Lessons in Anatomy. Morten Viskum

We find it normal that a cadaver should be dissected for scientific purposes to discover why we become ill and how a disease develops or to seek the cause of death. We find it equally normal that many artists in the past learned their lessons in anatomy by studying dead bodies and, if necessary, dismembering them. As macabre as it might seem, this does not horrify us. Seeing those muscles, those limbs, those bodies transformed into marvellous works of art assuages our moral objections. We prefer to dwell on the quality of the work of art, the way it was created, and we take comfort in thinking that we are within the realm of representation. We are not confronted by what the artist had actually seen, but by its transfiguration into art.   

To create his paintings, Morten Viskum uses the severed hand of a cadaver as a brush and animal blood mixed with acrylic paint as his colour. Whether we think of the maximum ten percent blood concentration in his studio paintings or the fifty percent in his public performances, the presence of any blood at all still exerts full impact on the symbolic level. Even one drop carries within it the memory of life.

Taking the action that gives origin to the work to be an integral part of the work itself, on a number of occasions he has transformed the creation of the painting into a public performance, filmed and photographed with the same spirit with which Yves Klein filmed and photographed the process giving rise to his Anthropométries. In using his body as a brush, Klein left traces on the canvas of the moving bodies of persons destined to disappear over time. If we so desired, today we could reconstruct those people’s identity via their DNA trapped in the paint. Viskum, on the other hand, presents to everyone’s gaze the use of the severed hand as a brush and animal blood mixed with acrylic paint as colour in his performances. While he does in some way allow those body parts to continue to act within the world of the living, he also shows us something we would reasonably prefer not to see or be aware of.

In 1997 he acquired the first of a series of amputated hands of cadavers. In 1998, after long considering the ethical implications involved in using it, he used the hand to paint the first work in the series The Hand that Never Stopped Painting. The hand was from a man who had been around sixty years old. Viskum now has seven of such hands, five male and two female. Each one, he explains, reacts differently to contact with the canvas or paper, exactly as do the brushes chosen by a painter to accomplish a particular aim.

In other works, Viskum – who studied veterinary medicine before becoming an artist – uses laboratory animals, which he shows to us in all the crudity of their role as sacrificial victims in man’s battle against death. As writes Tone Lyngstaad Nias, Viskum’s work “opens for us a room into which he places memento mori, a space where the dialectic between the abhorrent and the sacred, or religion and science, might be considered, and cultural borders and taboos examined.”[i]

Viskum is certainly not the first and will not be the last to make use of dead animals and their blood and to associate them with religious symbolism. It is normal at first blush that one is led to think that his art reflects a quest for sensationalism, which, as we know, has on numerous occasions given artists the opportunity to amplify their notoriety. However, we also cannot disregard the fact that couched within expressions that are legitimately seen as extreme lie questions regarding life and mortality associated with an existential condition and cultural heritage. And it is precisely in this heritage and in his personal history that the roots and motivations behind Viskum’s work must be sought.

A problematic relationship with a father or a sense of loss at his death has marked the lives of many key figures in northern European culture. We have seen this in the biographies of Søren Kierkegaard, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Ingmar Bergman, Lars Von Trier and Morten Viskum, whose personal histories evidence the extent to which shared cultural origins affect the way the theme of death is addressed. What unites these figures across the great distances separating them is the conception of an original sin that runs through many aspects of life, religious sensibilities and thinking. A sense of angst is a constituent of the existence of each of these authors.

The death of Munch’s father and other dear ones plays a prominent role in his work. He lost his father when he was twenty-five, in 1889. “And I live with the dead—my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father—mostly with him—Every memory, the smallest things come up. I see him as I saw him—the last time four months ago when he bade me farewell on the pier. We were a little embarrassed over each other—would reluctantly show, in fact, how painful it was to part —  How fond we were of each other in spite of all. How he prayed for my sake at night because I couldn’t share his faith.”[ii]

Viskum also evokes the father figure in his works. Regarding one of his Viskumboks, which we will discuss further on, that contains a photograph of his father, he explains: “In the photograph my father is sitting on the sofa, he is bald because of chemotherapy and trying to eat, and we have some friends visiting and they cannot speak with him as he cannot speak anymore.”[iii]

Munch’s work is pervaded with a sense of loss and anguish, and it brings this sense of loss and anguish to the fore via a way of painting that is more concerned with conveying emotions and memories than with rendering an image that resembles nature. In his painting Death in the Sickroom (prob. 1893), Munch commemorates his sister Sophie, two years his senior, who died at the age of sixteen. We see her from behind, sitting in a chair. We are unable to see her face. It is already as if she is just a hollow imprint in an empty bed. All those around her are dressed in dark colours. Death is already in the room.

