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A Beginning
by Claus Robenhagen
Before I began this essay, Peter Land lent me two books. One was about Balthus and the other was about the American outsider artist Henry Darger. Their stylistic and thematic overspills into Land’s watercolors and, most so, his paintings, have been described in more depth by others before me. Nonetheless, Balthus and Darger remain pertinent, triggering a chain of thoughts about the artist’s role and, especially, the way meaning is created in Land’s works.
In 1922, a young Balthus (1908-2001) wrote his friends, “God knows how happy I would be if I could stay a child forever. ”The statement, which could only be made by someone who has left behind the innocence of childhood, can be considered exemplary for Balthus’ work. Balthus was a master of pictorializing the duality of youth – the uniquely charged space emerging in the gap between childhood and adulthood. Balthus’ figures are withdrawn, self-absorbed, expressionless. Their remote and blasé attitude starkly contrasts with the figures’ psychological intensity, their apparently violent interrelations and the frequent references to forbidden sexuality. Although he never specifically worked in self-portraiture, Balthus’ own features seem to inhabit many of the figures in his paintings. This is most evident in a series of illustrations he did in 1932-1935 for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Rather than strictly adhering to his literary source, Balthus pictures himself as the novel’s romantic antihero Heathcliff in a series of tableaux in which he appears to alternately rescue and punish the Cathy character.
Contemporaneously with Balthus, in an entirely different world, though one no less marked by unreality, Henry Darger (1892-1973), a Chicago school janitor and dishwasher, was obsessively materializing the disturbing images haunting his mind.(I)
Darger’s posthumously published, impossible titled manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, relates the story of the seven Vivian sisters, princesses of a fictitious country leading a rebellion of Christian child slaves against their godless, grown-up oppressors.
Darger himself appears in various guises, both in the text and the accompanying illustrations, most strikingly as Captain Henry Darger who, alongside his position among the evil Glandelians, heads a secret organization helping the seven sisters. Darger’s dual role seems highly symptomatic. A large part of the story involves detailed descriptions of the assaults on the heroines by their enemies. Strangulation, slit stomachs and crucifixion are recorded with sadistic precision, suggesting that Darger’s obsession with little girls was less than innocent.
Considering how absorbed Darger was in this expansive universe of manic fantasy, it is probably not surprising that his own life withered. A practicing Catholic, he attended mass daily, sometimes as often as five times a day. He never left Chicago and spent all his time collecting bits and pieces of newspapers and ads to use as reference for his watercolors.
In Peter’s Land
Thus, I arrive at the subject of this essay, Peter Land. It is quite ironic, but for that reason perhaps also quite fitting, that I arrive by a circumlocutory route. Like Balthus and Darger, Land seems to be a constant presence in his works, appearing either as himself or transposing himself into other characters that, however briefly, have to assume the unstable role of Peter Land. That these characters most often are children or monstrous creatures (or hybrids of the two) suggests that the artist sees his role as an outsider to normality. Marginalized existences become images of the artist’s own powerlessness and attempt to come to grips with himself as an individual and a social being.
In that sense, Land appears to inscribe himself between Balthus’ extroverted self-orchestration and Darger’s self-eradication. Land stands in the spotlight but is also quite involuntary in his painful display of bodily maladjustment, as his undisciplined subconscious mind constantly threatens to take over. Land’s work articulates the fear of failure as a basic human and artistic condition.
Who is Peter Land then? The last thing you want to do is define him as a painter, sculptor or video artist, since he moves between all three fields. Rather than focusing on a specific medium, we should include those artistic expressions under an expanded field of overlapping practices united by a common narrative strategy. For example, the argument could be made that Land’s sculptures, paintings and watercolors are born directly out of his video works of the 1990s. After all, don’t the sculptures precisely exist in a state of permanent theater?
In a humorous salute to Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain (c. 1966), a young girl spits water into a small pond. Land’s figure is painted and dressed in real clothes, breaking with the conventions of material purity and unity we normally observe in engaging with sculpture.
It likewise seems limiting to discuss Land’s two-dimensional works in terms of traditional painterly parameters of composition, plane and line. Instead, we see them as stage sets where figures are held up by a narrative force that breaks the plane, allowing them to step out of the frame and directly relate to the viewer. In his new series of paintings, Land presents children as actors on a stage with a painted backdrop. Perhaps to enhance such a reading, the artist has even equipped several of them with instruments for performing. Despite their unfortunate circumstances – one is legless, another has a deformed head – they all, almost without exception, express a degree of accommodation.
In this game, in which the children become bearers of something considerably greater than themselves – specifically, the artist’s self – their own physical appearance seems to change. While in Balthus or Darger(II) this is manifested as ambiguous or incestuous sexuality, Land’s little protégées radiate adult world-weariness. Clearly caught up in something beyond their control, they are endlessly forced to enact their roles in front of an anonymous audience.
Theatricality
My discussion thus far might lead you to believe that Land’s works are distinguished by theater’s illusionism and ability to mimic reality. Far from it. Insisting on theatricality as a narrative strategy, his works reveal themselves to be exactly what they are: artworks that exist for an audience.
This aspect has been exhaustively treated by the Canadian theater theorist Josette Féral. According to Féral, theatricality is intrinsic to human nature, existing as a dominant social structure in all social intercourse. For this theatricality to make sense, however, viewers must be aware of the presence of a theatrical intention directed at them. Then, what transpires is converted into fiction.(III) Féral considers theatricality to be inextricably linked to the process of sight and the viewer’s gaze. Through his gaze, the viewer creates a space that is distinctly different from the everyday and that he himself, in principle, stands outside: “Theatricality seems to be a process that has to do with a ‘gaze’ that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which fiction can emerge.”(IV) For Land, establishing this fictional space becomes a way to visualize our experience of art itself. While Darger never expressed a need to share his manuscripts and watercolors with anyone (they were only discovered after his death), Land’s works obviously confront us as meditations on the artist’s role in the encounter with an audience.
Accordingly, they not only describe Land himself, they also mirror us and our expectations of the work. Ridicule and rejection are constant undercurrents in his work. Perhaps they are extra painful because of the apparently sincere gaze with which Land’s actors meet us across the fourth wall of the theater.
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I) In a curious coincidence, Darger mirrors Balthus’ statement in an essay titled, “History of My Life”: “Do you believe it, unlike most children, I hated to see the day come when I will be grown up. I never wanted to. I wished to be young always. I am a grown-up now and an old lame man, darn it.” In Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings.
II) Darger routinely equipped his little female protagonists with penises.
III) Féral, Josette: “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language” in Féral, Josette (ed.): Substance 98/99, volume 31, no. 2 & 3, University of Wisconsin, p. 96.
IV) Ibid., p. 97, l. 19.
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