@@Hordaland Kunstsenter@@

BEK-night: Ron Sluik

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:58:44 +0100

Usually some 10 or so people show up here but Sluik likes a full house and aims for 20?

He will avoid to talk about older works, the amazing revival of a pop career, his slides collection, Duinkerken or Duchamp, the networks he is still using, his neighbours, his love for Norway, the work for money, Carla, unstable urbanism, the club, his endless wandering and his future plans.

In stead he will explain why he has been looking around his house for clues and trails, tracks and traces of Parzifal… purely because he wants to believe that the hereafter must be here now! He will illustrate his talk with loads of pictures.

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BEK-nights is a serie of lectures and presentations by artists and researchers at Hordaland Art Centre. The series is part of BEK's lecture- and education initiative to informe about and promote artistic research and developement in art and new technologies.

MA-Weekend: Sol Hallset

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:23:32 +0100

Paul Otto Brunstad

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:48:44 +0100

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland has constructed a series of contradictions in the exhibition Palinca Pastorale. Priest, researcher and writer Paul Otto Brunstad will close in on the contradictions in his talk; where he will be asking: Limitations as the condition for creativity?

He writes:

Borders separate and unite, create stops and meeting points at the same time. The border holds a paradoxical simultaneity of relation and separation. The border is where something ends and something else begins.

Limitations are obstacles, but in the obstacle we find the possibility of transgression. Transgressions open the possibility of the expansion of knowledge and understanding, but also of new possibilities in themselves. Yet, transition also holds the possibility of destruction. Thus transgression is ambiguous. Much is at stake, but nothing venture, nothing win. A life without limitations, without strangeness would be a life without new possibilities.

Everything would be the same, and all would be one. Limitation is the birthplace of hope and innovation. Consequently art is also in need of borders. What happens in a culture where borders no longer act as limitations? Where everything is endlessly open at any time, where borders have become so soft that the world is chaotic and without shape? Is this the end of art and creativity, or is the boundless in itself a possibility, a limitation which creates the start of something new?

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Paul Otto Brunstad (b. 1960, dr.theol.) is a priest, researcher and writer. At the moment he is connected to the Air Force Academy in Trondheim, Norway, where he works with ethics and leadership. In addition he has developd a character building programme for officers, based on the classic virtues. He has written extensively, both articles and books, such as Ungdom og livstolkning. En studie av unge menneskers tro og fremtidsforventinger (1998) and Melancholy of Victory (2003). His latest books are KPrudent Leadership between Vices and Virtues (2009) and Enduring Military Boredom: From 1750 to the Present (2009, with Bård Mæland).

In relation to every exhibition Hordaland Art centre hosts a talk, free and open to all audience.

Hyunjin Kim

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:38:17 +0100

Hyunjin Kim (1975, South Korea) is an independent curator and a writer, based in Seoul. She recently co-curated the 7^th Gwangju Biennale 2008 and has worked for Artsonje center, Seoul (2001–2003) as an assistant curator; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005-2006) as a research/guest curator; Insa Art Space, Seoul (2006) as associated curator for IASmedia program development; and Gallery27, Kaywon Art & Design School as associated curator. Hyunjin Kim’s previous independent projects and exhibitions include Plug-In#3-Undeclared Crowd, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 2006, Sadong 30- Haegue Yang, Inchon, 2006, Ten Years, Please-Jewyo Rhii, Uiwang, 2007 and Movement, Contingency and Community, Uiwang, 2008. Latest she curated Perspective Strikes Back at Doosan Gallery, Seoul, 2009.

Daniela Castro

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:01:52 +0100

Master Night: Tove Kårstad Haugsbø

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:42:28 +0100

Tove Kårstad Haugsbø points out that most art histories start with the artist biography, which locks the production to a specific time and place. This is also the case with Nikolai Astrup, who in retrospect most often is described in relation to his village Jølster. The biographical interpretation is a platform also in Haugsbø's project, but she also aims to see Astrup as something different than a traditional "local painter". Through contemporary views on place, like in the 60s site specific art and an increasing focus on the importance of place in recent aesthetics and contemporary art, she finds new understandings which in turn can lead to new perspectives in the research on a painter like Nikolai Astrup.

Tove Kårstad Haugsbø is currenty doing her MA in art history, and will finish her dissertation about Atrup's art in May 2010. Haugsbø has previously studied both old and modern art, museology, religious studies, as well as art and craft at Bergen University College. She has also acted as museum host and mediator at Astruptunet in Sogn og Fjordane, and currently work as museum guide at Bergen Art Museum next to her studies.

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Master Night is a series of lectures where both MA students and recently graduated art historians present their MA dissertations to a public. With Master Night Hordaland Art Centre wishes to bridge the gap between the academic and practicing art scenes in Bergen, and create a place for interaction between students and professionals.

Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this programme and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study commitee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Hyunjin Kim (KOR)

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:27:19 +0100

Her recent projects and exhibitions have evolved from her interest in different formalities and attitudes in artistic and curatorial production as a visual politics, as well as their response to the speculation on the notion of community.

During her residency in Bergen Kim will work on a thesis and exhibition project speculating the notion of discretion (the quality of behaving in a discreet way, inspired by French philosopher Maurice Blanchot) and how it can be seen in artists’ works, and further implemented and presented in the exhibition space.

Witness report: As well as eye candy by Are Hauffen

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:59:20 +0100

To experience art is to watch our managed world being managed again, within closer limits. This allows us to separate art from life, because life cannot be organised in quite the same way. It is all about a separation that allows for the cultural contradiction between concentration and distance, which is the basis of the role of the trained guest entering the salons of art.

My task has been to be such a guest, a subjective observer with some practice in watching, noticing nuances and formulating thoughts. I will consider the year's activities at Hordaland Art Centre, my main emphasis being the exhibitions this year.

I sense that 2009 has been characterized by a consciously discursive element at Hordaland Art Centre, a departure from previous years. However, as I contemplate the exhibitions, I must conclude that only three of the nine events have aimed (each in their different way) to formulate ideas about our role and actions as artists and producers of culture. So my impression that the program at the art centre has presented a unified idea may be due to the fact that all the exhibitions this year have presented brand new works, that they have been experimental in form, and that the art centre is the producing unit behind all of them. Besides all this, Forum, the art centre's arena for professional discussions, has organized some twenty lectures and presentations of artists.

The art centre's new director appears to have clear ambitions for the institution. Being formally unlike both commercial galleries and art museums, the art centre is finding its own place, emphasizing investigative work within a niche that serves both the local art scene and a larger world of art. That is the new conception of the art centre. The idea may be old, but it must be infused with life in order to survive.

At this point, I would like to emphasize two concepts, those of "eye candy" and "work without object". They may provide a perspective on the year's events at Hordaland Art Centre. These concepts are not necessarily as contradictory as one might expect. Eye candy is connected with a certain physiological effect, initiated by characteristics inherent in the object, but it derives its meaning from the subject. It is all about something within the object working on the viewer's mind and eliciting a memory of something infinitely, irresistibly beautiful. It may only be a combination of silhouette and light, a shimmer of something shiny or uneven, but the memory must be the right one, and this will vary with time, mood, age and other individual differences. Eye candy describes something which is artificially attractive, entertaining and not very intellectually stimulating.

However, art without object has its roots in heaven. The 1960's discourse about modernism shows how our view of the object as the vehicle of art becomes important for our understanding of the work of art, and we see the establishment of a distinction between the understanding of art as object and how art might exist without an object. The minimalists prepare the ground by emphasizing the work's surroundings, both the physical surroundings and the viewer as subject, whereas conceptual art introduces the complete liberation from the idea of art residing in the object, such as in Sol LeWitt's description in ”Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”.[i]

In our context, I consider works without object as a field of interest, where the art centre investigates how the relative strength of the physical object and the exhibition's idea can be adjusted and still communicate as an exhibition of art. It is not the quality of the art object or the place where it is displayed which separated it from design or craft, lending it an aura of art, but whether the work affirms the rigid flow of thoughts filling the viewer's sphere of reality, or if it is able to entice the viewer into taking a look at the building blocks of his own ideas. The question is if the object closes or opens the viewer's world.

Words for anxiety

posisjoner – Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen

Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen's exhibition posisjoner (positions) was the last one under the former director, Mari Aarre. With a good eye, Holmen filled the walls and floor of the exhibition space with a selection of short texts, some of them brief sentences, some just individual words. Most of the letters were made from self-adhesive foil, of different sizes and nuances of grey, mostly small caps in a sans serif font. In the centre of the floor there was a sculpture made of soft stuffing, covered in pale grey material. The sculpture formed the word "STED" (place) with giant letters. In two places Holmen let lamps covered with text stencils draw the writing on the wall with the words "LIKSOM" (as if) and "DEN INNERSTE VIRKELIGHETEN VIL BRISTE STILLE” (the inner reality will burst quietly). These two projections were visually connected, but they were also connected to a white text on the grey gallery floor, where I stood: "TROEN PÅ SAMHØRIGHET ER SVÆRT UTBREDT" (there is widespread faith in interdependence). Then I realized that all the statements in this room were connected, that the meaning of everything was relative, ambiguous and ambivalent, and that every single block of text, as well as all the text together, pointed in a single direction, a swirl moving towards an empty, logical fallacy, nothingness.

All this was intentional, as Holmen is a specialist at showing how signs only appear as language in certain combinations. If they are changed in such a way that they are governed by something other than a desire to create meaning, there is a noisy, brutal, emptiness.

Holmen and the art centre has had technical problems fastening the foil letters to the surface. This provides an entertaining connection between what the texts say and what actually happens: "DET RASTE ORD NED FRA VEGGENE DRØMMENE LÅ SOM MORKEN MURPUSS I DE FORLATTE IRRGANGENE INGEN KLARE TANKER TIL OVERS TOMMHETEN FYLTE ALT” (words tumbled from the walls dreams lay like crumbling plaster in the deserted labyrinths no clear thoughts left the emptiness filled everything). But Holmen is not into witticisms. Rather, this sentence, shaped like a border along the ceiling above all four walls, is the exhibition's credo.

I find it depressing. Through concentrated, artistic work, Holmen has arrived at an expression of something feeble, dry and shut in, and it seems genuine. This is no dramatic exposure of the dark recesses of the heart, but something more powerful. It's expression is altogether more confusing and very reserved. It is against me, against language, against meaning, against communication, against contact, and it guards its plight jealously.

Artists to be 1

An Elaborated System of Human Longing – Chloe Lewis and Andrew Taggart

Master-weekend is a cooperative effort which the present director of the art centre has inherited from her predecessor. Two weekends a year are set aside for exhibitions by one or more masters students of the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (KHiB). The scheme is based on applications evaluated by a jury with links to the art centre and KHiB.

The first Master-weekend was given to Chloe Lewis and Andrew Taggart. This was a shared project, as everything they do is done in cooperation. Lewis Taggart is keen to illuminate tragic aspects of problems faced by subjects in our world. They find good examples in their work together and stories they pick up. Through different media, objects, drawing, video, they reinforced short stories intended to evoke in the beholder sympathy, a mixture of sentimentality and humour.

Tragedies come in different magnitudes, depending on who experiences them, and when. The tragedies of the exhibition seemed to be scaled down to appropriate gallery sizes, and the exhibition seemed to be well matched to an unspecified view of how a white cube should contain contemporary art. Thus the room and the style became stewards of the exhibition, and the installations were charming, well crafted objects telling moving stories in an agreeable way. This created a fitting distance, both to the drama and the humour, and Master-weekend was given a taste of High Quality McContemporary Art Burger. Was that the intended effect? If so, we should note that it is quite possible to create an exhibition which has all the professional trappings, but has forgotten that what actually should happen is a meeting of the work of art and the beholder. Unfortunately, this time the form of the exhibition had taken over, and the exhibition seemed clever and overly elaborate.

Exploded view

Might arrives – Pedro Gomez-Egaña

On this occasion the regular show room on the ground floor was fenced off with an almost invisible barrier. Boarded up, puttied and painted. Yes, this was a surprise, but going to the cafe instead does not feel unnatural. We are served coffee and cake. While we and the rest of the visitors wait for the exhibition to open, artists, assistants and staff are scurry about. They race up and down stairs, some of them sending each other searching glances, disappear outside. The atmosphere is hectic.

Having waited inside, we are sent outside. A lorry appears round the corner, stops and extends its screw jacks. Slowly the lorry unfurls its enormous lift arm from behind the driver's cab, then the arm turns and stretches toward the art centre. The arm extends further and further, reaching inside a window on the top floor before finally coming to a halt. The man who steered it into place, switches off the engine, locks up and leaves.

This performance, the lift arm developing out of a lump of metal, turning into a mighty thick line through the large outside space and finally crashing through the window opening way up there, feels like one gigantic transgression. The experience fills our senses. In a manner of speaking, I am full and ready to go home, but there is more, of course. It turns out that there's a sequel to the performance, not in time, but in level, and the next level is inside the house, one floor up, through the office area and right inside the room which the crane had entered through the open window. The spectators are escorted there.

The crane extends about a yard into the room, and from it a cord stretches diagonally into the room. A three-dimensional drawing of a spacecraft hangs from the end of the cord. The spacecraft is pointing at the roof of a skyscraper, suspended in midair, vibrating, exactly half an inch above the roof of the skyscraper. The skyscraper is one of many others in a model of a skyscraper city pointing towards the crane at an angle. From the open square with the large lorry, through the open window, this is the golden town which is about to be visited by power. In this place or point the drama has entered a psychedelic state of affairs where it remains, its size changing from biggest to smallest and back, from reality to fiction and back, in an endless temporal loop.

As if liberated from space and time the audience can enter the place where the drama has come to a halt. The door into the room feels like an inspection lid into the combustion chamber of the drama. I enter the room through the lid, walk round the spacecraft and the skyscrapers, study them closely, note that the craft is suspended at an angle, eagerly quivering to enter the city being kept in check by the vehicle outside. To experience this work it is important to enter the room, but doing so is an unpleasant act. It is confusing, sowing doubts about what I am experiencing. Is this performance, drawing, sculpture installation or a model from a future folk museum? It doesn't quite fit in. At the same time, it is here, in this room, in this half inch gap between spacecraft and the roof of the skyscraper model, that the work of art is found. Everything exists for the sake of this centre of invisible, super-magnetic tractive power. And where the centre is, there it is ... air.

A kind of alchemy

The Generic Stone – Toril Johannessen and Sidsel Meineche Hansen

Entering the exhibition The Generic Stone was a very agreeable experience. On the floor at the front of the exhibition space was a small showcase. In the showcase there was a tiny stone. As it was partially coated in gold, it was somewhat reminiscent of a rustic precious stone, before being mounted in jewellery.

A showcase takes up precious little space, and the room is large. In the other half of the room, diagonally relative to its length, there were four rows of chairs, and in front of the chairs was a projecting screen. The rest of the room was empty. It felt as if the room was sufficiently lit up for the artefacts in it. Actually, I have to strive to remember that the showcase with the little stone was there. Initially, the title of the exhibition and the placing of the chairs and the screen was enough. Why? Because as communication is about conveying a specific content, an attitude is also conveyed. The attitude carries the content, and in this case the attitude tells us that what has been prepared, is the result of a combination of willpower, knowledge and experience. The attitude lends credibility to the contents. As a beholder, I feel well looked after, so the sensory information carries, even before I become aware of the idea behind the work.

In this case the artistic effects were so well arranged that the only object necessary for the exhibition, besides the spatial arrangements and the appropriate title, was a small piece of granite inside a pale grey showcase. That completes the exhibition! And so it does what it should do! It guides us to the next chain of the story being told by this exhibition, as well as being enough in itself! There is eye candy, and there is eye candy.

The next chapter in the story of the exhibition came in the shape of a one hour lecture eight days after the opening. It was a lecture in two parts, the artists doing one half each. It encompassed an introduction to the stone in the showcase, how it was produced in the lab, a bit about granite in general, as well as thoughts about physical reality, representation, abstraction and idealized models relative to the production of a gem, as well as some thoughts about how a laboratory is a place both for experimentation and creation. The lecture manipulated me into just as great an enthusiasm for this part of the project as the material exhibition had done.

The title of the exhibition is a difficult word in itself. Generic. The word means general, it is used to include all the members of a group, class, kind or scientific category. In this exhibition the word signifies this stone in general, but during the lecture Johannessen and Meineche Hansen discusses what a general stone is in such a way that it seems that both the title of the exhibition and the work of experimental geologists could be transferred from the systems of science to those of art. The best eye candy of the year, and the smallest object.

My box in a box for you

DIG IT – curated by Linus Elmes and Anne Szefer Karlsen

This at least was a decent exhibition. Nice, tidy, not too many things, not too many media. Pictures on well illuminated walls, objects in a glass showcase. But is it a proper exhibition? It looks proper. What is exhibited is proper art, oil paintings, drawings, frames.