Many of Munch’s works feature a wait for death. And Viskum, since his debut as an artist, has re-expressed Munch’s sentiments through a scientific approach, informed partly through his veterinary studies and work in animal experimentation laboratories. The relationship between science and death also appears in the works of Munch, who portrayed Kristian Schreiner, a physician and professor of anatomy who later became his personal doctor, in the company of cadavers. Professor of Anatomy Kristian Schreiner (1928) is a painting on three sheets of paper joined into one and indeed is often referred to as a collage. This feature leads us to think that Munch returned several times to the autopsy room that provided the setting for the painting and did a number of studies of the cadavers there before painting the final version of the portrait.

Like Munch, Bergman – another eminent representative of northern European culture – also jimmied more than one lock so that he could look death straight in the eye. Bergman tells that as a child he often accompanied his father to celebrate Mass in the chapel at the Sophiahemmet hospital. There was also a funeral chapel on the grounds of the hospital. Bergman happened upon it by chance and, after making friends with the custodian, often returned there. He says that he saw many corpses in varying states of decomposition. He also recounts that he was once locked in the Sophiahemmet morgue for a few hours when he was ten years old. In his autobiography he describes his mother’s dead body and recorded the phases of his father’s death from oesophageal cancer and the feelings it aroused in him. He also described the horrible death of his brother as the result of a medical error.

The morgue, like the doctor’s office and the scientific laboratory, is a place where one is inspired to ponder the meaning of life, observing the effects of death and the mystery of how a life may suddenly end. Viskum began pondering this matter early on, as a child, while examining the dead birds on his patio, killed when they crashed into the treacherous plate glass windows. For these birds, death had suddenly halted their flight, it had suddenly interrupted an action that involved the expenditure of a great amount of physical energy.

Viskum worked with laboratory animals from 1984 to 2008, twenty-four years. This began when he was a student of veterinary medicine and continued, even after he had dedicated himself to art, as a part-time job to support himself while attending the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Oslo and to fund purchases of materials for his art projects. His œuvre reminds us that while animals suffer physically like human beings and in many cases experience a sense of loss, they are also different from us in that they do not feel the dread of mortal finitude: the animal may fear an immediate threat but it doesn’t fear death because it does not live in the experience of a historical dimension. The death of an animal is a natural event, while that of a human is the interruption of a project.

This awareness underlies Viskum’s symbolic humanization of the animal in his work, going so far as to stage a memorial service in his installation The Funeral (2006). It is presumably the funeral of a rat, attended by only two of its peers, two stuffed white rats. A small white coffin with a small wreath of flowers stands before 176 metal chairs, all but two of them empty. The fact that the two rats are seated far from one another evokes a feeling of desolation. The Funeral is a reflection on the fact that, in spite of the fact that it touches every one of us, death seems to be an event that all deliberately ignore, something we look away from, even though our ultimate fate is no different from that of laboratory rats. By ritualizing the death of the animal, Viskum gives it the historical-symbolic dimension proper to humans.  

Viskum responds to the issues raised by our awareness of death by bringing into interactive play our emotional condition, scientific pragmatism, symbolic dimension and rituality. The emotional condition is associated with an individual’s life experience, by relations with other human beings and thus finds its extreme expression in the sense of loss; scientific pragmatism relates to the human battle against disease; the symbolic dimension, linked to the dynamics of language, makes it possible to discern the hidden meaning of signs that belong to a universal heritage and hence transcend the individual dimension; rituality involves actions that confer sacredness on the symbolic dimension. In his interpretation of the world, Viskum had brought these four factors into reactive interplay before he even knew he was an artist.

Regarding the birds that Viskum found dead on his and his neighbours’ patios when he was about six years old, he says that he buried some fifty of them in a nearby woods with a small stone, wooden cross and fresh flowers, all sized to suit the tiny graves.[iv] Underlying this decision was a feeling of compassion, but also the desire to remove the bodies of the birds from sight and protect them from the onslaught of insects. Although here we are analysing the gesture of a child, not entirely removed from the realm of play, this story helps us understand the symbolic and poetic dimension of the work that Viskum would develop over the years. Marking the birds’ graves with a stone and a cross places the action within the sphere of the symbolic, placing flowers is a ritual element that testifies to the process of keeping alive the memory of the one who is no more. The young Viskum chose the stone, the cross and the flowers to mark the grave taking care to maintain proportions that would ensure aesthetic balance to the whole. Placing a cross at the burial site of an animal also denotes the idea that, like man, the animal too has a soul, a conception that would gain significant meaning for Viskum over time. And the choice to bury the birds at the foot of a tree also has a symbolic value: the roots sink into the depths while the branches stretch upward, making the tree the symbolic element joining heaven and earth. These things obviously did not go through the mind of the six-year-old Viskum, he acted on instinct. But as we have learned from the fathers of psychoanalysis, the symbolic moves in the subconscious regardless of the degree of awareness of the subject.  

