SCRAPBOOK STICKERS WITH GLITTER BY CECILIE HØGSBRO ØSTERGAARD
Scrapbook stickers with glitter
By Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard
Scrapbook stickers with glitter have always been more attractive than those without. Little girls with sound business sense have always known that just adding a touch of glitter can be enough to vastly increase the swap value of a poor sticker. A large and unusual angel or a charming flower arrangement with birds will usually sell itself, but a touch of extra glitter always helps along less seductive pictures such as those of boys, cars or boring standard angels.
Benny Dröscher uses more or less the same procedure - though hardly to optimise the value of his works, as glitter and scrapbook stickers have a rather different status in the world of art and in the playground. On the other hand it is precisely the latter factor that Dröscher is working to understand; unlike most artists, he is not as much interested in the relationship between picture and reality as in the relationship between the glossy image and reality. Not that reality is presented as a glossy image by Dröscher; on the contrary, the relationship is inverted: he translates the symbols of glossy images, whether two-dimensional scrapbook stickers or the metaphors of a cloying hymn into tableaux and tangible objects. He says himself that it's a question of finding out where the threshold of pain goes in our use of banal symbols, and our need for them.
The interesting thing is that the symbols Dröscher chooses from the world of kitsch and cliché have not always been as banal and dull as they now appear. They once had a considerable spiritual, magical or religious significance, and the demand for them was naturally not entirely trivial. The banal symbol thus generally represents a natural phenomenon to which, through fairy tales, art or religion, we once assigned a spiritual or symbolic value. Along with the general secularisation of life, however, motifs such as roses, small birds, spring, Jacob's ladders and sugary snow disappeared into the world of scrapbook images and Christmas decorations. In much the same way, the fairy tale, once a legitimate part of the adult storytelling tradition, has been banished in modern times to children's culture; certainly collected and registered in a scientific way, but in the final analysis mostly for the benefit of children. The same thing has happened to the fairies of the fairy tales. These are no longer our small virginal helpers in nature, but have slipped down into a subcultural morass of shoddy feminine sentimental culture, and have acquired rather less innocent sexual connotations, at any rate in English.
The voyeur
In the final analysis, Dröscher's exploration of the relationship between the glossy image and reality is concerned with the relationship of art itself to nature. Art once had the function of presenting nature as an integrated divine mystery, or as the revelation of the functioning of divine laws; in other words, as a religious symbol. Later, science taught us that the mysteries of nature were there to be explained, symbols to be revealed. Art soon followed after, and began to present nature as an enigma in the process of being explained – or even a theme undergoing development. Science paved the way for the view of nature as a complex and organised phenomenon. Nature was no longer a whole, but was broken down into cells and atoms, to be explained in terms of processes, autogenesis and photosynthesis. Science explained how nature was structured, connected and constructed as a kind of scenography. Serious art followed on the heels of science; nature was studied in order to learn from it and perhaps tame it, but not to subject oneself to it in romantic or religious visions. It was now understood that our view of nature was merely an artificial cultural projection. The heath, the Wadden Sea, or the overgrown English garden were no longer examples of wild nature, but a cultural landscape.
The artist, too, began to identify more with the biologist and the anthropologist than with the priest.
However, art which, like science, attempted to study nature in a matter-of-fact way and avoid cultural projections came to relate to the natural world in something of the same way as a TV nature documentary: nature is a collection of facts, information, species and names. It may look beautiful, but it has absolutely no symbolic meaning, only scientific significance. When the presenter of a nature documentary whispers while pointing at some natural phenomenon or other which must not be disturbed, it is to maintain this aura of a down-to-earth scientific approach. The whispering, at any rate on television, is a powerful metaphor for invisibility. When the presenter whispers, the viewer can convince himself that the animals don't notice him, while at the same time we have a tendency to confuse this "invisibility" with objectivity. But a whispering TV presenter also has the unintended effect of appearing to express religious devotion.
In the same way, art presents a fundamentally voyeuristic picture of the human being as an invisible and taciturn outsider, who sits watching or pointing at nature via some form of technology or through a medium: a microscope, telescope or camera, or possibly a painting. It is not for nothing that art in modern times has been fascinated by the fundamental scientific schism between the observer and the observed. But like the whispering TV naturalist, this schism creates a new kind of artistic devotion or ceremony of which not all are equally aware.
The cold camera
One might be inclined to think that art which distances itself from nature as a spiritual, symbolic or subjective affair – a glossy image – is also anti-romantic. This is far from the case. The image of nature as a laboratory or as a voyage of discovery is perhaps one of our time's greatest romantic visions. Visual technology is not merely the medium of cold scientific analysis; technology also re-enchants nature for us. It even captures signals which become new forms of superstition and spiritual symbolism: UFOs, aura drawings, and the like. Technology spreads, so to speak, just as much glitter on nature as the romantic religious painting: a point which is made indirectly and tongue-in-cheek by Dröscher.
Dröscher is concerned with how art and technology do not just demystify, but continue to mystify nature for us. In this respect, his work is in fact more closely related to film production than to art. A simple anecdote from film history may perhaps serve to illustrate the relationship between installation (sculpture) and photo in Dröscher's production.
