CIRCUS EUROPA
Michael Kvium 2
Content
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Foreword Christian Gether
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Exhibition credits
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The circus has come to town Andrea Rygg Karberg and Camilla Jalving
62 Conversation in the circus ring Carsten Jensen
92 Michael Kvium CV 94 List of works
Mud Tale (detail), 2016 Next spread: Vertical Tale (detail), 2016
The circus has come to town
By Andrea Rygg Karberg and Camilla Jalving My pictures are not narrative. They are performative. Michael Kvium’s CIRCUS EUROPA is in town, and what a circus it is! The title of the exhibition arose very early in the intense working process leading up to this major exhibition of brand new paintings, films, sculptures, installations and objects created for the occasion. On the one hand Kvium has always been interested in theatre, film, performance and the circus; on the other, the idea of the circus is appropriate to the reality to which the exhibition was meant to relate. Like many other artists, Kvium is preoccupied with contemporary events as they are unfolding in Europe, the historical centre of the entire western civilization. Like a seismograph he reacts to what is going on in his world: the near and the very far, which reach him, as well as us, through the coverage of the media and its flood of images. The current situation is characterized by migration, pollution, extremism and violence. Yet most of us live on, unaffected, on the principle that ‘the show must go on’. Even as the world as we know it comes to an end, performers and artists continue to perform and entertain, and to struggle for attention. When the press reports from wars and catastrophes, it takes strong imagery to maximize ratings. The news stream is characterized by an almost schizophrenic schism between the actual events and the arranged, edited images. Both the political scene and everyday life seem to mime old circus acts, repeated ad infinitum. In other words it is not just the weather that is ‘extremist’, as Carsten Jensen puts it in his conversation with Michael Kvium in this catalogue; the political world is too.1 Circus Europa is a reality. As always, Kvium’s artistic answer is neither nice nor decorative. He willingly strips humanity naked,
literally or figuratively, and displays all our imperfections. At the same time there is always a quite special sense of humour; humour that is used to lure us into the works and that skewers us mercilessly from the moment our attention is caught. This article, building on the idea of ‘performative pictures’ which the introductory quote brings into play, will identify the means that Kvium uses in his art, in general as well as specifically in CIRCUS EUROPA; an exhibition where art meets reality and vice versa in a scenic encounter that puts the exhibition visitor right in the middle of the circus ring. A WALK THROUGH THE WORLD The exhibition is intended as an immersive installation; as a process, a walk through exhibition halls that contain many of the genres that Kvium has worked with since the 1980s. A magician is the first person to greet us, at first very energetically, and later in the course of the exhibition in a far more dejected, muted version. In the painting Illusion (page 24-25) we first meet a failed circus artist in the midst of a talentless illusionist act with a large hobby-horse around his waist. In another painting a man in a top hat holds out the waistline of his grossly oversized trousers, as if to build up excitement about what the trousers might conceal – it is unlikely to be anything impressive. On closer inspection you see a little pill on his tongue that testifies that Stand Up Comedy, the title of the painting, isn’t quite as funny as we think (page 8-9). In Small Talk Show (page 14-15) a third performer in dark sunglasses nonchalantly throws away his removed eyeballs, as if he would rather attract the gazes of others than be confronted with the sights that reality shows us. In a world focused on individual performance we can presumably all to some extent identify with the characters’ failed attempts to impress and demonstrate their own merits as we feel both contempt and sympathy.
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Previous page: Still from the video EUROPA, 2017 Small Talk Show, 2016
The Justice, 2017 Part of the series Contemporary Clowns
In the next room seven sculptures are presented. They depict different archetypes from western culture, each immersed in its own full oil barrel. The familiar characters have often appeared in Kvium’s paintings and are realized full-size in three dimensions. Each personifies and strips naked its own general concept: Faith, Justice, Power, Art, Freedom, Liberty, Future. The elevated ideas of the superego are confronted with the dumb, egoistic urges, with an added hint of threatening pollution. Kvium calls the seven sculptures as a whole Contemporary Clowns (see opposite page and 44-49). CURRENT EVENTS The content of the exhibition has been planned as a totality on the basis of innumerable sketches done before Kvium proceeded to the large canvases. Along the way new works have naturally been added, but the broad lines of the process have remained the same. The process has been carried forward by great effort and strict discipline – Kvium really has a lot on his mind. Terror and fear, refugee flows and war at close quarters – all of this was running through the back of his mind while the exhibition was being created. Kvium’s art can clearly be interpreted as existential. The flaws, the sickness and the constant presence of death are part of the basic human condition. In that respect Kvium’s works are universal, or as the art historian Merete Sanderhoff has put it, for Kvium existence is “stripped of anaesthetizing wrappings, exposed in its physical reality.”2 Kvium’s works are inspired by and linked with real events. For example, one of his most famous paintings from the 1980s, to which we will later return, A Kitchen Scene from 1986, was conceived after the artist had read in the newspaper about a mother who had stifled her child.3 In CIRCUS EUROPA, however, the political relevance of the motif and Kvium’s socially critical side become more explicit than ever before.
