Niels draft

In this text I will briefly describe works I made before going to the Piet Zwart institute and works made during my stay. Also I will write about the distinction between my making practice and thinking practice, and where these two overlap.

Three recent works

“Departure” is a collection of sixteen found boxes that can be opened and closed. The smallest box is about 7x7x7cm, the largest is about 45x14x30cm. The boxes are made of wood and metal. Inside are small grass hills, or islands, made from materials used in model building. As I find more boxes, the installation grows. Each is a part of a minimal visual story, a story that unravels itself when glancing inside. An open ended record on longing, motion, and disappearing. “Tower” is a beam of maple, 5x5x180cm. Each side is engraved with shapes similar to windows. The bottom hangs about half a centimeter from the floor. It is suspended from the ceiling by a thin blue rope normally used in mountain climbing. It is tied with a knot to a hook, some excess rope is visible. It is unclear if the beam is leaning on the floor, or hanging slightly above it. While waiting for the bus I was looking at the houses opposite the street. After I changed my thinking slightly, it was not the people making sounds, but the house itself. A house that grows and speaks. I am looking for different ways in which I can make architecture more alive. “Leaking lighthouse” is a walnut beam, hanging from the ceiling. The beam is about 5x5x190cm. A text is engraved in, and spiraling around the wood. It is suspended from the ceilin by a thin white-red rope normally used in mountain climbing. It is tied with a knot to a hook, some excess rope is visible. It is unclear if the beam is leaning on the floor, or hanging slightly above it. The text “Leaking lighthouse, abandoned water. Delayed diagonal, mimicked broadcast.” is engraved with a font commonly used in novels. A novel stores a history, this beam facilitates a dense text about time being registered by devices more abstract than clocks.

Three previous works

These works are relevant because text got introduced for the first time, the early stages of ideas about measuring time are visible as well.

	“On the shore of the galaxy” is a work containing framed sheet music depicting silence, ten books with photographs of myself holding fruit on one page, and images of celestial bodies on the other, and a  larger photograph of myself holding a planet. To me this work was all about silence, a monument for stillness of some sort. This I related to the universe, I was thinking about a three singers in the same outfits being quiet, an anthem for the universe.

“The mountain and I” is a 30x60cm photograph of myself next to a miniature mountain, made from plaster and fake grass. I was thinking about a series of questions, the proposition of how my body relates to the sculptures I make, what similarities can there be between a mountain and my face? How you can live next to a mountain, look at it, how this landscape feature becomes part of yourself? In the video “Clock” you can see my hand pointing at a lightbulb that floats from one side of the frame to the other. I wanted to have one of those devices above old elevators, an arrow that points to floor where it is. There is also a clicking sound audible, similar to that of a clock.

A description of artworks that are differs in medium and form, but seen together a scenario is flowing through. This is similar to my practice because I communicate thoughts using a wide variety of materials.

Torgny Lindgren is a writer who lived for most of his live in a remote area in the north of Sweden. He writes about characters who live in this area and deal with the reality that surrounds them. In his writing, this everyday reality becomes remarkably unreal. “Disappearing thoughts disappear” has a similar quality. The sentence across the backs of the books reveals itself when they are placed right order. The empty books are not quite real, there is a disburance of reality somewhere. This way of thinking is key to how I understand my current work: where does reality get subtly disturbed?

The first scene of Bela Tarr’s Werkmaister “Harmoniak”. In a bar that is about to close, the main character Valuska directs the locals to move in ways that illustrate his explanation of the universe. Valuska considers the universe a story that can be told anywhere, with means that are at hand. I respond to this idea because it explains a large concept in a simple, distinctive way. I like to think of my art as minimal open ended stories that reflecting on thoughts about time and reality in a similar way.

“One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car — nice car by the way — and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc.” (David Foster Wallace, 2002, p179)

“The Clockshop” is a work by Job Koelewijn. It is a recreated shop filled with clocks, all have stopped at a different time. The store itself is hanging from the ceiling, and moves back and forth, becoming a clock itself. The shop is hanging in a hallway just wide enough. By moving it is sometimes blocking and sometimes opening the way through the hall.

Both David Foster Wallace’s text and “the Clockshop” address notions about the present as an invisible force powerful enough to make ideas disappear. Here I can create a bridge to Bas Jan Ader, whom I value for the fact that his body of work reads like a novel, but his physical disappearance is hard for me too disconnect from his visual work, which casts this shadow of tragedy on the rest of his work. I am interested the open end, and in reading my art as an open ended work of fiction.

What is relevant to me in regards to disappearance and time, is that a clock ticks. But time is what happens in the intervals between ticking. Agnieszka Kurant made a work based a short story by Heinrich Boll. Her work is called “Silence is Golden”: an accumulation of silent pauses in famous political speeches, played during an exhibition. The political content is not something I care for, but the idea of quietude as a tangible material is relevant to me, and the connection to musical intervals is easily made.

That moment of silence is made almost tangible in music. I experience time to the fullest when all instruments are quiet during a song, all sound disappears if you will. As an artist who makes music, ideas such as resonance, oscillation, wavelength, tuning, tension, sound in space, and most importantly, silence are central to the way I understand and experience art.

Cornelius Cardew made sheet music for his experminental music which doesn’t respond to linear time, they are drawings that can be interpreted with sound. I can see how my thoughts about time and silence relate to his work.

The reality I grew up in was an empty landscape filled with wind. In a week or two I will return to the north with a camera and tripod, to create a portrait of the land, the wind, the buildings. While thinking about disturbances in reality, I will capture the windy landscapes to see what reality I can find there.

By expanding Departures, I wanted to go deeper into the subject matter of opening and closing, revealing and concealing. I was thinking about Jac Leirners installations, or Martin Parrs collections. I wonder if this expansion truly will lead to a more profound understanding of this work?

Here is a series of questions and concerns that surround my practice. These are not questions I can answer directly, nor am I very interested in clear answers. I am interested in positioning them in my practice.

Are the titles “On the shore of the galaxy” or “disappearing thoughts disappear” too generic, an aphorism maybe? How do these texts relate to the physical appearance of the work? Is the physical appearance of the works distracting from the text?

Nostalgia is something that has come up during several tutorials, I want to figure out what that means, since I am much too intrigued by the present to long emotionally to live in the past. Svetlana Boym writes about collective nostalgia in her book “the future of nostalgia”, this is where I would like to start my research.

Conclusion

List of references

Writing Boym, S, the Future of Nostalgia, 2002, Basic Books. Foster Wallace, D, Good Old Neon, 2002, The O. Henry Prize Stories. Heinrich Boll - Murke’s Collected Silences, 1958, Kiepenheuer & Witch. Lindgren, T, Norrlands Akvavit, 2007, Norstedts. Lindgren, T, Light, 2003, The Harvill Press.

Art Cardew, C, sheet music. Koelewijn, J, the Clockshop, 2003. Kurant, A, Silence is Golden, 2011. Tarr, B, Werkmeister Harmóniák, 2000.