The rediscovery of storytelling

Proclaiming the need for an autonomous art wholly internal to the logic and characteristics of its linguistic tools, modernist art refused all forms external to the character of the visual language it adopted. It therefore excluded all elements from the real world, including instances of narration, which was considered a plebeian, rhetorical and superficial linguistic form, a by-product of kitsch. The American art critic Clement Greenberg, modernism’s principle theoretician, writes: ‘The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: “it tells a story”.’1

In a process of critiquing and superseding Greenbergian theories, postmodernist movements like neo-Dada, Fluxus and Minimalism began slowly but surely to erode the self-sufficiency of modernism’s structured visual language, to introduce life within the increasingly larger perimeter of the artwork. In this context, we could claim Conceptual art as pivotal in introducing a few timid and allusive forms of storytelling with which to surpass the pure opticality and silence of modernist ideology. Conceptual art initiated a broad use of written language with a variety of goals: as an attempt to dematerialise the art object, as an effort to reach a broader public, and to convey theoretical considerations on the linguistic and epistemological fundamentals of art. Since they are of interest to us here, one may mention two more possibilities of the written word by Conceptual artists. One uses writing towards a categorisation and ordering that is impersonal, archival and parascientific, often to call into question the criteria by which the world and its phenomena are classified. The second uses writing for its ability to name without showing, for its indirectness and imaginative punch, for the way it frees thought beyond the visual limits of the artwork, not to say beyond the limits of the visual realm. In other words, Conceptual art reworks the potential of pictures, texts, shapes and objects (even when they appear to possess a laconic aspect) to make them not only the vehicles of narrative and conversational forms, but actual devices by which to expand our imaginative capacities, even going as far as to give form to an object, concept or image by means of the allusion created by a textual element. It would not be right to define Hreinn Friðfinnsson as a strictly Conceptual artist – so rich are the range of directions and types of expression explored in his practice. Indeed, if his work moves away from the more analytical forms adopted by certain Conceptualists (Art & Language and Joseph Kosuth to name the two most representative), we could see it as belonging to a more lyrical line characterised by a romantic tendency that seeks the potency of imagination, often conveyed by relating to the natural landscape and its phenomena.2 However, at least two typical characteristics of Conceptual art are found in his work: the use of the written word as a form of expression (either on its own or in relation to pictures); and a metalinguistic understanding of the figure of the artist, art and art history.

In line with a certain kind of Conceptual Art, Friðfinnsson uses the written word both for the categorisation and description of materials that are impalpable, mysterious and seemingly unclassifiable, as well as for its imaginative possibilities. While, as mentioned above, Conceptual art introduced condensed and elusive forms of storytelling, it is no small merit of Friðfinnsson’s work to have brought a narrative quality to Postminimalist art in more explicit ways than most artists of his generation. Moreover, one might credit how he has made art history and the artist’s craft recurrent subjects of his work, taking them as narrative material – not without a vein of humour alien to the majority of Conceptual artists.

In this sense, Friðfinnsson’s art can be seen as part of a renewed self-reflecting irony regarding the craft of making art and the role of the artist, an element that emerged in the early 1990s. At the same time, constitutes an important precedent to the more recent attention to storytelling, narrative and oral forms of art that began in the context of our digital techno-society in the early 2000s, and that has also used art history as material and even legend.3

We might therefore be tempted to read the work of Friðfinnsson, a farmer’s son from the Icelandic countryside, as an involuntary yet appropriate riposte to Greenberg’s classist assertion. Without going so far, however, this text discusses the ways in which Friðfinnsson has used narrative constructs as a founding pillar of his visual language from the early 1970s to the present day. I will point out a double register through which his interest takes shape, generally corresponding to two chronologically distinct phases of his career. Although the two themes are present in his entire oeuvre and alternate in his work over decades, we can distinguish a first period running from his artistic beginnings up to the mid-1970s, and another running from the early 1990s to today.

