installation views
VIRGINIE BARRE: GALERIE FRICHE BELLE DE MAI •
MARSEILLE, FRANCE
JONAS DAHLBERG: MILCH • LONDON, ENGLAND
Promising Fiction?
So I decided that my contribution to the next zingmagazine,
had to be my thoughts about these two unconnected, almost unheard of,
bright, young Europeans. Then it occurred to me that this might easily
be construed as a “Tip for the Top” exercise, as we finally
start to settle seriously into the century.
However, that wasn’t the idea in choosing exhibitions
as far from zing’s home as Stockholm, London, and Marseille, by
two artists in that crucial career time-zone still close to art school,
but making serious steps towards a practice both challenging and mature.
In fact, what was particularly of interest to me was that both of these
very different artists have been using the mechanisms of narrative as
a significant tool, an efficient artistic means to an end.
Indeed, in experiencing the work of Virginie Barré
and Jonas Dahlberg, both born in 1970, I had the clearest impression yet
that Contemporary Art itself might finally be heading for maturity in
its own relationship with the notion of narration. Apart from a few flings
(most blatantly, of course, the exaggerated liaison between the two that
occurred in ‘80s painting), the poo-pooing of narrative has more
often than not been seen as a necessary and even admirable reflex in much
of Contemporary Art. There has, of course, been ongoing evidence (Fischl,
Sherman, Barney . . . ) that the goose never died, but I’ve never
before had such a feeling that narrative is once again poised to take
its place in the House. Full membership for the first time since the nineteenth
century, as an unavoidable and desirable regulator, rather than just a
tolerated and occasional guest. The reasons for this are multiple, of
course, but there can be little doubt that featuring highly among them
is the advent of virtual and cyber realities, making us all feel more
comfortable with an upgraded version of the kind of storytelling that
our nineteenth century counterparts took for granted, as a valid job that
art could usefully do.
In her exhibition in the generous architecture of the
Friche Belle de Mai gallery in Marseille, France, Virginie Barré
presented interrelated fragments of what seemed to be both the same and
different narratives. A variety of references and a diverse cast of characters
reappear in different works. A series of meticulously rendered drawings
of suspicious incidents in an urban setting (which turns out to be Hamburg!),
a video projection of a pool of obviously fake blood slowly spreading
around an obviously fake victim, wall drawings of two falling figures,
two more clearly fake mannequins, one representing a prostrate murder
victim, modeled on a sequence from a Godard film, the other apparently
a child, dressed as a Star Wars Yoda, and all of this cemented together
spatially, both by careful lighting and by a veritable flock of bizarre
body bag-like cocoons, suspended from the ceiling. The artist seeks to
create “numerous possible bridges” between these diverse elements:
characters (modeled on her friends), suggested or reconstructed incidents,
scenarios, settings, images and atmospheres. The spectator links things
together, spontaneously making choices as if involuntarily playing an
oddball, homemade version of Dungeons and Dragons, set simultaneously
in the contrasting worlds of Contemporary street culture, Hitchcock movies,
bad ‘70s TV serials, and Star Wars science fiction.
Barré’s world somehow feels surprisingly
sparse and logical, considering the diversity of its ingredients. This
feeling comes from the fact that the viewer’s impression is of being
his/her own tour guide, and this aspect is significant in the unfinished
narrative form employed by both Barré and Dahlberg. The latter,
by comparison with Barré’s peopled universe, uses the suspense
of empty architectural spaces as the context for his viewers’ involvement.
Jonas Dahlberg first studied architecture before transferring
to the Malmö Art Academy in search of wider debate. The two DVD projections
which make up the work he showed in London earlier this year were filmed
inside a complex, multi-level, panoptic structure in the form of a foam-core
architectural model. The model was realized during a residency at IASPIS
(International Artist Program Sweden) in Stockholm. In Dahlberg’s
piece, Untitled (Vertical Sliding/Horizontal Sliding), one film is taken
by a camera travelling vertically through the model, while in the other,
the camera travels horizontally. The spectator experiences unfolding series
of spaces, meticulously reproduced to resemble hotel-like rooms and corridors,
complete with cornices, moldings, wallpaper, and ingeniously realistic
light sources filtering in through communicating openings and shafts.
