The Trails, Tracks,

and Traces of Art

 

– Ólafur Gíslason –

​

Trail is the name that Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir has given her latest series of charcoal drawings, abstract drawings that indeed show a trail: something has marked the pictorial surface in the course of passing on. These are drawings that echo some kind of handwriting or calligraphy in nature, repetitive patterns that might bear friendly attribution to the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms. Yet this is not a case of direct portrayal; these are a kind of reference to the roots of the handwriting, testament to the artist’s vital relationship with the natural kingdom, not through objective imitation of it but via the “trails” the handwriting traces through live contact between the hand and the pictorial surface, in a dialogue as transient as the passing moment. The questions these drawings are apt to raise may sound something like this: What has been and gone and left a trail on this ground, what is this ground, where did the path start, and where does it lead?

These are not easy questions but it is precisely the magic of significant art to present us with conundrums.

Let us consider the first part of the question: What has been and gone here and left a trail? The simplest answer is perhaps to say that it was the very artist, that these pictures show her fingerprints and nothing else. One might say in support that these drawings all attest to a hand’s bodily contact with the pictorial surface. There is a distinct bodily presence/absence in these pictures, which we clearly feel. But why then does the artist not let it suffice to leave the tracks of her palms and feet on the pictorial surface? What is the errand, in this work, of this calligraphy, these constantly repeated marks that perhaps call to mind indeterminate natural phenomena? Here is a clouded issue that needs clarifying.

When the police wish to identify a culprit, one traditional means of investigation is to take the suspect’s fingerprints and compare them with corresponding marks found at the crime scene. The accused dips a finger in ink and presses it on paper; it leaves an indisputable imprint, indisputable proof that the accused has left this trail, traversed this ground. The difference between the police’s fingerprintmaking and Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s calligraphy is that the fingerprint is not an artwork in any traditional sense, so that our question leads to another still-more-difficult question: What sets an artwork apart from fingerprints, if both evidence the trails of their “authors”?

“Art is the sensual manifestation of the Idea,” said the German philosopher Hegel, and few have disputed this sharp definition: art concerns ideas. This can scarcely be said of fingerprints. To see a fingerprint gives us small notion of the relevant person, his thought or ideas; the fingerprint’s evidential value pertains to mechanical comparison.

 

An artwork is another matter, isn’t it? We need see only a small fragment of a Van Gogh to see his “imprint” or fingerprints in the brushstrokes, imprints that form part of a whole image that is recognizable to us from our endless trips though Van Gogh’s oeuvre. But this does not apply to all art in equal measure. Pioneers of abstract art such as Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky wanted to erase the personal imprint, the fingerprints, from their art, so it would display itself and nothing else. The same goes for Byzantine iconographers, for example (cf. the Image of Edessa or the Veil of Veronica). It also applies to many contemporary pop artists, minimalists, and conceptual artists (Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Lawrence Weiner); examples are innumerable. This definition of artworks as marks or fingerprints of their authors’ personalities and subjective beings is thus insufficient, to put it mildly. Placed in the broader historical context it is nearly useless, for who would think of searching out authorial personality or self-awareness in the cave paintings at Lascaux, the Venus de Milo, the carved doors at Valthjófsstaðir, or even the Mona Lisa? Whose tracks mark Malevich’s work of 1914-15, his “suprematist” Black Square? What trail was blazed in that work? If in this case it is the trail of an idea, it depicts something other than the personality or subjective being of the artist.

 

But what of Delacroix, Van Gogh, and all the Expressionists from Munch to Jackson Pollock: Is their expressive “handwriting” not “fingerprints of the soul,” to use the common metaphor? The ready answer is that, just as a name objectifies the phenomenon it names, this “handwriting” is also an objectification, and the subjective being that renders an object as its own image is always elsewhere, beyond the picture. If the subjective being wishes to reveal itself in the handwriting, it is always “another,” as the poet Rimbaud said, of himself. A unity of the self and the handwriting can never be rendered, even in the automatic writing of the Surrealists, who always set themselves rules for rendering chaos. Just as language “speaks us,” as Lacan put it, handwriting is a “rule” that gives objective form to its subject, whether that is the invisibility of the “subjective being” or Platonic transcendental forms. The subjective being instantly vanishes from its rendered image, is elsewhere.