But if the animal has a soul, how can we justify the fact that it is continually sacrificed to suit our needs? Viskum addresses this theme in his work I Hope You Didn’t Die in Vain (1999), steel shelving eight metres wide and two metres high with an orderly array of small glass jars. In every jar, immersed in formaldehyde, is a mouse no more than ten days old.

In different sizes and colours, the mice represent the animal experimentation laboratories where the animals are offered in sacrifice in the human quest for earthly salvation. Viskum thus places the animal on the symbolic order of religion.

The most striking expression in this vein is Love from God, a series of eighteen photographs of a crucified laboratory rat progressively dissected away to nothing; only the bare cross remains in the final photo. On the formal level, this work, like others by Viskum, embodies the process of simplification that has characterized many modern and contemporary works of art. Suffice it to consider the progressive distillation of the image initiated by Piet Mondrian in 1908 starting from Red Tree. By analysing the forms and the relations within the tree that link the limbs and the trunk, Mondrian arrived at an abstract representation of the tree. We may also think of an analogous process in Theo van Doesburg’s 1918 work Composition VIII (The Cow), where a realistic drawing of the animal becomes, through variation after variation, an abstract geometrical painting in primary colours. In 1945-46, Picasso refined the figure of the bull, stripping it through eleven successive stages down to the essential skeleton of the original figure.

The position of the rat Viskum binds to the cross unequivocally refers to the crucifixion of Christ. In some versions of Love from God, the image of the animal on the cross is presented in vintage frames that relate the work to representations from the past, thus establishing a continuity with traditional religious iconography. There is no iconoclastic intent behind the work; it expresses deeply religious feelings by creating an image for the role of sacrificial victim played by the laboratory animal. Like the lamb, the laboratory rat is elevated to a symbol of innocence. It is the predestined victim that will pay the price, through physical suffering and death, of the human attempt to find a path to salvation. And yet, like Christ scorned, the laboratory animal rates nothing in our eyes: we are oblivious to its suffering, comforted by the knowledge that science, and thus all of us, will benefit from its sacrifice. Humans engage in experimentation on laboratory animals to save other humans, so that each person may enjoy and share the affections of their loved ones as long as possible. Scientific research on animals, with everything this inevitably means for the animal, is thus motivated by the need to keep love alive. Quite the paradox!

As we have said, on a par with other significant representatives of northern European culture, Viskum has filtered his existential vision through his relationship with his father and his sense of loss at his death. In him, however, the tragic nature of existence becomes an element described with almost a detached attitude. His poetics is so deeply rooted in northern European cultural tradition that it can only be approached in all its complexity when seen against this backdrop and through those who have given expression to it. Although it is not incorrect to place his work in the context of the contemporary art dominated by such artists as Damien Hirst and Andres Serrano, Viskum’s conceptual elaboration of his sense of loss puts him on a different road, putting more distance between him and these artists than might first appear. If anything, his artistic conceptions harmonize more closely with those of Marc Quinn, with whom he shares the theme of finitude and beauty residing in what we are inclined to consider “imperfections of nature”. His shelves have no relation to Hirst’s showcases and pharmacies, which address the theme of faith.

In Hirst’s showcases and shelves, the boxes of medicines are arranged according to an aesthetic criterion hinging on the size and colour of the packages. This is at odds with what we would, at least until recently, in real pharmacies and medicine cabinets, where the bottles and boxes are grouped according to much different criteria. Nowadays medicines are hidden away in drawers that protect them from light, but until recently they were grouped according to illness, alphabetically or by pharmaceutical company. This notwithstanding the fact that every doctor, as Hirst says, arranges them according to his or her own criteria. With his Medicine Cabinets series, Hirst highlights the way we regard medicines, swallowing them without really knowing what they do, as a sort of gesture of faith. The first of these works, created by Hirst in 1988, nevertheless has a relation to the life of the artist in that it is conceived as a portrait of his grandmother made by assembling the packages of medicine that she left him, as he requested, when she died. The title, Sinner, refers to the Clash song The Sound of Sinners (1980), sung by Joe Strummer. As is evident both formally and in terms of content, the Viskumboks make no reference to Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets. If anything, we may find a reference point in the showcases by Beuys, and particularly in Auschwitz Demonstration (1956-1964).

Auschwitz Demonstration is the first of the showcases created by the German artist. It evokes the ineffable horrors of the Nazi death camps through a series of used, worn, blackened, broken objects and hair, sausages and the remains of a rat. There is also a clay Christ on a plate in crucifixion pose. To make even clearer the gap separating Hirst and Viskum: if Hirst’s guru is Bacon, Viskum’s is Munch. The Viskumboks are thus a novel combination of the poetics of Munch and the formal strategy of Beuys.

