The trendiest of cultural expressions

My refrigerator has gone on the blink in the hot weather and food does not even keep until its sell-by date. A colleague points out that this is similar to the art world, the trendiest of cultural expressions that she has encountered — worse even than the world of fashion.

My thoughts turn to Lo Caidahlen’s interesting book Konstens anspråk [Art’s Pretensions] which was published earlier this year and in which some twenty artists are interviewed about their attitudes towards art. One of the subtitles in each interview is The Art Scene/Trends. Several of the artists take the opportunity to regret the trendiness of art, for example Carl Johan De Geer who emphasizes that art today is extraordinarily sensitive to trends. (In comparison to what, the sixties?) But there are also quite different voices. One of the most entertaining interviews is with Dan Wolgers who ridicules the people who prop up the bar while complaining that art is trendy: ‘One stands there believing oneself to be honest and candid though, in point of fact, one is naive and old-fashioned and pretentious. Renouncing the trends is more pretentious that looking at them and dealing with them’.
One finds a similar attitude in Stig Sjölund, a person whose work constantly follows what is happening in the world. ‘Everything is in a state of change and art needs to be so too if it is to be interesting’. For people who see the artist as timeless and the values of art as eternal this is naturally an irritating statement.
The word ‘trend’ is used remarkably frequently without any attempt at definition. As I understand things this is a matter — as in most fields — of a broad register: from important and searching discussions to unoriginal follow-my-leader games adjusted to the current market. In the world of criticism one often sees how what was originally an attempt to define something important at the time is, in due course, reduced to conventional assertions. But a world of art totally without trends is something that only people who see art as being quite separate from the world could believe in.

The project ‘Best Before’ by Åsa Andersson and Karin Hansson takes as its point of departure a society in which date marking and sensibility towards time are fundamental values. Certain information appears at a precisely calculated point in time and disappears at another point. PR companies and marketing consultants cleverly exploit the winds that blow and create news around any message or any product on the market. Everything can be sold by the person with his finger to the wind. The interesting thing is that if one followed the characterizations that are often applied to the art of the nineties — a return to physical presence, to everyday concretion — one would realize that ‘Best Before’ passed its sell-by date well before the project was even thought up. The information society: was that not something that one was concerned with during the eighties?
If one looks at the participating artists it becomes evident that these are aspects of our situation that can scarcely be separated. Analysis of the information and media society did not cease just because a decade ended. And this is an analysis that is intimately interwoven with the analysis of ‘reality’. Below there are some brief reflections on the artists in this exhibition. Even if they cannot be summarized under a common heading one may note that several of them concern themselves with some of today’s most sensitive ‘sell-by’ fields: advertising, information technology, the market. But also with more sluggish, everyday matters that are difficult to define. Or, viewed in a wider perspective: like attempts at understanding how — or if — one can understand something of what is happening right now.

the art

This last ambition has pervaded several of Åsa Andersson’s and Karin Hansson’s joint works: the will to understand some of these instances in which ‘information’ is produced today. When, a few years ago, they started [a:t] they commenced with an extensive Internet project with some twenty artists and as many companies involved. The aim was to gain an insight into some of the mechanisms that are active on the Internet but also to see the extent to which the Net can be exploited as an exhibition venue.
In recent years both of them have worked in companies in the fields of PR and the Internet besides their artistic activities. These experiences in due course gave rise to Ted, a fictitious person in a human body. Ted can be seen as an investigation of how one creates a brand name. One day we see him handing out balloons bearing the device ‘My vote’ beside Carl Bildt’s speech for the EU election, an ‘unusual’ event that was in the news programme Rapport the same evening. The next day he is on the culture page in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. The values that he stands for have naturally been sifted from the period: goodness, intuition, vulnerability and truth. For the time being one can see Ted and his appearances in different media as a means for the artists to learn their ‘strategies’ — to gain insight into and to make visible the power that is available to those who know how to spread a message. But what is Ted to sell when he has become widely known? Underpants or polemical journalism? Every message, every product becomes a moral choice.
The work becomes a sort of hybrid of some of the artists’ separate works. Åsa Andersson has previously worked with portraying the border of what we can not really grasp or understand, as in the exhibition ‘Avatar’ in which two large ‘speaking’ sheets of glass created an interface that was simultaneously transparent and opaque, a sort of doorway to the other side of the computer screen and to fantasies about what happens there. Karin Hansson has, for example, exhibited real people from her own situation. The first time was when one of the human ‘advertisement supports’ on Drottninggatan proclaimed ‘Lövbiff 79 kronor’ during the performance weekend ‘Loveall’. A Duchampsian gesture with powerful social undertones. In another work she presented her union representative as an ideological underlining at a time when the unions risk losing their meaning. In this borderland between something very concrete and something that is difficult to grasp, between simulation and ‘reality’ one can place several of their works. Ted becomes the incarnation of a process which is normally hidden. He has naturally been launched in accordance with a real marketing plan, a process with equal amounts of information, misinformation and manipulation. One thinks of some of the fictitious corporations that turned up during the eighties, such as Stefan Karlsson’s Paperpool International Corp which satirized the multinational business ethos of the time.

