mousse 42 ~ Torbjrn Rdland

FOLDING THE PERIPHERY

Tales of weirdos, bizarros and people just like us. The photographs of Torbjrn Rdland are strange and ugly, they are repulsive, perhaps perverted and disgusting,
somewhat unpleasant and yet they are also familiar, pretty and attractive, simple
and ordinary, maybe even erotic yet straightforwardly normal. We are caught in a
rare mix of reactions, warm and intriguing, cold and captivating, giving us shivers
and comfort at the same time. Everyday items and situations at their most surreal
and grotesque, beauties and beasts, terror and tranquility. Uncanny, eerie and perverted transformations. The gloss of a contemporary fashion magazine and the horrors of Hieronymus Bosch next to one another, hand in hand, face to face. Northern
Gothic lens sketches.
An octopus wrapped around a persons hand. Facial mask made of plastic over a

womans face. Red haired boy with marker strips on his shoulder and a broken arm. In
a forest with hands wearing sneakers. Pair of legs bound together with string. Another
body, sideways, gymnastics with the head against the wall, bleeding. High heel, leg
and paint. Elbow pads on the floor. Syrup and napkins on the ground. Long dark hair,
red and black ribbons, a beautiful girl and a pool. Black paper, white fabric and a bug.
Is this here to grab out attention, fascinate and shock us on the level of the eye or are
we looking at a fantastic world of true bizarreness hidden underneath our gardens,
streets and houses and inside the depths of our souls and bodies? Is this what we will
become or where we came from? Caricatures of ourselves or the real us?
Jens Hoffmann

B Y LU C A S B L A LO C K

LUKAS BLALOCK
A lot of photography of late has been concerned with the photograph
itself as an object. I was wondering if this is something you think
about?
TORBJRN RDLAND
I do think about it, but ultimately I see myself as more of an imagemaker. In my BA program in Bergen [Norway] in the early to mid1990s there was full focus on self-conscious and referential pictures. I
had read cultural studies and was already on board. Feminist and postmodern photography was the first contemporary art that really made
sense to me, but I also longed for an image that didnt close in on itself
or its referential category. Without regressing to a simpler worldview,
I wanted my photography to also be about something other than itself.
I wanted to engage with the world. That was my project from the beginning. The will to reengage was always a drive and a need for more
complexity.
LB
When I was thinking about our conversation this question felt like
some sort of red herring, but hearing your answer, it is obvious that of
course you consider the works through their objecthood. However
and maybe this is why it felt so alien to me in the askingthis object-

LB

TR

LB

TR

hood isnt the first place I want to locate the work in your pictures,
though it is obviously part of the constellation. I instead want to think
about relationships: within pictures/out there, between pictures, between content and material, to history, etc. Is this something like what
you mean by complexity?
Well, pluralism was already established. Being open to fifty quotable
voices seemed liberating and limiting in equal measure. Acknowledging
the culturally coded and interpretive side of perception is a start, but I

TR

LB

118

was looking for a position that was even more inclusive, and thereby
more layered than pluralism.
Isnt evolution always a movement towards more complex forms?
Walker Evans was carried forward by Sherrie Levine, who through
appropriation added questions and layers to his work. As a student,
Levine s After Walker Evans made a lot of sense to me, but it also
seemed unrepeatable. To move forward, I began to integrate qualities
dismissed by postmodern photography, and adding what I found
missing in Jeff Wall, who was another early influence. I opened up
to lyricism and cuteness, and I tried to integrate the sensuality of the
photographic moment.
Photography as medium; as a field of materialized thinking that can be
considered, mined and expanded (like painting) is really important to
me. I see this as a condition that Jeff Walls writings and work really
helped to develop, but also one that, as you said, leaves a lot of as yet
un-territorialized space.
I want to ask about sensuality in the way you are using it. Your work
often gets grouped with practitioners whose pictures draw on commercial situations, but your pictures really reject this logic, at least if
we spend time with them. Furthermore, this doesnt seem to me to be
the sensuality you mean. We have talked a little before about Minor
White and others who have developed photographies outside of documentary style, or at least documentary intention, but not in line with
commercial practice either. Can you say some more about this?
Minor White to me has come to represent both the failure and the
achievements of old school art photography. He picked up and ran
with Stieglitzs most sophisticated idea: photographic abstraction
photography with an unresolved indexicalityas a mirror image of
individual spiritual life. Minor White was trying to figure himself out.
He struggled with guilt over his sexual attraction to men. He questioned his faith. With the rise of Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 1970s
White gradually lost relevance. His work deteriorated. After his death
in the mid-1970s, Minor White s aesthetic lived on in camera clubs,
trivialized and obsolete. White wrote about the need to get free of
surface, texture and form. The only tool he believed in was paradox.
He famously talked about working the camera as a metamorphosing
machine.
I like the metamorphosing machine against the more common description of one that indexes. I have been thinking a lot myself about photography as a drawing machine; drawing being a means to understand,
bring closer, or quite literally be able to picture, which might sort of
split the difference. I have read before that you moved away from an
early interest in drawing to pursue photography. Does this description of photography through drawing have resonance for you? And
do you think about the apparatus so directly in your own work?
As a teenager I made money drawing for newspapers. Maybe for that
reason Ive focused more on differences than similarities between
drawing and photography, but a love for vertical lines and figurative
detail runs through both practices. One quality that drew me to photography was a paradoxical sense of inner life, something my drawings
never had. Depending on cameras for very specific aesthetic qualities,
Im afraid I dont think about them very much.
That seems perfectly fair, but I think I am really trying to ask something else. Let me try this way. When David Lynch made Inland Empire

