EXPERIMENTS IN PLASTIC, PINK AND DRAWING

In the light rooms of Galleri Lorentz and Kurtz pink and colours capture the attention, the only colours in an almost clinically white room, supplemented by a mere touch of grey and black. The first impression is light and airy, raw and self-aware. On a counter in the middle of the room small canvases are stacked. It looks like a sales exhibition in a chic fashion boutique with the latest collection of shirts. This clinical, hyper-aesthetic room is nevertheless the scene on which a quite different story is being played out. Spread across the small, coloured canvases on counter stand small plastic soldiers. There are tanks and cannon emplacements, officers on horseback and orderlies bearing the wounded on a stretcher. The soldiers are not in their customary khaki and army green but follow the same tones as the rest of the room: white, grey and pink. On the wall hang a number of canvases decoratively mounted, including a large, almost abstract drawing in pink. Beneath is the title: “FOR(N)EVER”.

Ever since his earliest works Jannik Broz has been experimenting with artistic forms of expression and the possibilities of art. He works with various media, including photographs, drawings, installations and performances, often fused into a unity. The works and their genesis are part of an ongoing process. Frequently elements recur from work to work, or are taken up years later in adapted form.

In his latest exhibition FOR(N)EVER there is a small picture, an edited photo of the artist himself, taken during a performance back in 1996. The photo is central to Jannik Broz’s artistic development in several ways. As in previous works where he produced graphics from stills of Dreyer’s film “Jeanne d’Arc”, we are here looking at an edited version of a photo, only this time it is a computer-adapted photo of the artist affixed to the canvas. The picture is produced in ten different copies as part of the series “Private Pictures”. The motif itself is from “Akt I. Transmission”, a performance which like the photo itself leaves more or less visible traces in a number of his subsequent works.  

Akt I + II

“Akt I + II” was a combined performance and exhibition at Horsens Museum of Art (Kunstmuseum). “Akt I. Transmission” was both a physical and a mental challenge for the artist. For a week he had to live and work in voluntary isolation in a field outside the town and simultaneously subject himself to the public gaze. The project itself was to build three pit ovens for melting lard. The clay for the lining of the ovens was kneaded by foot. Deep holes had to be dug and the ovens built before a huge fire was lit and the many kilos of lard melted – to be used later for sculptural experiments. The entire process was filmed from the artist’s “angle” via a camera mounted on his head and transmitted to TV-screens visible from the window façade of the museum of art so that viewers could follow events at a safe and civilised distance.

The sequel to “Akt I. Transmission” came a few months later with the exhibition “Akt II. Index”. For this Jannik Broz furnished an exhibition room at the museum with a number of different materials and objects, all with the character of something that was left over or about to be turned into something else, as in a stockroom or a workshop. Placed around the floor were large wooden boxes with lard from “Akt I”. Some of this was also used literally to pickle the many hours of film. The tin cans containing the “preserved” rolls of film were lined up along the walls of the exhibition room. The computer-adapted photo of the artist which forms part of “FOR(N)EVER”, and which is also the only element recorded in the 2^nd person, is together with some film stills the only surviving testimony to “Akt I. Transmission”

Out of the fat

A few years earlier, in 1992, Jannik Broz had initiated another remarkable happening. For the exhibition “Cells”, held in the old prison in Horsens, he was filmed as he slowly broke his way out of a chrysalis of lard. He himself was in the one cell, while the audience was in another, watching the happening live via video-screens. As in “Akt I. Transmission” the work illustrates the problem of being a witness without actually being present and with no risk of having to have an opinion or become involved. Simultaneously the video-screen is a filter, creating distance and becoming a generator for the viewer’s role as passive spectator, as voyeur. For Jannik Broz these performances are boundary-breaking. He describes being wrapped in lard for the exhibition “Cells” as “the wildest and most intense experience I have ever exposed my body to, as though it once again recalled/relived the foetus stage”. His desire constantly to reach back and use elements from these performances, even years later, testifies to the necessity of personal bodily experience as one of the points of origin for the creation of his art.

The Finland War series

In 1999-2000 Jannik Broz received the National Art Foundation’s 2-year initiator grant, which he used to produce a new work built around the theme of the Finland War of 1939-44 when Finland fought against the Soviet Union army. Inspired by photos from an old history book Jannik Broz produced a series of drawings in pencil on paper or, where the format is larger, in acrylic paint. The motifs are drawn directly from the photos in the book, but require careful attention to identify them on the artwork. Most of the recognizable elements have been erased and only a superstructure remains, an extract of lines and forms that make the drawings balance on the edge of abstraction. But beneath this traces of the war landscape and military equipment stand out: fragments of shattered tree-trunks, the scars of trenches across the landscape, the muzzle of a gun, a motorbike or the contours of an emaciated horse. In some of the drawings Jannik Broz goes further in his investigations: curtains of green dots are spread across the picture surface – like an explosion of colour in the black and white universe. The effect does not fail to materialize; the colour is powerful and the dots run a decorative filter across the war landscape.

FOR(N)EVER

In 2003 Jannik Broz took part in Grafisk Skole 25, an anniversary exhibition in Århus Kunstbygning (Centre for Contemporary Art). The event saw a new departure in his work: small plastic soldiers occupying the exhibition walls and canvases. This was the first time he used his drawings in the context of installation art. His contribution was also awarded a prize by Århus municipality for its originality.

In 2005 Jannik Broz continued his work on the theme from the Finland War and the small plastic soldiers in an exhibition for Galleri Lorentz and Kurtz, the artist’s own occasional gallery. As in any boy’s room the soldiers are set up in formations, arranged in small scenarios and groupings. But this is far from being a game. A real war forms the basis for the installation – a theme which is foreign to most people today but nevertheless recognizable. The soldiers are not necessarily in historically correct uniforms. The important factor for Jannik Broz is what he calls the figures’ pictogrammic qualities. Although we have no direct reference-point we recognize the figures – if from nowhere else then from the film and entertainment industry.

Jannik Broz is absorbed by war as a human construction that both exposes a fundamental human ugliness and contains something beautiful – as in boys’ war games, and in the banality of dividing the world into black and white, heroes and villains. In spite of their naturalism the plastic soldiers represent at the same time a kitsch, innocent candy-world which serves to camouflage the underlying realities of war. In his latest works this war-and-boys’ universe has been further invaded by markedly girlish, pink colour amid the classic black and white graphical aesthetic.

In the course of the past ten years Jannik Broz has moved from raw workshop-style stacks and boundary-breaking performances to hyper-aetheticised installations. The works express a more immediate smoothness, in line with the increased focus of our time on self-staging and sleek design fetichism. But they not only reflect the desire of the present for non-committal pop culture and self-centredness. Being full of chinks and rifts and ambiguity they encompass a memory of another, equally real, world. At a time when many are pursuing extreme sports in order to sense the fragility of life, for the artist it is the performance which presents the physical and mental challenge. The manipulated photo from “Akt I” is a testimony to these trials, a personal “war”, a memory to be secured.

There are signs that Jannik Broz is again about to produce a series of new experiments. The word is that a full-size horse has been stabled, ready to be cloned and drawn around town. Perhaps it will be a whole regiment of pink plastic horses.

Christina Rauh Oxbøll, MA, October 2006