Skyline or the Commodification of a Fascist Body Aesthetic:
Notes on Artistic Intention and Responsibility in the Computer Animated Work of Magnus Wallin (1)
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by Tone O. Nielsen
Adolf Hitler: "Miss Riefenstahl, give me six days of your life. An artist has to make the film - not a party film director."
Leni Riefenstahl: "I will make it if you promise that I will never have to do another film for the Reich, you, or the Party."
Leni Riefenstahl recalling a conversation with Adolf Hitler regarding the commission of the 1934 NSDAP Party Congress film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) (2)
THE LENI RIEFENSTAHL EXAMPLE
When in 1934 the German cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl (born in 1902) agreed to make Triumph des Willens , a film about the Sixth German National Socialist Workers' Party Congress in Nuremberg, it was neither her first commission for the Nazi Party, nor would it be her last. The previous year, she had accepted a commission from NSDAP to document the Fifth Party Rally in Nuremberg, which resulted in the film Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith) (1933). (3) In 1935, she made Tag der Freiheit - Unsere Wehrmacht (Day of Freedom: Our Armed Forces) , documenting the German army parades during the Reichs Party Day of that year. In 1936, the party put Riefenstahl in charge of filming the Berlin Olympic Games, and after two years of editing, the two-part film Olympia 1. Teil - Fest der Völker (Olympia Part One: Festival of Nations) and Olympia 2. Teil - Fest der Schönheit (Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty) premiered in Berlin on April 20, 1938, in celebration of Adolf Hitler's birthday.
The party's choice of Riefenstahl as official NSDAP film director was largely due to Hitler, who had been very much impressed by her 1932 debut film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light) . The film portrays the unspoiled mountain girl Junta (played by Riefenstahl herself), whose 'mystical essence' is destroyed by the materialism of the villagers. It is a prime example of the romantic German Bergfilm (mountain film), which dates back to the early Weimar Heimatfilm (homeland film). Riefenstahl's experience with these genres provided Hitler's propaganda films with "the needed emotional association with German tradition and culture," as Robert von Dassanowsky has pointed out. (4)
Riefenstahl's films would soon be internationally acclaimed. Triumph des Willens and Olympia were awarded the Gold Medal and First Prize respectively at the 1935 and 1938 Venice Film Festivals. The director's extensive experimentation with different types of film stock, numerous camera positions, shooting angles and film speeds, movable and underwater cameras, rich sound and lighting techniques, and contrastive montage redefined the genre of documentary cinema. The specific cinematic form and photographic techniques she introduced have had an enormous impact on world cinema in general and have also become commonplace within the fields of contemporary sports coverage and advertising.
Despite the importance of her work for the international film community, Riefenstahl was denounced after the second world war and detained by the Americans. Particularly, she faced Allied charges of having been romantically involved with the Führer as well as complicit with his programs. Riefenstahl was attacked as having contributed to the development of a fascist aesthetic that glorified the ideology and politics of the Nazi regime. In spite of her protests to the contrary, she was considered to be intimately connected with the Third Reich propaganda machine. Critics maintained that the radical cuts between extreme close-ups of Hitler inciting the crowds and panoramic aerial shots of endless party parades in Triumph des Willens promoted Hitler's notion of 'One Leader, One People, One Reich.' Tag der Freiheit - Unsere Wehrmacht employed similar techniques, and was criticized of celebrating the will and readiness of the newly formed German army. Olympia , with its innovative use of multiple cameras shooting the same subject at various speeds and angles, was considered a fascist study in the beauty and superiority of the Aryan physique. The film created a cult of the pure and strong body as the symbol of the perfect spirit and linked this body aesthetic directly to the Classical ideal. In the context of Hitler's degenerate program, Olympia film thus made a case for the elimination of the defective and imperfect body. In all her films for the NSDAP, Riefenstahl utilized dramatic effects of feature movies. Her application of melodramatic sound and lighting effects from 1920's film genres to public events was particularly criticized for submerging individuals into masses and constructing reality according to the party ideal. Failing to represent the politics of the party from an 'objective' point of view, Riefenstahl's films were thus accused of explicitly expressing those politics.
Riefenstahl always maintained her 'objectivity' as a 'documentary' film maker and has continued to insist on the separation of art and politics in her work. For her, art is a matter of the visually interesting. (5) Due to lack of evidence of her 'direct involvement,' in June 1945 Riefenstahl was thus released by the Americans. Although officially 'de-Nazified,' she has been unable to find support to make other films - with the exception of Tiefland (Deep Land) (1939-53), a mountain film more than fourteen years in the making. Riefenstahl the person, apparently, was considered 'innocent,' but the images she produced, were evidently not. Shunned by the film industry, in the 1960s she took up still photography, publishing in 1973 and 1976 a two-volume photo essay on the African Nuba tribe; and working in the 1970s and 1980s on an as-yet-unfinished underwater sea epic from her scuba diving expeditions. Although found to be formally and technically as brilliant as her films, Riefenstahl's photography has been deemed by critics like Susan Sontag just as ideologically problematic. (6)
ARTISTIC INTENTION AND RESPONSIBILITY
At the core of Riefenstahl's generally accepted infamy lies the question of artistic intention and responsibility. Riefenstahl had originally planned to begin work on her second mountain film Tiefland in 1934. However, the prospect of the fame that a commission from Hitler would bring, as well as the difficulties in getting funding for strictly entertainment films, forced her to put Tiefland aside and accept NSDAP offers. (7) Thus, rather than leave the country as many of her colleagues did after the Book Burnings of 1933, Riefenstahl stayed in Germany to work for the NSDAP. (8)
Sympathetic towards Hitler's politics in the early 1930s and fascinated by his persona, like so many other Germans, but never a member of NSDAP nor active politically, Riefenstahl might have been sincere when claiming that artistically she never intended her NSDAP films to convey Nazi ideology, considering them to be entirely separate from politics. (9) Regardless, her acceptance of NSDAP commissions automatically disqualified any claims she might have made for neutrality in her films. The impossibility of an 'objective' neutral position in fact defined the terms of her silent acceptance. And such a silent acceptance, I would argue, always indicates complicity with the politics in power - in Riefenstahl's case, the politics of the Nazis.