In the first phase, the references to a narrative dimension are related to the imaginative possibilities provoked by the use of certain linguistic operations by the artist, and to Icelandic folk culture, whose rich tradition of sagas, fables and legends has greatly influenced both Icelandic society and Friðfinnsson’s artistic endeavours. In the second phase, a substantial group of artworks is constructed around references to (and evocations of) art history, which he sometimes uses as material with a legendary, mythical and fabled character. To be concise, we could say that in an almost 50-year career, a certain narrative predisposition is present in Friðfinnsson’s work in the following forms: ‘art as storytelling’ and ‘the storytelling of art’.

The artist as a young man

As confirmed by the artist multiple times, his education and upbringing from infancy to adolescence played a decisive role in his relationship to the natural landscape of Iceland and his fondness for the twofold theme of storytelling and art history.4 Although his background might seem far removed from artistic influences, the young Friðfinnsson was very fond of drawing and art. His family considered such pastimes

‘not very useful’, but did not oppose them.5 The small amount of artistic information that it was possible to absorb came mostly from the pictures he saw in Tíminn (Time), a daily newspaper distributed in the region where he lived that published reviews of exhibitions taking place around Iceland. Another art-related experience was a visit to the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik at age ten.6

Such scarcity of information on art history and its exponents began to subside in 1958, when the 15-year-old Friðfinnsson moved to Reykjavik to attend the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts. Although the school’s approach was traditional, based on life drawing and still life, it introduced him to a broader source of artistic references and acquaintances: on the one hand, he gained access to a few bibliographies, and on the other, he met a teacher passionate about Paul Cézanne. Artists’ names and ideas began to gain ground in the mind of the teenage student, along with a keen interest in abstract painting. Subsequent trips to London in 1963 included a memorable visit to the Tate Gallery. Back in Reykjavik, Friðfinnsson took to books to find out more; then he met Dieter Roth in Iceland and Bas Jan Ader in Amsterdam; learned of the existence of Marcel Duchamp’s work; became familiar with the Conceptual art of Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner and Stanley Brouwn at the gallery Art & Project in Amsterdam; and discovered the ‘earth works’ of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. All contributed to the maturing of his artistic language.7

A connection can certainly be found between Friðfinnsson’s irregular and episodic artistic education, based more on reading and word-of-mouth than the direct experience of art, and how he incorporates art history and its exponents as fairy-tale material in his work, living as he did in a social context with a bent for mythological creation. Indeed, the way in which he treats art as the stuff of legends, storytelling material and narrative building blocks could have its origins in the fact that his family had no dearth of books on Icelandic sagas, myths and legends, which, along with novels and poetry, were a fundamental influence on his development.

The combination of an interest in storytelling, which he sometimes melded with mythical or autobiographical elements, and an attraction to his country’s fables and legends, is an important specificity of Friðfinnsson’s work. But before proceeding with an analysis of the two directions ‘art as storytelling’ and ‘the storytelling of art’, I will mention a couple of examples from the early years of his artistic endeavours where the two ambits overlap, almost in an announcement of developments to come.

Storytelling and art

Despite the fact that Friðfinnsson’s work came to full development around 1971, it is surprising to note how at least one of his first works showed the emergence of a curious combination between ‘art about art’ and narrative allusions. Dropping by at Jón Gunnar’s (originally made in 1964, but lost and then rebuilt in 1992) is a hybrid form originating in the removal of an object from its context. Here, the object was a door belonging to an artist who, like Friðfinnsson, was a member of the SÚM group and happened to be replacing the doors of his house. After much thought, Friðfinnsson decided to forcefully kick the door and then apply the three primary colours on its damaged surface. In short, it was a kind of ready-made obtained through physical violence, where the application of paint to the torn wood seems to function as a healing salve, suggesting the possibility of speaking a new language. By conducting an operation that contains not only a Fluxus element of brute force, but also a reference to art and its history (the primary colours used by Mondrian), Friðfinnsson introduces a minimal personal and narrative element in the form of his reference to a fellow artist. We could even read the contrast between the destructive act of breaking the door and the application of an abstract swatch of paint – easily associated with a master of abstractionism – as a declaration of intent. The expressive action of breakage (which could symbolise the emphatic gestures of expressionist artists) is superseded by a new order, a new linguistic vocabulary with a ‘colder’ register.

