The line as mediator: mapping the lacuna in contemporary Icelandic art

Abstract

This paper takes as its subject the conceptual valence of the line to bring together the disciplines of anthropology and art practice and, in doing so, reconfigure the knowledge practices and methodological stances embodied within both. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Reykjavik with a contemporary Icelandic artist, I suggest that the line's specificity can act as a means of mapping the move from an anthropology that is retrospective and static towards an approach that shares much in common with art practice and is, potentially, projective and imaginative. Taking seriously the recent call to develop ‘an anthropology with’ (Ingold), this paper explores the epistemological limits in the artist's drawn line. In so doing I suggest that the specificity of the line for these disciplines lies, conversely, in their ambiguity and openness of form: an approach that has the capacity to bridge our knowledge practices towards an open-ended interpretation.

Keywords:

• ethnography
• interdisciplinarity specificity
• Icelandic art
• anthropology
• knowledge practices

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on research conducted during my Ph.D. at the University of Aberdeen from 2007 to 2012. The opportunity arose to write this up for publication thanks to a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design, based at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks go to Haraldur Jónsson who inspired this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elizabeth A. Hodson completed her Ph.D. at the University of Aberdeen in 2012. Her doctoral research was principally concerned with contemporary Icelandic art practices, and especially drawing. As a studio-led enquiry her work was intended to open out the debate on ethnography and anthropology, and ask what the artist-anthrologist may bring to the discipline of anthropology. Before taking up her post as Research Fellow on Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design (2013–2018, PI Professor Tim Ingold), Elizabeth worked at Edinburgh College of Art (2012–2013).

Notes

1. A further comparison between Latour and Ingold is offered by Knappett (2011), although he presents it through a discussion between the ‘objects’ of the network and the ‘things’ of the meshwork.

2. This is substantiated through the concept of ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold 2007, 75).

3. Iceland has a patronymic naming tradition and thus it is common to refer to people using their first name instead of their surname. I have kept to this convention throughout the paper.

4. Haraldur studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany (1987–1990). From there he went on to the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, Paris (1991–1992).

5. Emotional Wallpaper was part of the Illuminated Emotions exhibition, Reykjavík Light Festival (2003). The ‘wallpaper’ has been exhibited in a number of different languages, notably Japanese in New York city as part of Volcano lovers (2010) at the ISE Cultural Foundation, as well as in English in a variety of locations.

6. The term lacuna derives from the Latin ‘lacus’ meaning ‘lake’. In anatomy it is the depression or cavity of a bone and, additionally, can pertain to a missing portion of a book or manuscript. More generically it alludes to an unfilled space. Thus we find a link to a specified space and/or the movement between boundaries, which also ties in with the etymology of lacus: a separate but fluid location, a lake.

7. There was also some discussion of the sequencing of works and the positioning of the piece in relation to the architectural features within the room. The fire exit to the right of the work and the plug socket directly underneath were particularly mulled over, the work was placed in the end in accordance with its relationship to the plug socket. The socket acted as a compositional element in the piece in much the same way as the wall upon which the work was hung. For Haraldur it was important to ‘reference the architectural space’. In addition, the order of the images themselves was contemplated. This was left entirely to Haraldur and he rearranged the pictures in accordance with the distribution of the lines in each. Some drawings were heavier than others and some held very little. It was not an intellectual exercise but a matter of trial and error, in what looked and felt right according to the artist. The heavier images with the most dense lines were positioned at the bottom of the set and the two faintest ones were in the middle rows. He took maybe five or six minutes to complete this task, while I watched.

8. Anatomy of Feelings (1998), You and Me (2003), Surface Drawings as part of the Surface Sense exhibition (2004), Diagram of Feelings (2004) and Emo Scans (2009).

9. This creative dialectic is emblematic of his way of working beyond the drawings per se. As he himself notes, the drawings form a backbone to his practice and are ‘a blueprint of everything, a schematic, a heartbeat’.

10. See Gell (1998) for an inspired discussion on the artist's œuvre as a distributed object. His analysis suggests that the network model can be used as a means of mapping artworks across longer spans of time.