Art. History. Looking.

Dr. phil. Peter Kohlhaas
Marie Irmgard Birkedal, Savage Glitter
© Text (2018): Galerie1214, 2018

Marie Irmgard Birkedal grew up in Copenhagen, where she studied English, art history, and art. She traveled extensively in the USA, has been invited to numerous solo and group exhibitions in Scandinavia since 2003, and has lived in Berlin since 2013. Marie Birkedal’s work encompasses genres ranging from conceptual approaches and photography to painting. She works within an artistic and historical continuum and refers to a coordinate system broad enough to incorporate the explorations and achievements of figures such as Cy Twombly, Diego Velázquez, and Yoko Ono into her artistic work.

In her latest works on canvas and paper, Birkedal once again approaches the creation of the image through a new, specifically painterly method. Alongside impasto applications of paint, a mode of painting often heavily diluted with linseed oil comes to the fore, particularly, though not exclusively, in large formats. The genesis of the image is delayed, slowed down. Content, surfaces, and color are subjected to the test of time.

Literary criticism uses the expression “god’s eye view” for a narrative perspective from which figures and events appear completely transparent and—within the framework of the narrative—as true facts: everything is always already known and weighted. The closest equivalent in visual art might be medieval pictorial narratives, which create a comprehensive simultaneity through the juxtaposition of spaces and narratives: the painter is their omniscient chronicler. Cubism, too, condensed this into a claim of its own: its nesting of perspectives sought to make the conditions of “modern life” themselves visible. Or, as Guillaume Apollinaire, one of its spokesmen, put it succinctly: Cubism is a realism. In her art, Marie Irmgard Birkedal takes a different path in relation to claims of a totalizing representation of the world.

The origin of this path—for it is a matter of being underway, of movement, rather than a thesis or polemical position to be adopted, inhabited, and defended—lies in Birkedal’s seemingly paradoxical position outside the polarity of assertion and counter-assertion (A vs. non-A), in an original aesthetic of astonishment. In an interview published in 2016, in which she discusses the motivations behind her artistic working method, she says: “To me, passive astonishment is a transcendentalist's outlook. (...) I look a lot at nature's ‘visual design’—the outlines of dog paws, horses’ cannon bones, cat skulls, and bird feathers never lose their fascination for me. The same goes for some foods—a broken egg, a mango cut in half, and an eggplant—to me there's everything in that. I can look and look and I still don’t quite get it—but I don’t mind that I don’t get it—as long as I can keep looking, there is no frustration in that look. It's very much about being in a state where not understanding, or ever expecting to understand but just observing and admiring, is okay.”

One might be tempted to speak of “subjectivity” or “subjectification” here, but that is not Birkedal's point. Her original insight (which may have something to do with her feminism and her subtle reflection on her own life history) is essentially that subjectivism in painting is—not radical (enough). Beyond the assertive gesture, in the practice of art it often enough remains centrifugal, dispersive, ultimately consumerist, incapable of dispelling fundamental doubts about the enlightenment power stereotypically attributed to it. Less elevated names for this would simply be curiosity and variety. Subjectivism in art does not lead down to the roots of simple human needs, at most—if at least well done—to their parody. To that extent, it remains centrifugal. Astonishment, by contrast, as an attitude that has taken root, has a different orientation: it opens and concentrates at the same time; it is centripetal and exposes itself to the gravity of real fields of experience, come what may. To be astonished means to observe and wait.

Wait | Condense

Painting from the attitude of amazement is not indifferent to the painting process. In many of her current works, Birkedal uses linseed oil as a painting medium, whose long drying time sometimes considerably delays the process of elaboration. As a result, certain form-generating intentions, as well as the achievement of precisely intended color values, can neither be arbitrarily accelerated nor simply abandoned. The wet texture of the diluted paint facilitates the painterly gesture, the rapid stroke, while at the same time serving as a precaution against accepting the first gestural impulse as the result; instead, the gesture of the painting hand is repeatedly tested to see how it ultimately fits into a whole.

If, in a personal encounter, one asks Marie Birkedal the conventional question of whether she has time, she will often answer yes, explaining that she has to wait anyway: a painting is lying flat, drying at a particular stage of the working process before she can take the next step. This is a kind of suspended courtesy that characterizes the person as well as the painter's technique. Respect is not an empty phrase, but a concentration on the open process that intention and hand have set in motion. In her case, astonishment and observation require waiting as the very basis of the artistic way of working. For the normal Western view, waiting appears to be an imposition: “Waiting, according to the standard perception, is empty, lost, pointlessly elapsing time” (Ralf Konersmann, Waiting is a disappointment, a humiliation, an art. NZZ, March 12, 2017). Birkedal, on the other hand, integrates waiting into her artistic practice as a prerequisite and as a kind of substance that the work of art assimilates. Studio practice makes waiting an instrument of painting technique: by delaying the drying of the colors, Birkedal slows down the material process and deepens the intellectual process of production. This allows for a parallelism of investigative ways of seeing: several paintings are always in progress, so that their development is guided on the one hand by the specific situation of each painting and, beyond that, by painterly recognition of constellations. Observation may lose itself in detail; it may (in Schiller's expression) be naive, while at the same time reaching beyond the individual work to a reflective level of dialogue, where Birkedal's perception of the whole (Schiller's sentimentality) approaches the historical and contemporary roots of her artistic impulse.

