All alone in the dark: After Elvira Madigan (1967), Salon dans l’obscurité
by Amy Hickman

It seems somehow completely without irony that Salon dans l’obscurité presents its first show, After Elvira Madigan (1967), a one-night-only display of one unnamed artist’s paintings, exclusively produced from scenes of Bo Widerberg’s impossibly saccharine film about real-life nineteenth-century slackline dancer, Hedvig Jensen, best known as Elvira Madigan. Hedvig’s story is a sort of Nordic Bonnie and Clyde; she runs away with (or is maybe abducted by) married nobleman and cavalry deserter Sixten Sparre, and a couple of months later, he shoots her dead and then kills himself. In the film, this is played as a suicide pact, and she’s delighted to run off with him in the first instance, rather than, as her mother alleged, only doing so because he threatened to kill himself otherwise. Pia Degermark and Thommy Berggren, as Hedvig and Sixten, prance about in the verdant Swedish countryside, catch butterflies, have picnics and engage in petty theft as they learn how to live apart from society, before they eventually run out of money and food, and finally, in desperation, turn to suicide. The film is famously beautiful; every scene could have come from an impressionist painting, not just in content (it’s all boating and wine in the grass) but in its cinematic aesthetics. Supposedly, Widerberg loved Renoir, and many scenes are intentional homages.[1] The paintings that make up the show, then, are also generally impressionistic, and look to be done by the same hand with varying levels of attention and care. One of the most interesting looks rushed compared to the others, but the flat quality of the paint makes Hedvig and Sixten’s faces, in a moment of passion, look totally lifeless, like rubber masks; this makes it, in its own way, one of the most attractive paintings of the bunch.
        The show, as all of Salon dans l’obscurité’s shows promise to be, is one-night-only and anonymous.[2] This means there’s not much in the way of framing; the show has its title and a floor sheet that is more or less a description of the film and its reception. There are also two projections of scenes of the film, one of which seems to be cut together into something like a trailer. In lieu of an artist name or images of the work, all that’s really brought me and presumably anyone else here is the sheer novelty of it, based on the gallery’s call for artists (and, admittedly, a weird personalised email invitation—flattery will get you anywhere, I guess). Their information pack for artists considering submitting an expression of interest is really the exciting part. It reads like a challenge: no name, no biography, no meanings, themes, significance, or really anything else allowed. “Any reference to these will automatically disqualify your application.”[3] To the anticipated horror, or at least derision, of the Perth art scene, it dares to claim that all applications will be judged on the quality of the work. Cue gasps. “According,” that is, “to the subjective taste and biases of the curators.”[4] Crisis averted; of course no one would dare to think that an artwork (well, really, an EOI) could be judged on its objective quality.



How and why have we come to think like this? Blame the critics. No, wait—blame deconstruction, postmodernism, the university, and the critics. All these, it would seem, have conspired to produce a world of relativism gone wild, where anything means anything. In the face of such a world, apparently, we can only desperately retreat to that last unassailable bastion that can’t be diminished or distorted by its relation to so many competing truths: the personal opinion. Broadly, though, the curators (are there really more than one?) of Salon dans l’obscurité have sniffed out something that does, in fact, piss people off: that art seems to be judged on the basis of a whole range of things that are not, strictly speaking, the art object “itself.” That list of things might include the artist’s own biography, the place or time in which the artwork was made, the place or time in which you are viewing it, its distribution through various media, any movements—aesthetic, political or both—that the artwork or artist can be said to be part of, what the artist says about it, what other people say about it… in other words, context matters. Taking a stand against context, the curators of Salon dans l’obscurité want to know and want you to know as little as possible, and to thereby encounter the artwork in the dark, as it were.
        The information pack is therefore comprised, for the most part, of a series of prohibitions: the aforementioned ban on naming yourself, but also, “no claims about what your art does or achieves or dismantles or critiques or researches or enquires-into or problematises or any other such thing,” and “no reference to meanings, themes, significance, or contemporary relevance.”[5] There are also the usual instructions—describe the work, add pictures, etc.—accompanied by further baffling prohibitions (“do not explain your work”). It’s not clear that the curators realise how reactionary this all sounds—as in, why can’t we have quality anymore? why does everything need to be about who you are? why can’t we just have pretty paintings of pastoral bliss like we used to?—but I think, on the whole, it would be unfair to assume that they are trying to press some kind of half-baked political agenda. That is, it’s easy enough to recognise that there is a kind of juvenile authoritarianism here, and it doesn’t require us to speculate on their feelings about woke.
        Reading it generously, it seems fair to say that the curators are interested in the idea of the art object itself, and particularly in the idea, or really the question, of whether they can actually facilitate an unmediated experience of the artwork. I also think that it is fair to say that this particular exhibition of works has been delivered as the inaugural one because of the way it complements, by problematising, the posing of that question. Salon dans l’obscurité doesn’t want its artists to distort or diminish the actual presence of the work of art in advance through, for example, the common practice of distributing photos of it on social media. Instead it seems to aim, through the anonymous, unphotographed, one-night-only-event, to stage an encounter with “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in the place where it is at this moment,” that one thing that Walter Benjamin says survives “even the most perfect reproduction.”[6] It makes for an interesting twist, then, that the paintings here are essentially reproductions of scenes from a film that itself cinematographically sought to reproduce yet more paintings. The question of the “here and now” of the work, that is, despite all these closures, is as difficult to address here as it would be in the case of, say, its reproduction across social media—as Peter Osborne writes about the analogue photograph, “insofar as the question can be meaningfully addressed,”  it can only be said to be “distributed across the sites of its process, which it permeates as an image… albeit in a peculiar ontological state of dependency upon the processes that it transcends.”[7] In other words, this problem isn’t exactly a new one; or if it is, it’s only insofar as digital media has unlocked or brought to the fore a possibility that has lain dormant in much of what we call modernism. Duchamp’s Fountain, arguably the most famous “work” of modernism, is perhaps no work at all, having never been exhibited. Insofar as it can be said to “exist” now, it is only through the reproductions and re-presentations of a fundamentally hidden origin: “even Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph of the work is no more than the first in a long and seemingly never ending line of copies, each one at some remove from the thing itself without ever being entirely independent of it.”[8] The Salon’s staging of this show, in this way, certainly makes for an interesting practical experiment in the idea of the “thing itself,” not just insofar as it tries to limit the show’s visibility to its three-hour window and disregard the usual conventions of soliciting an audience in pre- and post-show documentation, but also because it presents us with reproductions and reproductions of reproductions of some fundamentally obscured origin—maybe that’s the unobserved real deaths of Hedvig and Sixten, all alone on Tåsinge. On the other hand, insisting on such a high degree of obfuscation, to the extent that no information about the work makes its way to the public before the show, means that the Salon has nothing much more than its ability to generate gossip to get people out there.


