ON GHOSTS AND CARCASSES / Text by Hanna Johansson / 2010

First I see a wilderness landscape and then I see nothing I can ascribe by name. A moving image reveals something close up. Could it be the visual perceived as pure darkness? Soon violins and the singing of Beniamo Gigli (1890-1957) begin to accompany the image. Via the strains of Jules Massenet’s opera Werther (1892) they lead my gaze to merge with the dark sensation of the picture. The object in the picture is still covered in uncertainty. Gradually as the piece progresses, I dare to affirm that the picture contains an animal and moments later I can identify that animal. / Hannaleena Heiska’s video piece Ridestar (2010) begins with the threat of death although it deals with life through an animal. In philosophy animals are often separated from human beings through the conception of death. According to Martin Heidegger only a human being can die because only a human can question the desirability of his or her existence. Where the human is capable of dying the animal in turn can only perish.

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In Ridestar, the animal is only a masque insofar it represents the human being. Accompanied by late-romantic music and the lyrics of Goethe’s Werther the film actually seems to be about passion: the impossible attempt to smother a burning love which ultimately stokes an even deadlier fire. / Animal figures have become familiar in conjunction with Heiska’s art. They can be seen in her paintings, where they usually feature as masques ‘protecting’ humans or as figures that blend into the vegetation of the landscape. Heiska tells a kind of fictional fable in her paintings, where animals move among strange landscapes and curious events. / According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida an animal only exists as a fiction. In his animal musings and Heidegger commentary Derrida arrives at the conclusion that since an animal cannot postulate thoughts of death as an extension of its existence it simply just perishes and thus becomes a spirit or a ghost. Since death does not apply to the animal, it outlives death, and thus does not really die at all. The animal’s way of existence is to overlive or sur-vivre as Derrida puts it. The animal is essentially fictional not only as a name for the impossibility of experiencing death but also since we cannot say anything about the animal itself except by means of this fiction.

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Heiska does not depict the human through the animal or tell fables. In the film as well as the new paintings she depicts the spirit, fiction and carcass as not only mysterious and ambiguous, but also as a material energy or enticement and thus makes it more humanlike than previously. In my view, Heiska in accordance with Derrida takes an oppositional stance to the long dominant conception of animal in Western thought. / Art has its origins in animality states philosopher Elizabeth Grosz with support in the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Art is born from the unreasonable, the excessive and the unpredictable. It is by no means a consequence of reason or intelligence, or even borne of a sensitivity characteristic of humans as we have so often been taught. The most artistic aspect of the human is according to Grosz the most animalistic. Are animals the elite among artists? According to Grosz’s conception of art animals are at least artists.

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Heiska depicts animals, although her works are not made by animals. In the works now on display she seems to have moved closer towards her subject. She has striven to arrive at touching distance close to the plumage of the bird, horsehair, vibration of animal skin, and the movement of the animal. The gestural language of the body is also a subject in the new paintings, in which Heiska has retained her characteristic working methods of spontaneity and absence of prejudice. She does not correct or paint over mistakes. This technique forces quick and self-confident solutions but also makes possible the transmission of gestural rhythm in the paintings.  / The animals in the paintings are fragmentary and frail, almost unidentifiable. Two levels seem to be in argument in them. At once the abstract impression conveyed by the painting, which in the finished work tells of the liberation of energy or life itself, even animality. Then again when the impression takes on a form that reminds us of something familiar in the world it becomes an image or representation. The two possibilities of the image are entwined in the paintings so that instead of this argument the artist’s living movement of hand and moving object becomes one.

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Heiska’s paintings approach the realm of the figural. There pictorialness, representation, signification and narrativity are discarded in favour of bodily memory, colours, movement and fragmentary sampling of imagery. There is something similar in the paintings to Leonardo’s swirling imagery of the Great Flood from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Both serve the ideal of continual transformation rather than arrest and stasis of form in painting. / This kind of polyfocal, chaotic strand of seeing which emphasises movement and time runs alongside the traditional, so-called monofocal window model of seeing through the centuries right up until the era of contemporary painting. The story of polyfocal seeing is now a part of general art history. The examination of polyfocal impressions as animalistic offers a new way of thinking about painting, however. / Heiska is working in an as yet unnamed area where animal and human might perhaps meet without the animal being seen as a carcass or a spectre. I am not claiming that the artist identifies the human with the animal or strives to say anything about the animality of humans in the final analysis. However, Heiska’s works are full of traces of that fictive ghost which Derrida speaks of as animal. / Hanna Johansson, PhD