FLAGERMUSENS SYMMETRI
Om Lisbeth Eugenie Christensens kunst

Af Lilian Munk Rösing

I Karen Blixens fortælling ”Det ubeskrevne blad” berettes der om et kloster i Portugal, hvor nonnerne dyrker og forarbejder den fineste hør, sprunget af et hørfrø hjembragt fra det hellige land af en korsridder. Af denne hør væves lærred, der bliver brugt som brudelagener af Europas fornemste familier. Efter bryllupsnatten returneres lagenet til klosteret, hvor det indrammes og ophænges i et helt galleri af brudelagener med hver deres blodplet, som bevidner, at bruden var jomfru. Denne særprægede form for batikkunst frembringer motiver, der som blækklatten i en Rorschach-test lader sig tolke mangfoldigt:
”I de falmede og blegede aftegninger, som rammerne omslutter, kan man [...] finde billeder fra sin egen tankeverden: et træ, en rose, et hjerte, et sværd, eller endog et med sværd gennemstunget hjerte.”
Det mest interessante værk er dog ifølge fortællingen det tomme lærred - det lagen, der engang blev returneret uden blodplet: ”I hvilken evig og urokkelig troskab mod historien er ikke dette lærred blevet indføjet i rækken! Fortællerskerne selv tilhyller her deres hoveder og tier.”

Denne fortælling genfortæller sig i mit hoved, når jeg betragter Lisbeth Eugenie Christensens kunst. Hendes værker forekommer mig at dele en række motiver og momenter med Blixens fortælling. Vigtigheden af selve lærredets materialitet. Det fremmede frø, som tilføres udefra. Håndarbejdet, som kan udvikle sig til kunst. Kroppens bidrag til den skabende proces. Batik-agtige pletter og Rorschach-agtige motiver. Og ikke mindst underfundigheden; den lille diskrete latter, som klinger et sted i billederne.

Lærredets materialitet er vigtig for Christensens kunst: de smukt forarbejdede papirark, der bevares i den beskæring, de har ved deres ankomst til kunstneren. De vidner om det håndværk eller håndarbejde, der er fundamentet for kunstnerisk skabelse, som nonnernes kætning og vævning hos Blixen er fundamentet for de fornemme brudes body art. Når Christensen arbejder tæt med blyant og skaber snoninger gennem schatteringer, så vore øjne bedrages til dybde, har det noget af håndarbejdets tålmodige, tilfredsstillende monotoni over sig.
Men håndarbejdet ligger ikke bare i værkernes materialitet, i papirets kvalitet og blyantstregens tæthed, det optræder også som motiv. Der er farveklatter, som ligner batiktryk; der er motiver, som ligner papirklip; der er fletninger, som ligner hår eller julehjerter.

Et genkommende motiv er fletningen, der opløses. Fra pertentligt julehjerteflet i kvadrater hænger lange løse ender, der snor og vrider sig i graciøs uorden. Som hår der løsnes romantisk fra en lidt for stram frisure. Eller måske som en markering af en grænse mellem håndarbejde og kunst: håndarbejdets monotone mønstre må brydes af noget kaos, noget opløsning, for at kunsten kan opstå. Samtidig med at det er håndarbejdets omhyggelighed, det tætte arbejde med blyant, der får de løse ender til at sno sig.
Fletningen kan ses som urformen for det traditionelt kvindelige håndarbejde: vævning, strikning, hækling. Freud skriver meget fantasifuldt, at når en kvinde sidder med sit håndarbejde, sidder hun dybest set altid og fletter sit pubeshår. (For at skjule at hun ikke har nogen penis, naturligvis...)

Freud ville have elsket det billede, hvor Christensen på en smørgul baggrund med blyant har flettet en cirkelrund Gretchen-frisure, der i den ene ende løber gennem en umiskendeligt vaginal sprække og kommer ud i opløst tilstand, som uflettet hår. Men det er også et billede, der med sin underfundige flertydighed supplerer Freud. Opløses fletningen gennem sprækken, eller flettes håret? Starter fletningen i sprækken, eller slutter den der? Sprækken synes at være et transformationens rum, hvad enten denne transformation er opløsning eller formgivelse. Der er ikke tale om, at fletningen dækker over sprækken som over en mangel, men snarere at sprækken er et rum med kraft til at opløse og formgive. Sprækken er også en mund og minder os om at den forskel, der skal til for at give noget form, ikke behøver at tænkes som den forskel, fallos sætter – den kan også tænkes som forskellen mellem to læber. Måske med tænder imellem – associationen til en kam kan godt give den vaginale sprække tænder. Hvis vi med sprækken får kam til vores hår, får vi med kammen tænder til sprækken.

