Magnus Wallin

Published in Magazine: NU: The Nordic Art Review Vol. III NO. 3-4/01; NSVS ISSN 1404-207X

Bodies in motion
– by Sara Arrhenius

Magnus Wallin´s videos are short, intense, three-dimensional animations projected in pitch-black rooms. All are complex narratives that, for a few moments, place the viewer face-to-face with a visually and aurally compact over-pressurized experience. There is no distance here, no measured formalism. Only participation, seduction, and the melodramatic gothic romance of horror. Magnus Wallin is not and does not want to be ironic.

Magnus Wallin´s work is first of all, a narrative about the body, or rather, about how the body is understood and portrayed in Western modernity. His videos examine and reveal the ideologies that determine the ways in which we not only view the body but actively shape it, today perhaps more than ever before. But above all, his work is an engaged confrontation with the consequences of our corporeal ideologies, with how our desire for symmetry, hardness, and perfection makes us not just look away from certain bodies but even to classify them out of circulation. And how a standard of beauty that rests on notions of harmony, unity, and paradisiacal purity is in no way innocent, its flip-side being violence, contempt, and dehumanisation.

Two kinds of bodies recur in his works: the heroicized body, erect and athletic, and the grotesque body, deviant, asymmetrical, and insubordinate. In his breakthrough video installation Exit (1997) we see several limping, disabled people being chased by a fire coming down a long corridor. They seem to be the victims of a demonic, grim contemporary version of a gladiator game. Every time the fire consumes someone, the applause crescendos. Some of the people manage to save themselves with the help of a helicopter waiting for them. In the vide animation Skyline (2000), we encounter the opposite of these bodies: the monumental aesthetic´s heroicized bodies - symmetrical, muscle-bound machines. A group of athletic men take turns swinging from a trapeze out into emptiness. Their bodies then crash against a tower - the clock tower from the 1936 Berlin Olympic stadium - and fall down in pieces on an examination table in an anatomical theatre. The short animation video sequences confront the viewer with their intensity and demonstrate, at a dizzying pace, a historical trajectory, namely how the body formed through an increasingly triumphant natural science has turned more and more into an object made of different components that can be assembled or dismantled like a mechanical apparatus.

The mystery that still shrouded the body until the 16th century began to dissipate with 17th century rationalism. The strong, disciplined body became a cog in the increasingly complicated machinery that was modern, developing society. And how this body could be controlled, made efficient, and deployed was a subject for various branches of modern science, such as medicine, psychometrics, anthropology, and sociology. From the mid 19th century on, social theories of every political hue drew on various imaginative scientific theories and findings to formulate plans for improving the citizenry. This was a point of view that was taken to its absurd extreme in the Nazis´ attempt to create the perfect human being and society. These are perspectives, however, that still operate as more or less hidden figures of thought in our own contemporary notions of the body. A striking example of this way of thinking is the female synchronized swimmers in the video animation Limbo (1999), taken from an Esther Williams film. As part of a seductive dream of paradise, the women swim in beautiful symmetric circles. Every swimmer is only part of a larger machine, as exchangeable as a worker at a factory conveyor belt or the obedient creatures slaughtered in Skyline . Today, we unabashedly celebrate this heroic body in fashion and advertising, and we enjoy watching it as it carries out its duties in our equivalent of gladiator games in sport arenas or during performances on TV.

Opposed to this are the limping, deformed people who are desperately trying to save themselves from the fire in Exit . These are the bodies that no one wants to acknowledge, and that we can avoid having if we only exert enough effort, work out, eat right, and undergo a little plastic surgery. A malformed exclamation point, a grotesque deformity that reminds us of our insufficiency and our pain. But the body that we must hide, correct, rectify, and discipline, is also the body that questions and exposes hierarchies. It is the carnival's insubordinate body that sneers provocatively and turns the world upside down.

Magnus Wallin´s four videos, Exit, Limbo, Physical Paradise and Skyline , can be seen as a series, both thematically and formally. If shown together, like they were at Uppsala Art Museum during the fall of 2000, the consistency of his work becomes apparent. All are short, intense, three-dimensional animations projected in pitch-black rooms. All are complex narratives that, for a few moments, place the viewer face-to-face with a visually and aurally compact, and over pressurized experience. There is no distance here, no measured formalism. Only participation, seduction, and the melodramatic gothic romance of horror. Magnus Wallin is not and does not want to be ironic. I would say that Wallin consciously draws on the visual power of high and popular cultural imagery in order to narrate something, and he does not shy from using a strong rhetoric in order to captivate his audience. The keywords are proximity, strong emotions, and visual volume.

