The Landscape Listens

The Landscape Listens

George Stolz

The Huldufólk are the “hidden people” of Iceland, inhabiting its scabrous volcanic landscape, its cliffs and crags, its nooks and crannies, its hills and farms and rocks and streams. Part fairy, part angel, part elf, part nature spirit, their hiddenness consists of their being incorporeal, but their incorporeality does not entail absence; to the contrary, they are always there, a kind of genius loci, in, and of, the landscape, even when unseen. Although they can and, indeed, on occasion, do appear in human guise, visible to the eyes of “normal” folk, they do so only when and where they choose, only under their own conditions, on their own terms. In other words, they cannot be cajoled nor conjured nor in any other way obligated to appear; they reveal themselves.

Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Icelandic by birth and upbringing, has explicitly referenced the Huldufólk in works that span nearly the entirety of his career. For instance, Sacred and Enchanted Places (1972), a series of triptychs, combines photographs of sites in Iceland said to be inhabited by the Huldufólk with written descriptions of the curses placed by the Huldufólk on those sites. (Although they are, for the most part, benign, the Huldufólk are at times defiant and even capable of wrath and harm when crossed, a wrath that is usually issued through unbreakable curses placed on people, places, and objects.) Another work, Tungustapi (1989), depicts the topographically dramatic site in Iceland that is known as the “Cathedral of the Huldufólk,” while Green Glass (2020) again combines photo and text in recounting a mischievous intervention of the Huldufólk in the storage area of a museum (a museum dedicated to “Folk and Outsider Art,” no less). Fridfinnsson has also spoken of the Huldufólk regularly in interviews and statements over the years, whether in regard his own work and personal experience, or to their place in the collective Icelandic psyche.

But Fridfinnsson is no regionalist nor folklorist, despite these overt references in certain works and words, and despite the palpable sense of Icelandic identity that infuses his entire oeuvre (and, in particular, a sense of identity rooted in the Icelandic landscape); to the contrary, Fridfinnsson, as an artist, has been informed by, participated in. and contributed to various purposively global avant-garde art movements from the time of his earliest work to the present, as even a cursory examination of his career makes clear.

Fridfinnsson’s first medium was painting, in which he was trained in the 1950s and through which he first expressed himself in abstract imagery stylistically indebted to Mondrian (an influence he, in some ways, still retains in other media, particularly with regard to a simplified chromatic sensibility). Launched in the medium of painting, his work soon evolved, in keeping with less conventional, more trans-disciplinary and performative formats pursued by certain art movements of the era, such as Fluxus, and particularly in keeping with the restless and iconoclastic work of Dieter Roth, who at the time was living in Iceland and whose influence was seminal among Fridfinsson’s circle of younger artists. Indeed, by 1965, in conjunction with the first Fluxus event in Iceland—a concert by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, which inaugurated, remarkably, given Iceland’s remoteness, the pair’s first major European tour—the twenty-two-year-old Fridfinnsson curated an exhibition of “graphic music,” with scores by some of the more radically experimental composers of the time, including John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. That same year, Fridfinnsson, along with a small group of fellow Icelandic artists, formed the avant-garde artist collective SÚM in Reykjavík, which would prove to be a catalyst in the development of Icelandic art of the 1960s and ‘70s, and would provide a platform for its international visibility and dialogue. In the years that followed, Fridfinnsson travelled in Europe and ultimately settled in Amsterdam (where he still lives), while his work continued to partake of various avant-garde idioms of the era—Land Art, Conceptual Art, language-based art, performance, etc.—with Marcel Duchamp’s work and thought exercising a crucial influence throughout.

Dropping by Jón Gunnar’s (1965–92), encapsulates the concerns underlying Fridfinnsson’s practice during this period, while, at the same time, presages to a remarkable degree the delightfully idiosyncratic direction it would take in later years. In creating the work, Fridfinnsson kicked holes through a discarded door that he had salvaged from a friend’s house, and then gesturally painted sections of the wood that remained in swaths of primary colors. Part painting, part sculpture, part-objet trouvé, part performance relic, Dropping by Jón Gunnar’s voices various contemporaneous avant-garde concerns of the time: the hybridity and everyday-object orientation of Nouveau réalisme; the destruction-creation dichotomy of Fluxus’s performance-generated methodologies; perhaps even the obsessive and insistent hole-making found in Dieter Roth’s work. Above all, Dropping by Jón Gunnar’s breaks down—a breakage that is literal and metaphorical—the tenuous (and ultimately dubious) barrier between art and life, in keeping with the ethos of these aforementioned artistic currents, which the twenty-one-year-old Fridfinnsson had already fully assimilated, and from which he would go on to pursue his own distinctive artistic practice.

