REMARKABLE WORKS BY CURATOR ANNI NØRSKOV, MUSEUM TRAPHOLT, KOLDING, DENMARK
Senses and ideas are challenged in a remarkable manner when BennyDröscher's theatrical, thoughtful and humorous sculptures enter into dialogue.
Benny Dröscher plays with the concept of sculpture, both with regard to materials, location and motif. This can be experienced from May to September, when Museum Trapholt will present Benny Dröscher's works in connection with the exhibition Samlings•••••••.
Visitors will encounter two works by Benny Dröscher which are as fascinating and ambiguous as their titles: With My Head Bent Auspiciously Over The Centre and Abducted By UFOs – Purged With Hyssop.
The two sculptural works seduce our senses and challenge our ideas, partly through their puzzle-like character, and partly in the way that they break with genres and thereby illustrate, in a good-humoured manner, the kind of cross-field which characterises the Museum Trapholt collection.
ANIMATION SCULPTURE
Benny Dröscher : With My Head Bent Auspiciously Over The Centre
A handful of sparkling Christmas stars + two lambskins + puppet strings + a gnarled tree = a sculpture! This unusual and seductive sculpture presents us with a small piece of animation theatre, in which a universe endowed with spirit challenges, by means of tricks and illusions, our sense of reality and our concept of sculpture.
The sculpture bears a title which, quite deliberately on the part of Benny Dröscher, does not provide us with an answer, but rather with more tantalising questions; for what could a title like “With My Head Bent Auspiciously Over The Centre” possibly mean?
BD: The titles are often the place where the audience seeks help in decoding the work. We like to think that we are far more familiar with words than with images – we attempt to communicate with and understand each other via language. A work of art is a difficult and even an absurd way to communicate, but it is not always one which is best decoded by words. My titles often result in a total short-circuit for the observer, forcing him or her to start again – often visibly relieved, because the entire situation had started to become grotesque.
Fiction in 3D
This theatrical sculpture approaches us from the wall, the air and the floor, and it is by no means obvious where its boundaries lie, or what kind of work it is. The tree trunk which occupies the painting's customary place on the wall refuses to be forced back flat against the wall, but reaches its branches across the room above our heads.
The flat skins on the floor resemble warm, living animals which invite you to stroke them, but just as the skins can call forth our tenderness, the furry beasts can cause us to start with shock when we are caught by surprise, and instead of seeing through the illusion, merely gain a quick glimpse of something strange and animal-like out of the corner of our eyes. The strings that lift the skins bear large glistening stars reminiscent of Christmas decorations.
We encounter in other words a sculpture which engages us with its overbearing form and familiar motifs.
BD: The ability of the work to seduce and communicate depends very much on the degree of openness on the part of the spectator. But fundamentally, we are all influenced by size and location. A sculpture is after all an object in the room which is competing with our bodies for the space. If it is larger than us, we feel small – if it is hung high, we must look up to it, and so on.
Magically, like a puppet-master, the branches of the tree bring to life the flat, dead skins – a magic which is illustrated by the sparkling stars. We witness the dramatic moment at which the dead, flat skins are transformed into living spatial forms.
BD: In that context, ”With My Head Bent Auspiciously Over The Centre”, provides an image of the conviction that we are controlled by someone or something greater than ourselves. Like puppets, the skins on the floor become almost living – and without free will, they must accept being told what to do.
Even if you are not inclined to deterministic fatalism, it is difficult not to be swayed by the seductive power of the sculpture. When you stand before it, it becomes apparent that here, Benny Dröscher is not merely illustrating a predetermined fate between a controlling power and an object, but rather that Dröscher himself is the puppet-master and we are his objects, willingly allowing ourselves to be seduced by his dramatically presented image of the power of the illusionist.
Foam fakery
As a sculpture, ”With My Head Bent Auspiciously Over The Centre” is also a ground-breaking experiment in form, to which we are both witnesses and participants. What does it take for us to accept an illusion as reality?
BD: The skins have a past, in that they were once rather more three-dimensional – i.e. they once walked around in the form of living sheep. Since then, they have lost this ability and have become rather flat, so to speak. Here, with the puppet strings, I attempt in an almost childlike way to give them form or, if you like, life again.
The choice and treatment of the materials is also a part of the form experiment and the construction. The materials have undergone very different degrees of processing. The work's "body", the tree, is actually the least 'natural' aspect of the composition, and the part which has been subjected to the most processing. The "tree" actually consists of painted polyester foam, so beautifully crafted that we unhesitatingly accept it as a tree. But Dröscher himself is happy to destroy the illusion, for the end of one branch and the lowest part of the low-relief half-trunk on the wall reveal the inside of the polyester tree and its skeleton: plastic foam and a plank. Which, then, is the "real" tree? The polyester tree or the wooden plank?
Seductive illusion
BD: My works attempt in every possible way to seduce the audience into believing in them as "reality" but (...) it is after all a trick. An illusion is in the final analysis a construct – no matter whether it takes the form of an idea or, as here, a physical creation. By revealing what the work consists of, I point out this constructed nature. The interesting thing, however, is that the eye simply chooses to reject this reality quite quickly, and flees back into the illusion, the work's motif and symbolism. There is a lot of psychology involved here.
