INSIDE THE FIRE – COLLECTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL IN ANNA ÅDAHL’S ART
By Stefan Jonsson
Here, fire is a living crowd.
Elias Canetti
Collective and individual. Between them, the drama of democracy is played out. From the French revolution until today, the practice of politics has to a large extent consisted in keeping the masses at a distance from the city center. Those in power have wanted to stop them from penetrating into the headquarters and disturbing the deliberations. At times, they have also attempted to organize the masses, and they had nothing against being greeted, lauded, and carried forth on the arms of the people.
The reason that the mass is one of the most important political phenomena of modernity is that modernity is the era of democratization and urbanization. The mass is a product of democracy, which leveled out all hierarchies, rendered all citizens equal, and placed political decision-making in the hands of the majority. The mass is also a product of the big city, where different classes were crowded in the same street, where bodies were pressed up against bodies irrespective of social strata. However, we could also claim the opposite: that both democracy and urbanization from the outset were products of the mass. The big city was the societal form, and democracy the political form, where the majority, the many first became visible for those who had up until this point had the privilege to interpret, shape, and govern the world.
The leading circles wished to hold on to this privilege. In order to retain it, they did not hesitate to depict the masses as controlled by their emotions, unwise, and dangerous. A number of methods and tools were developed for suppressing the masses with violence and extinguishing them. Other methods and tools were developed for purifying the masses and transforming them into people, movement, or party. Some of these methods and tools form the starting point for Anna Ådahl’s works. For example, we see a riot barrier, a megaphone, and a cone consisting of steel pipe rings that become narrower at the top.
What is the use of these objects? Perhaps we could see them as instruments for sorting. The barrier separates man from beast, law-abiding citizens from violent activists, natives from foreigners, one group from the other. The megaphone, in turn, amplifies both the commands of the police officer and the slogans of the demonstrator. And the peculiar cone? It is a scaffold onto which a group of people is supposed to climb and together form a human pyramid and be photographed. It was designed by Soviet artist Rodchenko in 1936, when he tried to invent new ways of shaping and designing the socialist collective.
In Rodchenko’s days, there existed an established belief that the collective was something larger and more important than the individual. The collective was a new life form. In order to understand this life form, it was necessary to develop a new kind of philosophy of society. In order to represent it, one had to invent a new politics. And in order to shape it, it was necessary to create a new art. This is why the period between the wars is so rich with political, philosophical, and aesthetic experiments. Regardless of whether they came from the right or the left, they all aimed to give a form to the collective. For example, some of them started to experiment with collage and photomontage, assembling suggestive visual diagrams for the mass man of the new era. Anna Ådahl returns to this practice in her own collage works, which resemble postmodern replies to similar works by the dada artists or by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy or John Heartfield. In these works, we see the masses as the ornament of the new age.
Between masses and individual, historical reflection also oscillates. Is history driven by great personalities, Individuals with a capital I, who make the right decisions at critical moments? Or is it driven by the anonymous collectives, which can only be discerned in numbers, statistics, and demography? Suddenly, the city is empty. In the next moment, it is flooded with refugees? Suddenly, great numbers migrate? In the next moment, they all press against the barrier, which abruptly collapses. Then a wall falls, hundreds of thousands overflow the borders, and the political landscape will never be the same.
And between masses and individual, art history moves. Art history, it could be claimed, appeared in its present form when the concept of art was placed on the side of the individual against the masses. Starting from this point, the artwork became the same as a unique aesthetic object, signed by a unique individual, while other types of images and objects were turned into anonymous craft, peasant art, folk art or – mass culture.
But what happens if the artwork, as the German critic Walter Benjamin wrote, is ”absorbed by the masses”? In Anna Ådahl’s video work Adversary, a sole individual is placed in front of the camera. But she does not act as an individual. Her posture and all of her gestures are given their significance by an absent collective. Only in relation to these other, invisible bodies do we understand what she does. Undoubtedly this is the case with every person. Even in her loneliness she preserves the physiognomy and the gestures that all surrounding but now absent persons have imprinted on her.
Masses or individual? This is the fateful question of our time, wrote the authors of the Swedish Functionalist and Modernist manifesto Acceptera in 1930. For the Swedish, progressive Functionalists of the 1930s, the aim was to develop a living, a design, and a society where each part of the masses was treated as a unique person capable of realizing her own possibilities. However, since there were so many persons, the measures had to be launched on a massive scale, or a mass scale.
If we distance ourselves from our fellow human beings they are transformed into a faceless mass. If we approach them we can see that each part of the mass has its own characteristic traits. Therefore we cannot choose between masses and individual. They both exist at the same time. The masses appear and disappear depending on what distance we place between ourselves and society. The same holds for the individual. Where the one ceases, the other begins.
Whether society appears as mass or as individual subjects depends, then, on the spectator’s gaze. What is singular about Anna Ådahl’s work is that it teaches us to swiftly shift between the perspectives, or even to adapt both of them at once. In this way, her aesthetics contains a political pedagogy. Nowadays we are taught from our early years to take the individual for granted as the fundament of society. But why not instead look at society itself as the fundament for society, and therefore for the individual? In the beginning there is the social space and the community. The kind of human subjectivity that we call individual is a late invention, which remains secondary in relation to the world we have inherited from the great masses of the dead, and where the individual, whether she likes it or not, remains incorporated in the great masses of the living.