Elmes and Szefer Karlsen call DIG IT an exhibitional situation. Their first move has been to ignore habitual and safe requirements of membership of the art community through name, CV, trend, contacts and friendships, or as Elmes writes about his ideas for the planned exhibition: "It is a presentation without rhetoric, academic alibis and anxieties. This explains why it is a significant work, and it explains why it is part of our exhibition."[ii] And so the curators have contacted artists and borrowed works which these artist haven't themselves created. Rather, these are works that the artists have a special relationship with, either through friendship or family connections, and all are made by so-called amateurs.

The other move the curators have made is to simulate an established, museum-like exhibition format, scaling it and placing it within the room, both as a physical zone and as an idea of a different room, a room for something else. Their use of the room, their choice of art objects and the way it has all been done, are meant to reinforce each other and make it look like an exhibition which contemplates "speechless ... activity. Speechless both in a non-verbal sense, but also speechless as in directionless."[iii] The curators appear to ask the question whether there is room for a more personal, affinitive approach to showing art and talking about it. They want to "consider things that are not normally discussed within the usual framework. Such as the word inspiration."[iv]. As I see it, this is both good and important. We who belong to the art community should at times reflect on what significance our lives have for what we devote ourselves to, how we think and the choices we make. If such reflective investigations have their place, then surely Hordaland Art Centre must be the place for it, considering its traditions and origins.

The exhibition is a jewel, no doubt about that, but it is a faded jewel. And so I wonder if the exhibition might not have profited from a higher level of conflict. I hope this excellent move, that of creating an exhibition situation within the exhibition space, could be repeated on future occasions. As for this exhibition, I feel the move might have been a bit more subtle, so as to benefit the individual works and the autonomy which is theirs by virtue of their origin, by virtue of the artists who chose them and by virtue of being included in the exhibition. The question is, could these works have been left without the curators' deft moves? I think they would have done fine if they had been less cosseted and protected, because the concept is a strong one, the show room is versatile, and the professionalism of the audience should not be underestimated. And one more thing: If the context is too obvious, the same thing will happen as when things are too well arranged: it seems as if the work of art is holding its breath.

Fooled

Kuratert av Erlend Hammer – curated by Erlend Hammer

Among the exhibitions of the year, the event at the art centre which received most public attention was the project that moved right out of the art world and took place as political propaganda at a randomly chosen roof, located at Klosteret 17, 5005 Bergen. The exhibition space was an empty, moderately lit room, idle and unimportant, with nothing to indicate what the project was all about. In conjunction with the exhibition title Kuratert av Erlend Hammer (Curated by Erlend Hammer) he deactivated art room only allowed for an interpretation in the direction of something private, empty and desperate. But it is not about an exhibition. Ignore it.

The pamphlet In defence of eye candy is a twelve page document written by Erlend Hammer on occasion of the project. The text is an essential part of the project this curator ended up being in charge of. The text was available at the art centre during the exhibition period and is still available from the art centre's home page. As the exhibition space is empty, one might wish to view the pamphlet as the physical work of Hammer's project. The text tells why the project developed the way it did, it shares opinions about how the money and disbursement policy of Arts Council Norway operates, it urges the cultural scene to show moderation during the polemical culture wars fought in certain media outlets ahead of the 2009 parliamentary elections, but most of all it is a lengthy, well crafted appeal for artists who really "want to contribute to political change, to work politically and practically, like everyone else must do, whether they are carpenters or bankers"[v], and leave their critical art out of it. But this pamphlet is not art. Ignore it.

What is of importance to Hammer, is the purpose, the superstructure. Being a curator, he is keen to present his point as efficiently as possible. The institution of art is his starting point, and he uses it in an appropriate manner. The director of the art centre ought perhaps to have stopped him, arguing, maybe, that that the idea which had "given him access to the premises" was a failure, that the curator was unable to come up with a good makeshift arrangement, or other power strategies, full of pathos. That would have been an obvious tack to keep Hammer in check: After all, he was unable to do anything in the exhibition space. I am unsure who should be stopped, especially as Hammer's project is to make us, the target group, the cultural elite, aware that our aims and actions don't add up, that we are already the victims of misleading political propaganda. When asked whether the party political banner on the roof is a political work of art, Hammer tells NATT&DAG: "No, the HKS roof is not particularly artistic. A roof is a roof." Thus he sums up both the aim and purpose of his project.

Artists to be 2

On the Marionette Theatre – Elida Brenna Linge

For the second Master-weekend the student has used a story by Heinrich von Kleist as her starting point. Originally published in 1810, the text was translated into Norwegian for the magazine Vagant in 2008 by Espen Ingebrigtsen and Elida Brenna Linge.

Brenna Linge has placed two texts frames of approximately the same size opposite each other in the exhibition space, one on each longitudinal wall. The text on one of the walls contains the entire story of About the marionette theatre. The words of the story are coded yellow, magenta, cyan and black so that every word should receive a colour in the same sequence throughout the text. On the other wall the language has been disassembled, split into individual words which have been arranged alphabetically. The word "og" (and) is repeated in a row, the exact number of times it occurs in the text opposite. The other words are repeated in the same way. A string has been stretched from each word in the story to the same word on the opposite wall, the string colour coded like the word. Naturally, this creates an intricate pattern and interplay of colours, as all the strings between the texts start and end at their appropriate word. It all looks very elegant, but I wonder what it is I haven't grasped in this work, as von Kleist's text is not a text about the strings of the marionette theatre, nor about the deconstruction of language, not even about colour coding.

It is appropriate that students should have their own forums for displaying art, as you often sense that their works would fall short in places where the audience has other expectations. What is in short supply is not talent, but time, complexity and artistry, and these three often go together.

What I can see most clearly at Master-weekends, is this: They are striving to look like art, more than being it, as if art were somewhere else, and that genuine concentration, attitude and interest completely evaporate into tense exhibition grimaces. The projects seem too weak for the format of an exhibition, and students and audience alike should be spared these experiences, humiliating and misleading as they are for both. Nevertheless: Master-weekends must go on. This opportunity to cooperate in a public, yet cushioned environment is a gift, both to the institutions of art and to education, but I wish these projects were steered more firmly, for instance by letting the students leave their projects unfinished, or that some other kind of project were undertaken at these Master-weekends. Projects that preserve the dignity of the students, projects that are experimental, that display an openness to the complex relationship between art and the world, projects that are not set in stone before they are anywhere near finished.

Shiny objects

blink – HC Gilje[vi]

HC Gilje already has a great deal of experience working with performing arts like dance and theatre, as well as with exhibitions at galleries. The process leading up to the opening seems to have been characterized by a general playfulness, displaying rich knowledge and technical confidence. Gilje characteristically told the audience during the opening event that the exhibition was incomplete. This might have been just an apologetic comment, but the intention was rather that of enticing the audience into returning to the exhibition at a later date. Gilje knew that what was already on show would be more than sufficient.

blink consists of two works, one in the gallery and one in the crypt. The fact that Gilje has called both works blink, suggests to me that they are more than works, they are tools, and these tools of Gilje's project act as impulses, creating a harmony between the rooms, the audience and the tools themselves. The tool blink in the gallery at the art centre consists mainly of a video projector, loudspeaker units and a computer. The projector emits light of different colours which ends up in a strictly defined area. The lit area is shaped into the room in such a way that it is parallel with one of the longitudinal walls, stretches over the floor and up onto two other walls. The tool, blink, reveals a great deal of interest in the specific characteristics of this room, activating and redefining the relationship between the structure of the floorboards, the perspective of the walls, the lateral of the back wall, the width of the coving, the strong grid in the ceiling, the size of the room, nuances, the floor's basic colour, as well as the shiny paint surface. The audience can watch a projected area framed by a thick white edge, sometimes in monochrome, with elements reminiscent of road, balcony, the edge of a piece of furniture, the colour of a house, a landscape seen through sunglasses, analogue television blur, as well as anything an audience can be reminded of. The images are accompanied by a sound track which raises the visual play out of the surfaces in such a way that the images remain standing in the room, around and together with the audience.

I thought: I could have done that! Because it was so simple? Hardly. No, because the tool, the room and my senses were communicating so well that it felt as if the work was myself.

Objecthood

That was then... This is now – curated by Heidi Bjørgan.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe... – Seminar in connection with the exhibition.

According to Synnøve Vik's presentation at the seminar Eeny, meeny, miny, moe..., Nordic craft has traditionally been tied to the material and its conceptual and symbolic significance. And so Nordic craft has moved in the direction of contemporary art while craft elsewhere has been looking to unique objects.[vii] The starting point for That was then... This is now is Made in Scandinavia, an exhibition which Bjørgan curated in 2002, as member of the curator collective Galleri Temp. Bjørgan has caught up with the young craft artists who were involved in the previous exhibition and traced their subsequent movements within the ideational, artistic and craft landscape. A seminar of interesting presentations by artists and theoreticians was held in conjunction with the exhibition, covering themes relevant to the development of craft.

If one is into subtle investigations of the placement of art within and outside the object, one had better lower one's gaze. Here the objects are everything, all of them announcing their own reality loud and clear and with a great deal of material joy, in colourful, ingenious, ornamental and surprising ways. The architecture of the exhibition shouts loudest of all. The room has been turned temporarily into a wooden crate made of coarse chipboard for the occasion, with stylish light courtesy of fluorescent tubes. Still, the architecture doesn't kill off the objects. On the contrary, it makes them appear more at home. The objects can take it, but why? Because both the form and contents of this exhibition derive from the same interest in the material's potential for being interesting, strange and exciting.

What is happening at this exhibition is a display of that art which is more closely connected with the material than with ideas, and the form of the exhibition is an appropriate one. Even I get tired. This celebration does not concern me personally, as the objects don't explore things I am used to being explored by objects in art rooms. But isn't it all right to fill the art room with things that speak loudly about themselves, considering that the same room is allowed to be empty, deactivated throughout a whole exhibition period, as in Curated by Erlend Hammer? One approach, possibly the best, is to let material-based art and idea-based art live side by side and see how trend and practice allow them to move closer or further apart. This is how an art centre must do it, in view of the way it is organized. It may feel painful, but this is also one way to investigate the relationship between work and object.

One of the works at the exhibition is an installation right at the back of the room, somewhat behind the scenography, where abstract ceramic shapes covered in whitish-grey glaze initiate a community between viewer, space and the objects themselves. The artist is Anders Ruhwald. In this case, having passed all the things at the exhibition, it strikes me that the autonomy of this installation derives from the fact that it steps out of itself and is less concerned about its own materiality, but rather, that of the shape, surface, lustre and weight. It is as if the objects would like to live in the presence of their surroundings. Ruhwald's objects show clear signs of physical work, the traces left by the artist being an important communicative element. Still, it is as if these objects, more than the rest, do what good design does. I am thinking of mass-produced objects, successful design, such as Pernille Veas' Jug. Such objects do what they should do and are where they ought to be. Art can also be where it should be and still evoke wonderment in the viewer.

And then, a loop

Through the object

The word objecthood[viii] occurs in the 1967 essay Art and Objecthood by art critic Michael Fried[ix] Fried uses the term about the characteristic distinguishing Minimalist art from abstract modernism. To him it means that the object itself lacks content but acquires significance through its relationship with its surroundings as well as relative to the viewer's subject. This is in contrast to abstract minimalism, which by its autonomy presents a world independent of surroundings, offering the viewer an experience transcending his subject.

And then, a loop: The English word objecthood corresponds to the Norwegian word objektalitet. In the world of design, the English word objectality describes those characteristics of a product which make consumers want to buy it. I shall therefore introduce objectality as the vulgar cousin of objecthood: As to its contents, objectality is related to the concept eye candy, defined as that which is artificially attractive, entertaining and not all that intellectually stimulating. Furthermore, the word objecthood is related to a view of art in which the work is something occurring within the viewer's subject, coming into being as a consequence of its relational significance, where the work might just as well be without an object and exist solely by virtue of the associations and emotional movements the work initiates in the viewer.

Out of my miserable life I long for something imperishable, light, something which is ... without object. In art the universe beckons us, for through its creator, the artist, I the viewer am invited to engage my opinion of reality with his. That is transcendence, and the art room should always serve such a purpose.

[i] Artforum, June 1967

[ii] Linus Elmes in the text DIG IT

[iii] Anne Szefer Karlsen in the text DIG IT

[iv] Anne Szefer Karlsen in the text DIG IT

[v] The pamphlet In defence of eye candy by E. Hammer, Hordaland Art Centre, 2009.

[vi] This exhibition is HC Gilje's visual work in connection with the project Conversations with spaces which he has prepared at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, at the Academy of Art, during the three year Programme for Research Fellowships in the Arts.

[vii] The seminar is reviewed by Frøydis Linden at the ytter.no web site.

[viii] Glenn Adamsons uses the word "objecthood" in his text Marking Time, written for the exhibition That was then... This is now

[ix] Michael Fried, well known art critic and historian. His contributions are included in the historical discourse of the origin and development of modernism.

Doubt, lightness and multiplicity by Thomas Hestvold

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:37:24 +0100

There may be certain works of art that neither should nor can be interpreted, only experienced. Perhaps. We might try to imagine a painting of a natural scene that is just beautiful. Low light painting silhouettes of naked tree trunks against the sky. The sun is setting in the west, leaving a tinge of pink and red, the girlish hell of the world of colour. But our picture is facing the east, where a deep blue hue lingers, the only memory of all the colours which moments before covered everything. This colour has been growing for a while, now it has turned to blue magma, deep and solid, as much sound as light. Our picture is about holding on to this light. That is all. We need say no more.

Well, I wonder. After all, shouldn't we be asking whoever is responsible for this work why he creates something like this in 2010? A touch of irony, perhaps? Etc. It is always possible to interpret, read what's behind the surface. But how important or necessary is it? That may vary a great deal.

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland has given one of his works the title On Thomas' lightness. Two bronze hands touch a transparent, potentially invisible surface, but are injured in the attempt. Is that all? This Thomas happens to be the one known as Doubting Thomas from the bible story, one of Jesus' disciples. The story is found in John 20:24ff. The other disciples have seen the risen Jesus and they have told Thomas about the experience. But he refuses to believe it, unless he can touch the wounds of Jesus' hands and side. Then, after a few days, Jesus visits them again, and this time Thomas is present. Jesus asks him to touch his wounds, saying "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

On Thomas' Lightness opens up an unexpected pair of concepts, doubt and lightness. Both Sveinung Rudjord Unneland and I are the son's of priests. In fact, the sense that doubt weighs on you is not something I learnt at home, but something I became painfully aware of during years spent in Christian youth groups. Thomas was far from an ideal for them. Quite the opposite, he was a let-down. He should have believed, without hesitation, like the others. Arne Garborg's novel Peace is a shocking story about how this kind of doubt, doubt as the lack of faith, can consume a person. Doubt can destroy people. I'd say Rudjord Unneland is aware of this, too. But somehow, his work is about the Doubter's lightness.

Italo Calvino has written about lightness in Lezioni americane. This book is a collection of five lectures Calvino was unable to hold at Harvard University before he died. The first one is about lightness. Then there are beautiful discussions, based on literary examples, of quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity.

"I soon noticed that between – on the one hand – the realities of life, which should have been my raw materials, and – on the other hand – the bright and biting suppleness with which I wanted to infuse everything I wrote, there was a chasm, which demanded an ever greater effort to bridge. Maybe that was when I discovered heaviness, inactivity and the non-transparency of the world, those characteristics which immediately grab hold of your writing, unless you find a way of escaping them." Then Calvino considers the relationship between lightness and heaviness, suggesting that one might settle for heaviness. Even Dante, whom Calvino is so fond of, becomes its representative, while he finds lightness in an author who is unknown to most, Cavalcanti. Dante's heaviness is revealed in his elaborate, precise descriptions and locations, while Cavalcanti achieves the linguistic lightness Calvino is looking for through his choice of open metaphors "which don't force upon us a solid item."

Lightness is then connected with speed, precision, visibility and multiplicity. All these concepts have contrasts which you might want to advocate. You could obviously defend slowness. Also that which is dim or hidden. When Calvino settles for what he does, it is because he has learnt that there are certain qualities he quite simply prefers to others. These are qualities that should in no way be confused with frivolity, sloppiness or shallowness. Rather the opposite. Lightness and progress presuppose planning, training and economy. In connection with what he says about multiplicity, Calvino writes that he would like to say as little as possible, but write all the more, as he can then return to his sentences and reshape them over and over again until they are just the way they should be. Calvino connects lightness with precision and progress, with certainty.

