The One Thing After Another
Per Kristian Nygaard at KHM Gallery
by Wojciech Olejnik

Per Kristian Nygaard’s exhibition The One Thing After Another explores the influence of social and political ideologies on public and private space, on its material composition, on its architecture. Consider House (2010), a model of a high-rise building constructed out of unfinished plywood. It towers over the viewer like a modernist sculpture, simple and elegant in its design and use of material. Such simplicity marks much modernist city planning and architecture, which seem to embody a bare rationality developed out of a rigorous consideration of the placement and arrangement of objects. This approach involves the implementation of an overarching order, where even ornamentation stems from its very structure, according to an inner logic. House (2010) presents the deduced, bare essentials of such a logic: form and material. Presented as a model it acts as a demonstration of the original design, of the formal concerns that precede the eventual completion of the structure, and in its unpainted state it brings attention to the raw material used in its construction.

It is no secret that in modernist architecture the materials used were often left exposed, that they themselves symbolized new engineering feats, but also represented a new modern age. Nygaard’s work such as Unapologetic Architect II (2010), brings attention to certain forms and shapes that have also been crucial in establishing the modernist aesthetic. This piece is a drawing of an imagined building, which compresses rectangular shapes to form a complex architectural structure, reminiscent of a mall or some other social space. A uniform grid of windows covers the walls and the roof, with steel frames and glass convening in an angular geometric reality of cubes and squares. Unlike a circle or a triangle, the cube is infinitely divisible into the same shape, into equal portions, and thus it may represent equality itself. Here, the clean lines and Lego-like units that define this public place suggest a uniformity of the social body, of its infinite mass, and how its wealth and property can be portioned into discrete, equal yet separate units.

Mirrorbox (2010) also utilizes the form of the cube. In this work, four small mirrors line up on a shelf to form a box with their reflective sides facing inwards. Like a miniature gallery this mirror cube encases in its center a plinth also constructed out of mirrors, which stands unoccupied, reflecting itself in the surrounding walls over and over again until infinity. This kind of self-reflective, self-referencing system is familiar to the most severe modernist art, but it also parallels the insulated, self-replicating realm of form. For what is form if not the infinitely present, the innumerable itself; that which cannot be counted, cannot be bounded, like a mirror image which cannot be extracted from its realm? Once form is materialized as an actual object it becomes specific and unique, a singular entity that carries the trace of its particular history. From the outside Mirrorbox (2010) is plain, dead black, reminiscent of a box one finds in a magic show which holds inside a completely different universe of intangible entities and reflections.

The distinction between form and material is always a matter of perspective; it is the distinction between the inside and the outside, a distinction which can be overcome theoretically, but not materially. The drawing, End of Suburbia... (2007), presents a grim grid of almost identical suburban houses, walled-in so that the individual plots are only visible from above, from the viewer’s privileged position, while on the ground level each exists as its own, singular world. On this bottom, material level the boundary to the outside, to the formal system seems almost impenetrable. The formal can never be successfully reconciled with the material because every material object is singular, different from all others, while form is innumerable, infinite, always the same. Attempting to enforce the same on the differentiated can also never be completely successful – in fact, is this not the problem with the application of an ideology to politics, where this application may be most successful and dreadful in its unfinished state, as an everpresent tool for the control of the populace? Perhaps these typical pitfalls of the application of ideology to politics could be avoided if the content of the ideology was transparent, constructed rationally and verifiable. Many ideologies (such as Marxism) claim such an approach, because it is premised on universal accessibility, where every individual has access to the political sphere. However, this transparency is often prone to oversimplification, for even on the formal level everything is not always simple, one encounters paradoxes. Thus, as the square or the cube can represent a kind of social equality, it could also represent a totalitarian, inescapable sameness, as in Unapologetic Architect II (2010).

And so in some of the work such as Fence (2010) Nygaard utilizes a curved form, an arc rather than a square, a form that does not mark out an enclosure, but defines an opening. Fence (2010) is a hand-made, metal, curved handrail, which occupies the middle of the gallery space, its starting point positioned just inside the entranceway to the gallery. On a neighbouring wall hang three drawings, one of which presents a card with a definition of the word “fence” pasted over a loose rendering of a fence. By presenting the object, the drawing, and its definition, Nygaard is able to deconstruct, to unfold the functionality, the design of the object, and in doing so provides a fuller account of the object, giving more access to what this word might actually mean. At first, this fence may appear as a typical urban object, used to divide the masses into more manageable aggregates. But here the strong rectangular logic of the city gently swerves, gently bends from its expected rigorousness. Of course, handrails often take a curved form, but here in a gallery space it no longer fulfills its prescribed function. Nor does it simply stage the social-political power machine by constricting the viewer’s movement. What Nygaard is after is something more subtle, more actively resistant. The viewer’s movement is not simply prescribed by the fence; the viewer must actively configure their relationship to it, by choosing a path alongside it. In this way, the function of the object is altered, but also it is not restricted to a single use. Its very form and placement allows for a renegotiation of its function, while its unclear function allows for a reexamination of form as the transparent, simple entity, which through its unchangeability always enforces the same onto the differentiated, onto the material.