A doorway marks a portal, a point of passage, a node of contact and connection. A hole in a door is a portal through such a portal. The search, the discovery, and, ultimately, the sharing of such portals (and such portals-through-portals) has been an ongoing aspect of Fridfinnsson’s work, from Dropping by Jón Gunnar’s to the present day, from its roots in a particularly Icelandic (and landscape-oriented) identity to its embrace of universal experience.

Doors and windows (on a literal level) recur throughout Fridfinnsson’s work, whether as objects or in photographs and videos (or combinations of these formats). These include Five Gates for the South Wind (1971–72), gates built in a remote site along the seacoast in the south of Iceland, plain, white-painted, free-standing gates through which nothing (or at least nothing visible) passes other than the wind, and which Fridfinnsson, using his preferred method at the time, first built and then documented in photographs and text (while abandoning the objects themselves to the elements). Examples also may be found in works such as Seven Times (1978–79), an odd photographic sequence involving a man, a window, a curtain, and all that lies beyond; First Window (Homage to Marcel Duchamp) (1992), a photographic composition that powerfully invokes the ineluctable connective tissue lying between, but also separating, indoors and outdoors; From Home (2009), a pair of deceptively simple photographs that somehow succeed in conveying both the warmth and the melancholy distance of hearth and home; and Door (1964–2016), a work that, in subtly emphasizing the keyhole that perforates a door, seems to have evolved directly from Dropping by Jón Gunnar’s, but that (again, like that earlier work) also belongs squarely to the artistic currents of its own place and time. And this is but to name only a few of many such works.

But the role of the portal in Fridfinnsson’s work goes beyond that of mere motif, despite its recurrence in the literal form of gates and windows and doorways and the like. Again, a portal is a point of passage, a node of contact and connection, a something through which something else might be able to flow. Yes, doorways and windows are, indeed, portals. But so are dreams portals to something, the experience of which cannot be denied but that, as experience, cannot be touched, cannot be grasped, cannot be held, cannot even be experienced, except through the portal of the dream; the dream itself is the experience of the dream. This is true of everyone’s dreams, and in this specific context the dreams that Fridfinnsson recounts with such deftness and ease. Portals, too, albeit somewhat counterintuitively, are the mirrors that flash back and forth through Fridfinnsson’s oeuvre. As, perhaps even more counterintuitively, are the rocks Fridfinnsson incorporates with such delicacy and yet such solidity into his work, portals across the eons of geological time, or, in the case of the meteors, across the vast distances of outer space. Indeed, even language is a portal in Fridfinnsson’s exquisite handling of it; or, rather, language is above all a portal, in Fridfinnsson’s work and everywhere else. Fridfinnsson’s work makes all this manifest and, once detected, it allows for an appreciation of one of the many strands of cohesive continuity running through his entire practice.

For instance, the very title of the work Portal (2016) points us to this facet of Fridfinnsson’s practice. Simply assembled out of a string of onyx beads strung between two mirrors placed along a vertical axis, Portal opens a dizzying and infinite two-way passageway between material and immaterial realities, one, perhaps, more tactile, yet neither more “real” than the other on an experiential level; in this regard, we might read Portal as Fridfinnsson’s commentary on (or, perhaps, mockery of) the conventionally accepted but ultimately nonexistent “barrier” between art and life. The emblematic work Attending (1973), which consists of two photographs and text, establishes a similar portal. The photographs are ingeniously composed, with background, foreground and reflection equally sharing a single visual field in each. In one photograph (sub-titled Attending Earth), a hand mirror is held up against a sky-blue sky, while the reflection in the oval mirror presents us with an image of the grassy earth. In the other (sub-titled Attending Sky), the structure has been reversed; the mirror is held in front of the grassy earth while reflecting the sky-blue sky. In the wonderful simplicity of their juxtaposition, the paired photographs capture the entire world, from earth to sky and back again. And in both photographs, the subtitles alert us to the key role played by the mirror’s reflectivity; it is what allows us to “attend,” to pay attention so as to be able to see something that is undeniably “there” but not immediately visible—an action that underlies Fridfinnsson’s entire approach to creating art. Perhaps even more emblematic of this aspect of Fridfinnsson’s practice are the pair of works bearing the title So Far (1976 and 1976–2001). The first is a single black-and-white photograph, the other a set of two color photographs. In each of the images, a hand reaches—yearningly, achingly—toward a reflection of itself, or is it the other way around? That question and that quest are what drives the work, yet at the same time they—that question, that quest—are futile, doomed never to achieve resolution. In this sense, the dual-versioned So Far is something of an intellectual conundrum, and yet it is also somehow heartbreaking.