Viskum is bound to Munch by a sort of affinity of sentiment, manifested in the various references he makes to The Scream, one of the iconic works in the history of modern art and Norwegian culture. Munch appears for the first time in Viskum’s art, albeit in an indirect and less explicit manner than in later works, in I Hate Art and I Hate Museums in 1996, when Viskum was still a student at the Academy of Fine Art. This series of photographic works is characterized by a baby white mouse with its mouth open wide and its head in its paws in a pose reminiscent of the subject in Munch’s famous painting. Behind it, in place of that “sky [...] like blood—sliced with strips of fire”[v] that triggered Munch’s boundless, all-pervasive scream, Viskum places postcards of famous museums and of well known historical, modern and contemporary works of art collected during his travels. Given his special love for these works and museums, the titles mean exactly the opposite of what they say. In 2013, invited by the Haugar Art Museum to participate in the exhibition Munch by Others, Viskum added a work to this series titled I Hate Haugar, in which the screaming rat stands before a silkscreen by Andy Warhol, part of the Haugar Art Museum collection, representing Munch’s Scream. Viskum discussed the genesis of this work by explaining that he found it odd that Warhol’s version of Munch’s Scream was better known than the original and that orbiting around that work and its various citations, interpretations and reprises was a fully fledged industry of films and novelty items.

Equating every work placed behind the screaming baby rat with Munch’s blood-red sky suggests that there is no work of art that does not carry dramatic elements within it. For the same exhibition, Viskum also staged the performance Painting a Text about a Painting, documented in a video, in which he used the severed hand of a dead person as a brush and animal blood as colour to make a copy on canvas of Munch’s journal entry about The Scream.

As he had done in 2006, when he used blood to rework reproductions of Warhol’s Maos and Flowers and Lichtenstein’s Speech Bubble Paintings, in 2015, Viskum painted on a large black and white print of Munch’s Scream using Hand no. 2 and animal blood. Appropriating the repetition and seriality typical of Pop Art, that same year he did five other versions, all in different colours, and all painted in blood using a severed hand. The screen prints are accompanied by Munch’s journal entry written in black acrylic.

Munch and Viskum also share the practice of self-portraiture. In addition to painting his own portrait on a number of occasions, Munch often took self-timer photographs of himself, often doing double exposures to make his image appear evanescent. He provides no clear image of himself here. Equally ambiguous is Viskum’s image in his self-portraits, where he creates an interplay between his own image and that of someone else: perhaps someone in particular or perhaps representing an entire category of people.

To create these self-portraits, Viskum goes to Paris every year on his birthday, 2 February, and has a body mould made in a specialized workshop. He then uses this to make a silicone and resin sculpture, adding human hair and clothing. Beginning in 2004 with Immortal, the self-portrait project comprises both large installations with images of the artist in the guise of historical or religious figures – Christ, Gaddafi, a devout Muslim, a priest... – and others associated with contemporary society and news events – a scientist, homeless person, bodybuilder or terrorist. Since 2006, he has also created self-portraits using photographs predating the cycle of sculptures. His self-portrait wearing priestly garb, for example, was created in 2006, but it shows him the way he was in 2003. 

As in all of his works, the common denominator among the self-portraits is the theme of finitude. Viskum explained to Jean Wainwright that his sculptural self-portraits “arrive [in Vestfossen] in wooden crates, almost like a coffin, so it is an odd sensation when I open them.”[vi] Anthony Ritter, the fabricator in Paris who helps Viskum make the sculptures every year, explains that “there is something very strange about having a cast of your own face – the first time you have it done it is like seeing yourself dead, especially when it is the white plaster; the second time you are more used to it. Strange when you think about it, as it is only plaster and the imprint of your face, but does have an effect on what you think about death, you get used to the idea of seeing yourself inert and pale.[vii]

Viskum does not conceive of his self-portraits as mere representations of himself. On the one hand he uses the strategy of conceptual art, which has among its objectives that of questioning the dynamics of language, while on the other he places himself within a narrative. This dynamic is associated with figurative art and is something to which conceptualism, with only rare exceptions, has always stood counter.

The first work in the series of self-portraits is Immortal, where the artist is himself looking at a wall where he has written the word IMMORTAL in blood, varnishing it to prevent it from fading. An organ and a stool stand below the writing. On the wall to his right are two vintage illustrations covered in animal blood. They show a head used in phrenology studies viewed frontally and in profile. In Imago Dei (2006), Viskum is Christ holding a skull in his right hand and a shrunken head in his left. Two physical features are combined in The Clown (2012): a clown costume and the hairdo and beard of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist responsible for the killings on the island of Utøya in 2011. In this case Viskum gives himself an image that is at once ambiguous, ridiculous and chilling. In The Beggar (2014) he is a homeless person kneeling on a piece of cardboard holding a sign saying “HUNGRY AND HOMELESS PLEASE HELP THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS”. And again, in I am Charlie (2015) he is Charlie Chaplin with his classic bowler hat and cane and a copy of Charlie Hebdo under his arm.