Men ligesom vi ikke må forfalde til at tro, at Blixens portugisiske nonner er et monoseksuelt kollektiv, som skaber på kvindekraft alene, således er ikke heller Christensens vaginale sprække et kvindekraftværk, der udfører sine transformationer i den lukkede cirkels selvforsynende kredsløb. Ligesom Blixens nonner har fået frøet til deres hør tilført af det andet køn fra et andet sted, således er også kimen til Christensens vaginale form hentet udefra. Formen er tegnet af efter et fotografi af en art deco smykkenål, som Christensen har fundet i en bog og anvender i flere af sine billeder. Nok er også smykkenålen et stykke håndværk, men det er gjort af hårdt metal og ikke af blød tekstil. Smykkenålen er således også et kontrapunkt til fletningen, ligesom de rette linjer, der udgår fra dens højre side, er en slags kontrapunkt til cirklen. Eller et alternativ til fletningen: i stedet for at sno og samle trådene, kan man skille dem ad og arrangere dem i rette linjer.

Smykkenålsformen er et rigt reservoir for associationer. Er den krop eller redskab? Er den de ydre skamlæber eller en indre livmoder med æggestok? Er den en sprække eller en nål, der skal lukke sprækken? Er den et dekorativt smykke eller en svangerskabsforebyggende spiral? Den er kort sagt lige så mangetydig og Rorschach-agtig som blodpletterne på Blixens lagener. Som disse står den i forbindelse med kvindeskødet. Men samtidig er den, ligesom hørfrøet, det fremmedelement, som er tilført værket, for at det kan forme og formere sig.

Det tilførte fremmedelement er et genkommende træk ved Christensens billeder. I en række af dem finder vi variationer over en computergenereret form bestående af stang og kugler. Denne cybernetiske og falliske form sættes sammen med de mere organiske, sirlige og vaginale former som smykkenålen. Den bliver et mandeanatomisk kontrapunkt til noget kvindeanatomisk. For at associere de falliske former til maskulinum er det ikke nødvendigt at vide, at det er Christensens kæreste, keramikeren Per Ahlmann, der har genereret dem på computeren. Men det er meget sjovt at vide og gør det helt konkret, at formen er bragt til værket af en mand, ligesom hørfrøet til nonneklosteret. Ophævet til det mere abstrakte siger det noget om en skabelsesproces, der afhænger af at få et fremmedelement tilført. Det kan siges at være et alment princip for kunstnerisk skabelse, men er af Christensen gjort til et konkret princip for arbejdsprocessen.

Lidt ligesom beskueren hos Blixen står over for noget, der både kan være en udfordrende gåde og en sjofel vits, står beskueren af Christensens billeder ofte over for former, der synes på én gang at referere ganske plat til kønsorganerne, på den anden side at indgå i en gådefuld mekanik og dynamik med sig selv og med hinanden. Til forskel fra den sjofle vits er kønsorganerne ikke underforståede associationer, men tværtimod det åbenlyse udtryk, som så raffineres af farvebehandling og af spillet mellem gestalterne.

I et billede mødes smykkenålens gestalt i en lysende farve med en grøn og éndimensional variant af stang-med-kugler. Smykkenålen er her ikke bare form, men også ornamenteret flade; dens bølgende ciseleringer er tegnet op og giver figuren dybde, hvilket forstærkes af den lettere fosforescerende lysvirkning. Tilsammen danner smykkenålen og stangen noget, der kunne ligne en pisk.
Der er noget drilsk inversionsfigur over dette billede, et spil med forgrund og baggrund og forløb. Sprækkens dyb kunne strengt taget også være en forhøjning. Stangens fladhed kan både få det til at se ud som om, den er foran smykkenålen, og at den er bagved. Ligesom det er en tredje mulighed at opleve, at de to sammenføjede gestalter befinder sig på samme plan. Hvad angår retning eller forløb, kan vi både forestille os, at den grønne stang er et håndtag, hvorfra der hænger en pisk (vi følger skikkelsens forløb fra højre mod venstre), og at smykkenålen er en slags lod eller legeme, hvorfra der hænger en slags kabel eller snabel (vi følger forløbet fra venstre mod højre). Figurernes forening foregår under dække af et sort gitter. En slags fletværk, igen, men noget der leder tankerne i retning snarere af stålkonstruktioner end af tekstil. Er det sorte gitter et grid, der skaber orden? Eller er det snarere en slags spindelvæv, der minder om al ordens opløsning?

