IDA EKBLAD - Nasjonalmuseet

IDA
EKBLAD

Repeating Expression:
Ida Ekblad’s Painterly Lexis
Andrea Kroksnes
“I believe in painting like I believe in music.” 1 There
is something new (or very dated) and thus surprising
about Ida Ekblad’s outright credo in a medium that has
been called problematic and even “dead” for decades
now. This might also be the reason why her very first attempts
as a painter were read by some critics as ironic—
maybe even as feminist commentaries on the grand,
male-dominated genre from the art-historical past.
These paintings were huge-format canvases of wildly
gestural abstractions in bright tones of blue, yellow, and
an orangey palette of reds. The paint was applied thick
and fast, self-assuredly, and showing little time for reflection
or doubt. The big format was deliberately macho,
disobeying the common-sense assumption that so few
female painters produce large-scale paintings due to
women’s supposed difficulties handling large canvases
because of their smaller bodily frames. Furthermore, Ekblad’s
paintings were clearly referencing a mostly male
generation of painter heroes, ranging from Asger Jorn to
Jackson Pollock.
Ekblad’s bold artistic expression diverges from that of
her contemporaries who show a more hesitant and selfreflexive
approach toward painting. There has been no
coherent view on painting since the last wave of Neoexpressionist
paintings in the 1980s centering around
New York and Cologne/Berlin. True, painting has always
existed, and painting in particular has seen a new rise
in the art market in recent years. But artists working as
painters have been perceived as working independently
of a larger group or movement 2 and the discussion on
painting had been somewhat put on hold until recently.
Few young artists, critics, and curators have been very
engaged in painting as a “discourse.” For them, painting
has posed a threat to acknowledged postmodern beliefs.
How can a medium that presents a stable and fixed view
of the world—even if it is non-figurative—be reconciled
with the postmodern assumption of a de-centered and
fragmented reality? Ideas of subjective expression and
authenticity that always seemed inherent to the medium
were to some extent dismissed as essentialist and dated.
In a kind of misunderstood 3 reading of Roland Barthes’s
1 Ida Ekblad, quoted in Sarah McCrory, “Ida Ekblad”, Ida Ekblad:
Poem Percussion (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), 38.
2 Admittedly, we have witnessed attempts to describe some of these
painters as groups, such as the German Leipzig School. But in reality
this labeling was fueled more by attempts for market-driven branding
than by scholarly interest and these phenomena have received little
critical attention by art historians or critics to date.
3 I believe Barthes was misunderstood because he never really had
the intention to say that there was no possibility of or positive
outcome from any kind of subjective expression from an author. His
text simply looks at what happens between a text and the reader, a
perspective that had been neglected until then.
text, the Death of the Author, 4 critics declared “the end
of painting.” In particular abstract painting was deemed
suspicious, as it had so much to do with an authorial
gesture. Even though twentieth-century modernism has
always favored a version of painting as an inherently selfreflexive
medium, it seemed the kind of reflexivity that
focused on its own attributes was too myopic to include
the renewed interest in questions that went beyond the
paintings’ frame, such as Institutional Critique and issues
of representation in an age of de-centered subjectivity.
Also, the increasingly more complex constitutions of
class, race, and gender could not be approached within
painting, or so it seemed.
It is interesting to note that in the last few years there
has been a renewed interest in the theoretical and
art-historical debate about painting. Only recently, the
important German art journal Texte zur Kunst devoted
one of its issues to the topic of painting, intriguingly
with a highly self-reflexive title posed as a negation of
its very topic: “Painting Is Not the Issue.” The editors
sum up the difficult discussion as follows: “Once again
it is quite clear that the term “painting” is an inadequate
common denominator for the set of diverse practices
that have long clustered under the name. In our view,
it is precisely for this reason that there is just no getting
around the renewed discussion of painting.” 5
Many contemporary painters have been eager to promote
their self-reflexive approach. It has seemed impossible
to be a painter without acknowledging that the
“innocence of painting”—or any original expression—is
long gone. Ekblad’s paintings seem to be diametrically
opposed to such a painfully modest and overly referential
and self-effacing attitude in recent painting. And
Ekblad is blunt about what painting is for her: “I cannot
be concerned with its death, when working at it makes
me feel so alive.” 6 For her, painting is not an intellectual
cognitive exercise or a problem to be solved, but a very
enjoyable spontaneous, and most importantly, subjective
way to express herself. “Painting to me combines expressions
of rhythm, poetry, scent, emotion…. It offers ways
to articulate the spaces between words.” 7 In an interview
with the Norwegian critic Peder Amdam, titled “For the
Love of Painting,” Ekbald also talks about the “other
4 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Harrison and Wood (ed.)
Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Cambridge: 1992).
5 Isabelle Graw and Andre Rottmann, (ed.), “Preface,” Texte Zur Kunst,
77 (March 2010): 107.
6 Ida Ekblad, quoted in Sarah McCrory, “Ida Ekblad,” Ida Ekblad:
Poem Percussion (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), 38.
7 Ibid.

side” of painting, something she describes as including
“soul-searching, doubt, exhaustiveness, and slowness…
struggles, creative blocks, and trouble, all of which
awaits me in my studio.” 8
Ekblad’s paintings surprise us because they dodge the
discourse of “the end of painting,” the “death of the
author,” and all the other postmodern endgame talk.
Instead, her strategy is to pretend these discourses do
not apply to her, courageous and cocky at the same time.
It is interesting also, that by this, Ekblad still manages to
stay within the modernist progressivist tale of the avantgarde
artist: she gives the discourse a new turn, even
though it is a turn back. It is also refreshing to see how
effortlessly she does what she wants to do without having
to compromise. Ida Ekblad simply believes in painting.
How is that even possible? Other artists of her generation
struggle with producing art altogether, describing it, for
example, as the Norwegian artist and long-time friend
Matias Faldbakken does, as: “the paradox of not believing
in it and still sticking to it.” 9 For Ekblad, however,
there is no paradox in this. While many of her peers only
play with the idea of producing autonomous art, and
everything in their practice tells us that they are conscious
of the pitfalls of this approach, for Ekblad a return
to an unspoiled state of artistic expression is not only
unproblematic but the only way out. Ekblad is not interested
in working through the end of painting once more
in the tradition of the famous German painters Gerhard
Richter, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert
Oehlen—a generation of painters that has strongly influenced
contemporary painting practice internationally.