Each of these installations with self-portrait contains an encrypted but not secret narrative, laden with personal and collective meaning often associated with well defined current events. For example, I am Charlie is the product of his emotional response to the killings at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the attack on the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who was Viskum’s teacher at the Academy of Fine Art and since then a friend. Portraying himself as Charlie Chaplin was a way to evoke one of the most powerful expressions of satire, staged in 1940 by Chaplin, who ridiculed Hitler in The Great Dictator. Becoming Charlot with a copy of Charlie Hebdo under his arm was Viskum’s way of commenting on the slaughter of the editors of the magazine and support the fight for freedom of speech, beset by the fear of reprisals.

Assuming different identities while leaving one’s own face recognizable is a way of communicating that the individual is an expression of an unfathomable complexity that cannot be characterized by pat definitions. The same can be said of Munch’s double-exposure photographic self-portraits. Viskum brings to the stage a sort of theatre of appearances that gives an image to the discrepancy between being and appearing, imagination and reality, fear of death and the lack thereof, which in many cases coincides with a feeling of immortality. But although one can rationally accept the idea of one’s inevitable demise this does not result in liberation from the existential implications that death brings into play. We may not be afraid of the idea of our death, but we cannot remain indifferent before the loss of our loved ones. The thing that makes the idea of death so distressing, even for those who do not fear it, is that we can only know its effects, we do not know what it actually is. Death is an abstraction that takes concrete form in reality, but something we can only wonder about without ever getting beyond mere hypotheses. Hence the feeling of disorientation when we find ourselves before something imponderable that looms over us generating a sense of dread.

For Kierkegaard, dread, precisely because it is associated with the imponderable, is the very essence of our existence in that every choice we make has unpredictable consequences. Unlike Kierkegaard, who saw in the father figure the origin of an unredeemable guilt, Viskum idealizes the father figure, which assumes a determining role in focusing his own existential outlook within his narrative. Viskum tells us that his father was an architect and the director of city planning in Drammen, becoming city planning director for Oslo about a year before he died.

While on the one hand his father’s death did not eliminate all traces of the work he had done, on the other, it made it impossible for him to complete the projects he had only begun. It prevented his father from expressing his full potential. Viskum’s father represented more than the affective sphere for the artist, he was also a person who, having a role in society, left traces of his existence in the place where he lived. His death entered the young Viskum’s work in the last photo that he took of his father, which he would include in one of his Viskumboks (1993-1997), a series of 72 boxes that he began to work on when he was still an art student and that contain photos of his family, photos of a crucified rat, postcards, small objects, medicines, spices, mice in formaldehyde, syringes, scalpels, vials, test tubes and other medical devices that he had accumulated when he was a student of veterinary medicine. 

Collecting objects and arranging them in boxes, display cases and other sorts of containers is a consolidated practice in modern and contemporary art. From Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and Joseph Beuys to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Marc Dion, assemblage recounts the desire to attribute dignity as repositories of historical memory also to objects salvaged from the trash. With the approach of a collector, these and other artists have sought to protect objects associated – for better or for worse – with a life from destruction and oblivion. The Viskumboks carry on the tradition initiated by the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) in the early 1920s, when he enclosed the scene of the painting in wooden boxes and used – as if they were colour fields applied to the canvas with a brush – found objects, newspaper clippings, pieces of cloth, wood, metal, cork or other materials. As revolutionary and farsighted as Schwitter’s conception of the work may have been, as demonstrated by his influence on artists in the coming generation, it still responds to a compositional logic that transcends the material used in creating it. In his Merzbilder (collages) a piece of cork or wood becomes the equivalent of a brushstroke. His Merzbau, a project he began in 1923, was something completely different. In it, the object is removed from a pictorial logic and becomes a constituent part of an inhabited space undergoing progressive transformation.  

Viskum shares with Schwitters the idea that the object can assume a connotation on the canvas not dissimilar from a recognizable image in a figurative painting or a brushstroke in an abstract painting. However, Viskum’s intent in collecting and incorporating syringes, medicines, scalpels, remains of laboratory animals, postcards and photographs into his boxes is quite different. Paraphrasing Barnett Newman, who believed that a painter paints to have something to look at, we may say that Viskum accumulates objects to preserve in the real world something he wants to remember. From this perspective, even the impressions he felt as a young man standing before a work of art bring the relationship with finitude into play in his art, because there is nothing that humans do that cannot fall into oblivion.

Schwitters would have been amazed to see the storeroom occupying more than a thousand square metres attached to Viskum’s studio in Vestfossen, less than an hour’s drive from Oslo. This is where he keeps his collection of more than seven hundred works by other artists, documented in the voluminous catalogue for the exhibition 1986-2013: En Kunstner Som Samler Kunst – An Artist Collecting Art at the Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in 2013. Viskum has some three thousand of his own works in his studio spanning his entire career and gathered in a large dedicated space. They include various types of objects, including signs and taxidermy animals, originally hunting trophies or simply “decorative objects for the home” bought at antique stores, auctions, street markets and also from private individuals.

