Henrik Olesen

Emblematic of the twentieth century, Turing was recognised for his work while simultaneously effaced as a homosexual. This compromise resulted in the machine that constitutes the basis of all post-war computing. Olesen’s display of Turing’s indeterminacy is a reworked critique of capitalist alienation and extraction – you might be celebrated and rewarded for your work but you will not be allowed to live as you want. In 1953, Turing was convicted of homosexual acts and forced to take ‘correctional’ synthetic female hormones – in other words chemical castration – and later committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. Here, I typed a note on my phone: what is it to change, and what is it to hide? In Turing’s case the enforced change suppressed a social truth. His story has since been cannibalised by Hollywood into the digestible biopic form, absorbed into the general totality where all timings and lives are blurred and therefore differentiation (and meaning) is lost. The Imitation Game was in fact the highest-grossing independent film of 2014.

Any affirmative, post-biological promise of resistance sampled by Olesen in this work with Turing (that is, a fantasy of possible bodies coded to bypass representation) has been undermined in the last ten years. Where is the pain, disgust and slow degeneration that need to escort the inexhaustible body as in De Sade? Love can’t be optimistic because there is no attachment. The liberating flows, multiplicities and open applicability of Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of ‘becoming’ has been recycled and incentivised by the powerful to establish unidirectional control over others. The internet is now built around definitive declarations of personal identity and networking is about individual survivalism. And that which is produced by participation largely seems to be the same as any other good, since a government-corporate complex is doing the assemblage. In his recent book Dark Deleuze (2016), Andrew Culp recovers Deleuze’s hatred and negativity to contest ‘today’s digital world of compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure’. It is interesting that the major thread he pulls through the book is a repulsed ‘materialist feminist one: something intolerable about this world is that it demands we participate in its accumulation and reproduction’. ⁰³

Some Faggy Gestures (2007) is an inventory of gazes, dispositions and anecdotes that struck Olesen as queer, all drawn from pre-modern Western culture. The seven panels of raw, printed web images have a total lack of world-building aspiration. Instead they make an adamant historical materialist case against ‘realism’, and against the status quo. Standing among the panels is to understand that bodies have an effect on each other far in excess of a person’s capacity to represent it. In his indifference towards manipulating his research into anything other than it is, Olesen effectively suspends his own role as artist and simultaneously arrests the viewing process. We are postponed in a pre-modern, non-legislative struggle of looking and being seen, which challenges the evaluative, combative tendency of the eye to see and search for what it already knows (control). What is the value of being recognised by someone you do not recognise? Desire, like power, has no aesthetic value in the traditional sense, ‘meaning that most researchers of non-dominant social groups and sub-cultural practices must, as a matter of principle, interpret what cannot be found’ (Olesen’s words).

Faggy Gestures in combination with How Do I Make Myself a Body? (Olesen’s work on Turing), raises Maurizio Lazzarato’s question: what types of organization, on the street and with our bodies, must we construct to bypass the double bind of social subjection and machinic enslavement? It follows that in Corners (2015) Olesen gives up altogether on visibility as a means of claiming political recognition for marginalised groups. Instead, he goes directly into the schism between theory and practice, pleasure and possession, driving them wider apart and leaving both properly unsecured. This disconnect enables a big release of libidinal energy, staging a collective form of life that can no longer be conceived within a visual, liberal economy. The four corners of the space are cast in plaster and collapsed on the floor, with an extensive pamphlet called Sex (In Public) stacked at the edge of the room.

At the core of the show is an impasse of confusion. Anthony Caro’s bright red, modernist sculpture Early One Morning (1962) is appropriated, bloody and messy like some kind of perpetual Caesarean section, surrounded by blacked-out collages and enlarged printed internet images of butchered carcasses glued on plastic sheeting, marked and splashed from previous use. A piece of writing by John Kelsey is presented on the wall which conflates the exhibition as a whole with the expanse of a life. Kelsey uses this quote from Dante’s Inferno at the centre of his own text: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost’. At a moment when all language outside of consensus and marketing is being eradicated by liberalism, Olesen manages to hold oppositions and dysfunction with justice (instead of balance) in a single room. The work asks how to remain torn, weak, how to be split apart and persist within one’s weakness instead of consolidating power in normal ways. This is maybe similar to what the UK’s Labour party is currently working out at their party conference late in 2019, at the time of writing. And for Olesen’s work to come, the proposition of which is visible through an inserted window: how to proceed and build a system from intuition, a system of this complete abandonment.

Recent work consists of the packaging of painkillers, creams and other products declassified by a layer of paint, laid out on school tables. There is a wooden, free-standing door frame plastered in exit stickers called Exit/ Portal (2018). A large clear perspex sculpture of the letter ‘M’ distorts the timing of thought in the room because its referent is a red perspex ‘M’ far away at the other end of the show. Smaller glass boxes line the space, all As Yet Untitled (2018). One such transparent box carries a scribbled post-it note reading ‘arm’, and a reflective black box of similar dimensions is called Depression (2018). Olesen’s exhibition demonstrates over and over how repression is the pervasive phenomenon of history, and how the status quo is pure concealment. Various health studies suggest that repression is inherently connected to memory loss and dementia. If, as D. W. Winnicott writes, madness is the need to be believed, Olesen has laboured without intention to relinquish his own need to be believed. The viewer’s basic processes of looking and reflection are discontinued in turn.