It may not be possible to connect the kind of lightness which is idealized by Calvino with the consuming doubt which is the cause of Enok Hove's breakdown in Garborg's Peace. So we should perhaps approach doubt from a different angle. We may have to take sides with Thomas and defend him against Jesus' undiscerning criticism. After all, wasn't Thomas the only one who more or less kept his cool during a rather special situation when a dead man was rumoured to be alive again? After all, posterity has used Thomas' literally tangible way of looking for assurance as the strongest evidence about the resurrection. We may suspect that John the evangelist had to invent a doubter who was actually allowed to feel the wounds, in order to affirm the story of the resurrection. The other gospels, all of them older than John's, make no mention of this episode.

Let it be clear: Doubt and scepticism is the prime prerequisite for cultural and intellectual development. Where distrust, criticism and wry looks are suppressed, you get stagnation, surveillance and terror.

I have always felt a kinship with Thomas the disciple. For reasons best know to my parents, they named me after him, and being the doubter has been somewhat convenient as it has become more difficult to give my assent to the declaration of faith. But my main reason for liking him has been his exemplary attitude in the face of undocumented claims.

But doubt is not without its costs. As we know, doubters can easily fall out of favour. Giordano Bruno, who placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the centre of the universe, thus expressing doubt about the teachings of the Church, was burnt at the stake. History abounds with such heroes, and it is not very difficult to find contemporary examples of what questioning truths can cost.

The Thomas of Sveinung Rudjord Unneland's work appears to be investigating something he doesn't quite know what is, something see-through and indistinct. He doesn't seem to be much of a Giordano Bruno. Maybe he is too easy-going, not having prepared himself well enough, therefore cutting himself. We may have to admit that Thomas' lightness is of another kind than that advocated by Calivino, that we could be dealing with a kind of sanguine frivolity. Maybe he feels that doubt has been taken too far, missing rootedness, that he is floating about, weightless and without direction. The places where he puts his hands just turn to holes. Maybe this Thomas, as presented here, lacks weight, something strenuous to be anchored to. But perhaps this whole discussion is a bit beside the point of Rudjord Unnelands work. I am open to that possibility.

Calvino's last lecture is about multiplicity. There he defends the polyphonous text, a text which opens for a multiplicity of readings at different levels, a text that by its centrifugal power liberates thought.

If we approach Rudjord Unneland's work as a text, we should approach it in the hope of being able to read it in many different ways. One of which is the one we explored initially, that of pure experience. We gain that experience by looking at it, moving around it, watching and perceiving its parts, gaps, colours and surfaces. All works of art are visual in one sense or another, they present something direct and self-actuated. But they also carry a further meaning, they hide something which can become less hidden. With Sveinung Rudjord Unneland there is much of this. The titles open and shut, depths and surfaces both past and present confer significance on pictures and objects, and they involve us in fluid interpretations and different levels of reading.

Rudjord Unneland's interest in that which we are not quite conscious of, that which must be given a significance before it can be significant, is also apparent in the work Lost signal (Hermann Roscharch) where a pile of newspapers partly obscure a picture of Herman Rorschach. You may well have heard of the Rorschach test somewhere. It belongs within that large story of common cultural thoughts that form the base of our thinking without our knowing a whole lot about them. Einstein, Freud, Descartes, Spinoza, Abel. Most of us can only string together a few sentences about what their contributions were, so here's a short summary on Rorschach and his test. The patient, or the tested, is asked to interpret abstract blobs of ink, the therapist then interprets this interpretation, thinking he can learn something about the patient's unconscious mental life from it. So the patient, who might be myself, is not able to understand his own interpretation. Sveinung Rudjord Unneland grabs hold of this man, hides half of him, revealing the other half. Where is this taking us? The spin dryer of meanings?

Why not, let's put it that way. And let's put the title of the exhibition into this spin dryer as well, Palinca Pastorale. In visual art, the pastoral is the peaceful scenery where the shepherd keeps watch over his sheep. Palcina is an Eastern European homemade brandy.

Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Fredheim.

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Thomas Hestvold (1957)lives and works on Vestre Sandøya outside of Tvedestrand, Norway. Through an active career and a long series of exhibitions Hestvold has positioned himself as an important painter. Until February 14^th 2010 he holds his latest solo exhibition at Kabuso in Øystese, Norway. Hestvold is in the collections of the Contemporary Art museum, Arts Council Norway and Sørlandet Art Museum, and was educated at the School of Visual Arts in New York, National Academy of the Arts (Vestlandets Kunstakademi) in Bergen and the Art Academy in Trondheim.

2010

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:08:30 +0100

Nordic residents are:

Einar Garibaldi Eiriksson (IS)
Firth-Eagland&Lundh (SWE)
Maija Rudovska (LAT)
Fredrik Strid (SWE)

International residents are:

Cécile Belmont (FR/GER)
Marco Buzzone (GER)
Daniela Castro (BRA)
Juan Gaitan (COL/NL)
Bertram Haude (GER)
Margret Holz (GER)
Hyunjin Kim (S.KOR)
LeRoy Stevens (USA)

BEK-night: Gerhard Eckel

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:11:28 +0100

Bergen Center for Electronic Arts writes about his practice:

Gerhard Eckel is Professor of Computer Music and Multimedia at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), University of Music and Performing Arts (KUG) in Graz, Austria. He creates sound and music installations for real and virtual spaces, which are presented at international festivals, conferences and trade fairs as well as in museums and galleries. He is currently artist-in-residency at USF in Bergen, working on a commision, Catabolizer, for the upcoming Borealis festival in March.

Eckel holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Vienna (1989). In addition to his scientific training he studied Composition of Electroacoustic Music (with Dieter Kaufmann) and Sound Engineering at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Vienna. European scholarships brought him to the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht in 1985 and to IRCAM, the computer music department of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1987. Eckel worked as artistic-scientific researcher at IRCAM (1989–1996) and at the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication (IMK) in St. Augustin, Germany (1996–2005).

His research work at IRCAM focused on the construction of computer tools for composition, sound synthesis and visualisation. In 1989 he invented the user interface paradigm SpecDraw for the AudioSculpt application. He was also involved in the development of the physical modelling system Modalys. From 1994 onwards he headed his own research group Interfaces et représetations des sons. At Fraunhofer IMK he worked in a virtual reality (VR) department where he specialized in 3D audio rendering for projection-based VR systems. His group built the first CAVE in Germany in 1996.

Eckel takes both an artistic and scientific interest in matters of sound. His research topics range from psychoacoustics, over sound analysis, visualization, processing, spatial rendering and synthesis to virtual and augmented reality systems using gestural control. Lately he is mainly involved in artistic research, with a special focus on its connections to scholarly research.

He creates sound and music installations for real and virtual spaces, which are presented at international festivals, conferences and trade fairs as well as in museums and galleries (including CeBIT, ICMC, Expo2000, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Galerie Stadtpark Krems, Inventionen Berlin, Archipel Genf). His extended studies on space and architecture and their relevance for music and sound art brought him to the Banff Centre for the Arts, where he served as Composer-in-Residence in 1995 and 2000. His CAVE-based music installation Camera Musica presented at Expo 2000 received a Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica in 2001.

Eckel’s early works incorporate aspects of improvisation in the analogue studio, digital tape music, electroacoustic performance and concert installation. His later work is focussed on the possibilities of sound installations to convey formal openness to the audience in a tangible way. Since recently he combines his interest in generative music processes, as usually employed in installation situations, with performance-based forms. From 2000 –2003 he coordinated the EU-IST-project LISTEN, which defined and explored immersive audio-augmented environments from a scientific and artistic perspective. In 2002, he served as an Edgar Varèse visiting professor at the Electronic Studio of Technical University Berlin. In 2004, Eckel worked as Artist-in-Residence in Krems, Austria.

In his most recent artistic research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), he and his team develop a new paradigm of intermedial expression: Embodied Generative Music. Since 2007 he directs IEM. His latest project Choreography of Sound is funded in context of the FWF’s new artistic research funding program PEEK.

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DIG IT 2, Verkligheten, Umeå, Sweden

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:41:07 +0100

PRESS RELEASE FROM VERKLIGHETEN:

"Dig it: 2"

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January 22 - February 5
Opening January 22 19.00
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Curators: Linus Elmes & Anne Szefer Karlsen

With contributions by: Anna Eliasson, Per Enoksson, Rebecka Adelhult Feklistoff, Kent Gustafsson, Ida Hansson, Johanna Larsson, Allan Mattsson and Ulla Thøgersen

This is the second edition of a project initiated at Hordaland Art Centre in Bergen 2009. We have once again created an exhibition situation, more than an exhibition, which for the first time shows a number of little recognized works by artists with different social, political and ideological attitudes to and reasons for their artistic practices.

As a constellation of informal points of references these works create an iconographic geography, in which the individual works have been important, sometimes crucial, influences and catalysts for contemporary artists. As such, they are the foundation of contemporary art practice.

Our project describes how artistic methods and strategies are shaped and reconstructed, both as a phenomena within the social space, but also through its presence in the studio practice. "DIG IT: 2" is constituted of particular key-works that we together with Verkligheten have identified as part of an important intellectual heritage.

We provide a retrospective perspective, as well as a close reading, of how contemporary artists relate to other artist’s works. "DIG IT: 2" is an investigation in which it is possible to take part and observe a series of historical works to try to understand the presence.

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Verkligheten
Pilgatan 16
S-903 31 Umeå

Telephone: +46 (0) 90 10 99 00
E-mail: maila_verkligheten@yahoo.com
Homepage: www.verkligheten.net
Join us in our facebook group: Verkligheten
The gallery is open Tue - Thur 9 - 13, Fri - Sat 12 - 16

Verkligheten is run by the 9 artists Gerd Aurell, Stina Rosenberg, Ludwig Franzén, Anneli Furmark,
Moa Krestesen, Mattias Olofsson, Knutte Wester, Helena Wikstrom and Emma-Lina Ericson.
Statens Kulturråd, Umeå Kommun and Västerbotten Läns Landsting support Verkligheten.

Retrospective catalogue 2009

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:09:18 +0100

Through seven exhibitions and two Master Weekends, there has been a subtle discussion of what an art object is at Hordaland Art Centre. Together with artists, curators, writers and of course the audience we have let different views play freely, and as summary we offer this retrospective catalogue both in print and online. We want our common production to be avaliable to as many people as possible, at the same time as this is a way of turning both the Art Centre and its archives inside out into the public where we participate actively. The catalogue is designed by Ole Kristian Øye at Klipp og Lim.

FOREWORD
To visit an art institution as audience is to visit a place with specific expectations in mind, expectations of experiencing something. As people come through the door, they may even have preconceived ideas of what that experience should be like. Throughout this last year we have tried to create debate about what has been exhibited at Hordaland Art Centre by not always fulfilling such expectations of how one should experience, thus carefully shifting the experience. Without publicly defining a theme or an agenda in advance, we have spent time discussing what an art object is, seen in relation to the specific framework of Hordaland Art Centre. We have tried to create a specific discussion without revealing the theme to be discussed beforehand, thus disregarding the hierarchical relationship of institution and audience where the institution is already in the know. In order to dissolve this hierarchy, we have let all the exhibitions be new productions, either artistic or curatorial. That way both institution and audience have started out with the same amount of information. A series of new meetings have been held and acquaintances made where the physical parameters of the art object have been explored, as well as the framework around it at the Art Centre. Works and exhibitions have ranged from almost non-existent to all-embracing. We have been motivated by our desire to participate in the present, and to do that we must endeavor to act concurrently with this age, without preconceived ideas. One way is to invite our guests to think new thoughts, patiently supporting them while they create new works to be made public for the first time at the Art Centre. There is something very special and extraordinary about such a method, and very few general rules. Our responsibility has been to prepare everyone’s meeting with this art and develop the surrounding framework. Without resorting to aestheticizing or interpretations, but insisting on new productions, we have commissioned accompanying texts, presentations and discussions for each exhibition in order to help translate what has happened in the exhibitions. That is how we have established the framework. All the exhibitions of 2009 have been anchored in the local art scene, but they have also reached out to include something bigger. Or rather; they have included themselves within a larger context. Without further ado Hordaland Art Centre takes on this role with those we work with. Still, it would not be correct to say that the programme displays a unified local identity. That has never been the intention, as it would have cramped both exhibition and the local art scene. This is why we have not wanted to define an essence in the exhibitions which would be translated to a specific contextual or visual landscape. But we can do so here, in this retrospective catalogue, and so it is the art object which has been the focus of our interest this year. More than one exhibition has stretched Hordaland Art Centre almost to the limits of its own comfort zone, but unless this happens sometime during a year, the institutional structure will set in its form, one which cannot carry on a discussion and maybe not even take part in innovations. In addition to those texts which have already been published in connection with each exhibition, Are Hauffen has been commissioned to follow the entire 2009 programme. The result is a witness report called As well as eye candy. Hauffen has been both a witness and a critical partner. By inviting an artist and writer to follow our activities we have constantly had to look at ourselves in relation to a critical audience.

Texts
The former director of Hordaland Art Centre, Mari Aarre, has written the text Reflective positions for the exhibition and project posisjoner (positions) by Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen, about her work to keep language vague and open. We have had the pleasure to publish an extensive excerpt from a text by the dramaturge Bojana Bauer entitled The Mechanics of the Soul, about Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s methods and works on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Norway; Might arrives. The exhibition situation DIG IT is accompanied by a dialogue text of the same title, written by the curators Linus Elmes and myself. The curator Erlend Hammer wound up using the textual space allocated each exhibition as a stepping stone for the project Kuratert av Erlend Hammer (Curated by Erlend Hammer) with his text In Defense of Eye Candy. Based on previous interest in HC Gilje’s works, the artist and theoretician Mitchell Whitelaw was invited to write his text Right Here, Right Now - HC Gilje’s Networks of Specificity for the exhibition blink. In addition to participating at the seminar Eeny, Meeny,
Miny, Moe… Glenn Adamson wrote the text Marking Time for the group exhibition That was then… This is now, curated by Heidi Bjørgan. As an extension to this year’s B-open seminar, writer Mette Karlsvik was invited to write a report on the day’s events which we print here, along with a text commissioned from the curator duo Firth-Eagland&Lundh. Karlsvik’s B+o+b – talk + talk + text is a mix of documentary and fiction, while Firth-Eagland&Lundh’s What’s all this talk about talk in art? is a conversation text where the talk is about precisely that: talking about art. Reading all these texts a picture emerges of how we relate to art today, they clarify the paradigm which suggests that art is dependent on both time and place.

Forum
Another way of contextualising our exhibitions is through presentations. The word forum describes a place; the assembly, institution or situation where an issue is to be discussed. Our experience is that Hordaland Art Center is a place where art can be discussed. The idea has been to let themes and interests criss-cross, dissolve into each other and sometimes allow the connection between presentation and exhibition to almost vanish. In addition we have hosted artist talks by our resident artists, and of course co-hosted the B-open seminar. This way we, our guests and our audience have been active participants in the conversation about art. Artist Lisa Torell presented her work on the last day of the exhibition posisjoner (positions) by Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen, and discussed how her works are defined by the language she uses. Torell’s works are often site specific, dealing with how we can read a society through its application of text, how we devaluate and position ourselves through language as well as how this facilitates a reading of a society. She specifically spoke of her site specific installation Reserved places for more diffuse purposes which has been transported to several sites. This work consists of a text describing how man throughout the ages has tried to map his surroundings, thus endowing it with meaning. Torell’s work is a monument to those places which have no expressed meaning, encouraging the audience to preserve these places. In connection with the exhibition Might arrives we invited the audience to the presentation and conversation entitled On articulating works and places, with curator Abdellah Karroum and the artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña. Karroum presented ideas relating to our constant need to reinvent language to describe art works, and described the challenge of presenting works in places other than their place of origin. He also discussed the exhibition and piece Might arrives with Gómez-Egaña; how the piece almost stopped time, being a constant promise of something about to happen. Gómez-Egaña’s performance for video, Anytime Now, which was part of Hordaland Art Centre’s contribution to Karroum’s project Le Monde Autour De Vous for the first Brussels biennial in 2008, was screened and discussed. Just like in Might arrives, the artist also relates to an inside and outside of the art space in this video. The exhibition situation DIG IT was also accompanied by a conversation during the opening weekend. Linus Elmes and artist Ylva Ogland talked about Ogland’s contribution: her father Bengt Lagerås’ untitled painting from 1974, the year she was born. They discussed the relationship between her and her father’s works in the light of her childhood. Lagerås’ paiting is the one work in the situation which had a distinct frame, hanging on a yellow area on the wall. Ogland informed us that the painting had always hung on a yellow wall in Lagerås’ home, which resembled a museum. His relation to his own collection of images and objects was non-hierarchical, and the meaning of the collection was to be found in its actual composition. Ogland also told how she constantly tried to interpret the painting when she was a child; the wing of the eagle covering the moon, the moonshine lighting up the scene from behind and the two warriors fighting on the edge of the cliff. She always read the two warriors as her own father, trapped in an impossible situation, with no resolution in sight. In relation to, but also as an integral part of the project Kuratert av Erlend Hammer (Curated by Erlend Hammer), we invited the audience for lunch and a conversation. After a brief introduction we opened for questions from the floor. The conversational format was chosen particularly to create a forum where the audience could ask questions which had arisen during the time of the project, both publicly and in private. The reactions were varied, ranging from those who found it provoking that a curator had left the exhibition space empty, to those who could not understand how a project like this could gain so much attention. The relationship between exhibition and audience was discussed, as well as the status of the exhibition space. This gathering did not reach any conclusion, which had in any case not been its intention. What was intended was the conversation between curator and audience, and that mission was accomplished. For the exhibition blink HC Gilje gave an artist talk where he mapped out the process behind the two works of the exhibition, and artist and curator Line Halvorsen was invited to give a talk on the closing day. HC Gilje talked about his thoughts on movement as background material, and how shadows can be considered a specific way of telling time. He also showed how the exhibition space he worked with almost disintegrated, just by pointing at how light creates both darkness and illusions of perspective. Halvorsen presented her work on mapping the artist as figure, contemporary participant, colleague and myth. This work started when she made the interview film Kunstakademiet i Oslo 100 år together with Astrid Skumsrud Johansen earlier in 2009, from which she also screened excerpts. The title of the presentation was Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, appropriated from the van Gogh painting of the same name, because this image could capture many of the stereotypical attitudes of society towards the artist: “If the ear is cut right off, a bleeding ear, a missing ear, a bleeding giant wound, of course you must bandage the whole head. And I was thinking that this is a nice image of an artist, someone who has lost parts of his hearing, walking about in mono, orienting himself mostly through his vision.” In conjunction with her exhibition That was then… This is now, curated by Heidi Bjørgan, she also conceived the one day seminar Eeny, meeny, miny, moe… During this day several aspects of contemporary craft were discussed by art historian Glenn Adamson, Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and author of Thinking Through Craft; Synnøve Vik, art historian, critic and exhibition coordinator at The Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts; Hans Stofer, designer-maker working in the field of Applied Arts and professor at the Royal College of Art and artist Anders Ruhwald. Viks’s seminar contribution has been reworked as a text, and can be found in this catalogue.

