Barry Anderson THE
JANUS RESTRAINT
Barry Anderson THE
1
JANUS RESTRAINT
artwork created September 2012 through April 2013 in Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, USA; Skagaströnd, Iceland; and Mývatn, Iceland artwork first exhibited May and June 2013 at The Studios Inc. Exhibition Space in Kansas City, Missouri, USA
On the Cusp of Change: The Janus Restraint: The Ascension Stepping into Barry Anderson’s exhibition The Janus Restraint. The Ascension at The Studios Inc (Kansas City) is like plunging down the rabbit hole into an alternative universe where humans and landscapes transform at surreal speeds to the sound of haunting instrumental music. Poetic videos, photographs, animation, and mixed media components map out a mythology of initiation driven by play and fraternal bonding. Inspired by Anderson’s recent journey to Iceland and his ongoing fascination with spatio-temporal disjunction, the installation evokes a meditative mood and a melancholy longing for extending the past into the present and the future. It simultaneously calls to mind the complex mythology of initiation invented by Matthew Barney and the transcendental time and space characteristic of Bill Viola’s video art. The title of Anderson’s exhibition seems to be a more or less intended wink at both artists’ influence, given its indirect association with Barney’s Drawing Restraint series begun in 1987 and Viola’s Ascension video installation (2000). Yet, Anderson’s palimpsestic representation of time also stands apart from that of his precursors since it is anchored neither around a complete mythology centered on one protagonist nor around the alluring promise of afterlife. The non-linear narratives he charts merge the time of humans with that of nature, underscoring their fragile condition and calling into question the possibility of eternal return. Placed at the exhibition entrance, Finnean, a kaleidoscopic video portrait of a young boy, serves as a threshold guardian of the otherworldly realm designed by Anderson. His image is repeatedly fractured by angular criss-crossing V-shapes, which point to the plasticity of identity. The shifting coordinates are suggestive of the boy’s transformation. His selfhood becomes increasingly multi-layered and private, forbidding easy access to its innermost content as experiences accumulate. Despite his young age, the boy appears highly conscious of the irreversible passage of time as he gazes forward with determination. His only escape from the external flow of disruptive mutations is the plunge into the world of memories and fantasy. The boy closes his eyes, seemingly becoming absorbed into the projections of his mind, which nonetheless prove to be equally elusive and labyrinthine. The boy is Finn, Anderson’s nine-year old son, whose adventures and reflections during the transition from childhood to adolescence serve as an impetus for the artist’s exploration of the initiation theme. Yet, Finn, the artist’s alter ego at a different age, is not the sole protagonist of the narrative. He is merely one embodiment of the endlessly fragmented and multiplying figures of Janus that resist absolute control in spite of Anderson’s cunning use of time lapses, reverses and loops. The motif of duality and metamorphosis is all pervasive in the exhibition irrespective of the medium: the Entries video presents the story of two boys seemingly intent on discovering the entrance into another universe, a photograph portrays twin-like
figures wearing Frankenstein masks, and two Gemini Revolution1 soundtracks corresponding to different videos intertwine in mesmerizing tonalities. Human bodies and land formations appear to be composed out of the same primeval matter, arranged in similar configurations. A photograph of twin ice chunks melting against a visceral red background is suggestively titled Ice Bone to indicate the vulnerability of human life and planetary balance. The temporalities of humans, nature, and sci-fi beings fuse under the sign of perpetual duality and transformation. The speed of change becomes somewhat relative as its flux cannot be fully reversed or stopped. Nonetheless, what seems somewhat repeatable at the level of the macro-cosmos appears irretrievable at the level of individual lived experience. Straddling the path between childhood and adolescence, two boys metaphorically assume the roles of mythical beings participating in the creation of the world in the woods in the Entries video. One of them carefully molds a spherical shape out of earth. This ball vividly recalls the shape of our planet, which becomes as vulnerable as a toy in the hands of children. The motif re-appears in the exhibition at the level of another reference to play. In 9 is the Key, a baseball bat seems to defy gravity after having cast an invisible ball through a mirror disk attached to the gallery wall. Anderson collapses the differences between the temporal frameworks of identity formation and world creation by attuning them to the same mystical rhythm. The complex interweaving of these processes is reminiscent of Stan Brackhage’s experimental film Dog Star Man (19611964) and Terrence Malick’s feature film The Tree of Life (2011), both of which combine human and