Escapist Machine: Go Go Smooth Operation!
In Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus in Bremen, Henrik Vibskov and Andreas Emenius have populated the
courtyard with a small pack of three-legged round metal bellies, looking like the mongrels of an
eco-friendly fireplace and a space capsule. Steadily filling large orange balloons with air, they
eventually become much more graceful vehicles - getting ready to go somewhere you would think?
But just as conscientiously they’ll deflate again, evoking memories of all the times your feelings ran
high, and you thought everything in your life was about to change, but it did not.
The outdoor installation Inhale, exhale is the second section of Circle Series, a succession of
collaborations by the fashion designer Henrik Vibskov and the artist Andreas Emenius. The Circle
Series follow the ten Fringe Projects the duo carried out between 2007 and 2009, and which were
eventually exhibited in their totality at Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg. Looking at the two artists’
individual work, as well as their collaborations, it is obvious that Vibskov and Emenius share an
obsession with form. But their communal work is just as characterized by a particular use of
seemingly random visual reference, intuitively mixing up marks from here and there, chaining them
into open associations. As such, their projects take the shape of peculiar emotional rooms. Often
they will have a scenographic quality, evoking props and set designs for abandoned stories. The
work however may be carried out in potentially any media; as video, as installation, as staged selfportraits or product design. The media seem somewhat less important to the two. What comes first
is creating these appearances from a place somewhere on the brink of culture; the point where
flashing imagery from the anachronistic time system of collective memory melts into a more
innocently abstract form. The work of Vibskov and Emenius oscillates between solemnity, humour
and sensual psychedelic, how it comes together, there is something almost demure about it too. It is
the sensation of a strange and beautiful bird outside your window looking in at you. Yes! In many
ways it has to do with cliché imagery – just like strange and beautiful birds looking through
windows. It has to do with escapism and longing for coherence, excitement and beauty, a
disquieting ontological homesickness.
Oh Heroic.
It all began with the series of Fringe Projects in which the duo together with a horde of assistants
would frantically dress everything in coats of fringes cut out from paper and fabric. With this
simple formal trick, they would be creating a make-believe universe quite of its own. The Fringe
Projects kindled a batch of wonderfully naïve formal questions in their makers and onlookers alike:
Is a fringe a fringe if there is just one? Does the fringe underline contours or dissolve them? Is
fringe perhaps the ultimate antithesis of the form-follows-function concept, being ornamentation
and undermining delimitation? If some of the projects were rather minimal, the effect of the fringe
is still wonderfully rich, and especially when fringe is moving, it makes you think of leafs, or the
ghostly swaying of seaweed. In project 6, a set is made of sliced up fabric, a little wood and some
mirror foil, but it easily translates into indications of a location; clearly we are in a swampy jungle.
The triangular shapes become rocks or elbows of bald cypress trees, mirror turns into silent waters,
and the fringe into neatly structured plants, like the crosshatching in a graphic print. Vibskov and
Emenius paddle slowly through the theatrical scenery; pearl divers from a resistance movement in a
communist avant-garde ballet, gliding through the dark, burning waters. Sure they might be toying
with a visual vocabulary that juxtaposes Jules Verne and photo reportages from National
Geographic, and maybe they sometimes come dangerously close to what could be misunderstood as
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fantasizing about imperialistic pasts. But rather than describing a power relation, it’s conducted as a
catalogue of dreamy mythologies, that is most refreshingly never ironic or superficial in its
reference to archetypes, but respectfully apes our most hopeful and dreamy expectations of the
unknown. In fact the two artists are wonderfully unashamed of the heroic.
In the Circle Series, abstract form is used a background signifier to build up boyish fantasies and
valiant characters. However, if the fringes often where miming foliage and tribal costumes, the form
of the barren circle seems to lead Vibskov and Emenius elsewhere. Circle Series section 1 was a
line of costumes used in two short films for the band Mew, and here the duo continued the signature
exotic look of the Fringe projects. But barren of the fringes, the effect leans more towards modernist
like …………………….. In Circle Series section 2, the heroic theme seems to take over their
investigation of the most perfect of geometric forms, a frosty polar ……… , and a distant stroke of
realism have entered the universe of Vibskov and Emenius.
Performing Anonymity.