Wallin´s works are connected by certain motifs and characters that recur. Some examples include the tunnel, the fall, the hunt, the stadium and athletes, psychedelic colors that make decorative patterns, and flying angels. But what connects the works together, above all, is that they are fuelled with a critique of how integrated certain conceptions of the body are in our culture at large and of the way in which we divide the body into good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless. The works show how these conceptions in turn rely on the belief that symmetry, clean lines and surfaces, and perfect bodies reflect a virtuous divine harmony and how bodies that go against the grain trigger horror in us. Magnus Wallin makes us aware of how the body has become increasingly fragmented since it was first splayed open in Renaissance anatomic theatres, and how it is today imagined as a machine, an information system, or a code whose components can be exchanged, improved, or replaced. He make us realize that we have become increasingly unforgiving towards bodies that deviate, do not function, or simply do not fulfil the reigning ideals of beauty.

Documentation has dominated video art in the past decade. Contemporary art has been fascinated by documentary and by photography's way of recording the world. In the light of this development, it is especially interesting to think about Magnus Wallin´s decision to use animation as his medium. When used in conjunction with digital media and video, animation is usually associated with computer games and the entertainment industry. But its art historical roots in painting and drawing are also perceptible in Wallin´s work, which often takes as its point of departure a detail from an old painting or drawing. One dimension of his work is exactly about the encounter of various visual regimes, and you often get the feeling of diving down into our culture's unconscious where classical art history is there alongside Hollywood films and cartoon strips. This is not because Wallin is interested in addressing the value of these various visual forms. On the contrary, he makes no statement about their status in our visual hierarchy. They exist side by side only by virtue of their symbolic strength or visual power - they have something to say to us. Hieronymus Bosch, a Leni Riefenstahl reference, and psychedelic visions of paradise that seem to be from a New Age source are all incorporated. There is no categorization or hierarchy of these different visual references - they all play a role in our visual culture and express how we conceive of ourselves. What Magnus Wallin shows through his cannibalistic visual references is how certain conceptions of the body and of the human race have survived in our contemporary visual repertoire and still disseminate their powerful ideologies, even if they are not officially admitted or privileged in our dominant discourse.

I understand the logic of his decision to work with three-dimensional video animations. The world that Magnus Wallin creates in his works makes no claims to realism or reality; rather, he is interested in how we use images to create representations and ideologies. To use animations is not just a technological choice but also a way of examining and commenting on the way this technology is used in our culture. When choosing to use video instead of a technology that is exclusively identified with high culture, such as painting, you are choosing a visual form that is prevalent in society and that resonates with the present moment's fantasies.

Magnus Wallin´s animations are highly complex narratives where every part is the result of many decisions. The animations originate from a series of careful preliminary studies where the characters and every sequence are planned in a storyboard and built as models in his studio. The final animation is done in collaboration with professional animators. "Animation gives me the opportunity to be pathetic", says Wallin. And of course this visual tradition does remain open to exaggeration, seriousness, sentimentality, and a gothic love of horror in a way that photographic tradition does not admit. There is also the opportunity here to define every moment and expression.

When you see Skyline alongside Magnus Wallin´s earlier work, you see a clear process of refinement that makes it even more obvious how he uses and recycles certain images that function as metaphors. These images recur because they have something essential to say about our time, an example being the fantasy of weightlessness and the desire to leave the heaviness of the flesh and float freely. In Physical Paradise , the viewer is taken on a journey on the spaceship Honolulu to a weightless paradise for handicapped people. From hell - devised with the help of images taken from Bosch´s paintings - the passenger is taken through various seductive kitsch fantasies of paradise. Colors, patterns, forms, and symbols rush at the viewer. The body does not crash against the walls of reality, we are no longer pulled down towards Earth, and we do not feel any pain. The same fantasy is at work in the athletic men in Skyline who rise up towards the sky like Icarus only to crash headlong a moment later, and in the apparently weightless swimmers in Limbo whose bodies float through the water.

