Entrance #1

Dallas, November 22nd 1963, nearly half past twelve. People are crowding the streets around the city park Dealey Plaza in Dallas, waving to John F. Kennedy and his wife Jaqueline Kennedy as the convertible limousine passes by. When the caravan of cars passes Texas Schoolbook Depository, two shots are fired. About one hour later the message is broadcasted worldwide: "The President of the United States of America is dead".

John F. Kennedy was the first modern politician to use the mass media as a means of self staging. Understanding the importance of the image, he held himself with a personal photographer. The private snapshots of John, Jackie and their kids were common property, personifying the "American way of living". So happy, so intimate, the smiles so white. Everyone had a personal relationship with the Kennedy-family.

During the short presidency of JFK, the private and the public runs together in an exceptionally powerful way. Where previous leaders based the representation of themselves on distanced sovereignty, Kennedy chose the "Jesus-strategy": I am the chosen one, but still one of you. Through her drawings, Lotte Konow Lund analyses the modern iconography represented by JFK, as she pulls his images away from the mass medial sphere, bringing them back into the personal. Transferring the iconic motif to drawings, she exposes the extensive nature of the image and reveals its symbolical value, portrait character and role as a factor in history and politics.

For an artist it is almost impossible to work with a photographic image of Kennedy, because it is inhibited by the unapproachable aura of intimacy. By reconstructing the image as a drawing, in the form of a dual portrait, Konow Lund releases the image from the sphere of mass media, and it becomes her own.

The "authority of likeness" does not dominate these portraits. There is resemblance, but it is reformulated, almost camouflaged. Anyhow, likeness is unimportant, because this is Lotte's Kennedy. He is different. The narrow lines have weakened the aura of power. The posture is hunched, as he covers his face with one hand. The prevailing image of John F. Kennedy is the blond, groomed to perfection. The assassination has prevented the darker image of Kennedy from doing any harm. In Konow Lund's images, the bright and the dark version are equals.
 
It is a paradox that the absence of power in the drawings makes the symbolical value of the motif even more important than in the photographs and TV clips. In the drawings, the symbolical (the public) is unable to transcend the corporeal (the private), intelligently commenting the long term effects of Kennedy's use of his private life for political purposes.

In the homeland of TV, the first presidential debate – between Kennedy and Richard Nixon – was broadcast in 1960. Among the radio audience, there was a general view that Nixon did a better figure. For the TV audience, however, the young, tanned and charismatic Kennedy crushed Nixon, with his grey, sweaty appearance and five-o-clock shadow. JFK won the election by telegenic images, not by words.

America – and through it the Western world – was forever marked by the names John, Jackie, Bobby and Ted. Several of the drawings in the exhibition include references to these names; in one it is written "The Chappaquidick Incident" – the scandal that ruined the youngest brother Ted Kennedy's political life – another one is of Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy, the second youngest.

Bobby ran for president in 1968, and was shot in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in LA, just after winning the Democrats' primary elections in South Dakota and California. The Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan fired into the celebrating crowd surrounding Bobby, hitting him with three shots. Another Kennedy was brought to the ground by a gunman. Konow Lund depicts him lying on his stomach, face turned against us, like in a press photograph or a movie scene, but the drawing adds distance to such image genres, which might explain why I perceive the work as so merciless and disturbing.

The understanding of images as not mere images, but as "players in history"1, is an important feature of the exhibition What has been shown cannot be said. Konow Lund transfers into drawing images from many different genres and areas of life; press photographs, TV and movie images, private snapshots and sculptures. This strategy can be interpreted as an attempt to release the image from its genre of origin. It also represents an opportunity for the artist to appropriate the motif.

Meeting a sculpture of Henry Moore with the lightness of a drawing offers a new understanding of the work. Konow Lund's drawings release the sculpture from the entrapment of gravity, from the tradition upon which its status is based, leaving it hovering in mid air for all to see. This is not a post-modern gesture where "the content is lost but the form is tempting"2, but a progressive utilization of art history, through a conscious use of form and medium.

When Konow Lund liberates one of Botticelli's faces from the paralyzing grace of the body – twisting and deforming the limbs – she displays what is invisible in the original image: How a person's visibility depends on his or her beauty. That is a dictum with centuries of relevance.

The relation between artist, representation and expression is elaborated in The Illona Series, in which the female body is the scene of a humorous game of drawing, cutting and photography. In one of the pictures a woman is facing a white wall, wearing only a pair of panties. Lotte Konow Lund has cut away a piece of the underwear, revealing the butt cleavage. On the wall next to the woman she has drawn a black circle, slightly larger than the cut-out. The question posed by this simple and funny set up is: what happens when a part of reality is literally cut away and reconstructed in another medium, in this case as a drawing?

In The Illona Series we interpret the drawing as a prolongation of the real. The black spot on the wall becomes the missing piece of fabric from the panties. At the same time the scale prevents us from creating a one-to-one relation between reality (the photograph) and the representation (the drawing). In its Baldessarian way, this series demonstrates that representation always comes at a price.

”Portraiture is such a calculating art of (mis)representation that no beholder can be completely innocent”, writes Richard Brilliant in the book Portraiture.3 The power of the artist to manipulate the model – and the way we look at her – is made obvious in the "cut and draw" images. Drawing is not a practise of innocence.

