Saggi Critici » The Stillness of Things.
di Ralph Dorschner
“But the Mind, which ever ist, assuredly now too is that everything else also is, in the surrounding muchness and in the things aggregated together and in the things separated out.”
(Anaxagoras, 499/8 – 428/7 B. C. B.)
In his thoughts on Lena Liv’s works. Pier Vittorio Gatti points lo the “images… of timeless, pre-Socratic spaces, in which meditation on the specific image seems suspended over the spellbound universe of time…”, classifying that “time” not in the Heraclitean manner, as flowing, but, with Anaximander. as indefinite. This insight from pre-Socratic philosophy also provides a key lo Lena Liv’s installations: their theme is the Individual’s (or the object’s) relationship to Time.
Lena Liv uses the negatives of old photographs for her installations. The sometimes huge enlargement and the detaching of details from the context of the photograph they came from brings about the surreal effect that is special to these works. Human faces emerge as if veiled, even ghostly, from the darkness of their surroundings. Karl Ruhrberg speaks in this connection of ,,near-monochrome”.
The photographs are surrounded by rough iron constructions in shades of rust and grey. Yet the way they are built out, and have shelves with other objects on them, takes them beyond being just a frame.
Since the seventies, Lena Liv has been experimenting in working with paper. The objects incorporated in the installations (children’s shoes. toy railways, balls etc.) are the outcome of this confrontation with the material, since they are all modelled on the actual articles, in a complicated procedure using handmade paper. The consequences of this fact for the iconology of the works will be further discussed later.
Use of the paper objects sometimes breaks through the “ monochrome” aspect of the works; the blue colour that often turns up here is for Lena Liv a symbol of warmth, light and hope.
From rust-brown iron frames that recall the doorways of ancient tombs, people, especially children, peer out of the darkness: their accoutrements indicate that in their bodily existence they belonged lo an earlier age. The artist chooses child faces with serious expressions that confront the observer with the gravity of their message: at the moment one makes eye contact with them, their being, suggested through the medium of art, is already long past. They are no longer what they assert themselves to be. The melancholy feeling that arises results from the spectator’s identification with the person portrayed, from the certainty or being unable lo escape essentially the same fate.
In these works, Lena Liv, using other artistic means, attains what earlier artists, within a Christian hermeneutic, were capable of expressing. The writer ist reminded of the inscription on the coffin in Masaccio’s fresco of the Trinity in Florence: “IO. FU. GIÀ. QUEL. VOI. SETE: E QUEL CHI SON VOI. ANCOR. SARETE” (I was once what you are: and what I am, you shall yet be). Yet the statement of transience in Lena Liv’s work is linked not with the Christian doctrine of salvation, but with the ancient philosopher’s insight: ,,Mind is ever”.
On another plane, the works draw up to the surface of the observer’ s consciousness, from the mirk of the past, memories of childhood long put by, both positive and negative. It is Lena Liv’ s conviction that the experiences of the past are not lost, but accompany us, ever present, to come to the fore again in such moments. But ultimately this phenomenon too culminates in the recognition that the step out of childhood already means a little death.
The interplay of levels of reality is still further enhanced by the remaking in paper of the everyday articles incorporated in the installations. Just as the child figures are not real, but anonymous people whose true fate remains hidden from us, so the objects too are unreal, since their material nature takes any real utilization away.
The work ,,Suora con bambole” takes us to another qualitative level. From the iron frame, out of the dark, the massive face of a nun, surrounded by the white edge of the wimple and collar, stares at the spectator. In front of the frame, on the ground, as if at her feet, sit three rows of three black dolls, with no arms and skullcaps. Here the children (= dolls) of the earlier installations have now themselves turned into paper objects, helplessly exposed to the grip of adult authority, unable to offer resistance either mentally or physically. A further component is contained in the figure of the nun: just as in other installations of Lena Liv’s a citation of the Christian world appears. The interweaving of the doll motif with the figure of the nun ist not necessarily, however, to be understood as an attack on the institution of the church; instead, the artist is pointing in these works to shortcomings to be found within the community of faith, not least among the believers themselves. But this too is done by Lena Liv in a very quiet way, with no shocking.
One small installation shows the miniaturized copy of a famous Pietà. To right and left of it, the overall arrangement reminiscent of a home altar, are two small frames each with the same photograph of a young man. In his posture, his slicked hair and not least his facial expression, as it were distorted into a smile, he looks as unreal as one of those shiny pictures children stick in their albums.
One large untitled work, its triptych shape recalling a folding altar, shows at the sides the photograph of a slaughtered steer, fastened by the hind legs to the ceiling, with its body already far enough cut apart to give a free view of a heavy elderly man standing behind it in a white overall, bending slightly forward. Behind this man, only vaguely visible, is another slaughtered animal in the same position as the one in the foreground. Between the two halves of the animal’s body, a belt over the man’s right shoulder and a bar- shaped object he seems to be holding between the widely separated halves of the animal form a cross. On the middle panel the spectator sees a row of beds in a ward, the ones behind with people on them but the front one empty and unused. At the bottom of the panel, on the cross-member of the iron frame, stands a small box, also in iron, with the sides open showing the contents, a loosely rolled gauze bandage. Lena Liv’s theme here is once again the way different individuals are treated: while the human being will do anything to maintain his life and pursues this goal through medical intervention, the individual animal is denied the right to life in favour of its superior. The reference to cure in the form of the empty hospital bed and the bandage in the middle scene, bracketed by the bloody scene in the wings, has a downright cynical effect in its hopelessness.
One development in Lena Liv’s oeuvre is unmistakable: the subjects of the installations have become more aggressive. The works showing children in a quiet, almost internalized way done up to 1992 have given way to ones leading the observer from reflection on being in time to a confrontation with social phenomena. Common is the effort at a universal pictorial language that makes the work’ s intention understandable for the observer without further explanation.
The conclusion from Karl Ruhrberg’s statement that Lena Liv shapes ,,verbally inexpressible picture-stories” can perhaps be balanced with an insight from another pre-Socratic , Democritus: “There are two kinds of knowledge: one is real knowledge, the other shadowy. The shadowy includes all seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling; the other, the real, is quite separate from this … when the shadowy can do no more, neither see exactly, nor hear, nor smell, nor taste, nor feel, yet something much more subtle is involved … that escapes the sight of the eyes, then that can be caught by the sight of the mind”.
Ralph Dorschner