Collection

by Kristiina Lahde

November 16 to December 15, 2001

A system of measurement is a system of control, a way that we can know the world. Collections, as we know them in museums, galleries or the like, are discrete ways of seeing the world articulated through taxonomies, provenance, and other methods of organization. To some degree a collection has already managed to control. This essay is written to attend an exhibition of recent work by Kristiina Lahde, a young artist who has spent most of her production time contemplating various systems of measurement or containment. Ostensibly Lahde’s work dovetails her concerns as an artist and a conservator, duo concerns that also underpin her presence in Peterborough. Having received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1999, Lahde maintained a studio in Halifax for the better part of a year before taking her next step. Unlike many of her colleagues, Lahde very consciously decided not to enter into a Graduate program in Fine Art right away, opting to undertake course work in the field of art conservation instead. She moved to Peterborough in May 2000 and enrolled in the art conservation course at Sir Sanford Fleming College. To understand the logic of this move is to gain insight into Lahde’s art; her particular method of operation; her pleasures, suspicions, politics and poetics.

The sport of any collection is bound up in its mathematical predictability. That certain problems produce certain outcomes often carries with it a measure of gratification for the person navigating the formulae. Lahde approaches the material concerns of art production with a similar note of exactitude. Her manipulations are very strict and quite often proceeded by a thoughtful, if rigorous, term of research and contemplation. As do conservators and curators, Lahde derives pleasure from the exacting process that intones such a museological content, which is in turn no small part of what informs her work. This level of engagement, while it plays on Lahde’s own personality (why she is not just an artist but an art conservator) is also the (self) reflexive object of her critique.

The enjoyment is real but it is also motivated by the preoccupation to expose secret agendas, flushing out subconscious desire as it relates to the need to possess. James Elkins, who has written extensively on the "nature of seeing", addresses the strange order of desire that is at bay for Art Historians who "write books that leave themselves out". His example makes for a decent analogy to Lahde’s own fascination with collections, in particular the invisible, supposedly disinterested, forces that play upon the collector. Elkins writes, "In my profession of art history, that is what we routinely do. We construct theories about how all seeing is fraught with gender constructions and power relations, but then we study works of art as if we were just trying to appreciate them—as if we had no desire to possess them by writing about them and reproducing them in our books". (James Elkins, THE OBJECT STARES BACK, Page 31.) With this statement Elkins reflects back onto his own profession, admitting that subconscious desire is a prescriptive impetus that dominates the determinations of art history or indeed, theory itself. Lahde has not only turned the lens back onto her own desires in terms of reflecting on the underlying levels of enjoyment in her work, she has made these methods of control, the very means of containment, the subject of her work. In effect, she has become the conservator that remarks on the underlying, often prescriptive, desires that actually mark her presence as an individual, and all this within the ironic frame of a disinterested authority.

One of Lahde’s collections features 3M post-it notes organized into a strict, mathematical grid covering a section of wall. On each of the post-it notes Lahde has hand-written "I Love You" (also the title of the piece, 1998), a sentiment that under normal circumstances is reserved for that "someone special". The act of repetition imparts the obsessive nature of collecting, in this case a collection of love notes, while effectively watering down the significance of said notes in terms of conferring any sentiment of remarkable status. Love is rendered mechanical, as schematic and grid-like as the collection itself. Contrary to the authority that such gatherings impose (data for the support of observed tendencies) Lahde implicates the collection with this work as a tool for normalization, incapable of sustaining any sense of the personal. Love is all around but absolutely impotent. The critical edge of Lahde’s work operates by way of implication. Her sensibility is much more subtle than outright satire, her use of irony more emergent than overt. Take for example the sculptural work she has undertaken using rulers. While collections in general act to impose systems onto things for the purposes of understanding, rulers represent the ultimate authority in terms of measurement. Quite simply, rulers are the rule. Over the past year Lahde has variously encircled, bent, fractured, and curved a number of wooden yardsticks. In each case the use-value of these objects has been robbed, replaced by an organization of material so arbitrary it borders on the purely aesthetic. One may enjoy this work, such as "Double Measure" (2001), for its simple pleasure-- a new kind of appreciation for a very familiar object. To this extent R. Mutt would be proud. And yet Lahde’s objects are not exactly "found", although they reference the very same (inherently aesthetic) loss of function—in this case so fundamental to the understanding of rules and rulers. The question that Lahde poses pertaining to these systems, indeed as it relates to all of her collections, be they shirts, rulers, zeros or post-it notes, ultimately troubles the authority with which people entrust the actual systems. As with Francis Picabia’s marvelously sexy renderings of machine parts (c. 1915), Lahde extrudes hidden properties from the materials that she uses by physically re-arranging them.

The underlying assumptions that Lahde implicates with her work reflect upon measurements, taxonomies and gathered data, insofar as such "matters of fact" must be understood from a given perspective. It is true and well observed that authoritative data often commands our trust. My own knowledge of rudimentary physics, for example, has some baring over when I will attempt to cross the street. Nevertheless, the persuasive force of science and technology, as seen through a complex of intersecting perspectives and motivations, directs me in ways that extend far beyond simply reaching the other side. I am guided by the systems that are in place tantamount to culture itself. Ultimately, this is where Lahde locates her poetics; a subtle disturbance of that which we take for granted. In so doing her objects may help to make us mindful of the ways in which a collection directs our attention and channels our energies.

Written by David LaRiviere, 2001.