Catalogue Text - Private Collection or Playing the Piano for Pleasure 2010

by Milena Hoegsberg

On two white gallery walls at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, a series of objects have been carefully installed in a constellation, structured by the objects’ formal and conceptual connections. Berit Basten’s attention to both formal detail and specificity of reference is evident in the arrangement of individual objects that make up Private Collection or Playing the Piano for Pleasure (2010). A textual index of exhibited objects, mounted on the wall, provides clues as to the artist personal connection to each component of the work, a partial key to the meaning of the many cultural signs and ideas she activates visually.

Three photocopies of a catalogue photograph of the study ”female model undressing,” painted by the artist C.W. Eckersberg in 1844, hang in a horizontal row. All three contain visible signs of the original painting—it’s aging evident in its cracked surface—as well as its subsequent reproduction as photograph and photocopy respectively. Eckersberg, often considered the father of Danish Golden Age Painting, was a professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (situated in Charlottenborg) between 1818-53. He instituted life painting from the female nude model as a part of the academic curriculum. In the exhibited images, the model poses as if captured in a natural state of undress, her chest laid bare, her gaze cast down on the clothing that partially veils her. The repetition of the image of the female nude model, and the variation in the three juxtaposed photocopies, call attention to the image’s changing status and authority as original (work of art) and as copy (reproduction). Drained of their authority as “masterpieces,” the images reproduced here point instead to themselves as signs.

Basten’s exploration of the authority of the image is underscored by the juxtaposition of the three modèle de femme and another “triptych”: three volumes in the first Danish edition of Simone de Beauvoir Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), published in 1965, hung side by side on the wall. Beauvoir’s seminal book discusses women as the quintessential Other, defined and differentiated in relation to men, and gender as a social construction. Conspicuously, the blue cover of the Danish edition features only a triangle, a gender symbol, seemingly representative of the reductive notion of women, which Beauvoir opposes. Through this visual juxtaposition, the artist sets Eckersberg’s and Beauvoir’s ideological and historical positions into dialectic play.

Placed on the museum wall—the institution—Beauvoir’s text is inscribed in a discourse, created and dominated by male voices, including the questioning of the authority of the male artist’s gaze, exemplified by Eckersberg’s study. This connection is highlighted by a reference to Hartnack’s survey of the canon of Western (male) philosophers, mentioned in the index of exhibited objects, but not on view in the exhibition.

Between Eckersberg and Beauvoir, a photograph of a studio backdrop at the academy, Charlottenborg, hangs in a traditional oak frame. Emptied of both the model and the work of art, the blank pictorial non-space points to framing as an institutional gesture of authority, which generates meaning and confers status onto an object. The space of the exhibition (“the white cube”) is, as discourse reminds us, not a neutral space, but itself an institutional construction. By inscribing the institutional space (Charlottenborg) into the work of art it frames, Basten calls attention to the (academic, arthistorical and philosophical) institution as an ideological space, which produces context as well as identities.

In the index of exhibited objects, Basten purposely allows her own emotional investment to seep through her descriptive, museological language. Her expressed memory of a strong wish to possess an orange beach cloth, belonging to her mother, inserts the individual (sentiments) into the collective (intellectual discourse). Like the copy of Le Deuxième Sexe and the absent philosophy book, both “courtesy of” her mother, the beach cloth—displayed as a photograph—introduces the personal and private into an otherwise intellectual deconstruction.

By way of a deliberate orchestration of objects and text, Basten opens up to reflections on the formation of artist-identity vis-à-vis institutions, aesthetic traditions and gender discourse.