While their paintings convey black humor and irony, selfreflection,
negation, and even mourning, Ekblad’s works
lack this register almost entirely. The anti-subjective
painterly methods demonstrated in Richter’s squeegee
paintings, Oehlen’s computer paintings, or their respective
world views are absent in Ekblad’s paintings, with
the artist returning instead to the good old gestural
brushstrokes. With autodidactic self-confidence and the
stylistic clumsiness of punk, she frees her work from
any commitment to reflexiveness. However, her work
is not completely free of any historical references. Even
though she does not acknowledge a direct influence of
postwar Abstract Expressionism, the resemblances to it
in her works are so strong that one could almost discuss
them as contemporary remakes of the older generation’s
works. If one of the particular qualities of Ekblad’s works
is their credo to the tradition of easel painting before it
was spoiled by postmodern problematization, what does
this tell us about her work?
8 Ida Ekblad, “For the Love of Painting,” interview with Peter Amdam,
SMUG, No 6 (Oslo, spring/summer, 2013).
9 Faldbakken made this remark in a discussion with the author,
February 2009. Quoted in Andrea Kroksnes, “Critique of the World
as Signature Style,” in Helen Legg and Øystein Ustvedt (ed.), Matias
Faldbakken: Shocked into Abstraction (Oslo/Birmingham: Ikon Gallery
and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, 2009),
97–146.
Isabelle Graw and Peter Geimer have recently
published Über Malerei, 10 a little book with two essays
by both authors and a discussion. The book is a
continuation of the discussion about painting that was
already featured in the Texte zur Kunst issue (which again
referred back to an Artforum issue published a year earlier).
Graw, who has a sociology-of-art background and
is the founding editor of Germany’s most intellectual art
magazine, is not interested in finding the essence of the
medium of painting. Her continuous interest in painting
is rather motivated by an investigation of the problems
its methods pose us. Graw is suspicious of media essentialism—in
particular of essentialist painting and the
figure of the authentic artistic subject that goes hand-inhand
with it. She argues that the artistic mark-making
in painting favors a subjective reading of painting.
Based on C.S. Pierce’s theory of the index, she sees the
painterly mark as a physical index that links a painting
to its artistic subject. In gestural painting particularly,
there is a danger of encouraging a mythological reading
of authentic expression. Graw is therefore more interested
in painterly practices that critique this expressive
paradigm. She sees Kippenberger, Oehlen, Christopher
Wool, and Michael Krebber in this tradition. Oehlen, for
example, opposes expression by following “a blunt plan
imposed from the outside that is simply implemented.” 11
Thus each painting—even though it also might acquire
an aura of virtuosity—is an outcome of an external
experimental arrangement.
The Austrian art historian, critic, and curator Achim
Hochdörfer, on the other hand, argues that the painting
practices of the 1950s and 1960s “sought to understand
how subjective experience might survive the age of
simulation.” 12 He calls this practice a “hidden reserve”
which is now being tapped into by a young generation of
artists trying to carve out new approaches for themselves
in an age where art-making and the notion of a creative
subject seems outmoded altogether. Ekblad can be
identified as belonging to this young generation. Other
figures that come to mind are Peter Doig’s lyrically
subjective paintings of faded nostalgias, Josh Smith’s
insistence and ruminations on the artist’s signature and
painterly mark-making per se, Thea Djordjadze’s and
Gedi Sibony’s spatial improvisations on the subject of
painting, and also Sergej Jensen’s sensual and virtuously
de-skilled “fabric paintings.” Like the generation
of postwar painters described by Hochdörfer, this young
generation, just like Ekblad, mediates between personal
“feeling” and cultural notions of subjectivity. Her bold
painterly signature is also reminiscent of that of Louise
Bourgeois (an acknowledged source of inspiration for
the artist) in the years before her death, when she ap-
10 Isabelle Graw, Peter Geimer (ed.), Über Malerei: Eine Diskussion
(Berlin: 2012).
11 Isabelle Graw, “There is no such Thing as Painting: A Conversation
between Isabelle Graw and Achim Hochdörfer,” Texte Zur Kunst, 77
(March 2010), 115.
12 Achim Hochdörfer, “A Hidden Reserve: Painting from 1958 to
1965,” Artforum (February 2009), 153–159.
parently was no longer able to sign her full name. The
large capital initials of Ekblad’s name, I.E in sans serif,
executed on the lower right corner of the paintings can
been interpreted as a blunt declaration of authorship. 13
Ida Ekblad’s devotion to the artistic practice of painterly
mark-making—in particular that of Abstract Expressionism,
cannot but be read as a deliberate investigation
of the possibility of subjective expression, imagination,
creativity, and above all artistic action. Ekblad knows well
that we live in times when any autonomous rebellious
gesture is co-opted by the “dominant system,” as brilliantly
pointed out already in Herbert Marcuse’s essay
“Repressive Tolerance” in 1965. 14 She started her career
with works that precisely problematized this dilemma,
as in her exhibition Silver Ruins at Oslo’s Fotogalleriet
(2008). 15
Since then, her work has left this self-critical agenda
behind. It almost seems that she has adopted the faux
innocence of a pop musician. Pop music does not care
about re-inventing itself completely, but contends itself
with endless repetition. Good pop actually has to resonate
with all the songs we have heard before. And maybe
good art has to resonate with all the great art we have
seen before? Ekblad uses Pippi Longstocking’s words to
express her own attitude in regards to creation:
“I am used to things appearing and disappearing,
changing and rearranging—fill ev’ry minute ’cause you
never know where you might be tomorrow, or who you’ll
meet, or what you’ll see, or where you’ll go.” 16
Pippi Longstocking’s favorite pastime game of collecting
things that have been thrown away not only
resembles a postmodern practice of pastiche, the story
is transhistorical and universal and does not help us in
periodizing Ekblad’s work. Pippi is a completely normal
girl, and since she lives by herself, the child’s creativity
has not yet been socialized away into regulated behavior.
So maybe Ekblad’s quoting of Pippi is a credo to
find one’s own state of unspoiled creativity. This does
not necessarily entail that we have to find something
genuinely new, rather that we use the things we find to
make something new. Like Pippi, Ekblad still dares to be
imaginative. And as Paul Ricoeur has written, “imagination
radiates out in all directions, reanimating earlier
experiences, awakening dormant memories, spreading
to adjacent sensorial fields… a free game of possibilities
in a state of uninvolvement with respect to the world of
perception or action. It is in this state of uninvolement
that we try out new ideas, new ways of being in the
13 See Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith who gives us a complicated reading
of I.E as a sign of self-evident subjectivity, “I.E” Ida Ekblad: Poem
Percussion (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), 16–18.
14 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” Robert Paul Wolff,
Barrington Moore, Herbert Marcuse (ed.), A Crtique of Pure Tolerance
(New York: 1965).
