The artist Henriette Heise recently convened a seminar at The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK). The topic was the phenomenon of late works, a subject Heise is currently researching in her capacity as postdoctoral fellow at the museum. Around forty-five people made their way to the museum’s cinema for ‘Twilights: Stories About Late Works for Our Futures’, which turned out to be exactly the kind of seminar I want more of. Perhaps this is even how seminars used to be before the concept was rendered unnecessarily complicated.
At SMK, those present were able to simply sit back and enjoy a string of presentations about: Anna Ancher, Michael Asher, Lutz Bacher, Elisa Maria Boglino, Franciska Clausen, Tony Conrad, Félix González-Torres, Derek Jarman, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernest Mancoba, Yong Soon Min, and Helene Schjerfbeck. All artists who are no longer with us. They were brief presentations, only ten minutes each, all focusing on the relevant artist’s late production.
The selection of “storytellers,” as Heise called them, did not seem arbitrary. They consisted of artists Maria Zahle, Christian Vind, Pia Rönicke, Sebastian Hedevang, and Guston Sondin-Kung; the art historians and museum curators were Dorthe Aagesen, Julie Foged Kristensen, Birgitte Anderberg, Karen Westphal Eriksen, and Mathias Danbolt; writer Steven Zultanski and graphic designer K Vang also participated. All people who, to a greater or lesser degree, are part of Heise’s circle of acquaintances, whether they are current colleagues at the National Gallery of Denmark, former students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, or simply people with whom I sense Heise has maintained an ongoing conversation for years
Anyone who has followed Heise’s career over the years will know that this is how she works. Perhaps that is how we all work when we seek out people we find interesting in order to launch a conversation. However, collective thinking has always been an overt and deliberate strategy in Heise’s work, from her many years of involvement with Copenhagen Free University (2001–07), throughout her twelve years teaching at the academy, and now in her approach to conducting a practice-led postdoc study of late works.
The simple but carefully curated framework let audiences immerse themselves easily and effortlessly in the subject, which only grew more and more fascinating as the seminar progressed to encompass several surprising aspects ranging from ideas about doomsday to what it actually means for a work to typify its time. There was neither discussion nor any comments from the floor along the way, yet I felt that the room was fully on board, thinking along with the storytellers. As Heise put it afterwards: “The late works became a kind of frozen object that we thawed out and warmed up together to reawaken the potentials of the past.”
How did your interest in late works begin?
For many years, my job was to take an interest in beginnings as I taught the young students at the art academy. I was very fond of that work. There were frequent moments of touching poignancy whenever I began to see the contours of a practice in a student I had followed for some time. And then, in my last few years there, I noticed a change in the overall mood.
I think it started around that very hot summer of 2018: I began to observe a lack of faith in the future, in the students and in myself. There was a pervasive mood of lethargy and wanting to give up, a sense of: How can we keep going? In this world infused by wars, crises and climate change, how can we even think about our future, let alone make art? It made me think about what the artists before us have done. After all, there have been difficult times before, so how have previous artists managed to continue working even when things looked bleak? So I turned my attention away from difficult beginnings towards being interested in endings. Partly to see if we could learn to think about our futures in different ways through those artists who persisted.
How do you define late works?
I interpret the term quite broadly. Generally speaking, they are works made during the last part of an artist’s life, often when they have become very old. But I have also studied late works by younger artists who knew death was looming on a not-faraway horizon because they were ill, for example Félix González-Torres and Paul Thek, who were terminally ill with AIDS, and who quite bravely and with eyes wide open addressed their own impending end in their last works.
I can allow myself the luxury of approaching the late works in a different way than the art historians. I have taken the liberty of disregarding the usual attributions of value, such as whether or not art is of so-called high quality or not. I’ve had quite a bit of fun thinking about how we judge art when we speak about this or that artist being ‘in tune with their time’, or, conversely, why someone is ‘out of step with their time’. It is a rather spacey way of looking at things, and one which I’ve felt the need to clean up a bit.
I’ve been particularly inspired by Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain from 2007, in which he addresses Beethoven’s late quartets. Late in life, Beethoven no longer needed to write for either the king or the church. And Said describes very beautifully how Beethoven steps away from what was typical of the time, creating a new vocabulary that his contemporaries could not stomach at all, but which continues to inspire modern compositional music to this day.
