Simulacrum - a trace of life
“Thees works have no exact topography. The indeterminacy of Bøe`s images leaves their context open. Motifs from his earlier work reappear: the road (of fate), wide-open landscapes, utopian urban panoramas or romantic stars capes - we could be anywhere in the 20th century. The background is indistinct, in Roland Barthes sens of the utopia, the noise, the place lessens of language. There appears to be a greater narrative or mythical context to these works.
They feel like parts of a wider structure or an extended film, or the dramatic climax of a chain of events. Every photograph in the series seems to belong to a large whole that feels familiar to the viewer, yet remains hidden. The complete screenplay does not exist. Like a myth that embodies unconscious, collective social importance, these scenes can-not be entirely penetrated.
Myth as a form of interpretation, an assertion, a form that is not determined by objects, but by the way in which objects are discussed (Roland Barthes), is the foil upon which Nils Olav Bøe deliberately plays with the desire to find the familiar and the understandable in fictional scenes.”
(excerpt from catalog text by Barbara Blicensdorff, Galerie Blickensdorff/Field. Solo show at Field Galerie, Berlin 2008)
Nils Olav Bøe’s Photographic Constructions
by Arve Rød
In Nils Olav Bøe’s studio in the old armoury (Lavetthuset) on the island of Hovedøya, just beyond the Oslo harbour, is a multitude of effects you don’t normally expect to see in an artist’s studio. Stored in boxes on the shelves and tables is a large collection of tiny objects. Some look like a collection of random odds and ends, other items are more recognisable; houses and trees, bushes, masts, automobiles and street lamps – all in miniature format. For someone who has followed Bøe’s artistic career the past 20 years, it’s no secret that these are products originally intended for model train sets and other hobby activities, for the construction of small landscapes and miniature worlds. This is also how they are utilised by Bøe, as props in a photographic project, which, despite the innocent, somewhat nerdy intimacy these objects often evoke by imitating a “grown-up world”, have taken on an increasingly epic and sombre, and at times dystopian appearance.
On the other hand, someone who was familiar with Nils Olav Bøe’s art from the late eighties and through the following decade would hardly have been able to predict that he would end up creating art that competed with the likes of model builders and hobby constructors. He gained recognition early on as a multi-media artist and sculptor who was quite comfortable with large formats, and who often combined constructions in steel and mirrors with various technical apparatuses, such as electric motors and light and sound effects, in monumental and spatial installations. An early example was exhibited in the Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo in 1988, only three years after Bøe graduated from the so-called experimental class at the Oslo National Academy of Art. The untitled exhibition consisted of several different “stations” in a 5002 metre semi-dark and spot-lit room that encompassed everything from melted iron and rusted steel basins filled with 20 tons of water, to holograms and sensors in infrared light that activated a variety of sounds – “noise structures”, to coin the artist’s term – as the public moved around the room. Bøe made a number of such large and small installations up until the end of the 1990s, which often included both mechanical movement and experimental music, or sound and noise settings (Bøe’s multi-media activities have extended beyond the realm of visual art; among other things he has composed music for various theatrical productions and collaborated with professional musicians in different arenas).
The combination of heavy industry materialism, archaic formalism and atmospheric, at times spectacular scenography in many of Bøe’s early installations for the most part corresponded well with the aesthetical ambitions of the postmodern expressionism of the eighties. It is worth noting that the exhibition in the Museum of Science and Technology was arranged only four years after Per Inge Bjørlo almost single-handedly introduced installation as a form of artistic expression in Norwegian art, with his powerful and overwhelmingly sensory “rubber room” (Inner Room I) at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in 1984. Throughout the next decade Bøe’s installations move away from this type of dark and often melancholic material romanticism towards a more cogent, reductionist and minimalistic formalism. Among the more important artistic influences from this period, Bøe points to Brian Eno’s exhibition of video and light sculptures in the series Crystals in a darkened church in Rome in 1984, and light and installation artist James Turell and video artist Gary Hill, who both exhibited in Stockholm in the mid-nineties. Two of Bøe’s central installations from this period that reveal influences from these artists are Two Circles, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Oslo in 1991, and Line, shown at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in 1996. Two Circles, as the title suggests, is a composition with two prone circles in aluminium, lacquer and an electric motor, with a rotating pendulum that slowly irons out the prone forms and defines the circles’ points of contact. Line similarly took the form of a circle – the circle, and in a broader sense rotation and repetition both as form and idea, are repeated elements in Bøe’s production, – this time made of tilted mirrors with a rotating light projector that directed a beam of light down on the mirrors. This resulted in a graphic point which travelled along the walls of the room accompanied by a soundtrack composed of ambient noise resembling dissonant static, electronically fabricated by Bøe based – of all things – on the croaking of African frogs.