Ted is hungry , Andersson/Hansson1999

With this we are getting close to the subject of Ola Pehrson’s latest works: the Market. We are fed daily with reports about the state of the financial markets: The market reacted thus and thus to the statement of the Prime Minister; The market reacted negatively to a forecasted reduction in unemployment, etc. If it has long been claimed that political decisions are increasingly being made on the terms of capital rather than on ideological grounds this is at least evident today.
Ola Pehrson’s Yucca Invest Trading Plant can be seen as a picture of the market’s logic, or lack of logic. A Yucca palm has been coupled to a computer using electrodes, and the electrical currents that are registered govern purchasing or selling indications for a number of shares. If the Yucca palm does not give a positive result it gets no water, whereas if it succeeds it is given water and can grow more. Here the market undeniably appears as the nervous and irrational system that it is, in which every decision is as dependent on gut feeling as on intellectual and technical calculations. The work also links to the terminology that pervades economic language — growth, offshoots — words that seem to indicate a natural law. The ‘market’ is increasingly depicted in this fashion by the frequently paradoxically servile media. Was it not Fredric Jameson who said: We are living in a time when it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to conceive of a non-capitalist economy.
Ola Perhson works with various techniques, often conceptual, even though painting is his base. In one of his paintings he has, for example, tried to recreate every brush stroke of Zorn’s self-portrait with a view to being able, in due course, to reproduce the ‘genius’’ painting mechanically. Simulations and translations are two recurring concepts as in the works in which the artist has played with computer simulation of imagined physical objects but which do not necessarily have any simple physical reference. In his Desktop Ikonostas [Desktop Iconostasis] we meet, instead, a physical model of a normal icon-based Windows interface. The religious terminology causes me to think of what Sherry Turkle in ‘Life on the Screen’ (1995) calls the ‘Macintosh Mystique’: users in an interface constructed in accordance with a simulation aesthetic remain on the surface, at a level of visual representation, without being able/needing to know anything about the underlying mechanisms.

Winfile.exe, Pehrson 1999

Mikael Lindgren has made use of digital techniques in his art ever since leaving art college. Nowadays he works, in parallel with his artistic activities, with developing programmes for 3D graphics in real time, mainly for games and simulators — two tasks that clearly influence each other.
If one looks at Lindgren’s work from the nineties one notes a recurring interest in matters of language and power, the individual contra society. One of his earliest works, Yes Box No Box from 1992 contained cancelled official documents from the government and parliament, documents that had never been in the public domain. The extensive collection of documents was presented in a sober construction which enabled visitors to withdraw material and take it home. Accessible but unreadable. His Karaoke Power Platfor was also based on archival material. Here the visitor had to climb up into a ‘political karaoke’ where instead of the usual popular tunes there were recordings of historic speeches, everything from Margaret Thatcher and Hitler to Martin Luther King. The result was a strange hybrid of political reality and entertainment, of fiction and fact.
In one of his most extensive computer-based works, Karma 2000 — recycling the future from 1996 (together with Mats Hjelm) history and the future were intertwined in a stream of images on five large screens in the room: scenes from science-fiction films, with their visions of the future, were mixed with probability calculations of future wars, epidemics and criminality (information from the Internet). As we know, one can create truths both backwards and forwards in time.
Similar matters of reliability and meaning are touched on in a later and, expressionistically, simpler work: five diagrams presenting different studies. Everyone knows that one can support any conclusion one likes with statistics nevertheless it is extraordinarily easy to view such presentations as reliable. By introducing evidently subjective and ‘impossible’ subjects such as ‘Things I should have done versus things I shouldn’t have done’ the works play with the feeling of authority that the form promotes.

