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Bodily exercises
Nina Rantala takes my hand to show how she has drawn
directly on people’s skin in a number of her works.
The situations and places have changed; the flow of black
and red lines on the arm of a lady in Hamburg, the
metamorphosis of a butterfly on the back of a friend,
tattoo motifs on sailors aboard a Norwegian ferry. The
body gives scale to the drawings; the relationship with
the person imparts the motif. The lines follow the folds
of the skin, skirt sinews and moles, race down veins and
reach up with arteries. Power lines, veins, fragmentary
body maps; interspersed with words about time, dream,
fears. The artist herself states: ‘One cannot draw
closer to anyone than on his or her skin.’ The
colour will gradually fade away and yet the skin
remembers – the presence and touch.
The British artist and theoretician Yve Lomax considers
the body, temporalness and photograph and asks:
‘When the fragrance of a body beckons we may ask,
‘well then, what is a body?’’ Her reply
combines various fields of science, transcends categories
and limits of artistic endeavors:
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‘A body can be
anything – an animal, an idea, a body of
sounds, a mountain, a linguistic corpus, a child,
a photographic body of images or a wind. A body,
we might say, is never separable from its
relations with the world.’ |
We can ask where did the question about body
enter Rantala’s works? The most obvious answer is
her past as a sculptor and the implied close relationship
with the physicality and characteristics of materials as
well as a feeling of the weight of matter. A more
insightful question would be how is the body present in
Rantala’s works? In her early Structures sculptures
the body is implied in the scale of the buildings and
spaces, observations and experiences on partitioned and
shared city spaces, taken into private use and
represented as simplified structures. Small details
articulate the personal border in relation to the
observed space.
In the two works about the arson of the Porvoo Cathedral
the body is a place for collective remembrance. It is a
congregational body, people and turning points in life.
The church building as a body is a place for mourning as
well as for rebuilding, an attempt at resurrection and
facing the future. In her sculpture Room the sculptural
body is a metaphor for sacral space with no access to the
holiest of the holy. It is like an idea of a religion
that one can feel sharing as long as it is being lived
but which is never put into words. It keeps its innermost
secret.
A scent of tar permeates Rantala’s works. It
attaches to various strata of meaning like in tarred
shingles of a church roof and images of the sides of the
wooden ships of a bygone age. The memory traces attach to
the layers of cultural nostalgia: a tarred wooden boat
and skin sticking to the sun-warmed back thwart; the
tarry humid air in a dusky sauna; or the stories of
previous generations about the snow sticking under
recently tarred skis.
The question of presence is central in Rantala’s
work. It is not translated into the metaphysics of
presence but rather to a question of the body as a part
of a community and human interaction. The sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman states in his studies on the relationship
between exchange and gift: ‘even if the personal
context cannot accommodate the whole business of life, it
still remains an indispensable ingredient of
interaction.’ In True Romance Rantala examines the
separation and transcendence of private and public,
intimate and hierarchic. In the drawings made on the skin
of the crew of a Norwegian ferry crossing a fjord, M/F
Stryn, the fragmentary and probing line of Rantala’s
previous works transforms during bilateral conversations
with the crew into personal pictorial symbols of the
important things in life: work, hobbies, love. To the
engineer it is the ferry’s eight-cylinder engine; to
the captain it is a series of nautical knots on his back;
to the ticket-seller it is a view of the fjord, anchors
and lines of flowers. In return, the engineer drew a
Norwegian fishing boat on Rantala’s arm as a
souvenir. The personal nature of these images avoids the
clichéd shoals of traditional sailor tattoos.
Through these drawings the body becomes a scene, not only
for nostalgic remembrance but also for pictorial
presentation of the borders of self. The role of the
photographs in True Romance emerges as one of its main
functions as a practice of late photography and a form of
presentation in contemporary art: to leave a visible sign
of a past event. The photographs of the drawings sail
permanently with the ferry and its crew. They remind of
those quiet pensive drawing sessions, of the strange
closeness on the deck, in the mess hall, in the engine
room. A community can be built and strengthened by
sharing personal memories and making them visible. It is
a question of daring to approach another human; or as Yve
Lomax condenses it when contemplating the relation of
photograph to the human body:
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‘It is the
affects that bodies have upon one another which
come to constitute the photographic image or
indeed make the child. It is the relations
entered into which come to define a body.
’Nothing but relations’, we may
reply.’ |
Text by Leevi Haapala
translation Jaakko Koskentola
Yve Lomax, “The photograph and les temps”,
Writing the Image, An Adventure With Art and Theory.
I.B.Tauris Publishers, London, New York, 2000, 121.
Zygmunt Bauman, Sosiologinen ajattelu, suom. Jyrki
Vainonen. Vastapaino, Tampere 1997, 122. Alkuteos
Thinking Sociologically, Blackwell 1990.
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Ruumiillisia harjoituksia |
