Hordaland Kunstsenter

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.