be|long

Reflections on an exhibition


I have decided to write down a few reflections on my own recent exhibition; be|long. This might well turn out a very self-centered and priggish text, but I feel I had not had all the discussions I hoped for and there’s aspects left that I need to pin down and clarify for myself. Read it at your own peril, then.

I want to take as a starting point the titles in the exhibition, since they have turned out to be far more revelatory than I expected when I first named the works. First off, the title of the whole exhibition, which was designed to be read in three different but interlocking ways. Belong, read as one word, represents what turned out to be perhaps the main theme of the show (slightly more concerned with the individual human than I first pictured). The universal desire to belong to a whole and the frustrating inability to find and hold on to that sense of belonging seems to stem from the common (mis-?)conception that it is something we once had, that we lost, and that we might somehow hope to return to. Then dawns the crushing realization that in this world of constant flux, the idea of a return is an impossible utopia. And so with spatial belonging thus shown a vain prospect; we cannot belong in anything but time. Which leads to the second way to read the title; as the phrase be long, referring to longevity. Uncapable of grasping the intersection of past and future that is the present, and find any kind of solace in our linear time perspective, we try instead to extend our place in time; to live longer, either biologically or in the structures, the buildings, the monuments, we create in our name. Posterity becomes the battleground. In our failure to belong, we try to be long.

And thirdly; isn’t it wonderful how the word belong breaks up into the two verbs; to be and to long? With the risk of turning entirely portentous; don’t these words pretty much define human existence? We are, but we always want to be someone, something, or somewhere else. This constant dissatisfaction separates us (I would suppose) from other lifeforms, and is at its core of course tragic. But isn’t it also what drives creativity, science, progress and history? Maybe this state of perpetual and futile search is where we actually belong.

Trying to avoid further grand statements, I now turn to the works in the exhibition. The clay wall was intended as the central piece of the show; it posed most challenges to me, and it connected most obviously to my readings and discussions during the process. Curiously it turned out to be the least obviously formative of the main theme that I’ve described above. Most people I’ve talked to simply read the exhibition more as a personal space than as dealing with architecture and the city, and thus the clay wall turned into an atmospheric backdrop to the room. I don’t want to decry or deny this, but it is one of the things that have prompted me to write this text, and I still think the connections and implications between the personal and the societal become strong with this work. Once again, its title – Re: Building – was designed to be read in several ways. Two grammatically different, with two shades of meaning within each. Disregarding the colon and reading it as one word poses the question of what is being rebuilt? The clay wall does not try to imitate something that was once there, but rather it attempts to reimagine the space as a whole (one effect I was happy about was how it drew attention to the size of the wall and the height of the ceiling, something a lot of people made surprised comments about). So rebuilding in this sense comes closer to repositioning rather than recreating; again emphasizing the impossibility of return and the inevitability of change. But there is yet another nuance of the word rebuilding, which is its relation to the word recycling. This is echoed in the clay itself. Taken from the site of the new motorway in southside Glasgow, it is waste material from underneath the city used by me to build a new structure within the gallery space. In my way of seeing things, this reusing of material, together with the above described ”rebuilding” of the room, muddles the distinction between construction and destruction, and in a way mocks the idea of human creation, or of an individual claim to posterity. We are after all only endlessly rebuilding the earth, without ever adding anything new, or making any truly lasting modifications.

The grammatically different way of reading this title is noticing how it emulates an e-mail subject line. In this case the Re: stands for reply, meaning the work is a reply to building. But this could both be a reply to a building, and a reply to building as an activity. In the former case, the building in question is of course the Vic gallery. The work replies to the building it’s been placed in both in a strictly physical sense – the way the gridsize answers to the windowpanes, playing with 3D perceptions, the way it restricts and changes the light in the room, the way it uncomfortably incorporates the outshoots from the wall behind it – and in a symbolical sense – it is a visibly withering, temporal wall ”desperately” built in an old space that will itself be torn down together with its surrounding building within a year.

Building as a broader human activity is better represented by the roadwork-source of the material. Compared to the M74 project, my clay wall is a very different sort of building. While the construction of the new motorway aims for permanence, or at least the illusion of permanence, I aim for cracks and ephemerality. While the structures put in place on the southside exchange and cover the unruly nature with concrete and asphalt, I have hid a solid white wall behind a layer of muck. While a new road is built with a modern view of the future in mind, a wall of clay gives the space a tint of age and monumental time. In these ways I hope that my wall works less as one architectural structure among others than as a reply to building as the manifestation of expansion, progress and linear time perspectives.