The big painting The Duke (page 18-19) refers to the TV reporters and commentators who display and discuss the bombed city of Aleppo in the news. The actual depiction of the city is based on a press photo which Kvium has inserted as a backdrop. In the work as a whole this grisaille marks out a stage taken over by a peg-legged devil disguised as an entertainer. Its shadow reveals its true self – it is Death with his crooked finger who has the city in his grasp. Throughout his artistic career Kvium has collected photos and newspaper clippings and used this material as a reservoir of forms, figures and compositions upon which he can draw in his art.4 Kvium has done a lot of work with collage and as a painter he enjoys compounding several canvases into one work which as a whole speaks of a complex world full of different modes of expression.5 Many of the paintings in CIRCUS EUROPA consist of several canvases. Thus, The Duke is pieced together from four paintings. It is not always the initial intention, however, that a motif should branch out like this; it is something that happens along the way, when a finished picture suddenly gains further meaning from the unexpected juxtaposition with other pictures. The biggest painting of the exhibition, Beach of Plenty (page 64-65), also derives from a photo, taken on the beach in southern Spain near Kvium’s home, where you see beach, sea and the always inactive tourists. In the painting, a triptych, where the beach with tourists is painted on three large canvases, a refugee boat is arriving on the scene, and a man is fighting for his life unheeded in the surf. No one is helping or reacting. Two states of being, two worlds clash. The sand and the sea are depicted very realistically. The postures of the figures reflect the contrast in their situations – the well-off, self-assured and relaxed viewer is contrasted with the individual’s desperate struggle against the fury of the elements.
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The Duke, 2017
The Animal is Loose, 2017
The tourist is a motif with which Kvium has also worked earlier, for example in the painting Tourist Piss from 2012. The tourist is a spectator staying in a place that isn’t his own. He is a spectator of existence who can in many ways be likened to the museum visitor who looks at the work of art from a safe distance; a rather noncommittal museum visitor, it should be noted, who has no wish to be involved in anything that is too different. We see the refugee in the surf frontally; he confronts us and appeals to us with his raised arm. The tourist has his back to us. He stands the same way in front of the refugee as we ourselves stand in front of the big canvas. Our body is projected into the tourist’s body and the composition of the painting dictates that he is the one we identify with – whether we want to or not. The tourist apparently does not notice the man in distress. Do we? THE WILD ANIMAL Close to this in the exhibition stands an old circus wagon with bars, of the kind that transports predators from show to show. The door has been broken open. The Animal is Loose is the title. After lingering – or perhaps even shuddering – at the empty circus wagon, you can step into a real circus tent. The difference, though, is that we do not find ourselves in the audience seating, but in the middle of the ring. Perhaps it is here that the frightening realization comes: we are the circus animal! The wild animal, the predator, the escaped tiger. Here we stand in the spotlight as the dangerous element in the show, an item for the entertainment of the others. The tourist placed on the stage. The museum visitor as part of the work. The civilized consumer of culture stripped down to an animal, driven by bestial urges. An animal that can only be tamed by the keeper with the little chunks of meat it will do anything to get. THE CONFUSION OF LANGUAGES When the shock and shame have died down, there is
fortunately something else in the ring – a work we can look at. What kind of circus are we part of? It is Circus Europa. And in the middle of the ring we see a big inflatable boat, lying there like a beached whale, punctured and weighed down by European dictionaries. All the official EU languages and many others are represented. In other words the boat contains a wealth of different languages revealing the tribes and groupings that testify to great cultural differences in a geographically small Europe. The work aptly reminds us of the Bible stories of the Tower of Babel and the Miracle of Pentecost. The Book of Genesis describes how the people set out together to build a tower in Babylon, the Tower of Babel, to reach Heaven. God knew that united they could accomplish this, and to avert the threat he fragmented their unity by giving them different languages: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”6 This put an end to the united construction work, and the peoples were scattered over the face of the earth. God’s idea was extremely effective. Despite dictionaries and simultaneous interpreters, it is still impossible to create a common understanding and a voluntary consensus among all the peoples in Europe – and on the Earth. But the dream is still there – as expressed in the account of the Miracle of Pentecost, which takes place some time after the Resurrection of Christ and his subsequent Ascension. The peoples are left isolated again and are unable to achieve unity. Then, to a crowd of people of different nationalities, each with its own language, “there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of
