Torbjørn Rødland
Air de Paris, Paris, France
As far as imperatives (and exhibition titles) go, ‘Go to the VIP Room’ is about as subtly confounding as they get. So with Torbjørn Rødland’s work, which fellow photographer Gil Blank once described in a letter to the artist as ‘blatantly retarded in a consciously agile way.’1 One expects as much from Rødland: a crafted, off-kilter parody of man and nature; of religion and romanticism; and, above all, of any symbolic pretensions. His most recent work at Air de Paris would seem to be a departure from previous deadpanning; in contrast to his earlier work, whose wit often lay in anticipating its own fundamental lack of interest, Rødland’s series ‘Go to the VIP Room’ abounds with suggestive fragments.
Rødland triple-exposes negatives to produce instantaneous collages, not unlike Fischli / Weiss’s ‘Flowers, Mushroom’ C-prints (1997-8). Yet whereas the latter prints are inescapably pretty, Rødland’s series verges on involuted excess. The images are daytime and nighttime shots of Los Angeles, combining upward-gazing views through foliage with scattered spangles of marquee lights. These shots overlap with varying degrees of transparency, so that each layer seems to reflect the other environment, as a car window might mirror both the boulevard and the peering face. Several feature the looming, pore-free portrait of a Nordic model, who gazes vacantly into the mid-distance. Emerging from the jumbled landscape, her face rises like a psychedelic surrogate for the solitary Romantic figure.
The most solitary rover to inhabit Rødland’s scenery would be Bas Jan Ader, whose nocturnal pilgrimage across LA formed the first part of his ill-fated In Search of the Miraculous (1973). Unlike Ader’s series, which heads towards the sea and towards the last throbs of Romanticism, ‘Go to the VIP Room’ dwells in the vestibule of LA imagery. Rather than evoking Romanticism or exposing its persistence, Rødland’s images are like complicated outsized ciphers; the model’s face and the black blot that occasionally replaces it reiterate the same zero at the centre of the composition. This bald, even comic colour field centrality circumscribes a Rødland trope: despite the sheer business of these compositions, there is ‘nothing to see here’.
‘Nothing to see’, of course, does not mean there’s nothing to look at, just that there’s nothing that captures your attention or imagination. Rødland’s series participates in the same evacuation of meaning performed by the Pictures generation, in particular artists like Troy Brauntuch, who engaged in what Douglas Crimp termed a ‘withdrawal from signification.’2 Stripping an image of its sense transforms a picture into an object of desire that ‘remains forever at a distance.’3 This distance, when created by an oppressively close face, is perhaps the most engaging paradox in the exhibition. Yet, in comparison with Rødland’s former work, it falls short of the mark. The curious and estranging senselessness of his older photos nonetheless rallied around a palpable presence, an almost fetishistic object of his attention. ‘Go to the VIP Room’, on the other hand, is bodiless; seizing these photos is like trying to grasp a windshield. Rødland’s newest works are, finally, unappealing, and one has the sense that they blatantly don’t care.
1 Gil Blank, “Letter from Gil Blank,” in Torbjørn Rødland: White Planet Black Heart (Göttingen: SteidlMACK, 2006).
2 Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly vol 8, no. 1 (2005): 23; reprint Pictures (New York: Artists Space, 1977).
3 Ibid., 25.
Joanna Fiduccia
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