Gardar Eide Einarsson, from his exhibition ‘Power Has A Fragrance’ at Astrup Fearnley

When I went to Oslo, I didn’t expect to see what I saw.  From all angles, the Norwegians are making a concerted effort to support both the incredibly energetic Nordic Contemporary artists as well as their counterparts in the international community.  In this article you can read about four of these different angles: a private gallery (Standard Oslo), a museum (Astrup Fearnley), a private/corporate effort (Carnegie Art Award) , and a purely state run entity (Office for Contemporary Art Norway).

Carnegie Art Award recepient Milena Bonifacini (Peruvian-born, lives in Denmark)

Let’s start with the Carnegie Art Award.  This exhibition is wildly comprehensive in mission, scope, funds, talent, and expertise.  The more I saw and the more I learned, the more my faith in the corporate world’s ability to take strong cultural initiatives into their own hands was restored (the award is funded by the Carnegie Investment Bank).  To every major corporation and investment bank I say take note and follow their lead.

Carnegie Art Award recepient Astrid Sylwan (Belgian-born, lives in Sweden)

The exhibit features 23 exclusively Nordic artists (meaning living in or originating from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Iceland) ranging widely in age, gender, medium, and résumé.  As you can read on the the award’s website, the work featured in the exhibition is nominated by a series of art-experts, people working in museums, educational institutions, or specialists in other Nordic Contemporary Art contexts.  It is well curated, benefiting from the spacious and well-lit Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo.  Amazingly, the complete exhibition also travels to Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Beijing, Helsinki, London and Nice, maximizing the exposure of this Contemporary Nordic survey.

Carnegie Art Award recepient Foreground, Camilla Løw (Norwegian)

Carnegie Art Award recepient Sigrid Sandström (Swedish)

This painting from Sigrid Sandström (above) captures well a sensation that I often had throughout the exhibition.  The strength of the piece is rooted in its abstract and harmonious tension between form, color, space, and movement, yet it also acknowledges what I might call its natural Scandinavian roots, with its flat glacier-like forms floating on top of a mysterious swirl of depth and gesture.  To achieve this kind of contradiction in a work of art, when a piece talks about something while remaining for the sake of itself, is no small feat.  Moreover, that Sandström has developed such an elegant visual language to express this contradiction makes the experience of this painting all the more sublime.

Carnegie Art Award recepient Hannu Väisänen (Finish-born, lives in Souillac, FR)

(ibid, detail)

Carnegie Art Award recepient Anastasia Ax (Swedish)

An obviously impressive component of the show was the diversity of the works displayed.  Between the painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and documented performance pieces, hardly any medium was left unexplored.  For me, not only does this reflect strongly on the breadth of Scandinavian artists, but it also speaks well of the shows organizers, who clearly made a distinct effort to provide a full view of Contemporary Nordic art practice.  The show takes the perfect amount of risk, incorporating various works of an explicit, daring, or violent nature without coming off as too distractingly shock and awe.

Carnegie Art Award recepient Torben Ribe (Danish)

Next, we move to the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

Sheela Gowda: Postulates of Contiguity at OCA in Oslo

In traveling, I often have this sort of reverse effect where the more places I visit, the more patriotic I become about the United States.  Call me cheesy but, time after time, the more I see across the pond, the more I realize how lucky we are to have what we have in the States.  Unfortunately, my visit to the OCA in Oslo was not one of those moments.

