Catalogue text by Gertrud Sandqvist, Professor of the History of Art Theory and Ideas, 2018

Carin Blücher’s images are constructions in which figures move, or rather, are captured. It could be a stage design. If that be the case, we are presented with performances from Theatres of the Mind, as described in the psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall’s famous analysis.

McDougall quotes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.” She uses the stage metaphorically to describe the Mind’s own secret theatre, where the same roles from the past are reenacted, over and over again, with the same result – pain and pleasure. The child’s thinking, and the child’s solutions, are transformed on this inner stage into the adult’s mental scenarios, which are sometimes labelled neurosis or psychosis.

I am not implying that Blücher uses images for a psychotherapeutic purpose. But she herself describes her artistic process as working towards a flow, where choices are partially made unconsciously. When she comes in touch with her inner stage, she experiences that she is there. To her, the situations and figures she then constructs describe not only her own individual circumstances but something more universal.

However, Blücher’s imagery often returns to a woman locked into an interior.  My earliest encounter with her works, at least fifteen years ago, was photographs of herself as a cameo in a decorative domestic setting. It was an ironical statement about conventional paintings of the angel of the home, a character inserted into an environment where she could not move. I associate it with Gustav Klimt’s many female portraits from Jewish fin-de-siècle high society. He paints the prototype for Freud’s Dora into a golden setting, hard and solid as mosaic. Only the suffering face is alive.

In Blücher’s recent works, her young women are imprisoned in abstract paintings. This time, however, their female gender is irrelevant. They are human beings. The characters in their neutral costumes, are put in near-impossible situations. This is enacted in large, painted decors, where the protagonists are instructed to stand or lie down or hang or curl up or writhe according to Blücher’s instruction drawing.

Everything is analogue. The background and props are painted. The photo, taken frontally with a camera on a stand, as in the old photo studios, is proof that the act was performed, while the camera lens’s capacity to create a certain kind of illusion is fully utilised. Blücher seeks to demonstrate that this singular event actually happened. Dream or fantasy has been materialised, and takes place before our very eyes.

The camera lens also has the ability to reveal what the eye overlooks. Walter Benjamin called this phenomenon “the optical unconscious”. For Blücher, it is critical that the optical unconscious is at work – which is paradoxical, since she weeds out all the obscurities where this optical unconscious would normally take place.

The pictures are primitive. The props are coarsely painted. The young women are dressed in neutral, anonymising costumes. This is what avant-garde theatre might have looked like in the 1910s, as in Malevich’s decor for the revolutionary opera Victory over the Sun.  I saw a reconstruction of it in Imatra in 1989. The actors sang and recited, trapped in their geometric figures, in a scenery that was a suprematist painting. Malevich had forgotten to make eyeholes in the costumes. The poor singers tottered around on stage, fell on each other. The sound was rather muffled.

Carin Blücher has not seen Victory over the Sun (I asked her). But this could have been a reference, because she does have quite a dark sense of humour.

Malevich’s revolutionary opera was made of wood slats, glue paint and paper. The fantastic new society proved to be a Potemkin village for brutal oppression.

Blücher’s photographs show people imprisoned and trapped in someone else’s dreams. As an artist, she strives for clarity by reconnecting with experiences that are normally inaccessible. She hopes that the creative spark will reach inside the viewer. Who will pass it on.