15 Arve Roed, “Institusjonsbatikk,” Kunstkritikk.no (05.09.2008),
http://www.kunstkritikk.no/wp-content/themes/KK/printPage.
php?id=555&r=0.98794
16 Ida Ekblad quoted in Gigiotto Del Vecchio, Mousse Magazine #22,
February 2010. http://www.moussemagazine.it(articolo.mm?id_528, l
world.” 17 Ekblad follows an imaginative approach that
we also might call “devil-may-care.” This practique sauvage
18 is an undomesticated practice that moves wildly
around in consecrated mainstream culture. It is a playful
and ambivalent practice that is both fascinated and disappointed
by what it finds. On her wild journeys, she voraciously
collects miscellanies of this culture, tosses them
around, and reassembles something fresh. Even more
obvious than in her paintings, this practice of “dumpster
diving” becomes evident in Ekblad’s sculptures, where
it is not the dumpster of art history that serves as source
material but street and landfill garbage that she picks up
on her Situationist-inspired “drifts” through the city. 19
And even though Ekblad likes to deny any influence
of postwar art practice, we inevitably think of possible
pictorial precursors and references when looking at her
paintings. Ekblad’s paintings have been compared to
those of Asger Jorn and the COBRA group. And indeed
Ekblad’s early paintings from 2009 (like Ti ville hester...,
Tyrian Purple, or She hath been bitten by the Tarantula)
do in fact resemble Jorn’s abstract works from the late
sixties and seventies, such as Midsummer day dream
(1970) and Light and dark sides (1970) or Bitter Ernst
(1971), in terms of their color scheme: an energetic swirl
of dark and light blues, contrasted by a warm yellow,
and different shades of orange and red, all given depth
and contrast by areas of white and black. There are also
similarities in the way these paintings are executed.
Thick organic lines that have a strong graphic quality
winding through the picture plane, demarking patches
of pure color that are painted out in a rough, thick, and
fast manner. These are painted in a mode so deliberately
sloppy that they evoke both virtuosity and child-like
clumsiness.
When looking at Ekblad’s paintings, it is not only
Asger Jorn that comes to mind (and his colleagues from
COBRA, among them Karel Appel and Corneille).
Her paintings evoke the works of Serge Poliakoff, Jean
Dubuffet, Jean Deyrolle, Jean Dewasne, as well as an
entire generation of followers of key Norwegian postwar
painters such as Inger Sitter, Jakob Weidemann, Anna
Eva Begman, Irma Salo Jaeger, Jens Johannesen, and
later in the early 1990s, even some works of Kjell Nupen.
17 Paul Ricoeur, “Imagination in discourse and in action,” in Gillian
Robinson and John Rundel (ed.), Rethinking Imagination: Culture and
Creativity (London and New York: 1994), 122–123.
18 I am referring here to Gayatri Spivak, who has proposed a
deconstructive practique sauvage, a “wild practice,” a “practical
politics of the open end” as a feminist tactic using laws and
occupying self-confidently hegemonic positions, but also daring an
adventurous re-writing of the script, when necessary. See also: my
essay in the exhibition catalogue for the Nordic pavilion in Venice in
2003 that took such a practice as its loose theme. Andrea Kroksnes,
“A Wild Practice,” in Anne Karin Jortveit and Andrea Kroksnes
(ed.), Devil May Care: The Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennial
2003 (Oslo: 2003), 16–17.
19 The Situationist dérive was an artistic practice originally aimed
at subverting the capitalist structures of the city environment: a
meandering walk which strays from functional roads and weaves
the rational designs of the city into a poetic chaos according to the
unconscious reactions of the drifter to his/her environs.

Norwegian postwar art was strongly influenced by
what was happening in Paris (in contrast to a more
general trend in art history that shifted its focus from
Europe to New York after the Second World War 20 ).
In postwar Paris, various abstract movements such as
Informel, Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction developed,
spanning from Art Brut to COBRA. Jean Dubuffet, who
coined the term “Art Brut” was inspired by the work
of children and the mentally handicapped. Tachisme
focused on painterly spontaneity as a reaction against
the more conceptual geometric abstraction of an earlier
Constructivist movement. Tachisme’s point of departure
was partly a Surrealist automatism, partly COBRA’s
idea of subjective expressions of feelings. In 1952, Kunstnernes
Hus in Oslo showed the exhibition Klar Form,
which presented twenty of the most important painters
from the pivotal Paris gallery Denise René, among them
Poliakoff and Dewasne. The various styles of Tachisme
and Lyrical Abstraction have become the lingua franca
for all serious Norwegian abstract painters since the
1950s.
What happens when Eklbad picks up this tradition
once again? And is it a coincidence that one of her peers,
another young Norwegian painter, Fredrik Vaerslev, copies
works by Dubuffet, one of the members of the Paris
school that had such strong influence on Norwegian
postwar painting? 21 But while Vaerslev is still playing the
“painting as endgame” game, outsmarting harsh critics
while at the same time reenacting Dubuffet’s Art Brut
terrazzo paintings, Ekblad seems beyond such complicated
theoretical exercises. Like Vaerslev she sometimes
indeed steels the idea of the originals. 22 Her ceramic
reliefs, in particular Then digging holes into my pineal
gland (2011), do not accidentally resemble Asger Jorn’s
ceramic experiments at the workshop Mazzotti in Abisola
of 1954. Ekblad produces her ceramics in the very
same legendary ceramic workshop as Jorn—without ever
before having been trained in ceramics, just like Jorn before
her. Her mimicry of Jorn manifests itself also visually
in the works themselves. It is not only palpable in the
narrow palette of mostly primary colors plus black and
white, but also in the treatment of the clay: her approach
as violent and immediate as his, a kneading, digging, and
pinching with hands and fingers. For the firing process
the ceramic plate has to be cut into smaller pieces. Like
Jorn, Ekblad cuts her relief with irregular curving lines
that add to the overall expression of the work. Again like
Jorn, Ekblad also produced “normal” pottery items such
as vases and decorative plates. And lastly, her excitement
for the artisanal medium of ceramics also resembles that
of Jorn. Jorn’s experiments with ceramics epitomize his
20 See Serge Guibault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art
(Chicago and London: 1983).
21 Vaerslev’s Terazzo Paintings look very much like Dubuffet’s Le
mécanisme de l’effacement des traces from 1957.
