Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

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with their “normalising” agenda, tend towards the prescriptive and reductionistic. Historically, many philosophers and writers have had strong animistic tendencies, and Mrs Berlinermauer calls herself an animist. We find strains of animism in Plotinus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Joyce and even Proust, who wrote: 138 The various places of the earth are also beings, whose personality is so strong that some people die from being separated from them. 3 What does it mean for an artist (as opposed to, say, a documentary filmmaker) to make a film about a woman who loves a wall, especially the Berlin wall? Eija-Ritta Berlinermauer is a woman who both aesthetically and sexually finds walls and fences attractive. Horizontal lines in particular stimulate her. How many minimalist artists have suffered the same passion for such lines? From Carl André to Richard Serra to the artist Andreas Slominski, who succeeded in building a wall from top to bottom in the Serpentine Gallery, walls and other built structures do arouse devotion in many people, but it seems this is only considered acceptable if purged of sexuality and romance. The Berlin Wall could be said to represent the “Law” in a symbolic and Kafkaesque sense. Eija-Ritta Berlinermauer loves a structure that was the quintessential symbol of law being enforced: the physical manifestation of separate legal and political zones which, if you crossed over, could put your life at risk. A wall is the ultimate form after all and a very primal one. The Berlin wall no doubt seemed the ultimate form of security to its new lover. It was impenetrable and utterly reliable: the perfect husband! One of the more interesting analyses of the relationship between Desire and Walls can be found in Katherine Schonfeld’s book Walls Have Feelings Too: Architecture, Film and the City, where she discusses Roman Polanski’s preoccupation with walls. Polanski lived in the Cracow ghetto until he was four, and when the Nazis came his father lifted up the fence that was the border to the ghetto and pushed him through to freedom. In many of Polanski’s films we see the transgression of an architectural edge or boundary. Walls, floors, etc are seen as a sexual threat of bodily violation. His film Repulsion (1965) is almost the inverse of The Berlin Wall in which Catherine Deneuve’s character is repulsed and feels violated by the walls of her flat. Similarly, in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976), walls are treacherous structures. This could be seen as a response to the fears aroused by Brutalist architecture of the time, when interiors were reduced to being merely the “other” side of someone else’s wall. Clement Greenberg, writing on Kafka’s Great Wall of China, suggested that the wall is a metaphor for how culture is used by humanity to keep the “formless” at bay. Laumann’s film brings with it added connotations today, given our present cultural conditions in which “form” is often dissolved in a matrix of virtuality. The notable crisis of Interiority/Exteriority that became manifest in the culture of the 1960s and 70s, and which gave the wall a specific potency, also finds its present equivalent in the breakdown of the public/private domains. In Shut Up Child, This Ain’t Bingo we find Laumann touching on the subject of Interiority/Exteriority again, both in terms of the “inside” confined world of the prison for Carlton the death row prisoner, 3. Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerar Hopkins (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1955), 896.
and the “external” free world of the artist, but also in terms of private (internal) thought structures and public (social) systems of thought. There is a Proustian element to this film, not only because it is about the nature of love and how that affects people’s understanding of their own thoughts, but also in the utterances of Carlton about his life and memories: What do last words mean? It’s all the words that come before last words that matter. At one stage, Laumann, through an intermediary, asks Carlton to tell him his favourite riddle and Carlton says: What’s the difference between a picture of Jesus and the real Jesus? It only takes one nail to hang a picture of Jesus. We are presented with a disturbing and ironic image of a man awaiting death (based on a judgement guided by religious morality) which exposes the sacrificial codes that frame execution rituals. This riddle highlights the problem of reality and representation in today’s culture and represents the type of linguistic subversiveness Laumann fosters in all his work. Carlton talks about coincidence and systems of belief, echoing motifs in the Morrissey film. The artist who loves him (Kjersti Andvig, a close friend of Laumann’s), questioning signs and signification and her own memory, begins to look for secret signs around her. In a statement which could almost be from Baudrillard or Virilio, she says: “Texas has no idea about aesthetics except in the death chamber, it’s so cinematic.” This reveals the film to be as much about truth, representation and reality as it is about the central couple. Laumann weaves the sadistic voyeurism of the death chamber into a subtle analysis of cultural voyeurism on a larger scale and the instability of identity amidst such conditions. In the installation Swedish Bookstore, we find Laumann drawing more explicitly on his bibliophiliac upbringing (his father had a bookstore). The focus of this installation is a scene from the film Top Secret, set in a bookstore, in which the soundtrack was reversed as the original directors (Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker) thought that doing this would make it sound like 139
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Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana halo
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Editors Jens R Jenssen Bjarne Våga
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A WORD FROM THE JURY As chair it is
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IDA EKBLAD, OR FOR THE NEW YEAR One
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ut rather because it takes up the c
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The physicality (the gum from the a
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Political Song for Jessica Simpson
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If You Give To Me Oil on linen 200
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The Gold Bug Drift (nYc), Rockaway
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Tyrian Purple Oil on linen 200 x 16
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The Gold Bug Drift (nYc), Navy Yard
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A Woman Under the Influence Install
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The Gold Bug Drift (Clapham Common)
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Installation view: (from the left)
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Royal Festival Hall Welded found ir
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Francis Oil on linen 200 x 160 cm 2
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DEVILS, WEREWOLVES AND OTHER MYTHS
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Over the years its state of abandon
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“It embodies the parallelism betw
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Lycanthropic Chamber
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Collar Oak wood in four pieces 140
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Saltire Oak wood 228 x 119.5 x 5 cm
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Lead, Follow or Get the Hell Out of
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Hermes Polished granite stone slab
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Holiday in Bosnia Watercolour on te
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Fussorius Pickaxe, shovel and t-shi
Page 95 and 96: THE RITUAL WHEN THINGS FALL APART:
Page 97 and 98: When you look at me shirt once whit
Page 99 and 100: 1. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de
Page 101 and 102: and Australia, initiated an externa
Page 103: Whose Privacy? Sound/sculptural int
Page 107: Road Map Sound/sculptural/drawing i
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Page 114: When the Private Became Public Vide
Page 120: Can you see…, Can you hear… Sou
Page 131: LARS LAUMANN
Page 134 and 135: 136 For the perfect flaneur, for th
Page 138 and 139: an authentic foreign language (an A
Page 141: Morrissey Foretelling the Death of
Page 150: Berlinmuren Video installation, Ger
Page 160: You Can’t Pretend To Be Somebody
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Page 165 and 166: Ida Ekblad Born 1980 in Oslo, Norwa
Page 167 and 168: Skate Culture, Preus Museum, Horten
Page 169 and 170: Lars Laumann Born 1975 in Brønnøy
Page 171 and 172: OLAV CHRISTOPHER JENSSEN Born 1954
Page 173 and 174: CAROLINE M UGELSTAD Born 1972 in Os
Page 175 and 176: THE WRITERS DAVID LEWIS (American/I
Page 177 and 178: The Statoil art award is intended t
Page 179 and 180: acknowlEdgEMEnTs 181
Page 181 and 182: 86, 87 Fussorius Courtesy of the ar
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Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

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