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The Inbetween: Plus & Pulse Catalogue
Aarhus Kunstbygning 2002
By Tracey Warr and Søren Høgsberg
Translation T. H Corridon
Danish version

MATERIALISATION
by Tracey Warr
Tine Bech and Annette Damgaard are two artists who are both working with categorical ruptures. They are grafting technology onto textiles and exploring a hybrid of biology and materials in order to examine the notion of materiality. The naked human body is the explicit subject of Damgaard's work. The body is also everywhere suggested and evoked in Bech's work, and in some of her 'action drawings' she has literally used her own body as a tool - jumping on charcoal to make drawings. Through an exploration of materials and materiality these artists address the body's languageless experience of the world. Their approach is not logocentric. They are addressing the gap between sensuous, bodily experience and its interpretation in words and categories.

Abject bodily fluids are frequently suggested in Bech's work, in Pink Hair for example. The materials she uses such as tapioca, egg yolk and hair are vaguely phobic or nauseating. One of her action drawings titled as a landscape recalls Duchamp's 'drawing' of his Sinning Landscape with semen on black velvet.

Bech often presents us with disturbing, disorientating views of something familiar. Is Space Pussy for instance derived from an eye, a vagina or neither? These are mysterious objects and images. We feel that we should know what they are but they elude our categorisation, sliding past our full recognition. There is a visceral trace in her work, as Francis Bacon put it describing his own work, there is something 'leaving a trail of the human presence and memory… as the snail leaves its slime'. She renders the familiar unfamiliar so we are no longer sure what landscape we are looking at. This is a strategy akin to Surrealist photographs by Brassai or Bouffard and the exploration of fetishistic close-ups by Bataille and Eisenstein.

Bech's textured sculptures frequently seem organic or uncannily alive: Fnug with its expressive open mouth, or Boundless in Space, sprouting and shedding duplicate smaller versions of itself in an amoeba-like reproductive process. Her drawing of a Sea Creature looks like a cross between a flesh-eating plant and an exotic insect and her sculpture, Tumbleweed could be a nest or a container for an unseen life-form.

Bech's work is a soap opera of microbes and macrocosms - both referring to the human body. She says that some of her drawings have been inspired by the body's holes or by jellyfish, for instance. Her tactile materials are reminders of physicality - we want to touch her objects, we need to walk around them, to experience them, to meet them and they interact with us, responding to our proximity. As her exhibition title suggests, they seem to beat with a somatic pulse. But her drawings are also inspired by the forces of nature and by events in the cosmos - by black holes, images of galaxies, landscapes seen from space and rainfall. In Spacehole we are flung into a macrocosmic void, a black hole. Bech gestures at both the miniscule world of the microbe and the vasty world of the cosmos.

Bech is concerned with the formless space between categories and Damgaard is concerned with polarities and the communication between those polarities. In Damgaard's work we enter into the body rather than imagining a sometimes slimy contact with it as we do in Bech's work.
Damgaard's felt tent in Plus resembles a breast that we walk into and that encloses us. Her work explores the dichotomies of nature and culture, man and woman, material and immaterial, time and timelessness. She employs a language of oppositions, of black and white, hard and soft, naked and clothed, circle and square, inside and outside, handcrafted textile and digital media, to underscore these dichotomies. Just as the nothing between heartbeats is an essential something along with the beats themselves to construct the on/off of a pulse, so too in Damgaard's Plus - the joining or interplay between opposites is as critical as the delineation of the two things opposing each other.

In Plus in a tent on a PC screen a computer animation of a naked woman appears as the second hand of a clock. She is ticking her way around the clock face, blinking wryly at us as she circles 360 degrees, holding eye contact with us all the while. She reminds us of the body clock of fertility and the body clock of mortality. We recognise that we are trapped in the inevitability of time just as she is. In the other part of the work a naked man is projected onto felt capes and hangings in a space. He is shown in a series of poses - frozen in mid-action, doing something purposeful - climbing through an opening, reaching or throwing, thinking, jumping, going somewhere. He recalls Myerbridge's photographic studies. The viewer has to consider the contrasts between the two images in Plus - male and female, and we also consider the plus between them.