Riefenstahl's understanding of the propagandistic purpose of the films is further evidence of her complicity. Commissioned for explicit propaganda purposes, the films were intended to portray a positive image of the party as well as expressing its ideals. Creating images of enormous suggestive power, Riefenstahl contributed to promoting these ideals to millions with the help of the 1930's new mass medium of cinema.
In this sense, because Riefenstahl agreed to make the films in the first place, claimed to meet the commissions from a neutral position, and accepted their propagandistic purpose, she became politically complicitious and could be held artistically responsible for contributing to the Nazi model - if unintentionally.
While Dassanowsky does not deny that Riefenstahl's films were vehicles of Nazi ideology, he asserts that Riefenstahl did eventually break with Hitler and the Nazis. Her inclusion of the American black athlete Jesse Owens and her showcasing of both male and female athletes of all races, nations, and colors in Olympia are for Dassanowsky indications of Riefenstahl's attempt to distance herself from the racism, nationalism, and sexism of National Socialism. Dassanowsky also offers the example of Tiefland, where according to him Riefenstahl symbolically reenacts her shifting relationship to Hitler and the Reich: first, her opportunistic acceptance that lead to her own artistic success; and second, her rejection based on a realization of the meaninglessness of the war and the extent to which the propaganda ministry was curtailing her artistic freedom. Tiefland's filming at various locations outside of Germany between 1940-44 are seen by Dassanowky as Riefenstahl's "inner immigration." (10)
The more prevalent point of view refuses to recognize that any significant break was made. Riefenstahl's attempts to revive her directorial career have been rejected on such grounds. As a number of feminist critics have pointed out, this indefinite punishment might not only be due to Riefenstahl's 'wrongful' associations and sympathies, but to her gender as well. (11) According to this view, the world has willingly accepted the public 'apology' of numerous male artists, scientists, and intellectuals who were Nazi sympathizers; but similar females have generally been denied such forgiveness. (12) In any case, one has to ask what such 'forgiveness' might imply. Is it about 'forgiving' her as a director because she transcended her Nazi affiliations, as Dassanowsky does when he re-evaluates her post-propaganda film production? Or is it rather about a willingness to overlook those affiliations, even to justify them for the appreciation of aesthetic merit? The question at hand is whether an aesthetic such as Riefenstahl's is to be categorically denounced or refuted? Can her techniques be reclaimed on aesthetic grounds, ultimately can they be separated from their political context? In a sense, these very questions are the starting point for Magnus Wallin's recent work Skyline , and form the underlying theme of his artistic production in general.
PHYSICAL SIGHTSEEING
Born with a withered arm, Wallin has, since the beginning of his career, been preoccupied with the human body and our conceptions of it. In the early 1990s, he produced a number of interactive installations in which the vulnerability of the body was exposed. In 1996, he began his Physical Sightseeing project , the collective title for an ongoing series that presently includes four works of which Skyline is the latest. With this project, Wallin takes the viewer on a critical tour through the various representations of the body in Western culture from the present day and back into history. Physical Sightseeing is a careful inquiry into the West's culturally determined notions of the 'beautiful/perfect body' as opposed to the 'ugly/defective body,' the ideological and historical foundations for such a dualistic categorization, and the representational systems used to reproduce these categories.
Behind the individual works in Physical Sightseeing lies the poststructuralist thesis that all representations, including those of the body, are informed by power and that they serve the purpose of maintaining the dominance of that power by reproducing its order. In Western culture, the representational systems that structure its representations are thus constructed to secure the continued dominance of the white, Anglo, heterosexual male. The systems continuously seek to represent the white, Anglo, heterosexual as the Subject, the Absolute, while anyone different from him, i.e. women, colored, queer, are represented as the Object, the Incidental, the Other. Because the Other constitutes an 'alternative' and thus a potential threat to the dominant order, she/he must be conquered: By being turned into Objects for the Subject, women, colored, and queer are thereby deprived of their access to a Subject position that would enable their voices to be heard, their acts to be accounted for, and their self-representations to be acknowledged within the dominant order. Cast in the role of the Other, it is now the Subject that speaks for them, represents them, and acts on them, and they become stereotyped as 'Woman,' 'Colored,' 'Queer.' Rendered numb, invisible, and paralyzed in the eyes of the Subject, the Other is marginalized from the dominant order whose operation of power can continue.