The desire away from the body towards a weightless spirituality has a long history in our culture, often paired with contempt for the body's materiality, its mortality, desires, and pains. The question is whether this fantasy does not persist in contemporary, utopian virtual worlds that we are able to create with the help of new information technologies. The contemporary dream of the boundless human being who can move everywhere like a stream of pure information and who leaves his miserable flesh outside the computer terminal in order to disperse all over cyberspace has a great deal in common with the men in Skyline who try to defy the force of gravity on their bodies. Virtual worlds hold the promise of no longer heeding the body's limitations and weight. The contemporary expression of this age-old dream of leaving the weighted body behind is our desire to approach and even become a machine; to not see the computer screen as a barrier but as something to pass through.

This drive towards proximity, towards eliminating the distance between image and viewer, is an incurrent in today's visual culture at large. It is clear in the rhetoric that is generated around new technologies and in the segments of the entertainment industry and popular culture that are looking to develop technologies that can offer us such experiences. Films such as The Matrix by Larry and Andy Wachowski or David Cronenberg´s Existenz are only two examples that reflect precisely this virtual reality fantasy of the image as not only something we look at but also as something we live in. The screen is not something we have in front of us and look at; the fusion of human being and machine dissolves the border between representation and reality.

Magnus Wallin´s work consciously addresses these questions at a thematic level, but his choice of technology also functions as a commentary. I see his work not as an isolated example, however, but as a part of a larger current in contemporary art. I see this development as the beginning of a decisive transformation in the way we relate to films and images that we look at. The passive film viewer in the dark cinema who focused his gaze on the sparkling screen or who stood in front of a spatially delimited TV monitor is now part of an older history and has been replaced by another mode of vision. The magnificent video installations that are obviously a part of contemporary art's development of film presume a mobile viewer who moves through the room or a series of rooms filled by a stream of moving images where there is no beginning or end, and no place that can be described as the center or the periphery. The boundary between image and viewer, between the space of image and the space of reality, between the solidity of architecture and the instability of the image has changed. In video art, this transformation has led to a shift away from the TV monitor as the image's given frame toward the projected image as a moving, streaming phenomenon that covers the walls, floor, and objects in the room. This is what I would like to call a new intimacy in our affair with the image. The viewer could be said to now move in and with the work.

Much of what is written about video today assumes a lineage from film to contemporary video installations. This is correct insofar as they are both time-based mediums and many video artists work with some sort of narrative. Magnus Wallin is one example. At the same time, I think that the differences between traditional film and today's video installations tell us more than their similarities. Film researcher Raymond Bellour has pointed out that when we see contemporary videos, we are wanderers and visitors in the images rather than viewers of the images. The desire behind the use of moving images is to bridge the distance between the viewer and the viewed. The image is not something that is to be looked at within a designated framework, like at the movies. In many video pieces, the image wallpapers the entire room. It bends around the corner and moves over the walls, floor, and ceiling. There is no clear demarcation of the image as image and the image as an architectural element, of the image's illusionistic space and the space the viewer is occupying. His tendency is perceptible in Magnus Wallin´s earlier work. The proximity to the viewer and the intensity and seduction of the narrative make it difficult to turn away. The size and volume of the projection overwhelm the viewer.

This tendency is even more clear in his latest work Exercise Parade (2001) shown in May at the År ett exhibition at the Bo 01 house fair. The work is composed of two video projections shown on two sides of a dark room. The narrative picks up the themes that Magnus Wallin returns to again and again, but here they have been refined even further into a series of metaphors that are demonstrated spatially. Two figures - a skeleton and a muscular mannequin - go down a long, dreary, faceless corridor by leapfrogging over one another. The skeleton is crying miserably and their journey is broken up every now and then by large spheres that rush through the space. If you look closely at the spheres, you'll see that they are filled with images of deformed children: images from Nazi experiments on the handicapped. The walls are vibrating and moving. A terrifying snake moves through the corridor and threatens to swallow the viewer in its enormous mouth that opens as wide as a tunnel. The skeleton and the muscleman continue their apparently endless and aimless journey. By using two projections and letting the narrative jump from one side to the other, the viewer is surrounded by images and narrative. The images surround the viewer and create a new sense of space where the video's spatiality of light and time fuses with the space of the room to unsettle the place of the viewer. It is no longer an image that I can securely place in front of me and control, but more a course of events that I myself am inscribed in and participate in, if only with my gaze.

Translated by Sina Najafi.