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them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”7 In other words, everyone there heard in their own language what the others said. For a time, everyone understood one another. The Miracle of Pentecost symbolizes the formation of the Church that was meant to restore the unity of the human race. But it was to no avail. Kvium’s inflatable boat full of dictionaries manifests the infinite complexity of what we call Europe. Europe is no unity, it consists of a myriad of different cultures. European history is characterized by internal wars, power struggles and a continued incapacity to step up, united, when the situation so requires. European identity is impossible to define. Yet we are all in the same boat. Europe’s role is threatened by the new world-picture, in which power has passed into the hands of other, larger nations and economies in what the Eurocentric worldview called the Third World. Europe’s democracy and general prosperity are still a magnet for the many non-Europeans who want to come to Europe. Wars and environmental disasters turn people into refugees, and we Europeans envisage that they all want to come here, and that the eventual overpopulation this entails will destroy the very prosperity and putative peace they dream of. ART IN THE BODY Kvium doesn’t say all this in words. It is the authors of this article who are summarizing in writing many of the thoughts and feelings that CIRCUS EUROPA generates. In that regard Kvium is not a politician but an artist who occupies himself with the political. He does so not by offering us solutions, but by creating situations in his works where we as observers get to feel what is happening in the world; where we get the chance to be disgusted, repulsed, surprised, shocked; to wonder, to sympathize and to detest.
In that sense a translation takes place in the exhibition where the state of the world is transformed into bodily sensations and moods – what with a collective term can be called ‘affects’. Affects are not ‘emotions’; they cannot be expressed directly in words and do not have a particular ‘content’. On the contrary, they are to be seen as “physiological shifts in attention and as something that can be experienced corporeally through rising and falling intensity and energy.”8 The affect-creating devices that Kvium uses are familiar ones: a cultivation of the grotesque in the depiction of humans through distortion and ridicule; an insistence on meaninglessness through the absurdity of the subjects; the use of contrasts that can effectively arouse our emotions: A bombed city and a dubious duke; an exhausted boat refugee and a relaxed tourist; a helpless child and a selfish priest. And finally the scale, which is impossible to ignore in this exhibition. The paintings are large and the depictions of people are almost life-size. This prompts a mirroring and an identification of viewer and subject, but it also has the quite simple effect that the works overwhelm you; that with their scale they occupy the body of the viewer. THE SPACE OF THE INSTALLATION The affective quality is also related to the installationlike nature of the exhibition, which consists of spaces that must be traversed and experienced with all the senses over time; spaces that envelop the visitor’s body and create a situation where the individual ‘work’ is not inevitably distinguishable from the experience of the space.9 Several times in the past Michael Kvium has created decided installation art. He did so first at Aarhus Kunstmuseum in 1997 in the exhibition with the related name Circus Humanus. There you could see, among other things, an assemblage on the floor of about 2000 eggs cast in iron; a video installation
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Social Sculpture, 1997, private collection (not in the exhibition)
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Illusion, 2016
in a cylindrical wooden structure; and the work Social Sculpture (page 23), consisting of 18 interconnected acrylic-painted figures in foam rubber and latex hanging in a cluster from the ceiling. At the time Kvium was best known as a painter and he wanted to try something new. All the same, the exhibition and the installations had connections with the paintings: eggs had long appeared in many pictures and were now given physical form, and Kvium had long painted conjoined human bodies before the work Social Sculpture. It was also the first time Kvium used the circus reference in an exhibition title. The circle shape was a recurrent feature of Circus Humanus, formally as well as thematically, reflecting how ‘the human circus’ can be said to be repeated over and over again.10 The following year, 1998, Kvium exhibited the installation Sleepwalk at the major Momentum biennial for young Nordic art held in Moss, Norway. Five identical beds were lined up, all intended for very short bodies, but standing on very tall legs. In other words, beds for dwarves that the dwarves themselves cannot get into. The work is very minimalistic and atypical for Kvium in its execution, but still characterized by the familiar grim humour. The chandeliers and the wallpaper with sleepwalkers’ footprints in Kvium’s characteristic yellow and black blindness-symbolizing colours were also part of the installation.