Karma 2000 - Recycling the Future, Hjelm/Lindgren1995

Oracle, Boqvist 1999

Kari Mjåtveit’s work also has links with portrayals of time and specific moments, though less explicitly. Her photographs can best be described as a sort of condensed narrative, or as the artist herself expressed it in a e-mail conversation, as a ‘mental and physical summary of a narrative’.
The result is often quite comic, banal, comprehensible and incomprehensible. In one photo we see a hand held out of the window and with half a loaf of bread speared on one finger. In another a quilted jacket is spread out over the corner of a brick building. In a third picture a man is lying across a deckchair holding a cup of coffee in one hand while beneath the chair there is a large pool of milk in the form of a ghost.
Her point of departure is often everyday milieus and objects and her portrayals have something documentary about them. We clearly see everything in the picture. At the same time it is impossible to explain what is actually going on. When I think of these pictures there is one word that comes to mind: ‘contemporaneity’, as though they were temporal sections in which possible events and thoughts had been stacked upon each other. A sort of grey zone between an outer and an inner world: subject and surroundings can, quite simply, not be seen as separate entities but are in a state of continual exchange with each other.
The pictures seem to touch on something that has a high degree of ‘Sell by’: the problem of describing and evaluating things while they are happening. Which aspects of that which takes place around one and within one form part of the exegesis of a situation? Who has not forgotten what the newsreader just said because his or her forehead had its own performance?

Mjåtveit 1998

Johan Fowelin takes us back to the start of the text: since the end of the eighties he has worked both in art and as a photographer for fashion and advertising. Thus his pictures extend over a wide field. Johan Fowelin has often made use of genres and styles of photography in order to look more closely at their language. One example is the extensive series of pictures from the subway which relate to traditional architectural and documentary photography. A completely different way of working lay behind an exhibition from 1994 in which he showed photographs that he had found in the vast archives of the Stockholm Transport Authority. He chose photographs documenting uniforms, but only those portraying the person from behind. The repetition gave a feeling of the absurd and, as with Mikael Lindgren, one senses a fascination with the archive as an entity — for the will to embrace and document everything.
For this exhibition he has, with Åsa Andersson and Karin Hansson, worked with photographs from companies and institutions that, in different ways, have influence in today’s information society: Swedish Television 24, the trading room at the SE Bank, the media company Spray, the PR company Rikta, the Swedish Council for Psychological Defence. The pictures have been taken with a large format camera and are, of course, carefully directed. (I can not help thinking that all the participants had to sit still for 10 seconds while the pictures were being taken.) The portrayal departs provocatively from the aesthetic that we normally associate with several of these places: no drama, no drastic or rapid gestures, merely a feeling of something very ordinary.
One of Fowelin’s early pictures is a photograph taken at the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin in 1989 just after the border had been opened on 9 November. It is dark and, in the foreground, one sees something that seems like a film production or an illuminated building site. In point of fact the picture shows part of a gigantic media stage that was constructed on this historic place since it was hoped that something dramatic would take place there. Nothing happened and the stage became something of a media anticlimax. And when the wall was later removed this took place in an orderly manner. The photograph is ten years old but thoroughly contemporary as an emblem of how our own time is produced, of how history is created.

Translation William Jewson

Berlin 17 November, Fowelin, 1989