Anne Lindberg

"sleep" by Anne Lindberg

Silence

a group exhibition of international artists curated by Jaanika Peerna

opens Thursday, May 24, 2012

from 6 to 8 pm

at Masters & Pelavin Gallery

13 Jay Street

New York, NY 10013

www.masterspelavin.com

limited edition catalog available - information at bottom of blog post

press release:

Masters & Pelavin is proud to present Silence, a group exhibition of international artists, curated by Estonian artist and curator Jaanika Peerna. A variety of media will be shown—video, sculpture, painting, photography and installation—a number of artists represented, including: Peter Baumann, Anne Lindberg, Janine Magelsen, Kazumi Tanaka, Thomas Fougeirol, Kaido Ole, Jaan Toomik, Jaanika Peerna and Krista Mölder.

In reference to spiritual connection, a silent mind, freed from the onslaught of thoughts and thought patterns, is both a goal and an important step in a number of spiritual teachings. Many religious traditions imply the importance of being quiet and still in mind and spirit for transformative and integral spiritual growth to occur. In Christianity, there is the silence of contemplative prayer; in Islam, Sufis insist on the importance of finding silence within. In Buddhism, it is implied as a feature of spiritual enlightenment; and, in Hinduism, silence, or “Mauna,” it is taught for inner growth.

In these traditions, spiritual tools, such as mandalas, may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts. Mandalas, or concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Even in Christianity, forms which are evocative of mandalas are prevalent: the celtic cross; the rosary; the halo; the aureole; oculi; the Crown of Thorns.

In common use, “mandala” has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective. In Estonian artist Jaanika Peerna’s Murmuring Silence, thousands of infinitesimally thin lines, spaced so closely together that they are barely distinguishable from one another, combine to create a densely layered mandala. Scale and perspective are rendered extraneous, unimportant; we could be looking at atoms or stars, and that ambiguity is it's power, keeping our viewpoint in motion, fluid, subjective. As an aid to meditation, Murmuring Silence establishes a sacred space, both for the artist and the viewer.

According to the psychologist David Fontana (1934 – 2010), the mandala’s symbolic nature can help one “to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises.” The psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1871 - 1961) saw the mandala as “a representation of the unconscious self,” and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.

Recent neurological studies have found that such emotions and behaviors as goodwill, security, fear, anxiety, self-protection, gravity, sexuality, and compulsiveness, generate from humans lower cerebral core. American artist Anne Lindberg’s works inhabit a non-verbal place resonant with such primal human conditions. In Sleep (2005), Lindberg presents the viewer with a white cantilever bed, just large enough for one person to rest on, which hangs from the gallery wall. The fabric, white sheets and pillow cases, are covered in hand stitched texts from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, 1975: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow—I feel my fate in what I cannot fear—I learn by going where I have to go.” Systemic and non-representational, Lindberg’s work is subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive.

In Western cultures, it is still sometimes difficult to interpret non-verbal messages, especially those being sent by a person being silent (i.e. not speaking). The act of not speaking can mean anger, hostility, disinterest, or any number of other emotions. Because of this, people in Western cultures feel uneasy when one party is silent and will usually try their best to fill up the silence with small talk.

In Das Schweigen (2011), a video work by German artist Peter Baumann, the viewer is presented with an awkward lack of conversation in a café between a man and a woman. The portrayed couple seems to embark on sharing of moment of intimacy or importance that never quite happens. Each person seems desperately afraid to offer up any word at all. Silence in speech can be the result of hesitation, stutters, self-correction, or the deliberate slowing of speech for the purpose of clarification or processing of ideas. These are short silences. Longer pauses in language typically occur in interactive roles, reactive tokens, or turn-taking. Baumann’s video humorously makes use of the awkwardness found while being silent within Western context.

Other artist have struggled with making use of silence within Western Culture. The first time avant-garde composer John Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 lecture at Vassar College, A Composer's Confessions. At the time, Cage felt that such a piece would be “incomprehensible in the Western context,” and was reluctant to write it down: “I didn't wish it to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.”

Music inherently depends on silence, in some form or another, to distinguish other periods of sound and allow dynamics, melodies and rhythms to have greater impact. Most music scores feature rests denoting periods of silence. However, Cage eventually took the use of silence in music to an extreme. 4’33” (pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”), was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece.

Estonian artist Kaido Ole's large-scale trompe-l'œil paintings of speakers, The Band ( 2003 ), like 4’33”, presents the viewers with an an experience in which they expect to hear sound but do not. In consequence, attention may be drawn to the sounds of the viewers surrounding environment. This ‘awareness’ is also induced by the sculptures of Japanese artist Kazumi Tanaka—a tiny piano, Seperation ( 2001 ); a miniature turntable, Recording ( 2012 ), each instrument laboriously hand crafted from such materials as craved wood, ivory and the artist own hair. These works, as well, do not produce sound. However, it can be argued that they are also not silent.

The works of Ole and Tanaka have the ability to allow the viewer to focus on the impossibility of silence, as long as the viewer is open to the idea of doing so. As Cage wrote about the premier of his first silent composition: “There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

4’33” is an example of automaticism. Since the Romantic Era, composers, like Cage, have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In automaticism, composers wish to completely remove both the composers and the artist from the process of creation. This is motivated by the belief that creation without social pressure is impossible, there is no way for us to truly express ourselves without infusing the art with the social standards that we have been subjected to since birth.