Francisco de Zurbarán, St. Agatha, 1630-1633, Musée Fabre
THE THEATRE IN THE PAINTING Finally, the affective is also associated with the role that Kvium assigns to the viewer in his works. As in Illusion (page 24-25) and Small Talk Show (page 1415), the viewer is often addressed, inasmuch as the people in the paintings address an audience with their gazes and gestures, as if they are actors on a stage. In many ways theatre and painting go hand in hand in Kvium’s works. For instance, the aforementioned A Kitchen Scene from 1986 clearly illustrates
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A Kitchen Scene, 1986, Sorø Kunstmuseum (not in the exhibition)
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Natural Circle, 1992, ARoS (not in the exhibition)
something fundamental in Kvium’s pictures. This is a strange combination of a realistic depiction of a girl in a kitchen with a surreal, nightmarish rendering of a naked, animal-like mother’s body, all of it staged with a theatre curtain between us and the kitchen, pulled aside by a flock of Baroque angels. This use of the curtain is typical of many of Kvium’s early works, in which the curtain, as a prop, often establishes a tension between the ‘subject’ and the ‘observer’ – for who is the actual culprit: the characters in the painting or the observer outside who is watching but not acting?”11
The paintings in CIRCUS EUROPA do not have draped theatre curtains as in A Kitchen Scene, but they are full of spotlights and brightly coloured stripes like the ones we know from a typical circus tent; blue, red and orange bands which like the curtain function as theatrical markers framing the painting as a stage. Here the theatrical is to be understood in its most basic meaning: as that which has to do with theatre; as that which functions like a theatre.12 THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE This use of theatrical markers is also familiar from the
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Tim Rushton and Michael Kvium, Passion, 2007, a ballet performed by Dansk Danseteater
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art of the Baroque where the play with reality was effected with illusion-creating tricks. And indeed Kvium’s paintings exhibit striking lines back in time to the visual art of the Baroque in their use of both Vanitas symbols and trompe l’œil.13 Not without reason, Kvium has spoken with enthusiasm of the Spanish Baroque artist Francisco de Zurbarán (1596-1664) and how Zurbarán has been a formative influence on him, especially with his images of saints whose skulls, eyes and even breasts are held out towards the viewer on dishes (page 26).14 Baroque art is also known for its use of stark contrasts between light and shade, so-called
chiaroscuro, in pictures. This stylistic feature is also found in many of Kvium’s pictures. One element in this play of light and shade is the use of the spotlight that indicates a stage. Kvium’s works are full of spotlights, from the early Naturkreds (Natural Circle) from 1992 (opposite page) to the new Mud Tale (page 42-43) from 2016, where the circular light points both to being on display and simply being seen. The Baroque is at the same time the ultimate theatrical style and period that involves the audience in open, all-encompassing works. This happens in the Baroque
Gesamtkunstwerk, in which architecture, painting, sculpture, furniture, decorations and spatial continuity all merge together.15 It can be seen in the churches where Bernini, as the central figure in the Roman Baroque, created both the building and the whole interior as a swelling totality or organism that envelops and almost swallows up the churchgoer. The Gesamtkunstwerk can be seen as a very early precursor of installation art – and of Kvium’s CIRCUS EUROPA, which takes this very form as a unified spatial and bodily experience where the theatrical takes precedence and the viewer the leading role, and where the meaning of the work is born as the viewer moves through the exhibition. THE PAINTING IN THE THEATRE Kvium has also worked directly with the theatre. Among other things, in 2015 he created the stage design for Black Rider at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen, and he worked with Tim Rushton of the Danish Dance Theatre on the ballet Passion (page 29), while in his films, which he has often made in collaboration with the artist Christian Lemmerz, he has worked with a number of well known Danish actors and theatre people, just as he himself has acted in several films and TV series.16 An important part of Kvium’s back catalogue is made up of his work in performance art. In the 1980s he created a long succession of performance works with the group Performancegruppen Værst, which also includes the artists Christian Lemmerz, Sonny Tronborg and Ingunn Jørgstad. One of the group’s first performances was Vi har ikke noget at sige, men vi gør det så koncentreret som muligt (We have nothing to say, but we are doing it as concentratedly as possible), which Kvium and Lemmerz performed in 1985 at the exhibition space Kongo. As the title suggests, the action was minimal. On the white floor lay a row of gramophone records that the two suit-wearing artists
