Islands of thoughts
Magnus Florin, 2020
Puppets, creatures
The calm gesture of the hand, the chest moves with gentle breaths, the head turns slowly, the body slumps and then gets back up …. What is it I am seeing?
The creatures in Ön [The Island] (2018) and in Ön [The Island] (2020) are autonomous sculptures close to human size, equipped with advanced electronics and mechanics and with an internal composition like that of the centuries-old Japanese form of puppet theatre Bunraku. So I know what I am looking at – and still it does not explain why my heart is so moved by them. They possess their own presence, they give the impression of being living beings in this very moment just like me.
Such a difference from the “bio-mechanical automatons” that the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) stunned his contemporaries with! His skilled tambourine player and his solo flautist who breathed on their own and played twelve different melodies, and his legendary mechanical duck that, with eight-hundred moving parts, could flap its wings and quack, wag its tail feathers and lift its legs, be fed and release its excrement.
That is not what Karl Dunér’s creatures are. They do not need to make an impression, do not wait for applause. They have an aura of integrity, they manage without us.
When I see them I am reminded of the play Wielopole, Wielopole (1980) by the Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. He gave the stage to those from his childhood who were long since deceased. Those who were otherwise forever turned away got to bridge the distance between life and death for a moment. He let them have an autonomous existence where they could be at peace. And thus they gave us – as Kantor himself commented – “an illusion of a different world beyond our spaces”.
A different world... Perhaps it is that which these creatures give me an inkling of? Although they have such a simplicity about them, beyond all the determinations and conditions of living, in a sort of bloodless independence.
Foreign to us – and yet strikingly familiar, perhaps because they bear witness to a part of existence that is common to all people – that which is not action and intention, meaning and objective but just plainly the fact that we exist. The act of being. In this way, Karl Dunér’s beings are reminiscent of the French film director Robert Bresson’s view of repetition as an overwhelming part of life – the majority of what we do and feel is subject to habits and automatism, not free will and thought.
Or is there something else, more immediate, that moves me? The breathing, the vulnerable, the little volume of air necessary for a life. The delicate hands with the soft bend of the fingers? The foot that protrudes with its five toes? The tilted heads with their rudimentary countenances?
But I am not with them. They form a couple and a group of its own. They are where I am not, on their island, deserted in their place. How long will they stay? Perhaps forever. Like the six men and six women, blind since birth, in Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blind (1890), waiting without end in sight in a very old forest on an island surrounded by the wide ocean. Yet, Karl Dunér’s creatures probably evade such a sad association. There is a restrained smile on them, a lightness and vigour far from melancholy.
Ön [The Island] (2018) and Ön [The Island] (2020) have a continuation in the series of works called Fot [Foot] (2020). These small floor plates with feet from a prostrate body allow me to return to the puppets’ protruding feet. But now it is not the toe and ankle I am focusing on but the sole of the foot. Its naked arch, likened to heaven by the poets. Turned upwards when kneeling in prayer. But also the ingenious cooperation between muscles and small bones that allow us to walk away.
Sounds, places
The archaeologists divide the remains of the city of Pompeii into nine “regio”, i.e. districts. Each regio is in turn divided into different “insulae”, plural for “insula”, really “island”, but meaning here block or building complex. Each such “insula” is then divided into various separate locations. The designation is thus a specified zooming-in and at the same time an expansion to a slice of life. Regio VIII, Insula 3 is one such location – according to the archaeologists, a shop. The brick wall has been adorned with a square metal sign bearing the number 3, just by the opening to Pompeii’s old, bustling main street lined with shops and restaurants.
The place name from Pompeii forms one of the titles in Scen 1–10 [Scenes 1–10] (2014–2018), a series of sculptural audio installations and venues for the past and the present, imaginary and real. The excavated Pompeii meets marketplace life in Paris. The auditory space of each work has its specific recording location, hence the titles. The sounds in “Place d’Aligre” are gathered from the old Parisian market square near Place de la Bastille. In “Arènes de Lutèce”, the past and present cross paths – next to the lively Rue Monge, also in Paris, is the Roman theatre that attracted an audience of 15,000 at the time of Pompeii’s destruction. Two historical and contemporary urban spaces that Karl Dunér has returned to with the same titles in later renderings (2018).
Each sculpture has its own rhythm, the light rises and sinks in its own way. Their sounds rise and fall in the same individual manner. In many, most, of the sculptures there is a figure that moves in its unique way without repetition. Who is listening? The figure or me?
