“Nothing consoles us. There is no trace of any contact with a universal sense of order, no trace of a law that gives us something to rely on or leads us to believe that destiny, even in its most horrifying aspect, is, nevertheless, God’s will.”
This quote, from art historian Theodor Hetzer’s essay “Francisco Goya and the Crisis in Art around 1800” (published 1973) describes Goya’s print portfolio The Disasters of War (1810–20), reading his references to war as a carrier for his pacificist message. More subtly but equally significantly is this correlation between chaos and godlessness. In art duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s current exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Only for the Wicked, however, those who control law and order are the most “godless” of all. The show is a grand drama of depravity and degradation, sometimes enacted by official powers like Church and State, other times by rogue players exploiting their powers of intimidation. In all cases, though, there is no consolation.
Across the gallery’s two floors, the artists pair multimedia sculptures of flowering branches, rock, and boulders with a series of short claymation videos by Djurberg, scored by Berg. The word “dreamlike” comes up frequently in discussions of the artists, and on an aesthetic level, their work seems straight out of a fairytale. In the gallery’s foyer, three gold beavers surround a pile of Klein-blue branches below a blue bough sprouting flowers. Like a fairytale, the unexplained scene suggests that something sinister lurks beneath the innocuous surface. That wickedness emerges in full force in the next room, where seven short claymation videos are projected in a row along the walls.
The artists mine traditions of the grotesque for the characters in these videos: A friar and a king share space with anthropomorphized animals whose thoroughly human cruelty raises the question of why “humanization” connotes anything positive. Although the narrative unfolds roughly from left to right across the room, it doesn’t really matter where you enter it. The characters trade places falling victim to greed, selling out one another, meting out and receiving abject punishment, and coming back for more soulless gain. Together, the looped videos compose a tale of corruption, betrayal, and pain in which protagonists and antagonists are one and the same and no heroes survive.
The level of craftsmanship in the work is staggering. Djurberg’s colorful carnivalesque characters are perfectly synched with Berg’s scores to create works that are both stunning and engrossing, even as the characters become increasingly barbaric. Their lascivious appetites evoke the bodily grotesque of the Renaissance that Mikhail Bahktin examined in his seminal study Rabelais and His World (1965), but the joy associated with what he called the “lower bodily stratum” (as opposed to the abstract sphere of the mind/spirit) is here replaced with a cynical view of power that finds its nourishment in nihilism.
On the second floor are more bucolic sculptures, followed by an immersive installation of boulders and rocks sprouting plant life. Stepping into the room feels like entering the foreboding realm of a Brothers Grimm story, but three looped videos (“Dark Side of the Moon,” 2017, “A Pancake Moon,” 2022, and “Howling at the Moon,” 2022) tread even further than the Grimms into the dark reaches of the real and psychical forest as three female-coded characters — a pale moon, a young woman, and a girlish pig — are coerced and abused by menacing male-coded animals.
Of all those words associated with the artists, including “dreamlike,” “fairytale,” and “psyche,” “political” is rarely among them. That’s unsurprising, given the fantastical visuals, yet many of their antecedents, from Bruegel to Jacques Callot — and, indeed, to Goya — are deeply entwined with sociopolitical critique. Djurberg and Berg may be exploring human psychology, but the specific scenarios they depict are nothing if not a reflection of actual systemic abuses in reactionary and totalitarian governments — from the top levels of corruption to the harassment and bigotry they enable on the street level. The trail of monstrosity and victimization in Only for the Wicked — and particularly the spectacularly disquieting animations — is about as dreamlike as the nightly news.
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg: Only for the Wicked continues at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (521 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through February 21. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