Guests
Our two resident artists, both from Sweden, presented their practice. Victoria Brännström showed documentation of several of her works where she involves different groups and constellations of people to discuss networks appearing between people in society. We were told of the strong reactions her work Antippa på Iaspis (Antippa at Iaspis) caused, when she according to the anarcofeminist cafee Antippa’s political philosophy kept this as a female separatist event. In Bergen she conducted research towards the production of a work in 2010, co-produced by Hordaland Art Centre also involving a group of women. Felice Hapetzeder screened three of his latest video works. During his stay in Bergen he completed the post-production of the second part of the video series Limits of forgiveness, where he uses interviews to describe events which the interviewees have not themselves experienced, but which have affected them in their childhood through their parents. He continues to explore the relationship between nationality, ethnicity and sexuality.

Most of our audience visit our exhibitions for a fairly short time, but the purpose of this catalogue is to stretch time so that we can all experience the exhibitions over a longer period, at the same time as the Art Centre’s archive is turned inside-out.

Anne Szefer Karlsen
Bergen, January 2010

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland - Palinca Pastorale

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:14:49 +0100

Palinca is the name of the Rumanian and Hungarian fruit brandy which is so strong it is commonly referred to as "fence-ripper", while the pastoral often is connected to a nostalgic description of landscapes, a description of an exaggerated simple and seemingly honest lifestyle. This duo of words is as many others of Rudjord Unneland’s works: humorous.

The exhibition is one project divided into several pieces; paintings and sculptures in different materials. Rudjor Unneland is part of a young generation Norwegian artists preoccupied with how our society has shaped us and what effect our lives have on others. Two of the sculptures in this exhibition are produced in China, thus the method of production enters into the themes raised in the exhibition. In a global economy seemingly without borders there is of course still a harsh division between those who have and those who don’t have. Entering the exhibition space time can begin, and at the end of the journey in the basement of Hordaland Art Centre time starts again, helped by a clown in blinking neon. It is as if time is a circle in Rudjord Unneland’s works, and through the loop we can jump back and forth to scrutinize out times.

Ideologically Rudjord Unneland has several years been occupied with transgression and time. In a text from 2008 he paraphrases the theologian and researcher Paul Otto Brunstad: “There is something transgressional about our times. Not because borders have ceased to exist, but because existence has become so liquid that it is running over, under, through and past everything which used to be known as solid. Like a forgotten yeast leavened dough which rises quietly over the edge of its container without much fuss. Accompanying this softness of our times is a constant heating of the society by more and more sentimentality and aesthetics. Feelings are in focus. Facts, stringent logic and clear arguments do not have the power of intimacy. The soft, warm, malleable and flexible have set in. Everything is left to the individual’s continuous interpretation, where every interpretation is possible and plausible. “

Our obsession with repetition of already tested and tried concepts evolving during the twenty years which have passed since the first winner of Big Brother ran out from a surveilled house in the Netherlands is discussed in the exhibition Palinca Pastorale through works leading illogical reasoning.

The artist Thomas Hestvold has been commissioned to write a text for this exhibition: Doubt, lightness and multiplicity.

This is the first of a series of three solo exhibitions this spring at Hordaland Art Centre. We highlight three strong individual voices and investigate their views on our times.

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland (1981) lives and works in Bergen, Norway. Through painting and sculpture he discusses the collision of the private and society at large. He has been visible both in Bergen and nationally by keeping a high level of activity. During 2006 and 2007 he was part of the artist group Members Club. They created a series of group exhibitions, as well as the one off event MC Messa (The MC Fair) which gathered all the artist run galleries in Norway for one night. In 2009 he curated the sculpture exhibition Re.* Doubting Telling Objects at Visningsrommet, Bergen, where he also showed the piece Love story; a yellow parasol perforated by fluorescent tubes. Other group exhibitions he has participated in the last year are The Last Resort, M4 residensy, Amsterdam; Sidehow, galleri Gathe, Bergen; Weird Science, Waterside projectspace, London. In 2008 he made the work Jaws, a two part concrete monolith on a marble foundation which stopped time, at the outdoor exhibition Tempo Skien. In a split second it seems the concrete has captured a bird, twigs and other unfortunate objects, thus freezing a particular time and place. He also participated in the group exhibition Inland Empire at Christiansands Kunstforening with the work Future and past combined. Autumn 2010 he has his second solo exhibition at LNM in Oslo. Rudjord Unneland finished his MA at Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2007.

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The exhibition Palinca Pastorale by Sveinung Rudjord Unneland is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen and produced by Hordaland Art Centre. Sveinung Rudjord Unneland has received support by City of Bergen, Vederlagsfondet and Statens utstillingsstipend. Hordaland Art Centre receives its core funding from Hordaland County.

Canopy, parasol, awning – or how to work together as artist and curator

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:47:24 +0100

What do you call something that is mounted firmly on the wall in order to provide shelter against sun and rain? This was of the first thing we asked ourselves as we arrived at the somewhat dilapidated hotel Grand Central where we would find shelter during our stay in Rotterdam where we attended the three day symposium, "The Curators" at Witte de With. We had both forgotten what this architectural feature is called, we were lost for words and struggled a long time to remember what it used to be called. Canopy, parasol, umbrella? No – perhaps a curator? Or rather: the curatorial! If it is true that the curatorial is related to the institution and is extendable in relation to it, then the parable may not be so silly. In any case, it is the curator's task to guard and protect works of art. The problem is knowing how far the facility can be stretched without overshadowing the work of art.

This year's first issue of Billedkunst discussed the curator's role and presence on the art scene in three different articles. A feature common to all the articles was an expressed distrust between artists and curators. For instance in curator Geir Haraldseth's remark that he uses works to illustrate his exhibitions, and that the artist is never free or autonomous. Moreover, he says that the "curator is a power broker and that this power is enhanced when the curator is institutionalized." This statement is countered in artist Hans Thorsen's lengthy lamentation on the position of power enjoyed by curated exhibitions. Artist and curator Åse Løvgren thinks that the sceptics are mainly found among the older guard, but that is perhaps not correct, either. All of these opinions instilled in us a scepticism about the bleak picture that was painted. And so we decided to take a trip abroad to learn more about what it really means to be a curator.

"The Curators" was made up of the cream of the world's curatorial staff, and it was easier to count those who were not there, than those who were there. The place was crammed with celebrities, and panel discussions, similar in format to those on television, were frequent, with enticing titles like: "Does the exhibition have a future?", "Is the curator by definition a political animal?" and "Radical-chic curating: Curatorial practice vs. curatorial fashion?" All these issues were formulated by the Witte de With's own curators and was a confirmation of the well-known curatorial trap where an exhibition (here: symposium) with an overall theme merely uses the works of art (here: the external curators) to illustrate the curator's point. We thought the panel discussion "Is curating always a collective activity?" would present new ideas about the relationship between artist and curator. Unfortunately, that was not to be, as it focussed exclusively on the role of the curator.

We shall therefore try to put into words what was left unspoken. In contrast to the reactionary attitudes expressed in Billedkunst 1/09, we would like to explore new attitudes to collaboration. For we cannot, as Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, says, withdraw from the discussion – "We cannot extract ourselves from the thing that we talk about". Thus we submit to her idea that we are all implicated in our field, and in our own lives. In the Norwegian debate about the artist's view of the curator, the artist almost exclusively assumes the role of victim, and the curator rarely expresses his views about the artist in public. You change things by taking part. We want to be active participants and would like to describe a possible scenario where our roles blend and mix without disclaimers. This is not about resistance, but an active involvement where time and again you betray the establisment from within the system, in order to generate new forms of collaboration. During an exhibition we become part of a common "we", and are able to collect fragments from the past in order to build a new history together.

How can a common voice be created; how is it possible to be both subject and community at the same time? We believe we are closing in on a solution as we focus on the relationship between curator and art, not the relationship between curator and artist. The curator must be passionately involved, so as to understand the work as if it were his own. Thus the relationship between subject and object can be dissolved. The artist's passion for his work must be adopted, and to achieve this the curator must engage in close collaboration with the artist. This must be done through sustained cooperation and interaction, also involving others, not just the artist and the curator. Art is the object of our discussion, and this process must allow for conflict, so that the discussion can give rise to a new "we", a new communal subject.

This "we" is more than just a curator and an artist. In other words, we can no longer consider curatorial work as a dichotomy. "The collapsing of the distance between the exterior and the interior must be reproduced again and again," as Rogoff says. "We" are, in other words, at any given time sitting on a terrace – a physical space between inside and outside – where the awning above us can be operated either from inside or outside, depending on how it is mounted. In this "we", we also discover the essence of art mediation. Here the audience is not viewed as a quantifiable and passive group of people but as participants, just as the artist or the curator are participants, too.

Today, conflict has become the norm, but even when a conflict happens far away, no one can remain unmoved. We believe the art scene is neither a battle field nor a transaction, but a collective and private meeting where various interests are discussed. The rhetoric about art has been borrowed from the military field; revolution, avant garde, goals, strategy, and later the economic field; power, project, method. A new language must therefore be created across the established discourse in order to embrace the production of knowledge which curator and artist actually develop in unison, and not in opposition to each other. This means that the curatorial is creating ideology, but we must be aware of the pitfalls of utopian hunting grounds.

The curator must possess a certain authority in relation to the public and his institution in order to perform his function, while the artist must have such authority in relation to his work. However, the curator and the artist should suppress the issue of authority when dealing with each other, so as to foster such mutual respect and understanding as is necessary for innovation and renewal. Therefore, both artist and curator are tasked with using the institution to change art through the curatorial.

One of the participants at the symposium who attracted most interest was Jan Hoet, a charismatic elderly gentleman from Belgium who was remembered for having mediated a Bruce Neumann video by jumping up and down next to the work. Hoet's passion for art is a good example of curatorial involvement. He believes that artists should focus on artistic production and what they want to convey through their work, not on exhibitions. The curator's role is to place the artist within society, at least one at each factory – according to Hoet. The only purpose of art is that of puncturing hierarchies and creating new relationships within an established system. In Hoet's utopian model, the curator must be available in the institution's cafe at any given time – or on the terrace under an awning – available for discussions with the public.

The question is how much sunshine you want to be exposed to. Or how much room the curatorial should take up. After all, it is obvious that everyone on the terrace has different opinions about this. And so it is high time we examined new ways in which curators and artists can collaborate. A fundamental part of the curator's job is to participate in the implementation of an exhibition, so as to create harmony between what the curator wants to highlight and what the artist would like to achieve with his work. Artists want to organize and mediate their art in the best possible way, and as for the curator, he is dependent on the work of art in order to create significant contexts. Their concern for the curatorial unites them.

We must do battle with the idea that a curated exhibition should be a purely thematic exhibition. Works should be given a non-hierarchical co-presence, where all constituent parts work in harmony. Just like in a choir, all voices should be heard at the same time. This common voice must not be a theme, but it could be an attitude, a discussion, or an assertion. It's all about the curator moving away from having his own agenda to having a perspective. The curator cannot gain an understanding of the work by reading about it, he must also possess intuition. According to Beatrix Ruf, director and curator of the Kunsthalle Zurich, the task is one of making allowance for freedom so that things can happen. We must dare to let art work on its own, and trust a piece of art's ability to mediate itself. Irit Rogoff believes that in the curatorial we must move away from what's ethical, as ethics is bound by rules, and move towards a place where theory and practice meet and remain uncomfortable. This becomes evident as you actively participate, whether as an artist or as a curator, and reach a position where you can influence the art scene. Experience creates and shapes one's position. By participating in biennials you may try to direct your criticism at the curatorial frameworks. As a curator, you can examine the curatorial by moving from being independent to being employed by an institution. And together, you might, for example, write an article in Billedkunst. In this way you can alter your point of view, become less sceptical, and find that you are in an unexpected place. Before we proceed, we will sit down on the terrace, pull out the awning just so much and enjoy both view and insight: An exhibition is not a conclusion.

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Translated by Egil Fredheim

Application

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:46:23 +0100

Hordaland Art Centre has been host to guests since 1987. Today the residency is focused on research as well as production and is an integral part of our programme. The residency is open to international artists, curators, writers and other art professionals. Our guests are expected to have a public presentation during their stay with Hordaland Art Centre.

Our guests stay in a quiet residential area seven minutes walk from Hordaland Art Centre in the centre of town. The flat has one bedroom, kitchen, living room and bathroom, as well as a south-west-facing balcony. The studio is on the top floor of C. Sundts gate 55, a nine floor studio building only three minutes walk from Hordaland Art Centre. The studio is furnished and has open access wi-fi. Guests are expected to bring their own computer and other tools necessary for their work during the residency.

Hordaland Art Centre covers travel, rent, studio rent, electricity and a small stipend to cover the high living costs in Norway. The applicant can apply for periods of 2 weeks, 1 month or 2 months.

Our residency is financially supported by Hordaland County and Nordic Culture Point. Successful candidates are also encouraged to apply for additional funding.

APPLICATION FORMS ARE MADE AVALIABLE OCTOBER 15TH.

Please make sure you comply with the instructions. Incomplete applications will not be taken into consideration. Please e-mail completed application form, cv and images/texts in one single e-mail to hks[at]kunstsenter[dot]no with your name as subject line.

We accept applications in English only to accommodate our international jury members.

Applications are assessed and chosen by a jury on the basis of merit, and the ability Hordaland Art Centre has to support the proposed research or project.

To be eligible for the Nordic residency, supported by Nordic Culture Point, you are a professional working artist, curator, contemporary art writer, critic or researcher from one of the Nordic (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland or the Faroe Islands) or Baltic (Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania) countries, or based professionally in one of these countries.

To be eligible for the International residency, supported by Hordaland County, you are a professional working artist, curator, contemporary art writer, critic or researcher from any country.

We are part of the network West Norway AIR

Marking Time by Glenn Adamson

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:34:11 +0100

Marking Time

That was then, this is now…

…such a simple sentence. And yet it captures much that there is to say about the history of craft over the past century. Discourse surrounding the handmade – particularly concerning its differences from industry – often takes the form of nostalgia, a yearning for the good old days when things were made in a human, and humane, way. Within this traditional narrative, modernity as materialized through the alienated labor of the factory, or for that matter dematerialized in the experiences offered on the internet, is positioned at a point called ‘now.’ Craft adopts the guise of another time, back ‘then’. It is rooted, historical, authorized by tradition. If these roles were to be personified, modernity would be a young executive, perhaps fresh out of university, and filled with ruthless ambition. Craft by contrast would be a kindly uncle or aunt, who might not have a finger on the pulse, but would be in touch with a better, wiser, slower way of doing things. Craft is precious in this familial sense. It is something that you may (or may not) be born into, but if you’re lucky enough to have a connection to it, you never want to let it go.

That was then, this is now!