Above all, there is one particular way in which the content of the show speaks to its framing in a way that, I think, exceeds the artist and curators’ intentions. The tremendous beauty and romance of Elvira Madigan in many ways disguised—although Criterion says only “barely” [9]—its measured critique of ’60s hippie counterculture. Some parallels are obvious, like Sixten’s desertion from the army. The pair’s utopianism, though, is perhaps more easily misinterpreted. That is, Widerberg meant for the film to warn against the dangers of that kind of hippie individualism, but the result was a film so visually charming that it served to romanticise the very thing he sought to steer people away from. Widerberg later said, in no uncertain terms, that he “wanted to prove that their idea was insane, that you can’t cut off relations with the rest of society and get along in the grass, alone.”[10] The sheer atmospherics of the thing ended up letting it be reducible to a sensuous mood study about abstractly doomed lovers. It’s not smuggled into the film; Hedvig insists, for example: “Don’t talk to me about love, Sixten. Can we butter our bread with it?” But it was, for audiences, so easily lost in the dreamy, sensual naturalism of the thing. It’s much easier to see when the film is taken in the context of, for example, Widerberg’s oeuvre; perhaps surprisingly, he followed it with a tennis documentary that covered a Swedish student protest of then-Rhodesia’s racial policies (he recalls it being his first time seeing someone “beaten with a stick,” but also “the power of the students when they came together”), then Ådalen ‘31, the story of a Swedish workers’ strike in which five workers were killed by troops, but which ultimately led to the fall from power of the Conservative government. In other words, movies about collective power, and the importance of being part of a world with others in it.
        If what you’re looking for is some kind of judgement about the quality of the Salon’s first show, “according to the subjective taste and biases” of one critic: it sucks! But a bunch of paintings in a vacuum are, well, just paint. You can’t butter your bread with it. The problem is that all those other things outside of the artwork that always risk diminishing it, and which Salon dans l’obscurité would rather do without—the frame, the gallery, the Instagram post, the textual explanation, the audience, the critics, whatever—are also, in another sense, the sustaining environment for this kind of thing to happen at all. In this light, to do away with context can really be understood only as a deprivation. What I’m trying to suggest, in other words, is that the curators and inaugural artist behind Salon dans l’obscurité’s first show could themselves stand to take a lesson from Elvira Madigan: suffering from the same insanity as Hedvig and Sixten, they think that you can get along in the grass (or indeed the dark), alone. But there’s no chance for life out there, without everything else that stands to sustain and enliven it.

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Footnotes:

1. Peter Cowie, “Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema: Another Sweden,” Criterion, August 22, 2023. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8234-bo-widerberg-s-new-swedish-cinema-another-sweden.

2. The possibility of any future exhibitions remains in question: since the time of writing, Salon dans l’obscurité has announced its closure for the foreseeable future.

3. Salon dans l’obscurité, “Information Pack,” 2, https://drive.google.com/file/d/11FHzMK-8CxrGrTAkpEQGLya_u9HDcSy8/view.

4. Salon dans l’obscurité, “Information Pack,” 2.

5. Salon dans l’obscurité, “Information Pack,” 2.

6. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, translated by J. A. Underwood (Penguin, 2008), 5.

7. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, (Verso, 2013), 124.

8. Robert Briggs and Niall Lucy, “Frame #1: Ones & Zeroes, Light & Shade (Dimensions: 4, Easter Eggs: 3),” Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy(1): n.p., https://www.ctrl-z.net.au/articles/issue-1/briggs-lucy-frame/.

9. Cowie, “Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema.”

10. Robert Berkvist, “Where Does a Man Go After ‘Elvira Madigan’?,” New York Times, October 26, 1969, 12.

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Header image: Installation view of After Elvira Madigan (1967) at Salon dans l’obscurité, courtesy of the author.