My experience is that I am on the verge of a memory. Where the consciousness suspects that something has happened but cannot manage to restore it. Some of it is obscure, some of it is clearer but not clear. Remembered sounds have detached themselves from that which is seen. And what we call “the memories” are not concrete entities but an ongoing “act of remembering” – a muddle of vague memories, shattered reflexes of something experienced.
What recollection is embedded in the four syllables of the word “Connemara” – the title of one of the works? Is it the Connemara that the traveller to Ireland finds in the far west on the edge of the Atlantic? Or as in the slave Lucky’s repetition of “the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot?
There is also rich imagination in these works that goes beyond regular memories and experiences. Canterel’s trädgård [Canterel’s garden] is a place we can visit only by reading the strange Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). In his novel Locus Solus, the learned professor Martial Canterel invites us into his expansive property – with the same name as the novel – and shows off his collection of inventions and sundry peculiarities. The reader realises that the showing is a portal to the boundless ability of imagination to let one thing lead to another endlessly. Karl Dunér’s Scen 1–10 [Scene 1–10] do not close up, they are open spaces of association. Imagination starts with a stay wire attached to something specific, then the journey begins.
Islands of thought
Bensalem, Foolyk, Houyhnmnms… the titles and descriptions of Plåt 1–5 [Tinplate 1–5] (2018) and Plåt 6–14 [Tinplate 6–14] (2020) tell us that they are alluding to islands. They are actually geographical locations in the ocean, but of such a kind that cannot be found in a regular atlas of the world. More likely in an imaginary encyclopaedia.
But these wall-hung or free-standing sculptures – the likes of which I saw in Karl Dunér’s production of Prometheus Bound, Aiskylos (Royal Dramatic Theatre/Dramaten, Stockholm, 2015) – have nothing of the material in the eye of the beholder. The name “Tinplate” is revealing. We can let a finger stroke the metallic surface and feel the material of the objects, their smoothness or roughness. What do they weigh? Would we be able to lift them? Perhaps, perhaps not. But at the same time, do they not seem surprisingly thin? Like the skin on our body. Drapery over something unseen underneath. Yes, what is underneath? After observing them for a while, it is like I see my own brain. Convolutions and grey folds. An internal geology common to all people. The twelve hundred grammes. Neurologists talk about a particular part of the brain named the “insula” – after the Latin word for “island”.
Entrances and exits
As a director, Karl Dunér has worked with drama by a long line of writers. Beckett frequently. Jean Racine, Alfred Jarry, Witold Gombrowicz, August Strindberg, Aeschylus, Stagnelius, Georges Perec, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Queneau … each of them are a world of their own. But I am struck by the fact that Karl Dunér’s theatrical work is connected to such a great extent with his artistry as a whole. His works-based art is, in a significant sense, scenic and theatrical in terms of its internal expression and in its delivery, like the theatre productions can be seen as being conceived sculpturally, implemented visually and often with filmic elements.
The staging of Strindberg’s To Damascus (Royal Dramatic Theatre/Dramaten, Stockholm, 2012) did not begin, as the writer’s stage directions stipulate, with The Unknown on a street corner by a church gate. On the contrary, he was lying down, sleeping across a pattern of grooves that conjured images of iron filings in a magnetic field, solidified lava, sand dunes, ocean waves or the convolutions of a brain. To the left of the grooves was an edge with a track on which a little carriage could move up and down, transporting the entrances of the characters. When The Unknown woke up, the audience could see that he found it difficult to move in the grooves.
Henrik Ibsen writes, entirely in accordance with his own theatrical aesthetics: “A stage set can depict a castle, a church or any other locality, but it cannot depict the stage itself.” But that is exactly what Karl Dunér does in his theatre productions and in his artistry in general! The stage depicts the stage. The scene represents the scene. And it concerns neither distance nor empathy but a third thing, an emphasis of the scenic as a reality all of its own with a power of illusion that appears not by concealing the methods of expression but, on the contrary, by highlighting them.
Next to the series of audio sculptures named Sven och Ingvar [Sven and Ingvar], we listen attentively. Skulls float above a podium – what is it we hear from them, what are the words that come and go, what is the breath? Karl Dunér collaborated many times with the, now deceased, actors Sven Lindberg (1918-2006) and Ingvar Kjellson (1923-2014). Their voices recall words by Raymond Queneau and Samuel Beckett, among others, in reverence of the ability of both literature and acting to hold on, as memory machines, to that which disappears. The throat and the head give resonance to the words. They are works that are related to Orpheus’ singing head in the Greek myth, but Sven’s and Ingvar’s voices will not allow themselves to be transformed into to a myth – their sonorous voices will remain earthly.