It is important to stress, however, that this is by no means a stable structure, nor a stable operation. The dominant order will continuously be met by local resistances that will in turn affect its structure and configuration. In fact, power is relationally bound to these local resistances. As Michel Foucalt describes it:
"Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently,
this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping"
it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is
subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason,
power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to
misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships.
Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these
play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations.
These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network.
Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source
of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a
plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances there are
possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage,
solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to
compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist
in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they
are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination
an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither
are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd
terms in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an
irreducible opposite." (13)
What Foucault is arguing is that power cannot be assigned solely to the dominant order. Rather, society consists of a multiplicity of power relations that are constantly played out and are constantly changing, as the dominant order will always be contested. These struggles are always local, the relations always unstable. In this sense, power is not entirely 'oppressive.' It goes both ways, producing counter forms of empowerment and powerment, especially when employed locally against dominant forms of oppression.
Applying this thesis to Western representations of the body, Wallin proposes that in addition to securing the continued dominance of one color, race, sexuality, and gender over others, the representational systems of Western culture also secure the dominance of one kind of body over other kinds. Apart from being white, Anglo, heterosexual, and male, the body in Western culture also has to be normal, fit, and beautiful - that is, perfect. Thus, the body that is abnormal, unfit, ugly, or defective is, like the female, colored, and queer body, cast in the role of the Other. Due to its physical difference, it constitutes the same alternative to the physique of the body in power and thus evokes the same fear if not objectified. By exposing the operation of the dominant order in Western representations of the body historically, Wallin's production sets out to denaturalize, if not disturb the subjectification of the normal body and the objectification of its deviant Other. Rather than being the 'confessions of a handicapped person,' his work thereby unfolds as a series of 'counter representations' to dominant Western representational systems and could be characterized as a 'local resistance.' From this perspective, Wallin's work inscribes itself in the tradition of minority group artists, who in their practice have attempted to counter their marginalized position and stereotyped representation in Anglo society as the Other by claiming a space within the representational systems for and by themselves.
The first couple of works in the Physical Sightseeing series focus exclusively on the representation of the defective body in today's society. Taking his point of departure in the fear that any deviance produces, Wallin employs the West's contemporary symbol for physical difference per se - the wheelchair. In the video installation Roll On (1996), he invited the audience to view his video of two wheelchair users dressed in protective sports equipment from a row of wheelchairs placed in front of the TV monitor. (14) Similarly, in the interactive installation Drive In (1997) he replaced half of the chairs in a public café with wheelchairs. (15) Giving the viewer the opportunity to sit in a wheelchair, Wallin not only offered the audience the possibility of viewing the world from the perspective of the physically disabled, but also to relate to the chair as a permanent condition. The wheelchair as a collective sign for all handicapped people was thus specified and individualized and its stereotyping effect became visible. More importantly, however, by setting up a situation where the audience had to choose between sitting in a regular chair or a wheelchair, Wallin confronted the viewer with her/his own feelings towards the two types of chairs, thereby forcing her/him to reflect on the connotations that each chair carries in Western society. As he recalls in an 1997 interview:
"What was interesting was that whenever people came in [to the café] by themselves, they sat down in the ordinary chairs so that they wouldn't be mistaken for being handicapped. If they came in a group, however, then they might dare to sit down in the wheelchairs." (16)
By structuring Drive In around the moment of choice, Wallin was able to reveal the apparent comfort of the regular chairs and the discomfort of the wheelchairs - viz. a desire to be identified as 'normal' and a discomfort in being mistaken for a handicapped person. Roll On and Drive In thereby exposed how the power structure of the Western world, in a protective move to maintain its order, has produced a body culture that idealizes the 'normal' body (read: instituted body) to such a degree that it produces discomfort, even fear, at the prospect of being identified with the deviant (read: Other body). The social consequences of this identification in terms of cultural and political marginalization, isolation, objectification, and being rendered invisible and stereotypical are simply too high.
Interested in the ideological and historical foundations of this fear, Wallin moved back into time in his next series of works. He investigated how the deviant body has been represented historically in Western culture and to what extent the historical connotations of these representations have any legacy today. In Exit (1997), his first computer animated video installation, Wallin appropriated a number of Hieronymus Bosch's late 15th and early 16th century drawings of crippled and deformed people, which were originally studies for Bosch's painterly representations of 'simple-minded,' 'idiotic,' or 'evil' people condemned to Hell. (17) Wallin scanned reproductions of these drawings into a computer and with the help of computer animation turned them into eight characters playing the leading roles in Exit's narrative, which is set in a fictive universe similar to the environments of contemporary computer games. The viewer watches the desperate movements of these eight severely handicapped characters as they attempt to escape from a raging fire in a one kilometer-long corridor. During the intense course of the 3:40 minute long video, three figures make it to the end of the corridor, where a waiting helicopter flies them off into the sunset. The remaining characters, however, end up being consumed by the flames to the cheers and clapping coming from the loudspeaker-covered corridor walls. Seeing how it is only the three least disabled figures that make it to the helicopter, while those more severely handicapped succumb to the fire, the viewer becomes a witness to a fatal 1,000 meter race in which only the ones most physically fit 'get a medal.'