22 The artist herself would never put it that way, but rather speaks of
her admiration for Jorn. The historical referencing in Ekblad’s work
is less clear-cut and conceptual than in Vaerslev’s paintings. Ekblad
uses the references in a more subtle and subjective manner, but her
result is no less well-informed and valid.
belief in experiment, spontaneity, and his anti-hierarchical
approach towards established genres and forms. 23
When asked directly about sources of inspiration,
Ekblad evades clear answers but mentions many things,
in particular music. She also recounts the frequent
museum visits with her family to the nearby museums
in and around Oslo: the collection of the Henie Onstad
Art Center, Stenersenmuseet, the National Gallery, and
the then newly opened Museum of Contemporary Art.
And it was the above-mentioned tradition of painting
that was ubiquitous in those collections in Ekblad’s
childhood years of the 1980s and early 1990s. Again
Poliakoff comes to mind, whose works from the 1950s
and 1960s are in all these most important Norwegian
collections. Poliakoff was also interested and inspired by
music. Himself a talented guitar player and familiar with
the emerging jazz music scene of his time, the notion
of musical improvisation seems to have been fruitful
also for his painterly production. 24 Like Ekblad, Poliakoff
pursued abstraction without any pretext. It seems
quite safe to say that Ekblad shares an untamed playfulness
with this influential figure of postwar Norwegian
painting, engaging in abstraction like in a never-ending
adventure.
It is difficult to decide on a single reading to give meaning
to Ekblad’s paintings. Many of her paintings are selfreferential,
intrinsic art objects in the tradition of high
modernism. But at the same time they are indices that
refer to something outside themselves. The combination
of subjectivity and context that these images offer as
possible clues for readings deconstruct the assumption
of an image as a coherent unity.
In a Derridian strategy of doubling, Ekblad’s paintings
rebel against the notion of the original developed
by Heidegger in his famous text The Origin of the Work of
Art. 25 Heidegger’s search for origins is deeply entrenched
in the Hegelian concept of expression, in which all
articulation is realized by a medium, which in the end
disappears under the realized representation. Eklbad’s
paintings never disappear in what they show us. We cannot
view her paintings simply, because these paintings
always remind us of their status as images in the world.
They do not allow an unmediated or transcendental approach,
even though they might want that.
Why is that so? Gorgio Agamben has argued that the
image produced by repetition is a means, a medium,
which does not disappear in what it makes visible. It is
what he has called a “pure means”—a picture which
23 Jorn’s stay in Abisola in 1954 and 1955 coincided with the duration
of a new movement that he founded, the M.I.B.I. “Mouvement
International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste.” The M.I.B.I. organized
an international ceramics workshop at Abisola in 1954 to which Jorn
invited a group of international artist friends to experiment with the
medium of ceramics. Jorn considered the results of the workshop as
groundbreaking for his artistic development.
24 This, at least, is argued by Nils Ohlsen. Nils Ohlsen, “Serge Poliakoff
– Architekt einer bildnerischen Poesie,” in (ed.), Serge Poliakoff:
Retrospektive (Munich: 2007), 32.
25 Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” in Holzwege,
Martin Heidegger. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: 1977).
shows itself as such: “The image gives itself to be seen
instead of disappearing in what it makes visible.” 26 By
“quoting” older artworks, Ekblad is dealing with the
problems of image and expression/meaning. Even in the
tradition of expressionist art, her pictures are never simply
expression but something in between. They recall the
expression the originals once claimed for themselves, but
this expression is never fully reenacted. The expression
that once was mediated by the originals can now, in the
“remake,” only be reconstructed and can no longer be
experienced. This does not mean, however, that expression—any
kind of intention to render meaning—is lost
in the paintings altogether. Ekblad still believes in expression.
By repeating the once vibrant works of modern
art that have long become expressionless objects held in
survey books and consecrated collections of museums
of modern art, she seems to perform a kind of homage
to the glory of unmediated expression. It is not the same
as such that returns in Ekblads paintings. In Agamben’s
words: “The force and the grace of repetition, the
novelty it brings us, is the return as the possibility of
what was. Repetition restores the possibility of what was,
renders it possible anew; it’s almost a paradox. To repeat
something is to make it possible anew.” 27 In her pirating
of imagery from the history of modernism, Ekblad
does not simply tear these images out of their original
discourse and thus fragment and devalue the originals.
The devaluation and decontextualization of the original
art object already took place long before her act of painterly
“appropriation.” The modern art object is no longer
autonomous but reduced to the status of a commodity
fetish. Ekblad’s “remakes” of the originals only make this
condition of “everything always already being a copy”
more palpable. And paradoxically, by decontextualizing
the object of representation once again, the artist seems
to attempt a salvation of the object.
Ekblad depletes the commodity status of modernist
art more generally in her recurring appropriations of a
whole generation of Abstract Expressionists—restating
their status as already reproduced and bodiless images.
The hermeneutic meaning of the artwork, its embeddedness
in a real historical context in which it is endowed
with innate authenticity and historical function is
confiscated once again. The works of Ekblad embody the
ambivalence of embracing a loss that they are simultaneously
mourning. But a return to the clarity of a hermeneutical
origin story seems no longer possible. Her new
painterly versions of postwar Abstract Expressionism no
longer allow for a meaningful distinction between the
original and its copies. They rather expose the repetitive
and even stereotypical quality of every aesthetic gesture
being at the same time imaginative and new. I would
argue, that sticking to the aesthetic paradigm of expression,
Ekblad does not necessarily repeat expression as an
authentic and essentialist format. The memories we own,
26 Giorgio Agamben, “Wiederholung und Stillstellung”, in
documentadocuments, vol. 2 (Ostfildern: 1996), 75.
27 Ibid.
the dreams we dream, the words we say might have been
remembered, imagined, and expressed by someone before
us. We are the estranged clones, brilliantly depicted
so many times in Hollywood’s science-fiction movies,
whose memories and dreams are implanted illusions
merely experienced as real. Ekblad’s insistence on expression
must not be confused with a nostalgic promotion
of an authentic subject position. (What is that really
and has it ever existed?) It is evident from her drifting
painterly voyage. Moreover, it becomes palpable in the
rest of her artistic practice, which shies away from forming
an identifiable signature style or recognizable voice.
She is a painter, sculptor, performer, and collaborator,
her techniques and styles spanning from contemporary
Neo-conceptualism, postwar Expressionism, Situationist
drifts, performance, music, artisanal ceramics, poetic
writing, all the way to do-it-yourself junk sculpture. It is
a de-centered, shattered, and disjunctive universe that
is Ekblad’s home—just like ours. But unlike us she is
not scared and paralyzed, but hopeful and creative. If
Umberto Eco describes our postmodern condition as
the lost innocence that makes it impossible to say “I love
you” because somebody else has said it before, Ekblad
insists on saying these words. That we have heard them
before does not diminish her sincerity.