Entrance #2

One of the finest projects of Lotte Konow Lund is Why Do I Draw. Hommage à Dagny Tande Lid.4 Here, she offered to sit as an unpaid guard in the Botanical Museum in Oslo. Her employment made it possible for the museum to open an exhibition with the floral drawings of Dagny Tande Lid. As compensation, the museum would provide her with a new flower or plant every day, which she would try to draw. Konow Lund writes: "Professor Sunding explained the properties and natural order of the plant. I was not regarded or treated as an artist. The employees mistook me for a guard or receptionist. The visitors regarded me as a guide and guard.”5

Lotte Konow Lund spent a whole summer in the museum, learning how to draw flowers. At the beginning of each day a new flower or plant stood in front of her in all its simplicity. Each day a new sheet of paper. Anyone who has tried to represent something will know the hardship of it; that the thing you perceive with such clarity disappears when you try to capture it by words, images or sound, the frustration caused by the lack of precision and failing abilities. In the end, the flower drawings came out as sketches, in starch contrast to the brilliant, perfect flower illustrations of Dagny Tande Lid. In this way she pays her respect to this woman, who never received the recognition she deserved. Presenting her attempts as works of art on the walls of The Stenersen Museum6, like Konow Lund did, takes a serious amount of courage. The result is one of the finest hommages I have ever seen.

Drawing is an art of skills, where too many talented artists are curbed by their perfectionism, ending up producing nice looking and completely uninteresting art.
One of the qualities of Why Do I Draw. Hommage á Dagny Tande Lid is how Konow Lund challenges the doctrine of the perfect drawing.

Why do I draw? asks Konow Lund. She replies by showing us how drawing is a tool, which she uses to reflect over how she is affected by art, and in the second instance how we – the viewers of these drawings – are affected. The project also demonstrates how the practically unlimited freedom of an artist in Norway also constitutes a heavy burden. The artist alone is responsible to place upon herself challenges and limitations that make the freedom comprehensible and meaningful.

In Why Do I Draw Lotte Konow Lund creates limitations on her own freedom by giving herself a job (unpaid) and a specific mission. She continues this approach in Why Do I Draw II. Images From The Inside where she once again offered her services without payment. For two days a week during seven weeks, she taught drawing for a group of inmates at Bredtveit Women's Prison, the prison being the ultimate manifestation of lack of freedom, and the place where dreams of freedom are the strongest.

While expecting to meet Norwegian women, Konow Lund was presented with women without Norwegian citizenship, serving time in Norway for various crimes. Unlike Norwegian prisoners at Bredtveit, these women are not offered education while imprisoned, but they are set to work in small handicraft workshops. The women come from different countries, and have no social network in Norway. The only thing they have in common is the long lasting transit at Bredtveit.

Besides teaching, the original idea of the project was to ask the inmates to present three items for Konow Lund to draw. These were to be objects that according to the artist "said something about themselves", and thus could work as "transferred self-portraits”.7 This turned out to be difficult, as the women hardly owned anything at all. Instead, Konow Lund helped them to find images of the items in books or on the Internet. The list of things chosen by the women could match any poem:

A teddy bear
a rabbit
Mary J. Blige
a picture of a woman and her best friend at a party
Jesus
Mary Magdalene
A bottle of vodka
a woman's niece
a rosary
a German shepherd dog
a pitbull terrier
a comb
a wedding dress
the name Alin, meaning "the one who gives love", intended for the unborn son of a woman.

First, the inmates drew the items. Based on these, Konow Lund made new drawings. This "transfer" makes a big difference, because it shows that the artist is not looking for the cheap glory of "authenticity", or to romanticise the situation. There is no accompanying text or explanation, nothing in which the beholders may revel.

What this project shows is the clear distinction between personal, private images and images that belong to the public. The depicted comb will never be mine. It belongs to someone else. Still, this subtle and indirect portrait expresses in a deeply universal manner how representations make us able to cope with our existence.

Why Do I Draw II/Images From The Inside walks a thin line, because there is such an overwhelming distance between the position and power of the teacher/artist and that of the pupils/inmates. That is why I find the result astonishing. Despite the circumstances, Konow Lund is able to create a learning situation based on equality. She does not teach "downwards", nor is she tempted to play the role of the Good Samaritan. Instead she takes hold of something everyone possesses, the items that we are connected to, and have them transformed into representations.

Another possible reading of Why Do I Draw II is as a mouth-to-mouth lifesaving attempt on the portrait genre, that rare species of art, endangered by its long liaison with power, and the men who possess it. In this project, the perspective of power is turned upside down and the beautifying aspect of portraiture (especially prominent when depicting the men of power), is eliminated. Konow Lund displays a strong will to redefine the portrait, and the way it communicates.

Real communication is always a struggle where you must define your point of view and what you want to express. In this process, freedom is inevitably limited, since you must choose one out of all possible positions. But few of us are ready to stand in that one position for a long time. When it gets uncomfortable, we change it. Changing positions is really the same as waiving the responsibility for the statement, and give up the belief that it can make a difference. In the end, it makes us unable to communicate. In the book Film At Witt’s End the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage describes an interview with Gertrude Stein, which made a profound impression on him:

Gertrude Stein was asked "Why is it that preachers, teachers, orators, politicians, etc. all die mentally before they are 35 years of age?" She answered (...)”Because they begin to believe that they can communicate".8

I think that Stein's answer points to one of the most important aspects of Lotte Konow Lund's oeuvre; she never underestimates the value of a statement. The works of her hand are all present in the world with a necessity that claims respect.

Marit Paasche