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local subjects and
(very) private politics
by Sanne Kofod Olsen
The local is only
a fragmented set of possibilities that can be articulated into a
momentary politics of time and place. Elspeth Probyn (1)
Kathrine, Bent, Ingeborg
and Søren Welling are all new characters in the work of Gitte
Villesen. Although they are very different from one another they
have one thing in common: they are passionately interested in objects
of different kinds. Kathrine and Bent love and collect lace. Ingeborg
is obsessed with oddities - or so it seems - and strange phenomena
in nature. The late Søren Welling created his own world in
his small town museum: an almost complete reconstruction of a Danish
small town with church, school, theater, traditional house interiors
and all the other things that would belong in a small country town
towards the end of the last century. Another thing they all have
in common is their affiliation to the Danish provinces - something
that is very typical for Villesen's work in generel. This focus
on the local is what I would like to consider here in relation to
the different persons presented.
The local is an issue
often written about within post-modernist theory and then seen in
a local-global dichotomy relationship. However, I would prefer to
relate the concept of the local to feminism and post-colonialism;
discourses within which the local implies a kind of politics of
the place and/or the body. Even though this is not supposed to be
about the politics of the minority groups of society in opposition
to white western man. This is not about the politics of the “other”
in the sense of the one excluded from Western discourse: rather,
it is about the politics of a single individual who does not belong
to broader groups in society (such as man, woman, lesbian, Asian,
Jew) but to even smaller groups in society such as buskers, lace
lovers or eccentrics - in other words, the minority of the ordinary.
To relate Villesen's descriptive works of real life characters to
feminist discourse might seem tendentious to anyone without a specific
political agenda. However, I think this is one way of looking at
these works.
Basically, I base
this on the idea that feminism and cultural studies in general and
the cultural production that
accompanied them had a significant influence on the arts in the
1990s. Especially important here is the investigation of the self
and of differentiated subjectivities within feminism and related
theories, which have since become major issues in contemporary art.
With the political agenda changing towards a more or less apolitical
dialogue, content individualizes into an extremely crystallized
and pluralistic subject matter that is not partaking in any common
cause but instead withdrawing into private world of the individual.
In this process the political can - as a possibility - remain, but
only in the form of very personal politics that do not include collective
or greater ideologies.
The works of Gitte
Villesen suggest partly the concern with differentiated subjectivities,
with people and their lives and partly the personal politics of
the subjects within the local context. Preceded by the Willy video-series
the video is about the passion for specific objects, in this case
it is lace: Kathrine makes it and Bent collects it.(2) Lace-making
is an old Danish tradition, practiced especially in the southern
part of Denmark. Nowadays, lace has become collector's item. If
it is especially beautifully done it can achieve high prices at
auctions or in the retail trade. Traditionally, lace-making was
(and still is) a women’s craft, but today there are not many
women left who can still make lace. It is a dying profession.
Thus, the focus on
a vanishing past constitutes a secondary signification which lies
in the role play in the video and the additional documentation that
explains the events leading up to the artist's meeting with Bent
and Kathrine. Obviously, the gender roles are very traditional:
a woman producer of handicraft items and a male collector and benefactor;
a woman in a traditional domestic though productive role and an
active, organizing and outgoing man. However, these roles are also
very ambiguous: on the one hand we see the woman as producer (a
traditional man’s role when it comes to the history of the
creation of art) and additionally a woman who was a skilled lace
maker and who could actually exploit this to make an income; and
on the other hand although the man seems well aware of his masculinity
and masculine pose, he succumbs at the same time to a passion for
lace - something obviously belonging to the sphere of conventionally
feminine attributes. Bent's traditional male attitude towards
Kathrine (and Gitte as well) and his view on life appears self-confident
and well-bred, even though he seems well aware of the ‘role’
3 (a conventional male pose) he is playing: Villesen emphasizes
this even further by informing us in the additional text that Bent
and the artist made a wager on whether she would be married with
children or not by the age of 25. Of course Bent lost.
The feature on people
and their passion is presented here as a fragmented description
of life that includes a characterization of norms within a non-specific
small community or a local setting. In this case the local exposes
affirmative domestic standards that exist in contemporary society.