Surface: I can look and look ...

To wait means to draw time under these auspices; just as one can draw breath, or draw hope, from a constantly renewing source. Empty time, the metric time of clocks, of measuring, by definition does not renew itself. Waiting is charged with energy through observation, and this is the prerequisite for the subsequent step-by-step process of condensation. Birkedal herself uses the synonymous pair observing/admiring and thereby distinguishes an open form of observation, prior to any judgment, from both an analytical approach and one that judges in advance. In doing so, Birkedal brings a term famously associated with Andy Warhol into play, but she appropriates it, as it were, cunningly, and extends it beyond the sphere of social interaction and self-reflection—a broken egg, an eggplant, or a still life are, first of all, unquestionably worthy of contemplation. As an insight, Warhol’s gesture is unrepeatable—it could at most be copied, but that is not Birkedal’s concern. Yet it contains a force that she seeks to preserve or reactivate for the contemporary relevance of painting.

With the creation of time, the space for action is created in which the interplay of content, form, and painterly elements can be explored. This is particularly evident in her deliberate work in series, in which the painting is allowed to watch itself, as it were. A dialogue develops between the painter's intentional impulses and historical foils and models (Velázquez is an important one, the Baroque still lifes would be another), on the one hand, and the current material process on the other. Through her approach, Birkedal allows a polarity to become visible between the ductus of the hand, in the visible traces of the design, and the obstinacy of a surface event that is prepared and supported, but at the same time takes place “by itself” due to physical and chemical principles: in the mixing and penetration of colors, the formation of microstructures in the background, which give the newer works their particular character, with running drops (“runners”), cracks, craquelure, or rhizomatic effects that project a fine linework promising order. They have to be seen and understood together with the broad brushstrokes that build up the pictorial space in large sweeps across formats spanning more than two arm lengths.

In her painting, Birkedal avoids articulating the surfaces as statements. Rather, the surface itself initially only wants to be visible, not discursive in the sense of meaningful statements or content that we always refer to when we want to claim to be binding for assessments. When viewed, the surfaces offer themselves like contributions from an ongoing dialogue between the painter and the world, from inanimate nature to history and art history, that avoids a narrative program or is so extensive that the space in between for the individual résumé is retained.

Color

Birkedal's current works (from 2017/18) derive their energy and intellectual tension from a coloration that is itself distilled by the painter through the process of making the image. It is not color that determines the picture; the process of the picture determines the color, demanding particular values. The constructive order, insofar as it can be reconstructed, oscillates around a preliminary drawing, which it soon leaves again. She exchanges the definition that promises security for the design that promises openness, modeling in the sense of the scientific model term as a “model for ...”, for a view that has yet to be gained. The astonished person does not yet know what it is: a flower, a house, a bouquet, venison, a room—modeling is the way to a view since the visual and conceptual lexicon of things has been used up, or vice versa with the digital explosion of the semantic, “overdetermined”. The observer, the waiting person, is the truly radical figure in this situation: she does not contradict the ubiquitous meanings, but delves into the open questions of the process: Why is this something, and this, and not something else? The modeling does not direct the search to something hidden behind the curtain or just below the surface; rather, it lets us feel the weight of the design, it presses the color into our eyes, it irritates us with the movement into which it transfers the static. The color is the meaning of the surface. Adding, removing, intersecting, superimposing levels, layers ... The picture shows a color shape, the (often) numerous individual steps of which can still be read and which can also be read. Two different strategies emerge here.

For a group of pictures, Birkedal lays a framework of strong dark tones over the primer, which she repeatedly checks for their effect on one another, in neighborly contrasts, and with a view of the picture as a whole. Even in this first phase, she often uses colors very diluted. This often happens with the canvas lying flat (on the studio floor). If Birkedal then raises it upright, the typical “runners” emerge, as excess paint runs downward with gravity in the direction of the intended inclination of the image. The fact that these tears of color often run in different directions shows that Birkedal keeps the picture structure open; she uses developments on the picture surface as starting points for new connections. The self-description “I look and look ...” thus contains both a maxim and an instruction: above all, the viewer who can unfold the condensed time of the painting gains access to its pleasure.

In addition to changing the basic color structure, the technique of glazing plays an important role, especially with uneven surfaces of titanium white in different densities and consistencies. They can appear as translucent clouds, as wiped broad brushstrokes, or in more or less dense veils or overlays that partly follow an earlier shape, but then reinterpret it through a semi-transparent application of paint. One could find that Birkedal goes the opposite way with the light colors as Matisse does with the dark ones: if he also used black to re-stage the light, Birkedal does it with light glazes and alabaster-like translucent bodies (such as in “Ersatz Primitiv”) conversely, to give the darker values a new meaning; like a map directs, but also first reveals a terrain, the colors are re-orchestrated by the specific colorism, to work their way through different works: as if they wanted to explore their possibilities in variations and in different contexts in the stubbornness that can only be defined painterly.