Second thoughts. What I’ve just described – craft as the secure preserve of tradition – is all over. We don’t have to think that way anymore. A brief glance through this exhibition , or the gallery at the Hordaland Art Centre, confirms it. Craft no longer needs to be positioned as some kind of retrospective activity, rooted in a medieval or folk or simply imaginary past. It takes on new and strange forms, many of which are representative of modernity and its discontents. Craft today is being reconceived as a means of encountering the new – not in a spirit of resistance, but rather as a tool of discovery. In this sense a moment has passed, and a movement is over: the long period of craft revival and reform that began with the Arts and Crafts era, and continued in the studio work of the postwar decades. Even the fight of the 1960s and ’70s, that craft be taken seriously as a subgenre of fine art, has lost its force (since the idea that anything would be indigestible to art practice seems increasingly quaint and historical). The next revolution is a quieter one, and has happened almost without critical notice. It is an inauguration of the postdisciplinary and open-ended, without categorical hangups; it has been a long time coming, and now it seems to be arriving in force. Look for example at the work of Anders Ruhwald, whose objects seem to wriggle away from any attempt to categorize them. His ceramics squeeze awkwardly into corners. They play gently with aspects of function. Their hand-marked surfaces, buried under thick matte glazes, are obviously the product of great skill, but even so they come across as uncertain. Even the colors of the objects are hard to describe. Ruhwald teaches in America, and he was trained partly in the United Kingdom, but his approach still seems most at home in his native Scandinavia, where a combination of generous government funding and a tightly knit, hothouse atmosphere has led to an extraordinary cross-pollination of ideas and movements. After decades of flying the banner for upright modern design, Scandinavia has suddenly become the place to watch: a birthplace of the now.

That was then…

But let’s not get carried away: there is a sense of drastic change in the air, to be sure, and not just in Scandinavia. But insofar as craft plays a role in the contemporary avant garde, it is still grounded in very specific possibilities, which have a basis in the accumulations of past experience (even if these are often tacit, and impossible to tabulate). And so the artists on show here do look back. They do so with the eye of a scavenging magpie, throwing handmade and readymade elements together; but also with the eye of a connoisseur, attending to the exquisite details of their materials (whether they made them or came upon them by chance). Bjørn Båsen, for example, has combined pieces of vernacular woodwork, a painting, and a bit of cushion into a surrealist bricolage that suggests an ancient prayer – perhaps directed toward the concept of art. The jeweler Göran Kling, too, draws on a wellspring of iconography that is deeply rooted in history. On one level, he wants to set the wearer free of fixed symbolism –wearing jewellery is an act of self fashioning, and just because you wear a certain necklace “does not mean,” in his words, “that you need to have a particular relationship with dolphins, God or Mercedes cars.” And yet Kling, like Båsen, recognizes the power of such established images. The potential of craft, in the contemporary mode of the bricoleur, is to put this power in circulation, even as it is undercut or transformed through new contexts.

That was now, this is then.

But hold on a minute. Then and now, now and then. They don’t necessarily need to come in a certain order, do they? Craft is not only a matter of materiality. It is also a marking of sequences, of processes and procedures. And it need not be linear. Like a good exhibition, it can create space for reflection, in which different temporal structures happily co-exist. And so in this project, we find the work of Erik Hellsten, who has done a series of deadpan embroideries in which the crushing boredom of bureaucratic documents is captured through the painstaking replication of the text in thread. Then there is AnnaSofia Mååg, whose ceramics exhibit both the slow action of fire across the surface of the clay, and also the lightning-quick effects of cracking, slumping and bubbling: an aesthetic that is geological in its sense and scale. Craft does impose discipline: not in the accustomed sense (clay, fiber, metal, glass, wood) but in the sense of rigor. It is a temporal order, tightly structured, and thus susceptible to deconstruction.

…this is now.

But enough of this speculation. Let’s finally get right down to it. There is only the now: you cannot escape it. One can want to live in the past, or just reflect on it, but craft is ultimately a matter of objecthood, and objecthood is presentness. And so perhaps the best way to experience this exhibition is to look not back, or even forward, but to enjoy the richness of what is placed before you, the careful work of another person’s hands. And there is so much here to enjoy. Consider the work of Åsa Jungnelius, whose iconography ranges from cosmetics to pornography, a thrill ride through the varied landscape of pleasure. Or the jewelry of Pia Aleborg, which translates the everyday happenstance of suburban life into spry necklaces – incidents draped around the neck, seemingly at random but with a crazy sense of purpose. Taken in its entirety, this exhibition comes across as many discrete moments of discovery: many individual cries of ‘Eureka.’ The objects of Maria Johansson, which may initially seem to be the odd ones out because of their super-resolved, industrial design qualities, are actually a telling sign of the intent that lies behind this exhibition as a whole. These objects are placed before you, right now, and they want to reach out and touch you. In the end, whether they do this through sheer ingenuity and formal invention, as in Johansson’s case, or through the techniques of Surrealism, bricolage, temporal play, or direct imagery – these details don’t really matter. The point is that craft is still here. It is both rooted and avant garde, playful and profound, evasive and direct. It has many faces, and can be timed by many clocks. That’s the good thing about craft: it’s never too late.

Line Halvorsen

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:45:32 +0100

"He couldn't stand it any more. Gauguin escaped, after which Vincent cut his ear off and put it in the hand of one of the prostitutes in the town's brothel. Later Gauguin claimed he had had a go at him with a razor blade."

The myth of the artist has always been constructed through stereotypical ideas about how the genious through intoxication, sleep deprivation and undreamt of powers reaches mysterious highs by working alone in an attic. What myths are still alive today?

Working with the documentary Kunstakademiet i Oslo 100 år Halvorsen conducted interviews with many artists. Almost all could tell of loneliness, social anxiety and that the connection to other artists or artist groups was problematic. The life in the studio, where every single one sees themselves in competition to everyone else, rubs off on the representation of the artist. Sune Nordgren has been quoted on saying that Norwegian artists are like instant coffee and the curator adds the hot water. It is possible to say that the artists don't lie orderly next to each other, but rather splashes hot water on each other thus adds to the myth of the artist.

Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear deals with the myths of and relations between artists. Clips from some of the interviews will be screened during the talk.

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Associate Professor Line Halvorsen (1976) is a curator and artist based in Oslo, Norway. She graduated from the Art Academy in Bergen and Malmö, Sweden, in 2005. Previously she was doing Literary studies at the University of Tromsø and also a Film foundation school in the islands of Lofoten. Halvorsen has mainly been involved in the language between film and video art, but is more and more concerned with the role of the artist. In addition she is writing and teaching. Since 2001 Halvorsen has been involved in numerous projects as a curator, artist and writer. November 2009 Halvorsen is going for a residency at Apexart, New York, where she will be looking at strategies in the storytelling and the myths related to the artist.

B-open 2009 Workshop

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:00:37 +0200

The workshop is directed towards artists wishing to develop their discursive arsenal and confidence in speaking in larger assemblies. Through practical exercises, art-related examples and simple techniques participants will expand their rhetorical repertoir. The workshop is separate from the seminar 30 October, but can also be seen as a preparation.

Workshop objective:
- To speak in large assemblies
- To develop articualtion skills
- How to promote views effectively
- Gain confidence in speaking publicly
- Reflection on own impact on the environment
- Be constructive when presenting arguments in stressed situations

Workshop led by Erik Aarebrot and Jørgen Larsson.

Registration by October 23rd to hks@kunstsenter.no

Fee: NOK 120 incl. seminar / NOK 100 excl. seminar. Paybale upon arrival.

The workshop will be held in Norwegian.

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Hordaland Art Centre is one of three partners in the organisation B-open. B-open organises a seminar every autumn, and open studios throughout Bergen every second year (not in 2009), and thus create a forum for a diverse discussion on contemporary arts in Bergen. The two other partners are BKFH and NKVN.

B-open reccieves an annual financial support from The City of Bergen. B-open 2009 is financially supported by: Arts Council Norway, The Freedom of Expression Foundation, Bildende Kunstneres Forening Hordaland (BKFH), Norske Kunsthåndverkere Vest-Norge (NKVN) and Hordaland Art Centre.

Design for B-open 2009: Elida Brenna Linge

BEK-night: Bjørnar Habbestad

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:27:43 +0200

Bjørnar Habbestad (b. 1976) trained as a flutist in Bergen, London and Amsterdam. He works as chamber musician in POLYGON, improviser in LEMUR, noise maker in REHAB, ensemble flutist in N Ensemble and electro acoustic performer in USA/USB. With Jørgen Larsson he has created several conseptual sound projects and installations called TELART.

Based in Bergen, Habbestad has established himself with a specific profile in the musical contemporary field. He has performed on most Norwegianstages and in most festivals for contemporary art: Ultima, Oslo; Borealis, Bergen; Nu Music, Stavanger; Ny Musikk, trondheim, as well as solo perfomances withTrondheim Symphony Orchestra, Residenzorkester Berlin and assamissimassa. He has also perfomed widely in Scandinavia, Europe, Asia and USA. He founded N-Collective in 2003 and today runs the N Ensemble, is co-curator at Lydgalleriet and 50% of the label +3dB.

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Right Here, Right Now by Mitchell Whitelaw

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:26:51 +0200

The digital network, where we all spend ever more of our time, is a vast infrastructure of generality. It deploys a system which is standardised, formally defined, highly structured, and internally consistent. If I send you an email, I do it trusting that the interlinked systems of hard- and software, the protocols for data encoding and transmission, the network switches and servers, will all hold together so that the email you receive is the same as the one I sent. Perhaps I'm in Australia, and you are in Norway: we could say that the network generalises our two points in space - for the network, they are the same. As I draft my email it exists as a pattern of voltages and magnetic flux inside my computer. To transmit that pattern effectively, the digital network must erase or resist any local errors or inconsistencies that it might encounter along the way, so that it does not matter if the pattern travels by optical fibre or copper, or in radio waves, or if a boat anchor cut through a cable near Indonesia. It does not matter that your computer is made of different atoms to mine. Those are specificities - local, material events and instances. Digital culture, and networked space, absorbs specificities, compensates for them, rectifies them into generality. Wireless broadband and mobile computing make us into human nodes, bathing in shared connective protocols.

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values - fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make - which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

HC Gilje's work arises from a moment when the anything-at-all of digital video was just opening up, thanks to a combination of new real-time tools, cheap computing power, and some key interdisciplinary influences. Drawing on experimental sound and music, improvisation and performance became important solutions; working live in a specific situation, artists would gather, process, generate, and recombine material. In work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, from Gilje and his collaborators in 242.pilots, as well as video ensembles such as Granular Synthesis and Skot, the result is abstract and intense, a flow of layered digital texture. In performance it saturates the body and senses; big screens, big speakers. Instead of the narrative transport of cinema, which takes us somewhere else, this work creates - and is created in - an intensified sense of presence, what Gilje calls an "extended now" [1]. This methodology is vital; it focuses the open-ended generality of digital media in to a point: on this, rather than anything-at-all.

This moment relies on a circuit, a close coupling between artist and media; data flows become experienced events - sounds and images - which in turn inform new data flows, and so on. Audience and performers share a digital-material situation. The specificity of digital media comes forward; for of course these media are always specific, always local, always embodied; but that specificity is usually suppressed by the functional logic of generality. At the same time though, the processes underway here depend on exactly that generality, on the machine's ability to rapidly transform data and shift it between instantiations - from the voltages in video memory to the patterns of projected light.

In nodio (2005-)Gilje creates a system of networked audiovisual nodes that process and share image material. Each node generates sound derived from its image, in a process of automatic translation. On one hand this translation is another demonstration of the abstract pliability of the digital - its ability to transform anything into anything (generality); on the other, its tight audiovisual correspondences generate sparks of material intensity - real events, rather than digital effects (specificity). With these distributed nodes Gilje deploys audiovisual materials in space, creating flows and juxtapositions that function as dynamic sculpture. Of course the formal model of nodio echoes our most ubiquitous generalising paradigm: the network. Once again, the artist applies this digital tendency for generalisation in order to cultivate instances of specificity - the texture and sensation of the here and now.

From drifter (2006) to dense (2006) and shift (2008), Gilje's audiovisual nodes map out a developing exploration of specificity. drifter deploys standard computer hardware, formed into sculptural modules; in passing material between nodes Gilje begins to break the frame of the screen, creating an implicit inter-space. In dense, the hardware moves out of the sculptural field, and the screen is further deconstructed. Instead of the frontal configuration of the cinema / computer, these suspended fabric strips are illuminated from both sides with a video "weave". The familiar architecture of the screen as a blank (general-purpose) substrate containing or supporting image content, is reconfigured here; the specific materialities of screen and content overlap. Even more so in shift, where the nodes are now wooden boxes, illuminated with precisely controlled video projections. As in earlier nodio works sound and image are directly related. Here Gilje extends this fusion to the sculptural objects; each node is also its own speaker-box, so that the digital articulation of sound and image is realised, and grounded materially, in the nodes themselves.

These works drive towards a spatial materialisation of audiovisuals: dynamic constellations of AV intensity, fields for what Gilje calls "audiovisual powerchords". The projectors, speakers and networks of the nodio works present one means to this end, deploying existing media technologies. Again we find an interplay of generality and specificity, as Gilje adapts generalising systems - projectors, computers, networks - to realise materialised instances. The Wind-up Birds (2008) represent another angle of approach; Gilje sets video aside, and creates materialised, local, sculpturally autonomous nodes from electronic and mechanical materials. In these robotic woodpeckers digital media and sculptural embodiment are further enmeshed. The birds communicate using digital radio, and their behaviour is programmed in a custom chip; but their sound is simply percussion - a mechanical switch, tapping on a specially constructed wooden slit-drum. Again this is specificity over generality: a loudspeaker is an acoustic shape-shifter, a technology which promises any sound, in the same way that the screen promises any image. By contrast the Birds produce only one sound, their sound, a specific conjunction of solenoid, timber and vibrating air.

The Birds will run for a month on their own batteries, strapped to trees, calling to each other and any other creatures nearby. These nodes are unplugged: they begin to come away from the technological support system of mains power and the shelter of the gallery or studio, and move out into the world. As in the artist's other work the engineering here is inseparable from the artistic agenda; the Birds are in that sense a realisation of Gilje's spatial and formal aims, an autonomous constellation of intensities. But they also literally expand from there; where the nodio works explore the composition of spaces within a network of intensities, the Birds move outwards, creating points of intensity in the wild, and evoking a spatial alertness - a way of being in and listening to the world - that extends beyond the well-marked edges of an artwork. The Birds are more like an experimental intervention, a digital-material overlay in a complex field of the living and non-living.

Similarly the Soundpockets works (both 2007) make small sonic interventions in urban spaces, pursuing local intensification and juxtaposition through directional soundbeams and micro-scale radio transmissions. Once again we find this interplay of the general - the anything-at-all of the digital - and the specific, the here and now. The "extremely local radio stations" of Soundpockets 2 form a sort of folded juxtaposition of three layers: globalised network infrastructures and protocols, the traced or mediated locations of field recordings, and the specific time and place of the transmissions. Just as Soundpockets 1 uses exotic soundbeam acoustics to perturb urban spaces, Soundpockets 2 shows how we can draw in technological infrastructures in order to reconfigure the real environment, creating flows and distributions that form intense moments of difference and specificity.

In this reading Gilje's work is partly critical. Pursuing specificity, and an intensified, material experience of the here and now, it pushes against the generalising tendencies of digital media. By the functional logic of the network, each node is formally identical, and must be effectively insulated from its environment. Ubiquitous computing promises us "everyware" - total connectivity, the complete interpenetration of the network and our lived environment [2]. But if the network is a generalising force, if it erases differences between places, what will life in "everyware" be like? Gilje's work suggests a utopian alternative: networks that are always local in time and space; nodes of right here, right now. Gilje's work strives for what Hans Gumbrecht calls "presence"; a way of knowing the world that is characterised by intense moments of encounter or revelation - aesthetic experiences that place us in the world, and of it, rather than observing from the intellectual distance of interpretation [3].

The beauty of Gilje's work though is that it not only suggests this prospect, but demonstrates it, makes it happen; and in that sense the work is constructive, rather than critical. In emphasising the specificity of media technologies, Gilje's work shows us a different way to frame those technologies; as always material, always in the world with us - a view I have called transmateriality [3]. As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, "computers ... are material machines dedicated to propagating a behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality." [4] Gilje shows us both sides of this statement, the functional illusion - generality - and its material foundation - specificity. It shows us a way to reframe the network, too; as always local, always specific; a tangle of real flows and propagating patterns; and endless possible ways of reconnecting the world with itself. Finally Gilje shows us one crucial role for the artist, in this context: seeking out configurations that intensify, rather than dilute, our sense of being in the world.

