Iron Law
Iron Law (1983-1984) is considered a seminal painting in Odd Nerdrum’s body of work because it signifies a shift in his artistic direction and a departure from the art he produced in earlier phases of his career. Some of Nerdrum’s early paintings (1968-1983), such as Liberation (1974) and The Murder of Andreas Baader (1977-1978) were characterized by his interest in everyday realism and left wing politics. These early paintings depicted a post Christian world, which in many ways reflected modern Scandinavian societies. Paintings like Iron Law are situated in a different reality: the artist imagined Scandinavia’s pre-Christian pagan past, a world of Norse saga and myth.
Iron Law depicts a barren landscape with a seascape in the distance. The painting shows a world of masters and slaves: one man clutches his head and bows in submission while the other is about to strike him with a rod. In the distance, there is a third figure that in his posture can be associated with well-known scenes of Adam being banished from the gates of Paradise. The painting shows the archetypal moment, which the 19th century philosopher Hegel identified in his The Phenomenology of Spirit as the moment that begins human history. According to Hegel, this moment established the master-slave dialectic: the first encounter between the two men leads to a deadly struggle, and one eventually dominates the other, thereby establishing the master-slave relationship. In Hegelian thought this is not a state of happiness - the slave will eventually overpower the master because of his skills and knowledge, making the master reliant on his labor. While Hegel viewed this reversal positively, Nietzsche’s philosophy viewed this as collapse and a situation that creates a struggle between conflicting moralities: the slave morality and the master morality. In his paintings Nerdrum engages with these philosophical concepts, and specifically in Iron Law, he depicts the world in which Nietzsche’s idea of master morality rules. From the master’s perspective qualities of nobility, power and strength are considered ‘good’, while characteristics of weakness and submissiveness are ‘bad’. Iron Law portrays the essence of this system, a primordial scene where power and strength are explicitly asserted. According to Nerdrum, these are the true values of humanity: the modern world does not negate them, it only creates tactics that conceal its aggressive ways. Nerdrum stated: “The most important thing is to make people see that everything we now look upon as qualities are negatives of the true qualities.” The figures in Iron Law exists in an elementary state, confronted directly with the realities of life and death. Nerdrum attempts to reawaken the truth of this ancient world that is obscured by the daily comforts of the modern world.
In other paintings from this period, Nerdrum created numerous scenes that imagine this ancient world. These paintings continued his exploration of themes of life and death. Paintings such as Twin Mother by the Sea (1999) and Woman with Milk (1988-1993) deal with motifs of fertility and birth. Other paintings like Buried Alive (1995-1996) relate more closely to death and violence seen in Iron Law.
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