his pictures are so ugly, childish, provocatively dumb, violent, aggressive and shameless that the question of their worth and quality becomes pressing when they are encountered alongside Munch’s canonised pictures. Is this really art? Is this important? Isn’t it just a provocation? It’s just scribbling! How Melgaard will be judged fifty years from now is impossible to know. It is safest to say that he is a great artist, since his pictures are sold for dizzying amounts by leading New York galleries, and laugh at all those who don’t understand it; but if you’re being perfectly honest now, with yourself, is it really art?

  But of course it isn’t as simple as that, Melgaard isn’t simply stepping into Munch’s role as the artist against the bourgeois mob, for after the modernist breakthrough, which Munch was a part of, the unlearned, deformed, wild and unfinished have become expectations of art, so it’s more that Melgaard sustains and affirms a certain language in that symbiosis with critics and gallerists which is formed by an art paradigm. It is difficult to imagine that a break as radical as that which took place in the 1880s and 90s will ever happen again – but then it was impossible for those living in the 1850s to predict that the old art paradigm was about to collapse.

  My shame on account of a few pictures which perhaps wouldn’t be considered good, and which I hadn’t even made myself, merely selected, and the spineless fear which a couple of critical voices produced within me, can perhaps serve as an indicator of the power of social mechanisms, how they force everything into the channel of consensus, and what it must cost not just to oppose them, but to work within them – not as a curator, for that is nothing, really, nada, zer
o, nil – but as an artist, what forces are present even before one picks up the brush.

  * * *

  * * *

  What Vanessa Baird was perhaps primarily doing when she spoke about Munch’s pictures, was demythologising them, and thereby art in general. Art is important, but there is nothing great about it, there is no reason to elevate it, turn it into something that exists on a higher plane. The essential thing about Munch’s art is that we recognise ourselves in it – that it is like us. And what we recognise is a little embarrassing, perhaps precisely because it is so common and cannot quite measure up to the church-like and sanctified position it has been assigned. Jealousy isn’t an elevated emotion, it is a petty and silly and unworthy emotion. Melancholy, that touch of world-weariness, doesn’t exist in isolation, but alongside the potatoes being peeled and the faint yellow light they fill the kitchen sink with when the peel has come off them, the cat in its winter fur looking like a rolling ball of wool as it dashes over the lawn, the voices on the radio talking about something perfectly unimportant in the background, the children suddenly shouting to each other somewhere in the house. And the breakdown which The Scream represents is just terrible, terrible.

  – I don’t hang out much with artists, Vanessa said. – Things get stuck that way, it becomes so important, everything becomes so hugely important. It’s so interesting, they say. All of it is so very interesting. And then I think, go to hell, it isn’t! It’s a way of seeing things, a way of being, and you make certain choices, you shove a little meaning into the everyday, and the days go by. Because it gets dreary at times, right. It’s not like you’re having such a fucking great time always.

  THREE

  One of the best film openings I have seen is that of Oslo, August 31st, Joachim Trier’s second feature film. It hardly gets any simpler: as we see living images of Oslo from the 1970s and 80s, some of them in the morning with deserted streets, others shot from a car driving through the city in the summer, glimpses of a public bath, glimpses of a park, glimpses of a beach, we hear a succession of different voices relating their memories of that same city. Every sentence begins with ‘I remember’. They are private memories, of people we don’t know, and yet we recognise them, we all have such memories. What this montage does is to weave together an enormous collectivity, for what you come to realise is that the whole city is full of people, all of whom are full of memories, criss-crossing time and space. That this opening moves me deeply every time I watch it isn’t merely for nostalgic reasons – that the images show a city which no longer exists except in memory – but also because I feel such a powerful longing to belong to that collectivity, to that shared space.

  That might sound odd, for I do belong to it, we all do, every single person in the world could relate their memories about a town or a place, and they would be interwoven with the memories of others. But that space is abstract, it is impossible to get to, it is made up of individual people who always find themselves in concrete situations, and it is these situations that we have to relate to, open up or remain on the outside of. The film that follows is about just that: instead of the city’s all, we see the city’s one, a gifted young man who meets various people in the course of one day, some who have meant a lot to him, others whom he encounters by chance. Common to all of them is that they wish him well, he is as it were enveloped in love, but he is unable to receive it, it runs off him, after a long day and a night he is exactly the same as at the beginning of the movie. He is a drug addict and has just spent time in a detox programme at an institution; the film ends with him injecting alone in an apartment early in the morning, and then we see in reverse order all the places he has visited in the past twenty-four hours, now deserted: what happened there is now merely a memory among all the others.

