| NOSTALGIA, REVERIE & INTOXICATING DREAMS Romantic Longing in the Art of Peter Callesen By Camilla Jalving
Those visitors crossing the lawn behind Goldsmiths College in London in January 1999 would have seen the following: a king, dressed accordingly in a robe and wearing a crown, was building a castle out of cardboard held together with cello tape. The castle was several meters high with four soaring towers and placed majestically in the middle of the lawn. In the beginning of the building process the castle seemed solid. A true home for a nobleman of his rank. However, during the ten days of construction the castle was weakened by the rain, becoming all soggy and damp, not being able to sustain its own weight. Nonetheless the king heroically continued to repair and build on his impossible project, as if his whole kingdom was now only to be found in this gesture of building, of trying hard to erect his dream. In the dead of night, after the 10th day of building, the king surrendered to the forces of nature and removed his castle, as if to erase any trace of his failed attempt to build a sustainable home. It is thus plausible that those passing the lawn the following morning might have believed that what they had seen during the previous days had only been a mirage, a fantasy, an imaginary fairytale of a king and his castle.
The fairytale was a performance titled ‘Castle’ by the artist Peter Callesen, also starring in the role of the king. In this role he became, although more due to rain and unforeseen circumstances than plain intentions, the performer of failure rather than of success. If Callesen failed as entrepreneur, he did not fail as an artist. On the contrary, ‘Castle’ stands out as an imaginative work, which seen retrospectively, embodies several issues that have become central to the artist’s practice. In the course of the next few pages I will attempt to approach some of these issues, whilst trying to connect the extremely wide-ranging practice of Peter Callesen. A practice which includes not only performance, but also sculpture, paper cutouts and drawings, but which nonetheless seems to gather around some common concerns.
The dethroned artist
Firstly, return to the king and his castle. The performance surely entails more than mere entrepreneurship tinged with slap-stick comedy. On the contrary, these are serious matters. During the ten days of the performance, Callesen slowly, but effectively dethroned not only the king, but equally interestingly, the masculine virtuosity traditionally attributed to the male artist. The photographic reproductions of the king standing next to his collapsing castle in the hazy mist, do not only tell the story of a performance, but also a story of loss of illusions and patriarchal power.
From a gender perspective, Peter Callesen hence puts on stake the supremacy of the male artist as it has been expressed in modernist art practices and discourses, often positioning the (male) artist as unfailing genius, exercising his creative power on the compliant material. This strategic undermining of the artist as heroic figure takes place in other performances by Callesen. In ‘The Dying Swan is Dying’, performed at Gallery Tommy Lund in Copenhagen in 2001, Callesen appeared dressed up as the Dying Swan, the artist’s alter ego, in a brown furry garb, complete with beak and swanfeet. As the swan entered the room, it started drawing an image of itself on the wall. Though, when comparing the image with its own body, it realized that the two did not fit. The image on the wall was too small. The swan therefore started drawing up its own outline, using its body as a direct template. However, after filling out the outline with a brown colour the swan still seemed unsatisfied with the result and started to cut off its own furry garb in order to place it within the outline of the drawing on the wall. The swan continued until its furry garb was almost completely destroyed, now hanging in rags and nailed to the wall, together with its cut-off beak and feet placed on the floor underneath the drawing, like old, worn-out shoes. The swan was now transformed into an image, an ideal representation, and the remainder, the now almost completely undressed artist, left the room.
Clearly, in both of these performances Peter Callesen puts on display the vulnerability of the male subject. He is more victim of a dream than master of the situation. In this way Callesen aligns himself historically with artists like Vito Acconci and in a Danish context, Peter Land. Especially Land has been puncturing the male artist’s ego, through self-compromising performances displaying, if anything, failure, hence destabilising, like Callesen, any fixed notion of patriarchal supremacy.
The romantic impetus
Even though this gender perspective is crucial when thinking of Callesen’s work, he still engages with issues too important to be reserved the discussion of just one gender. If anything, the art of Peter Callesen is fundamentally existential, as he not only engages with, but performs the conditions of human life and experience more generally. In this perspective one might conceive of ‘The Dying Swan is Dying’ as a performance that dramatises what Lacan described as the impossibility of the subject to see itself from the position of the Other. Or the ‘Castle’ as a performance that not just represents, but actually presents the daily struggle felt and encountered by most people.
Abstracting on these points, and without ignoring the specific gendered issues that Callesen’s performances touch on, one might talk about a certain romantic inclination running through the work of Peter Callesen as a common thread. I am thinking of ‘romanticism’ in line with the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who, during a series of talks at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1965, defined romanticism as
“the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable (…) It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially in the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages.”
