OUT OF DARKNESS 

Recently, I experienced a partial eclipse of the sun, from the place where I was 70% of the sun’s surface was obscured by the disc of the moon, which as a result cast its shadow over the Earth. To begin with, the daylight did not seem to change appreciably, my surroundings still looked familiar and innocently indifferent. Then I begun to doubt it. They seemed me to be paler, the colours less distinct than how I remembered them being before: wasn’t this like seeing an afterimage, created by having looked too long to an excessively bright light, which now slowly yielded and died away? Quite correctly, once the eclipse was over, I was convinced that the original colours had returned.

A similar experience, of being reminded on an equally concrete level of how light and dark presuppose each other’s existence, arises in the confrontation with Monika Nyström’s works. Throughout her artistic developement, she has consistently dealt with primary forms of perception, with reflections and lightning conditions, and with the perceptual conditions required for us to encounter an object at all and identify it as an image. In her latest works, produced during 1998 and 1999, this investigation has been carried to an extreme, in which she has worked in an radical fashion with the viewer’s actual physical situation. By constructing a network of fluorescing and phosphorescing threads of cotton on the wall, and then illuminating it with ultraviolet light at regular intervals, she has created a painting that seems to float freely in the air, beyond definitions and labels. With her unprejudiced attitude to painting, Nyström has methodically performed constant evasive manuevres so as to avoid getting caught up in discussions about the material of the canvas and was has then been applied on it.

During this time, she has also incorporated photography into her work, and consequently she quite rightly starts from the way that this medium too is characterised by the same elasticity, opening up the way for new investigations.

Three parallel spaces constitute the starting point in a thougt experiment for the works that Nyström chooses to present in her project for Kiasma.

The first is the physical space, the one visited by the viewer, but where the ligth that would normally be there has been excluded. Instead the artist offers the viewer a situation of darkness, to stand in one darkness, and see another darness, up to the moment when a time-switsched ultraviolet light is turned on and spreads across the wall. The work is ignites.

The secons space is measured by the eyeball, in which information in the form of perceptions – projektions of small, distorted, inverted images – is translated through series of electrical impulses into the language of the brain, creating the experience of surrounding objects.

The third is made up of the space inside of the camera. The hermetically sealed space that Roland Barthes recognises as Camera Lucinda., but which, like the aforementioned, is initially constituted out of darkness, up untill the moment when the shutter opens and in accordance with the chosen settings allows the rays of light to find their way deep into the mechanism.

Three spaces: one for physical experience; one for perception; the last for the mechanical, time-governed process of photography.

The light contained in Nyström’s threadwork gives the room a green-hot glow. But this is a deceptive source of light: within a few seconds it has already diminished in streght. Just as the moonlight needs the sun’s rays, Nyström’s work are reliant on another source of light in order to be visible at all in the subdued light of the galley space. What kinds of truths are revealed in the glow from these  feeble rays? If we are to talk about  making statements here, perhaps Nyström’s work should rather be interpreted as statements pronounced backwards. But it is important to respond even to such an indirectly mediated piece of information. As Charles Baudelaire puts it i Windows; ”Looking from outside into en open window one never sees as much as when one looks though a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle.”

I believe that Monika Nyström’s sympathies are  with Agnes Martin’s description of the experience of the work of art as resembling something that you almost lie down and relax in: ”This painting I like because you can go in there and rest”. In the self-evident insight that art has to be viewed, it is understood that the viewer devotes the time to it. Walter Benjamin points out in The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that the experiences of looking at a painting and of seeing a film are essentially different, since painting and film convey time in diametrically different ways. The difference in the experience accordning to Benjamin consists in the first place of the painting permitting the viewer to become absorbed in contemplation. When looking at a painting she can lose herself in associations prompted  by looking. The film is incapable of evoking the same state in the same way because of the inherent speed and changeability of the medium. Before the eye has grasped the scene that is played  out on the screen, a new one has already managed to appear, and yet another.