This demands from the painter the patience not only to bring a color value into play once, or, conversely, to always occupy it with the same valence, but to get involved with the respective picture as a special situation and to question the formal and color vocabulary each time with regard to its validity and suitability. In the larger formats, for example, one notices the recurring shades of brown or green, prominently in the dedication image for Charlotte Salomon, “L'ermitage was not the sanctuary it promised to be”, where they appear like an ostinato, in dialogue with bright, striking colors that create staggered vistas in terms of both content and space—though not in perspective.

Another group of works is represented in particular by the Berlin Flower Series (2014–2018), which delicately draws on the imagery of Spanish and Dutch Golden Age and Baroque still lifes and interiors. Through the color strategies described above and a decisive engagement with abstraction, they perform a double movement, tangentially taking up the interior and, with it, the condition of dwelling (building ... thinking ...). The arrangements are “bound” and dissolved again, isolated and gathered, infused with moods (in the best manner of historical models), and cooled to zero degrees Kelvin in the next manifestation of the cycle. It is fascinating to see how Birkedal, to a certain extent, develops a vocabulary for the condition of dwelling, which is also further worked through in large formats. It is not dwelling itself but the precariousness of dwelling that is existential. The nomadic is longing and at the same time triggers fear; to the emotional inevitability of settling down—under often difficult and questionable economic and social “framework conditions”—the answer is the dissolution of the order, which is then reorganized under a new shape.

In the cycle of the Berlin Flower Series, the more impasto application of paint—known from earlier work phases—is again more widespread. Brushes and sometimes spatulas are decidedly used for a thick application of strong colors, some of which are guided by the painting movements in parallel lines, strings, or streaks, while others blend more intimately. The thicker application of paint, the impasto, often gives the picture surface an almost relief-like character and enables special intensity in more intimate formats. They are chamber pieces of serial variation, capable at the same time of probing subtle moods. Birkedal partly uses the primed canvas directly as a background; partly she places the flower piece in a fictional space by choosing a different background color and a pedestal-like surface for the draped arrangement (as in “Gawkey”). In doing so, she also resorted to eye-irritating reversals, for example when in “Palpable Poignancy” she made the vase body (also visibly placed) in a dark brown, but transparent, while the densely staggering bouquet is again designed as impasto.

Savage Glitter

Birkedal took the title phrase of the Berlin exhibition in April 2018, Savage Glitter, from the novel “The Quick and the Dead” by Joy Williams; it alludes to the tension between the romantic (wilderness) and society (trinkets/tinsel), two polarities to which we find ourselves contradictorily drawn. The stories that explain everything are at some point—or suddenly—no longer believable. Images about stories, images that believed they could (or had to) tell something, keep losing ground in modern times; or have to conquer new territory. A “picture about” that seems like program music ...

Birkedal has dealt intensively with the question of what can be represented. She has reflected on Agnes Martin's apodictic privileging of composition over color, and of pure beauty over nature, but she does not regard representation as a taboo; rather, she understands it as a dimension of interest and of anthropology. Her reflection on the photographic image in the diptychs combining photographs and abstract acrylic works in the cycle New Mexico 17 Years After (2010), or in the Booth series (2011), can already be understood in this sense as a response—and a solution—to doubts about purely compositional strategies. One conclusion seems to be that the reflex toward form may perhaps be ignored, but the contents of human existence, the scenes of everyday life, are revenants, even when they are not transformed into narrative. Birkedal pushes these existential dimensions, which we work through every day in our stories, like questions through an open curtain and onto the stage, where the audience must engage with them, whether it wants to or not: flower arrangements, interior scenes from the intimacy of dwelling, or the compositions mentioned above, which reflect the Spanish-Dutch tradition of still life, mirror the rituals and residues of everyday life back into our contemplation and set the old dialectic of public versus private into disturbing vibration: what will become of our rituals of encounter, of religious or civic occasions? Does the private, the interior, also belong in the future to the sphere of masculinity, or, on the contrary, does the impulse to shape and create break open attributes that were once gender-specific? Is the flower arrangement “residual nature” (wilderness), or a visual echo of the “reactionary nuclear family”, or something third—for example, the quite Marxian liberation and reworking of the vanitas motif within a free play of reinterpretation, one that may even dress itself provocatively in glitter?

Marie Birkedal knows how to address questions of this kind through painting without giving their addressees a script. Colors cannot be metaphorical, but white, as a moderator of colors, can—as in Birkedal's work—put the literalness of color to the test, and it can suspend the unambiguousness of things—what means what—behind the veil of not-knowing. In ethnology, and later in psychoanalysis, the taboo was that message which could not be touched. Birkedal shows by concealing—glazing, wiping, deconstructing—and only through this do we know that there: something is there.

© Text (2018): Galerie1214 | 2018

Dr. phil. Peter Kohlhaas