notes from a visit to On Display, an exhibition by Gum Collective in response & reaction to Emil Nolde: Colour is Life at NGI, May 2018 - Sue Rainsford
Entering the exhibition: texture – a full and tiered spectrum.
The viewer quickly understand that tangibility is working in a very particular way and that, in order for the exhibition to resonate fully, a tactile understanding must be reached.
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As time passes within the space and the works speak to one another, this emphasis on touch – and its requirement that we come close, that we partake in a personal bodily proximity in the present moment – fuses with an undertone of mutilation & (in)voluntary transfiguration.
There’s a suggestion that we risk something in bringing our bodies within range of the pieces.
This suggestion will heighten, at times, into an outright sense of peril.
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Violence is apparent throughout, but not as a force understood in human terms. Demonstrated beyond the context of the human body or bodily connotations of trauma, violence works here as a shape-shifting force that begets material alteration and leaves a trace of itself behind.
Some of the works, in this sense, might be considered a kind of ‘spoor’.
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Violence can be transmitted through gesture, but also palette and form. This flexible, poetic understanding contextualises the remit of the exhibition as a whole: to not only respond but to also react to Emil Nolde.
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By intersecting Nolde’s output at a level of colour and form and working inside this cross-space, the exhibition enables commentary on how expressionism and embedded racism might conflate in a contemporary context. Nolde’s oeuvre is the result of the current artistic style entwining entwining with the current social anxiety of his time: what do our interior, emotional lives look like now, given the contemporary range of prejudices we’ve been insidiously steeped in? What does our latent anxiety look like? The base notes have endured, replete with a primal tenor, but its frame of reference has shifted to include pop culture, punk aesthetic etc.
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How has warfare as a context or subtext for artistic practice and production shifted?
Video games remind us that even our leisure activity imitates orchestrated and bloodshed: violence functions for many as a virtual, pleasurable stimulant.
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What we find troubling about Nolde’s work is not its racist content, but its racist conent rendered with accomplishment and sensory appeal: entering into dialogue with the work at this point of paradox – namely the concurrency of elements both appealing and abhorrent – a material reaction ensues that speaks to depravity and sensuality in equal measure. The visceral, unsettling viewing experience this produces feeds back into the broader historical disquiet around Nolde.
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The recurrent totem quality creates a tone of false worship or fetish, evocative of extreme ideology or false idolatry. The diverse range of media – notably the inclusion of ‘banners’ – creates a sense of an archive, or documentation of a historical event.
More unnervingly, it also suggests a future where work like Nolde’s is interpreted differently, perhaps not quite celebrated, but nonetheless embraced without any sense of taboo.
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