 

But what was “the Idea” that Hegel discussed and what is its relation to the artist’s person? Is “the Idea” something that has deep personal and subjective roots, or something connected to language and the laws thereof, or is it perhaps the absolute and immutable idea of the divinity that dwells beyond the personal, a kind of Platonic idea of universal truth? French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy speaks to this question:

 

The [Hegelian] Idea is the presentation to itself of being or the thing. It is thus its internal conformation and its visibility, or in other words, it is the thing itself as vision/envisioned...(the thing seen, envisioned, grasped in its form, but from within itself or its essence).   

 

In this regard, art is the sensible visibility of this intelligible, that is invisible, visibility. The invisible form—Plato’s eidos—returns to itself and appropriates itself as visible. Thus [art] brings into the light of day and manifests the being of its Form and its form of Being. All the great theories of “imitation” have never been anything but theories of the imitation, or the image, of the Idea (which is itself, you understand, but the self-imitation of being, its transcendent or transcendental miming)—and reciprocally, all thinking about the Idea is thinking about the image or imitation. Including, and especially, when it detaches itself from the imitation of external forms or from “nature”....All this thinking is thus theological, turning obstinately around the great motif of “the visible image of the invisible God,” which for Origen is the definition of Christ.1

 

This analysis of Hegel’s “Idea” is not easy to grasp, for Nancy is guiding us away from conventional definitions of “things” toward a meditation on being as a temporal event, on being’s paradoxical manifestation as both event and image. This account seems to lead us to an unexpected place, the field of pure theology.

 

Our original question was: What has been and gone here and made a trail? Is the answer, then, that it was Christ? No, obviously not, but the myth of the paradoxical appearance and disappearance of the Godhead as a condition for its existence can perhaps explain for us the nature of this riddle of the sensual manifestation of the invisible: just as God, as the image of the invisible, needs the sensual and visible image of Christ in order to be himself, the Hegelian Idea (the idea of the universal, and of the absolute unity of vision and the seen) needs to emerge from its invisible husk and become sensual in order to be itself.

 

In our day, however, ideas about universal qualities (and the absolute unity of the name and the named) have undergone many devaluations, and though it might be possible to discern a search for universal ideas in Malevich’s suprematist black square of 1914 (as if it were a Byzantine icon), that image is equally and perhaps above all testimony to the disappearance of such an idea. The black square depicts disappearance and nothingness no less than the fullness of the Idea. Possibly Hegel too had sensed this devaluation of “the Idea” when he proclaimed the end of art as an arena for the manifestation of universal ideas. He was referring not least to sacred art and the disappearance of its sacred core. Thus Hegel’s proclamation of the end of art has premises akin to those of the iconoclasts, who wished to forbid images in order to keep the idea of an invisible God separate from its sensual manifestations.

 

Then what remains? Again it is Jean-Luc Nancy who picks up the scent, by stating that the “vision” that stimulates all creative art is a vision of nothingness, a view into the void, a kind of negative image of the universal ideas. All images spring from anxiety in the face of nothingness, says Nancy, but this negative image of the Hegelian idea also conveys an awareness of its reverse; it harbors what Nancy calls almost nothingness. This he chooses to name ‘vestige’, a Latin word with many derivations pertaining to tracks, trails, and traces.2

 

And here we come back to Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s Trail. Nancy says that in order to understand the trail, this vestige, we must abandon Hegel’s notion of the “sensual manifestation of the Idea” along with the theological framework it belongs to, though the latter can serve as a means of illumination. To embody an absolute idea of the sacred was never the real task of art, Nancy says; only the theological iconoclasts held this position, based on misunderstanding. Art has certainly had ties to religions and their histories, but art is not religious practice nor does it entail belief. Nancy’s conclusion is that art is the vestige of itself and nothing else, its own trail or track; its meter and measure are that of a wandering gait; its imprints attest to vanished foot soles, bodies, and hands; its steps are a temporal event, the action itself without being the act, the vestige or path that being traces while it lasts. The trail or vestige thus becomes the manifestation of the disappearance of that which has been and gone, traversed this ground: What remains when someone or something has passed by.3

