Bo Bjerggaard

ERIK STEFFENSE
"The Beginner's Mind"

15. November - 2. February

Pictures of consiousness
A conversation with Erik Steffensen

By Synne Rifbjerg

The incredibly beautiful Abyssinian cat whizzes through the rooms more like a tsunami than a cat's paw, scratching the furniture to its heart's content, but Erik Steffensen doesn't bat an eyelid. It comes from a family with an artistic name with vestiges of the Golden Age and grey light, and the cat-buying artist does not hesitate to take a massive detour for such a handsome conjunction of interests. Confronting reality in North Jutland landed Steffensen in the soup, however, for positive thinking is not enough when the cat is out of the bag, things may go to the dogs, and sometimes, perhaps, it is better to refrain from thinking. Or talking.
But the cat is also very living proof that beauty justifies a detour, even if your goal is not a genuine Hammershøi. One has to be open-minded.
You need to be open-minded, too, to be in the same room as Steffensen, although latitude is the prime characteristic of the man whose exhibition entitled "The Beginner's Mind" makes no attempt to hide the fact that the spiritual dimension is at play in his new works.
"It's a question of keeping an open mind, and I find that rather interesting. I wanted to do something in which I tried to hold onto that openness, a place where I felt comfortable: stand in front of the pictures, not care about what they portrayed, whether they were into your full, it was simply supposed to feel wonderful to be close to them".
Erik Steffensen has retired from his chair at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Not that he ever sat still in it: he travelled with his students and lectured them, discussing and animating generously, while at the same time creating works and generally carrying on, curating and writing his memoirs, two volumes of them so far, although in terms of memoirs, one has to say he is still a bit green. An artist wants to communicate, and this one to such an extent that he has taken a course in being silent.
"The Beginner's Mind". Steffensen is certainly no beginner, but the expression comes from Zen Buddhism and has to do with maintaining the ability to experience something as for the first time, and eager openness not rooted in what we already know, but in the possibility of learning something, you could easily overlook because you have long since moved on from beginner to expert. As far as the art of remaining open and unprejudiced is concerned, this is not a step forward.
- "Are you engaged in what the singer Van Morrison calls 'The Healing Game'?"
"Yes, I think so. Fifteen years ago I was into his songs in the extreme, I sat there painting the kind of thing where it said The healing has begun. I took a series of Danish landscape photographs which I called Spleen - in other words melancholy. I had the word embossed in the card of the passe partout. I also did a giant series of Icelandic pictures of great white geysers and Guldfoss, beautiful pictures in my opinion. On then I had printed the word Healing, intended to mean 'healing' through nature. I wanted to get away from the crumpled up Danish landscape. Perhaps it is still all about those two positions: that which is melancholy and introvert and the sort of healing on the outside.
Like looking at one of Hammershøi's pictures. Everybody would agree that Hammershøi's pictures are terribly introvert, but really in fact his paintings are also quite extrovert. In Japan at least they can see - My goodness it's one of those spaces that is FULL of possibilities.
It's all about how you look at things, the way you train your eye, and it's not just your eye. When you have worked with images for many years you discover that they are something you feel. You sense the pictures and you feel at home in them; it doesn't matter if it's abstract art or if it represents something, you have a sense of closeness to them.
That's very important to me. I have become fascinated by it - is it something you feel - with your heart?
That's the way I do the pictures, when I take them. When I'm taking pictures somewhere, I don't look through the viewfinder and see, aha - that's what I want a picture of, over there. I stand there and pay attention to whether it's a good place to stand and let in the emotions. The pictures of the girl in the bare room, I took those the same way. I look for whether she feels comfortable, whether the lines are pleasing, whether she's making an effort. Models always stand there thinking, 'What the hell's that idiot doing?' Or: 'What am I supposed to do?' I say, 'You don't have to do anything, just hang out'.