While Dahlberg makes no effort to hide the process behind
his piece, it remains convincing as a real film of an existing full-scale
environment. However, the fact that it isn’t endows it with a strangeness
that helps its narrative proposition with a fictional vocation. At the
same time, it is of course, also a real film of a real object. As the
artist puts it: “[Models] are unique, yet represent something else
at the same time. They exist in the no man’s land between space,
object, and image.” This “no man’s land” is also
the territory where fictional narrative happens, and the common ground
between narrative filmmakers, writers, and an artist like Dahlberg, recording
what can be seen through holes in architectural models.
Constructing this narrative no-man’s land forms
a major part of the foundations of both Jonas Dahlberg’s and Virginie
Barré’s respective artistic practices. Furthermore, and perhaps
as a natural progression from this preoccupation, both artists are clearly
attracted by the effectiveness of Hitchcockian suspense, danger, and sensation,
perhaps the most obvious choice of weaponry when seeking effective results
in a career of narrative fiction.
Here the relationship between artist/narrator and spectator/audience
is a subtle and interactive one which relies on the acceptance by all
parties of a tug-of-war between complicity, trust and trickery, illusion,
fiction, and bluff. As the Slovenian novelist, Brina Svit, has put it,
“The reader must rapidly recognize that the narrator doesn’t
always tell the truth. The reader must be vigilant and not trust the narrator.”
Full mastery of the rules operating in the interstice
between fiction, reality, and reconstruction is clearly a requisite. One
of Virginie Barré’s earliest works, shown in the storefront
space of the art school gallery in Nantes, where the artist completed
her studies, backfired in spectacular fashion. The view from the street
was of a reconstruction of a murder scene, in a ‘70s office decor,
albeit with some rather unlikely mannequin victims and plastic pools of
blood. As the post-reception revelers headed homewards, returning towards
the “scene of the crime” from the restaurant where the after-party
had taken place, they found that the whole area had been cordoned off
by the police. The Fire Department were in the process of smashing through
the gallery window to remove the dead and wounded!
For Virginie Barré, this piece was clearly a failure,
since she had been incapable of letting the spectator “recognize
that the narrator doesn’t always tell the truth,” to repeat
Svit’s words. In Barré’s exhibition in Marseille, on
the other hand, suggestions of real life narrative are tempered by elements
of fantasy. The possibility that these could be real life fantasies absorbs
them into the narrator’s art and prevents alienation of the spectator.
Jonas Dahlberg sees architectural models as a means to
the same end. “Models allow you to realize fantasies and allow access
to otherwise difficult environments.” At the same time, like Virginie
Barré, he sees this as an opportunity to evoke suspense and sensation
in the overlapping territory between reality and fiction. The narrative
no man’s land once again: “You are able to exercise control
over situations as well as narratives. Models open a secret entrance to
environments with a limited access, or vice versa. For example, in a hostage
drama at an airport in 1976, a full-scale replica of an Air France plane
was made in order to allow the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to
experience and train in this environment before storming the aircraft.”
As a student, Dahlberg found himself living opposite a collector of “hunting
bows and arrows, crossbows and guns. I photographed his apartment from
my window, mostly
In this early work, entitled Safe Zones, the narrative
depended very much on the viewer, as nothing ever actually happened. The
same is true in Untitled (Vertical Sliding/Horizontal Sliding), the double
video projection shown at Milch, where the work maintains a continual
feeling of suspense as we explore yet another empty space, almost as if
we know that someone is in this endless building somewhere, so we have
to keep looking and checking every room and corridor. In such cases, the
“narrator’s” strength lies in his/her ability to keep
spectators on their toes. In both Barré’s and Dahlberg’s
work, a very powerful impression exists that something has happened and/or
is about to happen. The suggestion is more graphic in Barré’s
case and more subtle in Dahlberg’s, but the effect of the resulting
suspense is clearly the same.
Perhaps my thoughts have been too simply engaged in recognizing
the use of similar tricks of the trade in the work of two narrative practitioners
as different as say, Buzati and Zola, however inept that comparison may
be. Nevertheless, that this is the case in the work of two ostensibly
very different young artists of the same generation, for me provides further
confirmation of an evolution towards a different perception of reality
in Contemporary Art. Once again there is what Virginie Barré refers
to, in the same breath, as a “desire for timelessness” while
“speaking about your own time because you participate in it.” It would be another case of crass naïve
optimism to suggest that this may indicate a new shift towards integrity
in place of strategy—things are never as clear-cut as that, but
let’s just imagine for a change . . .
Lockwood Smith
London, England
2001
Organized by Triangle France, international artists’ residency and exhibition program.