When he has visitors, Viskum does not limit himself to showing his large installations arranged as if in a museum, but also the enormous storeroom where the feeling of accumulation and disorder finds no comfort in any compositional logic. And yet one has the sense of being in a sort of Merzbau in which every object, whether large or small, is a reference for the artist to a specific story; it holds within it, as unfolded in the tale told by the artist himself – whether true or imaginary – the memory of his personal history.

Rather than the boxes of Schwitters, Duchamp or Hirst, whose influence on the contemporary arts scene certainly cannot be ignored, it would be more pertinent to compare the Viskumboks with the Shadow Boxes of Joseph Cornell or the Personal Boxes of Robert Rauschenberg.

As often occurs, it is events in the creator’s life that feed into the story of a work. After his father’s early death, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) found work in New York as a door-to-door salesman. In his travels back and forth across the city he began to accumulate objects or fragments of objects that struck him in some way. He soon began to assemble them in his Shadow Boxes. As the artist tells it, however random the choice of these objects, this does not prevent the self from coming through, a statement that led to him being seen as a Surrealist, even though Cornell was never quite happy with that label. Unlike Cornell, who continued placing objects in small showcases for the rest of his life, Rauschenberg limited himself to an analogous avenue of expression in just a few Personal Boxes, created in 1953, in which he placed bones, hair, fabrics, photographs, feathers, stones, string, mirrors, clock parts, insects, glass, shells and other things without any compositional intent. He wanted to create the elements of a personal ritual, and so he called them “ceremonial objects”. 

The trait shared by the works of Schwitters, Cornell and Rauschenberg is the memories that the objects carry within them. However, Viskum’s boxes do not present found objects but rather objects collected within the specific ambit of the veterinary research laboratories frequented by the artist or objects that have a special meaning for him in relation to significant pieces of his life, such as a photograph or a postcard.

If we make a comparison between Viskumboks #35 and a work from the series Untitled (Celestial Navigation Variant) by Joseph Cornell (1957), we will certain find formal analogies. At the same time, however, although Cornell’s series originates in the artist’s interest in astronomy, it contains a dreamlike dimension that catapults it beyond the real. In Viskumboks #35  we find a rat head in blue formaldehyde, a vial of dog vaccine, a mouse cut in half (used for tests), a small bottle of yellow formaldehyde, a paper roll for recording temperature – all materials from the laboratory where he worked from 1984 to 2008 – and a postcard of the veterinary school he attended.

As we can see, the Viskumboks do not tend to bring out a subconscious dimension, they do not aim to reveal something mysterious through processes of free association, as is the case with Cornell and Rauschenberg. Instead they analyse the relationship of the human being with disease and death through the life experience of the artist. In 1998, after completing his Boks, the theme of the struggle with death is interpreted in different ways in the cycle Cancer Cells and in the project Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. The former deals directly with the human fight against death while the latter provides an image for the artist’s personal attempt to keep those who die from vanishing from the world’s memory. 

Cancer Cells (1998), following a year after Love from God – the photographic sequence of a laboratory rat dissolving away on the cross – , are twelve abstract works made using sheets of paper used to cover the laboratory tables during scientific experimentation on animals. The stains dotting the paper are cancerous cell residues. Viskum recovered this paper and glued it to paperboard of different colours, creating a frame around it. In Cancer Cells Viskum transforms the cancer cells into an art material. By incorporating them into his work and charging them with aesthetic value, he transmutes the diseased cells into something beautiful and desirable, saving them from ending up among the medical wastes. At the same time, considering the observer’s participation to be an integral part of his artistic-scientific pursuit, he makes sure that those beholding Cancer Cells know what they are seeing.

The formal composition of Cancer Cells evokes that of the abstract geometrical paintings of Josef Albers, an artist who considered colour to be a psychological experience and who painted squares inside a square. Putting a rectangle inside a rectangle, however including cancer cells in the process, is tantamount to taking the idea of pure colour as a psychological experience to an extreme. Unlike Albers’ Homage to the Square, Viskum’s Cancer Cells transform something that no one wants to hear about into something that can be appreciated on the aesthetic plane, they show a life form that both affirms itself while also producing the death of the organism. No contradiction could be more tragic. While Viskum can do nothing other than accept the alternation of life and death as a natural condition of existence, he stubbornly refuses to allow death to erase not only the individual but also all trace of the individual’s actions. Hence the conception of constantly evolving works that are enriched every year with new fragments, as in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

Viskum began working on Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in 1998, after receiving the Ib Schlytter endowment. This scholarship had a proviso obliging the recipient to visit Ib Schlytter’s grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, check its condition and provide a report to the law office that managed the trust fund for its maintenance. Viskum admits he knows little about Schlytter, who had no children and thus set aside a sum of money so that a Norwegian artist would take care of his grave in the largest Parisian cemetery intra muros, resting place of both ordinary people and a great many celebrities. Going well beyond the requirements of that proviso, since 1998 Viskum returns to the cemetery every year to take care of the graves that need it most. He weeds them and replaces damaged decorations, which he then takes back to his studio. He also takes photos of the images on the gravestones, obtained blurred, scarcely recognizable portraits of the deceased. On the one hand, the out-of-focus photograph does not obliterate the subject, on the other, letting only a few features emerge, it makes each of these subjects an expression for all of humanity. Viskum then uses the photographs and broken decorations (ceramic flowers) in installations, where he lines up morgue tables, places the ceramic flowers on them and hangs a photograph of the person buried in Père-Lachaise over each table.