Ud over nålen har Christensen hentet et andet art deco-smykke ind i sit billedunivers: en broche i form af en flagermus. Dens symmetriske skikkelse breder sig på flere af billederne, snart flagermuseagtigt i sort, snart papirklipsagtigt i hvidt. Snart ækel, snart sirlig. Hvis den hvide version af motivet er et gækkebrev, er den kærlige hilsen, det bringer dig, måske fra et lille ækelt kryb. Ikke en fugl foruden vinger, men en mus med vinger. I den hvide version er ”gækkebrevet” også tvetydigt derved, at det både kan se ud som om at det er malet på papiret, og at det er klippet ud af papiret. Er det et hul eller et ekstra lag? Og hvad gør det ved flagermusegestalten, at der er lagt et sort gitter over dens hoved? Et gitter, der i sig selv kan ligne en slags kadaver (mus eller kylling) eller en torturhætte, offerets eller bødlens … Ganske enkle former rummer en kompleksitet af mulige betydninger og kalder på beskuerens egne associationer. Som de besøgende på Blixens galleri af plettede lagener henvises beskueren til ”tankebilleder fra sin egen verden”.

Det tvetydige møde mellem sirligt og ækelt, håndarbejde og kunst, fallisk og vaginalt, forgrund og baggrund, figurativt og abstrakt, formgivning og opløsning, kropslige og kunstfrembragte former gør Christensens billeder vittige på en særlig måde. På en måde, hvor man gerne må forstå ”vittig” som noget, der både har med vid og vittighed at gøre. Det, der kunne have været en højlydt latter over de åbenlyst seksuelle (falliske og vaginale) motiver, modgås af en flertydig sirlighed, så vi ikke helt ved, hvad vi skal tro. Lidt ligesom hos Blixen mødes det grovkornede med det subtile, vits med vid.

Blixens fortælling ophøjer det uplettede lagen til at være det ypperste kunstværk. Den talende tavshed blandt rækken af tegn. Det helt blanke lærred for beskuerens projektioner. (Var bruden ikke jomfru, eller er hun forblevet det?) Den stoflige materialitet, som er værkets fundament. Finder vi et sådant blankt lærred hos Christensen? Ikke i konkreteste forstand, naturligvis, men vi finder billeder, som hele tiden lader os fornemme kvaliteten af det papir, de er malet eller tegnet på. Og vi finder den talende tavshed; hvis et Christensen-værk var en sætning, ville den efterfølges af tre tankeprikker for at angive det moment, hvor værket selv tier og efterlader beskueren med en egen eftertænksomhed og et lille smil på læben.

THE BAT'S SYMMETRY
On Lisbeth Eugenie Christensen's art

By Lilian Munk Rösing

In "The Blank Page", one of the tales from Baroness Karen Blixen's Last Tales, there is an account of a convent in Portugal where the sisters cultivate and process the finest linen, sprung from flax seeds brought home from the Holy Land by a crusader. From this flax is woven the canvas that is used for making bridal sheets for Europe's oldest and noblest families. On the morning after the wedding, the sheet of the night is returned to the convent, where it is framed and hung up in a long gallery of bridal sheets, each with its own blood marking, which offers solemn testimony that the bride was indeed a virgin. This distinctive form of batik art brings forth motives which, much like the ink blot in a Rorschach test, lend themselves to being interpreted in manifold ways:
"Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility [...] may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword – or even a heart pierced through with a sword."(1)
The most interesting work, though, according to the story, is the blank canvas – the pure white sheet that once was returned without any blood marking: " … with what eternal and unswerving loyalty has not this canvas been inserted in the row! The story-tellers themselves before it draw their veils over their faces and are dumb."(2)

This tale retells itself in my head as I contemplate Lisbeth Eugenie Christensen's art. It appears to me that her works share a number of motives and features with Blixen's story: the importance of the canvas's materiality; the foreign seed that has been supplied from elsewhere; the hand-made craftsmanship that can evolve into art; the body's contribution to the creative process; batik-like splotches and Rorschach-like motifs; and especially the subtlety – the modestly subdued laughter that resounds somewhere in the pictures.

