“We Are Living on a Star,” the Hannah Ryggen tapestry from which the thought-churning exhibition (through April 27) at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo takes its name, depicts a scene of cosmological innocence: a nude man and woman — Adam and Eve figures — embrace one another within an abstractly rendered paradise of symbols, patterns, and figures. Woven in 1958, in a style that one might call folk modernism, the tapestry hung in a Norwegian government building until July 22, 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik exploded a car bomb outside it, killing eight people, injuring more than 200, and doing extensive damage to the edifice. Infamously, Breivik went on to massacre 69 others and injure scores more on a nearby island, Utøya. The bomb that exploded during the first attack ripped Ryggen’s tapestry, and it is that tear that serves as a governing metaphor for this show.
For it the curators, Tone Hansen and Marit Paasche, bring together some 19 international artists to respond to the events of July 22, some in newly commissioned work, some with pieces that had already been made. By linking the torn tapestry to a rift in the fabric of society, the exhibition poses some intriguing questions: What constitutes normality, as the show literature calls it? And how do exceptional situations like July 22 affect peoples’ freedoms?
Appropriately a Norwegian, Lotte Konow Lund created one of the few pieces that directly addresses the incident. She asked her 9-year-old daughter what she would need to stay silent for 66 minutes, the duration of the Utøya killings. The girl chose calming items from her bedroom, which were then placed into what appears to a visitor to be two minimalist sculptures but are in fact little rooms, boxes just large enough (about five feet long) for a child to hide in. Only one of the containers has a door, and so the two objects suggest an analogy between the abstract, be it the concept of time or the non-referential sculpture itself, and the actual, meaning the period spent hiding by some of the children as well as the utilitarian box itself.
The piece also points to the notion of normality proposed by the exhibition. As an abstract concept it seems fitting enough, yet on the other side of the 66-minute massacre one has to ask just which is actually normal, the complacency of the safe, cocooned existences enjoyed by Norwegians prior to the attack or the havoc experienced by so many in the world on a daily basis?
Among the other direct responses is one by the Palestinian American artist Jumana Manna, who cast, in Jesmonite, a series of pillars from the High-rise, the building attacked on July 22. The structure itself rests on these pillars, which weren’t damaged by the bomb. Their appearance here seems an incitement to query what structures Norwegian society itself stands upon and to what extent they were damaged by the terrorist act.
While literally arresting — they force us to stop and think about events non-Norwegians are only vaguely aware of — Lund and Manna’s pieces shine, as it were, a spotlight squarely on that one apparently aberrant date. The more oblique work in the exhibition provides a kind of diffuse radiance, illuminating the context of the day’s violence.
Is Breivik, a racist intent on gaining publicity for his right-wing ideology, in fact abnormal? This, for instance, is the question implicitly raised by Doug Ashford’s affecting “Studies for Bakersfield CA Series,” 2013, an arrangement on shelves of found photographs juxtaposed with abstract acrylic paintings. The photos depict scenes from the normal life of an average American man, someone Ashford has never met but who seems to have come from a similar rung of the socioeconomic ladder. We see a baby in diapers by a scrawny Christmas tree paired with a painting in a vaguely American-flag pattern, but in egg-yolk yellow, pink, and black. An image of the man as a teenager posed by his car abuts another, similarly patterned, painting. And, beneath a painting with pink, orange, yellow, and black stripes, the man in the photo straddles a motorcycle and gives the photographer the finger; he wears black sunglass and, on his back, a swastika. Just another middle-American guy, whose bewilderment has fermented into hate.
Can we say that his life is any more ordinary than those of the children living in various Polish orphanages, whom Ahlam Shibli has affectingly documented in the 35 prints that make up “Dom Dziecka [Children’s Home]: The House Starves When You Are Away,” 2008? Why should we assume the norm to be comfort or niceness? Assumptions about what is normal can lead to hysteria and ungrounded fear: such was my thought upon walking from Shibli’s excellent series into Eva Rothschild’s “Nature and Culture,” 2014, a sort of tortured labyrinth in painted aluminum that calls to mind prison fencing of the metaphorical sort that all of us who accept Patriot Acts and gated communities live behind.
I was nowhere near Oslo on July 22, 2011. But I was close enough to be covered in ash and debris on September 11, 2001, and what I have never seen expressed in art about that New York day is the overriding disgust with my country that I felt in the months afterwards. Disgust at losing the battle instantly by throwing our freedoms away through a trapdoor marked Security and by giving in to racism, ugly nationalism, suspicion, and the swinish vengeance that justified slaughtering thousands of innocent people half a world away.
But such emotional extremes, such certainties, are not the agar upon which the best art feeds — rather it lofts questions, tweezes out slivers of thought. Like Eline McGeorge’s “A Future Journey on the Outside of the Norwegian Paradox,” 2013, a tapestry — or, if you prefer, a grid painting — woven from space blankets, the best art reminds us that things are rarely what they seem. Like Hanne Friis’s sculpture composed of reticulated blue and black denim (the fabric that holds us all together), it reminds us that every I is also a part of the beautiful we, that we are implicated in our collective delusions yet also celebrated by our triumphs.
What this fine show makes clear is that there never existed an edenic normality that was then wrested from Norway three years ago, no period of cosmological innocence that we have lost. Hannah Ryggen’s tapestry may depict a lovely fiction, but it remains a fiction nonetheless.