Nonetheless, a certain ambiguity remains through the observation
that the norms and standards, apparently present in the video, do
not seem quite so stereotyped at second glance than they appeared
at first. Avoiding an ostentatiously critical stance, Villesen establishes
a distance between herself, Bent and Kathrine by actively intervening
in this conventional location and emphasizing the generation span
and disagreement on gender roles between herself, Kathrine and Bent:
yet, this is a disagreement that might not be there at all, because
of Bent’s ambiguous behavior and Kathrine’s productive
role. Nonetheless, the local becomes a space of generation shifts
in which Villesen becomes an observer who will not only preserve
the production of lace but also a scheme of norms belonging to a
vanishing society. But yet again, this is undermined by the contradictionary
aspects in the whole scenery.
Kathrine and Bent
are characterized by Villesen through a low-tech video screening.
Villesen as the observer and camera holder is evidently present,
emphasized by the fact that she continously and loudly encourages
the two participators to say something about their common interest
in lace and tell something about what they are doing together. She
is not leading the course of events but pushing them in a specific
direction.
The same procedure
is apparent in the video of Ingeborg the Busker Queen. In this video
we meet Ingeborg who seems at first glance quite ordinary but at
a closer look is not ordinary at all. The video was taped through
in days. In the first sequence Ingeborg is laughing at the camera.
In the next we are presented with her rats who refuse to leave their
cage. In the last sequence (which is the longest one) we get to
know Ingeborg a little better - not on the basis of biographical
information but through a lot of small oddities and kitschy bric-a-brac
and images that she collected throughout her life. In this sequence
a young woman - Else - appears. She asks questions inspired by the
odd objects and images Ingeborg shows to her while Gitte plays an
inconspicuous part as the camera holder, only once in a while asking
a question or two. Animated by the memories evoked by all the curiosities
in her rather crowded living room, Ingeborg relates episodes from
her live. She demonstrates her various music boxes: the one with
the lights, the one with the dancer, the jug that will play when
you lift it to drink and the very old mechanical “record”
player. She also shows her mechanical mouse which the kitten loves
to play with, as it loves to play with the living rats without doing
them any harm because they grew up together. She takes out an album
with collected cat pictures and points out the one with the cat
boy who is covered in facial hair. A photo of a calf with two heads
is displayed on the wall. The calf once belonged to Ingeborg but
it didn’t grew very old: when it was supposed to start to chew
the cud it died because it couldnŐt swallow and digest.
Ingeborg has been
on the road together with her former partner Cibrino, the Rat King,
as a busker for the past ten years. During that time she was constantly
looking for curious things and phenomena that (lovingly, when it
comes to animals) could be used as entertainment. She collected
many strange objects, images and oddities that were used in establishing
a busker museum. For many years, the busker museum was a very popular
and unusual attraction especially for people who came to visit the
annual Vorbasse market in mid-south Jutland. Ingeborg and Cibrino
decided to will their busker museum collection to the city after
their deaths, but today the museum is closed. For one reason or
another the local authorities apparently could not wait for that.
A lot of the objects are already in the custody of the local authorities
and as such belong to the public museum in town. Ingeborg is left
with the small - and the less important - objects. Ingeborg, it
seems, has definitely lived an exciting and thoroughly happy life
and still appears very excited about her life in general. Nonetheless,
the rather sad story about the calf signifies a part of Ingeborg’s
life that has been (and still is) very important to her and which
differentiate her life from the life of the majority of people.
It is a kind of life
in which the tragi-comic plays a significant part and is articulated
in the performance of the busker (like the clown) who will use it
as her way of imparting the truth. It is also a life that could
be said to be constituted within the theatrical in the sense that
the location of a busker's life in which Ingeborg (or the busker
in general) contextualizes herself differs significantly from the
location of standard, middle-class life and behavior.
As a busker, she
belongs to a very small minority of society that have elected to
stand apart from conventional life, not belonging to any particular
class, subculture or political organization but forming a very individualized
group of people. The busker can be said to be the subaltern of society.