The substancelessness of Damgaard's light projections of a naked man contrasts with the materiality and weight of the felt capes and the screens hanging screens that they are projected onto. The virtual naked female body on a PC screen contrasts with the materiality and sensuality of the felt tent container housing it. These felt constructions are layered metaphors - her tent is architecture, room, and the body, and her felt capes are clothing, screens, doorways and pictures on the wall, like tapestries or wall hangings.


The use of textiles by women artists has in the past been identified with feminist agenda subverting patriarchal notions of ‘high art’ – in Miriam Schapiro and Faith Riggold’s quilts for instance. But Bech an Damgaard’s use of textiles goes beyond this feminist subversion to address a much wider discourse surrounding materiality. Their textiles refer also to the comedy of sexual, environmental textiles in the works of Yayoi Kusama, to Claes Oldenburg's limp sculptures such as Green Beans, or to Eva Hesse and Robert Morris's use of felt to explore materiality and gravity. Bech's use of materials is sometimes reminiscent of the Surrealists' exploration of visceral and fetischistic materials, of Meret Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer for instance. An examination of abject material continued in the 60s and 70s in the work of artists such as Piero Manzoni - with his fake fur balls and Artist's Shit, Lucio Fontana with his anthropomorphic but undefined forms, Robert Rauschenberg in his experiments with the abject in Black Paintings and Morris' experiments with detritus in Threadwaste. Abjection was explored too in the theoretical writings of Bataille, Sartre and Kristeva and associated with the mother and the female. Bech and Damgaard's textiles resemble membranes and skins - they exist on a boundary between animate and inanimate, between human and thing and they articulate the gap between language and experience.

Tracey Warr is a curator and writer based in England. She is the editor of The Artist's Body (Phaidon, London, 2000).


Tell Me Formless…
by Søren Høgsberg
The difference between what appears.
The unity of two sizes.
The silent interval between heartbeats.
Borderline—the frontier which belongs to
one and the other.
Our desire for order permits us only
one or the other.

The artists Annette Damgaard (DK) and Tine Bech (GB) investigate in this exhibition this frontier.
Annette Damgaard approaches this subject through the ”plus” sign, which acts as a ”crystallizer” - the meeting place of opposites. The central message in her installation is moment and movement. These two meet in the ”plus-point” the opposite couple – movement and moment. The universally formless felt acts as the form-giver, and technology is always present while the plus is continually in our consciousness.
Do we meet movement in the moment or do we meet the moment in movement? There is no difference when the bird’s eye view is taken. The ”plus” activates the whole.

The themes of Tine Bech’s work are pulse (impulse). Her works, both the sculptures and the drawings, appear as organisms, which come alive in the contact with the viewer. The works insist on having a ”before” and ”after.” But their actual condition lies between the two as between heartbeats—as a timeless now or an imaginary number. The interface between the work and the viewer hovers in the space in between.

In this exhibition it is Art which takes precedence over the artwork. What is set in action is an unusual twist in our perception of the work and our relationship to it as the viewer.
Damgaard and Bech both use intuition as their guiding star in their work with their own respective materials. They carry intuition into their work-interpretation, and reveal it to the viewer, whom is most keenly aware of their own senses. Here is the ”Art’s space” precisely a sensing of the interval itself. And if this ”sensing” can be articulated we must, so to speak, read between the lines.
Today’s art has for long time circled about the category known as statement-art. Damgaard and Bech offer their own solution. For them the relationship between the viewer and the work plays the decisive role. The relationship between two sovereign individuals in their communion on common ground can be described as a social occurrence. And when art is connected to our relationship, the work can be appropriately called relational art.

Søren Høgsberg, Sociologist and Founder of Galleri Høgsberg