Berlin here points out a range of romantic motives: moonlight, castles, falling water etc., but he also delivers an abstract notion of romanticism, pertaining more to a certain state of mind than a historical period. Neither the motives, nor this abstract notion of romanticism are foreign to Callesen’s practice. It is full of enchanted castles, as well as being marked by a certain nostalgic longing, a certain heroic and idealistic striving towards a higher mode of being. The king performs it in ‘Castle’, in his cardboard realisation of a fairytale fantasy, in his insistent attempt to construct a palace all by himself. The swan performs it, when trying to capture the true representation of its own body, when trying to see itself from the position of the Other. This implicit romanticism stands out in most of Callesen’s performances, acted out by the artist himself. What needs to be examined is how this romanticism, this nostalgia, reverie and longing express itself in other parts of his practice, first of all, in his many paper cutouts.
A4 fragility
Take a piece of A4 paper, just a normal ordinary blank one as it comes out of the copy machine tray. You can write on it, draw on it, but also cut into it. Peter Callesen does so. Since 2004 parallel to his performance practice, he has been transforming two dimensional surfaces into three dimensional sculptures by the means of a paper cutter. From the white surface of ordinary A4 paper, a narrative arises. Or rather, lots of them. Stories, dramas, film clips. In ‘Snowballs’ a small house is erected from the paper. In the background, up the hill, two balls of snow have been set into motion. It is only a matter of time before the house will be smashed to the ground by the force of the rolling balls. At least, this is what I imagine, as the small sheet-like paper sculpture only shows the seconds before the disaster. As a still image, a frozen moment in time full of classic suspense, it shows how a possible catastrophe will take place on the A4 paper, elegantly created by a few cuts and slices.
Other paper cutouts are more intricate, revealing a painstaking craftsmanship. With great care and immense patience, Callesen creates a white, hyper-aesthetic universe of puns-in-paper, often making use of a tragic-comic slap-stick humour with a melancholic tinge. Creating the paper cutouts is basic magic in a way. In stead of drawing, Callesen cuts, folds and suddenly a world appears. 2D becomes 3D, which is quite a heroic gesture in and by itself. A gesture of basic transformation you might call it, initiated by the artist/creator. However, and this is an important point to bear in mind, if the gesture is heroic, the outcome is equally fragile.
Much can be said about fragility as a formal strategy in artistic practices. In an art historical context, it can be seen as a counter-aesthetical move against traditional modernist sculptural practice, most often based, as it is, on volume, monumentality, the trace of manual force or industrial heaviness. Callesen’s sculptures are neither heavy, nor monumental. Rather, through their delicate materiality, their flagrant fragility evokes an ‘aesthetic of possible failure’, as if they are always on the verge of collapsing, of falling apart or being flattened by an awkward hand. In this way Callesen reformulates sculptural practise, querying as well as queering in a way, the monumentality of the medium.
In ‘Impenetrable Castle’ the castle reappears. Typical of Callesen’s paper cutouts, it is attached to its own negative, the paper from which it is cut. When cutting, Callesen never isolates the figure from the ground, but merely transforms ground into figure. Hence the castle remains a sculptural loop, a self-sufficient construction that cannot be entered as it closes itself off from the outside. As such it can be regarded as an emblem of both longing and enclosure, of “bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation” to quote Berlin one more time. A closed-off world of fairytales and childhood dreams.
This connectedness of figure and ground can be seen as a merely formal matter: as the artist’s way to stage a battle between the flatness of the paper and the volume of the figure, hence creating a certain formal tension between the flat sheet and the elevated sculptural form. Perceived more symbolically, the connectedness of figure and ground seems to propose the inevitability of origin, meaning the impossibility of ever freeing oneself from the past. Like the figure, we are always bound to our grounding, literally speaking the A4 paper, metaphorically the place we come from. For even though the figure rises from the paper, it is equally restricted by the paper, defined as it is by what makes it possible. The paper cutout ‘Butterflies trying to escape their drawing’ makes this point very clearl: eight butterflies flapping their wings, albeit aimlessly, as they are tied to the material that brings them into being.
Heavenly aspirations
This impossible and romantic longing reappears in Callesen’s full-scale paper ladder from 2003. Ladders in general elevate the human body. They make it possible for us to reach further than if we were just standing on the ground. Used in daily life they are practical. Used in art they might become symbolic- at least if one is to consider this ladder. Although made out of paper, it almost looks like a real ladder considering the meticulous detailing. However, if one ever wanted to step on it, it would no doubt collapse. The material thus clashes with the object to the degree that it becomes an impossible object, destined to realise its own breakdown.
