Where do Artists come from?
by Per Kristian Nygård
One day Theodor Ringborg asked me where artists come from. I said that I was uncertain, and then he insisted on showing a film about an Icelandic genetic researcher who claimed that the answer lay in our genes. The genetic researcher built his argument on an example from a remote fishing village in Iceland where everyone had been fishermen as far back as they could remember, until one of them suddenly decided to become an artist which, the researcher claimed, meant that the answer was in genetics.
Joseph Kosuth once wrote that deep down in the artist´s soul there is a fear of being revealed as a fraud. If we could find and isolate the so-called “creative” artist gene, it would be possible at an early stage to discern who´s genuine, who´s a wannabe and the other way around. (But is anyone really interested?)
The genetic approach also eliminates the idea that a certain form of innovation or creative invention could be the result of a need or an environment, since it only arises through mutation. For instance, the creative innovation of the wheel. Was it invented on the bases of a desire or a need for a wheel? Or was knowledge of the wheel genetically determined?
Where is the artist going? – Towards the post-industrial knowledge-production society?
For whom is it relevant where the artist come from? Who wants to know? What is it that is so alluring with this autobiographical dark masturbation-hole that we so easily get drawn into? Isn´t it more important to track where you are heading?
November 9, 1989 I remember my father saying that I had to come and see: “They are tearing down the wall now”. We saw the East-Berliners hammering away at the wall as years of isolation and anger blended with the tears of joy. I remember my first thought: Why did they build that wall there? I was 10 years old and didn´t understand anything.
The visual depictions of liberation in the former East Berlin are still touching, but the image of genuine joy expressed over the newfound freedom does in retrospect also entail something sad. A perverse fascination mixed with frightful delight; a fascination with the structure of the wall and perhaps a fear of dissolution. What now that the battle was won? Was it won? What next?
I think the core in many ways can be found here, in the time where all is dissolved, and in fact turns into air. Where everything seems to change faster than anyone can reflect on the consequences. A time of irreversible reforms. Then came a time where ideological convincement apparently becomes an obstacle for progress. Void after the end of grand History. Did it lead to totalitarian individualism? I was born into a time where nothing is greater than the idea of the self. Where the staging of the self is the greatest of all. A generation that had global environmental disasters for dessert. Not so much to do about it, except recycling our trash. We just have to keep our confidence in the continuous growth of the market.
If I prefer to talk about what the artist wants, or where the artist is going, it is difficult not to simultaneously describe what art is. It is visual non-academic thinking. And at the same time an effort to understand.
The balance of terror during the cold war had the world on hold. Now it was set in motion. Walls fell and Europe was continually redrawn. In retrospect, these memories are also characterized by emptiness, but not as political nostalgia – at the age of ten, I was neither right nor left on the political radar. Political affiliation is irrelevant here, and even though we know that artists are politically correct leftwing, elitist fascists, full of goodness, this is something that only comes in our late teens.
All these inarticulate, non-verbal and strong visual images of something that came to an end and an unknown beginning. The visual communication of events, simplified by a news anchor created a need to create images of these impressions – to supplement the deficiency of words.
In my work I am interested of what I often describe as an ideological vacuum, seemingly meaningless, the moment right before or after a fall. Or changes. A breaking point. The architectural scene in which the collective dissatisfaction culminates. The moment before Capitalism was able to manifest itself as the new world religion.
My work rotates around these themes; architecture and ideology and especially late modern architecture, in this period where the early modernist ideas become streamlined to formal repetition.
I think of architecture as a physical and mental image that I work with through reproductions and fictions based on architectural structures. Architecture as the last step in a political process, a collective idea, or a manifestation of political ideology.
Translation by Jonatan Habib Engqvist / IASPIS.
(the text was written as a response to the question “Where do Artists come from?” and was written for a publication made for Open House at IASPIS September 2011, curated by Theodor Ringborg.)
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