Much of Vibskov and Emenius work unfolds as self-portraits and performances. In many ways,
these images of self-staging seem to be the other key to understanding the duo’s mutual work.
Dressed up in fantastic guises, Vibskov and Emenius always seem to be on some sort of journey.
Discovery or flight, that’s the continual theme; it’s the romanticism of being an outlaw, and the
sinister situation of always being on the verge of inevitable and eventual capture. Or the fantasy of
electrifying times, in which things and places had not yet been invented, found and explored.
For the opening of the exhibition ………… in Wagenfeld Haus, the two collaborators did a
performance in which they theatrically initiate the installation by creating a soundscape, marking
their territory with flags and eventually turning on the balloon machines. Flares provide the smoke
and atmosphere, and the two artists are clad in white parkas, a graphic and instant link to the look of
heroic explorers like Scott and Amundsen. Like the parkas, the tent and the flags hints at
photographs of Scott and Amundsen’s competing expeditions to first reach the Antarctic. Robert
Falcon Scotts (1868-1912) British Antarctic Expedition, also known as the Terra Nova
Expedition (1910–1913). Not knowing they were combatting with the Norwegian team, led
by Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), they were preceded them by little more than a months’ time, and
all perished on their return. Rumor has it that Vibskov and Emenius was considered for the casting
of a feature film about Amundsen’s expedition that however never was realized.
Fringe is also slang for a project on the side - and this somewhat casual meaning comes close to the
originally floating intentions. The whole thing took off when the two long-time friends agreed to
collaborate on something that transcended the character and limitations of their individual work,
something immediate and hands-on. In Vibskov and Emenius’ world there’s a certain 1:1 logic at
play. ‘So if we’re doing this something together, let’s depict doing this something’, they seem to
have thought. But contrary to some expectations they seem to be covering up while dressing up,
using the guise as a camouflage to become anonymous. The logics of the staged self-portrait are
many, and a central point of fascination is how the portrait rescales a more general condition of
existence to a personal level, using the persona of the portrayed as a canvas of particularity. With
Vibskov and Emenius it is vice versa. The artists have covered faces, blurring of shape and identity,
but also submitting them to the mask magic of self-staging, dissolving into the image and willingly
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surrendering to this project of theirs. Hence the self-portraits and performances, and they do indeed
transcend and reveal a deeper nature of the project – a certain romantic state of mind that has to do
with time and belonging, with identity, history and memories.
In the Wagenfeld Haus performance, the question arises whether Vibskov and Emenius are in fact
playing the explorer, or is it rather the aggressor taking territory. And if so, are they the losers or the
winners?
The Act of Handling a Flag.
A flag is such an iconic object, heavily charged with the symbolic meaning of its purpose – the kind
of object one remembers even as a child when holding it, it would give one the feeling of grandeur
and ceremony. Not the least because of the gravity one felt when handling the pole, the feeling of
the weight of the fabric in the end of it. Certain things happen when you hold a flag. It’ll give you a
sense of movement and action, but with a certain solemnity. In the documentation of the Wagenfeld
Haus performance, it becomes apparent how the tilted lines of the flags and the small tent alone
create certain compositions that relate these images to much more grave motives.
It evokes cinematic images of the first moon landing, but also some of the most famous war
photographs in history, namely American photographer Joe Rosenthal’s (1911–2006) Pulitzer
winning snapshot Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima of American soldiers planting their flag on
Japanese battleground in 1945, and Russian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei (1917-97) famous
photo of a Soviet Red Army soldier raising the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin the
same year. The two images have always unofficially competed in being the most iconic photograph
of World War II, and both have a strange art like quality in their monumental compositions, the
silhouettes of the Russian soldiers standing on the brink of the rooftop like gargoyles come alive on
Notre Dame, and the poses of the American soldiers standing so close pushing the heavy iron pole
in a strangely Parthenon frieze-ish arrangement. Rosenthal’s photo have been reproduced in
sculptural war memorial monuments in Arlington and Carolina, and reproduced on U.S. postage
stamp – it seems to reappear again and again like some Warburgian Nachleben, willingly and by
coincidence. Take for instance the cover from Wu Tang Clans fourth album Iron Flag from 2001,
that obviously mimes the painterly quality of the cramped soldiers, but also Raising the Flag at
Ground Zero or Ground Zero Spirit, by Thomas E. Franklin, and a similar photograph taken by
Ricky Flores, but from another angle, on September 11, 2001. Both pictures show firefighters
raising an American flag at ground zero that one of them had gotten from a privately owned yard
docked nearby in the Hudson River. This motive was originally also planned to be carried out as a
sculptural monument.
