PAINTING AS NARRATIVE
Narratives. You know, narratives in the form of stories
that are put together,
recycled, hidden and revisited. Tales that are sold, told,
used and abused. They
are borrowed, stolen and battered, and yet constantly sent
in for another new,
never-ending round. Narratives are in the form of specific
structures, aspects of
time and chronology – playing with it and breaking it, giving
rise to various
theoretical takes on the question of narrative. A large,
obscure and contested
house with unnumbered doors, through which you can enter
and seek to relate,
scan the site and the surroundings – and make claims about
what, when, how,
why and why not. Narratives.
So, here and now, it is narratives as in paintings. Not
so much narrative strategies
specific to the medium of painting, but paintings in the
form of stories. This essay
will focus on the relational characteristics of both painting
and narratives,
emphasising them as processes. Movements and interactions
that happen within
the parameters – shaping, making and questioning them –
of the central concepts
of common/particular, public/private and background/foreground.
Painting as narrative – in the sense of a process that is
always a two-way street.
You have certain capabilities for affecting the stories
that are told, but other agents
and structures affect them at the same time. It is an interaction
between all the
participants in the game: artists, works of art, viewers,
exhibition venues, and
basically all the economic, psychological, political and
historical implications of a
time and a space-bound context. It is the merry-go-round
of situated
hermeneutics, where the problem is not how to stop the wheel
of interpretations,
but how to get into it and how to participate and situate
oneself within the process
of telling stories.
Now the trick in my approach, or the tick in the situation
of catch-me-now-I-am crawling
is: if every relationship and any cushioned collision can
be a story, how
do we differentiate between them? Obviously, not all narratives
are equally
important, interesting or relevant, and the task is to choose
what, how and why to
tell a story. This is a burning question for all participants
in the game. It is a valueladen
judgement, which should be a transparent act, openly confronted
and
contested, argued for and against. At the same time, it
is common courtesy to
emphasise that by narratives, I am not referring to any
particular genre or subgenre
of fiction. I want to focus on painting as narrative that
can create situations
of self-reflection, basically functioning as a sympathetic
vehicle for thoughts – both
disastrous disagreements and harmonious handshakes.
I will proceed in three and a half steps, continuously wobbling,
partly forward,
partly sideways and, of course, time and time again falling
on my back. The steps
taken begin with the question of how we watch and relate
to a painting,
highlighting the important characteristics and consequences
of narrative
structures and presuppositions. The next step is an analysis
of the simultaneous
presence of background and foreground in a painting or a
picture, as in a story.
Finally, it will be linked to the theme of public versus
private.
How do we look at a painting and why is it a meaningful
starting point? First of all,
my claim is that the answer to this accentuates an important
distance and
departure from the idea of the relationship between any
kind of picture and
authentic reality that it is supposed to illustrate. Instead,
it is about a process of
being with; a process in which you are not looking at, but
looking and being with.
There is no essence, no singular universal, transcendental
truth to find – no matter
how long you go Good Will Hunting for it.
Authentic reality does not exist. What does exist, and more
precisely, what does
indeed take place, is the relationship between participants
in the process of being
with a work of art. Therefore, the important thing is to
pay attention to nuances of
how we perceive, how we search out a relation,
and on what terms we try to
negotiate. And here we open a whole bag of complications
about how
connections emerge, how they happen and what kind of experiences
come out of
these confrontations, clashes, but also tender kisses and
afternoon tea-room
dances.
What is the connection between stressing the subtle varieties
in the procedures
involved? I would not say that it is like a hand in glove,
or a burning blister on your
ankle after playing ice-hockey following an honest 12-year
break, but it is more like
a bomb that will bring us together. That is figuratively
speaking. I am not referring to
a classical, strictly chronological sense of narrative,
as claimed by Aristotle in
Poetics or, for example, to psychoanalytical aspects
of narrative, such as argued by
Mieke Bal (1997). It is not a question of a whole. There
is a multitude of ingredients
– elements that make up the crime – both at play and at
bay. There are more
relations and their implications than meet the eye, if our
interest is focused solely on
the gaze and its role.
The structures that I am referring to go beyond or perhaps,
more precisely, they
choose to travel past and alongside these theories. My approach
strips down the
elements into the interconnectedness of experience and surprise.
Another way to
get closer is to use and accentuate the concepts of predictability
and uncertainty, or
presuppositions and undecidability (MacIntyre 1985). All
in all, it is about the
interplay between these two poles, within which narrative
elements of painting
evolve and take place.
Let’s start off with expectations. It might sound trivial,
but this is something we all
share and carry with us. In any kind of situation, we have
certain expectations with
which we arrive at a scene. They are definitely not the
same from person to person
and place to place, but there are common denominators. Expectations
are
connected to the past, to knowledge and experience of what
has happened before.