The Enabler!
Fanni Fetzer
Colin finished dressing. Getting out of his bath, he had
wrapped himself in an ample towel of fine fabric from which
only his legs and torso were exposed. He took the vaporizer
from the glass shelf and sprayed the perfumed liquid oil on his
light-colored hair. His amber comb divided the silky mass into
long orange strands identical to the furrows the happy laborer
traces with a fork in apricot jam. Colin put down his comb
and, arming himself with a nail clipper, beveled the corners
of his shaded eyelids to give mystery to his gaze. He had to
repeat this often because they grew back quickly. 1
Ida Ekblad is seated at the center, turning screws, flipping
switches, closing one tap and opening another and
ensuring everything flows smoothly without foaming
over. A small silver fish streaks down this tube and then
down that vessel, as if by happenstance, like connections
made between friends, relatives, and acquaintances.
Perhaps it is less a conscious strategy than an intelligent
way of life that includes everything and excludes
nothing. Perhaps Ida Ekblad’s generation, like herself,
began a degree in one place and completed it in another,
opened an artist-run space somewhere, but also joined
friends in smoking a salmon over an open fire. A trip
to the beach is lively and the basis for a video-work. 2
Her circle of friends is not a conspiratorial group, but is
instead characterized by great openness. All are warmly
invited to participate and contribute as they see fit:
music, a performance, an excursion to a fjord, something
to eat, a poem. In this sense Ida Ekblad compares
to a Pippi Longstocking of possibilities, of phantasy,
and a zest for life. However, this group is not a mottled,
childish rumpus, but more like a collective concentration
on essentials. Their aim is to enable exchange, not
to produce collective work, they seek the coexistence
of ideas, not close-knit cooperation. Though there are
innumerable opportunities for collaboration, these occur
in isolation and in relationships that don’t result in fixed
artistic groupings, but form lasting commitments.
Several blackheads were sticking out around the sides of his
nose, seeing themselves so ugly in the magnifying mirror, they
quickly went back under the skin and, satisfied, Colin turned
off the lamp. (...) His head was round, his ears small, his
nose straight, his complexion golden. He often smiled the smile
of a baby, and a dimple had appeared on his chin. He was
fairly tall, thin with long legs, and very nice. The name Colin
was more or less appropriate for him. He spoke softly to girls
and joyfully to boys. He was almost always in a good mood,
the rest of the time he slept. 3
Despite all this activity, Ida Ekblad never loses sight
of her own work. She cultivates her immediate social
environment without overdoing it, while nevertheless
remaining dedicated to her own work and art. This does
not draw on some theoretical knowledge, but results
from the process of making. Unconstrained and unburdened
by the discourse concerning the death of painting,
Ida Ekblad is part of an enviably liberated generation of
artists that manages to both maintain local roots and establish
an international network, while always pursuing
genuinely unique work with conviction. As an artist, Ida
Ekblad has a knowledge of life that is aware of the significance
of places. The fact that she hails from the North
and lives in a city where her friends and family are at
home is of central importance, despite the fact that she
not only studied in Oslo, but also in London, and the
USA. Of course she speaks the international language
of contemporary art and, given her winning charm,
knows everybody who is anybody. And yet she remains
a denizen of Oslo, tends to her circle of friends and
artist-run exhibition space, 4 while creating opportunities
for other people. Oslo is a small town where everybody
knows everybody. Her return here is a commitment to
her own roots and her own history, to proximity, nature,
and clarity. But above all, Oslo provides an opportunity
to be internationally mobile without being uprooted and
becoming a homeless castaway on the contemporary
data stream connecting the global exhibition circuit.
Colin slipped his feet into flying fox skin sandals and donned
an elegant indoor suit, corduroy velvet pants of a very deep
sea-green and a jacket of hazel calamanco. He hung up his
towel in the drying room, put the bath mat on the side of
the tub and sprinkled it with rock salt to discharge all of its
water. The mat started to drool, making clusters of little soapy
bubbles.
He left the bathroom and headed for the kitchen to keep an
eye on the final preparation of the meal. 5
Perhaps Ida Ekblad considers herself a Nordic artist.
She certainly lists a number of Scandinavian artists
when she speaks of her artistic heritage. Her color palette
could be called Nordic and her titles recall Nordic
people and landscapes. 6 But of greater importance is
1 Boris Vian, Foam of the Daze, trans. by Brian Harper (Los Angeles:
2003), 4.
2 For her video In Exile From the Mineral Kingdom, 2009, Ida Ekblad
crosses a scrap heap reciting her poems in her characteristically
scratchy voice, throws pieces of metal down the side of the hill, and
jangles metal against metal.
3 See note 1, 4–5.
4 Ida Ekblad ran the mobile exhibition space Willy Wonka Inc. with
Anders Nordby from 200x to 200x, where they provided friends with
first exhibition opportunities.
5 See note 1, 5.
6 Stalk Gills and Caps of Goodbye, 2009 or The Garden of Forking Paths,
2011.

her ability to combine the different trails of a biography,
English poetry, music from today and the 1970s, Gena
Rowlands and Hildegard von Bingen. Her studio has a
shared courtyard with the studio of her sweetheart. This
makes many things easier, such as the daily routine with
the children or the exchange of ideas. The floor of her
studio, a former auto repair shop, has sheets of paper
strewn across it: it is hard to determine which are valid
artworks and which incipient ideas or mere notes. The
speed of her working process is easily apparent in her
art. She produces a lot and she works quickly, with her
pleasure in the work apparent in her images and objects,
in her use of textile, gouache, metal, or language. This
results in seemingly effortless yet equally serious and
delightful works. Her paintings, her gouaches, window
paintings, sculptures, and arranged objects are neither
ironic nor humorous, but affectionate, engaging, fastpaced,
and generous. All her paintings, irrespective of
format, convey this same joyousness. Her expansive
gestures join color and form, allude to quotations or
make art-historical references. She possesses a lightness
of touch that makes everything equally possible and
admissible: “Chip of concrete smelly sour limestone,
dusty dry on the tongue, swallowed some.” 7 Ida Ekblad
brazenly eludes all attempts at being tied to a single field
or specific medium by including a poetically dreamy spider’s
web made of rusty metal (Wrapped In Silk, 2010),
or an ornate white fence (Illuminazioni? 2011) alongside
archaic gestures (The Bishop, 2010), bent metal (Bat &
Mouse, 2010), or rusting metal sheets (untitled, 2009,
Deconstruction Site [The Low Wall], 2009), as well as
sophisticated arrangements with cacti (The Gold Bug
Drift [Christiania], 2009; Woman Under Influence, 2009).
