Small Epiphanies and Minor Wonders: The Art of Hulda Hákon

By Jón Proppé

From the start of her career, Hulda Hákon has displayed a knack for
presenting everyday life as a heroic enterprise, her works commemorating
small victories, mishaps or just curious incidents in tableaux, images and
text that show them to be, in their small way, quite as dramatic and
noteworthy as what has more traditionally been the subject of memorials and
monuments. Reliefs and paintings on cut-out board, emblazoned with both
images and text, are a large part of her early output and together form a
loose narrative of characters and events. We have met the pigeon that ate
twenty-one hot dogs and the entire founding membership of the Icelandic
Bulldog Association (the dogs, not their owners), in addition to the
artist's friends and acquaintances, mythological creatures and wild animals.
Less recognizable figures present nameless people facing everyday social
situations presented in such a way as to draw some abstract lesson from
their predicament. Power dressing, self-doubt and social inhibitions are all
addressed as are the ever-present existential conundrums we struggle with
every day. Yet from this collection of apparently trivial (or at best
private) observations and stories, there emerges a more general critique
which applies not only to personal circumstance but extends to social issues
and even to immediate political concerns. Hulda Hákon's later work has
become increasingly sculptural and she has also exhibited texts without
images, works in which the texts themselves have been promoted to the place
of the image or sculptural objects.

In Hulda Hákon's early works we can clearly see how they grew out of the
various approaches that crowded the new expressionism and new primitivism of
the early 1980s. Parallels can be drawn with Jörg Immendorff in Berlin and
Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York or with any number of others at the time
for whom image and text became interchangeable elements in assemblage and
cheap materials offered an accessible and direct way to narrate their
message. This approach, however, places great demands on the artist: If the
artist's voice is strong enough it will come through clearly but the work
will be just a pile of junk if it's too weak. These artists develop a highly
personal style even when they work in different media, a style that can seem
more like a narrative voice or poetic cadence than a coherently visual
approach. Hulda's style is easy to recognize whether the work is moulded in
plaster or plastic, assembled from wood or cast in bronze.

Her style is most recognizable, however, in the particular way she combines
text and image. Her works have their own distinct idiom, rich in humour,
affection and provocation. Most often combining relief images and text, she
has presented snapshots from the world in a disarmingly straightforward way;
the picture of the dog that ate the Christmas dinner, for example, lists all
the ingredients. Her texts are aphoristic, short and thought-provoking. They
rarely state a definitive conclusion or purpose – or, if they do, we
understand them to be quoted from the real or fictional characters whose
presence is suggested by the accompanying images.

These pieces always hover somewhere between narrative and abstraction so
they can be approached either as tableaux drawn from life or as an ongoing
taxonomy of characters and events. The last association is reinforced by
Hulda's recent series showing various marine monsters – inspired by
illustrations in old maps – in their named habitats in the Icelandic waters.
These works also witness the increasing influence of specifically Icelandic
themes, visual images and stories, in Hulda's art, developing into a sort of
annals or highly personal history that is very reminiscent of the style of
old Icelandic chronologies written by farmers in often remote areas in an
age when news hardly travelled and far-away wars featured less prominently
than the death of a neighbour or the birth of a two-headed calf in the next
valley. Since ancient times, the pursuit of historical knowledge has been
divided into sapentia and eruditio – inspired, overarching narrative on one
hand and total immersion in detail on the other – and Icelanders have been
hoarders of details and anecdotes above all, their propensities noted
already by medieval mainland authors.

