For example in Exit 1997 the powerful film that has attracted a good deal of attention, with disabled and maimed human animations taken from Hieronymus Bosch's imagery, who in panic try to flee from a flaming pursuer (holocaust, normality). The walls in Exit are completely covered with embedded loudspeakers or as it were perforated with scrutinizing eyes, that in rising and falling rythmical sequences like a deafening blowlamp invisibly pursue the panting victims with the pulsating heartbeat of collective intoxication, ruthless looks, applause and cries. Extremely dangerous forces have been released into a space that has also become in a way the very essence of a beast (this is possibly most clearly seen in Exercise Parade).
The videos are -- not the east here in this exhibition -- often physically installed in a spatially well-planned context as peepshows that are approached by somewhat labyrinthine means. Together with the deliberate use of sound they create a maximum effect on the sometimes almost melodramatic emotionally charged animations. The screen we have in front of us is not clearly defined: the thin membrane between the mediated expressions and the watcher's sensibility appears to be extremely elastic, dialytic and permeable and finally it becomes one and the same space (this is particularly clear in the hallucinatory accelerating, almost psychedelic Physical Parade [1998] which is projected on divided walls and comes to an abrupt end with the sheep Dolly, monumentalized as a golden calf).
The claustrophobically charged Exercise Parade (2001) takes place in a square dead-straight tunnel. Its telescopic and controlled expression could possibly in full scale be recognized in the long road tunnel which forms a part of the Öresund link. In the film a flaming hall of gas clouds rolls intermittently through the tunnel like a booming ether-anaesthetic crackling with electric short circuit sparks. It bounces against the walls, alarm bells ringing. When it reaches the surface of the picture you get a glimpse of old photographs of people categorized with the chilly, rational eye of the anthropologist. In the exhibition such images have also been used n Backstag,. the series with vulnerable individuals, stripped naked, frozen in a a unmercifully coordinate system
Horrifyingly, almost clairvoyantly Exercise Parade could just as weIl have been created before the Öresund tunnel but the truly chilling sight is the very tall square tower faced with bands of granite slabs - Nazism's front facing of choice - twose prototype has been taken from the OS stadium in Berlin, 1936, which appears in similar forms both in Limbo (1999) and in Skyline 2000. This tower resembles a beam (...the beam in one´s own eye...) -- large very tall, straight lines and in a special way conceived according to the parallel perspective and carried out with such physically obtrusive obviousness that with undisputed hubris it does not even respect the eye´s central perspective by having the sense to reduce in size towards the top far away up. - >The question of Leni Riefenstahl's responsibility for her Olympiad film (which has engaged Wallin) is clarified and deepened in a remarkable way also by the fact that the tower and the falling bodies now afterwards, in the wake of 11 September, can remind us of one of the towers of World Trade Center. It is history itself that moves the limits of the interface.
Magnus Wallin uses and reuses images from previous eras freely and with self-evidence. But he does not do if in the form of a montage or collage, the images are not equipped with quotation marks: if is rather a question of his giving them new life in our own times and letting them continue living here and now to see how they behave (or conform) in this new context. By using a digital form and transposing and reproducing different historical attempts to illustrate man's fate and the body's characteristics (particularly the models of medical scientific knowledge) it also becomes possible to place these old, more or less mystical images into a three-dimensional room, give them a number of digital character roles and stage directions, simply animate them and then see what they do. This is an age-old dream of artists, which computer technology has made possible and it can seem slightly risky -- that the image in this way could be reduced to a narrating, theatrical illustration -- but the result in Wallin's work is often completely unexpected and powerful. This is probably in part because he consciously and openly works with imagery and narrating conventions that are taken from the suggestive illusionism of computer games and the entertainment industry. It signals entertainment and fantasy, but here it has to the highest degree the effect of the triumph of realism.
A brief digression on Magnus Wallin in the history of anatomy
ln the past, natural science, founded on a magical conception of reality, often considered medical and anatomical descriptions in a metaphoric, anthropomorphic form, from, for example, the cosmos being formed and conceptualized as God's body from which all parts of creation were generated, to man being comprehended as a microcosmos whose anatomical and physiological characteristics stemmed from the literal image that was represented by the terrestial body, God. This thinking in images had a concrete effect and was of exceptional value for thorough explanations.
