Published in Catalogue, Plateau of Mankind, 49 Biennale di Venezia, catalogue 1. Published: 2001 by la Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; ISBN 88-435-9607-1
– by Sara Arrhenius
A raging fire blazes forth through a long corridor as several cripples hobble in panic in a futile attempt to escape the flames. Every time the fire consumes a cripple, a round of applause is beard. Athletic men, perched on trapezes, swing in succession into a vast emptiness. Their bodies are crushed against a high tower the dock tower of the Berlin Olympic Stadium of 1936 and fall in pieces onto an examination table in an anatomical theatre. Magnus Wallin's computer animated video works, although possessing an aesthetics akin to that of computer games, are primarily stones about the human body. Or rather, stones concerning the manner in which the human body is portrayed and understood in contemporary western society. The short, animated sequences strike the viewer, with their intensity and subjective camera, and stage a series of events juxtaposing two body types. On the one hand: the perfect athletic bodies that submissively cast themselves into the void in Skyline, like cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse. The bodies that form perfect, symmetrical circles, like the decorative swimmers in Limbo, where each individual, as an exchange able cog, constitutes a small part of a larger mechanism. It is the heroised body of the monumental aesthetics we see here, a symmetrical machine of pure muscle. We honour this body unconditionally in advertising and fashion, and enjoy watching it perform in our modern day equivalent to the gladiator games in sports arenas, or in game shows on television. On the other hand: the hobbling wretches desperately trying to save themselves from the firestorm in Exit. These cripples represent the body that everyone chooses to turn a blind eye to, and that no one need be cursed with, as long as an effort is made to exercise, eat right, and undergo plastic surgery! A malformed exclamation mark, a grotesque deformity that reminds us of our pain and shortcomings; the body that we feel compelled to hide, correct, adjust and discipline.
Upon viewing Magnus Wallin's four video works, Exit, Limbo, Physical Paradise and Skyline together, the consistency of his work becomes apparent. A critical analysis is brought to beam, focusing on how these concepts of the human body are intimately intertwined with key aspects of our culture. We tend to categorise bodies in terms of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless. These nations are, in tum, based on the belief that symmetry, dean lines and surfaces, and perfect bodies reflect a divine harmony, as opposed to how bodies that violate these ideals instil horror. Wallin makes us aware of how the human body has, since the first dissections in the anatomical theatres of the Renaissance, steadily become more fragmentised, to the point where it is now presented as a machine - a system of information or codes, the parts of which can easily be improved or replaced. We have adopted an increasingly relentless attitude towards bodies that deviate, function poorly, or simply fail to fulfil the current criteria for beauty.