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Cecilie Høgsbro
In her latest show Kirstine Roepstorff is introducing a glorius but invisible figure to us: The Queen of Diamonds. Inevitably you start wondering who this character is. No doubt every sparkling, refracting and reflecting collage or crystalline object in the show, even the charged space between the works, are portraits of the Queen. She seems to be all over the place but still she’s not seen anywhere. Soon you realize that the Queen is not an identifiable, representable person, not even a fairy tale figure. She is an organizing principle. The Queen is a gardener, a cultivator of values. She’s a crystallization of Roepstorff’s own practice, A practice, where the cultivation, blooming and decay of values have been questioned over and over again.
Thus, when Roepstorff uses diamonds, flowers and pearls in her works it is not just meant as feminine décor. These ornaments are used as images in themselves. For what is a diamond – the subject of the Queen’s kingdom, the precious flower in her glass house – if not the perfect image of value?
The values of diamonds
Diamonds traditionally represent an incontestable economic value. Like flowers they are also banal metaphors for transcendent values like eternity, faith, virtue and love – no wonder we name diamonds like roses: Golden Jubilee, Excelsior and Southern Star. But diamonds tend to refract given values in the same way as they refract light. As cultural history shows us the eternal values of diamonds seems highly transcient and multifaceted. Diamonds make firm values merge seamlessly into their apparent opposits: tender love refracts imperceptibly into cool cash, immaterial virtue into material greed, social order into terror, mass security into mass destruction, liberation into oppression and vice versa.
007 taught us that a ”A Diamond is Forever". The saying wasn’t launched by Ian Fleming or the film industri in the early ‘70’s, however. It was a slogan made up by N.W. Ayer, head of “De Beers PR agency”, USA, in 1938 when U.S. faced a time of economic hardship. Its purpose was to dissuade women from selling the diamonds they had received as “gifts of love and faith”, so that prices could remain at a high level even during economic crisis. Undoubtly it has been one of the most successful slogans in marketing history. The diamond campaign was described by N. W. Ayer himself as "a new form of advertising which has been widely imitated ever since" with "no brand name to be impressed on the public mind. There was simply an idea – the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond." While diamonds in Western culture traditionally were regarded as masculine symbols, as emblems of fearlessness, potency and virtue, because of their supreme hardness, diamonds became more and more femininized during the 20th century. Diamonds were now used to symbolize eternity and love, being often seen adorning engagement rings. The marketing strategy was subtle: They were shown as wedding gifts in popular romantic movies, stories were published in magazines and newspapers which would emphasize the romantic value of diamonds and associate them with celebrities and so on..After the WWII diamonds were increasingly associated with female, sexually defined power and independency. Think of ”Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and ”Diamonds are a girls best friend”.
Indeed, Ayer’s campaign succeeded in reviving the American diamond market and in opening new markets where none had existed before, Diamonds were successfully promoted as western symbols of status all over the world. Today the trade of diamonds is, next to oil and drugs, probably one of the politically most charged and impenetrable areas within global economy. In her show Roepstorff therefore refers directly to the recent ’Conflict Diamond Campaign’ that is aimed at exposing to the world how the unregulated international diamond industry is fuelling Africa’s most bloody conflicts and is also funding international terrorism. On the other hand African human rights organization, NSHR, condemns the concept of this ’Conflict Diamond’ or a ’Blood Diamond’ Campaign as an insidious and racist strategy conceived by non-Africans who is aiming at taking control of one of Africa's most lucrative natural resources.
Royal Jewelery
Who is right? Who actually owns the diamonds? Who decides what ”emotinal values” should ”surround the diamonds”? Super powers, nation states, human rights organisations, PR agencies or trade net works? Artists?
In her recent show Roepstorff indicates that the ’Queen of Diamonds’ might know but we won’t be able to ask her since she’s not an identifiable person. She’s not a president, a nation or a global court. She is not even the artist herself. As mentioned, she is a principle. A power principle and a life principle. Even an aesthetic priciple. A principle we cannot attack since it is integrated in each and everyone of us. The Queen (or the Empress?) regulates our personal lifes as well as the global order from within, follows it, interpretates it, absorbs it, rearticulates it.
Each work in Roepstorff’s recent show – maybe every collage throughout her whole oeuvre – is an exquisite jewel of the Queen, reflecting but not representing her. On the surface these jewels are sparkling beauties high in energy, complexity and style. Looking closer we see violent political pictures gradually emerge. The diamond is thus method and metaphor joined in one image. The beauty and ’expressionism’ of the diamonds immediately attracts us and once our attention is seized, we are pierced by the political and cultural reality behind it’s beauty. Political events are being ’refracted’ through the prisms of the brilliants. The brilliant thus becomes even more than an image of value. It is also kind of viewing instrument, a lens that provides us with more or less tacit insight into the complex, interwoven production of political, aesthetical and moral value today.
In other works, like the banner Desolation of the Beast 2002, Roepstorff has turned this principle upside down. Here she is putting visual phrases of political protesting upfront, to make us understand how political commitment has transformed into an individualized aesthetic practice, a sort of expressionism and staging of the self.
Roepstorff’s crystalline, refracting, kaleidoscopic images thus make us remember that words, values and concepts constantly tend to merge into their apparent opposites. Where there’s beauty there’s politics, where there’s collectivism there’s individualism and vanity, where there is tension and difference there is also likeness.
The border in between oppositions is invisible but a glorious place to be. Roepstorff takes us there.
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