(After the gold rush, Neil Young)
I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home
Look at Mother Nature on the run / in the 21st century
Look at Mother Nature on the run / in the 21st century
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Stein Henningsen's reminders
The environmental crisis we are in can easily lead to paralysis of action, since we think that one person's actions and attitudes will have nothing to do with the big picture.
We could call this attitude of ours enlightened, cynical reason, to use one expression from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. The mismatch between acknowledgment and action are tangible, he believes, because although we know very well how we must change our lives to do something about the acute situation they undertake most of us do little other than source sorting. As Sloterdijk points out, based on the old Enlightenment ideal we would believe that thinking and correct information would lead to action, but this is a thing of the past. No matter how much we know about the injustice or the destruction of the basis of our existence it does not translate into a desire of change or solidarity, but often leads to indifference, he claims.
The situation has not improved since Sloterdijk formulated his theses in «Critique of Cynical Reason» in the eighties - on the contrary has truth, insight and will to justice for nature and people lost even more importance at the beginning of the 21. century where alternative facts, post-truth and conspiracy theories abound. It is reasonable to think that this situation has made simple and clear truths such as that we are destroying the planet we live on diffuse and less accessible.
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What the solution to such a fate will be is not easy to say, but one possibility is to wake us up from slumber again through images and stories that reveal the conflict between ideal and reality.
Stein Henningsen's artistry offers a wide range of such revival attempts, where precisely the break between insight and apathy is reformulated in unexpected ways.
In 2009, he dragged a block of ice into the gallery space in New York and the block was completely covered in dollar bills. Thus showed he in an unusual way how we usually don't just put monetary values before nature, but how we, with these optics, are unable to detect nature in general. Later, in subsequent performances, he chains himself to the ice, as if to say that all our woes and fortunes are inevitably conditioned by nature's health. In other contexts, Henningsen's performance forces us to dedicate attention to nature, as in Meltdown (2009) at the Kunstbanken in Hamar, where he lit some logs under yet another block of ice and waited for the whole thing had turned to water.
Modernity's ruling relationship with nature as resources or object of something beautiful or health-giving outside of us, has long been the dominant one point of view, but Henningsen sinks into the elements, submits nature. He is not separated from its violent forces, like Caspar David Fredrich's The monk by the sea (1808-1810), where a solitary thinker stands in front of the sublime sea, but sheltered from the agitated waves in his contemplative pose on land. Henningsen also differs from others in the performance tradition, like John Long, who in his performances leaves great distances behind in his journey through nature and shows off its movements as a small story or a poem.
Henningsen tries to re-establish a direct connection to nature and its processes, he emerges through the struggle against the elements, as in MAN STANDING, SVALBARD (2013), where he stands in a snowstorm until he can't do it anymore, or in HABITAT (2021), where he walks naked into the snow in front of a Glacier. He articulates the fact that it burns in relation to nature, literally spoken, in works such as THE BOAT (2021), where he rows out into the arctic sea in a boat with a live fire in the stern. Or as in TIMELINE II (2021), where he holds a beam where the fire eats its way through a timeline from one end of the beam to the other, as he holds it, standing on a high mountain in the wilderness of Svalbard.
There is something charming and undisguised in how Henningsen deals with ice, fire and other natural elements, for he does not seek to exalt himself or to create beauty tableaus of his performances, but re-establish a situation where we can connect to the environment we all depend so directly on. Instead of conveying the sublime experiences we can consider from a distance, immune from the nature portrayed, we are here witness to the individual's exposure to, and interaction with, weather, wind, ice and fire.
As in David Fredrich's paintings, he does indeed become a substitute for us, but unlike the German romantic, Henningsen's works are mediums to simple and important truths, not intellectualized considerations from which we distance ourselves from basic insights into what it means to be a human being.
Nevertheless, it is not man itself that is essential in these works, but the processes Henningsen integrates into: the ice that melts, the fire that burns, the wind that blows, the snow that is walked through. This is what he is asking us to show attention to and experience through his art, and it is through these passages of time we may be able to access an experience that is no longer cynical and indifferent, but in line with the whole of which we are all undeniably a part. It's these processes, these elementary constituents of what exists, and which is much bigger and older than us, Henningsen exposes and measures out with his own body as a reference.
In this way he anchors us, or perhaps we could say reminds us of, our place in nature - and that our way of life is completely out of step with the rhythms of reality. We are small dots in the vastness of natural history development lines, where we must recognize our place in the larger whole in order to live further with both snow, ice, fire, water and all the other life forms that live with us on this planet.
- Kjetil Røed