She/he is a person who will not adjust to the accepted standards
of social behavior but rather remains in an isolated position as
a differentiated subject and an eccentric. In the story of Ingeborg
the local becomes even more marginalized than before. The local
is not only the small society she lives in but also her own person
and her immediate and present context: her identity and her life
as a busker. Here, the local turns out to be a personal history
centered around an apparently happy elderly woman and her life who
has constructed her own local and very individual location in which
her identity is visualized and constituted for the viewer through
the attributes from a busker's life, her personal belongings and
obvious passions and loves. Objects that become signifiers for her
life.
The final work is
the documentation of Søren Welling, represented through memory
by Gitte Villesen who visited Søren's small town museum in
1995. Afte the visit she memorized and drew down the ground plan
of the small town museum, which was in itself a small town. Søren
Welling did somehow accepted the consequence of being an eccentric.
He simply built his own world in his small town museum in central
Jutland. In this museum - obviously a fiction of life (and not a
signifier of life) with no historical accuracy - he could make his
own rules, have his own standards, be whoever he wanted to be: the
grocer, the priest or the teacher. He was in fact an artist and
a poet. Painting and writing as well as asking other people to write
for him, for instance the two nurses he asked to write a play for
the theater in the small town museum, was a part of his strategy
in deconstructing all kind of societal hierarchies and hierarchic
positions. For Søren Welling there should be no societal
rules, he could himself become anyone he liked to be: an artist
or a writer, even a teacher and a priest. He strove for a better
world of total independence for the individual, an independence
which was not directed toward the local community but the state
apparatus.
Søren Welling
was a social critic in his own right. He even intended to make his
own pay system. He protested against the existence of interest profiting
in his home-made village journal and suggested to abolish all interests
because it was a fictional structure pulled down over our heads
of the government by the central bank system of Denmark. Instead
the government should decide the extent of the production of money
and in this way control that no more money than needed (specifically)
was being produced.
The small town museum
represents a kind of alternative society taking its ideals from
the past but counteracting the present as a critical intervention.
Taking the idea of an almost exchange economy system controlled
by a governmental currency strategy into a present in which it seems
an impossibility, Søren Welling established a half nostalgic,
half idealistic small town community. But only as an allegory of
the old days because the existence of the small town community will
always remain a fiction. Here the establishment of the local becomes
the establishment of a fiction of life; maybe a home-made ideology
which must be considered political in its own right, but actually
a fantasy in which you can feel safe. Being an artist he considered
his small town museum a work of art (he called it an art house).
Almost exemplifying the definition of the artist by Sigmund Freud
who called the artist a person who turns away from reality to become
hero, king and creator in his own reality (der Held, König,
Schöpfer)(4), by building his own world. It is a very private
definition of the local that is exemplified in the real life story
of Søren Welling.
Taking her point
of departure in a geographical local, Gitte Villesen shows different
aspects of the sociological and psychological local. Firstly, the
local is seen as a representational system of norms in modern society,
drawing on nostalgia and distance, even though with a twist, in
the video of Bent and Kathrine; a local subject as an unsettled
individual which defines her own local through a deliberate constitution
of an alternative local or a location in which she further signifies
herself in the case of Ingeborg; and finally a complete construction
of a local in the documentation of Søren Welling through
characterizing someone who is building his own world.
It is the local subject
and the private and momentary politics of the individual that is
the focus in Villesen's works that embodies a way to connect the
psychological local to the social, cultural and geographical local
as well as the nostalgic and fictional local.
(1)Elspeth Probyn;
“Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local”,
s. 186, in ed. Linda J. Nicholson; Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge:
New York, 1990.
(2)Willy collected
cars.
(3)It must be emphasized
that Villesens videos are not fictional.
(4) Sigmund Freud;
“Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen
Geschehens” (1911), i Sigmund Freud: Psychologie des Unbewussten,
Studienausgabe bd. III, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt a.M.,
1975/1994, s. 23.
Originally published
in: Wiener Secession Catalogue, Gitte Villesen, 1999ISBN 3-901926-08-9
Sanne Kofod Olsen
is a curator and art critic lives and works in Copenhagen
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