Circa 118: Review

Icelandic Love Corporation: Eruption – corruption , performance shot, Ard Bia Gallery, photo Rosie Lync ;courtesy Ard Bia Gallery

The Icelandic Love Corporation’s exhibition in Ard Bia Gallery took place as part of an ongoing curatorial strategy on the part of its owner, Aoibheann MacNamara, to introduce challenging international artists and artforms to the Galway artscene. MacNamara has been extremely proactive in establishing links through her travels with artistic networks in Iceland, Beirut and Japan.

With ILC’s Eruption – corruption one suddenly understands the inevitability of the Matthew Barney/ Björk coupling – a baroque performative aesthetic drawn towards a uniquely Icelandic creative eccentricity. ILC seem to encapsulate both.

In Modern painters (September 2006), Arthur C. Danto, in a dialogue with Barney, suggests that the latter shares a “philosophy of salvation” with Joseph Beuys, a desire to overcome boundaries and engage in a kind of primitivistic ‘healing’ form of creativity: art as a series of transformative acts. ILC have also been noted as having a ‘salvationary’ element in their work. In the late ’90s they staged a performance, Memories of feelings felt in the red-light district of Amsterdam, distributing champagne and cakes whilst displaying wall plaques commemorating the spectrum of emotions felt in the stripclubs and sidestreets of the area. In an accompanying poem they said:

Here we have four hearts,
Place yourselves on their outlines
We will give you the stars

ILC seek a poetic, almost selfredemptive tone in their work, and a relationship of playful innocence in their use of objects.Their mantra, “Love conquers all, the future is beautiful,” seems almost painfully naïve, yet they also explicitly invert Jacques Rancière’s conception of the “theatricality of politics” by creating impromptu stages and using megaphones to broadcast their aphoristic declarations. It is worth noting that ILC emerged from a unique artistic scene in Reykjavik which fostered a highly idiosyncratic collaborative community of artists. Icelandic art has a strong performative element, drawing on both a medieval theatricality which still resonates in their culture and a symbiotic dynamic between art, culture and nature. They are far enough north to feel neither connected to nor removed from European or American aesthetic traditions and yet appropriate and subvert both. ILC also have a raw punk aesthetic (again recognizably Icelandic), enabling them to produce work which is playful but not ironic in that it eschews cynicism, incorporating danger and death into its narratives in a way which echoes early children’s rhymes and street games. They aspire towards “innocent, yet effective terrorism; Sugar in the Gastank” (ILC statement).

This exhibition saw ILC interweave three different elements of their practice: performance ( Eruption – corruption ), video/ photography (a video of an earlier performance and large laserchrome prints from a series Cardiac circus ), and onsite sculptural work produced from locally sourced materials. Eruption – corruption sought to explore the “duality of creativity and destruction” and was structured to unfold like some cryptic fairytale in relation to the spatial specificities of the gallery surrounds. ILC arrived, crawling along the pavement at dusk covered in white duvets, making their way like overgrown larvae blindly shuffling in the gallery door, through the gallery and into its walled courtyard. ILC favour the demonstrative mode used by magicians, performing a short sequence and then using an almost mannerist choreography to draw the audience in. They create a ‘spectacle’ in the sense articulated by Guy Debord, an adventure mediated through the relations it creates. There was an intentional fostering of the amateur in the performance, and a deliberate appeal to the audience to drive the narrative forward. A chair was constructed with great muscularity and theatrical flair, the wielding of hammers, an axe and nails suggesting exaggerated pride and achievement. ILC then proceeded to smash their giant makeshift chair and burn it in a pot nested in their duvets. Tricks with balloons, milk, and glasses followed, all intentionally naïve and slapstick. What results is a strangely cinematic combination of the stylized tableaux of Sergei Paradjanov’s Colour of pomegranates performed with the burlesque physicality of Fellini, cut through with the childlike appropriation of accidents à la Tommy Cooper. There is the charm of early vaudeville about it all.

The photographs from Cardiac circus are of staged symbolic acts (an example of which graced the front cover of ArtReview in July) and draw on the element of metaphysical allegory which plays such a dominant role in Icelandic and Scandinavian culture. Love, death and a subversive mischievousness laced with revolutionary intent remain the dominant themes. Finally, a giant nest was constructed by ILC from branches gathered in Barna woods outside Galway and filled with objets trouvés – an Arte Povera gesture to seal their idealistic and romantic intent.

ILC manage to exude a charismatic eccentricity which almost provides them with a cloak of immunity against critical analysis. They wear homemade costumes that could only be described as ‘medievalbaroque’ and use their bodies in a way which defies conventional narcissism. Although pursuing a utopianism that one sees in a lot of work which has emerged under the ‘relational aesthetics’ umbrella, nevertheless, as with Beuys and Barney, they seem to occupy an artistic landscape of their own construction with its own peculiar yet consistent vocabulary.

Katherine Waugh is a freelance writer and teacher based in Galway.

Galway - Icelandic Love Corporation: Eruption-corruption - Ard Bia Gallery -

Reprinted from Circa 118, Winter 2006, pp. 68 - 69

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