Underskog

No Maps For These Territories

Kjersti Vetterstad

Åpner torsdag 08.12.2011 kl 19:00
på Podium Hausmannsgate 34, Oslo

Where does the self end and the world begin? What can one properly call the self when at every
moment it is penetrated by a host of perceptions, memories, sensations—all arriving from the so-
called outside world? Kjersti Vetterstad’s new work is concerned with precisely that most primal of
metaphysical riddles—the one having to do with interiority and exteriority. If one foundational image
for this riddle is Plato’s metaphor of a cave upon which exteriority’s shadows play out for our inner
delectation or sorrow, his schemata nonetheless leaves the sanctity of this inner chamber intact. But
what occurs when, as in psychosis, the sanctity of this inner world is shattered, leaving the self an
insubstantial wraith, miraculously exteriorized in a discomfiting reversal?

The literature of schizophrenia abounds with descriptions of this peculiar double movement:
breakdowns in spatial relationships and processes of signification; the collapse of a sense of
interiority and temporal continuity; the dispossession of internal coherence by external forces.
“Space pursues [the schizophrenic], encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis,”
wrote the French polymath Roger Caillois. “It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from
thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses.”

The spatial metaphors Caillois employs are of some consequence, for as Julian Jaynes notes in
his treatise on the origins of consciousness (“The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind”) the construction of one’s sense of self, hinges upon the fabrication of an interior
mental space, a little theater behind the eyes where we introspect, daydream, calculate and plan. That
the spatial properties of this interior realm are illusory do not stop it from being fundamental to our
sense of inner coherence and mental wellbeing. It is precisely the indomitability of this interior world
that is threatened in psychosis.

At the beginning of clinical research on LSD and psilocybin in the 1940s, these drugs were
dubbed psychotomimetics—mimickers of madness. Perceptive viewers of Vetterstad’s exhibition will
intuit that in the ensemble of works presented she is assaying an analogical project, an aesthetico-
mimetics of madness in which she exposes her (our) normative subjective coherence to the dangerous
and fragmentary forces of insanity. But a note of caution here: this is not a structural project where
these forces are contained and kept at a safe distance, maintaining the familiar binaries of
inside/outside, rationality/irrationality and civilization/nature upon which the western enlightenment
project is founded. In this series of works, Vetterstad produces the disorder engulfing the psychotic
subject, letting irrational auguries of superstition and sympathetic magic have their way, manifesting
the multiple, incoherent (and inchoate) forces that in madness overwhelm the durative subject.
Becoming exteriorized, this subject is prey to a world of vivid unreality, described by Marguerite
Séchehaye as having the appearance of “illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and
smoothness of material things.” The inner space of introspection is flooded with reveries originating
from a being no longer unitary but multiple. In these works Vetterstad becomes similar: “not similar to
something,” to again quote Caillois, “but just similar.” And this similarity, far from reassuring
, marshals galactic forces, manifesting the dark side of the Neoplatonic affinity for the logic of
correspondence—a terrifying and sublime experience. In western aesthetics, each are associated with
the feeling of bodily exteriorization that, in encountering this universal otherness, rushes for the exit
of the internal theater of selfhood, leaving overturned seats and general disorder.

/ Michael Baers

Podium

Hausmannsgate 34

0182 Oslo

08.12 – 18.12

Vernissage 08.12 / 19:00

Åpningstider/ opening hours:

Thursday / Fridays 4 pm – 7 pm

Saturdays / Sundays 12 pm – 4 pm

kjerstivetterstad.com