Conceived as a dream sequence, in which Bosch's historical figures merge with the contemporary world of computer games and sports events, Exit offers a wry comment on the fact that the late medieval attitudes of Bosch's society have managed to transpose themselves into contemporary Western society more or less intact. Just as Bosch's society categorized people's souls according to their physical appearance, Western society today judges ability and personality on the same grounds. And just as Bosch conjoined the deformed body with evil, mass media today still demonizes the defective body. In this sense, the long-standing tradition for bracketing the good with the beautiful body and evil with the deviant body, which dates back to Antiquity's and Christianity's dualistic division of the universe into Heaven and Hell, good and evil, seems unbroken. Whereas beauty, goodness, and perfection in earlier times were synonymous with Heaven, today they are equal to the dominant order's ideal; and whereas ugliness, evilness, and defectiveness were symbols of Hell, today they are personified in the Other. One could even argue that 'salvation' still lies in overcoming the forces of evil - only today it is done through processes of marginalization and discrimination.
With Physical Paradise (1998-99) and Limbo (1999), Wallin's subsequent computer animated video installations and his last projects preceeding Skyline , it becomes clear that his computer animated works constitute a mini series of their own, each new piece beginning where the previous one ended. In Physical Paradise , we follow those who were consumed by the fire in Exit to their final destination - a 'Physical Paradise' for handicapped people. (18) On board the space ship 'Honolulu,' the viewer arrives at the space station 'Physical Paradise,' where a friendly voice announces "Welcome to Physical Paradise. We wish you a pleasant journey." During the course of the next couple of minutes, the viewer travels, from the perspective of the handicapped characters, through what appears to be a zero gravity time tunnel of fantastic kaleidoscopic flower images to the sounds of soothing Hawaiian style music, before returning to the space ship and taking off again. Without actually representing an image of the handicapped characters, but allowing the viewer to occupy their position and seeing what they see, Wallin stresses that in the paradise for the physically disabled, the physique of the disabled is no longer of importance. Gone are those who would judge them by their deviant appearance; gone is the gravity that impedes their movements on Earth and makes their bodies ache. In this physical paradise, another order prevails.
By indirectly referencing another Bosch work in Physical Paradise , namely the painting Ship of Fools (late 15th century), the video installation simultaneously becomes a harsh critique of Western culture's tradition of isolating, institutionalizing, and excluding the Other. According to Foucault, the 'Ship of Fools' that appears in Bosch's painting was not just a fashionable motif within the arts in the early Renaissance. It certainly belonged to the series of romantic or satiric 'Ships of Princes and Battles of Nobility,' 'Ships of Virtuous Ladies,' and 'Ships of Health' that appeared in other works at the time, and "whose crew of imaginary heroes, ethical models, or social types embarked on a great symbolic voyage which would bring them, if not fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth," as he writes. (19) But more importantly, boats for madmen actually existed. From the 14th century onwards, European cities began arresting a number of their wandering madmen and handing them over to boatmen. Upon instruction, these boatmen would then sail the madmen far away from the city limits, often to another city, where they would again get expelled and put on another boat to a new destination and so on. That not all madmen were expelled to a ship but some admitted to hospitals and cared for by the city, however, makes Foucault speculate that maybe "these ships of fools, which haunted the imagination of the entire early Renaissance, were pilgrimage boats, highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their reason." (20) He continues:
"...to hand a madman over to sailors was to be permanently sure he would not be prowling beneath the city walls; it made sure that he would go far away; it made him a prisoner of his own departure. But water adds to this dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools' boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman's voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage." (21)
What Foucault proposes is that the act of setting the madman on board a ship was a ritual act of denouncing death, the great unreason. In the late Middle Ages, the discovery of the inevitability of death shifts to a contemplation of the nothingness of existence itself. In his idiocy and lunacy, the madman comes to represent this nothingness and, as a living man, he is the very presence of death in life. As a symbol of the reign of death in the world, he thus has to be denounced or it will be the end of the world. Foucault describes this shift as the fear of death turned inward and disarmed by giving it the form of madness: death's destruction is no longer anything, because it is already everything, manifest in the great nothingness of life which the 'empty' head of the madman comes to represent. (22) Thus setting the madman on board the boat constituted wisdom; the recognition that nothingness already rules in the world and that man is already dead. In this sense, the representation of the 'Ship of Fools' that sails through a landscape of delights becomes synonymous with knowledge.
Applying Foucault's analysis to Wallin's work, Physical Paradise thus becomes a symbol of the West's marginalization and institutionalization of the physically and mentally deviating and its exclusion of the ethnically different. However, by referencing both Foucault's reading of the 'Ship of Fools' as sign of the world's end and Stanley Kubrick's time tunnel in 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968) - a tale of a system 'gone wrong' and man's recognition of his finite intelligence - Wallin also constructs Physical Paradise as a symbol for the end of contemporary dominant Western society. With its discrimination of the Other, 'death' also rules in today's Western world, and a new structure will have to be proposed. Referencing Hawaii - in the name of his space ship, the exotic botanica of his time tunnel, and the music of his sound track - and projecting this exoticized culture into space, Wallin suggests a structure, where the 'natural laws' of the dominant order have dissolved, and its gravity has become without force. In short, an inclusive 'Physical Paradise' where subjectivity is extended to all human beings.
