The not-yet-known

I know Nina Roos quite well. I also know Anne Karin Furunes a little. I know their work, and I even know – more or less – what they would say about it themselves. But I have to confess at once that I do not yet know the images that will be in this show. I think you can see the quotation marks around “know”, even if I omit them in deference to textual decorum and good taste.

It so happens that I am currently obsessed with the idea of the future. I see everything in terms of prophecies and forecasts. I see futures everywhere. Therefore, I am glad to write about this exhibition, which I have not yet seen.

This is painting that I have to imagine. I have to piece it together from what I have already seen by these two authors. I have to make a prediction, based on computations of data I have stored from earlier encounters with Nina Roos and Anne Karin Furunes. I know Nina Roos’s new pictures will be made up of walls, and that Anne Karin Furunes will have made new pictures of trees.I know the particularities of technique and thematic which unite and divide these two makers of pictures. They will reveal opposite faces of the painted image: the surface and the underneath.They will demonstrate the added value of paint on transparent acrylic glass and of pierced opaque linen canvas.

Regardless of such contrasts, the pictures on display will, I think, be read as similarities rather than as differences. Both authors subscribe to a work ethics that marries faithfulness to painting as an arena (or practice, or operation) with the continuous breaking-up of painting as a framework (or system, or routine).In painting, it is particularly important to keep adding new ideas to the implementation of your method. Nina Roos and Anne Karin Furunes are both aware of this. Their work is about long-term development.Now, as painted images are popular again and “back on the arena”, they should both be able to reap the benefits of their far-sighted investment into the future of painting.

I allow myself a short digression here, because I wish to sketch a background for my “prophetic” reading of this exhibition, which does not yet exist.

In Western thinking, the future is the least privileged of the three basic tenses. There is a whole mythology of presence (which really could be analysed, in a minimalist way, as little more than the position of “that who speaks” in relation to space and time). There is a whole cult of the past (which is often seen as a “holy repository” of events that have travelled there from the not-yet-now through the now). In the linear chain of time, the future is the weakest link. In a culture that privileges information over intuition, the future will always remain a great unknown. In the grand scheme of history the future is a leftover. We will always lack information about it, and therefore it will never be an object of real knowledge. The future can be created, never evaluated. And we, in our thinking, tend to privilege knowledge over creation, science over art.

What is thinking? is the title of a lecture that Martin Heidegger delivered in 1952. It contains some seeds of revolt against the linearity of time and the tyranny of the past in Western culture. Heidegger employs the rhetoric of recurrence to outline a cyclical model for time. Without directly addressing the status of the future, he obliquely refers to it in a famous statement: The thing most worthy of thought is that we do not yet think. Taking his cues from Nietzsche, he also writes:

Our Will will only be free of its repulsion against Time, against its being-only-past, if it perpetually embraces this going away and coming back. Our Will will be free of this repulsive “past” if it embraces the perpetual return of all “past”. Our Will will be rid of repulsion if it embraces the perpetual return of the Same.1)

This recurrent, cyclical way of thinking never quite gained access to mainstream philosophy. Our culture is, in general, obsessed with the quest for “the new”. Quite often, the future becomes a projection of such idealized newness. We tend to equate the future (already de-valued, since it is not associated with “hard” knowledge) with the “soft” category of utopia, investing too much fuzzy hope in the future instead of taking it seriously as an operational category of time, with real potential for helping us organize our thinking – and our lives. Perhaps we should also remember that for many people the future brings nothing New, only more of the Same…

There is surprisingly little philosophical writing about the future, perhaps because of the perpetual and systemic absence of information about it. There are, however, a whole variety of visions about the future in other spheres of culture: from the religious mystics via astrology and science fiction to the movie epics of the 20th century. (Metropolis, Alphaville, Bladerunner…) Whether utopian (“from the nowhere-land”) or dystopian (“from the badland”), ideas about the future have never ceased to inspire artists. It seems that artists working with visuality – like architects, designers, filmmakers, or painters – have been particularly curious about the future, wondering how it will look.

Now back to painting, and to the work of Nina Roos and Anne Karin Furunes. How can painting paint the future? Does painting have a privileged view of the future? Can painting capture the look of the future? There are, in fact, some very general characteristics of painting that make this plausible.

Painting is a highly individual practice. It is perhaps the only art form that allows the individual author to avoid collaboration with others. It processes information from outside the painting subject, but does not become dependent on such external sources. It thrives on creating individual visual universes. Painting is a synthetic mode of creation. It aims at bringing things together in new ways rather than at taking them apart for analysis or evaluation. Painting is an atmospheric medium. It needs to elaborate many nuances – blurred, almost imperceptible and of little significance in themselves, but indispensable for the quality of painting. Nevertheless, painting is an essentially constructive art form, one that takes physical materials that carry no identifiable “meaning” and combine them into a new, meaningful whole. For these same reasons painting is, on the whole, a less efficient tool for story-telling, commentary and commemoration than art forms that are more dependent on human collaboration and social interaction (graphic illustration, monumental sculpture, documentary photography and film etc.).

Jacques Derrida speaks about “the perhaps of the future” 2). About the future, this much is certain: We never know. Something might happen. Painting seems to be constituted around a similar possibility: a conditional becoming, the painted image as a covered surface that becomes an open window – perhaps – and makes visible the not-yet-known.

Just as some plants are said to have the power of letting us see into the future, there are locations that have the same gift. Mostly, they are deserted plots, but also tree tops facing walls, blind alleys or front gardens where no one ever stops. In such places, everything that really lies ahead of us seems like a past.

- Anders Kreuger

Notes:

1) Martin Heidegger: Was heisst Denken? Vorlesung Wintersemester 1951/52, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1992 (p. 66).My translation.

2) Jacques Derrida: Politics of Friendship, Verso, (p.)

3) Walter Benjamin: Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert. Fassung letzter Hand, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1987 (p. 43). My translation.