Joakim Hällström

For my graduation project, I aim to look into the possibilities to (re)conquer, repurpose and generate new meanings for the objects that we surround us with, through the use of sculpture.

Most of our cultural products and artifacts have a unilateral, culturally programmed functionality inscribed onto them. However, new purposes can be generated through action. A skater modifies the use-value of urban architecture by performing tricks on it and mundane, sharp objects can easily be turned into weapons, which is why airport and prison personnel are required to be experts at categorizing things in binary terms. Paradoxically, this systematic and paranoid labeling has a constructive aspect as any suspicion momentarily disturbs our perception of the object. All possible outcomes need to be taken into account; a spoon fluctuates between an escape tool/murder weapon and a piece of cutlery.

It is this potential for (and sometimes even marriage between) comedy, creativity and violence that is latent in most objects that has led me to think about their instigating conditions; boredom, necessity and desperation, as a kind of holy trinity.

Many groups of people – impoverished, marginalized, fanatical or just purely passionate hobbyists – are forced to deal with limitations more than others, hence the need for creating certain strategies. In terms of ingenuity and use of material, how have they manifested their aims? Naturally, that is an overwhelmingly huge topic to cover, but I would like to look closer at a kind of DIY approach of stubborn, light resistance as a mode of formulating a critique against programmatic thinking. From a sculptural standpoint, it can be quite spontaneous and juvenile too, as Cady Noland illustrates in an interview:

An adolescent walks down the street with a couple of friends eating an ice cream cone and suddenly smashes it into the coin return slot of a pay phone. It’s a nihilistic, negative, gratuitous thing, not functional. It does not facilitate anything, yet it’s a pleasure to make the thing function in this other way.

This ‘pleasure principle’ will be discussed in the thesis, also in relation to me making sculptures from a fan perspective. I will dedicate a part of my thesis to the relationship that I have to my subjects, that have often alluded to or been taken straight from popular culture.

My works in the past served as lamentations of the point in time when initially powerful phenomena get exhausted, watered down, mass-produced and mediated. By contrast, in the thesis I will try to emphasize and elaborate on the intriguing aspects of what drew me to the source material and (actual materials) to begin with. This will also be a good opportunity for me to explain my views on the ability of physical materials to speak ‘on their own terms’ about their intrinsic properties and other things I am concerned with: loss, history, economy, paradox, absurdity.

Practically, I will test these thoughts by producing works that have been processed and shaped using several ‘workshop’ techniques, moving slightly away from the impact of heavily associative, straight-out-the-store products to more amorphous shapes and constellations. The origins of my chosen materials would become less distinguishable, in an attempt to bring them out of their semiotic territory. I imagine this being less about arranging visual codes and making premeditated work and more about creating stuff in an experimental manner.

The structure of the thesis will take the form of a pseudo-journalistic essay, interspersed with anecdotes mostly from daily life, art history and popular culture. I find texts by Raphael Zarka, Robert Smithson and Cady Noland helpful to look at for their tone, as well as templates for collecting information from a wide range of fields while relating it to their respective practices. I intend to keep a loose narrative throughout the thesis, similar to an extended magazine article written for a ‘general audience’.

I wish to analyze and link specific elements in my work (say, a brand of bubble gum used in a sculpture) to my personal preferences, trying to dig into what it means for me to be a fan of something. Is it an aesthetic tactic that can be nourished?

In The Forbidden Conjunction and The Question Is To Which Is To Be The Master, Zarka theorizes about forms of movement and Galileo but most importantly how the practice of skateboarding “energizes” and “destabilizes” structures conceived for rest and comfort, by the simple gesture of riding on them. Smithson, Zarka and many others have championed the production of social space through simple gestures - it is a discourse that might be not directly applicable to my thesis, but I am curious to know if it might somehow inform it. Can

INDEFENSIBLE THINGS

For my graduation project, I aim to look into the evocative power of materials and objects, as used in my sculptural practice. More specifically, I am interested in the tension that arises when we attempt to decipher the inevitable wide range of connotations that a material can carry versus its matter-of-factness, its unilateral, culturally programmed functionality.

To me, this is related to the possibility to (re)conquer and invent new meanings for the objects that we surround us with. New purposes can be generated through action, similar to how a skater modifies the use-value of urban architecture, how an actor uses props onstage or the way in which mundane, sharp objects can easily be turned into weapons (airport and prison personnel are required to be experts at categorizing things in binary terms).

I believe in a certain sense that the potential for (and sometimes even marriage between) comedy, creativity and violence is latent in most objects, a notion that I wish to explore further; boredom, necessity and desperation as the holy trinity. Whether any of this is true or false, a few questions have been on my mind lately: how should I relate to objects/things/commodities if they are instruments of ideologies? Will they disclose anything about us, about collective memory, if I turn them into sculptures, i.e. hijack them? Can they be nullified or recontextualized or is there a threshold where ‘outside world’ classification of objects stop making sense and everything turns into form? How do you activate a sculpture, something dead?