attempted to activate by biting them or moving their fingers like pick-ups, ‘just to do something’.17 Things are more grotesque in the film Grød (Porridge) from 1986, another production from Performancegruppen Værst, in which Kvium and Lemmerz are in the cast. The starting point for Grød was the painting Kitchen Scene, and the film indeed functions as a distorted social-realist depiction of dysfunctional people and conditions, or as the cover text for the video edition says, a “grim and grotesque status report from the everyday life of an ordinary Danish family.”18 Kvium was also there at ARKEN in the opening year 1996 when he joined Christian Lemmerz in the performance Failagain Wake. Once more one could see a theatrical or ‘performative’ unfolding of the motifs and scenes from the paintings. The title refers to James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake from 1939, which breaks with any logical narrative modes, and which has profoundly inspired both Kvium and Lemmerz. The same inspiration was manifested in a major collaborative work, the film The Wake from 2000, an almost eight-hour-long unforgettable silent film where the actors wallow in despair, hate, anxiety, violence, sexuality and drunkenness. This expansive epic film is technically innovative and recalls the disconnected, unclear memories of the dreams and nightmares of the night, which normally evaporate when we wake up. THE PERFORMATIVE PAINTING Let us examine the idea of the ‘performative’ more closely. In the first conversations about CIRCUS EUROPA, Michael Kvium mentioned in passing: “My paintings have never only been narrative. They are always performative.”19 Casually as this was said, it holds the key to Kvium’s practice. To say that the paintings are performative doesn’t mean that they are theatre. On the contrary – just like a performance – they only come into existence when they are ‘performed’ in the encounter with the viewer.20 Certainly they can
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Christian Lemmerz and Michael Kvium, Failagain Wake, 1996, performed at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art
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Alien Aftermath, 2017 Next spread: Alien Aftermath, 2017
be seen – after all, they are hanging right there; but their effect, or content, is something that arises in the meeting with the observer, in the affective space where sensation, mood and feeling merge; in the space of the painting, where I as the viewer am drawn in when I see the picture and the picture sees me. When the man with the horse in Illusion stares back with his empty look, or when ‘The Duke’ welcomes you to the bombing of Aleppo in the painting of the same name. The actual effect of Kvium’s paintings thus does not lie in what they ‘show’ but in the world they ‘create’, inasmuch as they affect the audience – just like the performative speech act that ‘does what is says’.21 There is thus no great gap between Kvium’s early performance practice from the 1980s and his current paintings from 2017. Both are about ‘doing’. About affecting us who are watching. This shift from an understanding of the painting as something that represents, to an understanding of it as performative also has another meaning. For Kvium it is not about the painting as a painting, but about the painting as something that acts. Or as the art historian Gitte Ørskou has put it: “Michael Kvium entertains no illusion that his painting is about painting. He masters the medium to perfection, but his mission is not – as for many other painters – to initiate a struggle or a relationship with his material – the painting. For Kvium the painting is precisely this: a medium for the world he allows to grow forth.”22 In this shift in perspective, Kvium does not stand alone. On the contrary, performance theory speaks of a change that took place in the 1960s in theatre and the visual arts. In those years, the theatre, as the German theatre historian Erika Fischer-Lichte put it, “was no longer understood as a representation of a fictional world that the audience could observe, parse and understand, but as the actualization of a particular relationship between actors and audience.”23 It is this
relationship that Kvium’s paintings activate, and it is this activation that makes them performative. AFTERSHOCK The finale of the circus show, the final space of the exhibition, is taken up by a particularly sculptural installation, an outlandish ‘aftershock’ whose technical structure traces a path back to the installation Social Sculpture from 1997 (page 23). Alien Aftermath is the name of the installation, which consists of conjoined bodily figures hanging from the ceiling, connected by strings. The figures include recognizable features like body and limbs, yet they are still entirely unfamiliar creatures. These organic, biomorphic forms have already populated several of Kvium’s paintings for decades. One of them can be seen for example on the right-hand side of the above-mentioned painting in the exhibition, Illusion (page 24-25). They are reminiscent of entrails you have no