Thus mirrors, in Fridfinsson’s use of them (which extends far beyond the aforementioned examples), are a means toward establishing a kind of trans-dimensional portal; in other works, he utilizes other means to establish other sorts of portals, in particular, portals across space and time. For instance, Drawing a Tiger (1971) juxtaposes two photographs: one shows the nine-year-old Fridfinnsson, bundled up and drawing an imaginary (absent, yet not necessarily nonexistent) tiger with his left hand while seated on a hay bale on a remote farm in Iceland; the other is of the twenty-eight-year-old Fridfinnsson, seated on a bench in Amsterdam, against the backdrop of the more manicured landscape of a Dutch city park, also drawing a tiger (although the page before him appears to be blank, as if the “tiger,” perhaps, did not survive the journey). Drawing a Tiger establishes a portal across time and space, from Iceland to Amsterdam and from childhood to adulthood, a portal that connects to, and through, the changed yet enduring figure of Fridfinnsson himself, and also through the changed yet enduring creative act—that is, through art. We can see another example in Mid-Night Jump, Canneto Pavese, Oltrepó Pavese, Italy, 1975–1976 (1975–2018), a Muybridge-like sequence of three photographs of Fridfinnsson jumping in the air precisely at midnight on December 31, 1975, and landing on January 1, 1976, and thus passing through a portal across the changing of the calendar years. And Fridfinnsson’s portals are also found in the stones that he has incorporated into various works, including Munster (Patterns) (1977) and Composition (2021); in these works, Fridfinsson presents meteorites as messengers, messengers that have traversed portals through time and space, even going so far as to treat them as embodying changeable spirits within their hard minerality in an animistic manner that often appears in his practice.

These individual portals, both literal and metaphorical—doorways and windows, mirrors and rocks, the artist’s body itself, and any number of other examples—are myriad across the long arc of Fridfinnson’s body of work. But their persistence through the shifts of format and material and stylistic idiom (a shifting-ness that in itself is also characteristic of the confidence and ease of Fridfinnsson’s artistic practice) also points us in the direction of an overarching concern that, in fact, unifies his entire career: that of establishing a connection—a portal—to a parallel plane of reality, a plane that not only accompanies us but that, indeed, surrounds us at all times, yet that so often lies unperceived beneath the hard veneer of daily experience. As Fridfinnson himself has commented about what drives his art, “I am trying to establish contact with underlying forces which I can’t define. They link everything in a way which obliterates the frontiers between nature outside—the countryside—and the nature of the psyche, which goes on inside our heads.”

As Fridfinnsson’s comment suggests, “inside” and “outside”—the psyche and the landscape, our mind and our world—are already linked through hidden forces of nature, a nature of which they both partake, regardless of whether or not we are aware of these forces; his goal is to establish a connection to that very connection, a link to that very linkage, a portal to an already existing portal. In this regard, we might think of his work as epiphanic, that is, structured on the method of the epiphany—not the epiphany of religious (i.e., Christian) usage, but rather an epiphany as a revelation of something that is already there, a flash of understanding that changes nothing concrete, that changes nothing other than perception itself, which, of course, changes everything. This fundamental aspect of Fridfinnsson’s modus operandi is exquisitely expressed in the work Untitled (1999–2000), a photograph which shows Fridfinnsson cupping his hands so as to receive light that has been refracted through a prism. In the photograph, there is no annunciation-like beam traversing the room toward Fridfinnsson’s hand; to the contrary, the light in the room is diffuse and even and balanced, a natural light, probably a morning light. And yet, Fridfinnsson reaches out so as to be able to catch and thus share its spectrum of colors. The light itself is already there—of course it is, otherwise there would be no photograph—as are the colors of which it is composed. Fridfinnsson, in Untitled, merely makes them visible to us—merely, and magnificently.

This approach—that of revealing what is already there—may explain, at least in part, Fridfinnsson’s mastery of Duchampian non- or minimal intervention as an artistic method. While not entirely averse to object-making per se, Fridfinnsson is far more interested in leading us to see what is already there, on the other side of the portal between the corporeal and the incorporeal, the visible and the invisible, the rational and the irrational. And, as so many of his works attest, Fridfinnsson leads us there not through anything resembling force or even direct guidance outright, but rather—as with the Huldufólk, who cannot be cajoled nor conjured into appearing, but will only reveal themselves—through creating conditions propitious to cultivating an attention and alertness to those portals themselves. In other words, he works by listening to landscape itself, much as the landscape itself—in keeping with the “portals” to which Fridfinnsson has dedicated his art—is said to “listen” in the Emily Dickinson poem that lends this essay its title. This holds regardless of whether that landscape be in Iceland or Miami or anywhere else, whether that landscape be exterior or interior, material or immaterial, lived or dreamed. We all, like the Huldufólk, inhabit a landscape.

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There’s a certain Slant of light (320)

by Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –