Drawing bloood is not enough

By Trond Borgen, conservator of the Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo

There is a gruesome image on the wing from an altarpiece by Stephan Lochner (early 1400s), now at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt: St. Bartholomew's martyrdom is depicted as an extremely gory affair – and it is obvious that drawing blood is not enough. The torturers also flay his body; slowly, thoroughly, painfully. But these people are not painted as sadists; they look more like hard workers: they are only doing their job; this has to be done, and they are obviously experts. Everybody knows his part in this ritual – even the saint, who seems to willingly let it happen. For he will get his reward in Heaven. His love of God will be preserved in his death.

It is as if all this pain, and the matter-of-fact way of handling it, is condensed and concentrated in Leo Copers's installation of roses in hanging vases, with knives attached. The knives are old hunting knives, stained with blood from their blood-letting and bone-picking work; and the vases hang from solid ropes, caught in a hangman's noose – as if publically executed. When this installation was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, in the 1999 exhibition called Composite, the vases were filled with blood – some of it actually drawn from members of the museum staff. Thus, in a very concrete way, we saw art feeding on the institution of art itself – art's own raison d'être – sucking its blood, like a vampire. It is a striking paradox: the installation embodies both destruction and preservation, for the roses can only be preserved through their destruction. Drawing blood is not enough – preservation is also required.

The blood is not only preserved in containers – it is used for preservation as well: the roses are placed in it, in the vases, as if they are to draw their nourishment from this blood. But they will wither and die – the moments of love symbolized by the roses can be preserved only in death – as they were also in Leo Copers's installation 1001 Nights, in which he placed 1000 different kinds of roses in 1000 glass jars (each jar holding many specimens of one variety).

The preoccupation with the relationship between love and death is crucial in much of Leo Copers's work. The rose, a symbol and also a cliché of love, is given new life by having it die in blood, a substance and a colour marking the absolute border between life and death. Seen outside the body, blood is normally the harbinger of death: the moment of love (the rose) also becomes the moment of death (the blood). Copers charges his blood-filled vases with a death that preserves it own instance, as the blood is kept – and held forth – in the vases. As if a relic from a saint. Drawing blood is not enough – it also has to be displayed.

With the stained old hunting knives attached to the rose- and blood-filled vases, this installation becomes a prophecy already fulfilled: the prophecy of sainthood through torture and violent death. It is as if we see a St. Bartholomew transfigured – through his suffering, pain, and violent death – into the love symbolism of the roses. The act of violence is complete, and completed: the blood has already been drained and is neatly preserved in a vessel – Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood. Drawing blood is not enough – it must also be celebrated.

Leo Copers gives us here an enigmatic and paradoxical Eucharist metaphor – a communion in which there is no communication between man and God, as there is no room for any vertical transcendence. For this is a communion that has come full circle – it is self-contained, and thus an image of perfection. Love and death make a perfect, self-contained circle, consecrated by its own celebration – its own sainthood – turned into art by an act of transfiguration which embodies the neat dichotomy found in so much of Copers's work: he represents each man that kills the thing he loves; but he is also the everyman who venerates his love in an eternal bond; an everlasting preservation of that which cannot be preserved.

ZT 1994-1995, roses (six de couleurs différentes), vases, cordes, six couteaux de chasse, sang animal et humain. Dim. variables