TEKSTY

Notes on I. N. Kjær’s As to ‘and days with Henrietta’

Ed. Martin Hentschel: Out of the North. Contemporary Art from Denmark and Sweden. Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart 24. September bis 15. November 1998, Stuttgart 1998, pp. 65–69.

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I. N. Kjær: As to ‘and days with Henrietta’, 1997, mixed media, 300 × 300 × 370 cm.

In 1994 I. N. Kjær wrote a text with the title “The inhalation of the massive” concerning primary-smoking, object and death, inhalatorial compulsion, and the smoking body. This text is practically unreadable, which does not mean that it does not say anything. Nevertheless, the language of this text echoes the formal language in As to “and days with Henrietta”, which could provoke some questions on the relation between form and its filters as well as circulation and its obstructions.

To be social means to be qualified to communicate with other socially qualified beings, i.e. participate in the circulation of meaning. Asocial persons are thus those who are not qualified or are disqualified from social interaction. This is not the same a being anti-social, which involves the desire to detach oneself from social interaction, as do fugitives, criminals, ascetics and other fanatics. But fugitives, criminals and fanatics are still interesting from the point of view of the social: they are to be caught, punished or convinced of the superiority of social interaction and reintegrated in its transactions.

The asocial being or behaviour is in a way reluctantly bypassed by social interaction and the circulation of forms, and this occurs without any dialectics. The asocial being or behaviour is a detached, dumb and absent-minded parallel to the qualified person or behaviour. This seems to apply to forms as well: if form are qualified objects, i.e. objects with an aesthetic surplus value then anti-forms are in this context formal criminals, ascetics or fugitives – all of whom we know from the heroic avantgarde – and as such qualified forms, even if negatively qualified. Form without qualification must then be, if my reasoning is appropriate, dumb, detached and distracted forms. Dumb like plastic, detached like smoke, distracted with regard to their articulation just like our artist’s infamous notions of “inter-objectality” and “one and a half televisions”, which in a broader sense implies “one and a half sculptures” as well. The idea of “one and a half sculptures” has haunted the artist for a while, for instance, in the case of the on/off Scuipture from 1993. Essentially, this sculpture did not act in any hostile way toward the tradition of minimal sculpture or radical painting, but just as a blurred version of these traditions. The picture plane was partly the dark glass of a TV that had been switched off or the electronic dust from one that was switched on but ‘distracted’, as it was disconnected from any sender. The form was cubic in the relations 2 : 1 : 1 – a typical minimal proportion one could say – as TV sets in a sense evoke a dilettantish vision of minimal art in the same way as industrial designers often appear to be ludicrous minimal artists. The infiniteness of the minimal sculpture thus finds its distracted version in the notion of “one and a half”-sculptures.

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I. N. Kjær: On/Off Sculpture, 1993, mixed media, dimensions variable.

If minimal art aimed to establish a language of forms based on primary qualities, a qualification of pure forms as a mode of aesthetic communication, then As to “and days with Henrietta” is not opposed to the formal language of, for instance, minimal art, but rather appears to be a distracted version of its formal language, utterly missing the point of its fundamental grammar. No opposition, no inversion, and no irony is really to be seen, but only the same enigmatic dumbness, which we know from idiots or, more commonly, absent-minded people: a kind ot irritating indifference. You try to experience the diffusely articulated ‘sculpture’. It does not respond. The semi-visible over-dimensioned object obstructs your way and vision. You do not respond.

In this setting of formal asociality and dumbness, objects relate to vision as air to respiration and conversation to meaning. The world is not non-objective, but the objects are suffocating and the subjects are smoking. It is a blurred, cloudy and noisy world, stuffed with distortions and filters, all of which make the interrelation between subjects and objects look ludicrous and compulsive.

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I. N. Kjær: ECHO/Selected Space, 1993, photograph, dimensions variable.

The ‘inter-objectal’ plastic wrapping in As to “and day with Henrietta” corresponds to what the act of smoking is for the respiratory organs and to what conversation is for the production of meaning. Smoking and conversation are related in a, if not complicated, then at least intricate way. What is interesting about smoking and conversation is that they make use of the same physical organs to link air to meaning. This linking, and sometimes even confusion, is emphasized when the circulation of air or meaning is disturbed or obstructed. Too much talking and too much smoking cause, which is well known, similar effects: coughing, dehydration, isolation and addiction; but even under normal circumstances smoking and conversation are necessarily characterized by short moments of asphyxiation, using the respiratory process as vehicle for the distortion and production of amorphous ‘inter-objectality’: smoke, halitosis, and all the strange guttural sounds accompanying the circulation of air and production of meaning. In is world we all smoke, suffer from halitosis and emit guttural sounds; they are only the formal adhesives necessary for our existence and participation in social transactions.

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I. N. Kjær: Dead Beat Icon, 1993, photograph, dimensions variable.

To smoke while engaged in conversation can thus be a good idea if you want to attach an aesthetic surplus value to you words. They could easily be given an extra nervous, arrogant, elegant or rude twist with the innocent addition of a cigarette, pipe or cigar to your respiratory arsenal. Yes, one could even say that the smoke gives the words weight and form, even if light and amorphous. On the other hand: when you sometimes find yourself distracted and your interlocutor’s talk obscure, you can always draw on your cigarette and inhale the no longer meaningful sound of the word as if diluted in the smoke. I suspect it is something like this to which our artist alludes with the unsightly title “the inhalation of the massive”. Of course, this has nothing to do with smoking, but concerns the sculpturing of social addiction: the compulsive inhalation of the social. The equation could be the following:

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Figur.

where the first proposition concerns social interaction in a conversation and the denominator concerns the production of forms.

This, I would say, explains perfectly well not only why we get addicted to cigarettes (which is trivial), but, furthermore, why sculptures concerning the social are so irritating, given their indifference and formal compulsion.

Jan Bäcklund