Physical Paradise was followed by Limbo , also a computer animated video installation and a visually and iconographically very complex work. (23) In this piece, we watch the three survivors from Exit move from Limbo to the gate of Heaven. Still on board the helicopter that rescued them from the corridor, the characters approach an Olympic stadium crowned by a tall tower bearing the inscription 'Limbo.' The entire architectural structure is dramatically illuminated by hundreds of searchlights throwing their beams high up into the dark sky from the exterior wall of the stadium. At the center of the stadium, the Olympic fire is burning. As the helicopter flies over the fire, its flame is blown out and an opening in the ground is revealed. In the following seconds, a formation of malevolent angels appears and forces the helicopter down the opening. Falling downwards, the helicopter travels through darkness to meet, at the end of the opening, the very eye of God. Breaking through God's eye, the characters on board the helicopter move through a parade of pure geometric figures to finally arrive in an exotic Roman style bath. Every shape and every form in this universe seems derived from Euclidean geometry, and in the pool perfectly cloned swimmers are swimming in perfect synchrony.
Whereas Physical Paradise constitutes a paradise for the Other, the heaven that Wallin constructs in Limbo seems intended solely for the ideal subject. Only perfect shapes and genetically perfect white bodies meet the eyes of Bosch's three deformed figures. Situating his characters in such a universe, Wallin comments upon the ultimate goal of Western science - the development of a genetically perfect human being inhabiting a socially perfect world. As the projected vision of Western mankind, Heaven must clearly be structured around such a flawless and uniform species. The movement from Limbo to Heaven in Limbo thus becomes a journey of purification away from Earth's 'evilness,' 'ugliness,' and 'imperfection' towards Heaven's 'goodness,' 'beauty,' and 'perfection.' However, by taking the Berlin Olympic Stadium - designed by Werner March for the 1936 Games - to symbolize Limbo, and by illuminating it in the manner of the infamous Albert Speer designed spectacles for the 1930's NSDAP rallies, Wallin implies that any such vision of perfection resonates with Hitler's project of the Final Solution along with the eugenics carried out by his scientists. In other words, according to Wallin, Western culture's notion of Heaven, and who is admitted, borders fascism.
Skyline
Like Wallin's earlier computer animated video installations, his most recent work Skyline also takes over where the previous piece ended. In addition to continuing the narrative, Skyline , however, also seems to address the very epistemological preconditions for the body culture criticized in the earlier works, as well as the premises for its continued existence. In this sense, Skyline could be said to explain Wallin's entire artistic discourse in ways his previous pieces had not done. Wallin addressed the fear of the defective body in today's society in the wheelchair installations; traced its ideological and historical foundations in Exit ; proposed an alternative to its resulting exclusion of the Other in Physical Paradise ; and pointed to the literal elimination of the defective body in the fascist clone-inhabited Heaven of Limbo . With Skyline , he moves on to a discussion of the very body ideal expressed in the dream of the cloned human being and its epistemological premise, historically, scientifically, and representationally.
Skyline was conceived for the former Assembly Hall of Moderna Museet's Old Vicarage and completed in 2000. The work included a darkly painted maze structure that directed the viewer into a small dark projection room, where a 3:10 minute long computer animated video was back projected onto a screen wall. Taking the visitor from the bright sunlight of the outdoors into the dark interior of the projection room, the maze functioned as a ' transitional passage ' from the reality of the Old Vicarage to the fictive universe of the computer animation.
Against a grey sky so heavily clouded that it seems visually impenetrable, a strange architectural construction appears before the eyes of the viewer. Not attached to anything, it seems to be floating in the sky like a space station in orbit. Consisting of a tall granite covered tower with a white, roofless octagonal structure attached to its base, the construction constitutes a bizarre composite. High up on a platform inside the skyscraper-like tower, a group of identical nude males figures stand at attention, looking out of the tower's upper glass section. At the center of the floor of the octagonal structure, which suggests a Renaissance theater or a Roman arena with its ascending rows of parquets, stands a white, oval table, its top covered by clean severed body parts. To the viewer, the function of and relation between the two parts of the architectural composite becomes apparent only during the course of the next couple of minutes as a series of nude, male athletes, identical to those in the tower, appear in the sky in rings or swings. One after another, each athlete attempts to reach the roof top opening by either spinning, long jumping, or somersaulting through the air. Letting go of their apparatus and jumping towards the tower, one by one the athletes miss their mark, their bodies cut to pieces as they crash against the edge of the tower's roof. Limb by limb, the body parts land on the oval table, passing in their downward fall the watchful figures inside the tower. At no point in the video do we see blood, hear screams; only the sound of the blowing wind, beating hearts, breathing lungs, the sighs of off-screen spectators, and thudding flesh of the body parts as they crash and pile up on the table. Only one athlete, the sixth to jump, never actually reaches the table. Swinging through the air in a pair of rings with his body bent L-shaped, he seems to be the only athlete actually able to reach the roof top opening. However, he reconsiders, swings back. His body now forming a T-shape in the rings, he surges forward, breaking his neck as he crashes into the tower. The viewer assumes that his shattered body parts will land on the table, but no one limb ever does. His body seems to have evaporated, vanished into thin air.