mousse 42 ~ Torbjrn Rdland

TR

LB
TR

LB

all he would tell Laura Dern (the films star) about the plot was that
it was about a woman in trouble. It was shot piecemeal and out of
order over several years and the whole time she had very little sense of
how it was going to come together. There is something of that kind of
involvement herea mystery more than a puzzle. Lynchs filmmaking
has obviously been really inventive, structurallyRobert Blake being
on both ends of the phone in Lost Highway, for examplebut asking a
question about how, or with what intentions, a strange thing has been
made feels totally reductive, especially when the technical elements
are easily discernable. The complexity in your pictures (and their inner life) has this same elusive relationship to language.
Youre right. Technically this is optical-chemical photography. And I
both feel and think my way through it. It is part mystery and part puzzle. I dont know if anyone who saw the solo I did at Algus Greenspon
in New York last year consciously picked up on the theme of dual unity, but in the show there were a lot of doubles internally bound together. The brain-like avocado consists of an upper and a lower half. The
male kabuki actor does a female character. The Starbucks siren has
two tails. The two Ducati girls together represent one person, I think.
Two walls meet in a corner and crumble, and so on. Other single images were built in the camera as two separate exposures onto a single
sheet of negative film. I typically discover themes or patterns like these
in retrospect. They can guide the compiling of an exhibition or the
sequencing of a book, but more seldom the making of a photograph
What does tend to guide your picture making?
Its vague. I get excited about an object, a face, a place, a picture, an
arrangement, a conceivable constellation. I wonder what I can make it
mean if I stay with it, look at it, go to work on it. I want to know whats
so interesting about the image of that thing Im seeing clearly but cannot quite grasp intellectually. Im curious as to how it will mean. I also
study pictorial spaces, something I should have mentioned when you
brought up the camera. I look at the difference between long and short
lenses. Every picture I can make with a wide-angle lens is a triumph. I
have very few, less than ten in total, and thats over a period of more
than fifteen years. I always want to make more.
Are you familiar with an artists note from the mid-1960s where
Gerhard Richter accounts for his practice of making painted copies of
photographs? Its because photographs and their viewers only care for
facts, he writes, and its very hard to turn a photograph into a picture
simply by declaring it to be one. In its original context I think this straw
man argument is forgivable. Admittedly, I have similar issues with wideangle photography. I know its time to fully embrace it, but it is difficult
to make a picture through a short lens. Its no coincidence that Richard
Princes early Cowboys are looked at through a very long lens.
It is funny you say that. I have been working with not a truly short but
a shorter lens lately, and it is a totally different problem to solve. You
look around instead of looking at...
I want to return to something you said earlier though. When you
were talking about White, you said that he carried on Stieglitzs most

Storie di gente stramba ed eccentrica, gente come noi. Le fotografie di Torbjrn

Rdland sono strane e forse brutte, sgradevoli, perverse e disgustose, o addirittura ripugnanti, e tuttavia sono anche familiari, belle e affascinanti, semplici e ordinarie, persino erotiche e al contempo perfettamente normali. Ci troviamo prigionieri di un raro caleidoscopio di emozioni, calde e intriganti, fredde e seducenti,
che sanno darci i brividi e farci sentire a nostro agio. Oggetti e situazioni della quotidianit allapice del surreale e del grottesco, belle e bestie, terrore e tranquillit.
Trasformazioni misteriose, sinistre e conturbanti. Gli orrori di Hieronymus Bosch
e la copertina patinata di una rivista di moda accostati gli uni allaltra, mano nella
mano, faccia a faccia. Disegni di lenti tardo gotiche. I tentacoli di un polpo intorno
alla mano di un uomo. Una maschera di plastica sul volto di una donna. Un bambino dai capelli rossi con segni di pennarello sulla spalla e un braccio rotto. In un

by Lucas Blalock
Lucas Blalock: Ultimamente la fotografia si
molto concentrata sulla figura del fotografo
come oggetto. Mi chiedo se anche tu sei interessato a questa prospettiva.
Torbjrn Rdland: S, una concezione che mi interessa, anche se ultimamente mi vedo pi come
un creatore di immagini. I corsi universitari che ho
seguito a Bergen [Norvegia] durante i primi anni
90 erano soprattutto imperniati su un genere autoreferenziale di fotografia. Io avevo letto molti te-

TR

LB

TR

LB

TR

sophisticated idea in his work: that of a photograph with an unresolved

indexicality. This channeling of White and art photography makes me
think of Walter Benjamin, who says something about how anything
that doesnt have a toehold in the culture of the present will be lost to
history. In a way the action is one of folding in the periphery. I know
your work has been talked about in the past through the perverse
which I likebut I want to also talk about it as polyamorous.
Polyamorous sounds like an inverted take on the integrative principle
Ive hinted at. Its one thing to spread yourself out in a web of scattered objects or perspectives, but its another to bring separate categories, voices and viewpoints into a personal unity and address them as
such. Maybe the latter is the true folding in of the periphery.
A few years ago you wrote twenty Sentences on Photography
for Triple Canopy. (I have read them many times and they ring
resoundingly true!) The sentences are both assertive and circular,
almost Beckett-like; the photograph (reductive, mute, distant,
lacking) becomes an unbearable constraint nonetheless tolerated,
almost optimistically. It is a certain kind of projectto stick with a
thing though you are so aware of its limits and failures. It becomes a
discipline in the classic sense. Speaking of lovers, your last book from
MACK was called Vanilla Partner, which refers of course to an initiate
to a different field of constraints.
When you talk about sticking around I think marriage. I have never
been married except to the medium of photography, but maybe this
is the situation after a while: partners dont know for sure whos
influencing and perverting whom. Even though Im probably taking my
straight medium to places it would never go without a forceful push, it
often feels like its the other way round; as if photography had a strong
will of its own. When theres so much it cannot do, it really wants me
to stop being timid and try that other thing, you know, beyond what
we have already tried. The medium is older and more experienced. It
knows itself. It repeatedly takes me out of my comfort zone.
I am thinking about all the fluids in your pictures and Jeff Walls idea
that digital expands the dry space of photography, which he equates
with control; the wet being the living, breathing world. In your work
it is very hard to forget about the body, that one is looking from the
body, and all of these fluids really reinforce an experience that wants
to bring in the other senses. Is your interest in a straight medium
related to questions of body and control?
One of the qualities I appreciate in Courbet is how weighty and
bodily his bodies are. I also like to look at century-old photographs
of physical mediums with ectoplasm. Wanting to bring in other senses
I think is exactly right. As you say, photography can be technical and
dry. It suits a person who likes cleanliness. Im also attracted to this
rawer and less controllable quality where you never really know how
anything will turn out, but theres this juice, this presence. I still prefer
the originals I produce to be physical pieces of plastic coming out of
a bath, rather than digital files backed up on two hard drives. There s
something beautiful about life rising from liquids.

bosco, con le scarpe da ginnastica alle mani. Un paio di gambe avvolto da un filo.
Un altro corpo, di lato, che fa ginnastica con la testa poggiata al muro, sangue.
Tacchi alti, gambe e vernice. Gomitiere sul pavimento. Sciroppo e fazzoletti sparsi
per terra. Lunghi capelli scuri, nastri neri e rossi, una bella ragazza e uno stagno.
Carta nera, stoffa bianca e uno scarafaggio.
l per attirare la nostra attenzione, per affascinarci e turbarci a livello visivo,
o stiamo forse osservando un mondo fantastico di autentica stravaganza celato
sotto i giardini, le strade e le case, e nelle profondit delle nostre anime e dei nostri corpi? ci che diventeremo o quello da cui proveniamo? Sono caricature o
ritratti di noi stessi?

sti di cultural studies e in quel periodo stavo gi

lavorando. La fotografia femminista e quella postmoderna sono state le prime ad aver davvero avuto senso per me, ma desideravo anche produrre
unimmagine che non si richiudesse su se stessa o
intorno alla propria categoria di riferimento. Senza
regredire in una visione del mondo troppo semplificata, volevo che la mia fotografia fosse qualcosaltro oltre a se stessa. Volevo impegnarmi nel
mondo. Questo sempre stato il mio progetto, sin
dallinizio. La volont di impegnarmi, oltre ad avermi sempre spronato, ha acceso in me il bisogno di
maggiore complessit.

119

Jens Hoffmann

LB: Ripensando alla nostra conversazione, questa domanda mi sembrava quasi una pista falsa, ma ascoltando ora la tua risposta evidente
che valuti le tue opere per la loro oggettivit.
Ciononostante e forse per questo che la domanda mi sembrava un po fuori luogo loggettivit non la prima categoria in cui collocherei
le tue opere, anche se naturalmente essa rientra
nella tua costellazione. Vorrei invece parlare di
rapporti: tra limmagine e il mondo l fuori, tra
unimmagine e laltra, tra contenuto e materiale,
con la storia, eccetera. questo che intendi con
complessit?