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A conversation between Peter Land and Anne Kielgast
A conversation between Peter Land and Anne Kielgast on the occasion of an exhibition at GL STRAND, Landesgalerie Linz and Fondazione March.
Anne Kielgast: Tell me about this exhibition. What sets it apart from your past exhibitions? It’s the first major showing of your paintings.
Peter Land: Formally, it’s the biggest presentation of my oil paintings to date. On a personal level, the exhibition shows how I have become resolved about my art. Thematically, it expands on a series of themes I have been working on for a few years. Mainly, the children. There has been a development there, as well: the children have become more individualized. Before, they were a lot like signs, now they look like little persons created with a lot of engagement. That’s a sharp turn from my drawings, where boys and girls looked almost the same.
They looked the same partly because of to a strong influence from the American artist Henry Darger, who has been preoccupying me for years. Darger’s pictures are full of children and it’s impossible to tell the girls from the boys. The children are very feminine, but they all have little penises. This is an exhibition of portraiture, which is quite a leap from what I used to do. The children are not just symbols anymore. They have psychology, so they don’t look serial like the children in the drawings.
Even the choice of painting as a medium is significant. Painting is a slower, far more contemplative medium than video, which, as I used it, didn’t have the same kind of filter. Also, I have other interests now than before. I work with different genres and types of subject matter in my paintings. It’s fun to parody genres like Byzantine art or nineteenth-century genre painting. I’m also very preoccupied with Balthus and some of my figures are directly inspired by him, while others were inspired by Struwwelpeter. So, I work with many different overlapping inspirations and there’s an element of play in the works now. I allow myself to do things I never allowed myself before – going in and playing around with references to things like nineteenth-century genre painting.
AK: Tell me more about what the change of medium has meant for you. You have said that video doesn’t interest you at the moment that you have arrived at a new point in your art.
PL: Video was a stopgap solution. Actually, I was always drawing and painting. But when I faced the fact that was unable to contribute to that tradition, I had a huge crisis where all concepts collapsed. I threw myself into a medium I knew nothing about. It was a desperate act, throwing myself into an extreme situation. It was sink or swim. I was terrified – especially about the first two videos I made. It felt like I was violating myself, because it went against my upbringing and my self-understanding. I wanted to reevaluate everything around me in order to get on my own track. It was extreme and intense and it stayed that way. I could never return to the previous state: so many people came and saw the videos that they became pretty important – to me, too.
AK: The 5th of May 1994 has become something of a signature piece – not just for you but for a lot of art in the 1990s. Much has been said and written about it and it has been shown in an amazing number of exhibitions around the world.
PL: Yes, it was extreme. I wasn’t very old at the time and in a way the piece locked me down. After The 5th of May 1994, which showed me dancing around naked, I did a video of me falling off a chair, then one of me falling off a ladder. Finally, I shot a hole in the bottom of a boat and went down with it. In a way, it was a very appropriate ending. I had reached a point where I couldn’t go any further. Literally, I had reached the end of the road.
It wasn’t that I was tired of watching myself in my art. The videos expressed roles I took on. I played an entertainer, a painter and so on. But I was stuck in a certain groove that had me thinking about what I could fall off next. The track narrowed. It didn’t open up. While working on the film in the forest (The Lake, ed.), I began a series of drawings of a hunter in the woods.
AK: Art history is particularly evident in the exhibition in a way we haven’t seen before. There are direct art-historical references and you introduce more subtle allusions and interests as well.
PL: Working in painting has allowed me to pick and choose among inspirations and references. Art history has become a playground for me. My current work lets me use the old masters constructively. I can use them as much as I find appropriate. That’s a significant change from the things that drove video works. I originally started working in video, because art history, the great painters most of all, were too heavy a context for me to relate to at the time. Now it’s a pleasure to use art history in my work. I used to be afraid to repeat what others had done before. Now I don’t worry about that anymore. For example, I use the background from a Giotto painting for my portrait of Nero. I don’t feel I’m imitating but quoting. In other words, I no longer see it as a problem but a strategy that allows the work to move in new directions.
Not that I wasn’t aware of tradition before, but it wasn’t an active part of my work like it is now. When I was at the academy (the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, ed.), tradition was a burden, so I went into video which didn’t have the same standing in art history. Painting, above all, is tradition and that sets it apart from other media. Now I find the legacy of painting fascinating.
I’m very interested in history, especially ancient Rome. I’m fond of dramatic periods in history – including the mad emperors. My focus is still on the offbeat, grotesque and inexplicable, but now the abject has become immanent, less explicit than in my earlier drawings. I have gained some distance. Hence, I don’t paint a Roman having his throat cut but use the more indirect portrait form in my paintings. I aim for the kind of images people envision when they hear a name like Caligula. Before I was much more graphic, much more explicit. I’m trying to say the same things today but in much subtler ways, leaving more of the meaning-creation process up to the viewer.
AK: You mentioned your interest in the outsider artist Henry Darger and his strange landscapes filled with children battling evil. Darger’s pictures are lovely and decorative yet veer into utter morbidity and grotesquery. In your drawings, you deal with the grotesque and the abject – mutilated children are an example – though, as you say, far more indirectly now than before. We have to form our own images of the atrocities of the mad Emperor Nero. Yet you still reflect on outsider artists, including Carl Frederik Hill. What do you find particularly interesting about their work?