As regards the reference to Benjamin, Nyström succeeds in situating herself in an in-between space that does not invalidate his statement, but which is capable of calling it into question. Of course Nyström does not work with film in the proper sense of the word, but the time dimension has been added to her painting, bringing in the potetial for change. It is easy to contemplate Nyström’s painting, but the ultraviolet light immediately causes a breach, not unlike the Verfremdung effect that Bertold Brecht used in his plays. Both work and viewer are taken back to a point zero, the work with a new long-life guarantee, the viewer once again attentive to his or her actual surroundings.

According to Rosalind E. Krauss, the formulaic system of a grid functions within modernist art in a primarily spatial and temporal fashion. Flattened, geometricised and strictly systematicised, it offered possibilities of ecsape into non-nature, into the non-representational and non-real, into an absolutely autonomous sphere of art. Of course, even such a chemically pure water has been mingled with time, and the domain of applications for this model has become a model for constant reformulation. In Monika Nyström’s oevre, which hitherto has restricted itself to strictly non-figurative elements, a cautious form of figuration now begins to emerge. The paint schematically applied to the threads in a work from 1997 created an impression on the wall that most closely resembled a panorama. What is revealed here is an urban landscape with it’s vertically oriented topography. The next stage in the project has been to detach the outer layer of the thread construction från the wall, and instead to focus on what has appeard randomly in the backround: a mural that lika a theater set oscilliates between being a painstaking depiction of reality and a chimera. The thread construction and grid pattern seem here, instead of charting out the surface of the painting, almost to have served as a perspectival device in the service of reality, in a tradition descending directly from Renaissance artists like Filippo Brunelleschi and Albrecht Dürer of fixing one’s own position in relation to the surrounding objects. Monika Nyström, however, ephasises the element of abstraction trough the way that a serial presentation dicreetly tilts the painting a few degrees sideways, and thereby manipulates the experience of the space. Viewers find themselves in perspectival imbalance with their surroundings and feel rather that they are hazily that they are levitating in the space where what seems logical to an increasingly far-reaching extent gives way to mirage.

In her art Nyström observes some of the most important maxims of minimalism: the concern for pure basic forms; mathematically exact calculation of the design of the work; serial presentations; and an interest in industrial produced materials. At the same time she rejects the minimalists (masculine) tradition of fetishising the object, since what she is actually saying is that the essence of the work of art does not exist as some in-built core. Instead, the picture and the object should primarily be seen as illusory and, being insufficient within their own physical limits, they constantly make use of the actual situation in the space and the viewer’s interaction in the form of movement and perception.

In 1998, Monika Nyström began to photograph phosphorescing globes set in motion in front of a recording camera. With minutes-long exposures she thus describes the extent of a moment in time and space, and thereby establishes a link with a domain that historically has been explored by people like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey in their early photographic experiments on motion. All three seems to be united in a common striving to depict movements that for them are fully visible, but which have as yet not been described with satisfactory documentation. Unlike, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s palpable realism, Nyström’s photograph are much more tricky to classify and identify. Powerfully atmospheric, they oscilliate between  light  transparency and dark opacity, between representational image and abstraction. They give an impression of containing both microcosm and macrocosm; as through microscopic an telescopic equipment were being used to photograph the barely visible and the infinitely remote.

By developing colour negatives and by using R-print technology to present the negatives as positive, Nyström’s photographs become, like painting, processes in which light and darkness become opposite poles to each other. In the latest series of photographs an object – a tortoise-shell – has been treated with phosphorescent paint, and documented beneath this is that is was made to move slowly forward. The dead shell, an intricate amalgam of slow growth, hexagonal segments, does not have a naturally rounded form that would indicate an ability to maintain the speed to which it has been subjected. Just as, in its mythical rendering, the tortoise-shell represents wisdom, age, and slowness, this reading is transposed  into the photgraphs. The slow movement offers a restistanse that strives against immobility, against zero, in contrast to the gently spinning globes. Through a kind of reversal of her earlier photography project Monika Nyström now seems to want to ewoke a slow moment in real time, a slow motion. A film recording a reality, frozen into stasis and separated into still shots.

Mats Stjernstedt

catalog text ”Traces” , Kiasma/Konti 1999