Her work inhabits a space between simple gestures and
old-fashioned paintings and recalls, not least in her
signature “I.E” placed at the low right-hand corner of
her paintings, a time when modernity was still topical,
and not merely a past chapter with a dubious influence
on the present. These are often touchingly simple works,
the bent frame of a piece of modernist tubular steel
furniture (Fence [Museum], 2009) or a poème trouvé
from a scrapheap (untitled, 2009) alongside an elaborate
arrangement made of numerous different things,
such as The Gold Bug Drift (Christiania), 2009, or Poem
Percussion, 2010. The common trait to these works is
her preference for muted colors with a sudden burst
of lemon yellow, flaming red, or dazzling purple. An
external characterization of Ida Ekblad’s work would
touch on her love for rust, for dents, and layers of flaking
paint, on her use of natural color tones and her general
sense of retrospection and simultaneous avant-gardism.
However, such a description would convey none of its
internal cohesion. Her art combines abstract paintings
and sculptures interspersed with small narrative morsels.
And while her images and objects are expressive, they
are also subdued, reduced, subversive, delicate, and even
introverted. Nevertheless, despite its historicizing affinity,
her work is not Appropriation Art, it does not convey
an intellectual construct, but enables a sensual experience.
Finally, pinning her oeuvre down is difficult not
least because she paints, builds, and composes, because
she employs cement, metal, plant parts, and watercolor
to equal degrees and because her glass paintings remind
us of finger paintings we did as children. Ida Ekblad’s
poems, situated somewhere between lyrics and slogans,
are dense, frayed, and beautiful, and only partly communicable.
She samples a wide variety of fragments at
breakneck speed, making use of the many opportunities
open to our age in that she reacts to architecture, painting,
history, and people. She paints the large windowpanes
of exhibition spaces with large sweeping gestures
and will be joined by her longstanding friend Nils Bech
for the opening of the exhibition. She inserts her own
poems or those of her friend Quinn Latimer in between
the art-historical essays discussing her work in exhibition
catalogues. Her work process is playful, but not childish,
and certainly not infantile. It evokes in the viewer
a desire to become part of this universe and experience
this certainty when dealing with friendships, materials,
tasks, and offers.
The hallway to the kitchen was bright, with windows on
both sides, and a sun shone on each side, for Colin loved
light. There were carefully polished brass faucets more or less
everywhere. The suns played with the faucets and produced
magical effects. The kitchen mice loved dancing to the sound
of the shock from the sunbeams on the faucets, and they ran
after the little balls that the beams formed upon pulverizing
themselves on the floor, like spurts of yellow mercury. On his
way through the corridor, Colin petted a mouse—it had very
long black whiskers, it was gray and thin and had a miraculous
luster—and the chef fed them very well without letting
them get too far. The mice made no noise during the day and
played only in the hallway. 8
Perhaps it is a slightly envious gaze that regards a new
generation that manages to remain mobile without losing
composure, that is on the move and plugged-in, while
discovering and creating for itself a center that is rooted
in places, in relationships, and materials, while all the
time taking a nigh-on conservative delight in sculptural
work, in artistic experimentation, and in the work of art
in and of itself. Ekblad constantly interacts with others
and always works at a horrendous pace, and yet she
also always seems to be at home. This is how Ida Ekblad
works and how she relates to her extended surroundings.
Once a foothold has been gained in this contemporary
art world, it is easy to lose sight of the overall picture, to
move too quickly, and become a mere fashion fad, soon
to disappear. Not so Ida Ekblad. Her gestures emerge
not from a vague attitude but from a consciously adopted
position. She will not fall off the wagon as she never
fully got on it, because she decided against London in
favor of Oslo, where she lives with her family, because
she prefers to do one exhibition fewer a year and instead
spend that time with her daughter, because she reads
and listens to music, and because only some of her role
models are visual artists. Ida Ekblad’s work contains so
much more that is unmistakably her own. There she sits
in her studio, opens a tap and turns a screw, feeds the
small silver fish and allows them to zip around from top
to bottom, from back to front, and then around again.
The galvanized tubes describe the course of Ida Ekblad’s
mental house and form an independent system of connections
and paths running between things, lines, people,
and interests. These communicating vessels symbolize
the surreality of simultaneous encounters in different
places that forms part of this accelerated world of technical
possibilities. Fully conscious of the art-historical
canon, Ida Ekblad is always aware of what she is doing.
She knows the references and alludes to them, but she
also builds her own house. In her handling of materials,
of styles, and models she is peerless; she delights in
hippie communes but feels no need to move in with any.
Instead, she collects materials that pertain to Denmark’s
Christiania for use in her installation. 9 The innumerable
gouaches hanging in her studio are imbued with an
enormous energy and an overwhelming sense of speed,
while it remains anyone’s guess as to which canvas is to
be singled out and framed for an exhibition and which
is merely intended as a study for use in the studio, as an
experiment in color. While insatiably curious, Ida Ekblad
knows her limits. Joie de vivre, not carelessness characterizes
her use of music, poetry, dance, and movement.
Colin sat down on a stool with a honeycomb rubber-lined seat
under oiled silk matching the color of the walls, and Nicolas
began in these terms:
Make a meat pie as an appetizer. Prepare a large eel and
cut it into pieces three centimeters thick. Put the slices of eel
into a saucepan with white wine, salt and pepper, a touch
of garlic, parsley, thyme, a bay leaf, and blades of onion.—I
couldn’t sharpen them the way I would have liked, said Nicolas.
The millstone has worn down. 10
Ida Ekblad’s quick, profuse manner of working is nearly
too much to take: everything is possible, quotation and
renewal, absolute openness but without naiveté or indifference
to the process. Her empathy for others, her care
in dealing with people and things, even with her own
artistic work, her pleasure in cooperation and her decision
to remain in Oslo, to participate, to be participate,
all result in her commanding a strong and independent
position within contemporary art. While Ida Ekblad does
not speak of collectives, it is quite evident that she can
only be understood in terms of this environment. She
is nearly always in a good mood! She loves nature and
her horizon extends equally in all directions. Her work
is neither neurotic nor twisted, nor is it simple. She is
equally at home basking in the warmth of landscapes
and friendships, she is herself a warm person and signs
her paintings “I.E” in the lower right-hand corner,
ostensibly for modesty, but actually in a coquettish,
old-fashioned, and roguish manner. And she does all this
with an exclamation mark!
