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AARHUS KUNSTMUSEUM
DEMO
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Still from “Inflated Constructions”,
2000
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INSTALLATION
Birgit Johnsen & Hanne Nielsen
17 June - 10 September 2000
demo 3/2000
©Aarhus Kunstmuseum and the artists
This catalogue has come forward in connection with the exhibition:
Hanne Nielsen & Birgit Johnsen
Inflated Constructions
Aarhus Kunstmuseum 17.6. - 10.10 2000
Curator: Anders Kold
Assistant: Lise Jakobsen
Installation: Hanne Nielsen, Birgit Johnsen, Kurt Hansen and Jørn Andersen
Translation: Ulrikka S. Gernes
Body Therapy - an introduction to Johnsen and Nielsen
By Lennart Gottlieb
Inflated Constructions is the title of Birgit Johnsen and Hanne Nielsen’s new video installation. As always, they keep up appearances and play it cool. All their joint video works carry strikingly artistically correct and humourless titles, which relate in a deliberately abstract way to what is usually the very concrete content of the videos.
What we are presented with is not exactly funny either. On the contrary. And even so the videos by Birgit Johnsen and Hanne Nielsen are almost always very funny, although at times black humour manifests itself in a most unfeminine way. Like all good storytellers, Johnsen and Nielsen seem to enjoy sticking splinters from their magic-mirror reflections of reality into the eyes of their audience.
In a paper on the video installation, the artists explain that the work “deals with those distances which in different ways develop between the viewer and the work” and that to a high degree, the installation deals with “images of identity in a gender context, which is activated”. Basically, the video installation - apart from a so-called flip book with a scene from the video which one can leaf through - consists of two parts that are played back, each having their own format. One is projected onto the back wall of the installation room in a projection that is about three meters high. The other part is screened on a monitor in the front of the room, approximately 4-5 meters before the large projection.
In the “inflated”, projected part of the installation, a series of monotonous sequences are presented. Here we see a woman dressed in dark clothes repeating the same action: she squats in front of a man wearing a white shirt and his trousers are pulled down around his feet. The man’s head is cropped off from the section of the image. The woman puts a balloon on a dildo, which is strapped to the man’s crotch. Through the dildo, she inflates a balloon, using a pump. With the balloon against or inside her mouth - you cannot see this clearly - she leans back and tiptoes backwards, following the steady expansion of the balloon, which is being inflated as if it were being given a blowjob. At last she removes the inflated balloon from the dildo, and walks toward the camera. From the balloon she proceeds to shape an animal, which she plays with right before the viewer’s face. Simultaneously she utters that cliché sound associated with the animal.
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Still from “Attributes”,
1996-1997
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The second part of the video, which is screened on a monitor, runs in an accelerated speed and shows the first part of the pump sequence. But here, the scene is interrupted every time by the balloon’s bursting. The scene showing the final burst is repeated very quickly 5-10 times with an added bang sound having the effect that the balloon appears to be shot out from the dildo.
As with the hollowly laconic and minimal but precise titles, the form utilised by Johnsen and Nielsen has been reduced to the absolutely necessary; it is unfailingly aesthetic. Here, nothing is left to chance. Like in the masterpiece, Attributes, from 1996. Here, the man makes a methodical commentary and skins a rabbit with surgical precision, whereupon he silently dresses it up in baby clothes. As in Inflated Constructions, the central theme of the narrative here bifurcates itself into two parts: one idiotic and one more ordinary. The order has been reversed, but the effect is the same. The second part of the installation, in comparison with the first, is more than just laugh provoking; it becomes sick and downright accusative.
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Still from “Attributes”,
1996-1997
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The terrifying man, obviously suffering compulsion neurosis, in Attributes, with his meticulous corpse-cutter hands, is replaced here by the woman, who, with her adroitly manipulating mouth and fingers regresses into childhood in a mechanical repetition compulsion as she faces the passive man. For his part he calls to mind the naked lying man in the grotesque Construction in Space, from 1996, in which a model plane is circling at the end of a string tied to the man’s penis as he lies still on a table out side. I wonder if women and men see the same thing going on here?
The actors in Inflated Constructions, are playing without any pleasure, seemingly sneering at sexuality through a repetition of images (scenes) covering the same trauma, the same unfulfilled desire. And on the monitor, the banging ejaculations, which do not exactly amount to any release but are merely a pre-release, a symbolic discharge that leads nowhere. Here, as in the other videos by Johnsen and Nielsen, which employ props associated with children and childhood, you cannot play your way into anything at all. They are working, in a literal sense, with a fixed camera and whenever it is moved, it can’t really catch sight of or grasp hold of anything (see: Grenåvej (1995) and Beyond Reach (1996)). But it is precisely the monotony and the calmness here that tug at all the cultural levels of content within the theme. From the bedroom to the public regulation of sexual behaviour. In much the same manner as it is conceivable that your attitude to well-meaning animal lovers, who want to humanise and domesticate animals, might be substantially altered after having seen the dressing scene in Attributes, sex and body therapy will not mean quite the same thing after having met the “inflated constructions”.
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Installation photo “Grenåvej”,
1995-1998
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It is the rawness of the content and the formal, aesthetic confidence that render the videos that Birgit Johnsen and Hanne Nielsen have jointly created since 1994, so relevant and so fundamentally entertaining. Aarhus Kunstmuseum first acquired videos by the artists in 1997. Despite the fact they are not entirely unknown internationally, it is a great pleasure for the museum to present the premiere of Inflated Constructions as a link in the ongoing demo-exhibitions. Accordingly, the museum would like to issue a warm round of thanks to the two artists. Also because they have agreed to supervise the process of installing the work inside the museum. We would also like to thank art historian Sanne Kofod Olsen who is contributing an article, which focuses especially on the gender-theoretical aspects pertinent to this installation and other works by Johnsen and Nielsen.
The exhibition is supported by the Center for Dansk Billedkunst (Danish Contemporary Art Foundation) and the Kulturministeriets Udviklingsfond. The artists have also received support from the Aarhus Kommunes Kulturpulje for the production of the flipbook.
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