The point is that, in order for you to relate to anything
at all – be it another person, a
book or a painting – without these expectations there is
no relationship. Period. The
meeting, the merry-go-round is built on expectations. All
manners of them, ranging
from passionate, loving and caring knowledge to the sphere
of silly stereotypes,
petty prejudices and nasty intolerance.
Consequently, we are confronted with the problems of how
much we need to know,
before being able to construct a meaningful interaction.
This is a very important
question. For now, let’s take a careful look at context-bound
expectations. Here we
get the litany of all the things that might affect the process
of being with. Confusion
gains ground, but then again, some things are still certain.
It is always more
complicated than you imagine, and always less controllable
than you perhaps
wished, and ultimately: the greater the expectations, the
higher the possibility or
even probability of disappointment.
Precisely here lies the crucial intersection and necessary
collision between
expectations and surprises. Lack of expectations is deadly,
but this clash and
collision also functions the other way round. If your expectations
are too high, and if
what you are presented with is the same as what you expect,
nothing more will
happen. In other words, you will know from the beginning
what is going to happen in
the middle and in the end. And this excess of predictability,
according to my
scheme of things, does not produce narrative. It is a repetition
of expectations in a
format that is painstakingly careful not to mix and mess,
and to bring about
surprises.
So we are back to the concept of surprise, but let’s hold
on for a second longer to
the idea and role of expectations. When entering a museum,
or picking up a book,
all of us have some kind of presuppositions about what will
follow. We have fairly
strong presumptions about what is going on inside the building,
on the next page,
between the covers – and under the ruby-red pillows where
the fight of souls is
being waged so fiercely. The point is that, at the same
time as we know the general
framework and direction of the plot, we do not know for
sure what will happen next.
And this is the core of relational and procedural narratives.
But what precisely can we say about surprises? That life
and love are all about
surprises? Please feel free to put in other banalities that
spring to mind. What about
surprises as the salt that adds savour, but also burns in
our wounds?
Alfred Hitchcock, our man with the amazingly well-tailored
suit, but not that wellhidden
neuroses, was certainly aware of the role of surprises in
the art of building
and maintaining suspense. For him, suspense was primarily
about who knows, and
what. It was the central trick in telling a story. A picture
of a room full of people at an
important meeting, with a bomb planted under the table.
The people in the room did
not know about it, but the viewers did. What neither knew
for sure was when it
would explode. This was uncertain, made dependant on a small
number of random
coincidentals. Thus, the carefully designed and plotted
play with expectations that
creates suspense.
Suspense aside, the point of the past-present-future (not
necessarily linear), backand-
forth linkage can easily be stretched to many modes of story
telling, from comic
to tragic and back to satire (White 1973). For narration
to happen, you need to have
expectations, and at the same time you have to twist and
turn, play and smash
those expectations. It is the act of giving them – whoever
is interested – what they
expect, but doing that in a way that they are taken by surprise.
A sentiment that can
indeed blow and bring us together, or it can say all the
right things in the right place
at the right pace with only a whisper.
We have now taken two of the promised steps. Next, it is
time to take a look at the
interlocked push & pull thematics of background and
foreground, and their
implications for the process of painting as narrative. Quoting
Robert Lucander, “I get
the motifs for my works from the backgrounds of things and
from features that are
present in everyday life. That is, things of vital importance.
I take the motifs from my
own immediate surroundings. I try to be present in that
moment, in space and
place, avoid following certain themes or issues. I bring
the background and the
related tension to the fore, and at the same time give it
the same value as the actual
event in the foreground. I thus create a pattern that analyses
what we actually pay
attention to when we look at a picture.”
What this interplay refers to is an intentional connection
between various aspects of
the same setting. It, for example, connects different time
perspectives, or views of
the world. Thus, we have the starting point of Lucander’s
pictures, which are
common knowledge to all of us. We realise immediately from
what field they come –
fashion, pop culture. So we have the background (expectations)
and then we have
the foreground, the first-level actuality of what is going
on in the painting and how.
In Lucander’s case, it is this tension, the blatant tension
between them that causes
the commotion. It is the extremely precise process of cutting
down the elements and
symbols in the pictures, of scaling them down to the absolute
minimum in order to
still put forward a certain dry, but warmly ironic, decoded
version of a story.
A strategy combined with the carefully thought-out choice
of making standard
DIN-sized paintings and expressly painting with material
bought from the hardware
store next door. And here, physically in front of us, we
have the land of surprises.
We see the background, but we just cannot be sure. We cannot
figure out what
exactly is going on. We have to participate, in order to
be with it and make those
connections.