wish to identify, or the freaks of evolution, genetically failed bodies. In Alien Aftermath we come closer to them than ever. They have left the flat canvas behind and entered into their full incarnation, ready to embrace our own bodies. Are these the new bacterial life forms that will one day evolve and become the next master race of the planet, as we followed the dinosaurs and other extinct species? Are they a foreshadowing of the day when humanity will be gone and will have been nothing but a single small quake in the history of the planet? Perhaps. Kvium wrote the following about the thinking behind Alien Aftermath: “By confronting the public with this alien ‘culture’ where everything is displaced from the given aesthetic and moral ideals by which we are normally guided, I want to turn the mirror inwards towards ourselves and the systems that make us divide the world into us
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and them – the unknown and the known. I find these very questions highly relevant when we see political efforts from several cultures to do exactly this – divide up the world, close down borders, instead of opening the mind to increased understanding and learning from it. The world is being divided up according to religion, skin colour, political orientation, cultural differences, rich and poor. In leading the public through this space, through a perhaps repulsive or frightening system of something not immediately recognizable, I want us to feel like aliens ourselves – to ask the question ‘Who and what is the alien?’, ‘Are we strangers to ourselves?’ For many years in my artistic work I have tried to create these abstract life forms and thus ask questions about our own existence. We humans are almost a parenthesis in the evolution of the Earth, yet we have changed the globe more than ever before in a very short period of time. It seems reasonable to consider whether our actions are justified and whether we are managing the planet as we should. What do we come from? What comes after us?” SEEING YOURSELF Michael Kvium’s text about Alien Aftermath illustrates how CIRCUS EUROPA is intended as a bodily, thoughtprovoking experience that raises a range of important questions. The exhibition is not about war, disasters and refugees. It concerns ourselves. It does so by being both theatrical and performative. It is theatrical, not as in the classic theatre where we can hide in the darkness, but as theatrical sets that force us on to the stage by repeatedly placing us in a central role in the middle of the ring. It is performative because with its insistently affective approach, it not only shows us the world, it creates a world, a situation, that we become part of – whether we want to or not. We arrived as an expectant audience, but we leave the circus as uneasy artists and exposed predators. •
Andrea Rygg Karberg is the Director of the Nivaagaard Collection of Paintings; Camilla Jalving is a curator at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. Endnotes 1 See the conversation between Carsten Jensen and Michael Kvium in this catalogue, 62-74. 2 Merete Sanderhoff, Sorte Billeder: Kunst og kanon, Copenhagen: Rævens Sorte Bibliotek, 2007, 149. 3 Michael Kvium in ‘At være menneske – unplugged’, Berlingske Tidende, January 26th, 2006. 4 Conversation between Andrea Rygg Karberg and Michael Kvium, Asserbo, May 12th, 2016. 5 An early example of the work with compounded canvases is the painting Creativity Theory, 2001. 6 Genesis 11, 6-7. 7 Acts 2, 3-4. 8 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage, ‘Affektteori’, in Kulturteori og kultursociologi, ed. Bjørn Schiermer, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2016, 58. 9 As an art form the installation goes back to the 1960s, even if the term only arose in the late 1970s. There is no one universal
definition of ‘installation’, but the following three parameters are part of the definition: The installation activates the space and the contexts; it extends the work in time and thereby takes on the quality of a situation; it focuses on the bodies and the subjective experience of the viewers. See Anne Ring Petersen, Installation Art between Image and Stage, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009, 41-45. 10 As Kvium says in the catalogue for the exhibition: “It’s not without reason that the exhibition is called ‘Circus Humanus’ with a reference to the circle, because it is something that repeats indefinitely.” Lennart Gottlieb (ed.), Circus Humanus, exhibition catalogue, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 1997, 48. 11 In 2002 the art historian Lennart Gottlieb describes how in these early paintings Kvium makes use of “visual barriers in the form of curtains which are drawn aside to let the scene reveal itself to the beholder. At the same time the curtains and pointing children or putti underscore the viewer’s role as a voyeur being entertained. Are the dominant figures of the scene perverted? Is the one who merely watches perhaps no less perverted? seems to be the message.” Lennart Gottlieb, Michael Kvium. Malerier og motiver, Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2002, 46.