I have previously made sculptures that deal with popular culture directly or appropriate its visual language. I see these works as lamentations of the point in time when initially powerful phenomena get exhausted, watered down, mass-produced and mediated. By using recognizable pictures, expressions and ubiquitous items, I reflected on how certain ideas are pursued and materialized in mass culture, viewing them as vessels for values. I have incorporated glass, wood, furniture, digital photos, plastic and steel, some of which have been industrially treated, cut, painted and so on, whereas others have been left raw. More recently, I have become fascinated by the physicality of materials, trusting their ability to speak ‘on their own terms’ about what I am interested in: loss, history, economy, taste, paradox, absurdity and their intrinsic properties.

Practically, I will test these thoughts by producing works that have been processed and shaped using several ‘workshop’ techniques, moving slightly away from the impact of heavily associative, straight-out-the-store products to more amorphous shapes. The origins of my chosen materials would become less distinguishable, in an attempt to bring them out of their semiotic territory. It would, perhaps, be less about arranging visual codes and making premeditated work and more about generating stuff in an experimental manner.

My concerns and research questions will tentatively be filtered through a prism of personal anecdotes as I usually work from the perspective of a fan. In the past, my stance has been quite critical and somewhat distanced. What if I close this gap entirely? In any case, a short discussion on my relationship to my subjects and fandom might be appropriate to include at some point in the thesis.

In connection to what I said earlier about inventing new meanings, I would also like to stress and elaborate on the astonishing amount of pleasure found in the process of making things behave the way you want them to, as a kind of DIY approach of stubborn, light resistance. Depending upon how hard I push this idea, it can be anything from the joy of assembling sculptures - effectively thinking through them - to formulating a critique against programmatic thinking.

To guide me in this process, I will look at the content and style of Cady Noland’s strange pseudo-academic essay Towards A Metalanguage Of Evil. Here she lays out the characteristics of psychopathic behavior – treating human beings as objects – by drawing from headlines, Hitchcock films and popular soap operas. While this inverted anthropomorphism might have many implications in regards to how fans treat their idols and sculpture making, I will most likely use it as a template or simply as inspiration for the basic structure of my thesis.

Texts by Bill Brown, like How To Do Things With Things and Thing Theory, also surveys the status of objects and things but in a greater philosophical perspective. I hope that Hannah Arendt’s Truth And Politics can expand the discussion by providing me with a bridge between everyday politics/deception and the encounter with an uncanny, wonky sculpture.

A great source of inspiration over the last couple weeks has been Raphaël Zarka’s On A Day With No Waves, an exhaustive, incredibly detailed chronology of the entire history of skateboarding. The included essays, The Forbidden Conjunction and The Question Is To Which Is To Be The Master, theorizes about forms of movement and Galileo but most importantly how the practice of skateboarding “energizes” and “destabilizes” structures conceived for rest and comfort, by the simple gesture of riding on them. I am curious to know if there is something to be learned from this attitude, from this one-liner.

References:

Noland, C. (1987) Towards A Metalanguage Of Evil, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.

Zarka, R. (2011) On A Day With No Waves: A Chronicle Of Skateboarding 1779-2009, Paris: Editions B42.

Arendt, H. (1967) Reflections, Truth and Politics The New Yorker, February 25, 1967, pp. 49.

Brown, B. (2001) Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things, pp. 1-22.

Brown, B. (1998) How To Do Things With Things, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 935-964.

Marten, H. (2012) Interview with Maurizio Cattelan, Flash Art n.283 March-April 2012

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Over the past year or so, my sculptures have moved towards abstraction and have become increasingly based on the evocative power of materials. As a consequence, I have been interested in the range of cultural connotations that materials potentially can carry, and ultimately their political significance. The materials that I work with are ubiquitous and not technologically sophisticated, but in the past I have not shied away from opportunities to ‘improve’ their appearance by applying spray paint, gloss, varnish and so on.

For an untitled sculpture that I made earlier this year I assembled printed, glossy digital photographs of color gradients with cinder blocks, a big sheet of glass, plastic boards, fake marble wallpaper and black insulation material. These pieces had been installed asymmetrically on the floor, the white cinder blocks forming two miniature towers. A bit further away, on one of the walls, two A4-sized prints had been placed at eye level, one being a product photo of a diamond-studded silk tie against a black background. I had sourced the image from an online store that sold Swarowski-enhanced modern day business attire and then turned it 90 degrees clockwise. None of the elements in this work had been processed in any significant way, in order to preserve an uncanny look of a slightly forgotten or dated culture.