Contemporary Estonian artist Krista Mölder’s demonstrates a similar conviction through photographic works with meanings that are not strictly tied to the visual image. In PIND / LIND (In between internal & external; 2D ↔ 3D) (2011), the viewer is presented a minimal; yet, surreal diptych. The left panel, a total abstract—autonomous—the visual equivalent to the idea of free association. The right panel, a seemingly dream inspired image—a color photograph of a white origami bird, simply; yet, elegantly lit upon a white background. The work has nothing extra, the visual language is minimal yet open and it successfully evades any one-to-one correspondence with the literary or theoretical.

One cited influence for 4’33”, was Cage’s first experience in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than reflecting them as echoes. Such a chamber is also externally sound-proofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.” Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.”

A related experience is found in Estonian artist Jaan Toomik’s Waterfall ( 2005 ), a video portraying a man standing in front of a large waterfall. The noise of the waterfall and the environment portrayed is muted. The viewer is presented with a seemingly silent film. Rising-action quickly builds, as does the anxiety within the viewer, when the protagonist’s opens his month preparing to scream. The anticipation is that the video will resolve in an anti-climax—that the film will remain silent. The scream is indeed, left unheard; but, silence is replaced by the ambient rushing sound of the waterfall in the background. This roaring white noise is amplified, along with the tension of the viewer, for just a moment. The video ends as the man closes his mouth and walks off the screen.

Another cited influence for 4’33”, came from the field of the visual arts. Cage’s friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly “blank” canvases (though painted with house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. Norwegian artist Janine Magelsen pushes this further in her diminutive wall relief, Wallconstruction V (2012)—small white objects against a white wall, which create effects of light and shadow on their smooth surfaces. The installation and the space changes character according to the shadows of the passing audience.

At first glance, French artist Thomas Fougeirol’s artistic technique can be linked as a similar dramatic art of the absence. In Untitled (2012), the spectator feels invited to mentally shed their habits. He dives into the complexities of an intimate narrative where disappearance and silence map out the space like two impassable banks. Equivalent to Rauschenberg and Cage, Magelsen and Fougeirol use silence as an aural “blank canvas” to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient “sounds” surrounding each piece. Rather than thinking of these work as destructive reductions, it might be more productive to see them as hypersensitive screens—what Cage suggestively described as “airports of the lights, shadows and particles.”

Within Western culture, silence is defined as the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech. Yet, silence is used as total communication, in reference to non verbal communication and spiritual connection. It is the absence or omission of mention, comment, or expressed concern. A freedom from the onslaught of thoughts and thought patterns. A state of being forgotten. A bringing to rest or stillness. A hush. A quell. A muzzle.

INQUIRIES +1 646 926 2787GALLERY@MASTERSPELAVIN.COM

limited edition exhibition catalogue now available on www.folioleaf.com

Silence

ISBN 978-9851414-4-8

essay by Todd Masters

46 pages, hardcover

12 by 12 inches, full color offset

After opening the Extended Drawing exhibition in Oslo September 1st at the Tegnerforbundet, I traveled up to the northern reaches of Norway to the Lofoten Islands for a two-week residency at the Kunsetnerhuset i Svolvaer. I flew from Oslo on a rainy cool Norwegian day to Bodo along the western coast, and then over the Norwegian Sea in a propeller plane to Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands, who's back is against the North Sea and and beyond to Greenland.

The Kunstnerhuset is a small art center started by a Swedish artist in the 1920s, and now houses four artists at a time to share two studios on the second floor of the hilltop center on Svinoya Island on the edge of Svolvaer. Today, most artists come with support from a joint Swedish/Norwegian association to create exchange between artists from these two neighboring countries in Scandinavia. I went to the Kunstnerhuset with the generous support of a grant from the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program.

Svolvaer village is home to intense cod, herring and salmon fishing industries that fish primarily in the winter from January to April, and tourism in the summer. Svolvaer is the largest community on the Lofoten Islands, and is center for the fishing & drying of "stockfish," a dried cod that is exported to Italy and Spain for the traditional "bacalao" delicacy.

There is much to show and describe about the time in Lofoten, but it is the light that was most memorable, magical, ever-changing and deeply mysterious. Each day & night brought a myriad of light and water conditions, many of which I witnessed from my drawing studio and small single room. I was in Lofoten just before the Autumn Equinox, when the light begins to quickly fall toward the Winter Solstice at which time this part of Norway lies in 24-hours of darkness. I felt a strong tipping and shifting of the light away from summer toward winter.

While in Lofoten, I read Didier Maleuvre's The Horizon, a History of Our Infinite Longing, published in 2011. Maleuvre is professor of comparative literature in Santa Barbara at the University of California. It was a timely choice of books to read, and aptly fueled the drawings I began in Lofoten.

From the Maleuvre's Preface, "The horizon isn't an objective boundary; it isn't really the place where earth and sky weld shut. It marks not the factual edge of the world, but the shifting line where perception trails off. A reflective phenomenon, a horizon bespeaks a beholder - the who, where, and when of its sighting. The "where" in particular: inasmuch as it limits perception, any horizon assumes the presence of a perceiver dwelling within, rather than above, the landscape. The horizon entails a ground-level immanent viewpoint of reality. It forbids the all-knowing proverbial eye in the sky. Not that the sky and what it symbolizes (the beyond, the unseen, the transcendent) is absent. On the contrary: the horizon arises from the action of casting an internal perspective on the faraway."

Indeed, I felt faraway - above the Arctic Circle in a place that sometimes felt Chinese and other-worldly with deep black/green mossy rock jutting out of the sea, continually wet surfaces, and low-lying clouds alternating with transitions to crystal clear sun. As the drawings I made in Lofoten reflect, it was a homecoming of sorts. I am part-Scandinavian descent (mostly Danish) - the Norwegian people, their customs, diet, gentle temperament and landscape felt deeply familiar.

Here are a few of thousands of photographs I took of the Lofoten light: these are shown in the order I took them...starting with the first day.