HAUSFRAU ON A MISSION
by Frans Jacobi:
The danish song is a young blonde girl. This is the first line an unofficcial national anthem by the danish writer Kai Hoffman and the composer Kai Nielsen from 1924. The danish nation is thus personified as a young blonde girl. In a similar manner the french nation is personfied by La Liberté, the proud halfnaked Marianne, holding the tricolore, leading the revolution in Eugéne Delacroix painting La Liberté guidant le peuple.
Who personifies the norwegian nation?
In Vibeke Tandbergs photoseries Aftermath from 1994, the artist has staged herself as a white female humanitarian doing various good deeds in Africa. She is wearing a white cape against a backdrop of dark african people and green and brown african landscapes. A red and a blue stripe on her socks marks a discrete but obvious reference to ‘norwegianness’ and thus opens up a discourse on Norway as a nation of peace and humanitarian aid in the world. Tandbergs personification of the norwegian nation is ambigious and slighty ironic. It invites and reveals the colonial gaze inherent in the norwegian role in the third world.
In Gitte Sætre’s recent series of ’Woman cleaning performances’ the personification of Norway is more direct, fuelled by anger and shame. Whereas Tandbergs work is inscribed in a post-modern re-contextualising of images, the ’Woman cleaning performances’ consist of symbolic, political actions. Here Norway is personified as a contemporary Hausfrau, desperately trying to clean away the shame of the nation.
Already in her previous work, ‘morstøv’ (motherdust) Sætre took up the cleaning and the Hausfrau as an identity from which to explore womanhood: ‘I collect and archive dust. Dust and its connotations is my artistic strategy’. The cleaning of dust is the region of the Hausfrau. Revealing and collecting this dust is to personify the very thing that the Hausfrau is meant to clean away. It’s a humourfull paradox; by archiving the thing that is meant to be cleaned away Sætre reverses the gesture. The cleaning is turned into a symbolic act of revealing the hidden. This a classic feminist act – by reconfiguring the figure of the Hausfrau Sætre takes control. In this house nothing is hidden, even the dust ‘mirrors our identity’.
In the ’Woman cleaning performances’ the figure of the hausfrau leaves the private domain. She now acts in a field of national and global politics. In the 12 different performances/videos that Sætre has done until now, she confronts a variety of large scale political problematics. In ‘Woman cleaning tanks’, recorded in 2014 in Israel it is the obvious male agression inherent in the Israeli wars that is confronted in a very direct, but also humourfull manner. In ‘Woman Cleaning Polluted Oceans’ the climate crisis is adressed and in ‘Woman Cleaning Law & Order’ the notion of public space and its regulations of social life is on the agenda.
In some of the performance Sætre inserts signifiers of Norway or norwegianness; in a title such as ‘Woman cleaning norwegian salmon‘ or as a headscarf in ‘Woman Cleaning National Identity’. It is by these gestures that Sætre makes her Hausfrau a personification of the norwegian state. It is not only a woman cleaning these various objects - it is in a strange reversal Norway that is cleaning itself.
In her most controversal performance ‘Woman cleaning shame - a symbolic gesture to capture the greeting my country fail to make by not greeting HH Dali Lama’ from 2014, Sætre cleaned the sidewalk in front of Parliament in Oslo using the norwegian flag as a cloth. The performance provoked fierce, aggressive responses, even direct censorship and hatemail, but it is telling that it was not the issue of Norways response to Dalai Lama that was debated. It was the fact that Sætre used the norwegian flag to clean the streets that provoked such strong responses. To insult the flag in such a manner was seen as a humiliation of the nation.