There is no suggestion of documentarism or environmental commentary in the use of such real-life raw material. Bøe has refrained from including any explicit eco-political motif or form of commentary as artistic content. On the contrary, he talks about a desire to evoke “inner states” as the essential element in these early works. From the beginning, Bøe’s references and sources of inspiration were generally oriented towards film and sound – towards musicians such as the experimental American doom metal band Sunn O))) or Daniel Lanois’ poetic ambient noise structures, and film directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch. Bøe mentions the latter two repeatedly when discussing his own work, as two artists with a unique ability to combine metaphysical themes with political undertones, and their interest in a philosophical perception of time as circular rather than linear is reflected in Bøe’s art. If one were to find something that points to the world outside the artistic space in Bøe’s art, it would be similarly subliminal and indirect, and preferably also with a trace of melancholy.
It is possible to approach Bøe’s photographs with the same set of concepts. For a more recent public Bøe is primarily known as a photographer. Though he calls himself an anti-photographer. It takes months for him to prepare and perfect a motif before he considers it finished, as opposed to much of the escalating stream of images today. Nor do the peculiar and easily recognisable photographs he makes lean towards any specific photographic discourse or tradition. They should rather be considered a continuation of the installations and the condensed language that first came into view with Two Circles, albeit in both a visually and materially unexpected way. Almost overnight the artistic material – everything from the tools and effects to the motifs – shifted from large, heavy and spatially dramatic to a charming and initially even witty micro world; meticulously composed tableaus arranged on a spacious work table in his studio, and then photographed close-up with a macro lens and an analogue large format camera.
II
Artists must follow their intuition and be open to the detours and chance occurrences that might lead the work to new and perhaps more productive territory. You cannot choose the art you create, as much as it chooses you, a famous critic once said. The critic was referring to the relative improbability of defining ahead of time the boundaries of what is possible or impossible, relevant or irrelevant, good or bad in the things one creates. Free your mind, and your ass will follow, is another, less ceremonious way of putting it. In certain cases it might be a mere little push, perhaps just a coincidence, which is needed to propel a preconceived or predisposed course onto a new path.
In Bøe’s case this push arrived in the form of a challenge a bit out of the ordinary. In 1997 he was invited to exhibit by the artist-run gallery Gulp in Reykjavik. The gallery formed part of the alternative gallery scene in the Nordic countries during the 1990s. Today it has no website or any form of archival material on the Internet, and was in operation only a few years around the time Bøe was invited. Gulp did not even have an ordinary exhibiting venue, which would turn out to be the whole impetus behind the radical schism in Bøe’s artistic career. The unconventional proposition in the invitation from the Icelandic gallery was that the entire exhibition fit into a shoebox. Not only that – the work would not be shown in Reykjavik, but anywhere else the artist felt like having it.
The artists who exhibited under the direction of Gulp had to find a suitable space for the exhibition on their own, – “at home in their kitchen, in a tree, or at the North Pole for that matter”, according to Bøe – then arrange their own opening reception at a prearranged time, and thereafter send a detailed documentation of the event to the gallery to be archived.
That is how Bøe’s miniature world came into being. What else can you do when the assignment is literally to create art that fits into a box, and your artistic materials are metres, kilos and tons of iron and metal, accompanied by sound and lighting to create all-embracing installations? One can always fall back on the obvious, a scaled-down version of something already familiar and tested as an illustration. Or settle with placing a sample of said materials in the box as an abstraction. Plan A, or the first impulse, must nevertheless be to approach such a challenge with conceptual resolve and ingenuity, and to also see it as an invitation to test one’s artistic limitations. Bøe ended by making a micro-sculpture, or tableau, or scene – it is not exactly clear how one should categorise this work -– From Dusk till Dawn I, a white board placed horizontally on a plinth, with two headphones mounted on the stand. Mounted on the board is a representation of a small landscape, composed of a pond in the form of glossy lacquer, and two trees. On the shiny surface of the pond three tiny swans swim peacefully. In contrast to this pastoral idyll, the sound in the headphones is aggressive and hostile. The soundtrack is taken from Quentin Tarantino’s violent action film From Dusk till Dawn, thus the title of the work, and the juxtaposition of such contrasting elements evoked an almost absurd ambivalence when viewing the work.
