It may seem as if Magnus Wallin constantly returns to the same thing, but in fact both his objects and his position change from exhibition to exhibition. For example, the body is no longer what it used to be, in his work. In the beginning it was about the visible body's relationship to aesthetic and political ideals. Now it is mainly about invisible bodies and what happens when normalisation takes place. Still, Wallin's new work "Method" appears to be in line with his earlier works. It comprises three crania with geometrically designed fontanels. The holes provoke associations to the blocks of small children (whose fontanels close) to be fitted into the holes. In addition, Wallin connects this to how brain research is employed for normalising purposes; the block is intended to make an impression in the brain on the spot where imagination is formed. One may also think of the Bauhaus School's exercise in which students were asked to couple a colour (blue, red or yellow) with a shape (square, circle or triangle). I think it was Kandinsky who devised the exercise, and who had the only correct answer. Body, science and aesthetics in an unholy alliance, as usual. But not really as before: here the body is a means to approach to the subject and its education, and the discourse is rather more geared towards pedagogics than representation. It is a major difference. The lesson is: it may look familiar, but in fact we do not really know what Wallin is doing this time. At any rate, that is the impression I get when I look at his exhibitions. The popcorn he exhibited at Millesgården, for example... Who knows what they were about – and who wasn't struck by them!
Wallin's art assaults the viewer in a different way compared to those of other artists. There is nothing intrusive about the popcorn on the floor. It is their vulnerability, fragility, passivity, exposedness, defencelessness, frailty and insignificance that hit the viewer. Sometimes the connection between art and murder has been made in terms of the assertion that both spring from an incomprehensible impulse, deprived of reason, to do something that cannot be motivated. In Wallin's art, the accent is put on the other side, and perhaps it is grave rather than acute. The action is straightforward. To be exposed to it, however, and the ensuing consequences, that's where the mystery begins. The frailty of the popcorn, and their incomprehensible demand for respect. If we wish to call this a gesture, which is probably rather unsuitable, it is the gesture that recurs in all his works. Sometimes on its own, sometimes coupled with a coarseness or an insistence that may seem unrefined. It is not. Only naked. Even before Wallin produced his first animation on the theme of the body and ideals and politics, he poured a bucket of blood on an outdoor staircase. Five litres of blood, equal to the amount in a human body, poured over the staircase of the City gallery in Gothenburg ("Bloody Mary", 1994). I find this combination of aggressiveness and pathos without despair characteristic of Magnus Wallin's art. After all, I haven't seen it anywhere else.
One mustn't talk about "the body" as if there were only one. The incarnation, the flesh, is definitely not the most important aspect of the body, whatever Christianity wants us to believe. The flesh is only the body that lends a certain amount of anonymity to a number of invisible bodies – the Greek gods are supposed to have had sixteen – which Wallin has explored. When he, in "Colony" (2009), shows copulating skeletons, they are not the remains of a dead body but a coherent and complete living body, a skeleton body rather than a body's skeleton. It is not affected by cold or heat, and considering that it doesn't do anything else than fuck, reproduces itself, its marrow probably produces sexual desire rather than blood. An entirely different kind of body appears in the film "Educated" (2007). It was captured on heat-sensitive infrared film, so what we see is a thermal body consisting not of bones and tissue but of various degrees of heat and cold. Some years ago when I familiarised myself with a thermal imaging camera in Wallin's studio, the artist pointed out that it wasn't only the body that appeared but also the place where the body had been: for a moment after you have taken a step a "footprint" remains in the room. If one regards the body thermally, there is no reason to claim that the footprint is anything else than the body in motion. The body and the print are homogenous, which gives rise to a body that is discontinuous, diffused in the room and which, at its edges, has body parts that are rather short-lived, but which continually appear and disappear. A body of heat, a body solely composed of different speeds of atom movements, a body without organs, literally.
These bodies emerge thanks to technical innovations; without x-rays the skeletons would be dancing unseen, and the thermal body would be a visually unknown entity was it not for the thermal imaging camera. However, the way in which we view them is, of course, determined by the design of the technology. It is the technology that makes the thermal body discontinuous, because someone has chosen the upper and lower limits of the atom movements to be represented in the image. In this way technology does not provide us with the entire body, but just a mirror image (in this case: thermal) of the body that we already know. This is why the mirror plays an important role in Wallin's depiction of these invisible bodies: it indicates the relationship between technology and the body, the body's technological and discursive prison. In "Colony", the skeletons are standing on a mirror-like ice, and in "Mission" (2009), the skeleton moves in something reminiscent of a hall of mirrors. But who has made the mirror, the discourse's relevance criteria that govern that which technology chooses to reproduce? Wallin's answer: The social body (a completely different kind of body!) in which we all live. The social body turns up here and there in his work, in the shape of breathing walls ("Exercise Parade", 2001), or as a gigantic tongue that licks a skeleton that has ended up in a hall of mirrors ("Mission"). And we are inside of it when we view some of his works in this exhibition. However, in the social body we and our bodies are just organs.
In his film "Elements", organs float about in space, isolated in a vacuum waiting to be assigned a task in a stable organisation, that is, in an organism. It is the social body itself that wants to change, by isolating and refunctionalising its organs. The organs' situation repeats our own, in which we are encouraged to work for the sole purpose of survival, and suddenly and without warning can be forced into retraining, further education and be placed in a new context. Needless to say, there is also the use of foetuses for producing medicine, or organ transplantations. Good things, both of them, but it doesn't mean that they are without victims or pain. In the blood mirrors, "Antropoid", we may reflect on the suffering of the victims, their passion, as our own bodies. It is thus the passion body that Wallin depicts here, neither skeleton nor heat or flesh.
A passion comprises desire and pain in conjunction with ideas. David Hume talked about gout, which is painful. But pain is something else than that which we really suffer from, namely pain in combination with ideas of a future where one may not be able to work, or take pleasure, etc., because of the pain. Then, in that suffering, one has a passion, Hume claimed. The passion body could be the entire complex of association paths between ideas that are activated by pain and desire. A kind of circulatory system or metabolism of lust, suffering and ideas. A body that extends in time – in conceptions of the future and memories of the past – in the same way as the thermal body in space.
I believe that the gaze that Wallin wishes to cast on bio politics must fall upon the passion body; it is the passion body that science wants to design when it draws up charts and criteria for normality. Bio politics is going to shape our way of connecting sensory impressions to desire or pain, and how we then link these to certain ideas about the future and the past. It needs the passion body to its own ends. And this is the body that Wallin explores in this exhibition. Perhaps he also tries to shape some passions in us, some counter-passions anti-passions. As I said before, you never really know what he's up to...
Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, 2011
Translation: Hans Olsson