It’s possible that Anna Hrund Másdóttir’s artwork is antithetical to barbecue. Or should I say, it is antithetical to the act of barrel-cooking large cuts of meat for a crowd—in this case, six racks of baby back ribs, dry-rubbed, slow-smoked, finished face-down on a hot grill after a smear of tomato-y Kansas-style BBQ sauce that thickens until it’s sticky, jammy, everything stuck in your teeth. Despite that Anna’s work is also frequently constructed of foods (though not usually the perishable type), her food/art objects (think: a fragile stack of pink, sugary wafers) have little to do with the kind of showy, messy, frenetic indulgence they were unwittingly staged in opposition to.
Conversely, the non-food foods used as materials in Anna’s artwork employ a very different kind of vocabulary—processed, mass-produced, pre-packaged—non-perishable, individually served, ready-to-eat. Anna’s foods are crunchy; brittle; certainly not sticky, or at least, not any more. They may be feathery. Rectangular, but with a soft edge. A little bit wobbly. They could flutter, you could blow them away, you could mistake them for something else. The politeness, the rationality, the precision of Anna’s work—it all came into sharp, almost painful focus for me once it was inserted into a space in which it did not feel at ease—that is, the space of performativity, fire, flavor, drunkenness, never-ending chatter. A space which was a near-antonym of the singular word Anna used to describe her work the first time I asked her to describe it to me: meditative.
Putting aside the ubiquity of meditative, it’s a strange word for an art practice that at first glance seems so playful, eclectic, textural, even shiny. Meditation is for repetition, not variation. I reasoned that meditative applied to the way she assembled her works—their elemental architectural quality—the way various objects are stacked, inserted, bundled, woven—while others are placed in such a way as to make them look somehow different, more special than what they are. For example, a badminton birdie displayed feather-side down, accentuating its form as both delicate and utilitarian—an inspiring combination of something both heavy and light, intended to soar. Yes, this all seemed like a plausible interpretation.
But let me try describing a few of the objects to you. There is a ball-like clump of pink marshmallows held together with rubber bands. There is a green topiary ball on top of a stack of two wide rolls of tape. There are three white marshmallows on a white piece of paper. There is a chalky, broken rainbow. There is a large piece of single-sided red tissue paper wrong-side up. There is a piece of cellophane with a squished marshmallow on it. There is a piece of crinkled iridescent gold foil piled with clear plastic cubes. There are shards of blue-and-white taffy. There is a brown-and-white feather-duster inserted in a fluffy pink polyester paint roller which is stacked on top of a natural-sponge paint roller. There is a small pile of shards, sparkles, and dirt. There are rolled-up tubes of pink polka-dotted paper threaded onto a metal ring. There were many, many, artworks, or one artwork, or none—or too many to describe, and certainly too many to list—if listing is a way to possess, or to understand. Despite the pleasure of closely looking at Anna’s array of idiosyncratic objects, to my frustration, language does not have a luscious effect on her artwork. Articulation only seems to serve as a kind of deconstruction—words as tools which try to disassemble something very tangible (floss, taffy, a feather-duster) into something poetic—words that fail to understand that Anna has already transposed these viable objects to a place of unreality, fantasy, whimsy—that poetic place of complete non-function.
My theory is that in order to fully occupy Anna’s work, one must first picture some kind of store—the shiny linoleum floors, the long metal shelves, the pegboards and hooks, the price-codes, the boxes, all the shapes of packaging, the tags hanging about, even the banal pop songs playing over the PA. Then we must picture Anna shopping in this store, scanning the cosmetics and candy and whatever aisles, searching for something that we can’t picture—every aisle a traversable space of fantasy—every symbol and sign occupying a completely unique psychological looking-space. When I imagine the state of altered consciousness Anna must enter into to shop in her invisible art-supply store, I think, yes, I understand this work as a site of mediation, as a site with the possibility of altering the consciousness of the visitor as much as the maker—as long as we look past the inclination to narrate, and as long as we pause our privileging of metaphor as a necessary component with which to construct art.
In a sense, Anna’s work is about the non-think, which is a bit different than meditation—a kind of ultimate late capitalist dérive, whose outcome is to re-order our sense of how art constructs meaning, and instead allow it to deconstruct—to take meaning out of. Think of it this way; de-contextualizing an object, whether it is food or tape or something else, may turn it into something useless, or into something art—it is time, attention, culture, and criticism that decides. For example, a product like a bag of pink-dyed jet-puffed marshmallows, already uncanny, takes an almost inevitable next step into the space of something even weirder and more futuristic (rubber band marshmallow comet!?). It’s not that Anna toils in her studio making assemblage sculptures from found objects or non-art materials—it’s that her practice proposes something grave buried inside the form of something fun, light, sweet, even pretty—that function, i.e. purpose, is malleable; that at any moment, the logic of our social and material systems—what you eat versus what you sculpt, a tool versus a totem—are prone to disintegration. In short: The world is not fixed.
Indeed, disintegration is paramount to Anna’s work. To enter her studio is to see things broken, however gently. There is the sad, puckered marshmallow; the floss all loosed from its neat container; the fistful of disconnected wires drooping together over a nail; a lemon leaf planted in a sponge. Not to say that these objects aren’t beautiful, or somehow soothing, or even delightful—but what I missed when Anna said “meditative” was the melancholy inherent in that meditation. As zany, titillating, and downright playful and fun as Anna’s work may appear (the dancing shelf!), it is a lonely proposition, taken up in the space of quiet thoughts. It’s not a party, or a barbecue, or an event of any kind at all. It is a solemn art.
I’m still glad that Anna agreed to do an open studio as part of her residency. I’m glad we had something like a party, because art is worth celebrating, regardless of the fact that we are bound to get it wrong— writing the wrong words, choosing the wrong color, buying the wrong glue, cooking the wrong food—so it goes. But don’t forget—every time we take a risk on art, we open the possibility of getting something right, too—not so much by giving it a poignant ending, but an ellipsis—something to be continued.
-Georgia
Anna Hrund Másdóttir was the first resident of the unpublished studio.
For more information about Anna and her projects, please visit www.annahrund.com.
All photos by Cedric Tai.
Thank you to Sarah for editing this text!
Georgia is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. For more information on her projects, visit www.georgialikethestate.net