Sheela Gowda: Postulates of Contiguity at OCA in Oslo

(Rant Alert) The fact that United States does not have a Secretary of Culture is appalling.  Not that I haven’t had this feeling before, but I am honestly baffled at my country when I read about how the Norwegian Ministry of Culture, in conjunction with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, established this Office of Contemporary Art with “the aim of strengthening the position of contemporary visual arts and production from Norway and of stimulating and facilitating exchange between Norwegian and international art professionals and institutions” (from the OCA website).  And keep this in perspective, Norway has less than five million people.  Less than five million people.  There are almost twice as many people in New York City alone than there are in the whole of Norway, and yet their state makes a serious effort to dedicate a relatively large share of their resources for the support and sustainability of targeted cultural movements in a way that I just don’t see happening in the US.   Think back to the hotly contest $50 million allocated for the NEA in last years Stimulus Bill, a sliver of a fraction of a percentage point in a bill which totaled some $789 billion.  Then read this from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture’s website: “The Government’s vision is that Norway will be a leading cultural nation in which culture is given prominence in all sectors of society. Art and culture have great value in themselves. Investment in this sector has a strong influence on the achievement of other social goals such as business development, employment, integration and inclusion, health, learning and creativity.”  Furthermore, it would perhaps be different if we could say that private entities were stepping up to the plate and picking up the slack, but honestly, do you see any investment banks in the States doing what Carnegie is doing in Scandinavia, especially relative to what exists in America? Ok, that’s done.  Back to the matters at hand: Sheela Gowda and the OCA.

Sheela Gowda: Postulates of Contiguity at OCA in Oslo

The installation of Sheela Gowda’s at OCA is a graceful example of how aesthetic simplicity can yield vast expanses of perceptive and sensory information.  According to OCA, Gowda uses a set of “simple raw materials: 120 sewing needles and 120 red threads”, in a scrupulous process of weaving the threads (each measuring an astonishing 230 meters, approx 755 ft.) through the eye of each needle, “doubling the thread at its center.”  She then uses a composite mix made of natural materials (including kumkum) to bind the threads together and form the rope-like material (that, I must say, really reminds me of red-vines) which she then “inscribes by a meticulous and laborious process” within the space.

Sheela Gowda: Postulates of Contiguity at OCA in Oslo

The cords hanging from the ceiling beams of the rather large, completely white-washed OCA gallery space have this uncanny effect of putting you in your place.  They give the viewer a sense of their own physicality by making them aware of the space around them.  For me, the real focus of Gowda’s installation is not the cords themselves, but the transparent distance between our eyes and the objects they see (a phenomenon described at length in Aristotle’s De Anima [Part 2, Ch. 7], which feels all the more relevant because of the Aristotelian implications in Gowda’s title-word ‘Contiguity’).  This space is after all what defines our experience of the world, without it , it is safe to say that the cords would not exist.  The linear forms she strews through the gallery work to create a sort of Cartesian coordinate system with the additional z-axis, and, importantly, with the viewer becoming a point in that three-dimensional spatial system.

Sheela Gowda: Postulates of Contiguity at OCA in Oslo

At the same time, Gowda undermines this system in decisive ways.  One way is the gestural positioning of the cords, which gives life to the system through a quality of spontaneity.  After all, while the linear quality of the cords does impose a graph-like effect on the space, the lines are not straight; instead they seem to straddle the line between predictability and the obscurity, much as we do as humans.   The other is the physicality of the cords themselves.  For one, there is the knowledge of how long and painstaking the process was to make them, which complicates the “system” by introducing the role of the artist as creator.  Furthermore, that the ends of the cords are left unbound and unraveled, sometimes with the pack of needles on the floor, sometimes with the end of the threads disappearing in a seemingly infinite regression into space, further adds to both the poetry of the piece and the self-awareness of the artist (the needles are the only part of the installation that the artist asks the viewer specifically not to touch).

A really bad photo showing video of Gowda working on the piece in her studio

Finally now we turn to the last two venues, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and Standard (OSLO), which I will sort of lump together because they are both currently exploring the same Norwegian artist, Gardar Eide Einarsson, albeit in different ways.

The Meaning of Limited War, 2010 Acrylic on canvas  213 x 183 x 4 cm

First of all, I have to glow on Astrup Fearnley for a minute.  On top of it being a beautiful museum centrally located in Oslo that charged me nothing to see its exhibits, it also gave me, for the small price of my email address, a nice canvas bag with a bound color catalog of Einarsson’s show containing extensive essays and images inside.  Perhaps this might sound only somewhat unique to you, but I assure you that if you received anything for free in Norway after bleeding kroner for ten days, you’d be as astounded and appreciative as I was.  Not to mention, the museum’s exhibits were comprehensive and well curated with plenty of means for visitors to inform themselves on the mission of the museum as well as the projects of the artists they expose.  Moi je dis bravo.