cosmic events to reveal their mutual unpredictability, tension, and precariousness. To the incommensurable time of the cosmos and the constraining time of individual life, Anderson adds the hypnotic time of virtual worlds. In four animations titled Totemic Sonars, displayed in circular screens resembling submarine windows, Anderson splices together vivid abstract patterns with images from all the other exhibition components. He names this visual interplay “a sampled stream of consciousness.”2 The boundaries between reality and fantasy become fuzzy as the abstract motifs overshadow the otherwise easily identifiable figurative elements, inviting the viewer to relinquish fixed spatio-temporal coordinates. Among the clips incorporated in the bewitching visual texture, Anderson inserts images captured from Minecraft, an open-ended video game played by his son that enables users to design virtual spaces and communities. World building and world picturing constitute salient elements in any initiation process, be it part of ancient ritualistic practices or contemporary modes of negotiating selftransformation. However, the easiness with which new worlds and identities come into being in the virtual realm also implies a more ominous message concerning their equally rapid potential dissolution. Anderson’s only large-scale video projection in the 1 Gemini Revolution is an electronic band founded by brothers Dedric and Delaney Moore, who compose ambient music with psych rock influences. 2 Conversation with Barry Anderson. Wednesday, May 22, 2013.
exhibition, Fragments of Space [ST2], denotes this hazardous condition. It immerses the viewer into an endless corridor of luminous patterns derived from a five-pointed star that seems to recede or project with the creative or destructive force of a powerful energy source that escapes human control. The rhythm of sounds and images constantly alternates. While images in the Totemic Sonar animations appear to shift psychedelically, ice formations in the Kristalform video gradually expand in a rectangular monitor as more and more crystal patterns slowly flourish against a deep blue background. Yet, the time of both components is equally manipulated. The apparently natural expansion of the ice actually corresponds to its accelerated dissolution as Anderson displays the reversed time-lapse sequence of its melting process in order to suggest its growth. The end paradoxically returns to the beginning. This simulated return of matter to its solid state hints at the human intoxicating desire for endless accumulation and evolution. A compelling urge for arresting transformation forcefully transpires in Anderson’s work despite the psychedelic flux of images and sounds that suffuse some of his animations. This desire transpires at the level of his reversal of spatial and temporal registers. Relying on a point and counter-point mode of display, Anderson draws correlations between space and time reversals. He juxtaposes Spakonufell, a video showing upside-down images of a solitary mountain peak and its reflection in the water, to Myvatn, a video of billowing volcanic steam played in reverse so that the vapor appears to be reabsorbed into the earth. The mystery enveloping marvelous natural scenes is deepened by these spatial and temporal reversals that cast doubt on the actuality of the observed phenomena. The viewers’ sense of wonder is further enhanced by their encounter with Bifröst, a periscopic installation in front of which they need to kneel down in order to gaze at a video of the aurora borealis streaming across snowy mountain peaks. Anderson explains that he chose this mode of display in order to engender an intimate connection to the vastness of the mountainous scene, hence reifying to some degree his own experience of encountering the Icelandic landscape. The dark environment of The Studios Inc enhances the mysterious quality of the sublime setting. In the proximity of Anderson’s periscopic device, viewers cannot help but direct their gaze to the tiny window openings in the gallery ceiling, which render them aware of the variations in outdoor light intensity and heighten the impression of transience suggested by the aurora borealis. Neither outside nor inside the actual and imaginary worlds projected by Anderson, exhibition visitors experience a liminal state, hesitating between a desire for immersion and a need to step outside the frame of representation to seek symbolical connections between multiple visual and acoustic episodes. The installation includes its own archeology as characters, natural formations, and symbols are repeatedly encountered across various media. The abstract “V” motif is almost as pervasive and mutable as the