In contrast to that approach, a few months later I hastily produced a rather large (49 x 49 x 25.5 inches) fridge-like quasi-minimalist box by piecing together scrap wood and an Ikea table. The top surface was untouched but the sides had been interspersed with broken, pointy pieces of thin wood and fastened with screws. The hollow but heavy sculpture stood firmly on the floor, its height somewhere in-between a standardized countertop and an adult.

The title of the work, Hands break to hone raw energy, is lifted from the lyrics of the heavy metal band Pantera’s song Mouth for war, included on their 1992 album Vulgar display of power. Initially inspired by equal amounts Pantera’s heavy metal music and my fond memories of listening to them as a teenager, I soon began to critically analyze this now-defunct Texan band; how they adopted and mediated a grungy, occasionally grumpy, anti-establishment image and what impact that made on a headbanging kid like me.

Around the same time, while studying the political implications of 1960’s minimalist art and its legacy in contemporary sculpture and architecture, I was reminded of the sleek, ‘tasteful’ and definitely middle-class Scandinavian design that surrounded me when I grew up in Sweden, listening to the brutal, chugging sounds of Pantera. I viewed my final sculpture as a natural merging of these two worlds, with a nod to weekend warriors (and all the hardware stores where I can lose myself).

A more recent of body of work, Working under the influence, was created when I was listening to Vulgar display of power, only using a limited range of materials that were available to me on the spot – MDF, old furniture, cinder blocks, a shattered mirror etc. In other words, what I had lying around in my studio at that time. One work featured my pair of canvas sneakers with their laces tied together, tossed onto a cutout of an Ikea table. Similarly, I draped my grey t-shirt on top of a simple 2x2 construction. Two white-painted MDF boards had discreet lines and stars carved into them, forming washed out ‘wooden flags’ of the state of Texas. This gesture was mimicked in another work - pieces from the mirror shaped an approximation of the silhouette of that same state. The eight works shared a homogenous, muted color palette. By either leaning them against walls or placing them on the floor, I wanted to emphasize their weight and in some cases, balance acts. Additionally, the close proximity of the works indicated a direction and rhythm that the viewer was forced to consider.

I did not aim to dictate the reading of the works, i.e. pointing to historicized narratives or anecdotes, so any outside influences were somewhat obfuscated or concealed in the works. Nevertheless, the aesthetic that I opted for could perhaps resemble the reliably chaos-inducing banal objects and situations in slapstick comedy and cartoons. While having previously engaged with comedy in my work before, I do not possess much knowledge of historically important figures such as Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers – I guess I prefer Louis C.K and Calvin & Hobbes.

As for my methodology; in my practice I often lament a cultural phenomenon that I simultaneously am a fan of, arguably putting me into a morally compromised position. This position is not always explicit of course. To use a clumsy analogy – like many comedians (though I would undoubtedly be a poor one) I enjoy finding out if I can generate new meanings from my material by deliberately arriving at slightly absurd conclusions: poking fun at something as a productive act. For me it’s about a willingness to show affection while allowing myself to mock or scrutinize certain aspects of the things I like, be it minimalist heroes, heavy metal legends or safe, Swedish suburbia. I do sense however that traditional sculptural concerns like weight, gravity, mass and texture are important to me, so in future cases conceptual origins might be downplayed in favor of a more physical experience.

References:

Cady Noland – Towards A Metalanguage Of Evil http://ma-07.wikispaces.com/file/view/towards-a-metalanguage.pdf

Raphaël Zarka – The Forbidden Conjunction (Included in On A Day With No Waves. A Chronicle Of Skateboarding 1779-2009)

Hannah Arendt – Truth and Politics http://www.scribd.com/doc/67600027/Hannah-Arendt-Truth-and-Politics

Robert Smithson – Entropy And The New Monuments http://www.beigecube.de/citmg/reader/Smithson.pdf

ICA London, Culture Now – Interview with Josephine Meckseper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d8F7NvZwXc

Jörg Heiser – Surface Tension http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/surface-tension-words-by-jorg-heiser/

Kaleidoscope November/December 2009 Issue – Perverted Minimalism

Rex Brown - Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (To be released in December, 2012)

Jerry Seinfeld – Comedian (film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328962/

Joel Lovell – That’s Not Funny, That’s C.K. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201108/louis-ck-interview-gq-august-2011

Robert Hobbs, Jörg Heiser and Alessandro Rabottini - Sterling Ruby http://www.roberthobbs.net/book_files/Sterling_Ruby.pdf

Robert Hobbs – Smithson’s Unresolvable Dialectics http://www.roberthobbs.net/book_files/Robert_Smithson_Sculpture.pdf

Helen Marten – Interview with Maurizio Cattelan http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_art=862&det=ok&title=HELEN-MARTEN

Don DeLillo – White noise