  We learn almost nothing about his inner self, his thoughts or feelings, the important thing is the reactions he elicits from the people around him – similar to how Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868) is more about the reactions to the protagonist than about the protagonist himself, who is unchanging, but in the opposite way, unchangingly open and loving – but during the film’s final five-minute-long sequence it is as if we are given a glimpse inside him, as he sits down at a piano in the empty apartment and begins to play, just before he shoots himself up with heroin and passes out on the bed.

  * * *

  * * *

  To narrate is already to compromise with truth, that is, with reality as it is, and that too has always been the role of art, to manipulate, to calculate, to measure out effect and cause, and nowhere is this manipulation greater than in film, which perhaps for this reason is not quite considered among the fine arts. It is much less free in relation to collective notions, that language about reality which we mistake for reality, what we, when it appears in its simplest form, call cliché, and which in an expanded sense falls within the rhetorical concept of doxa. Film is often affirmative, and perhaps that is its true role, that it builds a sense of community; after all we see it in a cinema together with others, and that is an important part of film’s identity.

  But it can also show us something which otherwise would not have been seen, or would not have been seen in that way, and it does so not through single images but through sequences, so it works with time, with what is changing, towards what is coming into being.

  Precisely because film is a genre that addresses an audience so directly, and the theme of a film is so dependent on narration that it is almost always hollowed out by it, I have great respect for Joachim Trier; he succeeds in creating something that isn’t hollowed out, he reaches in to something simple, human and powerfully emotional, from where significance begins to work its way outwards.

  Oslo, August 31st begins in the collective, with memories we all have, while the rest of the film is about a rejection of community, of the others. We have no difficulty identifying with the protagonist, for we all know the conflict he embodies. This movie character sees through everything, everything that goes on around him is just empty talk, rubbish, banalities, and that’s how it is, social life is just empty talk, rubbish, banality, and yet that’s where we live our lives, and to turn one’s back on it, or to be unable to take it in, can be fatal.

  That the film shows this, with both perspectives effective throughout, both the people who give and he who doesn’t want to receive, in my view makes it a significant work of art. And even though a hundred years separate it from Munch’s oeuvre, and it not only plays out in another world but also represents an entirely different art form, and consequently there are no direct parallels, the fundamental thing in Munch’s art is not the reduction of elements on the surface of the picture, the simplification of forms or a wild use of colour, but the conveying of what it means to be a human being in the world. By exploring his inner self, he explored everyone’s inner self, the feelings he expressed were everyone’s feelings. And one of Munch’s main themes was the person who is shut up within himself, the person who shuts out the world – the man sitting with lowered head in Ashes, the man standing with lowered head in Woman in Three Stages, the man staring straight at us with the couple in love behind him in Jealousy. The woman sitting with lowered head in The Sick Child. The people in the sickrooms, each in their separate space, alone with themselves.

  The distance between Oslo and Kristiania August 31st is great, but isn’t it a fantastic thought that it is the man from Ashes, Munch’s most mysterious painting, who gets up and walks away from the forest and into Oslo, where the life he encounters, which he shakes off, is our life, our conversations, our parties, our nocturnal baths, and that the apartment where he sits down to play the piano is our apartment.

  That this could be so is because feelings never change, only our way of representing them. How to represent a feeling in visual terms, how to represent a memory visually – these are problems Joachim Trier engages with too.

  * * *

  *

  I met Joachim Trier for the first t
ime in New York, we were supposed to take part in an event together to talk about place and memory in film and literature, and met for breakfast in the hotel restaurant on the same day. I didn’t know much about him except that he was a few years younger than me, that he always gave good interviews, that he had once been the Norwegian national skateboard champion, and that skating movies had been his way into film. He had a reputation for being very nice and easy to get along with, perhaps a rather unusual reputation to have in literary and artistic circles.

  We sat down in one of the booths and ordered coffee and breakfast.

  – I feel like telling you a secret, he said. – Something hardly anyone else knows about.

  And then he told me a story which made everything else that was going on around us, all the comings and goings, the small talk, the faces and laughter and clatter of cups and cutlery, disappear completely. There was a fire in him, and a will to sincerity and self-searching which one simply couldn’t respond to with any kind of formality.

  On stage that afternoon he was extremely articulate, energetic and entertaining, while at the bar in the evening, surrounded by his friends, he seemed carefree and light-hearted, tuned in to them and what they shared.

  During my work on the exhibition at the Munch Museum plans for a film had also surfaced. At first I imagined that I might visit Munch’s various haunts, such as Åsgårdstrand, Kragerø and Ekely, perhaps also Berlin and Thüringen, primarily to write about them for this book, but of course I could also film a little with the camera on my mobile, capture the houses and the landscapes the way they looked now, talk a little about the pictures in a studio somewhere and edit it together with Munch’s own film recordings and other material from that time, quite simply and unpretentiously.