In the four wall sculptures with the title Sortie [Exit] (2018), a figure reaches a border – we can imagine the edge of a stage. But what is outside the stage? Another reality? Does it not even seem like the figure is on its way not just to the edge of the stage but also across it, to a new entrance? And that we see it as it precisely as it disappears? Defying the cast durability of the bronze. Whereas Dragningen [The Draw] (2018), in a suite of film cabinets, depicts a movement that is as stubborn as it is futile – reflecting the Danaïdes that carry water in a sieve or Sisyphus rolling the stone up the mountain in Greek mythology. But also the jolly disconsolateness of the farce, the repeating of boldness and failing.
The wall-hanging film cabinet – with its framed moving images – has become a recurring form of expression for Karl Dunér. The temptation is perhaps in its inner contradictory nature: the tangibility of the cabinet versus the of film’s virtuality, optics and physics; the boundary of the frame versus the stream of the film. In any event, a stage for existence.
The light, the water
The suite Vattenkikare [Aquascope] stems from the work with a tool that could be one of the inventions sketched by Leonardo da Vinci. A two-metre-long glass tube filled with water rests on a centre point, like a see-saw. But that which is set in motion here is not just a game with balanced weights, rather it is vision itself. The glass tube is both a source of light and a receiving eye. Handling it is thus both a physiological experiment and an optical adventure, a maximised and sophisticated version of the kaleidoscope. The secret is in the light, the rays of which are allowed to shine through via textiles, paper, filter and gaps. What happens?
The resulting films and photographs are impressions of both that which is seen and the seeing itself. The glass tube is both our eye and that which the eye sees. The water streams in wave movements and cascades that are simultaneously speeded up and calmed by the volume of the glass tube. A camera registers and conveys the seeing to our eye, but the glass tube itself is an image of how our eye is composed: vitreous body, ciliary body, iris, lens. It goes both ways. Or the glass tube is the large eye of the world that sees us. Foreign, mysterious, a god or a monster.
The floor sculptures Lod 1 [Sinker 1] and Lod 2 [Sinker 2] (2018), each with a film loop, makes a displacement to the vertical plane. The observer looks into the abyss. A well. I am thinking: eye socket.
The strings
The puppeteer puts a cross together and fastens strings to it, the strings go down to a puppet, its head, arms and legs, and make it move. That is the simplest way, but the illusion can be powerful. What is it that makes the marionette, strangely enough, seem more “natural” and “alive” than a skilled dancer or actor? For Heinrich von Kleist in the essay On the Marionette Theatre, it is – simply put – because the puppet has no consciousness. Its movements are just a result of gravity in continuous mechanics that reflect the finger movements of the puppeteer. While the dancer’s and actor’s steps and gestures are based on laborious practice and effort.
Kleist’s thoughts are undeniably different to those we tend to connect metaphorically to marionette theatre: manipulation, control.
When Karl Dunér in Kordofon 1–8 [Chordophone 1–8] and Kordofon 9–10 [Chordophone 9–10] (2020) makes a cross of cherry wood with two strings hanging down without being attached to a puppet – one of the strings is slightly bent, by its own force or while being manipulated – it is as if he is taking a few steps back. It is likely neither the control of the metaphor nor the immediate naturalness of Kleist that he is preoccupied with, but rather something prior and more primal. I can be reminded of Marcel Duchamp who, in 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), let the metre as a fixed unit of measurement be reconsidered by randomly dropped strings. Or of René Descartes’ preoccupation with the fibres he thought connected the body and the soul, a type of life threads constituting the world humans know. The life thread is also the human destiny in the story of the three Fates: the first spins the thread, the second measures its length and the third owns the scissors that cut it.
But with Karl Dunér the thread is not cut off. The film cabinets Tråd 1–8 [Thread 1–8] (2018–2020) let a couple of white threads move over a black background in a film loop – it reminds me of textiles or eyelashes that have become stuck on the lens of a film projector, are moved by its fan and quiver on the cinema screen. A disruption but a slice of life. In the production of Chekhov’s Platonov (Royal Dramatic Theatre/Dramaten, Stockholm, 2005), I saw two long threads quiver behind the actors above the white backdrop. As a constantly moving sign of their aberrations.