PETER VON TIESENHAUSEN
Reliquaries
Mar 24 – April 22 2023
Norberg Hall is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture, drawing, video, and ephemera by internationally recognized, Alberta-based artist, PETER VON TIESENHAUSEN. For over four decades, von Tiesenhausen’s work has dealt with the impact humans have on the environment, and has actively used his artistic practice as a means of environmental activism. Widely known for his large-scale artworks, and his use of natural materials and natural forces like fire, von Tiesenhausen chronicles the passage of time, life, and death as tools for contextualizing his artwork.
von Tiesenhausen has presented numerous lectures on his work and approach in museums, universities, and public institutions throughout Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe. With over fifty solo exhibitions and more than sixty-five group shows his work reaches audiences and collections far and wide. Documentaries and interviews highlighting von Tiesenhausen’s practice, community engagement, and environmentalism have been produced by Bravo, Vision TV, Hot Docs, CTV, CBC, Vice Canada, and many more. In 2015, von Tiesenhausen was the recipient of the prestigious Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artists Award and most recently he was recognized for his significant contributions to the province of Alberta with the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal.
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Reliquaries
Accompanying exhibition text | Magnus Tiesenhausen, Artist & Writer
Near to where we live, distributed through the boreal forest and muskeg are charred stumps, residue of the most recent of the vast forest fires that I think swept for hundreds of miles like an entire skin of fire over the world. The last one, approximately 110 years ago, occurred slightly before colonization had reached the land dad and I grew up on. Dad remembers coming across these effigies as a kid, riding horseback in the woods, and cites them as an early source of inspiration for his art practice. I remember him showing me them when I was a child too, probably 7 or so years old, and telling me about the forest fires and that the postponement of the next cycle of burning and growth was artificial. The charred stumps’ relative immortality is due to the absence of volatile elements in them, a result of a form of destructive distillation.
Pyrolysis (combustion in the absence of oxygen) reduces carbon-based forms to pure carbon. This carbonization creates a permanent funerary representation of something that was once alive: a carbon ghost, which takes the exact physical form of the object it memorializes except slightly smaller. I imagine it as “cellular hollowness”: each cell distilled into a three-dimensional silhouette. Carbonization takes carbon out of the life cycle; it makes it immortal, but lifeless, presiding over a new dimension. Because of the longevity and hollowness and echoes and the silence of dust settling, each cell is like a sarcophagus, a shell in the precise image of its emptiness.
Economy of Sainthood
Prior to AD 787, Christian saints were buried in one piece beneath or in the vicinity of altars. However, on that year at the Second Council of Nicaea, it was decreed that every church was required to house a relic of a saint within its altar. The increased demand for relics led to a spiritual drawing and quartering; the miraculous acts a saint performed in life were severed from the saint’s body by this economic pressure, making each deed specific to the body part that had carried it out. Dismemberment of saints’ remains and the creation of reliquaries containing separate parts of the saint which had performed miracles during the saint’s life became commonplace. These objects, called “speaking reliquaries” were sculpted from precious metals, ivory, jewels and crystals, mimicking the shape of the saint’s body part contained within. Notably, the deconstructed body parts of the saint began to effectively act as the whole saint, talismans forming a rhizomatic network of the saint’s posthumous sentience which could be estimated at thousands of kilometres in diameter.
Information-shaped information
Trees grow in layers outward from their centre, each layer a season of growth. It’s popularly understood that a tree’s age can be determined by cutting it down and counting the growth rings.Other elements can be understood from the reading of the rings: if the tree grew on a slant or was forced to lean at some point; if it was struck by lightning; if a volcano erupted in its lifetime; if it was infected by a disease or fought against parasitic infestation, when, for how long, if it survived that, and what effect that struggle had on its life after.
These stories can be accessed just by reading the end-grain, but if we could shell and flatten each layer one at a time, along the tree’s entire length, we could essentially read the exact history of the tree as told by itself from the last moment of its life to the first moment, at the core.
Every single tree accumulates evidence of itself and its world in this way, creating a body of autobiographical data which is so detailed that it’s not possible for us to separate our understanding of the collected data from our understanding of the tree itself. A tree is a book about itself shaped like a tree. My friend, neighbour, and fellow artist David McGregor talks about how a forest is like “a colony of scribes”, constantly documenting themselves and everything around them. David works with both dad and I, sometimes all together, sometimes independently, and we often find ourselves all working on similar things, and with similar materials, as three rural settler artists of different ages who want to be in contact with the land in a non-extractive way.
Spiral Library
In AD 79, in the 12th hour of its eruption, Mt. Vesuvius’s eruptive column collapsed, causing 6 surges of pyroclastic rock (shards of superheated stone suspended in gas) to descend from the stratosphere and inundate the neighbouring seaside town of Herculaneum at a speed of 160km/h. Organic materials including human beings, wooden furniture, shingles, feces, and food present on site were carbonized by the extreme heat and absence of oxygen.
In 1709, following growing rumours of ancient artifacts and artworks surfacing at the bottom of wells in the area, Herculaneum was rediscovered and work began to unearth the town. One building, now known as the Villa dei Papiri, yielded an estimated 1000 papyrus scrolls containing mostly Greek philosophical works, known in their blackened and immortal state as the Herculaneum Papyri.
By the grace of the 6 archival floods of pyroclastic material and the airtight seal provided by the subsequent flow of volcanic mud, the papyri at Herculaneum were able to outlive other printed works–which were subject to organic breakdown through the grind of daylight, gravity, wind, water, etc. The sheer elemental stability of their pyrolyzed form granted this unprecedented longevity, outside of the literary life-cycle of translations, representations, copies/editions, or plagiarized versions. This immortalization comes at a cost: an infinite physical fragility, which makes it possible to read each scroll once at the very most.
Initial, 18th century forays into reading the papyri were “ruinous”. Works were gutted from top to bottom, crushed by the atomic weight of mercury, cut into quarters or simply scraped away. To read a carbonized papyrus without destroying it would require a kind of seeing which could both penetrate the carbon layers of the spiral, and discern the charcoal-based ink from the charcoal of the page. This method, this eye, would read in spirals inward, from the widest diameter of the outer layer, toward the core of the umbilicus. The reading would take place inside of a purpose-built library chamber bathed in bright sunlight (as the carbon of the scrolls is UV-impervious) and a labyrinth of baffles to prevent even slight air currents which could flake valuable layers from the scrolls. As the text is arrayed latitudinally, for ease of comprehension the scrolls would be oriented vertically in the room, like a small forest of charcoal stumps.
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