APRIL ELIZABETH LAMM: WHO INVENTED THE WHOOPEE CUSHION?, 2007
Though it may be maudlin or just too modest to begin by describing a wall-text found half-way hiding behind the artist’s studio door (actually the door to the bathroom), this is where Lise Harlev’s work begins:I feel like I belong
in two places
instead of just one
There are two arrows curving around the top and bottom (which the software will not allow me to show you), pointing to an unknown past and to an unknown future. The arrow on top points to that direction we see as belonging to the past, that is, to the left, whereas the arrow on the bottom points in that direction belonging to the future, namely, to the right. If our math professors had drawn a line on the chalkboard and proclaimed that the positive side of zero was to the left and the negative side of the zero was on the right, then Lise Harlev’s arrows might have been pointing in the opposite directions.
Like a red dot on a map (YOU ARE HERE), the arrows might be pointing to a change of place, north or south, east or west, depending on your orientation. But even without a change of geography, Denmark or Germany, the phrase is applicable to the general malaise of the human condition: human beings are never “being,” but always “doing” something; we are on the move. We jitter, even when standing in place. Otherwise, we’d be more like amoebas. (No we wouldn’t. Amoebas move around a lot too.)
These are the kind of thoughts that are generated by her work. They make us slow down and actually think about the tiniest things we take for granted such as the interpretation of arrows, pointing out both time and space. (And in this case, the need to be in the studio and on the toilet too.) The work is from the series aptly titled "I Am Here and You Are There" (2003).
Lise Harlev has been living in Berlin since the year 2002, after spending a year at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. It was in Germany that she developed her keen way of working with language – not that the work is German-influenced, no, such linguistic revelations might have just as well have taken place in Turkey or France. And though her chosen medium – the English language – might be based on Keynesian demand, one might see the choice as being driven by supply-side economics. In this way, she fits the “international” bill more so than what one might label “the Danish.”
Several artists, and particularly female artists, it must be said, have made the written word their working medium. Or is the medium actually the “reading therein”? Words, spelled out largely, force the viewer to decelerate the synapses of thought. Different from the act of looking at a work of art and then reading a small text about it placed on a label, art that appropriates words (I will not say language, for language implies the whole kit-and-caboodle), contains the conceptual step of comprehension within itself. Ironically, by bringing the viewer closer to the words, a distance is created in which to view the thought behind them all the better. When one considers that many text-based artists such as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Nancy Spero began doing their best work in the era of Reaganomics, it seems all too fitting that Lise Harlev feels the necessity of spelling things out now (and the horribleness of that vague “now” has yet to be spelled out by a bite-sized definition of this era).
Harlev’s work oscillates between two places: between literature and signage, yes, but that sounds too pat. Again: to appropriate the first work mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Harlev’s work “belongs in two places instead of just one.” With this oscillation, the two places exist but Harlev’s work creates a third: a crossbreed of form, both handmade and man-made. Can you follow my arrows of thought? Slowly: she appropriates found forms, namely, the signage which makes up the backdrop of our visual field. These signs are recognizable as those signs which we tend to largely ignore – be it advertising, posters, or signs held high during a demonstration. Because of their familiarity, we tend not to read the (large) print. But the work of Lise Harlev makes us look at that print, those words, that text that we ignore. The large print, in Harlev’s case, is actually “fine print.” Harlev’s text is as succinct as the thought: the terse style conveys its truthfulness. The work is explicit but playful: it is a formalized manner of hide-and-seek. But behind its “factual” façade – this familiar signage – are the emotions evoked from an incredibly individualized standpoint. Its truisms stand tall but barely belie the fragile sensibility just under the skin.
April Elizabeth Lamm
Scrap thoughts:
The home page of her website bears one of her more recent signs from the series "More His Place Than Mine" (2006), which reads: “Living together, I wonder if I can keep anything secret from him.” The sign is reminiscent of the kind of cross-stitch pillows that slowly covered the couch after so many cross-stitch Christmas presents for years on end, from aunts and grandmothers and third cousins where a black sense of humor meets a fondness for crafts. But made of enamel on metal, Harlev’s sign appropriates the graphics found in the front yard of a house for sale.
Recently, she began working not only with signs, but the context of those signs as well. In the series “The Way They Act” (2006), one finds her signs placed within those ominous waiting rooms, the kind of waiting rooms relegated not only to foreigners, but relegated to those moments where even a native feels like a foreigner in their own country. These are the waiting rooms for anything “official.” One reads, “You tell yourself the authorities in your own country would never be this difficult” or “You think the way they act is typical for this country.” The “you” implied is the foreigner, in the first case, but the “you” in the latter also very much infers the self-hatred of the Germans, who themselves have a hatred for the bureaucracy this country is well-known for. In that sense, Germans have the unique ability of seeing themselves from a sort of third-person perspective. One can be a German and hate it too. In my eyes, rather, this is typically American.
When I met with Lise at her studio, we spent hours discussing what it meant to be Danish. I grew up in America, where “being Danish” might have referred to pure pataphysical nonsense. A “Danish” is a generic word in American English referring to a particular kind of pastry, so if you said to me (in bad English), “I am a Danish,” my retort would be, “Right, and I’m a baguette.” I’m a Greek, I’m a Chinese, I’m a French, none of these ring with the natural humor of I’m a Danish.
But everything Lise referred to as “being Danish” sounded to me like “being American.” Playing around with various symbols for a new heraldry for Denmark in general, and for the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in particular, she’d placed a pastry to the left and a sausage with mustard and ketchup on the right. A typical designer lamp was in the middle, which might have been Swedish, if it had been up to me. So this was the kicker: the first thing that didn’t look American to my eyes, didn’t look particularly Danish either, but rather Swedish. Lise told me that she was “trying to create confusion by using symbols that are not symbols, playing around with the idea of the universal but with my own idiosyncrasies.” Apparently, the Danes have good taste. Designer lamps are par for the course, in cafeterias or designer restaurants alike, good chairs, good lamps, everything is just right. This is what we agreed that we both liked about living in Germany, oddly: the lack of good taste.
“Danes are funny. But they think they can make jokes about everything.” The wisecracks of the North, I thought it was funny enough that we could agree that we liked Germany for its lack of taste, and then the thought occurred to me: what universal symbol that is not a symbol would you use to represent this Danish humor? She came up with a “fart pillow,” i.e., a “whoopee cushion,” and yes, that’s an American invention. No, it’s Danish, she said. I let her have that point of national pride. The Danish invented the whoopee cushion and they have great lamps and chairs.