Nationalism is on the rise. Its one of the fundamentalisms of the new global order. Sætres work points not only to the ambiguities of norwegian national identity, but to the complex global systems of domination and shame. The performative gestures are simple, funny and easy to understand, but they communicate a fierce political stance. By personifying the norwegian state as a woman cleaning – a hausfrau on a mission - Sætre claims the exact opposite: The nation state can never be good. Its not the nation state that will solve these problems.
by Frans Jacobi:
The danish song is a young blonde girl. This is the first line an unofficcial national anthem by the danish writer Kai Hoffman and the composer Kai Nielsen from 1924. The danish nation is thus personified as a young blonde girl. In a similar manner the french nation is personfied by La Liberté, the proud halfnaked Marianne, holding the tricolore, leading the revolution in Eugéne Delacroix painting La Liberté guidant le peuple.
Who personifies the norwegian nation?
In Vibeke Tandbergs photoseries Aftermath from 1994, the artist has staged herself as a white female humanitarian doing various good deeds in Africa. She is wearing a white cape against a backdrop of dark african people and green and brown african landscapes. A red and a blue stripe on her socks marks a discrete but obvious reference to ‘norwegianness’ and thus opens up a discourse on Norway as a nation of peace and humanitarian aid in the world. Tandbergs personification of the norwegian nation is ambigious and slighty ironic. It invites and reveals the colonial gaze inherent in the norwegian role in the third world.
In Gitte Sætre’s recent series of ’Woman cleaning performances’ the personification of Norway is more direct, fuelled by anger and shame. Whereas Tandbergs work is inscribed in a post-modern re-contextualising of images, the ’Woman cleaning performances’ consist of symbolic, political actions. Here Norway is personified as a contemporary Hausfrau, desperately trying to clean away the shame of the nation.
Already in her previous work, ‘morstøv’ (motherdust) Sætre took up the cleaning and the Hausfrau as an identity from which to explore womanhood: ‘I collect and archive dust. Dust and its connotations is my artistic strategy’. The cleaning of dust is the region of the Hausfrau. Revealing and collecting this dust is to personify the very thing that the Hausfrau is meant to clean away. It’s a humourfull paradox; by archiving the thing that is meant to be cleaned away Sætre reverses the gesture. The cleaning is turned into a symbolic act of revealing the hidden. This a classic feminist act – by reconfiguring the figure of the Hausfrau Sætre takes control. In this house nothing is hidden, even the dust ‘mirrors our identity’.
In the ’Woman cleaning performances’ the figure of the hausfrau leaves the private domain. She now acts in a field of national and global politics. In the 12 different performances/videos that Sætre has done until now, she confronts a variety of large scale political problematics. In ‘Woman cleaning tanks’, recorded in 2014 in Israel it is the obvious male agression inherent in the Israeli wars that is confronted in a very direct, but also humourfull manner. In ‘Woman Cleaning Polluted Oceans’ the climate crisis is adressed and in ‘Woman Cleaning Law & Order’ the notion of public space and its regulations of social life is on the agenda.
In some of the performance Sætre inserts signifiers of Norway or norwegianness; in a title such as ‘Woman cleaning norwegian salmon‘ or as a headscarf in ‘Woman Cleaning National Identity’. It is by these gestures that Sætre makes her Hausfrau a personification of the norwegian state. It is not only a woman cleaning these various objects - it is in a strange reversal Norway that is cleaning itself.
In her most controversal performance ‘Woman cleaning shame - a symbolic gesture to capture the greeting my country fail to make by not greeting HH Dali Lama’ from 2014, Sætre cleaned the sidewalk in front of Parliament in Oslo using the norwegian flag as a cloth. The performance provoked fierce, aggressive responses, even direct censorship and hatemail, but it is telling that it was not the issue of Norways response to Dalai Lama that was debated. It was the fact that Sætre used the norwegian flag to clean the streets that provoked such strong responses. To insult the flag in such a manner was seen as a humiliation of the nation.
Nationalism is on the rise. Its one of the fundamentalisms of the new global order. Sætres work points not only to the ambiguities of norwegian national identity, but to the complex global systems of domination and shame. The performative gestures are simple, funny and easy to understand, but they communicate a fierce political stance. By personifying the norwegian state as a woman cleaning – a hausfrau on a mission - Sætre claims the exact opposite: The nation state can never be good. Its not the nation state that will solve these problems.