The worn-out objects that Anna Ådahl shows in her sculpture work ”Public Matter” remind us of these absent but nevertheless everywhere present collectives. The work consists of ready-mades, but the point is not the one we have learnt in art history, that these things question the art institution – ordinary objects are introduced into the white cube and thereby place both the world and art in an estranging light. The point, instead, is to place the relationship between individual and masses in a new light. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people have earlier touched and held the same objects in their hands. Unintentionally but still according to a strict social logic, they have together formed, bent, scratched and worn these handles, fences and pieces of wood. The marks in the public matter constitute the text of the collective, which Anna Ådahl wants the spectator to read.
In this way, we are close to the secret of these remarkable images, sculptures, installations, and video works. The last decades have seen a growing interest in the artworld for social and political processes. The attempts to give sensible form to the abstract phenomenon called ”society” become more and more numerous – perhaps because the politicians themselves have given up and to a greater extent equal society with market. Some of the most famous names in this movement could be Anselm Kiefer, Barbara Krüger, Christian Boltanski, and Andreas Gursky. In their art we do not find any individuals in the proper sense, but large-scaled historical processes where bodies swarm around each other, place themselves in different constellations, and form different types of collectives.
Anna Ådahl shares their interest in the ”masses”. She places herself on the side of the collectives. But she proceeds in a more analytic fashion. She does not try to expose the masses as such. She makes no portraits of historical collectives, classes or groups. She seldom refers to specific social movements. Instead she recreates the collective from the traces it has left in public space. She shows that the public space, even when it is empty and still, is a trace after the volatile, political matter of the masses. With her objects and restagings, she therefore reaches down to the deeper grammar of political and social life. Elias Canetti spoke of the crystals of the masses, those fundamental social forms that according to him could be discerned in almost every human action. Anna Ådahl searches something similar. But in her case we should talk, instead, of the traces of the masses. The traces are everywhere. But precisely for this reason they are not visible before they are separated from their contexts, framed and exposed.
Few, if any, persons figure in Anna Ådahl’s photographs. Her installations, too, are sparse, strict, and almost empty of human presence. Around these works, a social space arches, which they constantly refer to and evoke. The artworks are traces of past mass manifestations and, at the same time, supply us with moulds for coming collectives. They refer to a place that was once filled with people and that will perhaps soon again be crowded. They also show that stillness is the strongest and silence the most talking in places that were once packed with people, but that are now deserted, and will perhaps soon be filled again. Filled with people who force their way though to clear away the barriers.
The barriers? As I said earlier some of Anna Ådahl’s works consist of sorting mechanisms. Or, with another word, of borders. Understood in this way, we can also see how she approaches the great questions of our time, which all seem to concern borders. Territorial borders: Israel’s wall against the Palestinians, the barrier between the US and Mexico, the border between the EU and the ”welfare parasites”. Borders between civilizations and religions, established by political scientists and security experts. Monetary borders, customs regulations, and investment obstacles, discussed and debated by economists. Cultural, ethnic, and sexual borders, investigated by sociologists and humanists.
Even the more pressing problems of society – alcohol taxes, immigration, trafficking, cultures of honor, agriculture subventions, ”social tourism”, capital evasion, terrorism, veil bans, rasism, the spread of firearms, or prison breaks – are in the last instance caused by the existence somewhere of a border which is either too closed or too open. The borders spread out, and they do so literally. Soon they will cover society as a whole.
But what is a border? That there are borders means, fundamentally, that there are identities. Whoever delimits a piece of land, a life form, a society, or a value, gives it an identity and defines its place in the order of being. Borders exist because borders are drawn, and borders are drawn in order to delimit identities – and the first border which is drawn, and which always continues to be drawn, and which is today drawn in a more strict way than since long, stems from the crude separation of similar from dissimilar, man from beast, ourselves from the others.
Even the Garden of Eden had gates. Illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages depict the border as a city wall guarded by angels with swords and halberds. The myth of original sin recounts how man was thrown out of paradise so that she was then forced to stand in line at the Pearly Gates with prayers and letters of indulgence which could give her back a place in the circle of angels – a bit like today’s sans papiers, which must persuade the authorities and produce certificates of legitimate reasons for seeking refuge, and of confirmed language skills, before she can be accepted among the legitimate Westerners.
Sometimes the borders are clearly visible: a fence with the sign ”Unauthorized access forbidden”. But more often they are invisible: we note them first when we transgress them. Someone giggles or raises their eyebrows. Someone rushes towards you, screams halt, and brings down the halberd. You are taken in custody, imprisoned, thrown out, in the worst case killed.
The border is the place of violence, writes the French philosopher Étienne Balibar. There, the politicians must get their hands dirty. There, the police brings out the tear gas and the truncheons. In the age of nationalism, where there is a presupposed idea that each society should preferably consist of one single people that inhabits one single territory and is governed by one single state, the sorting process has been accelerated. Each attempt to unify the people with a big P engenders another people which will in due time be detached and stripped of their rights – and in modern times, this people has been designated as a mass, a word that claims to justify the exclusion which it at the same times enforces. The masses are human beings. The masses also designate a zone in the periphery of society – society’s margin, where the order is dissolved and pass over into the barbaric or the wild. Each society needs such a border in order to define its own normative center where everything is supposed to happen according to reason and where all citizens are individuals.
Anna Ådahl approaches these limits and this periphery, and invites the spectator to follow her along, to discover her place within the collective creation that is called history. Around the known world, where we have established ourselves in peace and calm, just outside of the border, a circle of burning fires can be seen. We are surrounded by the masses. We are also part of the masses, with torches in our hands, on our way to storm the headquarters.
November 2009 |