Saggi Critici » About Things Appearing.
di Knut Nievers
Lena Liv’s photograph-based works contain a great deal of darkness and little light. Even things that seem quite blatant, as though they have been caught in a spotlight beam and abruptly illuminated seem unable to wrest themselves completely from the darkness.
For this reason Lena Liv’s images are often perceived as warnings that we should not forget; they resist loss of memory, and wrench the anonymity of faces and things that are witnesses of history into contemporary brightness that uses the forgotten and suppressed past to light up a social present – a present that seems able to keep itself alive only if it leaves all historical awareness behind it in order to hurl itself into its own wild days that reach their conclusion in an exaggerated sense of here and now. Recently the American film Titanic, which is breaking all previous box-office records at the time of writing, presented us with this kind of history-free feeling of the present, even though it seems to be recalling a historic event. But it does it in a way that knows historical “awareness” only in the form of fear of disaster, an awareness that tries to escape the knowledge that history does constantly repeat itself by making the fear of disaster subscribe to a sense of the present that can be sure of itself only in the ecstasy of its own self-destruction. Bungee-jumping is also a contemporary symbol of this kind: a leap into to an I-am feeling that gets a kick from the experience of being caught, but just before the catastrophe, namely by the elasticity of a rubber band that promises support, and is challenged as a life-span. It would seem that life as experienced is lived today mainly from the point of view of elasticity: tensile and material perishability tests are criteria for certainty of existence.
Placing Lena Liv’s photograph-based work in the context of current existential debate or banishing it to the realm of responsibility for history means on the one hand putting it at the mercy of relating to topicality, which would narrow its content value down to real or imagined contemporary problems, or pushing it into a field of pasts that have not been come to terms with, that have been left empty as a fallow area of bad conscience that may possibly never be walked on again. Certainly Lena Liv likes to use old photographs that she has found, around which some history has accrued, as a starting-point for her work but she is obviously not so concerned to wrest the people and things portrayed from oblivion as to preserve their anonymity and to shift them to a distance that gives their appearance a general, universal character.
If the starting material for Lena Liv’s work is photographic images, then the extraordinary thing about them is the way in which the artist treats and presents them. We have got used to very large-format photographs in art exhibitions, but Lena Liv takes her photographic resources into material and spatial dimensions that completely burst the frame of images and significantly change the pictorial content. The work “Ohne Titel (Flugzeug)” (Untitled (Aircraft)), 1995-1997 with the gigantic dimensions of 327 x 406 x 5 cm shows an aircraft engine, ripped out and smashed to pieces, lying on the ground. In the grey-black dark of the background parts of a facade with Windows are visible, reminiscent of factory architecture. We see smashed Windows and in terms of content immediately link this pictorial element with the crashed aircraft part, i.e. we read the picture as a chronological detail of war, disaster, destruction and death. This reading is certainly inevitable. Even an observer who had never witnessed such a situation would place the image in this kind of associative context; its dramatic appearance is enhanced by the contrast of light and darkness and that creates an “unpleasant” mood and fascination for the observer. Incidentally the starting material for this image carne from research carried out into the archives of Kiel and Schleswig by Lena Liv during two study-visits to the Schleswig-Holstein cultural centre in Salzau. But the origin of the picture is not of fundamental importance. It could have been taken “anywhere in the world”. But one could perhaps go further and not just assert the ubiquitous quality of the image but feel we should call it an image from the “archive” of the human sub-conscious.
But the reading of the image that I have described has to be linked with the form of presentation, which cannot be ignored. The picture is in a rusty iron frame and both broken up and structured by a grid of vertical and horizontal iron strips – also rusty. This structural, tectonic, panel-like grid presents an ordering pattern that at first glance seems to be in complete contrast with the content of the photographic image: construction and destruction. But the image does not remain confined within this strict dualism. It links the two planes in such a way that they support each other as conditions imposed and being imposed: the construction contains disaster, the disaster is caused by the construction. However, the work’s universal representational content has a surplus of affective power at its disposal invoked by material weight, the drama of the separation of darkness and light and the sadness of the motif.
Certainly the emotional quality of the image makes the content of what is represented subjective, but it also gives it essence: one does not have to be aware of Icarus to be touched by the engine lying smashed up on the ground; it has the quality of a physiognomy simply because the blades of its propellers still seem to be turning as if in a last rebellion against something that can only mean the end. (But that is something quite different from the kick received from an adventurous challenge to life, to return to the beginning of my essay). In this image, as in others by Lena Liv as well, there exists what I should like to call an Old Testament irreconcilability that could at best be bridged in Christian terms, but not removed. I do not mean cultural or psychological irreconcilability, but a break in the original creation that can be made tolerable not through comfort, but only through work, and perhaps joyful as well as a consequence of this.
The things that emerge in Lena Liv’s pictures -1 use the word advisedly, they emerge from the darkness into the light – and that also gave us the title for our exhibition – “buy” the intensity of their presence with an isolation that makes them look as though they are shut up or in quarantine. They have been captured and taken into spaces that are just as unavoidable as they are easily avoided: spaces of imprisonment and incurability, which is not the same as hopelessness. They are also spaces of silence, of time passing more slowly, but not of standstill.
Perhaps pictorial spaces are the actual event in the work of Lena Liv. By pictorial spaces I do not mean the spaces illustrated, but the spaces belonging to the images that appear. It is true even of small objects that they contain real, miniature spaces within themselves: how much more real are the spaces of the great works which the observer could enter, and which at the same time hold him at a distance, that compel him to reflect about what he has perceived! They take him in, but they reject him too. They require that a position be taken up, a decision made about whether to stay or go.
In one series of works Lena Liv confronts illustrations of objects with objects that are physically present, but that are just as artificially produced as the objects illustrated. The thing is the synthesis of the virtual object with its real version, without creating a congruency: the rent in the creation, the irreconcilability of the presence that is both real and ideal, an “unchaste Platonism” in which real life becomes involved with the ideas “indecently”.
On my daily walk into work in the Kiel Stadtgalerie, which is in a shopping centre immediately opposite the main station, I pass images of a current German reality that are becoming increasingly similar to Lena Liv’s images: images of poverty, of isolation, of material and psychological decay under the conditions of an aesthetic construction that can no longer keep in step with social reality to that extent, as it designs frames for conditions that burst the frame as images, however powerful that frame might seem to be. In a new sequence of works, which are reproduced on transparent film in this catalogue, Lena Liv uses the technique of back-glass photography (similar to the process previously used for plate photography). The gleaming, reflecting glass invokes a similar effect to the pictorial spaces of the installations and objects. It both distances the viewer from the image and includes him in it. In this way he becomes witness of an event in which things detach themselves from the darkness and step into the light of their appearance, without leaving the darkness completely behind them, but allowing this to be around them like a ground from which they are coming. The light in which they appear is not that of a sudden illumination or a harsh flash of lightning, but the light of a slow emergence.
Knut Nievers, Things