My studies of late works have also prompted me to renegotiate my own practice and thinking, a process where I’ve been particularly preoccupied with how we think about the future and the shifts and changes that are taking place now. All this involves the more speculative part of my practice, and I am quite aware of that. The seminar at SMK was part of that method. Basically, it was a case of twelve unrelated bodies of late works being juxtaposed without me or anyone else making any attempt at contextualise them. Almost as if they were found objects.
In fact, in the last two or three years I have been so preoccupied with late works that they are the first thing I look at whenever I discover an oeuvre by an artist I didn’t know before. Only afterwards do I look at the rest. I actually did the same thing as a kid; I would read the last page of a horror novel first because then it wasn’t so scary anymore.
Do the late works share any commonalities? Have you discovered any shared traits?
I have noticed that many late works have a certain “oh, fuck it” quality about them. There’s this sense that the artists allow themselves to let go and cut loose, unshackled from their previous production, and that is very inspiring. One example would be Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà from 1564, a marble sculpture that he worked on until a week before he died. It is a strange work. The torso of Christ appears to have been hacked almost furiously out of the Virgin Mary; there is an extra arm sticking out into the air. On the whole, it all comes across as far more incomplete than his other work. Some parts appear rough and coarse, having been hacked away, others are perfectly polished. Art history has long debated whether the work is actually finished or not. At the moment, the consensus is that it is in fact a finished sculpture. It’s really something.
This also touches on some of what Julie Foged Kristensen spoke about during the seminar: one of Anna Ancher’s last paintings, showing a little girl against a meadow done in acidic, luminous greens. Those are surprisingly bold colours for Ancher, and we can only wonder where she might have taken things had she lived longer. Lutz Bacher, whom Sebastian Hedevang spoke about during the seminar, is another good example. Her most active years were actually the last ten of her life. And when I look at what she did in that period, I see an artist who allowed herself a lot of freedom.
Bacher is fascinating. Can you say something more about what kinds of liberties she allowed herself?
The first time I saw a work by Lutz Bacher was the installation she made for the experimental X-room venue at SMK in 2014. I had never seen anything like it. There was something about that combination of nonchalance and precision, that strong insistence that the works were perfectly able to stand on their own, on their own terms, without an entire support structure of explanations and meaning-making, which was hugely inspiring.
Your postdoc project is called “The Lunatic Future for the Depressed Planet and the Flanet (flat planet): Learning from the late work of artists who figured out how on earth to keep going.” Have your studies of other people’s late works given you hope or courage to move on?
Hope can be a rather limiting way of thinking. I would rather say that my studies have inspired me to try to unlearn certain thought patterns. For example, I actively try to not let myself be paralysed by what might happen. Instead, I try to just see things for what they are.
I also didn’t think I would go back any further than one hundred years in art history, but as it turned out I got all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of deluges from about 1518. Throughout his life he spent a lot of time studying how water flows in streams, in rivers, in whirlpools. And late in life he used that skill to make drawings where entire civilisations are washed away. In a sense, studying them was strangely soothing. So many years have passed, and the world hasn’t been completely washed away yet. Perhaps seeing this was reassuring because the works so clearly demonstrated that catastrophising and visions about the future also have their own cultural history.
This is not to say that we should be cynical and indifferent about the great changes our world is going through right now, but there is something reassuring about seeing that our thought patterns are also borne by culture and trends. And I try to understand what this collective emotional life means in terms of how we act. It has also been said that people who suffer from depression have difficulty forming new thought patterns. And in a world that feels stuck in a firmly entrenched belief in growth and rearmament, I’m sometimes quite desperate for other avenues of thought. We all know the feeling of standing in front of an artwork where you can actually feel some of your brain cells being rearranged. Quite obviously, art has something to offer in this regard.
When it comes right down to it, the late works are eyewitnesses from the edge, from the end of life. Many of them testify to a courage to dare to look at what scares us. We must somehow train ourselves to get better at going through changes without becoming paralysed, unable to act. I myself am of an age where I can remember the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Chernobyl accident, and other things. There are short periods of stability and then there are periods of great upheaval, such as the one we find ourselves in now. At present, I feel a great need to think about how I can use my voice in the current crisis without having to make art that has been somehow pre-ordered or could have been made by AI. So, yes, one of things I have learnt from many of the late works is a kind of unlearning, a resetting of what you think you know and think you can predict.