In the Old Testament, the patriarch Jacob dreams of a ladder that reaches right to the sky and takes him to Paradise. In Christian iconography the ladder has thus become a symbol of the striving of humans towards Heaven and God. If this is the road Callesen indicates with his paper ladder, the road is clearly paved with obstacles. Seen as such, the ladder not only functions as a symbol, but manifests the impossibility in ever reaching what one endeavours. Hereby it presents the imbedded logic of romanticism: longing is everything but reaching one’s goal.
Symbolic meaning and romanticism aside, Callesen’s paper ladder also comments on art’s relation to reality by mimicking the real in a way that one can hardly see the difference. Callesen fully employed this strategy of imitating in ‘Mirage’, an installation in the Berlin-gallery Koch und Kesslau in 2004. Here he made an extremely realistic paper replica of the staircase within the gallery, thus mirroring in an uncanny way the real space. Uncanny, as it was difficult to decide what was real and what was represented.
The generous gesture
Now where do these examples take us? What can be generalised from these excursions into the artist’s practice? A range of keywords springs to mind, some of which have already been mentioned: Tragedy, comedy, heroism, transformation, fairytales, escapism, longing, dreaming and desire. Some of them can be found in Isaiah Berlin’s characterisation of romanticism. Others grow out of my encounter with Peter Callesen’s practice. A crucial point has been the element of failure implicit in every act of longing and desiring as well as in the work of Callesen. Do we ever reach what we endeavour? Callesen poses the question, but gives of course no final answer. Instead he offers the viewer not only objects to consider, but dreams to pursue. In 2003 he generously placed another star in the sky in the performance ‘Infinity+1’. In front of the Charlottenborg exhibition space in Copenhagen, he folded a star in paper, which he attached with a string to a balloon filled with helium. The balloon and the star went up into the sky, where it soon disappeared in the clouds. It is not known whether the star is still up there, but the possibility thereof exists.
Camilla Jalving is a Danish art critic, Ph.d in art history and lecturer at University of Copenhagen
FOLDING - UNFOLDING
By Pontus Kyander
A star falls from my winter’s sky, brim full and bristling. Headlong, and then – gone. There is a silent wish granted, and I wish there was someone to put that star in place again.
* * *
All narratives unfold in a space. Normally, both the unfolding aspect and the spatial are to be taken metaphorically: the space indicated is a mental one, one that has to be imagined, and the unfolding is a way of describing how the writer arranges the storyline to evolve in all those twists and turns we know from literature. The story has to be interpreted and re-narrated by the reader, in his mind. Sometimes, and sometimes not, the miracle of reading brings us to unforgettable moments, full of images brought out from our own mind and memories.
The space in visual narratives is mental as well as physical. Again, there is a story to be reconstructed, but the images are there instead of letters. It is an easy way to evade the cumbersome act of description (an image is not a description, it is a reality in itself), but places the viewer in the position to have to re-enact the narrative. Visual narratives are somewhat more open-ended than the stories told in books, in particular if we talk of singular images and singular objects.
Peter Callesen’s paper works are literally results of folding – and cutting. On top of a story that include various symbols that we recognise from fairy tales and other archetypical storytelling, and thus integrating all those narratives that we know from reading books and watching films about castles and princesses and monsters and darkness and a lot of other things, he also brings in the story of the work itself. This is not just a castle, it is a castle that tells you how it was made. All laid bare, the start, the process, and the final result. In that sense, the work is narrative, but also performative. Object and action at the same time. The act of viewing is a re-enactment, and an act of unfolding the folded, uncutting the cut.
* * *
—Tell me a story, said the piglet to the pig, or was it the puppy to the dog, or the kitten to the cat, or just my kid or your kid to me or you the other day. Let me tell you a dark, dark story, stark dark like tar on the wall inside a closed closet. Once upon a time there were these birds, they had feathers, beaks, wings, whatever you need to be a bird. But they were stuck. Have you ever seen, little piglet, or puppy, or kitten, or kid, have you ever seen a flock of birds on a pond surprised by the frost, with their feet frozen to the ice? Probably not – who has? – but can you imagine? Anyhow, these birds were stuck, they couldn’t get anywhere except for the occasional wrenching and wriggling to get loose from the ground. But then, it wasn’t the ground. It was just a big white sheet of paper, they were birds trying to escape their drawings. Can you imagine anything worse? They were just like us, tied to their shadows, turning and tumbling to get loose.
* * *
OK, we could go on talking about fairytales and such things, but if we do, we have to remind ourselves of the sadness embedded in many of those tales, at least some of the best ones. The prince is not getting the princess, the tin soldier melts from his burning passion, the mermaid is caught between her craving for love and her need to survive. And then you have the young swan watching the egg, wondering where on earth that came from.
