Artist Katrín Inga Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir Spanks the Canvas
Katrín Inga Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s 2021 solo show Land Self Love is an explosive exploration of body-driven performativity and contemporary feminine aesthetics. Drawing on visceral sensory experiences that juxtapose power and vulnerability—inspired by Iceland’s volcanic topography (“Land”) and kink-positive sexual encounters (“Self”)— Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir’s creative process is rooted in the physicality of sensorial memory. The artworks, created spontaneously from intuitive, body-memory-driven repetitions and movements, become a documentation of these processes, mapping territories of self-love (“Love”) and physicalizing the catharsis of self-trust. The viewer enters a temple of self-love: “Land Self Love—Your Self is Land of Love,” and is encouraged to feel the self-love within.
Katrín Inga Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir’s work explores love, sexuality, and therapeutic self-expression, focusing in particular on their aesthetic capacity to question patriarchal hierarchies framing both the art world and global society at large. After obtaining a BA in Fine Art at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2008, Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir obtained a BA in Art Theory and Art History at the University of Iceland and an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is a Fulbright Scholar (2012) and a recipient of several prestigious fellowships and awards, including the Svavar Guðnason and Ásta Eiríksdóttir Fund (2017), the Dungal Recognition Award (2012), and the Guðmundur Andrésardóttir Fund (2013). Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir’s work draws on critical feminist aesthetics, continental philosophy, subversive art-historical movements like fluxus, and land-based Icelandic art. She has exhibited numerous solo shows in Iceland, Europe, and the United States, establishing her as a celebrated multimedia artist at the crux of Iceland’s contemporary post-fluxus feminist avant-garde.
“I wanted to take the canvas and give it a little spanking. ”
The core political thrust of Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s work centers on the way she offers a commentary on the art market by transgressing high-low boundaries in visual culture. Like fluxus and pop-artists of previous generations, Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir leverages somewhat ‘outsider’ cultural experiences (primarily kink, sensuality, and tattooing) to drive her performativity. This spontaneous, body-driven performativity, in turn, generates more traditional utterances like abstract painting. In a subtle but deft move, the viewer first encounters the paintings, which look suitably abstract and not entirely out of place in a traditional gallery setting. On further probing, however, the viewer learns—from artifacts and other documentations from the making process, including a VR piece capturing masturbatory practices—that the abstract paintings were created with kink and fetish tools like floggers, whips, and tattoo needles, driven by instinctive bodily rhythms anchored in sensual, embodied ‘taboo’ experiences: Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir literally spanked the canvas.
Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir effectively places traditional formalist arts like painting into dialogue with experimental, embodied, ‘outsider’ cultural practices in a way that demands the viewer legitimize both or neither: the viewer cannot appreciate the paintings without acknowledging the processes that made them. The viewer, thus, is confronted with their own internalized values about what counts as ‘legitimate’ art, and they are encouraged—with therapeutic intent—to embrace more as valid, beautiful, productive, and good.
Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s playful but critical subversion of what counts as legitimate art is reminiscent of what art critic and analytic philosopher Arthur Danto attributes to Duchamp’s ready-mades and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, as well as what philosopher and aesthetic theorist Lydia Goehr associates with John Cage’s musical works like 4’33” and Bird Cage, all of which—as Goehr explicitly notes in Elective Affinities (2008)—similarly force the viewer to reconsider the criteria they use to distinguish legitimate ‘art’ from the ‘noise’ around it when confronted with the artist’s piece. In traversing similar divisions, Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s work critically questions hierarchies of value that set ‘high’ art apart from ‘taboo’ cultural activities. What sets Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s work apart, however, from fluxus and pop artists of previous generations, is her postmodern take on the art world as it stands today. Much like the ethos of kink, which is rooted in the idea of playing with power and vulnerability for positive, pleasurable—and often therapeutic (rather than dismissive or critical)—ends, Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s aim is not to dismiss the canvas (or the art object in general), but to lovingly put it in its ‘place’ and thereby empower it in a new way: through its vulnerability, rather than its authoritarian aesthetic power. Speaking of the former lover who inspired her turn to kink as process, Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir remarks:
“I sent him a picture of my body all marked up, and he said, ‘This is your land of love, this is your painting.’ I wanted to trust my body to do to the canvas what the kink experience did to me.”
Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s performative process thus physicalizes self-trust; notably, the trust she places in her body and its spontaneous body-memory driven utterances. The objects that result, in turn, invite the viewer into a “land of love,” one that marks its territory with cathartic and empowering intent.
Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s move to include artifacts inspired by Icelandic land art and natural Icelandic materials (like lava stone) also offers a subtle commentary on Icelandic aesthetics and its relationship with dominant strands of European thought (rooted in the Enlightenment) that have shaped the international art market since the 1800s. Enlightenment aesthetics—formalized in the late 1700s by theorists like Immanuel Kant and later taken up in artistic movements like minimalism—centered on the idea of framing art (as a human endeavor) in terms of what set it apart from nature (as a biological phenomenon). This theoretical move focused on showing that the human creative instinct is autonomous, effectively liberating the artwork from the rules that govern nature and natural objects. Subsequent Frankfurt School theorists (like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin) suggested that fetishizing the idea of humankind’s freedom from nature was both limiting and damaging to human culture.
By placing art and nature in dialogue, Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir destabilizes similar dichotomies through aesthetic means. She thereby invites the viewer to create their own narrative about the aesthetic relation between artistic utterances and natural materials. Speaking on the connections between her own artistic process and Iceland’s natural landscape, Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir notes:
“For me, there’s something about eruptions: the raw, explosive moment, the spontaneous outpouring of lava that becomes land. It’s regenerative, full of love.”
The feminist bent of Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s work is similarly interesting: she is unafraid to explore, subvert, and reclaim clichés about femininity, turning them into sites of radical aesthetic empowerment.
Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir integrates traditionally cliché symbols like cartoonish neon hearts and a plush velvet heart-shaped seating sculpture, which the contemporary art market conventionally associates with shallow, commercial, and cheap femininity. When confronted with such objects—placed in dialogue with more traditional art objects like panel paintings—the viewer is similarly invited to question why the neon heart need necessarily be seen as such. Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir reflects:
“After all, it’s the art market’s patriarchal structure that sees symbols like hearts as both feminine and derogatory, in an aesthetic sense.”
In confronting and embracing such clichés about femininity (especially those that symbolize the idea of ‘love,’ a theme that runs through all of Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s work), Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir reclaims symbols like the neon heart, liberating them for fresh interpretation that dialectically reflects on the art market’s tendency to associate the reductive, weak, and shallow with the ‘feminine.’ Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir thus subtly questions why artists—and women artists in particular, who have historically had far less power to impact the conceptual and commercial aesthetic picture—feel compelled to comply with the (patriarchally grounded) delegitimization of such imagery from the artist’s aesthetic.
The overall thrust of Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s work is thus fundamentally egalitarian: she lovingly humbles the abstract painting by placing it alongside—and in seamless dialogue with—other creative, embodied, and expressive cultural experiences, as well as natural objects like lava stone (which, similar to Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir’s own creative process, are themselves the products of the earth’s spontaneous activities, like eruptions). To Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir, all such utterances are fundamentally connected. Her role, as the artist, is not to ascribe new aesthetic values to the artworks herself, but to trust and empower the viewer to do so, after presenting the art works on equal footing and stripping them of their historically divisive trappings. Jónsdóttir Hjördisardóttir thus opens up the space for the possibility of an aesthetic that reflexively liberates conventionally derided ‘clichés’ like therapeutic healing, trusting, and loving, turning these processes into sites of creative empowerment—or ‘lands of love’—that both question and destabilize the art world’s lingering hierarchies.
Land, Self, Love, on view at the Residence of the Icelandic Embassy in Berlin, was produced in collaboration with Gallery Gudmundsdottir, The Embassy of Iceland Berlin, Icelandic Art Center, and Business Iceland.