Marte Eknaes: Fountain

MARTE EKNAES by Melissa Gronlund

London’s City Hall was designed by Norman Foster as a circular(ish), lumpen building that consists of different floors sitting awkwardly atop each other, like an egg-shaped cheesecake cut into slices and stacked up again. A bravura winding staircase travels the vertical length of the building, allowing people walking up or down the stairs to peer into the offices on each floor, separated from the staircase by glass windows. The staircase itself floats directly above the office where the mayor sits and where high-level meetings are held. Though the staircase was meant – like the glass dome of Foster’s design for the Berlin Reichstag – as a sign (and a means) of transparency, after a few weeks the amount of noise travelling down the staircase grew too great of a disturbance for the mayor, and staff were asked not to use the staircase when a meeting was in progress.


The malleability of the term ‘transparency’ – from its functioning a governmental and financial buzzword to its use as a literal building term – allows these little ironies to shine through, with perhaps more worth than they merit. Keeping staff off the staircase is no less an indicator of a government’s corruption, inefficiency or incompetence as clear windows are of its sparkling intelligence. Nevertheless, government and corporation buildings have taken the idea of ‘transparency’ as both a literal and symbolic constituent: actively equating the social imperative for ‘transparency’ with their use of it as building material, they employ the very qualities of their buildings’ glass skins as advertisements for a putative ethos within.

This inherence of ideology in materials is the problem taken up by Marte Eknaes, whose work investigates how corporate and commercial architecture work to manipulate the subject within the public sphere. Her sculptures and works on paper draw materially from the commercial sector they critique, often using found or appropriated elements – cheap metal clothes rods from retail shops, plastic shading for car windows, vinyl ‘brick’ siding – to re-phrase their mode of operation, turning away from their alteration of the given space (their adjustment bright light through the car window, for example, into softer, more palatable shade) and creating formalist, autonomous sculpture. Though this question of autonomy which might seem too obvious to mention, it is nevertheless important to emphasise. What is most thrilling about Eknaes's work is its sudden tacks sideways to purely formal or classically rhetorical inquiries: questions of irony, tautology and ornament that offer up something near to what Barthes would call the neutral, or an analysis of the game in motion.

For her work for Momentum in 2009, the Nordic biennial held in Moss, Norway, Eknaes investigated the use of glass in shopping malls in the local area to demonstrate how it gives the false impression of being outside – in an unregulated, public space – while in fact working to direct the shopping subject along long vistas mediated by private commercial interests: corridors of coffee bars, clothing companies and homeware purveyors selling a version of the good life, one in which certain values are ratified, like home improvements and shirts with sex appeal, as the ‘done’ emotions. Unity, contentment, love of family life – these are the feelings given by advertising and commercial interests that dress the architecture of so-called public spaces: Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, for example, or Times Square in New York, with their incessant promotion of relationships, technological progressiveness and apparently independent lifestyles. The resulting work for Moss, Milieu (2009), was made of two pieces of glass, one about three times the length of the other, slid into a bent metal hinge, creating a long shape not unlike the arcades of shopping malls. The longer glass had circular holes etched into it that referred to sticker dots that are put on glass doors in public buildings so that people will not walk into them, while the smaller glass was covered in plastic sheeting depicting fake water drops, a material often used to decorate bathroom interiors with funny faux perma-hydration. Like her use of the sheet of plastic raindrops, Eknaes often plays with such ‘literal’ material, which she orders from commercial and industrial suppliers. Her use of these material acknowledges their aspirational function (wood-like siding for people who can’t afford wood, for example) but more than that, it exemplifies their status as semantic dead-ends. Unlike the transparency of corporate glass architecture, which seeks to communicate transparency’s connotations of honesty and efficiency, this material seeks to communicate not symbolism or coding but simply what it wishes to be made of, or to be: watch this ‘wood’ attempt to look like wood. Such commercial tautologies exist like genetic aberrations: rather than pushing us towards consumption, they simply reiterate what we have consumed; they are pure ornament, useless in any semantic sense.

In a similar way, Eknaes’s sculptures and drawings display an attempt to return the ‘in between’ spaces of her work to sheer ‘blankness’ rather than coded ‘transparency’. Empty space is marshalled as a constituent element, in the employment, for example of ‘clear’ plastic siding to make shapes in one set of drawings, New line I - IV, 2008, or, in works such as Entrance (new arrangement) I and II, 2009, a material factor: the paper is itself lighter, fragile and nearly see-through – a semi-transparency she emphasises by hanging the drawing on glass matting.

With this in mind, compare Eknaes’s attitude towards information with the enthusiasm with which the high priests of the popular and postmodern, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, greeted the same effect of the LED screen, reading electronic ‘skins’ on buildings as genuine to and even the key innovation of our age. One of Venturi’s proposals was the:

‘“Bill-Ding-Board”, a shedlike exhibition structure set behind an immense electronic signboard that was to rise to twice the building’s height. The signboard would continuously project images of classic football plays, while the interior would contain a display of football relics and more projections of film on the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Venturi maintained that this was an electronic version of the painted ceilings of Baroque churches. Today, we talk about how cyberspace is changing the nature of built space, but this project, designed thirty-four years ago, is the first instance I know of in which an architect said, in effect, that the information is the building.’

Despite this keyword ‘information’, there is something in Venturi's choice of displayed material that suggests a shared interest in pure formalism: sport is essentially the art of coordinating actions solely through rules. Football games, which Diedrich Diederichsen once compared to the act of interpretation (he was talking about European football – who knows if his analogy would hold for the brute padded North American game), are created only in the space of the relationships between the players, and it is possible to read Venturi as also angling for the suspension of information and even ideology that Eknaes attempts to achieve in her work and so counter in the built environment.

It would be interesting, also, to connect Eknaes’s interest in tautology with Venturi Scott Brown’s (for instance, their famous example of the shed-duck café on Long Island), and to contrast, with an eye to drawing out similarities, Venturi Scott Brown’s avowed populism with Eknaes’s use of a formalist, autonomous art language. The reformulation of her found commercial material ends up in sheer beauty: Elaboration (2009), made of the metal racks that hold clothes in high street shops – held together by magnets that any spectator could remove – is reminiscent of no less than Dan Flavin’s “Monument” for V. Tatlin 1 (1964) and, standing upright, tall and thin in the gallery space, it seems to want not only Flavin and neon lights, but also Aaron Copland, and his overtures of enthusiasm and optimism associated with that same North America that pushes the privatisation of public space. Perhaps a moment of emancipation lies not in the ‘stuff’ espoused by postmodernism, but within its organisation, becoming a face upon which codes and prescriptions fail to adhere.

1) Paul Goldberger, ‘House Proud: Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi at Three Museums’, The New Yorker, 2 July 2001.

Marte Eknaes
Fountain