The materiality of the canvas is essential to Christensen's art: the beautifully prepared sheets of paper that are retained in the cropping they possess upon their arrival to the artist. They offer testimony about the handicraft or handwork that are the foundation for artistic creation, as the sisters' spinning and weaving of the linen in Blixen's story are the foundation for the high-born bride's body art. When Christensen works in such a concentrated way with pencil and creates twinings through shadings so that our eyes are deceived with respect to depth, there is something of needlework's patient and gratifying monotony about it.
However, the handwork is seated not only in the work's materiality, in the paper's quality and in the pencil stroke's density: it also makes its appearance as a motif. There are splotches of color that look like batik prints; there are motives that look like paper cuttings; there are braidings that look like hair or pleated Christmas hearts.

A recurring motif is the braiding that is being untied. From a scrupulously rendered Christmas heart, pleated in squares, hang long loose ends that twist and turn in graceful disorder. Like hair that is being loosened, romantically, from a somewhat too stiff coiffure. Or maybe as a demarcation of a boundary between needlework and art: needlework's monotonous patterns have to be broken up by some degree of chaos, some measure of dissolution, so that art can emerge. At the same time, though, it is the handwork's painstaking diligence, the concentrated work with the pencil, that gets the loose ends to meander and twist.
The braiding can be regarded as the primordial form of traditional female handwork: weaving, knitting and crocheting. Freud writes in a most imaginative way that when a woman sits doing her needlework, she is basically always busy plaiting her pubic hair (… in order to conceal that she does not have a penis, of course ...).
Freud would have been fond of the picture where Christensen, against a butter-colored background has, in pencil, braided a circular Gretchen-hairstyle which, at its one end, is led through an unmistakably vaginal opening and re-emerges in a disbanded state as loose strands of hair. But this is also an image that, with its cunning ambiguity, supplements Freud. Is the braid being loosened as it passes through the opening or is it rather the case that the hair is being braided inside there? Does the braiding commence inside the opening or does it terminate there? The opening appears to be a space of transformation, whether or not this involves dissolution or taking form. Here, the braid is not covering over the opening as it might cover some kind of deficiency. Instead, the opening is a space with the potential to dissolve and to give form.

The opening is also a mouth and reminds us that the difference that has to be there in order to give form to something need not necessarily be conceived of as the difference that the phallus posits – it can also be conceived as the difference between two lips. And maybe even with teeth in between – the association to a comb can well serve to give teeth to the vaginal opening. If we, with the opening, acquire a comb for our hair, we acquire, with the comb, teeth for the opening.

But just as we should not be tempted into thinking that Blixen's Portuguese sisters make up a mono-sexual collective that creates on the basis of women's energy alone, neither do Christensen's vaginal openings constitute a female power plant that carries out its transformations exclusively within the closed circle's self-sufficient circuit. Just as Blixen's sisters have had the seeds for their linen supplied by the other gender, from some other place, the germ of Christensen's vaginal form has also been obtained from elsewhere. The form has been delineated after a photograph of an art deco brooch that Christensen found inside a book and that she uses in several of her pictures. To be sure, the brooch is also a piece of handicraft. But it is made of hard metal and not of soft fabric. The brooch thus also poses a counterpoint to the braid, just as the straight lines emanating from its right side constitute some kind of counterpoint to the circle. Or some kind of alternative to the braiding: instead of twining and gathering the strands, they can be separated and arranged in straight lines.

The brooch form is a copious reservoir of associations. Is it body or implement? Is it the labia majora or a uterus with ovaries? Is it an opening or a pin that is supposed to close the opening? Is it a piece of decorative jewelry or a contraceptive coil? It is, to put it succinctly, just as susceptible to a variety of interpretations and just as Rorschach-like as the blood markings on Blixen's sheets. Like these, it stands in relation to the female flesh. But at the same time, it is, like the flax seed, the foreign element that has been infused into the work so that it can breed and propagate.

The induced foreign element is a recurring feature in Christensen's pictures. In a number of them, we find variations on a computer-generated form consisting of rods and spheres. This cybernetic and phallic form is sometimes juxtaposed with the more organic, meticulous and vaginal forms like the brooch. It becomes a male-anatomic counterpoint to something female-anatomic. In order to associate the phallic forms with masculine space, it is not necessary to know that it is Christensen's boyfriend, ceramist Per Ahlmann, who has generated them on the computer. But it is quite amusing to note this fact and it serves to drive home the point that the form has been brought into the work by a man, as the flax seed was brought to the sisters' convent. Elevated onto the more abstract plane, this tells something about a creative process that depends on having a foreign element induced. This can be taken to be a general principle for artistic creation but Christensen has turned it into a tangible principle for her working procedure.