In the gallery corner there was a TV, showing a still image of a plowed field, with a soundtrack of birds, and a mound of earth in front of it. This work was called Return; a much more concise and less ambigious title it would seem. But this is also the work in the exhibition which I am least resolved about. During the long time it has spent in my sketchbook it has taken on several different meanings and references, and the title Return which I gave it quite early on, prompts me now to try and relate it in different ways to the theme of the show. One of the more obvious associations perhaps is one of a ”return to nature”, a concept I do not believe in, but that I often find myself veering dangerously close to in both art and argument. Because while I really do not want to advocate any Rousseau-inspired illusion of a blissful natural state, and I maintain the impossibility of a return, especially to a utopia that has never existed, I also aim to fundamentally criticize our society’s antagonistic relation with nature. While my impulse is that we need to preserve the rural landscape and retain our direct contact with the earth, I rationally deplore any form of conservatism and backwards-striving. So in some ways this work seems to mock my own tendency for nostalgia and romanticism.

A related way to read the work regards its concern with the form of art; the difference between representation and illusion on one side, and the ”real” on the other. From this perspective the earth represents the ”return” of the concrete material from the image, overturning the passive consumtion of a mediated representation of the world. While this is one form of return that I wholeheartedly agree with, the work doesn’t completely bend to this interpretation. The earth has not broken out of the confines of the TV-monitor, it’s been placed there by me. The illusion of it having come out of the screen is just that; an obvious and quite unconvincing illusion. So instead of conquering illusion have I just replaced it with another illusion? Is it possible to make people react and interact with art as a physical reality, or will they always rather, as many did in my show, sit down and watch a screen, waiting for the slightest bit of movement (and in some cases even convince themselves they saw the still image move), since we’re all by now weaned to a world constructed of images?

I have now written about the impossibility of a return as though it is something I am absolutely sure of. It’s not. Because I realize that this assumption is very much embedded with a typical western linear time perspective. The greatly appealing theory of cyclical time is instead completely based on the prospect of return, and the work Return relates very clearly to this. Not only does the image of a rural field bring to mind the cyclical activity of sowing, reaping and continually reusing/revitalizing the earth, but its soundtrack (which is of course also looped) enhances this relation. The sounds of skylarks and cranes were chosen partly because they are both natural inhabitors of this place (the field in the image is situated a few hours outside Gothenburg and I have personally seen both these bird-species in this location), but also because they are migrant birds; i.e. their lifecycle is characterized by a constant leaving and returning. But – as always there is a But – both these bird populations are, together with the whole rural landscape, increasingly threatened by urbanism, industrialism and environmental change. So, the linear competes with the cyclical; the idea of human progress seems completely incompatible with cyclical thinking and any kind of return. Touching on this is also the image’s obvious references to Anselm Kiefer’s field paintings. In his work, the plowed field symbolizes history. Is this then a return to or of history? Or is the fact that the ordered and plowed field on screen contrasts with a raw mound of earth in front of it signalling that any grand linear narrative belongs in the world of illusions?

Lastly I return to the theme of belonging with the work simply titled Belong. The associations are simple; the human form within the element which it, according to myth, was created from; earth. A peaceful, even inviting, image of an imagined belonging. The problem is that there is no human body there, only the empty space – the trace – after one. It is a mold one could imagine returning to, but that would of course crumble and be ruined if one tried. Furthermore, it, again, speaks of cyclical time in a problematic way: The imprint is made in a fetal position, but it is also easily likened to that of south american mummies – the bed of compost is both womb- and gravelike. The fact that the imprint is one of a young adult (me), to me gives it a sort of desperate character in all its stillness. A clinging to the idea of in pulverim reverteris, if you so will.

But Belong is also very much a bed; made by the standard measurements of double-size beds. In this it ties with the rest of the exhibition – the old-fashioned TV and the comfy chair, the wall with its window spaces – in creating a slightly distorted, but above all deserted, personal space. Is this a room that’s been forever left empty, or is it waiting for a return? Is it a picture of a bygone past, or of a possible future? As I mentioned in the beginning, I thought the show was gonna be more about architecture and society, but I am now very happy about how it became more personal, without turning overtly self-referential. It is to me about man’s wish to belong and become one with time, in a world that seems to be hopelessly engaged in a battle against time.