We were shooting in a room where some stones had been left over after a rebuild and at one stage she picked up a stone, and the movement made me think - she found something there that caused her to start moving more naturally. So I asked her to throw the stone at the ceiling; we started to work with that stone, completely shifting the focus. No one would be able to see on the photo that it was a stone that caused her to sit as she is, very relaxed, a bit like an Indian, as though she was sitting by a fire.
In the photo Heat one will perhaps sense the heat emanating from her transcending; there are bright spots on her feet and one above her head. Sort of pictures of consciousness from me".
Haruki Murakami. Steffensen's pronunciation of the Japanese author's name is immaculate and at ease, he is reading his books very intensively at the moment.
For those readers not familiar with this author, here is a description of Murakami's style in a review of his best known novel "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle": "All his works are characterised by the same distinctive narrator's voice; a voice which at the same time is disassociated and intense and which in some strange way unites the laconic with the passionate. In addition to this unique voice, Murakami's novels accommodate numerous recurrent elements: lonely (but not necessarily single) men in their 30s, ironing shirts, cats with fish names, enigmatic women, scary hotel rooms and parallel realities, all of it garnished with abundant reference to Western culture." (Tore Rye Andersen in the Danish literary magazine "Standart").
Not surprising that Erik Steffensen feels inspired.
"I find it interesting how run-of-the-mill things lie right next to the transcendent. As an author, Murakami is good at explaining about some of the spaces which lie adjacent to our ordinary comments. Some people express themselves in such a way that you can always sense what ends they want to attain. I have personally started to ask - what if there is no end? I'm not kidding!
For example, I've been teaching for many years and have now started to ask: "What is the purpose of what we teach? It's a rather intense, odd, subversive question. Everything has to have an end, you're under constant pressure to take the next step and then the next, but that's not what art is about. Take this 80/20 per cent 'formula': The 80 per cent has to do with the fact that we'll be here tomorrow because we have the basic staples. Even the homeless man or woman at Nørreport Station have bread and something to drink, thus fulfilling the 80 per cent, but they haven't enough to secure the last 20 per cent. They don't have a surplus, so you could say 'Wouldn't you like to watch television once in a while, enjoy life?' - they're hard driven just to stay alive.
Throughout most of the world, in Africa and other Third World countries, the 80 per cent is what they struggle for. To my great fortune I live somewhere where I can say - I have quite simply committed myself to the last 20 per cent. I don't care whether my standard of living is high or low as long as I can focus on the last 20 per cent.
There's so much aggression in society these days, precisely because people have goals - happiness is an objective we must have next week, too. But it's not until the objective disappears from sight that things really begin to move, in artistic terms, too".
What Steffensen endeavours to do is to keep open to what he sees and when the pictures emerge he prefers them to be strange enough to him that they are able to "ask" people.
- "Is that why you manipulate them? To estrange them from you?"
"No, it's more of a bad habit. That's just the way things have developed, I wouldn't even say that I manipulate them, I do ... and I don't, but it's a way of working. It's the same as someone who is used to writing with a pen and paper, that's what they do. Apart from that it's very beautiful, but as far as some pictures are concerned, you have to refrain from seeing them as a particularly noble form of expression: "Oh, it's a painting!" Perhaps you have to see the pictures as they are, as art, or another work, some individual's cogitation, their tool".
This is not an invention on the part of this interviewer, that Erik Steffensen has been told that he must learn how to keep his trap shut, and as part of his hyperactive striving towards everything, and now silence as well, he has been on a mediation course, which turned out to be all about - healing. Not that it upset the artist's equilibrium.
"It was even better, because it's all about the same thing. You have to be in balance, at the same time as opening up to the world. It's no use some lively little thing trying to delve into the emotions of another person, because they're so thoroughly absorbed by rushing about in their own head and being completely vague.