In a manner that is somewhat akin to how, in Blixen's tale, the beholder is confronted with something that can be both a challenging enigma and a bawdy joke, the viewer of Christensen's images is often confronted with forms that seem to refer in an altogether vulgar way to the genitals and simultaneously to enter into enigmatic mechanical and dynamical relations with themselves and each other. However, in contrast to the bawdy joke, the genitals are not implicit associations but rather overt expressions that are subsequently refined by the application of color and by the interplay between the gestalts.

In one picture, the brooch's gestalt, rendered in a luminous color, converges with a green and one-dimensional variant of the rod-with-spheres motif. Here, the brooch is not merely form but also ornamented surface: its undulating chasings have been highlighted, giving depth to the figure – and this is further enhanced by the slightly phosphorescent lighting effect. Taken together, the brooch and the rod/spheres fashion something that might be recognized as a whip.
There are a few teasing inversion figures hovering about in this picture, giving rise to an interplay among foreground and background and spatial sequence. The opening's depth could, strictly speaking, also be a raised surface. The rod's flatness can cause it to look both like it is positioned in front of the brooch and that it is behind it. There is, moreover, a third possibility of perceiving the two joined gestalts as being situated on one and the same plane. As far as the direction or the course are concerned, we could imagine that the green rod is a handgrip from where a whip is hanging (here, we are scanning the figure's spatial sequence from right to left) or, alternatively, that the brooch is a kind of plumb bob or body from where some kind of cable or trunk is hanging (now, we are scanning from left to right). The figures' combination takes place under the shelter of a black grille. It is a kind of interlacing braided pattern, once again, but something that leads the mind toward steel constructions rather than toward fabric. Is the black grill a grid that gives rise to order? Or is it rather a kind of cobweb that is reminiscent of the dissolution of every kind of order?

In addition to this ornamental pin, Christensen has taken another piece of art deco jewelry into her pictorial universe: a brooch fashioned in the form of a bat. Its symmetrical apparition spreads itself out in several of the pictures: sometimes rendered in bat-like fashion – in black, and sometimes more in the manner of a paper cutting – in white. Sometimes loathsome, sometimes prim. When the white version of the motif is a who-am-I Easter snowdrop-paper cutting mystery letter,(3) it is an affectionate greeting that the work brings to you, even though it may have been sent from a repulsive and creepy creature – not a bird without wings but a mouse with wings. In the white version, the snowdrop-paper-cutting letter is also ambiguous in the sense that it can look both like it has been painted on paper and like it has been cut out from the paper. Is it a hole or an extra layer? And what effect does it have on the bat-gestalt that a black grille has been placed over its head? It is a grille which, in itself, can resemble a kind of carcass (a mouse's or a chicken's) or a torture hood, be it the victim's or the executioner's ... Very simple forms contain a complexity of possible meanings and call forth the viewer's own associations. Much like the visitors to Blixen's gallery of stained sheets, the spectator is being referred to "pictures from [her/his] own world of ideas."

The ambiguous meetings between prim and loathsome, between handicraft and art, between phallic and vaginal, between foreground and background, between figurative and abstract, between designing and dissolving and between bodily and art-generated forms all serve to render Christensen's pictures witty in a very special way: in a way where you might be inclined to understand "witty" as being something that has to do with both wit and with wittiness. What could have been a boisterous guffaw in response to the overtly sexual (i.e. phallic and vaginal) motives is countered by an equivocal meticulousness, with the result that we do not quite know what to believe. As is the case in Blixen's story, the coarse-grained meets the subtle, the joke converges with wit.

Blixen's story elevates the unblemished sheet to being the most outstanding work of art. The speaking silence among the series of signs. The completely blank canvas for the viewer's projections. (Was the bride not a virgin or has she remained so?) The textural materiality, which is the work's foundation. Do we find this kind of blank canvas in Christensen's work? Well, not in the most concrete sense, of course, but we find pictures that constantly prompt us to sense the quality of the paper upon which they have been painted or drawn. And we find the speaking silence: if a Christensen piece were a sentence, it would presumably be followed by three ellipsis dots in order to specify the moment when the work itself trails off into silence and leaves the viewer suspended with a special thoughtfulness … and a little smile on the lips.

Translated by Dan A. Marmorstein


(1) Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen): "The Blank Page", from Last Tales, Putnam, London 1957. p. 129
(2) Op. cit. p. 131
(3) A "gækkebrev" is sent, typically without any return address, as a "guess-who-I-am" message and often contains a special Easter greeting. One of the more poetic texts that frequently appears on these kinds of paper-cutting letters is the couplet: "A snowdrop, a summer's joke, a bird without wings / a little friend who cares for you, a loving greeting brings."