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12 In the art-historical context theatricality, or the theatrical as an artistic device, has been discussed most clearly by the American art historian Michael Fried. In a now seminal essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’ from 1967, Fried offers a critical analysis of contemporary minimalist sculptures. He writes in this connection that these sculptures fail by not being autonomous works created for their own sakes; on the contrary they are works that create a situation which by definition includes the beholder. For Fried, with the minimalist sculpture the work becomes a scene in which the beholder participates. Art becomes theatre. Fried’s concept of theatricality has since become crucial to the understanding of installation art, for example. See Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995: 116-147. 13 Many critics have in fact associated Michael Kvium’s art with the Baroque. See for example Merete Sanderhoff, Sorte Billeder: Kunst og kanon, Copenhagen: Rævens Sorte Bibliotek, 2007, 148-149.
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14 As Michael Kvium has said in an interview: “So it was Francisco de Zurbarán who gave me the key to what one could do with the painting. I had a feeling that it could still do something and had a perverse urge to use it, and in the middle of the 80s I saw an exhibition of his work in Paris. I only knew his name peripherally, but there I saw his portraits of saints, which are fantastic to me because they are
so abstract. I saw his Santa Lucia, who is standing with a dish with her eyes on it. Another saint, Santa Agatha, stood with her breasts on a dish. I thought “What sort of language is this? It’s raving mad”. That prompted an extreme curiosity in me about Spanish painting and the Spanish Baroque, which is totally different from anything else. And then I went to Madrid to visit the Museo del Prado”. Tom Herman sen, ‘Kunst handler om at skære huller i overfladen’, in Real Monsters. Michael Kvium, eds. Gitte Ørskou and Stinna Toft, exhibition catalogue, Kunsten, 2013, 11. 15 Gesamtkunstwerk is a German concept from the mid-19th century, when the composer Richard Wagner used it in his writings to show how his ‘music drama’ was to be understood as the total integration of music, poetry and dance. 16 E.g. Tonny Toupé Show (1985), Johannes sidste ugudelige dage (1988), Russian Pizza Blues (1992) and No Man’s Land (2000). 17 As the art historian Gitte Ørskou described it, “the two men wearing suits attempt to do something, just anything, to inscribe a function in the empty grooves of the records and to release the silent desperation which can be read from their expressions. First they try to act as the pick-up by placing their index fingers on the discs, then they step on the records, listen to them, bite them and balance them on their fingers.” Gitte Ørskou, ‘Om Kviums video og performance’, in Circus Humanus, ed. Lennart Gottlieb,
exhibition catalogue, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 1997, 36. 18 Quoted in Lennart Gottlieb, Michael Kvium. Malerier og motiver, Copenhagen: Lindhart og Ringhof, 2002, 59. 19 Conversation between Andrea Rygg Karberg and Michael Kvium, Asserbo, May 12th 2016. 20 It is said that performance art is an art form that only arises as it is being performed. It is “live art by artists”, as RoseLee Goldberg has put it in her book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 16. 21 As early as the 1950s the British philosopher of language J.L. Austin defined the performative speech act as an utterance that effects an action, or as Austin put it, the performative indicates that “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action”. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 (1962), 6. 22 Gitte Ørskou, in ‘Uhyret indeni’, Real Monsters. Michael Kvium, eds. Gitte Ørskou and Stinna Toft, exhibition catalogue, Kunsten, 2013, 24. 23 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 2004, 26.
Michael Kvium, b. 1955, occupies an important position in Danish art. Since the 1980s he has depicted humanity with equal irony and seriousness. This catalogue takes us closer to Michael Kvium’s universe as it unfolds in the exhibition CIRCUS EUROPA. Step into the ring and meet the superannuated circus clowns, the corrupt judge, the dubious priest and the indifferent tourists. Read about the refugee crisis and climate challenges and see how art can respond to political reality.
Contributions by Andrea Rygg Karberg Camilla Jalving Carsten Jensen Michael Kvium
For CIRCUS EUROPA Michael Kvium has created his biggest immersive installation so far with brand new works. The richly illustrated catalogue focuses on Kvium’s practice and thoroughly documents the works in the exhibition as well as the underlying process.
Buy the catalogue at ARKEN or order it at arkenshop@arken.dk
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