The Body Beneath byVictoria Duffee

The Body Beneath  * Anna Daniell, Birke Gorm, and Frida Orupabo

BY VICTORIA DUFFEE

The cruelty of white supremacy, sprinkled everywhere, is not always something tangible like a billy club; nor are the microscopic bacte*  The title of this essay is a reference I found while diving deep into Frida ria that can tickle your throat and/or end your life. Recent events Orupabo´s ever-evolving of racial violence and viral death bring more shapeless culprits to catalogue of images on Instagram via her page, light. Parallel to this thought: the body is crucial as it gives form to @neimepebe. It is the title of a 1970 horror life but the “self” that I feel like I am couldn’t be described as a body movie about a vampire alone. Art objects (excluding paintings) that deal with the body tend family, but I think it speaks to a second kind to be critically considered in relation to the corpse. Anna Daniell, of space we occupy. Birke Gorm, and Frida Orupabo are three artists that through scale, subject, and presentation make sculptures that are analogous to bodies. However, through their materiality and process, they challenge the reading of the body as a corpse and invite for an engagement with their art that insists on taking the unknowable seriously.

She’s so Lucky, she’s a Star

Anna Daniell spends most of her studio hours planning and organising experiences for her sculptures. Some of them drove in a Tesla with suicide doors; a composer has written music for some; scientists have spent time talking to others. They have rich cultural lives. Even though there is nothing comical about the way they look, they’re funny. I think their experiences affect their energy. Anna describes herself whipping up their forms quickly. Her materials are chosen for their lightness and absorbency of paint. I think she takes for granted the years of practice it took to be able to make something from scratch that will stand up, let alone to control how it looks. Either way, it looks like a lot of rubbing is involved. Anna told me anecdotally about a community that had a secret. When the young people came of age they were told

Anna Daniell, Emma and William, 2017, shoes, radio, candle, clay. Photo by Anna Daniell. Courtesy the artist and Galleri Brandstrup

this secret by the elders. No one outside the community knows the secret.

In their form, the works sway towards figuration but then, just before indicating a familiar shape, they become a magnified blobby echo of classical sculpture. Like a gauzy cloth blowing onto a torso carved in marble. Like a person frozen while trying to get out of a bag. Smaller individual components stand alone or intermix with larger forms. Each 3D work has a 2D counterpart, like a mirror only the sculpture can be found in. Years ago, I played music to her sculptures at her solo exhibition SCULPTURE CLUB at Podium, an artist-run space in Oslo. When I went to her studio, one of the works from that show was assembled. I remembered it like an old friend. The forms are the pasta, the experience is the sauce.

Rhythm of the Night

Birke Gorm works in a wide variety of techniques but her materials are limited to natural fibers and chunks of wood and stone. In one series, Common Crazies, her work intersects directly with text as each wall-based work spells out a line from Judy Grahn’s Common Women Poems in ripped-up necktie linings. I think these works are key to understanding Birke’s larger agenda. Her practice is dedicated to recreating labour that has been put onto women throughout time. She languishes in meticulous handmaking, every hour an hour of love. The process suggests that the collective inner lives of women are like streams floating around anywhere; a stream that can be accessed through this kind

of work; and thus, that it offers us the potential to communicate back in time. Her recent figurative sculptures are “stone warrior” assemblages built to the scale and relative weight of a baby. They are made of terracotta stones, building materials washed up on the beach. The sea has rounded their edges as if they were any other stone. Birke compares finding these particular pebbles to foraging. It is believed that women were the foragers of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I would guess the specifics of gender were more blurry back then, so I’ll go with a feminine-gentile-notinto-stabbing-animals-kind of energy rather than to say it was only women. These stones, the artwork, and action, can exist way longer than any person can expect to. Women’s work gets the raw deal in art in terms of price and attention, obviously! When we spoke on the phone, Birke told me the history of “crazy quilting:” at the turn of the century, particularly in the US, it was popular among women to sew together scraps of fabric freely, making up no specific pattern. Some of the quilts would take years to make, even a lifetime. These emerged around the same time as abstract painting; and I, an American with a Master’s degree in Textile Art, only just learned about them now.

“THEY’RE JUST PAPER— THEY CAN’T BE KILLED!”

Viral Imagery

Frida Orupabo’s collages create singular images, flattening the differences between time and space. They contain the history and complexities of the global black experience. Though there are visual references to colonial times, it’s important to me to recall that the work is made in a Scandinavian context. Orupabo is Norwegian and each of her works are, in a sense, projections of herself. This is not work about racism in a different context at a different time; it speaks directly to the fact that Norway and Scandinavia are not excluded from racism and white supremacy; no dismissing this as an American problem. Us liberal, bohemian, nice white people must take accountability. Elegance and poetics deliver these hard truths sweetly. The formal beauty of her work is undeniable and when you think about it in the context of recent art history, she manages to overcome the obstacle that took down post-internet art: it translates from the digital to the physical without becoming redundant, decorative or losing its intrinsic value. She talks about the trouble with low resolution in her work. She explains that she ends up having to swap out components, like arms and legs, for others. I think the element of relinquishing control is a way of making peace, and collaborating creatively, with technology.

When I saw Frida’s exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus last May, the scale of the paper works mounted onto aluminum felt like they were in the room more than on the wall. This display of the black-and-white imagery is striking and also confrontational. Paradoxically to the claims of this essay, their strange proportions and sometimes contorted postures can look like a mangled body, but their eyes stay open, never blinking, never dying. They’re just paper—they can’t be killed! But what about the souls of the actual individuals in the photos? They were real people, and understanding their placement in history is haunting, and something I am confronted

with under their gaze. Structurally, the system that an artist like Frida Orupabo is supposed to rise up through is broken. Her obvious success is in spite of that: it’s clear that the Scandanavian art world scrambled to meet the demand for her perspective in the market (a perspective that Arthur Jafa was able to identify). That is something white artists, galleries, and institutions should be recognizing in themselves under her artworks’ gazes. I am.

The realm of the uncanny and the excitement around artificial intelligence, robotics, and dildos is so tangible and easy to see in action. It may, therefore, be easier to talk and write about such subjects without sounding like an unqualified astrologer. But it’s important to allow for ourselves to interpret the effects that art can have on its environment, and the people who experience it as a real power, so that we can respect human experience and the qualities of life with the same wonder we possess for technological progression, blood and guts. ◻