Walking along Reykjavik’s south coast, one encounters
a penguin-like bird on a boulder in the sea (see editorial).
Clearly artificial—metallic, smooth—it is a duplicate of the extinct
great auk. Out of reach in the cold sea, Olöf’s sculpture is a
beaked ghost located at the coast off of which the last known nesting pair
of great auks was killed in 1844. Aware that the great auks were near extinction,
collectors offered large sums of money for display specimens, and the pair
was killed by Icelanders for a foreign collector. More than a century-and-a-half
after the last great auk was killed, the nation’s reassessment of its
past took the form of a campaign to acquire a stuffed great auk reputed to
have been “from” Iceland. Both the 1844 killings and the 1973
purchase from Sotheby’s involved dealings with foreign collectors; and
Olöf’s representation of the extinct great auk, about twice the
size of the actual bird, is cast of aluminum, a material whose production
for foreign interests has led to further impoverishment of Iceland’s
natural environment.
The irony of the great auk’s extinction is that its rarity was its demise:
it was the desire to display the rare bird that contributed to its value and
hastened its extinction. The politics and aesthetics of display are central
preoccupations of many of Olöf’s works. In a 1996 exhibition at
The Living Arts Museum, animals associated with Icelandic folklore are represented
in plaster and displayed as if neoclassical figures. In the 1998 “Corpus
Dulcis,” fragments of an idealized male body are cast in chocolate and
heaped on a podium for the consumption of viewers.
The recent “Iceland Specimen Series” includes
photographs of albino birds. Clearly lifeless, lying on their side with wings
closed, the specimens float against the cliché-clouds of blue skies.
The images are a curious entanglement of visual conventions associated with
natural history tableaus and the painting tradition of vanitas.
The “Iceland Specimen Series” also features deformed lambs, including
a two-headed lamb and a six-legged lamb, that were stuffed in the early part
of last century. The stuffed animals once belonged to a Reykjavik animal museum
frequented by the artist when she was a child. Olöf photographed the
animals in the Icelandic landscape; the results allude not only to Iceland’s
history of landscape painting but also to the folklore of monstrosity. “The
Iceland Specimen Series” includes the photograph of a stuffed animal
reputed to be a skoffín, a mix of dog and fox mentioned in Icelandic
folklore. The function of the specimen in natural history is to provide an
example of a pattern or category. Olöf’s “specimen”
of the skoffín, however, is a categorical error and at the same time
a mythic creature.
Olöf’s work continues to explore the folkloric traditions surrounding
Icelandic nature as well as those scientific practices that, in their seeking
to preserve and display nature, also fictionalize it.
Olöf studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She received
an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, followed by an MFA in sculpture
from Yale University in 1993. She was recently awarded the prestigious 2005
Richard Serra Award as well as a grant from the Center for Icelandic Art for
the production of a catalogue to be published in conjunction with her solo
exhibition at Gallery I8, opening on September 1.
Eva Heisler
