Inger Johanne Rasmussen

Character tips

That she is a textile artist and, for example, Heuch and Bengston work in other media, is a coincidence in relation to the exhibition program and the art historical discourse, but it is no coincidence that Inger Johanne Rasmussen works with textiles. In this she is as medium-specific as the great painters of modernism. The great champion of modernist painting and perhaps best critic Clement Greenberg started his career with i.a. to write an important essay on the relationship between a painter's (and a sculptor's) material medium and physical performance on the one hand and the literary or allegorical theme in the works on the other. In the essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940) he wrote that in order to create an identity rooted in the work they perform, the artists should clean the chosen medium of everything that was superfluous in the tradition of the particular medium. About the painters, he wrote that they had to stop pretending that the pictures were dreamed up. The finished painting had to show clear traces that it consisted of physical paint that had been deposited on a hard, flat surface. And this is what he noticed among the artists who throughout art history had had the highest ambitions:

There is a common effort in each of the arts to expand the expressive resources of the medium, not in order to express ideas and notions, but to express with greater immediacy sensations, the irreducible elements of experience.

This statement was at the time specifically aimed at painting, but we should note that he writes about a trend in all media. So it is thus beyond the social and gender-political interpretations that often accompany what is written about textile art, a medium-specific reason why an artist concentrates his work and expression on one medium, which is cultivated, researched and challenged. That Inger Johanne Rasmussen has chosen textile over painting has to do with the fact that textile in the way she has developed the medium is suitable for doing something else - and some would say - more than the painting could express.

But if this makes her a modern artist, she is a postmodern artist for generations. And postmodernism in the visual arts is, among other things, a rebellion against the strict, ever-self-purifying medium-discipline critics and theorists of Greenberg's type of sermon. For what Inger Johanne Rasmussen does is to retain the medium specificity of modernism while at the same time making a return to the rejected allegory and content theme. She simply goes out of what could have been an abstract world of images, and instead fills the works with meaningful, traditional and reinterpreted patterns and familiar shapes and figures.

This way of working is not outdated, although it is not strictly Modernist. The rugs show a use of collage where the traditions through fragments and fragments are passed on in new contexts, forged together (to use the poet TS Eliot's concept of the early modern compositional style) to be able to give a simultaneous and new expression of what in her and our time can be grasped and retold by what we carry with us of memories and perceptions.

The artist has a conscious relationship to her method, and she calls the rugs retellings. She is thus aware that the elements, patterns, themes, figures, shapes have a prehistory, and are basically familiar. By putting these elements and fragments together again, she continues some of the weight of meaning they carry with them, at the same time as the new narrative reveals something that is her own contribution.

This contribution is found both in what is peculiar to the textile medium as she utilizes it and in the theme, that which can be interpreted as interpretations. In Rasmussen's rugs, it is the use of old foot cloths from the military that, completely independent of all the associations attributed to them by various critics, is suitable for creating the special light effect and color effect that characterizes her work. Because the textiles are felted through use and have a fairly unique, matte surface, she can create a color that is very effective. She avoids what in the painting is related to binder and solution medium, whether this is tough, smooth, shiny as in oil painting, pasta cheese as in acrylic or powder dry and matt as in tempera. Its surfaces carry the color in that it is literally stained into the material itself and that it gives off a pure chromatic radiance. The color is allowed to be both pigment and light, both in the surface and in the room and the eyes it is experienced in. By coloring in the textiles, a slightly moldy effect also occurs, so that the color surfaces do not become monotonous and dead. They give a shading effect that both constitutes a very shallow picture space and a nice visual effect along the soft textile surface. With this ambiguity - that a rug appears both flat and spacious - the free fall of these images, the fact that they hang from the ceiling and are not stretched tight on a blind frame, also comes into its own.

Rasmussen's use of textiles also gives her another alternative to painting, and I would argue that this is precisely an advantage over painting, and it concerns the contour problem. As is well known, the contour is an abstract and tactile phenomenon, not an optical one. The contour is a drawing and conceptual interpretation of a tactile experience, the fact that by feeling things and bumping into things we understand that things are closed forms that delimit them in relation to the void they exist and take up space in. Drawings are usually based on the contour, but in paintings it is not necessary with contours since the surface itself with the circumference and local color can be drawn on the canvas without the use of contour lines. In modern figurative painting, the contour can be emphasized and enhanced or it can be cut out. But when it is cut out, the visual boundary between pictorial objects must be shown as the invisible boundary where two fields of color meet. In painting, this delimitation must be processed so that the strokes follow the curve of the boundary that separates the representation of one thing from another.

This whole methodological problem that painters have to deal with and try to solve is solved in an almost miraculous way by Rasmussen by cutting out shapes of colored fabric and sewing them on the bottom of the rug. In this sense, her rather imaginative and unnatural pictorial spaces and depicted scenes and events become something that is optically more in line with how we experience our visual surroundings with the eye, than what most painters can achieve.

I choose to promote this interpretation of Inger Johanne Rasmussen's use of old soldier's foot cloths, rather than emphasizing chafing and foot sweating. And the reason for that is, firstly, that it is the purely random quality of these well-used textiles that thus enables her to solve painting problems in an exquisite way. The second reason is that the floor-close, bodily, abject at feet and their close contact with the ground the snake sneaks on and the slimy rat's belly leaves traces on, can not be given any prominent place in this reading of Rasmussen's carpets, is that the meeting with them gives the experience of something clean, beautiful and sublime. So instead of the popular French-oriented reading of the corporeal - which has ridden the last 15-20 years' international art critique like a mare - I would like to quote a quote from Shakespeare. In The Storm, he lets the drowned man's eyes and skeleton undergo a "sea change" "into something rich and strange". Eyes turn into pearls, bone bones into corals. It is this type of transformation - which was valued by a modernist painter such as Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s - that works in Inger Johanne Rasmussen's work.

In modern art, the content is considered to be the purest expression of the artist's feelings and the goal is to create a correspondence where the effect of the artwork without dissemination and reinterpretation will affect the viewer's sensitivity. This transaction is wordless and linked to the formal, visually visible processing of the medium's characteristics and tradition. The rugs by Inger Johanne Rasmussen have this type of content, linked to the form and the medium, but they also have a content that goes beyond this and becomes themes, themes that can be stated and encourage the audience to reflect and reflect. Such works of art provide both an experience and new knowledge about the work's relationship to history and society.

In his two rugs specially made for this exhibition, the artist has chosen to work site specific. This is shown both by the way the pictures are mounted and by the content and theme of the pictures. The shape also gives an interpretation that enters into a dialogue with the very special atmosphere that is already in the room. The rugs hang back to back. The dark carpet with a freely designed neo-baroque light table in a dark picture room faces the museum's permanent exhibition of baroque silver. A narrow, relatively dark corridor is created, which metaphorically can be said to be like a mining corridor. The light table is like a visible silver spring has appeared in one wall of the mine tunnel. The table is placed at eye level so that the audience can walk slowly into the hallway and alternately see magnificently shaped and decorated silver objects and this beautifully shaped "natural" occurrence, interpreted in textile. She has called this rug "Lost Heritage", and with that title she gives a direction to our interpretations: This is about digging out and refining silver, making it into beautiful objects, putting it away, forgetting it, finding it again and rediscover it. And precisely this becomes, in a figurative sense, exactly what museum objects are about in their lives between magazines and exhibition stands and between oblivion and rediscovery. With this rug, Inger Johanne Rasmussen has gone straight in and found an expression of what the museums of our time do and can do.

Nøstetangenrommet is a museum room where the relationship between past and present is visible through the actual installation's use of dim lighting and glass walls between spectators and works. Such rooms have a theatrical feel, because a staging is created that both choreographs the audience's movements and structures its form of experience. The theatrical, the fact that the museum room is a theater stage and that the audience are actors and co-creators on stage is part of the modern pedagogy that places so much emphasis on participation and dialogue. In the rug "Stage rug" a large picture has been made of a theater stage, where the salon is in darkness, scenery and the stage curtain can be seen from the stage and the small spotlights shine in the dim atmosphere as the spotlight highlights engraved glass decor and driven relief in silver.

Inger Johanne Rasmussen's rugs open up for contact with the past and they are highly contemporary. The use of an elegant, curved vine table carries with it echoes from antiquity, the Renaissance and the Baroque, but through its graphic sharpness and flat silhouette effect, it also touches on our immediate contemporary design, where variations on this theme are very widespread.

Inger Johanne Rasmussen has a textile education from the Norwegian School of Arts, Crafts and Design in Bergen and the School of Art and Design in Stockholm. She has had a number of solo exhibitions, the largest and most important of which was the large display in the Sørlandet Art Museum in 2006-2007. She has participated in large group exhibitions at home and abroad and made a number of large decorations in embassies, schools, hospitals, churches and public administration buildings. Inger Johanne Rasmussen is represented with rugs in the art industry museums in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim and in Sørlandet's art museum. She has also been purchased by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo and by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo. She has published two textbooks in weaving and worked with scenography.

Åsmund Thorkildsen 

Museum director