Nicolas continued:
Cook. Remove the eel from the saucepan and put it into
a frying pan. Pour what’s left in the saucepan through a silk
sieve, add some espagnole and let it simmer until the sauce
sticks to the spoon. Pour through cheese cloth, cover the eel
with sauce and bring to the boil for two minutes. Lay out
the eel in the meat pie. Form a string of mushrooms around
the crust, put a bouquet of carp roe in the middle. Cover the
sauce that you have reserved for that purpose. Okay, approved
Colin, I think Chick will like that.“ 11
To girls she speaks softly, to men cheerfully. If Ida
Ekblad could also make perfect eel pies, it would be no
surprise.
Translated by Timothy Grundy
7 The title of the publication accompanying Ida Ekblad’s solo
exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, 2010.
8 See note 1, 6.
9 The Gold Bug Drift (Christiania), 2009.
10 See note 1, 7.
11 See note 1, 7–8.

A Philosopher’s Honeymoon
Barry Schwabsky
The world can be divided into two sorts of people: artists
and critics. (In a murder mystery, it will always be the
critic who murders the artist, never the other way round.)
Critics can in turn be divided into two sorts, those who
are seeking something they can understand and those
who are seeking something they can’t understand. To
seek something means trying to fulfill a lack. So there are
critics who feel they lack understanding and are therefore
trying to remedy this and others who feel they understand
too much, that they are choked on understanding, and
need to escape it. Arguably, both types of critic are laboring
under a delusion: the first understand far more than
they imagine, the second far less.
Notwithstanding my awareness that I too may be
among these deluded people, I must place myself in the
second category, those who might be called (paraphrasing
Alfred Hitchcock) the critics who understand too much.
When I go around to the galleries, I see many things that
give me pleasure but ultimately my pleasure is limited by
the feeling that what I’ve seen has, after all, been a little
too familiar—that they fit too easily into my readymade
classifications. They are, at best, like fresh performances
of familiar songs. The familiarity is as much a part of the
pleasure as the freshness, and the pleasure is real—but
there is a certain kind of fascination that this work will
always lack, because fascination involves a certain degree
of puzzlement, perhaps unconscious.
As you will probably have guessed by now, I am working
my way toward a statement that some readers, such
as the critics who seek understanding above all, will say is
tantamount to disqualifying myself from writing as a critic
about the art of Ida Ekblad: I’m not sure I understand her
work. So what, if that’s a good part of the reason I like it?
Some would contend my lack of understanding leaves me
with little or nothing of substance to say about it. But I
don’t think that’s true. The reason is that, just like understanding,
not-understanding comes in many varieties—it
has innumerable flavors and textures, can be direct or
intricate, dumbstruck or garrulous, irritated or awestruck
and so on. As for me, I have no desire to pass over
Ekblad’s art in silence. Writing about it may not eliminate
my lack of understanding, but it can illuminate the real
aspects of the work that evade intellectual comprehension—the
things that leave me in wonderment.
The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote of “the intricate
evasions of as”—which means, as John Hollander says,
that poetry “points beyond reductive assertions about
reality.” And that in turn is why, as Stevens also wrote, “It
must be abstract.” Much of what we call abstract painting,
however, is not abstract in Stevens’s sense of the word. It
is reductive. It stakes out a position on what reality is and
it defends that position, excluding everything else. It gives
you something to understand. I would rather use the word
“abstract” in a different way: as something that evades
our established categories of understanding, that effaces
the pictures of the world our elders have already painted
for us, so beautifully. Our poetry, including the poetry of
painting and sculpture, “must change,” as Stevens also
said. And finally: “It must give pleasure.”
Ekblad’s work seems to me to be abstract in Stevens’s
sense. It notices how things undo themselves, how they
transform, which means the loss of what they once were in
becoming otherwise. She once spoke of clambering over
mountains of detritus in a scrapyard to find materials to
use for her sculpture. As Stevens wrote in another poem,
“The dump is full / of images.” In this dump of images
Ekblad discovers “industrial products that once fulfilled
various purposes for society, now defunct: crusty, twisted
skeletons of cars, bikes, train tracks, beams, ironing
boards…. A marvelous, gargantuan pile that reveals our
forlorn condition and the absurdity of our world.” Here,
“forlorn” and “absurd” should be taken as synonyms
for “abstract”; so too should “defunct,” “crusty,” and
“twisted.”
What especially strikes me about Ekblad’s paintings—
even more than her sculptures, though what I am about to
say is also true there—is that they don’t establish any implicit
criterion of “rightness.” This is very unusual. There’s
sometimes an exciting moment at the beginning of an
artist’s career when she has stumbled onto something that
is genuinely unexpected—unexpected by the public for
art in a given place and time, but unexpected above all to
the artist herself—and part of what makes it intriguing is
the awkward sense you can’t tell what “works” in a piece
and what doesn’t; the implicit criteria for the success of
a work, or of a part of a work, have not yet gelled; the
good, bad, ugly, and beautiful mingle in delicious yet
uneasy promiscuity. Ekblad is still a young artist, but she
has already been exhibiting long enough that one would
have expected this first flush of raw energy to have been
transformed by now into a series of more or less secure
performances of an aesthetic whose parameters seem
broadly comprehensible. But that’s not what’s happened.
Despite the fact that Ekblad’s works in any given medium
betray the loosely bundled formal recurrences that we
call a personal style, they continue to display the volatility
and audacious indiscipline that thrills us in the work of
artists too new to their own discoveries to quite know how
to make a system of them, even as we paternally advise
them (if only in some imaginary conversation in our own
minds) to get down to work on clarifying their project.
Ekblad, on the contrary, seems to want to keep things
disjunctive, willful, chancy, and inconsistent. As she
herself says, “Some shapes rhyme, some reject each other,
etc.” That et cetera is crucial, because it gestures to all the
different and singular modes of relation and non-relation

that can be characterized as neither forms of agreement
nor forms of opposition and that may obtain between the
disparate parts of a sculpture, painting, or whatever. In a
poem that accompanied her 2011 exhibition at Greene
Naftali, New York, she wrote, “I push with force, submissive
as bequeathed by a visceral change of course.” Here
she is explicating her approach to making art, whether it
is paint that she is pushing across the surface of a canvas
or metal that she is bending into or out of shape for
her sculpture. In either case, it’s telling that Ekblad can
feel herself to be “submissive” as she applies force. This
sounds like a contradiction but of course it’s really not,
since an action that involves using force may simultaneously
be undertaken in submission to a still stronger force;
remember Sigmar Polke’s 1969 painting Hohere Wesen
befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen!—“Higher Powers
Command: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black!” It’s a
joke, but it’s no joke. Or perhaps the force to which one
submits is not higher but lower, a matter of what Georges
Bataille called “base materialism” and somehow more
elemental or corporeal, since the “change of course” by
which it is “bequeathed” is “visceral.”
