- Venue
- Camden Arts Centre
- Location
- London
For this exhibition, the Swedish artist screened four films: My body is a house of glass, Monster, Didn’t you know I’m made of butter? and I’m a wild animal, each one a claymation lasting approximately 5 minutes, accompanied by a soundtrack created by Hans Berg.
You walk into a darkened gallery to encounter a set of three tables, each holding dozens of precarious shapes that appear to be made of glass. Upon closer inspection these shapes look not so much like poor imitations of candelabra, decanters and jugs but more like fantastic out-of-this world ice and glass shapes.
The room brightens and two of the films start simultaneously on opposite sides of the gallery, which is filled by Berg’s soundtrack. Unusually, the composer created only one soundtrack for all four films. The subtle combination of sounds that pervades the space is inadvertently reminiscent of Aphex Twin or Four Tet’s melodic tunes, where the use of rhythmic electronic sounds creates a moody atmosphere and suggests an evolving narrative. There is a gentle tinkering sound evocative of tapping or the soft striking of glass. Berg finds subtle repetition as an antidote to boredom.
The beauty of the installation coupled with the music is in stark contrast to the films – each dealing with difficult themes such as sexual awakening, sexual violence, emotional suffering, and physical pain. There is a connection between the four films, originally explored by Bataille in his novella The Story of the Eye, which is excellently demonstrated in the relationship between desire and suffering. In Bataille’s book, desire and suffering, pleasure and pain, are so closely intertwined it is often impossible to distinguish one from the other.
You feel a similar sensation watching Djurberg’s work. The grotesque and outrageous is mixed with the humorous and childish. From clay crocodiles that talk through speech bubbles to a playful-looking bull that commits suicide, the films continue with her trope of turning the everyday and the familiar into the disturbing and incongruous. Each short film is a tragedy acted out by clay figures. The result is strangely compelling, and even if at times you feel like looking away, the beauty of the music, and the painterly quality of the clay figures stop you from doing so.
The greatness of Djurberg’s work lies in the way in which the grotesque allows us to examine the disturbing from a new perspective. When reading George Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, I found myself half-intrigued, half-horrified, but nonetheless unable to look away. Similarly, My body is a house of glass is an erotic reflection on pleasure and pain, where a caricatured black woman, with prominent lips and muscular figure, has both legs severed by a cunning fox while a hungry-looking wild boar stares in delight. I was terrified watching the animalistic amputation, and yet Djurberg generates so much expectation for this moment and the image is so erotically charged, that I could not help relishing it. Just like the untimely but entirely predictable death of Marcelle in The Story of the Eye it provokes in the viewer a morally questionable reaction.
Equally disturbing and compelling, Didn’t you know I’m made of butter portrays a sexually charged encounter between a bull and a white woman who is slowly melting away and being put back together by the licks of the animal.
Aesthetically the work owes much to the disfigured images of Francis Bacon and Paul McCarthy; bodies made up of independent limbs, fleshy colours that splatter the screen. There is also a poignant use of archetypes. The main characters: a bull, a fox, the crocodiles, a black woman, and a white woman, both with exaggerated racial characteristics could easily be mistaken for the protagonists of Aesop’s fables. However, Djurberg’s work is ambiguous and non-judgemental. There is no cautionary moral at the end of each story, and the responsibilities for the strings of each clay figure are carefully passed on to the viewer. Just like Bataille did many years ago, Djurberg has subtly turned morality upside down. In this case, the morally questionable is seen as rich-coloured, tactile and beautiful.
