THE EXTENDED MEANING OF DRIFT

     
Why does an inflated mattress in the shape of Iceland start migrating about the world? One may wonder but as the late German art historian, Rudolf Wittkower admitted, few things in art are as fascinating as visual communication and the way in which visual communication is passed on through symbols. In his seminal essay on monsters, „Marvels of the East“, Wittkower examined how ancient ideas of Persia and India – from the times of Ctesias of Cnidus in the 5th century BC and Megasthenes from Anatolia in the 4th century BC – had nurtured European imagination from antiquity well into the eighteenth century. 
Olga Bergmann and Anna Hallin are well known for their keen attempts to rekindle the spirit of ancient and medieval teratology in contemporary Icelandic art. Their critical and ironic attitude to recent scientific research and to the common suspicion of scientific experiments, which might go astray and cause a genetic disaster of irreversible kind, is one of ambiguity and humor. By choosing the shape of Iceland for migration they draw our attention to the fact that the contour of the island outlines a perfect monster, a common comprehension among the inhabitants.
But the migrating of Iceland also refers to the continental drift, the geological separation of the tectonic plates. As a matter of fact the monster of Iceland is evenly divided between two major plates of the northern hemisphere, the North American and the Eurasian plates, which are drifting away from each other. This dramatic separation stretches the country in two different directions along a diagonal axis running from southwest to northeast, inevitably enhancing its overall surface. Yet with the future perspective of 250 million years the theory of Pangea Ultima, the ultimate joining of continents, Iceland will perhaps be rendered to the centre of earth instead of being where it is now, remote and far removed from all related territories. 
The striking vision of Iceland as a water lily floating on the surface of a Giverny-like pond is an ironic allusion to global warming, which has definitely rendered the island more pleasant, climatically, but threatens to melt its glaciers, the most prominent crown of the country’s surface. With the retreat of the ice the pressure on the volcanic activity beneath the island is relieved with unforeseeable consequences, whereas nearly all Icelandic glaciers hide active craters beneath their icecap.
The geological side of Bergmann’s and Hallin’s drifting mattress is however only one side of a more complex idea. Drift is bound to lead us to its more psychologically charged synonym of dérive, the core of the psychogeographical attitude proclaimed by Ivan Chtcheglov and other leading representatives of the Internationale Situationniste as a method of approaching city life urbanism in a new and creative way. With their extension of the Situationniste principles beyond urban limits, Bergmann and Hallin address a new area, alien to the European avant-garde in the fifties and the sixties. The Situationniste voice, which formerly did not exceed the city, now, in the case of Bergmann and Hallin, also reaches the rural sphere.
Obviously this transition from exclusively urban emphasis to a more balanced position between the city and the countryside has a lot to do with the artists’ Nordic origin. In the Nordic countries, not least Iceland, psychogeography is as much a rural experience as it is an urban encounter. This might be the reason why Claude Monet and his pond of water lilies seem more in line with Bergmann’s and Hallin’s inflated monster of Iceland than an architectural landscape.
Instead of the urban flâneur so dear to Walter Benjamin and his vision of Charles Baudelaire as a stroller in the streets of Paris, the two women artists seem to address and reassess the more rural and romantic concept of the Wanderer, who roams the European countryside alone and forsaken in the sole company of the capricious trout. Is it not time to revise our attitude to nature and discover that it has a lot more to offer than a setting for a solitary, conventional soliloquy?    

Halldór Björn Runólfsson, Director of National Gallery of Iceland