But there’s more: “base matter,” according to
Bataille—and it certainly includes the refuse found on the
dump—“is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations,
and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the
great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations.”
Availing herself of ruined industrial and commercial
matter, her fascinated gleanings from this “marvelous,
gargantuan pile that reveals our forlorn condition and the
absurdity of our world,” it could well be that the artist’s
“force” is exerted precisely in some sort of submission to
her materials, rather than in making her materials submit
to her—to her will, to her taste, to her intelligence, to her
imagination, even to her “curiosity in discovering unusual
pieces, and the investigation of them in various combinations
later on,” et cetera. If this is so, her task is the submission
of all the special qualities that make her an artist
to whatever it is in things that exposes our forlornness
and absurdity and in short our condition of exile from our
own ideals. What her art teaches us is that this condition is
to be treasured. It is a source of freedom and joy. “Writing
poetry,” she says—and of course the same could be
said for making sculpture or painting—“becomes part of
the struggle to stay sane, or the struggle to stay insane, I
forget!” What I mean by freedom and joy is precisely this
inability to remember the distinction between madness
and sense, but they’re only that for those who can live this
condition without fear—or rather, since that’s probably
not possible, those who can submit their fear to the force
of visceral change despite the contrary impulse to obstruct
it.
In some of Ekblad’s works, fragments of various sorts
are embedded in concrete slabs. That these are hybrids of
painting and sculpture is probably one of the least interesting
things about them, since the artist is less concerned
with testing the limits of such conventions than she is
determined to just ignore them. What I find fascinating
about these pieces is the simultaneously dynamic and ambiguous
relation between these gawky, half-recognizable
shapes and the dense, dumb matter in which they’ve been
set. One feels at the same time that they are in the process
of sinking deeper into the concrete and that they are
emerging from it. The concrete acts as a kind of materialized
oblivion—pushed deeper in, the objects would simply
be covered over and lost to sight—and the sunken objects
are at once giving way to this oblivion and enacting the
return of the repressed.
Very different is the “punctual” or at most “linear” connection
between objects when they are welded together.
At times the weld can be nearly invisible; in any case it can
be discreet. Compared to those bits and pieces she has
semi-submerged in concrete, those that are welded together
seem relatively free, as if their twists and turns embodied
the restless yet fundamentally self-generated windings
of impulse. Oddly, but perhaps significantly, the discreet
way the weld allows one piece of metal to adhere to another
resembles the way a translation, in Walter Benjamin’s
account, makes contact with the text it is meant to render:
“Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one
point… translation touches the original lightly and only at
the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing
its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the
freedom of linguistic flux.” Wrenched out of its original
context and possibly out of its original form (having been
“pushed with force”), each element in Ekblad’s welded
sculptures—of which those in the form of gates are surely
the most remarkable—represents a separate extract from
time’s flux but each of these independent fragments supports
the other in its “visceral change of course.”
There is something inescapably pictorial about
Ekblad’s planar sculptures with objects set in concrete
but her paintings are closer in essence to the welded
sculptures because they allow for spaces between things,
although of course in the paintings these spaces are only
suggested. This space is something I’ve only gradually
learned to appreciate; I thought the paintings’ lack of
“atmosphere” meant a lack of space; the congested presence
of so many torqued and battered pieces of color at
first seemed to me to press any air out of the paintings
into the space before it. Now I think that’s wrong. These
rough and ragged shapes keep separating from each other
even as the surface they form together remains obdurate.
You feel you ought to be able to peek in between them.
To look at these paintings is to find oneself with the artist
on top of those “colossal mountains of shiny, scrappy,
rusty, multicolored pieces” from which she extracts her
“crusty, twisted” metal bits for sculpture—only here the
multicolored pieces are of nothing but color. Now it is for
the viewer to sift through these disjecta membra, not to
take away but simply to examine, to pick them up with the
mind’s eye and place them back before going to do the
same with another, and another, gleaning what one can
from this treasure trove of gorgeous cast-offs. Not to understand,
but to appreciate. “Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon,
one finds / On the dump?” asked Stevens. Ekblad
says yes. It consummates the nuptials of the forlorn and
the marvelous.

In Sunshine When I Rowed or,
Name of a Magazine I Will Never Read
Voice/Rider 1:
Voice/Rider 2:
After the soon
Where the island goes
Like wet-dark cobblestones
Your colors bewilder me, said the painting to the
Sea. A taste for glass does not explain the appeal
Of experiments in language, said the poet. Glass
Stayed silent. Examined the transparency of its
Waters. Across the continent the smallest nation
Offered: Here are your flowers of another order. Thus
You hold them to your chest as you cross countries
Whose borders are excellent, are porous. You read
The small, stale blooms—blushing like stains on the
Furniture—as though they were phosphorescent
Emails come through the dark train’s interior
Ether, illuminating each rider as though her trip
Was singular. Was it. Really, how single was it. Quite
Agreed the later exhibition’s exterior, where the bottles
Collected, beautiful. In the excellence of their glassy
Green material, the articles, ventricles, vehicles, the bottles
Delivered a lucid, no glassy address on the issue of
Dubious borders. We listened dubiously, drank
In the issue deeply, then shallowly, then deeply again,
As we clutched our bouquets to the small rivers of our chests,
Each the size of a face/hand
A train pulls me through some
September, her black, bemused
Forest. She unrobes: is
Gold, is green underneath
Her brutal kaleidoscopic trees
Mouthing mysteries, saying
Pronouns do produce us: Gentlewoman
Name of a magazine I will never
Read. The train loosens like a belt
Splits the field in two, as it were,
Unfurling its banner across the
Blues of this tree-fastened land-
Scape, someone’s Rheinland, lucid
And lingering as a snake, seized and
Seizing like mirroring shores for your
Double’s reflection. Oh season, oh rider, oh
Someone’s simulacrum, who produces
You—their failure—is the expert, ardent
Jailer.
Smallest instruments. Outside our travel, its fluorescence
Speeding, something darker, deeper, was keeping the shallowest
—Quinn Latimer
Lake bottom down. Shhhh. We are approaching, what, a
Town.
Notes:
“In Sunshine When I Rowed” is taken from a line by Ida Ekblad in her
work A Caged Law of the Bird The Hand The Land (2011). The line “A
taste for glass does not explain the appeal / Of experiments in language”
is lifted from The Invention of Glass, by poet Emmanuel Hocquard,
translated from the French by Cole Swenson and Rod Smith (Canarium
Books, 2012).