The use of text as a signifying component in works of visual art is not
itself a modern innovation but it is nonetheless a key to understanding the
ways in which modern thought transformed and expanded art's frame of
reference and conceptual scope. This is better explained with examples and
they abound in modern art from the early twentieth century onwards. For an
example of the new visual vocabulary of text we might even go all the way
back to the first performance in Paris in 1896 of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu
Roi – arguably the moment when Surrealism came into the world – when the
spectacle of the entire Polish army marching in the Ukraine was staged by
simply putting up a sign saying that the army was there. Dada and Surrealism
is still our primary reference for text-based art which forms a traceable
line through various artistic disciplines including typographic
experimentation, concrete poetry, conceptual art and Fluxus, and most every
one of the various formulations of contemporary art.
In the spirit of Surrealism, text can be used to add further layers of
abstraction to an artwork, altering its impact by creating a tension between
different levels of signification. René Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe
(1926) is a schoolbook example of this where text and image appear in
contradiction, raising doubts about the veracity of both images and words.
Often, such juxtapositions only result in humour and this element has become
a very common feature in contemporary art – wry humour that sometimes may
strike the viewer as supercilious – but by employing more and more
sophisticated rhetoric they can establish a meta-commentary that
communicates insights about the art, the artist and the viewer that are
beyond the capabilities of images alone. Sometimes this is achieved in the
title of a work otherwise focused exclusively on the visual; Gustave
Courbet's painting L'Origine du monde (1866), showing a woman's sex, is an
example. In Jarry's play the caption entirely replaces all visual staging
while in Magritte's painting the text negates our interpretation of the
visual image. Marcel Duchamp transformed a urinal bowl into a Fountain in
1917 by naming it and later, in the 1960s, Art & Language was to offer us a
pair of monochrome canvases, one with the text 'THIS IS A PAINTING', 'THIS
IS NOT A PAINTING' written on the other. These are only five quite
straightforward applications of a rhetoric that interweaves text and visual
objects and that permits of endless variations and nuance. It has brought us
a rich new source of significance in art that operates on many levels, from
the theoretical realm of Art & Language or Joseph Kosuth to a more narrative
and even poetic style that develops naturally once the novelty wears off and
both artists and viewers come to terms with its figures and logic. Hulda
Hákon's work is to be read in this context but her command of the poetics of
image and text, words and art, sets her apart and in her work she is never
content with presenting only a clever juxtaposition, a fresh conundrum. She
develops her vocabulary of images, objects and texts precisely in order to
move beyond simple abstraction or the play of logic to reveal life as rich
and engaging is all its chaotic detail and contradictory significations. In
her latest work, she brings her skills to social and political issues with
more directness than ever before, perhaps indicating something about her
future development, but these works proceed without a break from her earlier
work. They show that her voice, as heard through her art, is now strong
enough for her to take on ever more challenging subjects without breaking
the personal bond she has with her audience.
The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault devoted first an essay
(1968) and later a small book (1973) to Magritte's paintings (there were
more than one) of (or not of) his pipe. He suggests for its analysis the
metaphor of a calligram that the artist, bringing text and image into
conflict, suddenly opens up, 'so that the calligram immediately decomposes
and disappears, leaving as a trace only its own absence', causing 'discourse
to collapse of its own weight' and allowing 'similitudes, on the other hand,
to multiply of themselves, to be born from their own vapor and to rise
endlessly into an ether where they refer to nothing more than themselves'.
Despite Foucault's airy vocabulary, what he is suggesting here is not a
metaphysical transformation but a straightforward rhetorical manoeuvre where
the author or artist leaves the interpretation of his work in abeyance,
letting its possible conclusions present themselves for the viewer to ponder
and expand in light of his or her own experiences and understanding.
Similitudes multiplying, born from vapour and rising into the ether, should
not be construed as defeat, as the failure of communications or the
breakdown of interpretation. Rather, they allow the artists to present his
thoughts as an ongoing engagement with the viewer and his world, not a
conclusion but a continuing discussion.
Hulda Hákon is not so much concerned with bringing text and image into
conflict, teasing out paradoxes to raise questions about the very coherence
of the artwork or our systems of signs and reference. Her aphorisms – in
images and texts – are short and pithy but they do not leave the reader
speechless, hopelessly numbed by the impossibility of resolving the
contradictions of the work. Rather, they seem life-affirming, rich not only
in the use they make of the material and its presentation, but in the way
they present life, individual and social, as an inexhaustible source of
small epiphanies, minor wonders and personal yet profound insights. Indeed,
we would not be far off in saying that this makes Hulda Hákon no less a poet
than a visual artist, a poet with a highly individual style. Yet, the same
poetic touch comes through in works that have no text and even in sculptures
that are only vaguely figural. Similarly, the visual impact of her work is
present even in works that do away with images all together, presenting only
the text in shiny burnished brass letters. Either way, each piece reveals a
unique perspective on some unexpected aspect of our world, a story, an
image, or a knowing smile.

***

Jón Proppé (born 1962) studied philosophy and Germanic literature in the
University of Illinois, United States. Working in Reykjavík in the last two
decades he has written extensively on art and culture, including some 300
exhibition reviews for Icelandic newspapers and 100 exhibition catalogues
published in Iceland and the other Nordic Countries, the United States and
United Kingdom, Germany and France. He has curated exhibitions for several
museums in Iceland, including the Reykjavik Art Museum, as well as
exhibitions in Norway, Denmark and Germany, and in 1994-96 he served as
interim director of Hafnarborg, the Art Museum of Hafnarfjörður. He has also
worked in publishing as an editor and book designer, taught, lectured and
led seminars, appeared frequently on radio and television, and worked on
several documentary films for television and cinema as a writer and
producer.