 

Who, then, has made this trail? It is not the trail of the gods, says Nancy, but rather the trail of their disappearance. The steps of this passage are transient events that possess no form once they have been taken; they are the path left by being while it lasts. It is not the universal footprint but the emptiness that remains: The trace or trail is not the image of a tangible object, a finger- or footprint, but rather witness to the traverse itself, which is constant and unceasing; movement not stasis; the image of what vanishes not what is; the arena of being, ceaseless in the flow of time; a trail left by a traveller whom we don’t recognize, for it could be anyone, one or all. The traveller’s name is still a name and “the Idea” still an image, but Nancy renounces their metaphysical meaning. This renunciation that Nancy proclaims is perhaps not good for nothing: it goes hand-in-hand with a rejection of the iconoclasts’ despairing opposition to imagery, an opposition based on “the Idea” of the image of man and God (and the analysis—separation of elements, division—entailed in that idea).

 

It was Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s chosen name for her series of drawings, Trail, that led us into Jean-Luc Nancy’s complicated meditations on art as its own vestige. They tell us that the “trail” is that of art itself and that the ground is art itself. Art’s traverse has no start or endpoint that is “off track,” out of the way, or out of sight; art finds its goal and meaning through its own action. If imitation or “mimesis” is in play, its purpose is not to teach us how objects familiar to us appear, but rather to let what is shine forth in all its power. Thus Jónsdóttir’s “trails” depict themselves: the trace that is the vestige of Art and Being, the being that has to do with time and event rather than with object and definition. The power of these images therefore derives not from an imitation of natural phenomena or an expression of a given personal subjective being, but in a game that is justified by its own rules. In this respect we can liken these drawings to child’s play. Whether in Double Dutch, Follow the Leader, or Wallball, all rules and motions in child’s play are justified by the game itself. The game reveals itself and nothing else; it seeks its meaning and goal in the play and nothing beyond the play. A child jumping rope or playing hopscotch depicts nothing but those motions, motions which obey their own set rules and compel us to watch, learn the rules, and respond with direct or indirect participation.

 

Thus it is of little avail to search these Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir drawings for likenesses, either of natural phenomena or of Jónsdóttir’s own personality or character. The meaning of these drawings rests in themselves, in the action of their making, and nothing else. What happens as we experience these drawings is an experience of sympathy closely akin to our sympathetic response in watching child’s play. There are few things more human than such sympathy. When the artist has succeeded in arousing it, the aim of art has been achieved, for art requires no extraneous justification. Art is in and of itself a justification of the human.

Tracing Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir’s Spaces

 

– Jón Proppé –

 

The career of each artist is a journey through different approaches and solutions to both technical questions and the artist’s own development. Good artists never just stop, they seem untiring, ever searching and ever discovering new aspects to their own quests. Some travel slowly, reflecting on every detail from every angle before they exhibit the results while others step wide and have a new story to tell in every show. All travel untrodden paths though they remain, to stretch the metaphor, within shouting distance of each other, aware of each other and occasionally collaborating. An artist’s oeuvre can only be traced by following several threads at once but taking note of the central projects and concerns that remain, even through radical changes in the style and character of their output. Such features will, with luck, become ever more central as the artist develops.

 

When Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir started out in art in the early 1960s there was a thriving art scene in Reykjavík, though there debates and conflicts, sometimes acrimonious. The number of working artists in Iceland had increased dramatically since the end of World War II with a steady flow of young artists going abroad to study and returning with new ideas. Quite a few artists now made enough from their art to be able to support themselves without other work and an even larger number dedicated themselves to art even though they made little from it. The market for art had also grown and renewed itself through new fashions, for example in architecture and design, and the public was growing more receptive to new approaches such as abstraction and geometric design. The making of objets d’art was one way for artists to bring in money and Ragnheiður worked for a while in the ceramics studio Glit, run by sculptor Ragnar Kjartansson. Many young artists came there to work and experiment and enjoyed the encouragement and instruction of Ragnar, who was by all accounts an inspiring teacher. He was also open-minded enough to embrace even the most experimental art, though in his own sculptures he remained true to the naturalist tradition. This was far from being the only studio of its kind though it was perhaps the most influential. Many artists at the time engaged in such production alongside their other projects. Dieter Roth, then living in Iceland, came to Glit and produced, among other things, quite beautiful vases. He, Magnús Pálsson and Manfred Vilhálmsson also set up a furniture production shop, though that experiment was short-lived. There was renewed interest in weaving and textile art and, not least, in printmaking which has the advantage of combining free drawing with the possibility of making a few copies and thus reaching a larger market. All this activity helped to extend the Icelandic art scene and broaden its reach. At last, there was the feeling that artistic production had come of age with a community of professional artists.

 

When Ragnheiður began to exhibit her prints at the end of the 1960s there were still few in Iceland who had adopted printmaking as their primary medium though many had made prints alongside their painting, some with considerable success. The prints Ragnheiður exhibited at the time explored the medium and the relations of line and space with vigorous and even daring draughtsmanship. They developed from abstract shapes and forms to a more naturalistic expression  already in the early 1970s but with a strong admixture of surrealism and wry humour. She did not hesitate to stretch reality and develop symbols and themes for various aspects of contemporary society and morals. In particular, her work attracted attention for its treatment of women’s concerns and the feminist struggle. Ragnheiður was, indeed, one of the most important pioneers of feminist art in Iceland, the history of which remains to be written. One of the most important events in the women’s movement in Iceland came on 24 October 1975 when scores of thousands of women left their work and attended a rally in the centre of Reykjavík. Ragnheiður’s prints from that event became iconic, as did many other of her images, for example her prints showing women’s dresses, filled out to human form, sometimes even pregnant with child, but lacking a visible body, head, hands and feet. She had the ability to create symbols that stuck a chord with women engaged in the struggle but at the same time she was developing her own individual repertoire of images and techniques, confidently presented without compromising either in her subject matter or in her relentless exploration of the technical aspects of both drawing and the printmaking process. These lines of research came together in an exemplary way in her series of images of books that had grown a grassy surface – strongly reminiscent of pubic hair – where subject and technical approach are perfectly balanced but the whole execution also remarkably robust and free, the space of the picture bursting with the density of image and line.

 

It is not really to be wondered at that Ragnheiður would again turn to more abstract imagery where her well-known symbols made way for pure expression of line and depth; with hindsight we can see this amply indicated in her work from the 1980s. Around 1990, Ragnheiður gave up printmaking in favour of direct charcoal drawings and in her new pictures it was as if the drawing had been set free, no longer restricted by the complicated technical graphic processes. Her drawings became larger and more gestural, her subject matter less symbolic and more abstract, tending to large flowing forms. She produced a series of drawings on mythological subjects from the Edda, the ancient Icelandic cycle of mythological poems, interpreting them in terms of spaces and force than from symbols. These pictures draw more on nature than any of Ragnheiður’s earlier work and might even be described as mythological landscapes. Her approach is in some ways reminiscent of that of Kjarval, Iceland’s best-known twentieth century landscape painter, himself renowned for merging myth and landscape. Like Kjarval, she strives to dig beneath the surface or, perhaps rather, to imbue the surface with mysterious depths, revealing forces and flows in her line and textures.

 

In an exhibition at the Reykjavík Art Museum in 1994, Ragnheiður then exhibited a new series, quite unlike any of the work known to most of her many admirers. These were very large charcoal drawings, covered overall in dense patterns of drawing with no delineated shapes, the whole field given over to flowing movement and a striking evocation of great depth and distance. Aside from the radically new overall composition, Ragnheiður employed new techniques to achieve a greater depth of field without the use of traditional object-based perspective. She laid down swirling patterns of charcoal marks, smudged and then overlaid with patterns of other marks, more sharply drawn and darker in colour. This is the approach Ragnheiður has kept developing ever since.

