Sesam - Svenska kulturfonden

With the door as starting point
an contemplation of a site-specific work of art by Johanna Lecklin
Göran Torrkulla
“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself
and then comes to resemble the picture.”
– Iris Murdoch
A door story in three parts
In the e-mail where she described Sesame, the
site-specific art project of the Swedish Cultural
Foundation in Finland, Project Manager Sofia
Aittomaa wrote that each artist were to make one
or more works with the door as starting point.
Johanna Lecklin’s contribution resulted in a story
in three parts on three doors on the 5th floor of
the offices of the Swedish Cultural Foundation
in Finland at Simonkatu 8 A in Helsinki. The
three doors, both singly and together, manifest
as a site-specific work of art. Below I will attempt
to – without claiming to do justice to this
multilayered work – weave together spontaneous
reactions with retrospective reflections.
The doors were in fact there from before and
as such I would not have paid them any attention.
The words are appear as if they were written in
transparent ink and now suddenly become visible
as I read the brightly white radiating writing
in light (the handwriting of which takes my
thoughts to the school notebook for penmanship
training, which with concentrated persistence
one tried to keep within the supportive), or
as if a hand in front of my eyes on the empty,
rectangular surfaces of the doors were to write
stanzas in regular Swedish and in Johanna
Lecklin’s own natural handwriting in a large
script, here translated into English:
She had stayed
as a guest
in their home,
a temporary
visitor in their
mutual
life.
At home she had
become transparent,
as a forgotten piece
of furniture
in a corner.
It was the fourth
window she looked
out from,
the fourth landscape
she viewed,
before she arrived at
home.
Finally.
The three-part work of art establishes a
clearing of light, which turns spatiality inside out
and calls up the irreal sense of us being able of
walking through walls! Three “ordinary” doors
have as literally as paradoxically transformed
into entrances that– without me even needing
to press down the door handle – allow me to
enter the space that the work on the hinges of
imagination open within me. James Joyce appears
to be in the right, when he in Ulysses claims
that any given object is, through the co-creative
attention of the spectator, able to invoke an
epiphany: a transilluminated moment where
it – to speak with the words of Heidegger in The
Origin of the Work of Art – “shines and wants
only to shine”, and thus appears in its own right.
Through transfiguration or epiphanization the
three doors open an illuminated imaginary space
in the corner of the corridor: a kind of fourth
dimension!
On the whole I perceive the texts themselves
as discreet reminders of the as unpredictable
as quotidian decisive consequences of the
coincidences in the life of a person – reminders,
which allow both the possibilities and the limitations
of the existential circumstances to manifest.
Thereby they bestow a point of reference to our
aspirations and trepidations. The point of reference
maintains the transient contact with the life world
and those life experiences they spring out of.
The Rűckenfigur, or currently both home and away
The laconically concluding single-word sentence
”Äntligen.” (“Finally.”), suggests a searching absence
after which the “she” of the text finds her way home
to herself. In these poetically charged stanzas I
perceive a dynamic tension between presence and
absence, between departure and arrival, as well as
between being comfortable and uncomfortable at
a given place, where one can as easily encounter
home somewhere else, as homecoming can be a
voyage that, so to speak, occurs right there.
My first expression was that this site-specific
work deviates from Johanna Lecklin’s earlier
works. But on second thought, I do believe it
relates to the “chain stories” in the project Story
Café in a way that I regrettably do not here
have space to elaborate upon further. Instead
I will pursue a note from our discussion at the
site on the rainy morning of October 5th 2012:
”Compare the third story with C.D. Friedrich’s
Rückenfiguren”. This in turn led my thoughts to
the four interiors in the series She Had Seven
Dresses For The Trip, Just In Case That They Would
Meet (digital color photographs displayed at the
Finnish Institute of Stockholm in 2012). In these
interiors a lonely woman stands with her back
(more or less) turned towards us. She is in front
of a balcony-facing window in an apartment in an
apartment building. The balcony in turn faces a
wall of apartment building facades.
When I look up Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman
at the Window (1822), where a female form faces
away in a window embrasure and looks out through
the opened shutters towards a harbor (or a sea?)
that we can but divine, it occurs to me that Johanna
Lecklin in her own peculiar way removes the
safety from the pictorial space through perspective
displacements, which expand themselves here
inwards and here outwards, as well as so to speak
multiply the image room to rooms within rooms,
which open towards an open space. With a playful
seriousness she conceptualizes an amalgamation of
sorts of an everyday routine sight and of a sound
alertness, which suggests that we can be both
near and far at the same time. Still it is not a case
of mere daydreaming or romantic long-distance
yearning, but rather of an articulation of varying
states, where it no longer is valid to separate the
intrinsic from the extrinsic. In these images it is
moreover Johanna Lecklin herself, who to the
level of confusion and mistaking changes roles in
different guises. She steps in and out between an
own neck of the woods and an elsewhere, which
in combination with displacements in the position
of the rűckenfigur allows the spectator to see that
which is not visible in the images in themselves.
As with Friedrich, the rűckenfigur functions both
as a point of convergence and at the same time as
a turnstile of sorts, which makes us conscious of
ourselves as spectators. But in contrast to Friedrich,
these interiors keep us willfully in the ”regular”
city apartment with its view over other ”regular”
apartment blocks, and thus awakens the question of
our own relationship with the urban environment
around us. We are in other words allowed to
partake in a multilayered thematization of the
moment of observation by us being invited by the
rűckenfigur to a shared space, which explicates that
existence does not always have to be peremptory
and that absence does not have to be total.
At the same time we are reminded of the
brittle balancing between the intrinsic and the
extrinsic, as well as of the vulnerable in being
exposed to the gazes of others.
A concluding addition that I also could have begun with
The surprises and difficulties we encounter in our
intercourse with art bear in much a resemblance
to the complications we may come across in our
daily intercourse with each other. And as we are
unable to establish the terms for a successful
human relationship, this is equally elusive when
talking of a work of art. On the whole a work of
art has its significance in front of it, in part as
the co-creative contribution of the spectator can
evoke new questions that the artist did not express
and in part since new aspects keep emerging
along with the context where it is incorporated.
As the significance therefore is in continuous
metamorphosis, which does not let it be emptied
once and for all, the encounter with a work of art
imposes upon us the task of – from work to work
and from occasion to occasion – continuously
process our own understanding and endeavor
to comprehend what is tells of ourselves. This is
both easy and difficult. It is easy as we can begin
to dig around where we stand. It is difficult in that
it is ourselves we have to delve into. It is laborious
as we ourselves have to work our way to an own
personal relationship – something that at its most
extreme may present us with the insight that it is
we ourselves that have to change. The rest is an
ongoing story of what the work of art does with us
and of what we ourselves create out of the work!
I hope this short contemplation can invite the
reader to go through Johanna Lecklin’s doors
into the everyday life world, which we are simply
unable to leave, as it exists both around us and
in us, as well as to from now to now search our
finite abode exactly where we are – a task that no
one can take on his or her shoulders in our stead!