After more years of training, travels and encounters that culminated in his move to Amsterdam in 1971, Friðfinnsson’s language moved closer to Conceptualism, while still included commentary on the making of art, which he would connect to a narrative and autobiographica linstance. Drawing a Tiger (1971) is a diptych of two black and white photographs. The one on the left shows Friðfinnsson as a nine-year-old drawing a tiger while sitting on a bale of hay in the Icelandic countryside. On the right, we see him 19 years later in the same pose, but bearded, drawing in a park in Amsterdam, having recently left France and moved to the Dutch capital to follow his wife’s career, but presumably also with the ambition of becoming a professional artist. In Drawing a Tiger, the repeated act of drawing, of making art, seems to confer legitimacy to his artistic activity, becoming an affirmation of his early vocation. On the other hand, the dating of the two pictures, their temporal distance, accords a quality to the act of drawing that we could call foundational, which retrospectively gives new importance, a somewhat mythical dimension, to the older photo. Could it be the self-proclaimed legend, not without subtle humour, of the artist’s own preordained destiny?

As is typical of a certain strand of Conceptual art, it is only thanks to language (the written words used in the work and the title) that the spectator can know what is happening in the two photographs. The words solicit our imaginative capacities in order to see in our minds something that is practically invisible to our eyes. The long-distance comparison could be read as a declaration of intent in which the romantic idea of the artist as an eternal child is layered with a linguistic form typical of Conceptual art, by which the medium used is not important, while the thought behind it gives meaning to the piece.

Storytelling as art

Emotional landscape

After cultivating his familiarity with Conceptual and Land art, Friðfinnsson began in the early 1970s to add to their visual languages a number of elements typical of Icelandic culture and nature. The landscape at those latitudes, and the sense of emptiness and distance (if not infinity) of a ‘fundamentally prehuman physical world’8 that it transmits to those travelling through it and living within it, are indubitably the subject and inspiration of much of Friðfinnsson’s work. The ways in which this happens, however, and the character of the legends and myths native to those surroundings, are where his artistic contribution becomes more personal. Seen in the context of the artistic developments of those years, some of his early works show links to Land art, which was being explored by American and European artists in the late 1960s, mostly in remote and deserted locales. Friðfinnsson was particularly interested in the work produced by the British artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. We could claim that it was especially the relationship with the magical, apotropaic character of monuments from prehistoric civilisations as explored by Long that was of particular interest for the artist. In this regard, he brought to a local dimension of a culture particularly sensitive to a magical relation with nature, the anthropological interests evident in other Land artists like Robert Smithson. On the other hand, while the American Land artists carefully ‘re-designed’ the deserted landscapes into spectacles for a future and much-desired audience, Friðfinnsson used the natural elements as forces destructive of his artistic operations, and the remoteness of the Icelandic landscape as a tool with which to experience them.

The Icelandic landscape, and the culture of beliefs and myths that run through it, is the subject of at least two early works. For Five Gates for the South Wind (1971–72) he crafted five large wooden gates and positioned them in the middle of a remote landscape in Iceland by the sea. As the title implies, the gates have the ‘function’ of allowing the warm southern wind to pass through, bringing this beneficial element to that strip of land. Although the formal aspect of the work is transmitted by means of documentary photographic recording, a typically Conceptual device, another layer of formal presence is given by abandoning the five enigmatic objects in a virtually uninhabited place and making them the subject of a story (or legend) for the few people who actually had the opportunity to encounter them. Never seen again by the artist after their placement, the doors remained exposed to the natural elements, and were almost entirely destroyed by the wind and sea. The photographic documentation taken at the time of placement and the narrative generated by the work are the only way to know of these presences.

Whereas Five Gates uses the remoteness of an object in an unusual context as a tool to activate a narrative process, Sacred and Enchanted Places (1972) is the first time the artist directly samples the legendary and narrative material of his homeland. Even more clearly than Five Gates, it adopts rigorous and impersonal photographic and textual recordings, which take the form of an anthropological study that is typical of some Conceptual art, and applies them to a number of sites in Iceland considered by folklore to have supernatural powers. This is rendered by presenting a series of cases meticulously selected, photographed and referenced by the artist, most of which relate to life and labour in the countryside.