Furthermore it is typical that different observations of mankind's nature, and events that can be encountered by an individual, also assume human forms a completely new human being was simply built up solely on the basis of these elements. When, for example, in a pictorial handbook intended to illustrate how to relieve and heal different kinds of wounds and injuries that could be met with in war, the actual catalogue of injuries took on the shape of a Wound Man who literally personified all these injuries, which the observer could with his own eyes see inflicted on the body by a complete arsenal of weaponry launching a simultaneous attack from all sides. The Wound Man thus became a new kind of human being with his body completely merged with injuries and their causes. ln the same way a Bloodletting Man was created. Suitable places were marked on his body for bloodletting depending on the kind of disease. The particular astrological constellation in relation to the patient's sign of the zodiac was directly and concretely illustrated by simply building up the body of the Bloodletting Man with the animal zodiac signs. His task as a human being was to carry, illustrate and represent by means of his own appearance this necessary knowledge and methods for healing.
Obviously it is this ancient very bodily and its own way animated thinking in images that has captured Magnus Wallin's interest and he has recognized it as something that is basically still a reality in our own time. He has then developed it with the help of the new tools that are available today.
But what is special is that it is actually not pictures like, for example, those ancient magical Wound or Bloodletting Men that he has worked from; his artistic intuition has rather led him into a later, classical era of natural science and medicine with its more modern, profane images and models that to us do not seem to be particularly imaginative. We see them as factual, normal and directly answering to an existing reality. But what is important is that in these images he has recognized a direct continuation of the magical thinking far into the imagery of the revolution of natural science. Indeed, as something which still works, although concealed.
An example taken from Carl von Linné can illustrate this contradiction. ln 1729 Linné called the medical students in Stockholm to attend a dissection where he stated that the anatomist's factual and profane description and picture of the body represented the only true conception of the body; the human being was simply said to resemble his own anatomy (actually this corresponds to a sick and unhappy human being trying to find himself in the magical Bloodletting Man's animal sphere in order to be healed). Linné writes: "Knowledge of our own body is supplied by the science of anatomy in which we see ourselves as in a mirror." But then he continues swerving abruptly away from this magical conception of the world: in accordance hereof we ourselves should judge our healthy and sick condition"1. Here it is quite clear that the body is not regarded as magical, as a holy body with cosmic roots, rather as in principal a mechanical construction whose capability can be factually described in terms of its state of health. This physiological parameter has very little to do with the healing methods and hope of salvation to be found in more ancient times. -- When Magnus Wallin in a number of works uses computer animated athletic men, flayed (Fr. écorchées) to reveal their muscles, he builds on one of the best-known so-called Muscle Men ten from the first modern illustrated work on anatomy, namely Andreas Vesalius´ Fabrica printed in Basel in 1543. Although its woodcuts (by Jan Stephan van Calcar) were going to serve as the model for all future perception in the Western world of human "normality", "beauty" etc., it is important to state that the body ideal is only based on profane, natural scientific studies of anatomy and physiology, far from the existential and spiritual aspects that the ancient world saw as an inseparable part of the human beings physical predicament.
But Magnus Wallin demonstrates very clearly how historical and relative these body images and ideals are, indeed how absurd, discriminating and feeble they actually are as descriptions of the human being. And dangerous. And just as ideological and mystical as the images of human beings from ancient times. -- Strange to see how even 50 a kind of wheel comes full circle with the anatomic muscle-man acrobats in Skyline (2000) who lose their lives in the fall against the previously described tall tower and then actually tumble down from a considerable height -- on to a dissection table in an anatomy room (taken from Olaus Rudbeck's anatomy theatre in Gustavianum in Uppsala, built in the 1660s). There the muscle-men's bodies are spilt once more (the first time was when the parts of the body were dissected out and transformed into muscle-men, a complete construction made up of anatomical preparations. Michel Foucault who has been such a fruitful source of inspiration for Wallin's work, characterizes the claims of anatomy thus: The human body is part of a power machine that investigates, breaks it up and puts it together again."2) -- Has Wallin here a utopian vision of another bodily entity that can rise from out of this inferno, even though the body parts so far evoke a memory of fingers from a toppled giant statue of Stalin or Constantine the Great?