 

In the course of her career, Ragnheiður has drawn on many sources and influences. The printmaking art requires great patience and technical concentration with drawing as its basis, itself a method requiring patient application. To master these techniques and methods is hard work and to research and develop them is the work of a lifetime. Ragnheiður’s work reflects this effort and her participation in the artistic and social debates of her time and the varying developments to which all active artists have had to respond in the last four decades. In her oldest pictures we see the abstraction and geometry which so dominated the work of young European artists in the 1950s, then the new realism that spread, especially in Northern Europe, in the 1970s, with strong political overtones that came through in cinema and literature no less than in the visual arts. Each artist develops along many lines at once, reflecting personal growth and development as well as the engagement with whatever medium he or she has chosen.

 

Ragnheiður pursued her studies in the 1960s while also raising her children. She studied in Iceland at the Reykjavík School of Art and, in 1962, at the Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Later she attended the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts and, in 1970, travelled to Paris to work in Atelier 17, the legendary print studio established in 1927 by the great pioneer Stanley William Hayter. She then started to exhibit and her renown grew quickly. Her private exhibitions now number thirty and her work has been seen in more than a hundred group exhibitions around the world, all over Europe as well as in Egypt, India and China. In Iceland she became highly regarded and her works were sought after. It is no exaggeration to say that she was instrumental in prompting the revival of printmaking that took place in Iceland in the 1970s and 1980s. Her approach to her subject matter was also highly influential, the slightly surreal treatment, the appropriation of everyday objects for symbolic purposes and her daring in combining detailed representational drawing with a freer and more forceful line.

 

Many were doubtless surprised when Ragnheiður abandoned printmaking in the early 1990s. But as far as her images and draughtsmanship are concerned there was no sudden break. Her charcoal drawings grow naturally from her later graphic work and extend and open up avenues that had already been strongly hinted at. The charcoal works are, however, quite unusual insofar as we view them in the context of the history of drawing and thus help us to better understand what is so unique in her approach and in the visual world she has created.

 

Drawing is the basis of printmaking. The simplest method is to carve a drawing on a wood or metal surface from which it can then be printed onto another surface, usually paper. The method is ancient but gained popularity and wide distribution in Europe in the fifteenth century. In addition for allowing the mass production of drawings, the method introduced many refinements and new techniques in carving, etching and printing the drawn-on plates, some remarkably subtle and complex. The printmaker approaches his work differently than the draughtsman and the drawing is only a step on the long road to the final printed image, the character of which can sometimes only be guessed at from the original plate. A trained printmaker thinks of his work in many layers that only come together on the two-dimensional printed paper. The depth in the image is not only achieved in the drawing but also, and no less, in the etching, the chemical mix of the ink and the method of printing.

 

One could say that Ragnheiður’s charcoal drawings attest to this kind of approach. First she covers the paper with drawn patterns which she then works down, smudging and eroding, until they appear like swirls of mist on the paper. She then adds other darker layers which the eye registers as being much closer than the first, fog-like background. The effect is much like looking through a lens where the field of focus is limited to a certain distance but everything else appears indistinct. Looking at these drawings, one has the sensation of peering into a microscopic world or, alternately, looking into a cosmic distance at far-away nebulas. This, along with the overall composition, also gives one the sense that the drawings open onto a world much vaster that what one can in fact perceive – they give the impression of infinite distance and the whole experience revolves around spaces and the creation of depth in the pictorial field.

 

As to her subject matter, it might be thought that Ragnheiður has come full circle back to the abstractions of her earlier works, but in fact each stage in her development proceeds naturally from the other. The first abstractions explored the delineation of objects in space and in the last prints of the 1980s the objects were already giving way to texture and free-line drawings. Her familiar, naturalistic images of the 1970s and 1980s were most often placed in an indeterminate space, somewhat in the manner of surrealists, and gradually the symbolic objects gained a more general frame of reference, moving from the everyday world to landscape and nature and into the world of myth and cosmogenesis. That is the world of infinite distances and unbridled forces, the great creative void from which all things spring and to which all things must return.