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1. HC Gilje, "Within the space of an instant," in Get Real: Real-Time + Art + Theory + Practice + History. (ed Morten Sondergaard. George Braziller, 2005.)

2. Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. New Riders Publishing, 2006.

3. Hans Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press, 2003.

4. Mitchell Whitelaw. Notes on Transmateriality. (The Teeming Void) 7 Mar 2008. 21 Sep 2009.

5 . Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Every Contact Leaves a Trace”: Computers Forensics and Electronic Textuality. Workshop in the History of Material Texts. University of Maryland, 2005. 20 Sep 2009.

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Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist with interests in new media art and culture, especially generative systems, audiovisuals, and data aesthetics. Whitelaw's writing has appeared in a range of journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Fibreculture, Photographies, Senses and Society and Contemporary Music Review; he is the author of Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). His current work combines theory, criticism and practice in generative art and design, data visualisation, and digital materiality. Whitelaw is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. He blogs at The Teeming Void.

MA-weekend: On the Marionette Theatre - Elida Brenna Linge

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:38:25 +0200

Twice a year the MA-students at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Art Centre, and a professional jury selects one of the proposals. This autumn the young artist Elida Brenna Linge (b. 1982) will create a site specific work for the exhibition space at Hordaland Art Centre. Taking as her starting point the short essay On the Marionette Theatre by Heinich von Kleist, published in 1810, she will create a visual reading of the story, spatially highlighting the content while at the same time visually covering up the actual text.

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The MA-weekend is a collaboration between Hordaland Art Centre and Bergen National Academy of the Arts

HC Gilje

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:38:32 +0200

The exhibition recently opened at Hordaland Art Centre, and will be open this evening. Gilje has explored how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret this physical space. During an extensive career in the cross disciplinary field working with real time environments, installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video, Gilje has made different spaces come to life.

HC Gilje (b. 1969, Kongsberg, Norway) has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues, theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international dvd releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark which won the first prize at Transmediale 2003 in Berlin and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of the dance company kreutzerkompani. He was educated at the Intermedia Department of The Art Academy in Trondheim, Norway 1995-99.

BEK-night: Gisle Martens Meyer

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:42:46 +0200

Gisle Martens Meyer is a norwegian musician and composer, born in 1975, and living in Bergen. Meyer had a commercial breakthrough with the electronica project Ugress in the early 2000s. The use of cinematic elements both in music and on stage made Ugress very popular. His musical career developed into several different projects, and Meyer is a frequently used composer in films, TV, theatre, computer games and art.

Meyer has a typical modern electronic music background. He grew up making music and sound on computers, from Commodore 64, Amiga and trackers in the 80s, through PCs, hardware and sequencers in the 90s, up till today’s large quantity of mobile, digital possibilities. Meyer owns and runs a record company called Uncanny Planet, and he’s an innovative user of new technology both in his making and distribution of music, in rather untraditional and untried ways. He is strongly engaged in possibilities, challenges and issues that face both the art and its viewers, and how we experience art in our online everyday life.

Gisle Martens Meyer is currently making music for children’s TV series Kometkameratene on NRK, and has his own recurring series of concerts at Kafe Edvard.

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BEK-night: Michelle Teran

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:41:08 +0200

Michelle Teran from Canada explores the interplay between social and media networks within urban environments. She uses performative action, many times involving public participation, to articulate the relation of media to the body and architecture by staging urban interventions such as tours, walks, outdoor projections, participatory installations and happenings. She has completed residencies and commissions with several cultural institutions in Europe and Canada and presented at events and venues throughout the world. Michelle received numerous grants and awards for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention within the interactive art category and 2nd prize in the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition, sponsored by Fundacion Telefonica (Madrid).

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BEK-night: Terry Flaxton

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:58:44 +0200

Prior to his AHRC Fellowship at Bristol University he was a cinematographer, educator and artist. As a cinematographer he shot four feature films, one of which, Out of order, was nominated for a Prix Italia. As an artist his work has been seen at international festivals, galleries and museums around the world, and his works have been purchased by Arnolfini in Bristol and Museum of Modern Art in Berlin. As an educator he has taught at various UK universities including University of Westminster, Bath Spa University, University of the West of England, Goldsmiths and the University of Dundee (where he is an Honorary Lecturer). He is currently a Visiting Fellow in High Definition Imaging at Bath Spa University.

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Maaike Gouwenberg (NL)

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:49:54 +0200

After finishing her studies, Maaike was head of the platform for emerging artists Expodium in Utrecht. In 2006/07 Maaike participated in the Curatorial Training Program at de Appel arts centre. In 2008 Curator Curator, a series of projects of emerging curators at HISK in Ghent, was initiated by herself and Maarten Vanden Eynde from Enough Room for Space.Next to this the experimental project Mostly It Happens At Night took place in February 2009 in one of the suburbs of Amsterdam. On the base of this project, which took place in physical and virtual space, a new project will be shown around the theme of the relation between men and machine.

Gouwenberg's overall interests are often edgy performative practices, with an interest in the regime of theater, starting from the base of fine arts.

B-open 2009: Object + Verbal

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:47:02 +0200

Through the seminar B-open want to explore the relation between language and objects.

We are interested in looking at the function of language as a carrier of information and knowledge, and also the form and process of language itself: How verbal or written articulation takes part in the process of developing objects, like objects of art, and how this affects the way we look at them. Mediation of art influences not only the reception, but also the production of artworks. In light of the increasingly tightened bonds to academia through the founding of academic fellowships and PhDs for artists, the educational institutions affect artists’ relation to verbal and written articulation. We wish to address art’s role as knowledge production, and how this is connected to the use of textual and verbal expression in contemporary art production.

The seminar is curated by the B-open board; Toril Johannessen (BKFH), Liv Midbøe (NKVN) and Anne Szefer Karlsen (director, Hordaland Art Centre).

Time: Friday 30th of October 2009 at 10-15.30
Place: Permanenten, Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Nordahl Bruns Gate 9, Bergen.

With: Boško Blagojević, Will Holder, Falke Pisano and Mick Wilson.
Moderator: Marianne Hultman.

Registration: hks@kunstsenter.no by 23d of October.
Entrance: Kr 50,- Payable upon arrival.
The seminar will be held in English.

Party.
Party with food and performance at Hordaland Art Centre after the seminar!
Performance with Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.
At 7 PM
NoK 30,- / Free entry for seminar participants.

Reader.
B-open has on the occasion of the seminar Objekt+Verbal edited a reader in collaboration with the participating speakers. B-open has comissionned the Canadian/Swedish curator duo Firth-Eagland/Lund to write, and the Norwegian writer Mette Karlsvik has been invited to participate and write a text after the seminar.
All texts will be published here at www.b-open.no

About the participants.

BOšKO BLAGOJEVIć. Born i Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1983), lives in New York. He has recently mounted a solo exhibition at New York University's Kimmel Gallery, and has exhibited at cinemas and art exhibition spaces across the country. He has lectured at Parsons School of Design, Apexart, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. He has recently prepared a text for an upcoming monograph with Sternberg Press, has published criticism with journals such as Afterimage and Art Asia Pacific and has contributed to websites such as Art in America and Rhizome. He, along with Xenia Pachikov, is founder of Platform for Pedagogy, a New York-based initiative to advance a culture of public lecture attendance and develop the lecture
as form. He is also senior editor at Idiom.

WILL HOLDER (1969), British artist, designer, curator and publisher, which work concerns the relation between language and objects. Holder is engaged in a number of varied collaborations with other artists, notably some where he has taken on a role as mediator for others’ works – i.e. Falke Pisano - and thereby triggers further development and continuous reinterpretation. Holder is one of the editors of the biannual journal F.R. DAVID, and recently co-curated the month long program Talk Show at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

FALKE PISANO. Dutch artist, born in Amsterdam (1978), living and working in Berlin. Pisano's lecture-performances, text-based videos, objects and installations are the elements of a body of work that is distinctly induced by a practice of writing. She has in various ways in her practice researched how objects can have a presence in different ways by making transfers between various language forms, as for instance from abstract sculpture to verbal language in the work A Sculpture turning into a Conversation (2006). Her recent work focuses on the act of speech in relation to different forms of agency in artistic production.

MICK WILSON. Dublin based, British artist, writer and educator. Wilson completed his PhD in 2006 on the topic Conflicted Faculties: Knowledge Conflict and the University, and is author of the essay Curatorial Moments and Discursive Turns. From the mid-1990s to 2000 he produced a series of one-person shows, and the last years he has participated in group exhibitions like Blackboxing (2007) at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Coalesce: Happenstance (2009) at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, and more recently in a two-person show with Isabel Nolan, Reach Out and Touch Faith (2009) at Gallery For One, Dublin.

MARIANNE HULTMAN was born in 1970 in Tel-Aviv, and she grew in Israel and Sweden. Hultman has been the director of Oslo Fine Art Society since 2007. Before that she worked as a curator at Norrköping Museum of Art in Sweden 2002-2006. Exhibitions curated by her include: Charlie White, Spilling Hot Gossip; The Girl Studies (2009), Maputo, A Tale of One City (2009) in collaboration with Daniella van Dijk-Wennberg and Bisi Silva, and Rock’n Roll Vol I (2007). She has contributed to books and exhibition catalogues as well as magazines, mainly on contemporary art and architecture.

ALISSA FIRTH-EAGLAND & JOHAN LUNDH (Canada & Sweden) are working as a curatorial duo. Together with artists, curators, writers and scholars, they engineer frameworks for artistic and discursive actions. Their collaborative practice addresses questions concerning the development, production, presentation and dissemination of art and ideas.

METTE KARLSVIK is one of Norway’s most talented young writers, winning both prizes and critical acclaim. In 2008 she published her third book, Pol. Besides being a writer of novels, she holds a BA in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art and works as a journalist for daily national newspapers such as Dagens Næringsliv and the weekly paper Morgenbladet.

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Design for B-open 2009: Elida Brenna Linge

Localised / Ctrl + Z Publishing - Culture Night 2009

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:03:33 +0200

Texts by: Knut Ove Arntzen, Malin Barth, Jørgen Blitzner, Espen Sommer Eide, Øyvind Pål Farstad, Melanie Fieldseth, Gisle Frøysland, Are Hauffen, Ingvill Henmo, Toril Johannessen, Erik Joung, Annette Kierulf, Eva Kun, Per Kvist, Jørgen Larsson, Sissel Lillebostad, Jørgen Lund, Rita Marhaug, Marie Nerland, Heidi Nikolaisen, Anngjerd Rustand, Arne Rygg, Steinar Sekkingstad, Hilde Skjeggestad, Torunn Skjelland, Renee Turner, Maia Urstad, Ole Mads Sirks Vevle, Synnøve Vik, Jeremy Welsh

Participants: Anne Sofie Bertelsen, Sven Åge Birkeland, Hans-Jakob Brun, Anne Marthe Dyvi, Marianne Gathe, Erlend Høyersten, Frøydis Lindén, Trond Lossius, Åse Løvgren, Nina Malterud, Sjur Nedreaas, Julie Lillelien Porter, Dag Sveen, Sveinung Rudjord Unneland, Solveig Øvstebø

Edited by: Anne Szefer Karlsen, Morten Kvamme, Arne Skaug Olsen

Editorial assistan: Toril JOhannessen

Design: Pjolter

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Published with support from City of Bergen, and in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall on the occasion of the Bergen Biennial Conference September 2009.

Presentation by Erlend Hammer

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:51:46 +0200

Lunch will be served between 2 and 3.30 p.m. (limited) in connection with the presentation.

In Defence of Eye Candy by Erlend Hammer

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:20:56 +0200

A couple of years ago I had an idea for a project I wanted to do at Hordaland Art Centre (HKS). I wanted to give the impression that I was curating a solo-exhibition with a young, Norwegian artist, but in reality I would try to rent out the exhibition space at HKS to Clear Channel for them to show city furniture with advertising during the allocated exhibition period. Clear Channel is not an advertising agency they sell public space to advertisers that have products, services or experiences to sell. Clear Channel owns billboards on buses, on buildings, inside shopping malls and on city furniture, mostly within public space.

Since we normally refer to the art world as a public space, or rather as a part of public space, I figured anything within the art world should be within the scope of Clear Channel’s interest. The purpose of trying to sell the exhibition space was to negotiate the price Clear Channel would pay, thus finding out what could be considered the market value of HKS as a piece of public space. I wanted to get a financial evaluation of the art world as public space (“Öffentlichkeit”), albeit a very specific financial evaluation of a very specific part of the art world.

The plan was to give the audience the impression that there would be an exhibition of new works by Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen, while they at the opening night in reality would be met by regular city furniture with ads. (Both the artist and the institution were in on this from the beginning. Bjørn was also the perfect artist for this project since his work already exists in a murky water between art and commerce, with heavy focus on advertising strategies and branding. He also worked in the room next to my office in Berlin during the first stages of the planning of the project. The work at this point mostly involved us brainstorming about what we could do in addition to selling HKS to Clear Channel. One of the ideas was that Bjørn’s actual work would be shown either in the commercial Galleri s.e. in Bergen, or on actual Clear Channel billboards in Oslo; I would apply for funding from the Arts Council to pay market price for the billboards. That way we would also be able to see how much the Arts Council would be willing to pay to get some art into public space.) To me the motivation was partially that the audience would be flocking to HKS to see the “advertising art” (which I was sure would get plenty of attention in Bergen’s mediocre daily press), thereby turning HKS into a pretentious form of TV, since TV primarily is about selling people’s attention to advertisers by offering “content” in the form of TV-programmes. In this project, however, I would sell the viewers to the advertisers without even having to produce any content. Not only that, I would have sold them a segment of the population that usually “doesn’t watch TV” apart from obscure shows they download off the internet.(1)

I enjoyed the fact that I would be poking fun both at the general audience (by tricking them into coming to HKS to see advertising) as well as at the art world of Bergen and the scene around HKS, which I remembered as having been at the centre of the resistance towards the Clear Channel bus sheds.(2) A resistance I always found kind of lame. The deal between the City of Bergen and Clear Channel was as follows: Clear Channel would build bus sheds and put ads on them. This, some people thought, was not a good idea. The campaign “Byen vår” (“Our city”) emerged and arguments against Clear Channel were plunged out by middle class cultural workers, people who had read No Logo and found advertising vulgar, and “privatisation of public space” an evil that must be fought because it’s a “threat to democracy.” Related to this is the attitude that words like “persuasion” and “rhetoric” are negative because they involve “manipulation” instead of “the objectively best argument.”(3)

Whatever our opinion might be, the practical result of the resistance towards Clear Channel turned out to be a kind of class hatred since those victimised by the lack of bus sheds mainly are working class people who have to use public transport to commute to work: people with low education and low income who spend most of their spare time watching TV, and who we thereby can assume have a fairly relaxed relationship to advertising. They are the ones who end up suffering under Bergen’s lack of well-kept bus sheds. And they do so because a group of well-educated cultural workers think that advertising in public space is lame.

……….

A few months ago I sent Bjørn an SMS which read: “Fuck everything, let’s start an advertising company.” I had just seen the first episode of the TV-series Mad Men. The advertising world, to me, seemed like the pinnacle of advanced analytical, conceptual and strategic thinking. I wanted to wear a suit, drink all day long and have affairs with my secretaries. When Bjørn and I met with Clear Channel in Oslo in April of 2009 nothing was quite as I expected. Their offices at Ullevaal Stadium were not particularly impressive: none of the offices had a bar and the secretaries were as disappointingly grey as the wall-to-wall carpets covering the space. The coffee was mediocre.

On top of that it soon became apparent that there would be no selling or buying of the space at HKS. The reason was simple. The 3624 visitors HKS had in 2008 was not a sellable number. As the CEO said: “To us this is all about the numbers.” They had no interest in, or possibility to, sell advertising space with such a low number of recipients. Neither did the CEO have any interest in the potential attention an alternative form of marketing like this might lead to. His understanding of art was also less sophisticated than expected. Clear Channel, as it turned out, already has an agreement with “another participant in the art world.” I remember becoming filled with a sense of excitement at the prospect of being initiated into a juicy secret from Oslo’s art world. Who could this other participant in the art world be? Was it Galleri K, or was it Brandstrup? No such luck. It was Galleri Pingvin. According to the CEO at Clear Channel shows by “artist” Silvia Papas’ draw huge numbers of visitors to the openings at Galleri Pingvin.(4)

…….

This project is, as all other institutional critique, a mix of a conceptual one-liner (“Erlend Hammer tried to sell HKS to Clear Channel”) and a text. Now the project also consists of an empty exhibition space. I never really had a backup-plan. From the beginning I was so in love with my own project that I never really considered the possibility of this situation. I was sure it would work out, which I think Anne Szefer Karlsen also was, since I remember talking to her at one point in the preparations and realising that she apparently had already started spending the money from the sale on all kinds of fun stuff she would get for and do at HKS.