symbol employed by Thomas Pynchon in his postmodern novel V. It concomitantly denotes progression and regression since Anderson often presents it both upright and upside down in the animations. It can be associated with multiple natural elements represented in the exhibition, including a split tree trunk through which two boys are peeping in a photograph and the pyramidal shape of the mountain peak in the Myvatn video. The upside-down V-shape of an islet of 24 speakers, which emits the sound of an Icelandic child’s voice recounting the Nordic myth of Gylfanning, is strikingly analogous to the mound of volcanic rocks through which steam seeps down into the earth in the Myvatn video. Similarly, the brotherhood between two boys playing in the woods in Entries is paralleled by that of two other children of a similar age who gaze matter-of-factly outside the frame of a black and white photograph. The relation between index and trace is constantly subverted through the multiplication of pairs and analogies between nature and humanity, actual places and imaginary spaces. Paradoxically calling for the restraint of Janus while unveiling his multifaceted and hardly controllable identity, Anderson’s The Janus Restraint. The Ascension purposefully defies a unitary narrative. The cyclical time of myth is partly broken. Stories remain open-ended despite their visible entanglement. As one moves through the gallery, figures appear to mutate into one another just as water fluctuates between multiple physical states. Perfect correspondences are repeatedly upset. Nonetheless, each visual and sound element plays a key role in the overall framework of the exhibition, making it hard to imagine the exhibition components in separation from each other. They all contribute to a multivalent representation of time and its elusive incarnations. The Janus Restraint. The Ascension encapsulates the disjointed relation to time characteristic of the condition of contemporaneity, which is eloquently described by art historian Terry Smith in terms of an enhanced consciousness of “the contemporaneousness of lived difference, the coexistence of incommensurable viewpoints, and the absence of an encompassing narrative.”3 Anderson’s exhibition powerfully conveys our teetering on the cusp of different time periods and ages. Purposefully resisting a unitary mythology or a uniquely biographical story, it betrays our growing skepticism towards “grand narratives”4 and our increasing realization of deeply interconnected times and spaces that repeatedly expand, erode, and mold our sense of identity. Cristina Albu June 2013 3 Terry Smith, “ “Our” Contemporaneity?” in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson ed., Contemporary Art. 1989 to the Present (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 18. 4 Lyotard introduced the term “grand narratives” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) to refer to a set of totalizing explanations strategically employed to convey a unitary sense of history and to suppress all contradictions.
Then said Gangleri: “The sun fares swiftly, and almost as if she were afraid: she could not hasten her course any the more if she feared her destruction.” Then Hárr made answer: “It is no marvel that she hastens furiously: close cometh he that seeks her, and she has no escape save to run away.” Then said Gangleri: “Who is he that causes her this disquiet?” Hárr replied: “It is two wolves; and he that runs after her is called Skoll; she fears him, and he shall take her. But he that leaps before her is called Hati Hródvitnisson. He is eager to seize the moon; and so it must be.” Then said Gangleri: “What is the race of the wolves?” Hárr answered: “A witch dwells to the east of Midgard, in the forest called Ironwood: in that wood dwell the troll-women, who are known as Ironwood-Women. The old witch bears many giants for sons, and all in the shape of wolves; and from this source are these wolves sprung. The saying runs thus: from this race shall come one that shall be mightiest of all, he that is named Moon-Hound; he shall be filled with the flesh of all those men that die, and he shall swallow the moon, and sprinkle with blood the heavens and all the lair; thereof-shall the sun lose her shining, and the winds in that day shall be unquiet and roar on every side. So it says in Völuspá: Eastward dwells the Old One | in Ironwood, And there gives birth | to Fenrir’s brethren; There shall spring of them all | a certain one, The moon’s taker | in troll’s likeness. He is filled with flesh | of fey men. Reddens the gods’ seats | with ruddy blood-gouts; Swart becomes sunshine | in summers after, The weather all shifty. | Wit ye yet, or what?” Then said Gangleri: “What is the way to heaven from earth?” Then Hárr answered, and laughed aloud: “Now, that is not wisely asked; has it not been told thee, that the gods made a bridge from earth, to heaven, called Bifröst? Thou must have seen it; it may be that ye call it rainbow.’ It is of three colors, and very strong, and made with cunning and with more magic art than other works of craftsmanship. But strong as it is, yet must it be broken, when the sons of Múspell shall go forth harrying and ride it, and swim their horses over great rivers; thus they shall proceed.” Then said Gangleri: “To my thinking the gods did not build the bridge honestly, seeing that it could be broken, and they able to make it as they would.” Then Hárr replied: “The gods are not deserving of reproof because of this work of skill: a good bridge is Bifröst, but nothing in this world is of such nature that it may be relied on when the sons of Múspell go a-harrying.”
translated from Gylfanning, an ancient Icelandic text by Snorri Sturluson