In the early days of film, one of the fundamental questions was whether film could ever become an art form. By "art", people thought, in an entirely traditional way, of how the medium of film could be used to present nature. But how could impressions of nature be presented in an artistic manner using a technology which, by comparison with painting, seemed so technical, so objective and matter-of-fact? When Fritz Lang made the silent film classic Nibelungen in the 1920s, he thus constructed one of the most expensive and elaborate natural scenarios ever seen, in deep mistrust of his camera. He did not feel that unadorned camera recordings in natural surroundings could communicate the stylised, mythological landscape that he sought.
A few years later, the young Leni Riefenstahl did away with this technical pessimism. She wanted to produce her first real feature film about the nature child Junta in the South Tyrol, but did not have the same budget as Lang, and was in any case less than enamoured with the atmosphere of film studios. On the other hand she made the great discovery that when filmed with the right filters not just those of film technique, but also nature's own, such as fog banks and opposing light she could create precisely the artistic-mythological sense of nature that she, like Lang, was searching for. She painted, as she said, with the camera, and became in that sense the first ever technical film artist. The rest, as we know, is history.
Dröscher uses the techniques of both Lang and Riefenstahl at one and the same time. He constructs his nature tableaux both in the studio and, so to speak, on location. In the studio, he uses wooden constructions, paint, glitter and styrofoam; on location, the stage is set using nature's own filters and a tough-minded photographic perspective. The two types of practice are not contradictory, but are linked by drawings and paintings in which the symbols and structures of the tableaux are once again activated and stylised using small birds with halos, rays, fairy rings and complex titles. The stylisation of nature through styrofoam, glitter, fog and opposing light, the actual enchantment process, is not in the final analysis interesting in itself – it is merely a cheap trick, as Dröscher time and again reveals to us. The interesting thing is that nature and art do not sell themselves without this technique. Nature and art do not become truer, more valuable or more scientific by being revealed and cleansed of stupidities, kitsch and banalities; both parts become thereby merely incomprehensible – and unsaleable.
The Impossibilities of Sculpture
By Anna Krogh, curator.
The recent series of sculptural work by Benny Dröscher is comprised of one major installation (I’m so Sick and Tired of Having to do Everything Myself) and three voluminous wall objects (There Must be More to Living than a Mortgage and a Lawn to Mow, With My Head Bent Auspiciously over the Centre and Abducted by U.F.Os– Purged with Hyssop). Add to this some ten drawings (A Goofy Picture of a Magic Moment) all of which tune into the recurrent experiments with visuality that Dröscher has played out again and again in his work. He is dealing with the specific challenges a contemporary sculptor faces in regard to (symbolic) images, rethinking classical virtues within the media, and the artificiality and illusionary reality of form.
Dröscher explores the materiality of sculpture in order to find a metaphysical language that matches that of painting. In two dimensional media we uncritically accept that a ray of light, say, (as in Abducted by U.F.Os– Purged with Hyssop) can have religious overtones. If sculpted, however, we automatically begin to relate to form, to the form’s interaction with the surrounding space. In other words we are less concerned with the sculpture’s symbolic level of meaning because we focus on its materiality. Dröscher seems to insist that sculpture maintains a symbolic level, albeit expressed in an artificial language bordering on kitsch.
One thematic thread that runs through all these recent works has to do with magic – on several levels: the magic of spirituality, of religion and of the experience of art. He plays – not only with our willingness to accept just about anything – but also our need to believe in something larger than life, be it God, nature or spirit. The forms that he builds and constructs all have an underlying symbolic meaning, and more specifically a religious meaning. Dröscher makes no distinction between a catholic reference or an alternative, non-established mysticism on the one hand, or a nature-based spirituality in which God resides in all nature’s elements on the other. We may not be familiar with the content or reference in each form, but respond intuitively at a symbolic level.
Dröscher’s use of humour (explicitly present in the titles of the works, but also in the clashes between material and form) and his references to extreme pop culture make the artist’s ironic distance to the issues fully apparent. Whether divine beams of light come from a U.F.O or whether the religious belief is lived out in the world of Tarot cards, Dröscher visualizes the many different faces of religious belief, not with an artistic hierarchy as a starting point, but openly and curiously.
What remains is a progressive experiment with sculpture. Putting together seemingly incompatible materials such as foam, fur and natural elements like branches, plants, leaves and crystals, Dröscher creates artificial universes that in a sense go against what is possible – heavy trunks hanging from the ceiling as light constructions, seemingly heavy objects placed on the wall appearing massive and solid. In a sense he works as a classical sculptor, but he sets up the rules of his game to turn the impossibilities of the sculptural relationship between form and symbolic content inside out.
All of this challenges what is ‘acceptable’. All that is natural is here made unnatural, and everything that could be artificial becomes ‘the real thing’. Dröscher presents an illusion – of both religion and sculpture. Nothing is what is seems, the world is tilted upside down in a sculptural project that tests the physical laws of form. This project could be classified as ‘bad taste’ - kitsch balancing between pop and the baroque, but in such an extreme manner that it works.
There is a tendency in contemporary art praxis to return to form, to ‘the thing’ itself. Artists like Dröscher have in fact always insisted on the currency and potency of sculpture as a means of relating art to reality. His recent series can be seen as an attempt to redefine the impossibility of sculpture. Dröscher’s artistic concerns are thereby taken a step further, moving towards the conquest of the symbolic level for sculpture.