Benny Dröscher's work is simultaneously rebellious and seductive sculpture that plays with the power of our senses to visualise, and with our psychological need for images and stories. We accept fragments and read them as whole images, and we read illusions as true stories. What, then, is reality, and what is illusion – and is one necessarily preferable to the other?
RELIGIOUS SCULPTURE
Benny Dröscher : Abducted By UFOs – Purged With Hyssop
The other sculpture by Benny Dröscher, Abducted By UFOs – Purged With Hyssop, also from 2005, consists of three symbolically-charged main elements: a primitive and unworked group on the ground, a highly processed group on the wall, and that which communicates the tensions between these – in this instance, nothing! And it is precisely here that the work's focus lies, in terms of physical form and content. The work is about nothing – or rather, it is about that which lies "between heaven and earth", and whose existence we cannot prove, but which we nonetheless have a need to believe in and form images of.
Belief or superstition
The work's first public showing was at a 'religious' exhibition at Galleri Mogadishni in 2005.
BD: (...) The exhibition was not about distinguishing between one religion and another, or about whether what I believe is more correct than what you believe, and that I am therefore obliged to preach to you, convert you or kill you. On the contrary, it was about the kind of personal conviction that produces meaning, content and ritual for the individual – more in the direction of superstition.
The work comments with affection and humour on the individualistic religious buffet that characterises our society today. No-one can after all present rational and scientific proof that we will improve our chances by belonging to a church, or to a UFO-watching society, or by going in for alternative aura cleansing, but we take comfort in such beliefs and superstitions and are happy to accept the abundance of images that accompany them.
Religious references
The sculpture consists of a number of recognisable 'motifs', combined in such a way that we are bound to look for the connection – the solution to the puzzle. There are many references to well-known motifs from religious or magical imagery. On the floor lie a number of stones, surrounding three interwoven branches and a switch of a dried bush. The arrangement consists of unworked natural materials, organised in a symbolic order. The branch of the bush is the hyssop referred to in the title:
BD: Here we are moving into the area of religion or superstition. In the Book of Psalms, chapter 51, verse 7, it says: Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. This refers to the old belief that you could cleanse yourself of sin with a branch of the hyssop bush. I have no idea how, but it probably involved something like our modern aura cleansing, using a suitable object. More specifically, it was believed that a branch of the bush could buy a night of innocence for a bride – should she have lost it under unfortunate circumstances!
The extreme tip of the upward-pointing branch has been embellished with leaf silver at the point where it almost touches the group on the wall, with their finely-worked celestial bodies. This is the meeting-place between heaven and earth, where the 'fingers' of the two branches almost touch – like E.T. pointing towards his home planet, or the naked Adam in Michelangelo's famous portrait of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel, receiving life from the celestial finger of God. The heavenly silver did not come from a spray, but was applied in the baroque tradition, using a brush and fine leaves of leaf silver.
This uncompromising craftsmanship is continued in the work's divine radiance and UFO of polyester foam, which Benny Dröscher has shaped, varnished and polished to achieve exactly the right colour intensity and sheen, while the cloud of the same material has a light and diffuse appearance, and elegantly houses the flying saucer – right on top of the work's wedding cake.
The divine radiance is familiar from the baroque decorations of the Catholic Church, in which the artists sought, by using all possible means to represent the magnificent creative power of God, to provoke self-effacing admiration among the faithful. In Benny Dröscher's presentation, the opulent but deeply felt Catholic propaganda art may appear kitsch, but the clash arises purely from the change of context – in the church, the solemnity remains intact.
New form of sculpture
Benny Dröscher exhibits these religious images and our acceptance of them by taking them out of their original context and bringing them together in a single three-dimensional picture of the paradoxical power of our beliefs and superstitions to produce images. He thereby presents a proposal for a new kind of sculpture.
BD: The actual sculpture lies along a linear time sequence from the primitive to the futuristically technological. You could say that it attempts to bring together a plethora of styles, expressions and working methods. I have done this quite consciously as an attempt to introduce the idea of a new kind of sculpture into my profession.
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES
The aim of Museum Trapholt, as formulated in its mission, is to provide its visitors with ”... aesthetic experiences and insights, so that no one will leave the museum unaffected." These two sculptures certainly offer a palpable challenge to the senses and the intellect. Both works have an immediate appeal and encourage study, if we allow ourselves to be seduced by them and willingly tackle the puzzles with which they confront us.
Besides speaking to our minds and bodies, the ground-breaking form of the two works enables them to reveal the conventions associated with the creation, exhibition and experience of art.
Benny Dröscher's three-dimensional works cannot at first glance be called sculpture. By challenging our customary ideas of what sculpture is, and where it may be located, the two works demonstrate that sculpture can encompass every possible and impossible kind of three-dimensional construct in space.
The dialogue between these two sculptures and another principal works in the collection will be presented in the halls of Museum Trapholt from the beginning of May.
The quotes from Benny Dröscher derive from a written interview conducted on 23 March 2006. The questions were put to the artist by the author of this article in connection with the exhibition KRYDSFELT natur-ligt, which was presented at Museum Trapholt from 10 February until 30 April 2006, and Samlings•••••••, presented from the beginning of May until the end of August 2006.