Balladen om Bianca
(The Ballad of Bianca) and the meaning of banality

By Bodil Marie Thomsen

In Naja Marie Aidt’s Balladen om Bianca (171 pages, Gyldendal, 2002) there is plenty of action – and yet nothing happens. This collection of poetry features 48 different typefaces, constituting a dialogue with Kim Lykke’s colour and black/white photographs of all kinds of everyday fragments, as well as containing newspaper cuttings, simulated interviews, texts underlining details in the foreground of a photograph, or photographs pointing, showing, or invoking a response. Meaningless or meaningful details. We do not know, because our reading has no connection to the story, beginning or end – just like life itself, where the „I“ is not to be found. But the action can be. Both the typographical layout of the text picture and the photographic picture make the action a central aspect – although it is absurd, speechless. The familiar, lyrical „I“ meditating in synthesising metaphors has been replaced by a polyphonic poetic „I“ employing various mouthpieces – Bianca, Kristin, Otto, the greengrocer and José – revealing the confusion of loose ends that characterise human relationships.
These figures from the inner city of Copenhagen are not tramps, drug abusers or sexual deviants – and nor are they down and outs in any other sense. Socially they do not resemble the kind of riff-raff depicted sympathetically on an international scale in the neorealism of the 1990s – often in an autobiographical framework such as that of Nan Golding’s photographic snapshots of friends in intimate situations. But one characteristic feature – also present in Aidt’s work – is that the sharpness of the light and the lens results in neither clarity nor facts. These personal portraits in both poetry and photography remain loving, rewritten and diffuse. The profiles are never entirely defined. The characters work, relax, drink, walk around, make love, talk about the meaning of life, criticise and drink coffee with their friends. But they are never entirely clarified or entirely captured in the lens of the poem or photograph. In the first and last poems, which can be translated into „Here is the kitchen“ and „The street is now at peace“, there is a small amount of calm, a moment of pensiveness, in which the dawn and dusk respectively are given a little space. But the inner sense of unease, the leaping thoughts and disjointed pulse never cease. The final sentence in the book can be translated as follows: „We would like the wind and words to join forces and lie next to these heads which are bursting with so much, for instance with the idea that we are always being recognised and abandoned in the middle of everything“.
There is great visual nerve in this cycle of poems, as well as awareness that the reader will automatically create a correspondence between the images of the poems and the photographs. But this propensity for identification, for making the photographs illustrate the poems, is constantly being thwarted. In the course of the book we learn to regard the two media as being relational rather than mutually illustrative. The poems present one reality and the photographs another. But they meet and communicate, split apart, separate from each other, or combine happily for a brief moment. A modernist characteristic. Yes, it’s true. But a realistic one too, focusing on relational aspects, ambiguity, so-called everyday life that cannot be united. On things that cannot be contained in language or photographs, which will always recognise and abandon you in the middle of everything. Naja Marie Aidt and Kim Lykke seek to describe this „middle of everything“, a place where you are neither a photograph nor a poem. The formless, the unrepresented which has not yet achieved any form. They also tell the instructive story of the book in three parts: „We tell the children a story“. It’s about Bianca, who gives the tailor an expensive piece of material with „small birds, flowers of gold“, but who never sees the dress or the material ever again.

Realism translated into digital reality
And that is exactly what happens in life, in poetry and the visual cycle, dear children. You might never recover everything that you have given away, and your signs and representations might not always reach their destinations. This book seems to be saying that this does not matter. It does not waste time in a melancholy or calm state of mind when confronted with the lack of coherence in the sign between the designation and the designated. Like postmodernism, it celebrates complexity. It has an educational way of showing what Roland Barthes meant by the term punctum in Camera Lucida – the fact that denotative statements may contain a certain amount of ambiguity that cannot be resolved. The photographers of the 1990s utilise this to a great extent; and so does Kim Lykke, whose photographs become a key – and a key to the poems. One example of this is the photograph also used in the first part of „We tell the children a story“ (pp 44-45). This photograph shows the head of a barking (or yawning) dog with a ferocious appearance, encircled in red felt-tip pen. The dog, which is tied up sitting nicely on a carpet, may belong to the female singer or male accordion player photographed performing in a summer show for Nestlé ice cream somewhere by the Danish coast. Everything can be decoded denotatively with the greatest of ease, but you cannot help wondering what on earth the dog is doing in the picture. It seems out of place, grotesquely ferocious in relation to the bright, light summer evening. And it draws our attention to the ambiguity of the whole scene. The woman’s courteous smile directed at a (possibly imaginary) audience, the summer ambience although it is not summer, etc. Many varieties of the punctum effect illustrated by the misplaced dog can be found in the work of Kim Lykke, supplemented by various mirror effects distorting or showing unconventional angles in everyday situations. These snapshot photographs are successful; and the ambiguity of the motifs, which also occurs in repetitive compositions, turns them into more than lifelike representations. They become alien, exotic, and you suddenly see the distinguishing feature of the medium (photography) instead of the object being represented.
This puncturing effect, as well as good awareness of the medium, disturbs any sense of representational recognition. The excessively clear colours, the excessively familiar family members and everyday life become both grotesque and beautiful in the Polaroid reproductions. Because the grotesque excess which characterises the realism of the 1990s provides access to a media awareness and an immediate sense of authenticity at the same time. With all due respect for the differences between the 1960s and the 1990s, we can say that realism translated into our digital reality can be contained both in a clear media reference and an underlining of sensory authenticity in which the medium is forgotten. This final point, which once reflected opposite aesthetics (modernism and realism respectively), has been described using the terms hypermediacy and immediacy by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (Remediation. Understanding New Media. MIT Press 1999). In an analysis of computer graphics and the internet they show how new media reactivate old media, which in turn seek to incorporate the challenges of the new media. The aesthetics which have always existed as opposites in the old media tend to become parallel in the digital forms. Simultaneous hypermediacy and immediacy together undermine interpretation. Bacause what is being said? What is being shown? Nobody knows – but the result is one hell of a ballad!
This is all clear in the visual expressions of our times. But apart from the brief prose and Aidt/Lykke’s excellent ballad between photography and poetry, there is perhaps little innovation in written form. Mikkel Thykier offers an explanation of why this is so difficult, but he also presents an ethically formulated poetics in „Det generte objekt: mig“ („The shy object: me“, in Eg. Jag. Jeg. Forfatterskolens Skiftserie, Legenda no. 4, 2004). In continuation of the views expressed in Daglig tale (2002), he argues in favour of saying and writing me, of abandoning the exile of literature and approaching real relationships, new biographical forms. Thykier writes (translated from Danish): „In relation to events the book – as documentation or documentarisation – becomes secondary. This is significant: a biography in which the correctness of the information is unimportant and secondary in relation to a face-to-face exchange. A biography in which my life and facts about my life are not important, but the effect on others (or on anyone else) is absolutely vital. In fact: only the effect on others is life – the facts are not life“.
This action-focused and ethical spectrum of life, effects and influence, for which Thykier finds inspiration and material in the art scene of the 1960s, is rarely found in radicalised form in literature. But the voice and eyes of Bianca/Naja are not a bad example. And although this amputates the relationship between poem and photograph (pp. 144-47), here is an interesting quotation: „Let’s say it’s like this: you are lying about the colours/I cannot truly portray the snow/The others are boasting about the sky/We fall through a hole in the ice and drown/What are we to do?“

Bodil Marie Thomsen, PhD, associate professor in Culture and Media at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus.

Translated by Nick Wrigley