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Name: Lova Rebecka Hamilton
Born: 1968 in Stockholm
Element: Water
Profession: Artist, currently working with video object drawing
Colour: Orange
Precious stone: Diamond
Tree: Osmantus Fortunei
Flower: Smooth Fragrance (Rose)
Music: Ibiza, Café del Mar, Ministry of Sound
Film: Tempest - Mazursky, Nosferatu - Werner Hertzog, The Devil's Eye - Bergman, Barry Lyndon - Kubrick, Showgirls - Paul Verhofen, Skies over Berlin - Fassbinder, Cabaret - Bob Fosse, Marnie - Hitchcock, Polanski - everything!!!
Art: Chris Burden, Dame Darcy, Anna Gaskell, Eija Liisa Athila, Sophie Calle, Bror Hjorth, Susan Hiller, Simon Henwood, Hilma af Klint, Leitizia Battaglia, Tobias Bernstrup, Stan Douglas, Sverker Broström, Jean Reve, Mark Wallinger, Hill, Paula Rego, Edward Gorey...

Nils Forsberg was born in 1971. He writes on art for the Stockholm paper Nöjesguiden and is a member of the group of artists that run Ynglingagatan 1.

There is a Swedish rhyming proverb about how wanting to look smart necessarily involves suffering (Want to be vain? Watch out for the pain.) It is used by parents who want their children to look clean and tidy but probably appears most frequently in magazines principally aimed at younger women. There it serves as an encouragement to waxing legs, plucking eyebrows or wearing shoes lacking ergonomic qualities. For, as we know, natural beauty has to be created with the help of diverse cultural inventions.

Among these is the labour of painting one's toenails; not a matter of actual, physical pain but an awkward task that certainly tries one's patience. But in the video Red Nails (1996) it is as though Lova Hamilton has taken the Swedish proverb literally, for beauty really appears from within here. Using a razor blade she makes incisions in the tips of her toes, one by one, to the music of Burt Bacharach. She puts her feet into a bowl of water, washes them with soap (red) and dries them on a white towel that naturally becomes covered with blood. This is all done very prosaically as though it were the most natural ritual in the world.

The Kiss

click on picture to see "A certain awakening" in real video format

In the art of Lova Hamilton there are similarities with the performance art of the sixties and seventies but when Gina Pane cut her feet with a razor blade in 1976 (in Le corps pressenti) the point of departure and the context were different. Pane was rather making connections with contemporary philosophical discourse on temporality, traces and memory than with ideals of beauty. Nor are Hamilton's films documentation of specific performances in front of an audience, which was the case, for example, with Chris Burden or with the Vienna actionists. By avoiding this once only character and by being created as films her works avoid the myth formation that has attached itself to the work of the older artists. Worth noting, too, is how female performance artists during the sixties and seventies Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono are perhaps the best known examples almost always assumed the role of object as contrasted with their male colleagues who usually acted as (often pretty heroic) subjects.

It is perhaps questions like these that cause Red Nails to arouse such conflicting emotions: somehow it is OK for a woman's body to be an object for others (men) but not for the female subject to treat her body as an object to every possible extent.

The Look of Love (1994) etches itself as deep into one's memory as Red Nails. The scene is familiar from hundreds of television cooking programmes: a table with a red and white check cloth, food processor, chopping board and a plant as a pointless decoration. But on the chopping board there is a skinned calf's head from which Lova Hamilton extracts the brain and an eye and puts them in the food processor. She also adds a bull's testicle that she has cleaned in the same methodical manner that television cooks employ when demonstrating their skills. She starts the foodprocessor, thins the mixture with a little water and pours it into a tall glass. She takes some sips, vomits into a bucket, takes some more sips, vomits and so on until it is all in the bucket. Nothing is said; there is no music; all that can be heard is the sound of what is taking place. Here, too, she alludes to a discussion of beauty and its ultimate consequences when a young woman's own body becomes something to discipline. All or nothing, bulimia or anorexia. "Want to be vain? Look out for pain."
On another level it is a comment on our culture. Eye, brain, testicle... symbolically these are no mere innocent ingredients in the soup that Lova Hamilton cannot swallow. The supremacy of vision in the hierarchy of the senses was established in antiquity and Western thought is, in certain respects, a history of the eye. That it is also the story of the patriarchy hardly needs to be indicated.

Look of Love	Look of Love

Two new films arrive by post from London where Lova Hamilton has spent the autumn. A Certain Awakening tests more concrete laws. She comments in an email a few days later:
"I am fagged out and I give way to an impulse to lie down. There is a Mozart concert at the hotel and the music echoes through the corridors. I lie on the stairs listening. As someone claimed: One's awakening does not depend on some authoritarian person finally setting up boundaries for you, the relief and satisfaction that you feel depends on your succeeding in making him really angry".

In the film she lies down on the ground in various places where one is not supposed to do so in front of a moving staircase in a shopping centre, in the entrance to an hotel, at a Russian frontier post thus naturally bringing forth different reactions from those concerned.
A Certain Awakening is, as to its form, more "cinematographic" in contrast to the earlier films which have always registered a series of events.

Phanerogamous represents a further step in this direction. It makes use of the dream's fragmented logic; sequences from nocturnal taxi rides through tunnels and dark dance floors are interspersed with clips from Poltergeist and Rosemary's Baby: "It is the party girls' evening. Our bodies are possessed by demons and poison. Invaded by foreign men. Innocent Rosemary has begotten a child with the devil. Drugged she floats around on the open water. She lays out an anagram in order to calculate the real name of her diabolical neighbour. When I get home I dream that I have been thrown onto the ground in the forest, but as a man. Someone has cut off my penis. The surgeon seeks to heal me with his rubber gloves. A truce, make peace with the castrated part, must accept and go on."
The commentary is as hallucinatory as the film. Questions mount up. But something tells me that the truce will only be temporary.