Henrik Plenge Jakobsen

Henrik Plenge Jakobsen

Exhibition: Jun 11 – Jul 12, 1998


The murder of a day-care teacher, the vandalism of an art center’s ticket booth, the violent destruction of a museum café, a bus overturned in a tragic traffic accident—these are just a few of the scenarios Henrik Plenge Jakobsen has simulated in his art projects (many with collaborator Jes Brinch). They look real, and are real in the physical sense, but the various causes which usually lead to such displays of random violence are not there: they are faked destructions divorced from incidental meaning. As art installations, they quite effectively cross the line demarcating the territory between aesthetic abstraction and real life. They one-up, for example, Andy Warhol’s pictures of electric chairs or Leon Golub’s paintings of mercenaries. Jakobsen’s broken chairs and burnt-out vehicles are a more directly physical representation of disaster and evil. They are more like Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases: real violence taking over for hand-wringing mimicry and metaphor.

And in the contemporary context of the sensationalized scandal and lurid consumption of tabloid tragedy, Jakobsen’s staged disasters satisfy the hunger for manufactured, mediated horror. They are completely understandable rampages, especially in the context of a presumed Nordic repression. Jakobsen and his collaborators were simply letting off steam that had gathered for centuries. Jakobsen has developed a new approach to figurative representation, a “body” art that depicts the physical human body through emotional fragmentation and chemical atomization. Along with the disaster series, Jakobsen has used laughing-gas chambers, urine-filled Evian bottles, a huge neon hypodermic syringe, and rope-swinging “DNA” rides to present the modern body as a loosely compiled, ever-changing conglomeration of liquids, gases, and molecular attractions. This abstraction of the isolated body internalizes the overt social violence of crashed cars and vandalized spaces.

So, figuring I understood Jakobsen’s critical platform—I am especially fond of that vandalized art museum café—I felt that I knew what to expect when approaching his new solo work. I was initially disappointed by Jakobsen’s new installation at ArtPace, a bit dismayed.

I was confronted with a clean, white gallery space dominated by a smaller, white freestanding room in the center. A huge dagger was projected on the outside wall of the room, but that seemed clean and safely symbolic. (Jakobsen has used a skull-and-crossbones motif to similarly mark his installation arenas, but that image is more adolescently transgressive than a kitchen knife.) Had experience in the United States caused Jakobsen to temper his mirroring of mediated perversity?

Well, yes and no.

Rounding the corner and getting a full view of the installation, my fears were allayed. In the upper left corner of the high-ceilinged gallery, a full-size bed hung upside down and spinning. It is a regular bed with a typical American headboard and covered with a tucked-in bedspread sporting the latest Disneyworks icon, Anastasia, the Russian cartoon princess and the multi-culti entertainment flavor of the month. However, the overwhelming reference of the spinning bed here is to American horror flicks—Poltergeist especially, and The Exorcist—in which young girls are taken over by evil spirits and their struggles for self-possession take place in the presumed safety of their own beds.

The freestanding, white room is a bathroom, another usually safe and intimate place. But Jakobsen has carefully constructed a room that resembles a cheap hotel from the 1950s or ‘60s and in which the shower is always running. As I entered the claustrophobic space, hearing the splash of the water, smelling the humidity, and remembering the dagger-shadow outside, the memory came back in a flash: this was Jakobsen’s recreation of the shower scene in Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho. Even before I pulled back the shower curtain and peered down at the bathtub drain—into which blood ran (via a video-loop of redness projected from above and flowing down the tub)—I began to hear the “SHREIK-SHRIEK-SHREIK” of the Bernard Hermann soundtrack. Unwittingly, I was implicated as the murderous voyeur, Anthony Perkins, who stabs violently at the beautiful Janet Leigh.

The initial look of vapidity in Jakobsen’s installation is perfectly suited for American viewers. Jakobsen’s previous work reanimates art as a vehicle to reveal how culture represses feeling as opposed to expressing it. Here in the States, repression has become its own industry, and Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the art world have made a killing by packaging and selling it back to us in a mediated fashion as mindless entertainment. Jakobsen’s super-alienated reproductions of the Poltergeist spinning bed and the Psycho bathroom stage set may reveal how ubiquitous the constructed world of American cinema is throughout the cable-networked real world. As American consumerism pervades Europe, artists such as Jakobsen quote Americana in order to challenge and unhinge its hold. The German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s view of West Texas romanticizes the landscape as it problematizes its actuality. Similarly, Jakobsen grabs onto the inconsistencies of the American utopia, mining its symbolic representations of itself to investigate how expectations of violence permeate every moment of our lives—no matter how private we feel.

For Jakobsen, this is not a bad thing, rather it is how things are. Violence and destruction drive civilization, always presenting the counterpoint that frustrates goodness and light. By isolating and representing our cultural fears, he forces us to acknowledge their existence within us as well as our usually unstated thrill of experiencing them—like watching scary movies.

Another one of Jakobsen’s recent projects is an apartment window in which billowing smoke suggests that the place is on fire. In the San Antonio project, his use of Hollywood movies is as widely understandable as that burning apartment, provoking the same queasy feelings and punching the same buttons: the distinctions between the real and the fake are no longer applicable.

-Kathryn Hixson

Kathryn Hixson is the editor of The New Art Examiner and is based in Chicago, IL.

Artist

Henrik Plenge Jakobsen

Copenhagen, Denmark

Henrik Jakobsen was born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he lives and works. Jakobsen studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts,Copenhagen; Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique, Paris; and the L’Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris. Since the early 1990s, Jakobsen has exhibited work throughout Europe, including solo shows at the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; and the Nordic Art Center, Helsinki. He has participated in a number of group exhibitions and festivals, including Traffic, CAPC, Bordeaux, France; Shopping, New York; Nuit Blanche, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Now Here, Lousiana Musuem, Denmark; Manifesta I, Rotterdam, Holland, and the recent Ontom at Gallerie fur Zeitgenoshisce Kunst, Leipzig, Germany. Jakobsen also collaborates with Jes Brinch, under the pseudonym Burn Out. Jakobsen’s residency at Artpace was his first solo exhibition in the United States.

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Curators

Elizabeth Armstrong

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Elizabeth Armstrong is a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Dana Friis-Hansen

Houston, Texas, USA

Dana Friis-Hansen is a senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.

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Thelma Golden

New York, New York, USA

Thelma Golden is an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the branch director of the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris.

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David Avalos

National City, CA

Born in San Diego in 1947, David Avalos is a forceful societal observer and provocateur who employs confrontational gesture, poetic metaphor, philosophical inquiry, public interaction, and a variety of more standard art-making skills – video, sculpture, photography, etc. – in the creation of potent performances/installations/public art works. Long involved in the Chicano art movement, he has been student, peer, and mentor to three generations of artists/activists dedicated to social justice and the preservation and evolution of their cultural traditions. In is solo work as an artist, his ongoing collaborations with other artists, and in his role as a professor at California State University, San Marcos, Avalos extends the research and scholarship of contemporary inter-disciplinary discourse. He has been encouraged in that effort by the receipt of numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships, two Inter-Arts New Forms grants, and support from the California Arts council and San Diego County. Avalos’ work has been showcased in several solo exhibitions, as well as numerous group shows throughout the U.S. and in Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, and France. His collaborative works with other artists have addressed audiences in Turkey, England, Sweden, Spain, France, Mexico, and the U.S., engaging each local community in a discussion of identity, cultural tradition and change, public/private codes of behavior, and other issues of global concern.

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Maaretta Jaukkuri

Helsinki, Finland

Maaretta Jaukkuri is the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland.

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