In keeping with the premises set by the gallery Gulp, From Dusk till Dawn I was exhibited in Bøe’s studio on a prearranged date, as the first tableau in a series of four that were produced during the following year. The subsequent three variations had the same formal setup, and played out the same contrast between sound and visual impression; small female figures hanging out the wash to the sound of monitor lizards devouring an animal carcass; men playing golf on a green accompanied by a soundtrack from a horror film; and the last of the four in which the twofold play between sound and image is reversed: a gap is cleaved into the board like a brutal cut and accompanied by the sound of melodious bird song. More noticeably than his earlier installation works, From Dusk till Dawn I-IV demonstrates both collectively and separately Bøe’s interest in the cinematic – and not primarily because of the title, despite the fact that Tarantino’s film was most likely still being shown when the idea for these works was conceived. And not because of the soundtracks either, which were all taken from commercial films or nature programmes. For Bøe, what made film a relevant reference and model for his idiom was the logic of the film genre’s narrative structure; the possibilities that are readily available in the editing, sound and directing; effective and affecting devices that can elevate certain scenes and certain dialogue to encompass a whole world of narratives.
The tableaus, as they were presented in the form of mini sculptures, were nevertheless quickly perceived as an intermediate solution. The miniature world Bøe created as a spontaneous reaction to an eccentric exhibition invitation, encompassed generous amounts of anecdotal charm, but might nevertheless be seen as striving to assume the epic dimensions that characterise many of the role models from the cinematic world, not least the theatrical impact in many of the early installations. Almost immediately it became apparent that the scenes and figures had to be filtered through an additional stage in the creative process. Bøe realised that the representations might function just as well, or even better, when seen through a camera lens.
The first photographs made after From Dusk till Dawn I-IV admittedly have much of the same anecdotal and literary elements as the sculpture series. They appear as descriptions of situations, like stills disconnected from a larger plot: people on a beach with parasols (Nude, 1999); a couple examining something on the ground outside their motorhome with the wash hanging out to dry in a desolate, red landscape (Scene 71, 2000); a van standing alone, bathed in blue-violet light (Scene 98, 2002). The lighting is the same as in the earlier installations, an atmospheric and dramatic element in itself, inspired by art history’s great “painters of light”, like Rembrandt or J. M. W. Turner, and how these employed light to highlight a motif and suggest or underscore a narrative. From Dusk till Dawn I-IV are scenes with the same contradictory mixture of idyll and a feeling of portentous fate which, when it comes down to it, constitutes the narrative in the sculpture series. At the same time the motifs are meditations over the model builder’s imaginative repertoire and possible variations in the depictions of the settings, which chiefly aim at imitating an already existing natural as well as manmade environment. These early photographs, like the sculptures, recreate scenes as if in a realistic theatre, where the performance, despite being intrinsically open to interpretation, is nevertheless perceived as stemming from an already thought-out and scripted storyline, and we as viewers are forced to relate to one of two plot alternatives: “something has happened”, or “something is going to happen”.
It is with the still ongoing series Constructed Landscape, begun in 2004, and the later Konstruerte steder/Constructed Sites that Bøe’s photographic practice has found its present form. Two approaches differentiate the pictures in this series from both the sculptures and the earliest photographs. First of all, the narrative figure elements were removed. The pictures have lost their literary, narrative content, which gives them a more abstract dimension and opens for an even broader sphere of interpretation. Secondly, the colour scheme is reduced, to begin with to subdued greyish pastels, but quite soon to pure grey tones. With a few exceptions, this results in relatively large black and white pictures, where visually and compositionally simple yet symbolically complex arrangements play out against a soft, diaphanous background. Colours continue to play a role, albeit in a limited scope – the most obvious deviation from the grey tone rule are the newer series of Polaroid pictures (U.T., 2017/18), which Bøe describes as a natural continuation of the erstwhile production, and which extends his aesthetical repertoire even further. Seen in relation to other types of photography, the Polaroid’s more direct, “raw” material and chemical aesthetics imbue the motifs with additional layers of both delicate, painterly visuality, and an apocalyptic visionary element, produced by the technology’s characteristic saturation which falls in front of and over the photographed landscape, in the form of a greenish or sickly yellow toxic clouds. The idea of the Polaroid picture’s immediate and democratic use – a kind of photographic version of Post-it notes, or a physical, slow, pre-Internet version of the flow of images on Instagram – also brings an everyday touch to Bøe’s project, in contrast to the otherwise ceremoniously framed works, and large formats in the Constructed Landscape and Constructed Sites series.
III
In his studio Bøe operates simultaneously as a director, a set designer and a creator of worlds in miniature. On his worktable a paper world of props and backgrounds emerges, which under atmospheric lighting with the aid of mirrors and filters and refined via the camera lens’s low depth of field, evokes a “romantic world of endless expanse” that “awakens a yearning for peace. After which one becomes disturbed by the clinical purity”, as one critic expressed it in connection with one of Bøe’s exhibitions in Berlin.