Many children get on well with their grandparents because they are aware that their grandparents do not fulfil the yes-no, yes-no, yes-no function of their parents, who are constantly telling the children what is right and wrong for them. That's what happens when you allow your solar plexus to control your life - yes-no - being dead sure which route to take. The instant you forget that solar plexus feeling you may find that your gut reaction moves towards your heart.
- "But what if you have a heart of stone?"
"Nobody has a heart of stone".
- "Should there be no boundaries? How do you define the artist Erik Steffensen if the expansive gene now also includes Zen?"
"I think you look at the pictures, and then you will say with your solar plexus: 'That's not my cup of tea, that doesn't appeal to me, yes-no. Is it a painting, yes,' and some will say 'My goodness, what picturesque photographs, those are the most beautiful photos I've ever seen' - I actually think some people would say that. From the heart.
It's a perfectly standard exercise. I did it as a child. If I found a box of black and white photos in a box under my parents' bed I would have hours of fun perusing that magical pictorial material. It was noting but a grey mass, but it portrayed people and animals, and to me it was more real to be into that material than to meet a dog. But thirty years on I've just started meeting a few dogs when I think to myself: If I just stand here ... the dog will come at sit next to me.
As a matter of fact I met a dog yesterday called Pollock, and now people will think I'm pulling their leg - I am an ironist after all. But we have to respect each other and everything that lives, it's the only way ahead. It can give you a few experiences, where you have to admit - it dissolves a bit of that artiness. I mean, is that art, is that not art? Ultimately, the question arises, something along the lines of the last 20 per cent perhaps giving you a fuller life.
Art is not on the social agenda because politics has almost exclusively to do with the 80 per cent. We must constantly labour the issue of whether or not to exclude some people from our country because we want more for ourselves. Or to ourselves. Instead of perceiving other people as resources. I met a lovely 75 year-old lady who told me of a dream she had, in which she had to look after some cattle. She'd worked on a farm all her life, her parents had had a farm, and then she said to me 'My parents never gave me a hug. I never held them by the hand, either'.
Of course she was upset about that for many, many years - 50 or 60 years perhaps - but when she turned about 60 she sold her farm and decided that now she would think of other things, do something spiritual.
She told me she recalled what a fantastic place her parents' farm had actually been, because people came from all over to help pick strawberries and potatoes. They all came from Poland or Estonia, there was even someone from India, and they were such nice people. There were convicts, too, on leave from prison. They were wonderful, she said, concluding: 'I've had many a hug from a convict but never from my own parents'. You have to make those ends meet. The world is so infinitely full of goodness somewhere or other".
- "Don't you feel the urge to take a picture of such a woman, who told you her story?"
"She's always with me, she has become a landscape within me.
I've just run a marathon in Switzerland on Lake Lucerne together with a man from Taiwan, whose story made a tremendous impression on me. To me, that landscape changes constantly. After the marathon it has become a very physical landscape in which I have got both feet on the ground. I used to sit there dreaming that I was in Turner's hotel room looking out over the Rigi. In those days I would also say that a landscape was something you carried about with you all the time, it just gets more and more varied. Now when I meet the landscape it's not just the Rigi or Bürgenstock, visited by Gitte Grå and Bent Mejding of the 70s Danish TV series "Matador". I encounter both some inner qualities - I have now run about in those streets and mountains - but I encounter it on many different levels, and the next time I encounter that landscape it might be, I'm thinking - Taiwan.
So, obviously that picture may not resemble a mountain peak called Pilatus.
It's not because I'm out of my mind, but because I'm trying to weave the spaces I carry within me into my pictures, weave it all together. It is my life's blood, after all, and it ends up in the pictures, and sometimes it's red, others it's blue, and so on ...
It's the mood which from the outside can be seen as a sentimental statement, but from the inside, you have to consider, all pictures are political. Here we have a person who has chosen to say - 'But there is also an aesthetic sense and a craving for beauty we simply have to respect'.

If we didn't have those things, then ... "

Translated by Helene Heldager, Wordmaster