When Clear Channel categorically turned down the offer to buy the space I first thought about the idea of selling it to someone else, but that felt wrong. I realised that this was a question of yes or no. Clear Channel either bought the space or they didn’t. There was no other option than to let Clear Channel display city furniture with ads. So, a discussion with Anne Szefer Karlsen started about what would the correct path onwards would be. Anne first asked if the space for instance could be used to show a visual presentation of the project, a story about what had been going on, for the audience to read and learn. To me this was not acceptable. Not because I didn’t want people to find out what the process had been, but because exhibition spaces where you tell the story about the process behind a train wrecked project is simply crap art. At one point we also talked about whether we should just go through with a solo show with new works by Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen, since we already had announced to the world that this was what we were doing. But this didn’t feel like an option either. So it turned into just an empty space.

…….

In 1993 Maurizio Cattelan sold the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale to advertisers. This year Elmgren and Dragset pretended to be selling the Danish pavilion as high-end real estate. (An idea that would’ve been fantastic if they actually really sold it.) However, HKS is not exactly the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. As such, the attempt at establishing the value of HKS is not as general establishing the value of “the art world”, but it is specifically related to one particular kind of institution within the Norwegian art world: the publically funded art centre owned by the local branches of Norske billedkunstnere (Norwegian visual artists) and Norske kunsthåndverkere (Norwegian arts and crafts artists), a specific example of an “artist run space.” The art centres are organised so that artists apply for “exhibition slots” and these slots are allotted based on evaluations by the director, in some cases also in line with guidelines from the board of the institution. The art centres are not really driven by individual curatorial voices; they are examples of the social-democratic idea that the art scene is “free” when it is run by artists, particularly how it has developed since the “artist protests” of the 70s. The art centres exist within the same logic that makes it possible for Dag Solhjell to claim that every single exhibition by every single artist in Norway should be covered by publications like Billedkunst or Kunstkritikk.no. Such a claim must necessarily be based on an understanding of art that categorises art as unquestionably good and a general public concern. Such a view does not take into consideration one of the fundamental principles of the art world’s creation of value, which is that some things must be excluded to benefit others.

An important part of my motivation for including an artist in the project (besides the fact that I thought it would sound weird if the only thing the audience knew was that there was going to be an exhibition curated by me) was to claim that showing works at a place like HKS doesn’t really do an artist much good. The function of the empty space is also to claim that this space is not an interesting place to show art. The reasons being that this institution neither has an audience that buys art, nor an important audience to reach for me or Bjørn in order to further our careers. Consequently we might get more from trying to use the space in this way, since that at least can generate more interesting attention than from actually showing art.

This view is based on the following logic. Exhibitions that aren’t primarily sales exhibitions are generally made to generate other exhibitions, and these exhibitions should be in increasingly cooler venues. We start out by showing in small, unimportant venues such as Lydgalleriet so that we can work our way up to places like Kunsthalle Basel. The purpose of institution exhibitions is to increase the prices in the market so that we can make more money from future sales exhibitions. This is how an artist’s, or curator’s, career should develop. If an exhibition space cannot offer this kind of points we need to push on in the system, it is not necessary to make exhibitions there.(5)

And unlike younger, artist-run spaces like Rekord or Galuzin, the art centres don’t offer an ounce of hipness, and as such give very few credibility-points. So in addition to measuring the market value of HKS as a public space, using the space to show advertising would be to claim that this space is not very interesting to show art in and it would be put to better use simply by selling it, pocket the money and find a cooler place to show art. And there is really only one place in Bergen where it’s worth showing art, and that is Bergen Kunsthall. Bergen doesn’t have a single relevant commercial gallery, and the Kunsthall is the only public institution with an interesting audience.

The only reason why artists feel they have to take part in public life is that this is where the money is. This fact is at the base of a large proportion of the choices made within the art world. In whose interest is it really that an exhibition at HKS must be shown to a group of 5^th graders? Why is this something that Anne Szefer Karlsen should have to spend her time thinking about?

Exhibition spaces like HKS are based on public funding. Public funding is mainly generated in two ways. One is by pointing to “public outreach programmes” measured by number of visitors and number of events organised both for specialized and non-specialized audiences. The number of children almost count double when it comes to outreach, since the Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs (6) has decided that reaching children should be a particular focus area. That is the reason why all applications to the Arts Council include a section on how the project will attempt to reach children audiences. No good artist really has any interest of showing their art to children. Children do not buy art, have no ability to generate credibility and do not give interesting feedback.

The other way of generating funding is by showing your projects receive attention from the media. To exhibition spaces like HKS, media attention usually comes from local newspapers, Billedkunst or Kunstkritikk.no. If attention like this doesn’t regularly appear, funding bodies might think the venue is not a relevant part of its community, and the funding could disappear or decrease. To larger institutions there is also a need for international attention. Just as with Norwegian pop music festivals like Øya, this is done by including money on the budget to fly in members from the international art press, money often received through various other sources of funding, like the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the embassies of the countries the writers are flown in from. The 2009 edition of the Nordic biennale Momentum, for example, is flying in international critics to a four-day press programme that includes sightseeing in the area around Moss and other potentially interesting places like Edvard Munch’s house in Åsgårdsstrand. The reasoning behind this is that being mentioned in the international press generates cred-energy that will be released as future funding money.(7) It’s important to remember that it’s not necessarily the art institutions that are to blame here; they are simply dealing with the situation at hand. And in a way it’s also not really a problematic situation at all, since everyone seems to win: writers don’t live glamorous jetset-lives and rarely say no to a free trip, and international art magazines don’t have money to fly their writers around the world to every little event.

This September Bergen Kunsthall is organising a conference on biennials, partially because there’s been a lot of talk about a possible biennial in Bergen, but also because hosting such a conference, with so many international participants, whatever the outcome, will look impressive. Most importantly, it’s because the money was there to do it. The biennial conference has an extremely large budget for a Norwegian art conference, and the number of guests from credible institutions around the world ensures that the conference will always stand out as, if not important, at least on a high level.(8) So the money will seem have to have been well spent.

................................

Something else that is very important is that institutions like HKS provide a limited budget for their exhibition productions, other production is something the artist or curator must take care of for herself. HKS also does not provide travel or per diems, but they do offer a fee of NOK 10 000,- Artists that don’t have gallery representation usually do not have lots of cash to produce works. The system thus functions like this: if you want to do a show at such an institution you also have to deal with the Arts Council, which is the primary, or perhaps only, funding body for project support in the Norwegian art world. The system is constructed in a way that if we want to do cultural production we are also forced to enter into the system that is created to make sure that cultural production exists. If this happens to be a system we don’t want to take part in, we are either forced to drop out, or make art that is free to produce. To Bjørn and me, this means that just travelling to Bergen and staying there for four days results in breaking even.

The idea behind why the institutions themselves shouldn’t have sufficient money to cover all production costs is probably that it is seen as desirable to have a system “securing quality” where the artists themselves need to get their projects approved by the public before they can be carried out. This approval, however, is given because there is already an institution involved to vouch for the quality of the project. This means that the burden of legitimizing the work already lies with the institution, so the institution might as well from the beginning have been given the trust to allocate this money by itself. Now, however, the artists have to spend a significant amount of time keeping the financial administration alive, something all artists undoubtedly would testify makes their artistic work suffer. But this continuous application-activity is not only time-consuming. It is in the logic of the project support application that it also leads to artists justifying their own work by presenting it as relevant to the art world in general. (This, however, does not necessarily mean that the Arts Council gives preferential treatment to certain kinds of art, like “theoretical” art. The Arts Council is more than capable of supporting all kinds of art. I know this because I spent three months last year reading through five years’ worth of applications as an assignment for the Arts Council.) It’s this logic that, in different ways, leads to artists feeling like artistic practice, in general, needs to be defended. This, in turn, leads to some artists feeling that “being critical” or political is the only way to justify art. And, finally, this feeling, that art needs to be, justified makes some artists think that it is possible to talk about artists being “underpaid” because “being an artist is a profession.”

Contrary to what Fremkskrittspartiet, FrP (a Norwegian right-wing party with 35% support in recent voter polls) appears to think, the Arts Council project support model is actually a very democratic way of solving how to fund cultural production, but this is precisely the problem. The Norwegian art world needs less democracy, not more. When FrP complain about the “elitist” hegemony of the Arts Council they only reveal that they don’t understand what the alternative would be. (And they would never really be able to carry out a real cut in public spending on culture since this would also endanger a large number of initiatives that have significantly more sympathy with the people than the “contemporary art world”, like children’s sports programmes etc.) Because the alternative would be to let institutions keep control, trusting their professional judgement. This would involve, for example, that the money large institutions continuously need to apply for would be baked into the general budgets of the institutions so that the art professionals could concentrate on their actual work. But this is not an option that would really put the system in jeopardy. That would really allow populist forces to complain that “lots of money” is given to institutions whose directors proceed to “give it to their friends”, and similar problems.

What’s more important, however, and which is why art people shouldn’t enter into public debate to defend themselves, is that the entire problem field should be silenced to death. The discussion shouldn’t really be about the questions which at the moment are being discussed. The ongoing discussion is simply an excuse to smoke the “cultural elite” out of the grass so that “common people” can remember that we exist, that they don’t like us and that voting to the political right is a way of kicking our elitist asses. Nobody needs that.

The current discussion about cultural funding policies is only intended to create sympathy for political initiatives that really don’t have anything to do with art or cultural funding policies. The only goal is to score points with those voters who aren’t able to grasp the full picture of their political choices. It would of course be possible to make use of the same arguments used to attack the cultural elite (friends doing each other favours, and similar issues) to attack other parts of society, like the financial elite. As long as it is the political right that defines the discussion, where art needs to be defended, this of course is not happening. Maybe more importantly; it’s more acceptable to work in finance than it is to work in the arts, so art people are an easier target. As a result of art lacking sufficient legitimacy in public life, questions about cultural policies can be used to make people vote to the right even if this is not in their own financial interests, because cool economical analysis and rational thinking lose out to the emotional triggers that the “culture wars” put into play (just like questions about immigration, which also should be a purely financial question). What this discussion does is to draw attention towards unhelpful “us and them”-structures that serve no other purpose than to split alliances that in reality have shared interests. Cultural producers and the working class have shared interest in resisting the current attack on the social democratic welfare state that is carried out by the political right in increasingly aggressive ways. The culture wars’ only function is to blur our vision.

The willingness of the political left to engage in all kinds of questions about culture and identity allows us to be led astray by distractions that are designed to make us forget real political questions which are much more important to deal with. What we, the cultural producers, need to remember is that it is not in our political interest to define an “us” that doesn’t include the working class. As soon as we think about ourselves as a “we” that “they” are not part of, we have lost perspective on which political goals that actually are important to reach. When the art world gets worked up about FrP because we assume that their cultural policies will threaten our financial well-being, we are tricked out onto a slippery slope where we can’t avoid looking like Bambi on the ice. Which is why we should avoid taking part in these conversations, and instead focus on those questions that really matter, where cultural producers and the working class are part of the same “us.”

It is a faulty understanding of art’s position in society to think that “public” is an intrinsic quality of the concept of art. This proves a lack of understanding of how society works and (most importantly) of how it is possible to work to change society in whatever direction we want. The fact that cultural producers lately seem to have become “more interested in politics” is simply a result of cultural funding policies being attack more seriously than before, and that “being critical” is understood as a way to increase the legitimacy of sustained cultural funding. We are in the middle of a financial crisis which so far seems to hurt the bottom end of the market more than the top. The top end of the market is safe since it is already marginal to begin with and the marginally richest people are still able to buy their Murakamis and their Koons. This is why the non-commercial part of the art world is stressed and allow themselves to be pushed into defending their practice against low-brow attacks that art isn’t political or critical enough. And because the art world sees itself as “an important part of public life” we believe this involves us having to contribute “critique” and correctives to the way society works.

In reality the art world is a very marginal voice in the public conversation. The problem, however, is not that art is a marginal voice in the public conversation, but rather, that we shouldn’t accept this fact. The reasons why we accept this is because it would jeopardise the foundation of our entire existence, since we are living on grants, were we not to. Just like the politicians providing the funding believe, we believe that our function is to offer critique of, or “new perspectives” on, society. The art world’s desire to appear important in public life is really a continuous struggle to defend its own existance, a struggle that hinders the art world in concentrating on what it should be concentrating on, whatever we think that might be.

The parliament election is more important than art. It’s more important that people don’t vote to the right, than it is that they see art. And it’s not because of their cultural funding policies that people shouldn’t vote to the right. That’s why it’s unfortunate when cultural producers make critical statements about the political right based on their cultural funding policies. To the large groups with no sympathy for the cultural field (because we’re elitist snobs who live in Oslo) our attitude towards the political right is a sign that the right’s policies must be correct. That’s why it’s counter-productive when cultural producers publicly criticise the right for wanting to “trash public funding on culture.” Because the majority of people, partially prone to voting for the right in the first place, will most likely think “ooh, trashing public funding of culture…give me some of that” and then they will be even more likely to vote to the right than before. But even more importantly, it is immoral of cultural producers to vote for certain parties based on their policies on public funding of the arts. Such voting is as selfish as rich people voting for parties that make it easier to avoid paying taxes. The most important part of politics will never be arts funding; the most important part of politics will always be to make sure that as many people as possible, beginning with the weakest groups in society and then moving up, can make their lives better. Arts funding is good enough. We don’t need more money for the arts. The money that exists should perhaps be spent differently, and less money should be spent on administration work. The cultural field can hope for more sympathy when we have made contributions towards making things better for the parts of society that actually have more precarious needs.

So what should we do? I have no belief in art as a critical tool.(9) There is nothing cultural producers can do within the art world that can contribute to actual political change. At best “political statements” made within the art world can make people within the art world achieve a moment of insight in particular political questions, but this will only, at best, lead to these people carrying out other, perfectly normal, political actions, like for example voting for a particular political party. I do, however, believe that there are more intellectuals among cultural producers than there are in society in general, and intellectuals have an obligation to contribute to making society better.

That is why it is particularly unproductive when cultural producers spend their time on questions raised by the cultural left. The cultural left’s focus on identity questions, or the “analysis” of questions like “modes of critique, participation and resistance in the charged field between the cultural field and the political sphere”(10) and perhaps “critical art” in particular, is suffering under a certain jargon and is therefore stuck in a quagmire of inaction. The cultural left is trapped within a spectator role ending up running errands for the right by allowing the emergence of conflicts between parts of society that would otherwise have been allies in the resistance towards the political right. This is what the “culture wars” are really about, and the cultural left keeps falling into the same trap again and again. Like when some people think that advertising in public space is an important political issue today. Although the resistance to Clear Channel in Bergen was a practical matter and attempted to reach a particular goal, it was motivated by a confused idea about what matters in politics.

Artists who really want to contribute to political change must work with politics, as must everyone else whether they are carpenters or bankers. This demands an understanding of politics as not about the public debate (which very often is a mock-debate), but about making sure that the right people are in position to make decisions. In addition we must make sure that the very infrastructure where decisions are made is maintained in a way that does not threaten liberal democracy or the welfare state.

We must give up the idea that the art world should have some kind of privileged position to offer political awareness because of its “free role in society.” Art is not particularly well equipped to be critical because it is free, it is unfree because it is trying to be critical.

Erlend Hammer, Strausberger platz, 25^th July 2009.

(1) A kind of TV-viewing that breaks with the society contract (OBS) not because we’re ”stealing content” but because we are escaping the real purpose of TV, to subject ourselves to advertising in exchange for the content we’re served. The project would thus also function as a kind of moral victory on behalf of advertising in the face of a morally suspect segment of society.

(2) Which they apparently were not. See also season 2 of The Wire where the entire plotline springs from a misunderstanding.

(3) This is mostly a result of the Sophists being portrayed as evil in the liberal arts education programmes in Norway.

(4) Galleri Pingvin could generously be described as the worst ”gallery” in Oslo, but in reality it simply isn’t even part of the art world. It’s more a kind of scam-operation where IKEA-style artworks are presented as ”art”.

(5) Some artists I have talked to claim that there are also other reasons for showing art, such as having made a new work that one really wants people to see. This, however, is tree-hugging hippie crap. The goal is always sales or cred.

(6) Yes that IS what it’s called….

(7) The writers are invited with hopes that they will write something, but there are of course no demands forwarded. However, if the invitation is made through the editor of the various publications, expectations that something will actually be written are more probable. It also doesn’t really matter if the writer should end up giving a harsh critique, since the words ”Momentum 2009 was reviewed in publications such as Frieze, Art Forum and Flash Art” will look good on future applications to the Arts Council and local funding bodies.

(8) During the same days as the conference in Bergen, documenta are hosting a conference about documenta at a castle in Torino.

(9) We are trapped within a sufficiently post-Duchampian situation where statements made within the art world are seen as being expressed while wearing a clown’s nose.