Beginning and ending his video with an unsuccessful jump, and never actually depicting the jumps of those athletes who have already made it to the inside of the tower, Wallin gives the audience the impression that they have witnessed only a small sequence of an endless series of successful and unsuccessful jumps. The sense of an indefinite number of athletes is only reinforced by the fact that the short video is played continuously in a loop.
Structured around the narrative of successful and unsuccessful jumpers, Skyline depicts a brutal competition whereby failure results in violent dismemberment. Finding themselves at the border between earth and sky, as the title of the piece indicates, the athletes face the prospect of either making it to the safety of the tower or ending up as clean cut limbs on the oval table. As was the case in Exit , their fate depends on their physical ability. Modelling his athletes on historical anatomical models of the white, male body, (24) all Wallin's athletes, however, are Anglo males. Constituting the dominant order's conception of the normal, average subject, they bear no resemblance to the handicapped characters in Wallin's previous pieces. Whereas Limbo discussed the Heaven of the ideal subject, Skyline thus continues this discourse by focusing on the criteria for admittance. The athletes already inside the tower function as a testimony to these criteria. Only they have been capable of measuring the length to the tower correctly and adjusting their jump accordingly - that is, only they possess a body and a mind in perfect balance, which qualifies them as ideal subjects. Those without such abilities are rejected and end up as limbs on the table. Thus, Wallin's narrative of successful and unsuccessful athletes is in essence an allegory of the Western ideal body. By choosing only to depict the unsuccessful attempts by athletes to make into the tower, he, however, implies that such an ideal is unrealizable; a mythic construction that no one fulfill.
Wallin's decision to solely depict the jumps of the rejected athletes also allows him to discuss how this ideal is indeed operative in today's society, and how it has been employed historically for exclusion, and in the extreme case, extermination. Structuring the video on the athletes' failure, Wallin shows a literal transformation of the human body from living subject to dead object. By positioning the viewer in the position of the swinging athletes on the way to their end, then suddenly shifting to the viewpoint of an off-screen spectator, and then again to that of the athletes safely inside the tower, Wallin also represents on an ideological level how a body as subject becomes objectified.
Using actual historical models for the figures and environment in his video, Wallin traces this transformation in the conception of the body historically. As previously mentioned, Wallin modelled his athletes after actual historical anatomical models. Their body aesthetic and athlectic ability, he appropriated from a number of athletes appearing in Riefenstahl's Olympia . The tower, they collide with, is taken from March's Olympic Stadium (which also appeared in Limbo ). The octagonal structure, whose oval table catches the falling limbs, is also based on an actual historical figure; the Anatomical Theater erected by Olof Rudbeck the Elder at Uppsala University, Sweden in 1662-63 for public dissections of the human body. Both Rudbeck's theater, and the anatomical models employed by Wallin, are examples of scientific approaches that treat the body as an object to be observed, mapped, categorized, regulated, and disciplined. According to Foucault, these approaches are a result of a fundamental epistemological shift in the Western understanding of the body from vessel of the spirited subject to object of scientific observation and control. Due to the demographic explosion in the 17th and 18th century and the rise of parliamentary institutions and new conceptions of political liberty, an unprecedented intensification of the administration and discipline of the body in Western culture took place. Communal modes of social organization or the appropriation of the products of the body's labor was no longer enough; the body's operations and forces also had to be regulated and controlled. The modernization of institutions such as the army, the school, the hospital, the prison, and the factory all played a crucial role in this new discipline of the body, which according to Foucault produced the 'modern' subject:
"What was being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A 'political anatomy,' which was also a 'mechanics of power,' was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, 'docile' bodies." (25)
The enclosure of the student within a classroom behind a desk, the drilling of the soldier within the platoon, the surveillance of the prisoner within the cell, and the isolation and observation of the patient within the ward were all components in a rigid control of time and space that not only objectified the subject, but created a sense of individualism and heightened self-consciousness, which Foucault considers the hallmarks of 'modern' times. Isolated from other prisoners within his cell and constantly surveyed, a state of conscious and permanent visibility was induced in the inmate that made him regulate his activities according to the rules of the prison. In this sense, the control of the prisoner's time and space turned him into his own 'jailer;' an indication that the disciplinary control - that is, power - worked not only on the body, but also on the mind. (26)
Another effect of this intensification of the administration and discipline of the body is the production of bodily standards, categories, and ideals. By isolating and observing disease, scientific knowledge was obtained about sickness, allowing for scientific definitions of diseases in opposition to health. Wallin suggests, by piling up the limbs on a dissection table similar to that of Rudbeck's and offering them up for display, that the very possibility of public access to this knowledge concerning human physiognomy was the beginning of the development of cultural standards that now determine what we understand as 'normal' and 'abnormal,' 'ideal' and 'imperfect.' Rudbeck's public theater was exemplary in the development of modern science. According to Bruno LaTour, who has researched the emergence and function of the modern laboratory, the image of the scientist insulated inside his laboratory and keeping the findings of his experiments to himself, belonged to a period when God still provided all the answers to the mysteries of the universe and a scientific approach to Nature was considered heresy. With the arrival of modernity, these answers were no longer sought in God, but posed directly to Nature. Since Nature is mute, the modern scientist therefore needed an impartial human audience, who could witness, verify, and interpret Nature's ways as presented in the experiment. In the modern laboratory, God was thus for the first time temporarily put aside and a sharp division between Nature and Culture emerged. (27)
Wallin demonstrates how such ideals can be used to horrific ends by appropriating Riefenstahl's body aesthetic for his athletes and letting March's Olympic Tower be the element they fatally collide with. Quoting Riefenstahl and March, Wallin alludes to ways in which the new mass media of the 1930's, specifically cinema and carefully orchestrated mas events, played a crucial role in promoting these ideals to the masses. This mass media promotion of the Aryan body ideal not only reinforced Hitler's notion of 'One Leader, One People, One Reich,' but paved the way for the discipline, regulation and extermination of the non-Aryan body that he contrived - that is, the eugenic selection processes of the Final Solution. Having Rudbeck's theater be the base of Skyline´s architectural composite, Wallin in a double move points to Aryanism's origin in Scandinavia and the increase of racism in the Nordic countries today.
