Picture shows detail of screen shot from Monika Ross work for Lovesick “Acts of Love” at Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall.
lovesick was an exhibition addressing the theme of love in contemporary art. Love was here not only understood as something elating to emotions between men and women. In this exhibition the topic were dealt with in a much more complex way addressing minor and more complex narratives. In other words, it was not the great displays of love that played the principal role in lovesick, but the many small attempts to approach a subject that seems
Lovesick invited artists and theoreticians to work with questions relating to the subject of love in our times. Within this relation I am not thinking of love as one dimensional, pertaining to a spiritual emotion which springs up between two people. I am thinking more of a complex understanding of the concept which can imply everything from desire, eroticism, sex, attraction, intimacy, love at first sight, narcissism, devoted love, etc. Furthermore, this can be set in a likewise complex relation such as the mass media’s treatment of the issue, the development of new technologies such as the continuing effectiveness of the global communications network, science’s role in love, capitalism’s relation to it, politician’s role, the different cultures, AIDS’ influence, women’s lib, homo and bisexual lib, etc. I do not wish for this theme to be limited in any given direction, but will point out that the project should focus on the extensive treatment of this theme found in our present.
It is therefore not only this but a comprehensive secularised treatment of the concept of love can sometimes be set up against a more sensitive and sensible approach to it. Within this perspective is encompassed a love that can be abused, silenced to death or overly interpreted in order to undermine the individual’s need to cherish his or her own intimate love experiences. Or like Eva Illov proclaims in her article The lost innocence: “The idea that media shape our private dreams and acts of love has become a cliche, eagerly commented on by therapists and movies.”
Furthermore there has been pointed out endlessly how the earlier great stories from classical literature together with the objective truth have been lost. This is however not entirely negative, as it later opens up for marginalized stories and groups that earlier were repressed by these great historical volumes. Maybe it’s due time that we took Foucalt literally and wrote the history of love. This will not be one unique story, but rather the multiple stories, not the limiting and simplifying but the compounding and flexible, those without a fixed program, an ism, and a clear rational model. According to Roland Barthes, love’s own speech must create its own discourse and pictures that together can stand against the extreme trivializing and democratisation and therefore belittling, of the mass media’s treatment of love. There must be according to Barthes something helpless with this language, differentiating it from the assumed success that specially color advertisement’s seductive language. As Barthes further stresses: “There is something utterly lonely in love’s present discourse. No one supports it (..) it is separated from power and also separated from the mechanisms of power (science, knowledge, art) .”
In a more problematic light this theme could encompass the growth of feelings related to differences in power between the sexes, the diverse cultures and various social relations. As Victor Seidler points out, “Love and morality do not simply concern a realm of personal relationships in which we are supposedly free to act towards others as equals.” (ibid).
The concept of equality is strong in modern understanding of love, but it is especially unrealistic in how things work in a hierarchical society.
In classical art it is romantic love that is most commonly portrayed. In today’s art we see a far more complex picture of this theme where lovesickness, absence, longing, pain, eroticism, body, intimacy, etc. are also treated. Just as often we see in today’s art a wish to satirize the heaviness and pathos that art sometimes ends up in its treatment of big concepts. Today’s art is at times an example of the modest and more imperfect art which through installations, video, the Internet and performances, that jests both with the artist’s own references and society’s.
©Veronica Diesen