PL: In Hill, I’m particularly interested in the architecture. Generally, it’s their freedom that appeals to me. Their freedom to do anything they want without thinking about an audience or a context. They have that freedom exactly because they are art-world outsiders. Hill’s drawings from the 1880s and 1890s cut completely across all conventions and genres. That’s interesting to me. The special hermetic universe found in the work of psychotic artists piques my curiosity – their fresh, unusual experience of the world. When they get ill, they experience the world in new ways. It is these new eyes on the world I would like to borrow. Like them, I borrow from history. For instance, I use my knowledge of Roman history. However, my approach is different, more conscious, I think, than anything Darger and Hill expressed. There is no distance in Darger’s works. They betray an obvious guilt complex, and his personal relationship to children clearly shines through.
Darger remains a big inspiration to me, especially in my landscapes. It’s that strange mix of elements of idyll, girls in hysterically blossoming landscapes and sudden nightmare landscapes. There is a clash between one motif, a child that has been slit open, hanged, and the rest of the picture which shows a fantastic idyll. That’s fascinating to me. It corresponds to my own thoughts. After all, a loss of innocence colors the adult view of children’s lives. Children make you happy, but in adults the innocence they have has been lost forever. So, a touch of envy arises when an adult like me looks at childhood. In that sense, there is something retrospective about the works – they represent the point of view of a grownup looking back. In the works in this exhibition, the children are no longer victims of adult evil, however. They are children that make do despite various disabilities. They are brave, they have a zest for life, which was never so prominent in my life before. Take The Accordion Player. Though he has no legs, he perseveres. He is oppressed by an unreasonably superior force making his life difficult. It’s the same kind of oppression that’s found in Darger by the way, so he’s still around.
AK: The portraits of children appear to be memory images of the kind we all probably recognize – even if our personal flaws do not compare with pumpkin heads and amputated legs. How do you relate to psychoanalytic theory?
PL: I do not use those theories directly. But we are all Freud’s children, as it were. As a legacy from Freud, I, too, have a particular interest in the extremes of human nature, the fringe cases. That’s why I’m interested in the mad Roman emperors and, more generally, in the line between extreme social behavior in our media-borne day-to-day life where apparently normal children and adults suddenly run amok, eradicating all interhuman rules of behavior. For similar reasons, I’m interested in personalities like Hill and Ernst Josephson. Their personal history is exactly what’s exciting. What happened to those who went from one stage to the next? What kind of world did they enter?
More generally, I think memory is an interesting phenomenon. What are our childhood memories? Very few people have perfect recall of their childhood, though almost all of us can find traumatizing episodes. Memories are never objectively correct, of course, but they are still incredibly powerful and significant to our adult lives and our retrospective understanding of our childhood. The smallest things can suddenly seem traumatizing. The paintings in this show are like memory images – they portray physical handicaps, because those can be visualized, but much more generally they capture an adult look back at childhood traumas.
AK: Does the battle between good and evil still interest you?
Well, it did once, of course. The battle between good and evil was especially evident in my earlier, bloodier works. You might say that I had no distance before, but as I grew up I gained distance. My works and how I depict my subjects has become more objective. Before, I was almost in the state of being a child – I strove to experience the world for the first time in direct, innocent, pure wonder. It was a form of escapism. But I was escaping on purpose, because I was seeking something specific. I was seeking to return to a pure state, now that childhood’s world, a world of yesterday, is forever lost.
AK: The children have aged, too. Your works in this show a very clear development.
PL: Yes, they have aged and I think they will continue to age – it’s an ongoing process. Some of the children in the paintings are shown on their first day of school. But several of them have grown a bit older. That includes the emperor portraits. They became emperor as teenagers. It’s also a matter of taking my own pulse. The works and I have undergone a movement from not particularly constructive – frustration at having left the world of childhood – to acceptance of the situation and the decision to move on from there. Concretely in the paintings, as well. I see this development in retrospect.
AK: The children leave the forest?
PL: Perhaps. It’s not a straight line of development. A development might happen that ends up in an entirely different place. But, where that might be, I don’t know. In my earlier drawings the forest was a threatening place where children got lost. Now, the forest is probably more of a symbolic hiding place. That reading has changed: the forest is a place that can hide the children, representing security and longing. But it is also a hiding place for the disillusionment that comes with growing up, and so it is still a kind of escapism.
AK: The forest remains ambiguous?
Yes. That also ties in with the death symbols found in some of the pictures. There was a time when death represented something secure for me. I saw death as a way out of adult life, its repetitions and responsibility. My own reading has changed, and so the meaning of the forest has changed. Often, the children are seen to be running away. Bu they aren’t lost. They are running into the forest to hide.
AK: Absurdity, if anything, seems to be a fundamental existential condition of your art. Yet so much has happened since you did your video works and, indeed, the first violent drawings that followed?
PL: Absurdity was also in play in Playground, my piece for the 2005 Venice Biennale. However, the works are also becoming more constructive, as is the case with the works in this exhibition, including the sculpture Snapshot. There is also an absurd element in the form of water. In Playground, absurdity equaled infinity. There was a kind of eternal (and absurd) waiting for Godot in the children’s nonstop rolling the ball back and forth. Still, the theater of the absurd in its nihilist form is less pronounced apparent in my new work – here, it is more a case of optimistic absurdity. Absurdity with a smile. Though absurdity will always be a basic condition for the world as I see it. What’s new is a recognition that things don’t have to end up in pure moroseness for that reason. It is possible to get to the other side. In that way, I have acquired a lighter view of life.
AK: The narrative element is also more pronounced. Before, the overarching message of your work involved the universally human, the absurd and the loss of control. These things are still there, but they seem to be peppered with more narratives now, small stories framing those general observations?
PL: Absurdity remains a basic condition, not only in my view of art but also in my view of the world. I’m interested in absurdity as a universal human existential condition. This is expressed in the emperor portraits, where Nero and Caligula, so to speak, fit the description better than, say, Hadrian and Augustus. The small stories open up a personal interpretation, as in Pumpkin Head. The painting has a personal element, but it is universal as well.
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