Gardar Eide Einarsson, Our Rival the Rascal (Silvers 1, 2, & 3), 2008-2009

In respect to Einarsson, I enjoyed the opportunity to see an in-depth display of perhaps Norway’s most up and coming Contemporary artist.  It is well documented that he and his art are not what they seem.  According to Interview Magazine, while his work may at first look like the “kind of art made by a lot of young, white New York guys these days” with “plenty of graffiti, references to gangs, skateboarders, the police…”, one can, with closer scrutiny, discovers uncanny manifestations of the “painful limits of transgressive acts.”  This characterization, which I read after I saw the exhibition, resonates with me.  Normally I am not a fan of graffiti art, or at least not when its in the museum / gallery setting.  But, without necessarily being able to describe it like Interview did, I certainly felt like Einarsson’s work had deeper, or perhaps more unique, currents running through it.

Caligula, 2010 Mixed media sculpture: fluorescent light tube and fixtures 140 x 730 x 15 cm

In general, I liked his muted palette, his embrace of flatness, and his ability to pull off text in his art.  It’s clear that he has worked tirelessly to develop a certain aesthetic, and that he has tried it out in thousands of different combinations, giving an overall weight to his work.  And his identity as a Norwegian artist who moved to New York the day before 9/11 somehow perfectly suits him to critique the often tragic individualist-cowboy-hero-rebel characters that exists within American myth (*cue My Heros Have Always Been Cowboys* – god I love this song).  At the same time, it also makes sense that Einarsson has over the last years been spending more and more time in Japan.  In terms of his themes, his aesthetic, his presentation, his concepts, I find myself wondering: what other body of work could be produced by a child of the ideal socialist state who now splits his time between New York and Tokyo?

Organise or Starve, 2009 Cotton duck, iron and hemp rope 280 x 200 cm

Untitled (JESUS SAVES), 2008 Neon, metal and rotation motor, 550 x 180 x 180 cm

The show at Standard (OSLO) is in conjunction with the Einarsson exhibition at Astrup Fearnley and displays ten small works of other artists that speak to his influences.  Some of the pieces are from Einarsson’s own collection, some borrowed from collectors, some taken right off the internet.

Vito Acconci, Sisters, 1970

I was particularly pleased to see this Acconci piece seeing as though I just had the opportunity to hear him speak at UCSD in La Jolla as part of the fantastic Public Culture in the Visual Sphere lecture series.  Actually, I am proud to say that I peed next to Mr. Acconci in the men’s room just before the lecture.  It turns out that Einarsson worked at Acconci Studios, where he no doubt gathered a great deal of critical experience.  Discovering this fact only made my liking for Einarsson stronger, as I clearly remember feeling envious of the team that worked around Acconci on those impressive projects.

Gallery shot at Standard (OSLO)

Daido Moriyama, Bye-Bye Polaroid, 2009

Alors voila my experience of Oslo’s Contemporary art scene.  Mind you, I still had a list of venues I was unable to visit and in general I get the feeling that I only scratched the surface.  All in all its safe to say that I was incredibly impressed by not only the art but the city in general and its resolve to support Contemporary practice in particular.  I kept thinking Oslo like Portland but with a King.  If you ever get the opportunity to visit, I wouldn’t dare pass it up.

I leave you with a few shots from the permanent collection at Astrup Fearnley.  The Anselm Keifer piece in particular I loved, especially how Einarsson incorporated his cones around it.  I had never seen a sculpture piece like this from Keifer and was not expecting it when I walked in the gallery.  A pleasant surprise!

Anselm Kiefer, Zweistormland/The High Priestess, 1986-89

Anselm Kiefer, Zweistormland/The High Priestess, 1986-89 (alternate view)

Christopher Wool

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, with a view of one of his Hulk paintings in the background