The muscle-man who leapfrogs over a skeleton (and vice versa) in the terrible Exercise Parade is even in a way stigmatized by the anatomical terms that like word darts are fastened round his body, directions and signs that are made physical, merged together with what they signify and become almost more important than that. The same is the case of the mobile skeleton which like the muscle-man is a thought-up mechanical construction of the human being's mobility pattern, an invention from the 1500s and completely unnatural.
Reality is its own description
In several of Magnus Wallin's films, most evident perhaps in Limbo (1999), the animated figures have as a particular characteristic an artificial nature that can call to mind medial icons such as Barbie, Ken, Superman, but also "real' figures such as Esther Williams. These figures probably stem from the world of computer games where they form a manipulated, smooth-skinned doll-like (or Dolly-like) human species with a body language specially modified to the cult of the normal which today has reached a remarkably ritualized, indeed ornamental power. As Siegfrid Kracauer writes (in "The Drnament of the Masses", 1927): "The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflection of the prevailing economic system's sought-after rationality", "Arms, thighs and other single parts of the body are the composition's smallest parts." The theme returns in full force in me series Solo with eleven large computerized pictures projected on to the back wall of the exhibition hall: cloned muscle-men as geometrically ideal figures, rythmically collected into parades on mirror floors against a central perspective grid or merged into a single entity in acrobatic body pyramids like a radiator ornament on an old car, or forming completely new organisms as parts of machinery in a utopian society. Solo is actually the title of the last picture in this series which has a well-thought-out plan for how we observers move in this room that is entirely governed by the pictures. This picture has a different format from the others and the muscle-man, although still narcissistically admiring himseif in the mirror, has curled himself up into a foetal position.
ln Magnus Wallin's work the human being is thus always transformed into a token, a visualized term for an athletically perfect body machine, the modern day muscle-man whose message is completely overwhelming normality. The theme of his convincing, personified criticism of power is the vulnerability of the deviant.
Reality always resembles in one way or another its own description, is or always becomes more or less identical with its own mediated representation. This expression is otherwise generally used to signify a situation where it is quite clear what something is or implies, a transparent world with no secrets where we more or less say that "here we need no complicated explanations, life or reality itself reveals its meaning, what lies behind". It is just a question of reading reality's own book, a counterpart to Nature as God's own book, that the believer can read and understand straight away.
It is true that every description in word or image in some way is based on observations of an existing reality but the strange thing is that at the same time it creates this reality it says it describes, and that which ought to be outside the representation forms we use to describe it land up just out of sight. The media, here art or image, can thus be said to create "reality", including the so-called "objective reality" as historical products and something relative, something that appears as a consequence of mental experiences and rational interpretation within certain historical frameworks. For that reason the imagery and discourses appear not only as different ways of observing and behaving towards reality, but as reality's own historical figures, the forms in which that which is real becomes manifest. The painter, writer, architect, composer, choreographer, philosopher, researcher etc. are in each era the creators of the discourses, are those who give true form to reality.
Hall of mirrors? Of course, but also reflections, dazzling sun reflections and will-o'-the wisps can be used as truth-tellers; this is not the least manifested in Wallin's work. Art history is full of kaleidoscopically deformed pictures and anamorphoses intended to show a deformed conception of reality. That the experience of truth in some way is caused by fakes is of no importance at all.
It is just therefore that reality is also its own description. It is this reality and the (close) identity of the picture of reality that Wallin's work with such consequence and strength investigates. Or, to put it another way:
how the pictures and conceptions or prejudices create and petrify reality, as well as how a critical, deconstructive awareness is actually possible.
Torsten Weimarck
Professor, Dr. Phil. Art History, Lund University
Translation from the Swedish by Gillian Sjödahl
1. Linné quoted according to Vilhelm Djurberg, När det var anatomisal på
Södermalms stadshus! Stockholm 1685-1748 ( When there was an anatomy
theatre in Södermalm Town Hall, Stockholm 1685-1 748) Stockholm 1927, p. 128.
2. Foucault, Michel, Övervakning och straff Fängelsets födelse. (1974). (Supervision
and punishment. The birth of the prison system). (1974), Lund. Arkiv 1987, p. 162.
Torsten Weimarck © 2002. All rights reserved.