THE CRITICAL POTENTIAL OF MAGNUS WALLIN'S COMPUTER ANIMATION
With his reference to mass media's role in the promotion of the Aryan body ideal, we arrive at the crux of Skyline and Wallin's artistic practice in general. One could argue that my reading of Skyline has rested entirely on my ability to recognize and decode the works of Riefenstahl, March, and Rudbeck that Wallin appropriated in his animation. However, by not revealing the exact identity of these appropriations in the video, Wallin seems to stress that Skyline's production of meaning is not wholly dependent upon the viewer's familiarity with the origin of his quotes. Even for the viewers, who are unfamiliar with the anatomical models that Wallin based his athletes on, the jumpers might bring to mind the models, specimens, and drawings of the human body that occupy Western biology class rooms, hospitals, and laboratories. Similarly, from the many documentaries on Nazi Germany, some viewers might not recognize March's Olympic Tower directly, but be familiar with its architectural aesthetics. Also, the origin and function of Rudbeck's theater might not be known to a non-Swedish audience, but could possibly bring to mind a Roman arena or a Renaissance theater. And, even if they do not reveal themselves as exact quotes from Riefenstahl's Olympia , the movements and body aesthetics of the athletes, weightlessly floating in the air against a cloudy sky, as well as the camera positions and shooting angles by which they were animated, might recall similar photography techniques and body aesthetics used in contemporary dance photography, sports coverage, TV shows such as Baywatch, and car, perfume, and fashion advertising.
In this sense, Wallin's assumption that the identity of his appropriations will be understood is a way to reinforce the notion that the ideal body types presented by the anatomical models of modern science and those of Riefenstahl's Olympia have become in fact cultural standards; standards that reflect an ideology of the body as an object to be regulated and disciplined. The continuous reproduction by the mass media of these standards is in fact the mechanism of this universal understanding. Following this line of thought, Wallin's looping of the 3:10 minute long tape becomes yet another way of expressing how these representations of the ideal body still circulate, while his incorporation of sighs from and perspectives of off-screen spectators indicates how these images are still capable of attracting, even seducing, an audience.
Commenting on the continuous circulation of this body ideal by the mass media, Skyline levels a harsh critique at the commodification of a fascist body aesthetic as it first appeared in the films of Riefenstahl. By focusing on the commodification, however, Wallin has wisely refrained from attacking Riefenstahl directly, his mission being not to condemn her, but to criticize those who intentionally continue to make use of her seductive aesthetics to entertain or sell products. In this sense, Wallin seems to argue that whenever one 'overlooks' the fascist aspect of Riefenstahl's work in employing her aesthetics, one in fact reproduces this very fascist ideology. Such uncritical appropriations necessarily align themselves with the promotion of the Aryan body type, the dissolution of the individual into the masses, and even arguably, the extermination of the 'degenerate,' or otherwise undesireable body.
So what makes Wallin's re-use of Riefenstahl's body aesthetics any different from what I have just described above? How did he avoid reproducing its fascist ideology? In a sense, he did in fact reproduce these aesthetics. However, by juxtaposing Riefenstahl's images with others, he managed to push their connotations in different directions in the composite space of computer animation. Wallin was thus able to comment critically on the machinations of the aesthetics. The critical potential of Wallin's computer animations seems to lie in their ability not only to juxtapose existing stereotypical images, but to re-combine them and create entirely new spaces, new narratives, and new structures that deconstruct old mythologies and propose alternatives.
