Extension – Works from the Collection

Exhibition booklet no 3
Text: Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Professor at the Department of the History of Stockholm University
No of pages: 23

Language: Swedish and English edition
Year: 2002
Translation: Sina Najafi, Astrid Trotzig
Graphic design: Givelldesign / Linda Ohlsson

Alice in Wonderland fell down wells in which she saw her own consciousness breathlessly jumping about. Jacob dreamt about angels on a ladder reaching to heaven; later, he wrestled with a “man” who was God, or God’s emissary, but who touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh during the fight. The boundary lines between reality’s parts dissolve; that which is invisible or unseeable becomes visible and so perceptible that its traces can be felt in one’s sinews and joints.

Whenever an expression of some kind is understood, our perception of the world changes and is magnified. Art sometimes shows us such events. Art also offers the possibility not only of experiencing but of observing the strange journeys of understanding.

The difference between what is normal and abnormal is indicated in different ways in different cultures as is the difference between what is real, thought, or merely imagined. All the time language, thought’s various instruments, works on these boundaries, extending them now in this, now in that direction.

In Wonderland, Alice takes tea with a mad hatter. The story shows Alice taking tea with the hatter, the March hare, and a sleepy dormouse. I take it that Alice’s imagination allows her to experience in concrete terms what is she is imagining. Everything that happens happens inside her consciousness, the substance of the events being derived from her own reactions and daydreams. At least, the story admits to a facile and naive interpretation along these lines. Jacob’s wrestling with God is not as clearly a thought or an imagined picture, if we apply the conditions of existence obtaining in the story. However, Jacob’s story can be seen as a kind of miraculous transgression. There are angels in Jacob’s world, and God speaks to certain chosen people. Still, the text makes a clear distinction between the occasion on which Jacob was dreaming about angels and the moment when he met the “man”, wrestled, and was wounded. It is not the divine dimension in itself that constitutes a decisive peril or salvation for humankind but the way in which it reveals itself to the senses, the way in which it becomes visible and is incarnated in the world. (…)