All the Prizes and Then Some More reaches back yet further into Friðfinnsson’s life to tell, many years later, another story in which art history and personal history overlap. In 1958, the Icelandic publisher Helgafell premiered a series of reproductions of paintings by the country’s best artists. To advertise the quality of the prints, the company organised a competition and an exhibition with the aim of awarding ten prizes to the first ten visitors able to distinguish the reproductions from the originals. Of the 100 visitors who took part, only one was able to identify the lot: a young man from Dölum in West Iceland. As the accounts reported at the time, ‘A student from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, the young Hreinn Friðfinnsson from Bær, Miðdölum, received all the prizes – all ten reproductions.’ Some 35 years after Drawing a Tiger, with which we opened this text and with which Friðfinnsson practically commenced his mature work, the artist revisited yet another episode from his introduction to art. In this case, he is no longer the emerging artist that he was in 1971, at which point he was already mythologising his childhood. As a fully-fledged, recognised professional, a sort of tutelary deity to contemporary Icelandic art, Friðfinnsson again toys with a foundational moment in his career by commenting on the seemingly predestined route that begins in humble, provincial origins and arrives at the art world’s recognition of his official standing. With the same human sensitivity and jocosity that run through all of his work, All the Prizes restages that personal history and that art history. This new portrait of the artist as a young man seems to advance the hypothesis that those reproductions now adorning the walls of a museum not only demonstrate the capability of the artist still in his prime, but also testify – now that the reproductions themselves have become a work of art – to his entrance as a mature artist into the restricted hall of fame that is Icelandic art history. And surely, we might add, not only there.

1       Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 1935, http://theoria.art-zoo.com/avant-garde-and-kitsch-clement-greenberg/ (accessed February 2019).

2       Although it has never been posited, Friðfinnsson’s work could be included in what Jörg Heiser defines as ‘romantic conceptualism’ in his article ‘Emotional Rescue’ published in Frieze issue 71, November–December 2002, and in his exhibition ‘Romantic Conceptualism/Romantischer Konzeptualismus’ hosted at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany (10.5–17.7.2007) and at the Bewag Foundation in Vienna (14.9–1.12.2007).

3       I have written extensively about these subjects: ‘Nothing to See, Nothing to Hide’, published in The Weird But True Book for the 2005 Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania, and republished in a new version in Uovo issue 18, 2008; and ‘The art of storytelling, the story(telling) of art’, published in the catalogue to the exhibition ‘Power to the People: Contemporary Conceptualism and the Object in Art’ held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2011. These two articles contain references to Friðfinnsson. ‘Storytelling, nature and art: an introduction to the world of Hreinn Friðfinnsson’, was, in fact, the title of an essay I wrote for the catalogue of Friðfinnsson’s solo show at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin/Stockholm, 2012.

4       This text is based on my ten-year acquaintance and several encounters with the artist, mostly at his homes in Amsterdam.

5       From a conversation with the author, 11.10.2018.

6       For more on his upbringing, see Friðfinnsson’s conversation with Andrea Bellini and Krist Gruijthuijsen in this book, pp. 17–24

7       Friðfinnsson’s interest in storytelling was not only influenced by traditional Icelandic culture, but perhaps also by meeting Bas Jan Ader in Amsterdam. He attended Ader’s live reading performance The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls at Art & Project Gallery in Amsterdam in 1972, during which Ader sat in an armchair reading a true story from Reader’s Digest. Subsequently, Friðfinnsson invited Ader to participate in an exhibition in Reykjavik. In addition to the narrative dimension and self-mockery of the artist’s status, the two have in common frequent references to the work of Mondrian.

8       Giorgio Manganelli, L’isola pianeta e altri settentrioni (Milan: Adelphi, 2006), p. 62.

9       ‘Thorsteinn Surtr dreamed he was awake but everyone else was asleep: then he dreamed he fell asleep and everybody else woke up.

10     The subject of his work I Collected Personal Secrets (1972–2015) is once again undisclosed material, difficult to discover and share. Friðfinnsson placed a classified ad in the Dutch art magazine Fandangos asking readers tosend him their personal secrets, saying he would preserve them carefully (‘je les garderai précieusement’).

11     Questioned by the author, Friðfinnsson denies any reference to the work by Félix González-Torres consisting of mounds of candy and chocolates heaped in the corners of rooms, saying he has no knowledge of them.