CHANGING THE MODELS
In an overall view, Skyline comments on the power of images and the responsibility that image producers have when sending their representations out into the world. This responsibility involves being aware of how representational systems function, how one contributes to their reproduction, and, more importantly, how one can pose alternatives to them. The sixth athlete in Skyline , who seemed capable of reaching the roof top opening, yet opts to sacrifice himself and in so doing disappears, is one, who refuses both the heavenly tower of subjectivity and the dissection table of objecthood. His act of reconsideration and consequential withdrawal offers an alternative to the Subject-Object structure entirely. He chooses not to participate. In Wallin's own words, this uncoorporative athlete suspended there in the swing, his body forming a 'T,' in many ways resembles the figure of Christ.(1)
This essay is based on the ongoing dialog that I have had with Magnus Wallin since we first met in 1995 to discuss his contribution to my exhibition When the Shit Hits the Fan: Scandinavian Art in Recent Time (Overgaden - The Danish Ministry of Culture's Exhibition Space for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, 1996). Over the years, our dialog has also resulted in Wallin's participation in The Louisiana Exhibition 1997: New Art from Denmark and Scania (which I co-curated with Lars Grambye and Åsa Nacking at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 1997), the interview "The Individual's Exposure - Magnus Wallin talks with Tone O. Nielsen" (published in SIKSI . The Nordic art Review in Autumn 1997), and the catalog essay " Exit - or the Comfort of Sameness and Other Cultural Mythologies" (published in the exhibition catalog Out of the North, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 1998 and the postcard edition Exit , Malmö, 1998). The present essay can be seen as a crystallization of our long working relationship and I would like to express my warmest thanks to Wallin for sharing his thoughts and research with me during all this time and while writing this essay in particular. Also thanks to Morten Goll, Maria Lind, and Stephan Pascher for comments and editorial advice.
(2)
Riefenstahl quoted from Ray Müller's documentary Die Macht der Bilder Leni Riefenstahls, part 1 , a co-production by Omega Film, Nomad Films, Channel 4-London, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen & Arte, 1993. Author's translation from German.
(3)
Riefenstahl never considered Der Sieg des Glaubens a 'real' film, but merely a collection of poor quality footage, quickly edited together on the party's request. See Riefenstahl's statement in Müller, op. cit., part 1.
(4)
Quoted from Robert von Dassanowsky, "'Wherever you may run, you cannot escape him:' Leni Riefenstahl's Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland," at www.powernet.net/~hflippo/cinema/tiefland.html. The article was originally published in Camera Obscura, no. 35, 1995/96.
(5)
See Riefenstahl's statement in Müller, op. cit., part 1.
(6)
Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," in Under the Sign of Saturn , New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, p. 70.
(7)
Dassanowsky, op. cit..
(8)
See Riefenstahl's statement in Müller, op. cit., part 1.
(9)
See Riefenstahl's statement in Müller, op. cit., part 1.
(10)
Dassanowsky, op. cit.. Dassanowsky does not mention that Riefenstahl was reported to have used concentration camp prisoners as extras for Tiefland. Müller confronted Riefenstahl with this rumor in his documentary, but Riefenstahl maintained that she knew nothing about the death camps until after the war.
(11)
Feminist critics such as Ally Acker, Louise Heck-Rabi, B. Ruby Rich, Helena Sanders-Brahms, Linda Schulte-Sasse, and Sontag have all pointed to this. See Dassanowsky, op. cit..
(12)
Critic Richard Corliss refers in his article "Riefenstahl's Last Triumph," in Time , October 18, 1993 to 'forgiven' male artists, scientists, and intellectuals such as Céline, Roberto Rossellini, Salvador Dali, G.W. Pabst, Douglas Sirk, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Gustaf Gründgens, Veit Harlan, and Fritz Hippler, while Dassanowsky mentions 'unforgiven' female artists, scientists, and intellectuals such as Zarah Leander, Lilian Harvey, Marika Rökk, Lil Dagover and Kristina Söderbaum. See Dassanowsky, op. cit..
(13)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction , New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 95-96.
(14)
Roll On was Wallin's contribution to the exhibition Update, Turbinehallerne, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1996.
(15)
Drive In took place in Café Zoo Lounge, Oslo, Norway, 1997.
(16)
Wallin quoted from the interview "The Individual's Exposure - Magnus Wallin talks with Tone O. Nielsen," SIKSI . The Nordic Art Review , no. 3, Autumn 1997
(17)
Exit was Wallin's contribution to The Louisiana Exhibition 1997: New Art from Denmark and Scania , Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 1997.
(18)
Physical Paradise was first exhibited during the presentation of the E. Strand's Price, Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden, 1999.
(19)
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason , New York: Vintage Books, 1988, pp. 7-8.
(20)
Foucault, op. cit., p. 9.
(21)
Foucault, op. cit., pp. 10-11.
(22)
Foucault, op. cit., pp. 13-17.
(23)
Limbo was first exhibited at the exhibition Detux , Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway, 1999.
(24)
Wallin developed his athletic figures from a number of the historical anatomical models of the white, Anglo, male body that were reproduced in the catalog accompanying the historical survey exhibition Encyclopedia Anatomica at Museu La Specola in Florence. See the exhibition catalog Encyclopedia Anatomica , London: Taschen, 1999.
(25)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , New York: Vintage Books, 1979, p. 138. See also The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception , New York: Vintage Books, 1975 and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason , New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
(26)
As discussed by Foucault in his analysis of Jeremy Bentham's model of the Penitentiary Panopticon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
(27)
Bruno LaTour, We Have Never Been Modern , Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 20-29. See also Bruno Latour, "Why staging the theater of the proof?," forthcoming in Laboratorium, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist & Barbara Vanderlinden, Cologne: Antwerpen Open & DuMont Buchverlag, 2000.
Tone O. Nielsen © 2000. All rights reserved.