Constructed Landscape and Constructed Sites are composed of elements from a recognisable world: skyscrapers, grain silos, oil refineries, industrial installations and ruler straight infrastructures, mountains and plains, trees and scruffy thickets. The pictures depict fragments of nature and modern civilisation arranged together in diaphanous settings, like a combination of mirage and a painting by Caspar David Friedrich or Arnold Böcklin, had they lived long enough to give us dystopian science fiction scenarios or sublime interpretations of hyper-modern cities in the deserts of the Middle East, rather than painting barren icebergs or mystical islands. The installation Bøe exhibited at the Norwegian Sculpture Biennial in the Vigeland Museum in 2015, simply called Constructed Site, encapsulates many of these material and contextual aspects of his oeuvre. Constructed Site combined video and sound within an architectonic structure in the room. Two large video projections were placed at an open angle to each other over a triangular pool of water, which combined, created a spatial arrangement of images and reflections, together with an abstract soundtrack (composed by Jo Berger Myhre). The images depict the typical flat barren landscapes from the photo series, interspersed with isolated towers and islands of high-rise buildings, gliding sideways across the screens in a slow, monotonous, never-ending flow; a visually and conceptually ambiguous combination of elements which stimulated reflections about the great questions of time, space and loneliness, to more prosaic issues such as humankind versus the environment, and the sculpture biennial’s overriding theme regarding the modern digital screen culture.
Bøe’s constructed landscape draws the curtain aside to reveal limitless and timeless space, in grey tones – “if you take away the colour, you take away a little of time”, as Bøe explained when talking about the use of black and white rather than colour. The concrete elements are strictly speaking linked to our time. To the extent that Constructed Landscape and Constructed Sites represent a dystopian perspective of reality – industrialism’s conquest over nature, or as a consequence of this the end of humanity, are two feasible doomsday visions to be found in Bøe’s photographs – it is formulated as “an imprint of our own time”, according to the artist. The use of elements from the built world are perhaps just as applicable in relation to the “New Topographics” photographers of the 1970s, and how they introduced depictions of this reality as a subject for investigation in photographic art: panorama pictures of urban landscapes, highway intersections, and anonymous, modernistic architecture – also mainly in black and white. In retrospect, it is primarily the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, and their cataloguing of industrial structures, which they called “typologies” – a visually sober and serial documentation of water towers, power stations, etc. – which remain standing as the most well known from the New Topographics group. As professor and instructor at the art academy in Düsseldorf they literally started their own school, with a number of prominent photo artists as their students who would later be known as the Becher Class, or the Düsseldorf School, in the international art world. From the second half of the 1980s and thereafter, artists such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte became known for reproducing the sublime aspect of the modern world’s urban and industrial endless monotony. There is no futuristic intention or vision in such a perspective, neither in Constructed Landscape, Constructed Sites nor in the Polaroid pictures. They are interpretations of a world here and now, no matter how construed, atmospheric and dreamlike, which can of course increase the sphere of interpretation to encompass a more concrete critique of the political agenda.
On this point it is therefore relevant to view Bøe’s constructed landscapes in connection with more recent artistic projects such as the New Topographics photographers or the work of the Becher class. Pictures such as Constructed Sites (Texas) (2013); a single tower situated at the centre of the picture plane, or the stylised wall in Constructed Landscape 4 (2004), one is immediately inclined to place in the same aesthetic tradition. Yet they also differ significantly from it. The nature and appearance of the miniature tableaus bring an additional ambiguity to the sublime effect, which draws them down to earth, based on the physical construction of the scenes and the manner in which they are photographed, close up. The final result is both very solemn and subtly charming in its warping of dimensions and distances (for example the apparently infinite background is in reality just a curved sheet of paper submitted to meticulous lighting), as though they were real scenes seen through a tilt-shift lens – a technology which gives the picture a selective focus, and which is often used to simulate miniature scenes in photographing locations or objects (also known as a diorama effect or diorama illusion). This is not the case here, of course; as already described Bøe’s pictures are constructed from scratch in the studio, but they gain tension in their form of expression somewhere between dystopian and unreal, in some cases almost witty, which further increases the pictures’ potential for narrative content.
The psychological aspect is nevertheless the most decisive motivational force, also in the photographic works. The modern realisation that we are more intimately connected to nature and matter than we have until now been willing to take in, and that the life-sustaining foundation for civilisation as we know it is perhaps about to be disturbed forever, are eco-political insights that also pertain to Bøe’s oeuvre. Yet at the same time such a realisation calls for concrete political action, it also opens up new inner rooms for art to decipher.