There are a lot of solitary cygnets, ugly ducklings, steadfast tin soldiers and other losers and loners in the gallery of characters of Peter Callesen. Hard facts of life are counteracted by sheer optimism and denial up to the bitter moment of defeat and destruction. Just like the heroic characters of slapstick, there is under all of this an existential drive. In the Greek tragedy, you talk about peripeteia, the turning point when the shocking facts begin to reveal themselves, when the consequences of all the previous acts have to be paid and from which no regrets are any more allowed. Peter Callesen’s works, regardless whether we talk about his drawing, his paper works or his performances, usually place their focus on those situations, but without allowing the characters to reach the moment of insight and clarity. They are stuck in the moments of firm belief. It is only us, viewers and bystanders, who may draw any conclusions.
Or are we just jumping to conclusions? Is the moment of defeat really more real than the dream of success and fair rewards? We can actually choose to believe in the moment of belief, and instead of waiting for a wishing star to fall, send one of our own up in the sky.
* * *
Pink.
There was this white paper in a shop window – isn’t a gallery ultimately a shop? – against a backdrop painted all pink. You could see the silhouette of a branch and leaves and petals of a cherry tree. But only in the negative, as an absence cut out from the paper. The white flowers had all fallen to the ground, floating like water lilies in this pond of pink. This was in the week of the Cherry Blossom Festival, a national holiday in Korea, and simply a response to the situation. In his own way, Peter Callesen incorporated a painterly tradition (shared in particular with the Japanese, whose cruel colonisation of Korea left this poetic imprint behind) and of course the super-commercial noise of tingle-tangle and bric-a-brac going on around the city of Seoul. But this window was silent, the only sound imaginable was that of falling flowers that just had dropped to the ground. And the image itself was in ways a visual conundrum, a riddle and its paradoxical reply welded into one. You have the blossoms on the branch, but absent; the flowers on the floor are in return like shadows of the petals fallen from the tree, painted in reverse: white-on-pink responding to pink-on-white. Question and response, and the response echoing the question. Which is most real, the branch painted in pink, or the flowers cut out of white? The solid flowers are obviously or at least seemingly cut out of the paper, in fact both are part of the same white void. Finally there is neither nor.
White.
* * *
A spider spins his web, just to find himself stuck in it, The Dying Swan stumbles, falls, slips and even gets rolled in tar and feathers. The sailor folds his own boat out of cardboard, launches it in the pond or canal or at sea – just to find it sinking under him. A king builds his castle out of wood and cardboard, on the lawn by the art school or on a tiny custom-built island in the harbour. Great dreams are enacted by the simplest means and by somewhat faltering skill.
I used to think his performances were about failure, ineptness, lack of touch with reality. Probably I got it all wrong. Far from being a fact, failure should rather be described as a state of mind. If you are not willing to admit failure, though your achievements neither get any acclaim by the world around you, nor do they actually carry you anywhere further, still in your mind you can hold on to your visions and aspirations, however incomprehensible, unrealistic or false they might seem to anyone else.
“Life is a dream” is the conclusion of the hero of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s play with the same name. Life is all a dream, and even dreams remain but dreams. Dream and wake mix and reverse in the play, like the presence and absence, figure and ground in Peter Callesen’s paper works. But also his performances evolve in an opposition of realities, incongruous to each other but still just as much part of each other. Is this reality, is this a king, is this a brave sailor or just a fool? The contradictions of these different systems of belief create the tension that actually supports it all. So if it is a dream, let it be a dream. So is reality.
Peter Callesen’s various personæ all seem to share something invincible. They are kings of their own castles, heroes of their own worlds. What seems tragic could as well be regarded as absurd, at the most, or just uncompromising. They set their own rules, and stick to them. You see the cardboard boat sink, the castle collapse from rain and wind. But the heroes don’t give in. Courage and hard-headed stubbornness are kissing cousins. Instead of admitting defeat, they seem to have a more cheerful attitude: come on Sisyphus, there is still a stone to roll tomorrow!
* * *
There was this troll called Shame, and there was his mirror. He made it such that everything true and beautiful turned out ugly and distorted. He had a great laugh at all this. Then all bad and ugly looked just proper and great! Everyone around admitted, that now you could really see the true face of reality! But then someone dropped the mirror. It was smashed into a million pieces, pieces so small that they spread with the wind and got stuck in the eyes of people. Some even got a splinter in their heart, making it cold as ice. This was the birth of realism, of the proper way to understand the world. And in the middle of this sea of ice, you had the cold and beautiful Snow Queen making everyone play The Game of Common Sense. That is the framework of H C Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, and that is another story unfolding in the background while the snowflakes tumble bigger and bigger outside my window.
Pontus Kyander is a Swedish art historian, critic and freelance curator as well as the former editor of the weekly TV program on contemporary art, FORMAT on Swedish national television
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