Like Kierkegaard, Viskum confronts the tragic nature of existence: Kierkegaard by exploring the paths of desperation and angst until making a leap of faith, Viskum by observing, describing and accepting the limitations of science until making a leap into art, attributing a salvific character to it. The tragic juxtaposition of mortal finitude and the will to live, which stretches like a thread through the entire body of his work, is thus manifested in the contrast between the corruption of the living organism (contrasted symbolically with taxidermy) and the capacity of art to express beauty even in its most tragic representations.

One of the stuffed and mounted animals Viskum has purchased is Bubbles, a chimpanzee once kept in a Scandinavian zoo. The artist keeps it in one of the rooms of his studio, where he reads, works and receives guests. Sitting in an armchair, the animal is a presence that cannot be ignored. As I moved around the room I had the sensation that his eyes followed my every move. Bubbles was a part of the installation I'm crazy about Liza. We get on the phone and just gossip, gossip, gossip (2011). Sitting on a sofa with a can of Coca-Cola and a copy of Interview with Michael Jackson on the cover, Bubbles appears to keep vigil over a dead body covered with a decorated sheet. Copies of works by Warhol (editor of Interview) retouched with animal blood and pages from the interview with Jackson on the walls give us the idea that the body is actually that of Jackson, who was famously captivated by the idea of eternal youth and sought an image that responded to the way he wanted to look. Once again we find ourselves before a work relating to mortality, memory and the relationship between being and appearing. In this as in other works there is a direct relation between the taxidermy animals, the collected works and the purchased, collected and conserved objects. Viskum collects everything that attracts his attention and sparks ideas that lead him to produce new works. In this sense, he sees only a minimal gap separating a work of art and its reproduction, a sign, a medical laboratory table or a stuffed and mounted animal.

Viskum began collecting preserved animals when he was eighteen, but it was only in 2006 that he began buying them from a professional taxidermist who would pose them in positions that made them suitable for inclusion in his works. One example is Monogram, a cycle of twelve installations inspired by Rauschenberg’s work of the same name (1955-1959) and now in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Rauschenberg’s piece centres on a stuffed and mounted goat with oil paint brushed on its face and a tire around its body. The goat stands in the middle of a panel composed of pieces of wood to which he glued bits of fabric, newsprint, printed reproductions, a shoe heel and a tennis ball and then added oil paint. Stuffed animals and rubber tires are also elements in Viskum’s Monograms, but the base is a large surface painted using what Viskum calls “the hand that never stopped painting”. Monogram XI is an exception, composed of 82 cast angora goats, one for each year in Rauschenberg’s life.

While Rauschenberg used stuffed and mounted animals in three of his works – a rooster (Odalisk, 1955-58), an eagle (Canyon, 1959) and a goat (Monogram, 1955-59) – he viewed them as found objects, i.e. he used them if they were representations of themselves, on a par with a photo or painted image. While Rauschenberg’s Monogram highlights the transition of organic material (the animal) into inorganic material (the found object), Viskum’s Monograms reconnect the preserved animal with its original nature because they always work it into a narrative. At the same time, by using “the hand that never stopped painting” as a brush to paint the base of the installation, Viskum frees himself of the theoretical premises characterizing American appropriation art. That is, he is not interested in altering the meaning of a known image by recontextualizing it along the lines of works by Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince starting in the late 1970s. By leaving the prints of a hand not his own on the base, Viskum transcends himself, thus bringing out the potential of every work of art to act as a generative matrix producing other art.

There are also animals – this time stuffed toy animals – in the 2004 installation Why isn’t Thomas at school today? consisting of a reconstructed  schoolroom with eleven teddy bears in place of pupils. Every bear has an open book on the desk in front of it, but one chair is empty. The teacher stands before them with his back to the blackboard looking out at the class. The blackboard bears traces of the lesson and the teachers has a man’s body but wears a bear mask, making him a zoomorphic figure. The scene thus shows animals exhibiting human behaviours (the teddy bears) and men in the guise of animals (the teacher). The desks and chairs are stained with animal blood, sealed with varnish after it had dried. The bears are also marked with blood and given the same treatment. The use of blood is not obvious, but is stated on the label sewn to each bear. On the walls, old maps from Norwegian schools show geographical areas that are different from how we know them today: the borders and names of nations are changed, in a number of cases as a result of carnage-filled wars. But bloodshed has a place in our society even during peacetime, as highlighted by the empty desk, alluding to the increasingly frequent gunfire and terrorist attacks in schools.