Especially the Rosenthal’s snapshot has raised lots of discussion throughout the years as to whether
it was arranged by the photographer. Rosenthal claims it was not – however Khaldei’s image shows
in fact a re-enactment of an earlier flag-raising not photographed. The original flag rising took place
at night on April 30, 1945. The flag was taken down by soldiers from the German army the next
day. However the Nazis were defeated two days after that, and on May 2 Khaldei went to the
rooftop to recreate the moment.
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The American people saw Rosenthal's photo as a potent victory symbol, but Vibskov and Emenius
performance not a pinch of war toughness in them – they stick with the beauty of smoke, an elegant,
lets-pretend. And here’s the puzzle. They’re wearing Inuit snow goggles, a solid visor og face shield
the size of glasses, with narrow cracks to enable the bearer to look out without getting snow blind.
So on what side do they really belong? Because the goggles, that were originally produced out of
pieces of driftwood or bone, here have the silly retro futuristic look of French designer Courrèges’
legendary white plastic lunettes eskimo from the mid-sixties, just as the fact that they are
surrounded by darkness makes the glasses hint at cardboard 3D glasses for the cinema. A mask and
a style indeed, much more than a piece of sporty equipment.
It’s a bit like Kurt Russell’s US Army ‘Campaign Hat’ in John Carpenters The Thing from 1982,
with the elongated crown and brim that is oddly flutter-squared on all sides rather than just two.
The William Wagenfeld Haus installation and the Exoticism of Machinery.
Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus was built in 1828, after the Napoleonic wars, and functioned as a jail
house or detention center for over 150 years. As the citizens of Bremen were not too thrilled by the
thought of a jail within the old city center, the building was make-upped with a classicist facade.
Women and men have been imprisoned under different regimes in this house. Its last use was as a
detention for deportees, and even if the jail finally was closed down in 1996, six cells are kept intact
as a reminder of the buildings gruesome history. This woeful history of the house inspired Vibskov
and Emenius to take up another thread from the Fringe Projects, namely that of being caught up,
maybe just in crazy thoughts, and of escape. The hot air balloon is in fact they earliest flying vessel
to have successfully carried humans, created in the beginning of the 1780’s in Paris, France. Both
sides of this artistic equation have a soft spot for science and apparatuses, with Vibskov having
studied to become an engineer in a former life. Their work is virtually full of sentimental liaisons
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with the imagery of machines, motors, vehicles and turbines - just like those balloons back in
Bremen. All nonsense machines, pointing, perhaps, at the way production has become less and less
visible while society is getting more technological. Nowadays, we don’t see the motor on the ferry,
but the smell and roughness of welded metal makes it utterly exciting. We don’t see the big pots in
which our medicine is blended. Or where the chicken is packaged. Or what the computer looks like
inside.
Take for instance Fringe Project 10, which was made especially for the first exhibition of the
totality of the Fringe Project at the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg, in February 2009, and has since
been shown in both Copenhagen and Tokyo. Probably one of the most obvious pop hits among the
projects, this piece is sure to give you butterflies in your stomach. The cylindrical rollers form an
avenue, which the museum guests have to pass through to get to the rest of exhibition - it works as a
soul wash of sorts, a rite of passage-machine of 12 majestically turbulent spruces, brushing the dust
of the world off you. Overtly dealing with transformation and transition, the obvious reference is a
car wash - every childhood’s exiting venue for industrial beauty. If you think about it, a factory
might be one of the most exotic places one can imagine. It is a fact that by the 17th century, when all
of Earth had been more or less discovered, speculations about visiting the moon became frequent,
and the first literature about time-travel also stems from this century. But where do we go for
strangeness these days? The many machines in the work of Vibskov and Emenius most intriguingly
superimpose the possibility of finding unsoiled virgin worlds with the imagery of our urban culture,
which has been separated from the realities of production.
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