For Lucander, painting is about creating a unique atmosphere.
Something that is
special and genuinely sought after in every kind of narrative
in its own particular,
adequate way. One interesting point of comparison, a case
that has been great
inspiration for Lucander, is the oeuvre of Rainer Fassbinder,
for whom the interplay
between background and foreground is present in terms of
historical events and his
own relationship and experience of them. Perhaps the most
apposite case is the
semi-documentary film Deutschland in Herbst, which refers
to and has links with
both crimes and events, and the situation in West Germany
at the end of the 1970s.
A situation when the government was on the brink of declaring
a state of emergency.
There was a realistic possibility of civil war, considering
the ongoing and growing
civil unrest, in which terrorist activities were one, but
not the only central point of
departure and arrival.
In the movie, which was deliberately shot in shaky technical
quality and on low
budget, sitting at a grubby kitchen table, Fassbinder argues
with his mother about
the importance of the past, especially of the crimes of
the past. Both share the past,
but their view of it is very different. Or more accurately,
their views of the
implications of the past are mutual opposites.
We see an almost heart-breaking scene, in which both try
to come to terms with the
other’s view but fail, shouting nervously. We see the serious,
but unyielding mother,
and the director, drinking and smoking non-stop, sweating
and going around in
circles with his emotions and his arguments. There is no
solution, no redemption,
just the accurate depiction of a problematic political and
ethical, generational,
experience-based dilemma. It is history that has got under
the skin of those relating
to it.
Of course, the whole question is: What kind of relationship
are we talking about? Is it
the relationship between the common past and one’s personal
view of it. Or about
what kind of relationship we have with fashion images that
we are bombarded with
everywhere? It is always about being aware of these processes
that continuously
affect us, making and breaking stories. Narratives, which
on the collective and
individual level are always intertwined and interlocked,
helping both sides to define
themselves and their positions.
This all relates to ethical aspects inherent in narrative
structures. We have two kind
of responsibilities. As participating agents, we need to
put forward our own stories.
In other words, we are accountable for what we do and decide
not to do. At the
same time, this requires an ability to listen to versions
of narratives told by others.
Thus, we have to compare, and ultimately make valued-based
interpretations and
judgements. Stories – words, images and gestures – push
us around, forcing on us
an opportunity to take a stand, but that is still not enough.
We need situated
narratives, reactions and actions about how to reflect
and relate to the stories.
By now, it ought to be evident how painting as narrative
provides another, hopefully
fresh, aspect for the widely discussed and influential theme
of public/private. Here,
‘public’ serves as something most of us can be expected
to share and recognise,
and thus it prepares and constitutes the ground for a meeting
point and for the
beginning of a possible relationship. And I must stress
that emphasis is on the word
possible. On the other hand, the private sphere is precisely
this experience of an
emerging and embracing relationship of being with. It is
the constant process of
going back and forth, here and there, now and then. The
very point, of painting as
narrative, is that at best of times, it gives you a chance
to be part of these narratives.
In the middle and in the making. Narratives that force you
to stop, to be with, and
then continue again.
Flirting face-to-face with cruel realism, Niklas Engvall
shows us early-morning
impressions of common-as-muck buildings and locations in
northern Sweden.
Matchbox-style shopping malls, one-family houses straight
out of brochures, and
frozen gas stations. This is the almost-forgotten landscape,
with eloquently disguised
social structures, which – without permission and without
asking – control and
direct our daily activities, busily and highly effectively
closing down options.
A confrontation, which can be the beginning of a very open-ended
journey. It is the
exact moment just before the sun is about to come up. It
spells hollow emptiness, in
great need to be filled with – something. Something in the
air, hanging, looming.
In one powerful sense, it is a surreal sensation, like a
lost-and-never-found version
of Twin Peaks happening far-away in the North. Or
it can be a sarcastic take on
amok-running confusion that is just about to happen, as
in Fargo. Or it can simply
be a super-normal, boring, semi-cold day that is about to
begin, during which
everything stays the same and simultaneously everything
changes – depending on
how you watch and how you react. With and within the never-ending
process of
telling and revisiting stories. Narratives.
Mika Hannula
Literature:
Aristotle, Runousoppi [Poetics] (Otava, 1962)
Mieke Bal, Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative,
2nd ed.
(University of Toronto Press, 1997)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory,
2nd ed. (Duckworth, 1985)
Hayden White, Metahistory (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973)
Catalogues
Each of the three Stop for a Moment exhibitions will be
accompanied by a catalogue with introductory essay, artists
interviews and illustrations highlighting the multifaceted
ways of working with 'painting proper'. Catalogues from
Painting as Presence and Painting as Narrative are available
and the third publication Painting as Presence is forthcoming
in September.
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