So who is Thomas in this scenario? Is he a victim of a terrorist attack? Or is he the killer responsible for all the bloodshed? What do we learn from the maps and their geopolitical situations, at times marked by bloody conflict? Viskum does not respond, he gives no answer to the question posed in the title and thus forces us to reflect on what is going on in the world. The fact that there are twelve desks in the classroom, just as Jesus was surrounded by twelve apostles, and that the absent pupil is named Thomas is a reference to the Biblical story. Indeed, it was the Apostle Thomas who doubted Christ’s resurrection in flesh and blood, saying he would believe it only if he had tangible proof. This narrative, regarding the conflict between the truth of faith and the truth of proof, has been extensively represented in the history of art. The absence of Thomas, of he who must touch the thing with his hand in order to believe, is deliberately ambiguous. What we may deduce from Why isn’t Thomas at school today? is that while religion teaches us that only those who embrace faith without reservations shall enter the kingdom of God, news stories tell of horrendous crimes committed in the name of a blind faith.

In spite of the fact that contemporary art has inured us to its use, it is still difficult to consider blood a normal art material. The memory of life that it contains charges the works that include it with symbolic or metaphorical value. For Viskum blood is a synonym for life. And it is life that he seems to want to infuse into the teddy bears sitting in for children in Why isn’t Thomas at school today? and into works of art that still have something to say to us after the death of the artist. Painting with the hand of a dead person expresses the same concept on the symbolic level. The canvases Viskum thus creates unequivocally confirm that, as Arthur C. Danto said, art is philosophy incarnate. But what happens if those gazing upon Viskum’s abstract paintings are unaware of the process used in creating them? They may be attracted by their formal architecture or colours, and they may be tempted to stroke the surface to feel that tactile graininess of the impasto. And yet the same person, not knowing how the works were made and surrendering to the pleasure of the eye, might feel revulsion at discovering that instead of a brush a dead human hand was used and that the paint is mixed with animal blood.

Process and concept coincide in these paintings. Viskum poses the question “what is art?”, bringing into evidence the schism between what we see in the work and what it actually is. This schism is particularly evident in paintings. Indeed, when beholding an installation or an object we are given to thinking that the work exists as a result of a conceptual quest, but the same is not true when we look at a painting. If we do not acknowledge the process, what prevails is the presence of a grid, which is associated in our minds with abstract painting. The hand used as a paintbrush suggests the process of proceeding by overlaying prevalently vertical and horizontal marks, as is demonstrated by The hand that never stopped painting 22 (1998). The same mechanism prompts Viskum to develop the formal construction of the painting by overlaying vertical strips of colour (The hand that never stopped painting XXVIII, 1999). And the artist does not leave us without references to the history of art. For example, The hand that never stopped painting XXIII (1998), evokes the colourist strategy of Claude Monet, while the series titled The New Hand shows a kinship with Arnulf Rainer’s finger painting in the early 1970s.

In addition to abstract paintings, Arnulf Rainer also used his bare hands in those years to paint over black and white photographic images of his body or face, screwed up into various expressions to capture the animal nature of humans in images. In 1978, with the intention of further dramatizing images that were already dramatic, Rainer made marks on black and white photographs of cadavers and death masks. In Viskum’s paintings, which are also divorced from expressionist gesture, one senses a tension that is not dissimilar from that which animates Rainer’s work. But while in Rainer’s work on photos the base image clearly evokes the artist’s intention, in Viskum’s abstract paintings, when the process is unknown to the observer, the absence of indicators makes accurate interpretation impossible.

And so it is because of the importance of the process used to construct the work that the hand that never stopped painting returns to life and to action thanks to its contact with blood. Viskum speaks to us of death throughout his œuvre, but, in the continual passage of blood that he puts on display, life is symbolically present as a flow which, unstoppable, is transmitted from one being to another.

[i] Tone Lyngstaad Nias, “I love only that which is written in blood”, catalogue for the exhibition Munch by Others, Arvinius + Orfeus publisher, Oslo, 2013, p. 115.
[ii] Edvard Munch, The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth, translated and edited by J. Gill Holland, Terrace Books, 2005, p. 79.
[iii] Morten Viskum, conversation with Jean Wainwright, on page xxx of this monograph.
[iv] Ibid, p. xxx.
[v] Edvard Munch, op. cit., p. 64.
[vi] Morten Viskum, conversation with Jean Wainwright, op. cit. p. xxx.
[vii] Anthony Ritter, in Morten Viskum, conversation with Jean Wainwright, op. cit. p. xxx.