(10) Sheik, Simon ”Representation, Contestation and Power: The Artist as Public Intellectual.” http://www.republicart.net/disc/aap/sheikh02_en.html

Translated by Erlend Hammer and Anne Szefer Karlsen

whatsthebigmistry (Priya Mistry)

Thu, 21 May 2009 14:29:42 +0200

Working with modes of story-telling whatsthebigmistry creates public interventions and intimate exchanges; journeys, rallies and promenades off site and spaces made bespoke and transformed by the artist. Projects are located in a variety of settings from formal art spaces and galleries to public space in streets, markets, riversides, road side cabins, online to the use of old warehouses, listed buildings and former breweries. Mistry´s work and process is synonymous with collaboration and exploring new ways of creating.

Priya Mistry graduated from De Montfort University with BA Hons Dance & Theatre Joint (+video & photography) in 2003. Mistry undertook a year of creative development from 20004-05. During this period she trained in aspects of visual arts at The Glasgow School of Art as an evening student. She trained as a performer, featuring in productions at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and volunteering and working in the arts, media and sports organisations, venues and companies.

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In collaboration with USF Verftet

DIG IT by Linus Elmes & Anne Szefer Karlsen

Thu, 21 May 2009 13:36:58 +0200

Linus:

I think we should change the world, and hope you don’t think that is a too ambitious goal... We have to start to think about the reasons for exhibition production. You know how we go about this. See exhibitions, read texts, go to seminars and make studio visits. Why don’t we forget about that for a moment? I just read Aldous Huxley last night. He writes: Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
My suggestion is that we don’t care about the recipe this time, if you excuse the metaphor. I am thinking of a number of works I have bumped into during the last few years, by Ylva Ogland’s father, Tova Mozard’s father and a painting in Andres Widoff’s studio. They are all fantastic works which have had tremendous impact, but remain unknown to a larger audience. I have spoken to a few other artists too, to ask if they too have works of similar importance and have received some wonderful responses. This is what Po Hagstöm writes:

About the village which didn’t care about art, and about the artist who kept painting.

Paul Cseplö came to Jämtland as a child, when his family fled from the war in Hungary. He was fascinated by the landscape and started to paint. He was not affected by the fact that the people of the village didn’t care about art, and in my childhood Paul was the only artist in the village. Paul’s answer to the fact that no one was willing to pay for culture, was to paint. These days there is a painting by Paul in every home. There are paintings in the pizza shop, the boat house, on the caravans and in the old people’s home. He painted the stage in the community house, the walls around the public dance floor and the walls of the big halls of the school. He was almost never paid, and only very seldom did someone want reimburse him for the paint. Sometimes he was not even paid respect.

Paul kept painting his whole life. When I visited him at the hospital in his last days he was painting a small forest lake on the hospital wall, with intravenous in his arm. The previous year his brother had died of leukemia and he had himself been fighting cancer for several years. My father was sad to hear about Paul’s coming death, but Paul just laughed: “Don’t be sad, why don’t you join me?” According to Paul nothing disappears, it just transforms.

Paul died in 2008 of leukemia .He was one of the best people I have ever met. And even though he might be right in saying that nothing disappears, the world is poorer without him.

The most interesting question to ask in relation to art is “what does it do?” Paul’s art changed a community. His actions have made it impossible to go around my village without encountering art. Is it possible for the people living there not to be affected? I don’t know. Do I think they deserve these works? Absolutely not. But Paul never distrusted the value of art or the strength of its presence. And his choice to distribute art is to me an all encompassing position when I act as an artist/curator.

Anne:

Change the world, why not? In many ways that is exactly what these works already have done. They have been feeding artists and their art works. And I agree, let’s leave behind the frame we usually operate within. For instance, what does it mean to create an exhibition situation, over an exhibition? I think that by creating a situation a space opens for relations and meetings different to the exhibition space. I am not necessarily talking about a social situation, but situations between the work and the viewer. We are inviting the public into a room of documentation, where we through examples document and acknowledge the private meetings these works have provoked. These are not elevated world known works, and we might not even want them to become that? These are works almost no one can know before they see them in this exact situation. I say almost, because of course they are extremely well know to some. And I guess that is where I want us to go. I want to look at the works and appreciate them in the exhibition room, but I also want to move further and think through what is usually not discussed within this frame. For instance I could approach the word inspiration. Or we could claim, like Po’s story indicates, that these works might create attitudes or alternatives we don’t encounter many places in society other than in art; the speechless activity, in the right sense of the word, and the activity without direction.

You are going to the country side with Ellen Jakobsson Strømsø’s father in a few days, to document and bring her contribution to this situation. When I hear her speak about her father I gradually realise who she is and why she creates what she does. The story of him as a member of the Art Council of Stockholm, where he consistently recommends the young female artist with the shortest cv to do public art commissions, expresses an attitude to society we can trace in his daughter’s work. To use another metaphor, since we both like them so much; by creating this situation we are creating a back stage traversing space and time.

Linus:

I have come to think of the individual works as subjects. The principles of selection are based on an interpersonal perspective, as if I was positioned in relation to an object, in the sense of an individual, rather than an art object. This is a position which undermines both discursive and rational interpretations, but instead force us one step closer to the Suchness which Huxley speaks of. Both the institutional and economical logic in the art world is based on track record and the idea of the oeuvre. This is what actually regulates value in economic terms but also in significance. The value is created and re-created through the surrounding text. Criticism, reproductions and our own communication such as this very text you are reading right, now helps to upkeep a certain order. When it comes to: change the world, I suggest we see that as having the tools to change the situation we create. In this case we do it through compiling this project in a mode that does not consider the length of any CV, just as little as Ellen Jakobsson Strømsø’s father considers it in any way. Anders Widoff writes: Millan and I must at some point have walked through the same dream. How else can it be explained that that this painting evokes so many memories? Moreover, I think that the painting seems to emerge as moisture and mold from the base. It seems almost as unpainted.

Anne:

That is why it is important to meet the works. Meet them and figure out how they affect, it they affect, and then try to describe that meeting. This way we can contribute to new thoughts about art, and with an attitude to display something not displayed before. This is something the institutional and economic art world has had to face in this globalised world. Because, at the same time as we have few tools to handle these works within the institutional circuit, we cannot apply our tools to art and visual expressions form other parts of the world without possibly abusing them. To let art exist in its own right for a while, without the evaluating “system” is a liberating thought, as well as necessary. Because it is not our task to dignify the contemporary at the same time as the contemporary happens. We cannot create a map of a terrain which doesn’t exist yet, we can at best make a weather prediction. Once again I turn to the exhibition vs. the exhibition situation. It might not be about changing the world we already know, as much as it is about changing the consciousness about the world about to be created. In this case the consciousness about the framework.

Linus:

In this case I think of the exhibition situation as visiting a dear friend, when you sit together in the kitchen or maybe on her bedside. You talk intimately about things; mutual experiences and shared secrets. Maybe you lightly touch each other’s hands.

Mikael Lundberg explains his relation to the Venetian portrait of the woman very straight forward:

it’s bought in venice, late 80’s when i lived there with katrin for 5 years, we even got married there, i saw it in the window of a restorer and bought it, i wanted it since it represented both katrin and venice, 2 factors that had an amazing impact on me and my artwork.

His words are liberated from rhetorical figures, academic alibis and worries. It is the explanation to why this is a work that means something, and that is the explanation to why it is included in our exhibition.

Anne:

This makes me think about the difference between interaction and staying in touch. It is easy to stay in touch with the help of something which replaces the format of conversation, nudge, kudos, sms. All three kinds of attention are pleasant, but can never really replace the conversation. Yet, we know that we don’t necessarily have to be close to the one we have a conversation with. Tønnes Omdal’s painting which has been hanging in the living room of Sveinung Rudjord Unneland’s grandparents, for instance, has been conversing quietly from the past for many years already. It keeps conversing, both with Sveinung and us. This work is important to the family, and Sveinung writes:

Tønnes Omdal (1920-80) worked all his life at Lista, except his years as a student at SHKS and The Art Academy in Oslo. At Lista he ran a small farm on the side of his activity as a painter. The work in this exhibition situation is owned by my grandparents, and has its reserved space above the sofa in their living room.

My grandother has told me many times that Omdal claimed it to be the pest painting he ever painted. I have often wondered if this was something he told everyone who wanted to buy his works, or if this was in a class of its own. It depicts a harsh weathered landscape, like I know it from Lista where I grew up. As a kid I could not see what the image portrayed or why it was supposed to be so good.

I often find it difficult to believe in art. Maybe that difficulty is similar to my doubt that chaotic colour fields could represent a landscape. When I look at the image today, I wonder how something as everyday as a changing sky above a landscape can be so much more. It’s as if this study of nature from the Seventies depicts something entirely different, like the emptiness after hours in front of the TV or the powerlessness after fifteen million hits on the internet. And I thought I had to make a noisy multimedia installation!

Linus:

It is a question of critical moments, maybe even a psychoanalytic process. It is a collection of points of references and informal historical objects that have shaped individuals. I will end with Tova Mozard’s text about the work that named this project. She writes:

The artwork I named “Dig it” is an old spade with the words DIG IT written in silver text on the blade.

The work was made in the Eighties by my father Lars Westin. Lars was born 1955 in Ystad and died in 1993 in Thailand. He was found in a hotel room. The vague and negligent written abduction report mentioned cardiac arrest as a result of an overdose as the cause of death.

Lars was an artist but lacked adequate education and he never had much of a career. He went to an art program at Östra Grevie 1973-1975, he made drawings, paintings, collages and assembled objects. He was interested in craft, Arnold Böcklin, surrealism and symbolism.

To re-activate and re-use things was something magic to him, he said it was important to be surrounded by things which were rooted in the souls of humans, that this established a certain contact. He collected human hair, jewels, junk, chains, textiles and toys. He assembled this to shamanistic objects and three-dimensional images or he just used it to pimp lamps, mirrors and carpets. He talked about making “things glow” and was interested in occultism. To him art was a state of mind rather than something fixed.

He was the kind of artist who claimed not to stand the light of day, he stayed up all night, painting to the soundtrack of Captain Beefheart and Greatful Dead. He loved the aroma of wet paint and dissolving agent.

When I was a child and visited my dad in Lund, we used to sit on the floor of his two-room apartment and listen to Elvis Presley and draw. I was allowed to draw directly on his oriental carpet, according to him it was a way to communicate with all the symbols woven into the carpets. I remember the luxurious feeling of using his silver and golden pens, I had to pump the ink through by pushing the edge against the paper until it shaped a dazzling, metallic spot. After Lars die, I inherited many of his things. The spade was one of them. I was thirteen the, and I remember how cool I thought it was. I kept it in my room and when I moved I brought it with me.

What makes it so powerful is its simplicity and the humorous form of a readymade. I can see his cynical world-view and his black humour reflected in it. Lars talked a lot about death and the process of dying. For me the spade has become a symbol of the effort it is to live. To dig where you stand or digging your own grave, that is the question.

Årsmelding 2008

Wed, 13 May 2009 02:25:09 +0200

Vedtekter

Wed, 13 May 2009 02:22:11 +0200

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe...

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:59:48 +0200

Speakers are Glenn Adamson (art historian and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and author of Thinking Through Craft), Synnøve Vik, (art historian, critic and exhibition coordinator at The Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts, Oslo), Hans Stofer (designer-maker working in the field of the Applied Arts and professor at the Royal College of Art, London) and Anders Ruhwald (artist, London/Detroit). Moderated by Anne Thomassen.

NOK 100 payable at the entrance

The seminar will be in English.

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Seminar programme:

10.00 - 10.05 Anne Szefer Karlsen, director Hordaland Art centre, introduction

10.10 - 10.30 Heidi Bjørgan, curator, introduction to the exhibition That was then... This is now.

10.30 - 11.15 Hans Stofer, designer-maker working in the field of the Applied Arts and professor at the Royal College of Art, London, presents his own work and discuss the status of crafts at the College of Art.

Break

11.30 - 12.15 Synnøve Vik, art historian, critic and exhibition coordinator at The Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts, Oslo, about how the Nordic crafts has changed the last five years.

Lunch served at Hordaland Art Centre to all seminar participants.

13.15 - 14.00 Anders Ruhwald, artist, London/Detroit, artist talk.

14.00 - 14.45 Glenn Adamson, art historian and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Thinking Through Craft.

Break

15.00 - 16.00 Debate with all participants, moderated by Anne Thomassen.

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Anne Thomassen, artist and part of the artist group Temp. Thomassen is Head of studies BA Visual Arts programme, Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), and is on the board of Oslo Fine Art Society as well asi n its election commitee. She has been part of the aquisition committe of Public Art Norway (KORO), and has produced several exhibitions, such as Momentum 2004 in Moss and International Academy of Art Ramallah at the Oslo Fine Art Society in 2006 in collaboration with KHiO. Temp ran a gallery space for two years, between 2000 and 2002, and is still active as an artist group.

That Was Then... This Is Now

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:57:02 +0200

With That was then... This is now Bjørgan picks up a discussion from 2002: The point of departure for this project is the exhibition Made in Scandinavia [1], an exhibition which debated the dividing lines between design, visual art and craft from a craft maker’s point of view. It introduced a broad range of works in metal, textiles, glass and ceramics by up and coming artists and designers from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, and was shown at Galleri Temp during the Bergart festival programme of Hordaland Art Centre in 2002.

Through Made in Scandinavia a selection of works was selected which could present ‘the new design’ emerging from Scandinavian art colleges at the time. In 2002 attitudes and tendencies emerged which emphasised a humoristic-conceptual and playful approach to design and craft, often in combination with exhibition and presentation techniques taken from visual art.

What has traditionally been defined as craft is today in a less clearly defined landscape; it can just as easily appear labeled as design or visual art. That was then... This is now discusses issues relating to positioning and defining what we understand as craft today. What we are supposed to understand as craft is the subject of a discourse voicing contradictory arguments.

This exhibition asks: Do the practitioners seek a common undefined area where genres flow into each other and where everything is allowed? How can craft makers preserve craft’s starting point in materials? Do we want to preserve craft’s starting point? This, in turn, raises a number of supplementary questions: what directions have the tendencies displayed in the 2002-exhibition taken? Where are the participants in the landscape of art, design and ideas today, and what new tendencies can we see outlined?

In her research Bjørgan has revisited some of the exhibitors who participated in 2002, and sought out art graduates from the Nordic art colleges in order to shed light on these questions. Bjørgan was at the outset of the project curious to map whether artists today have become even more conceptual or whether they have turned more towards design. Or perhaps we will see a return to more traditional craft? As a practicing artist and curator, it is Bjørgan’s aim to pick up and focus on movements in contemporary craft, something many arenas for Norwegian art fail to cover which in turn represents a loss for both the public and for craft makers. By showing the exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre, which has traditionally been an arena for craft and visual art, she wishes to re-establish craft as relevant to this art institution and the general public. This project provides the curator, the institution and the audience with a chance to challenge the perception of what craft is or can be.

As an integral part of the exhibition, the one-day seminar Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe... will discuss the issues the exhibition raises. A publication containing relevant texts will also be produced.

[1] Made in Scandinavia was shown by Galleri Temp, where Heidi Bjørgan was memeber from its inception, as part of Hordaland Art Centre's BergArt festival contribution. Bjørgan acted as project supervisor and principal curator for Made in Scandinavia.

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The exhibition is supported by City of Bergen, Culture Point North, The Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts, The Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts West Norway and Arts Council Norway.
The exhibition is produced by Hordaland Art Centre.

HC Gilje - blink

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:16:46 +0200

Like a conductor he directs image and sound through the room to create compositions of new experiences. These are the two most recent projects where Gilje explores different ways of improvising with space.

During an extensive career in the cross disciplinary field working with real time environments, installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video, Gilje has made different spaces come to life. By exploring how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces HC Gilje has focused on his research project Conversations with space the last three years during his fellowship at The National Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowships Programme at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (KHiB).

In addition to the exhibition featuring his two new works the audience can also take part in his wide production the last years through documentation material displayed in the first floor space: Soundpockets, out-doors sound installations; Wind-up birds, mechanical wood peckers; mikro,site specific performance based on microscope textures; nodio, a series of audio visual compositions featuring movement and grouping of images; as well as shift, a diverse collection of video projections on objects and surfaces. The development of specific tools, both soft- and hardware, has been an integral part of his process, which amongst other has resulted in the video projection programme VPT, which quickly gained ground through international users.

Gilje (b. 1969, Kongsberg, Norway) has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues, theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international dvd releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark which won the first prize at Transmediale 2003 in Berlin and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of the dance company kreutzerkompani. He was educated at the Intermedia Department of The Art Academy in Trondheim, Norway 1995-99.

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The exhibition is prodused in collaboration between Hordaland Art Centre and the Bergen National Academy of the Arts.