Akureyri Art Museum January 13th - March 4th 2007
Harvesters of Existence
Fleeting thoughts on the art of Jón Óskar and Adam Bateman
Art lovers in Iceland are not known to be patrons of radical ideas. Traditionally, they have craved a settled, middle-class art, quiet and modest — something they can in good conscience call beautiful and admire in their living rooms. Provocateurs who rock the boat are seldom accepted by society unless a real change of paradigm occurs and it actually becomes conventional to adopt their perspective. The rocking subsides but the old radicals are soon replaced by new ones.
The artistic career of the painter Finnur Jónsson provides an example of the victory of social convention over creative innovation. In 1925, still a young man, he returned to Iceland from Germany, where he had studied with Oskar Kokoschka and Kurt Switters. Finding that his fresh ideas were rejected by his fellow Icelanders as ‘misinterpretations’ of reality, Finnur resorted to painting realistic pictures of the landscape and of fishermen at work, paintings that were easily acceptable in Iceland at the time. For much of the twentieth century, this was the cultural context that young artists returned to after studying abroad.
Towards the end of World War II, the wave of Abstract painting finally made its mark on Icelandic visual arts, but almost thirty years more were to pass before this kind of art became generally accepted to decorate Icelandic parlours. By then, the Fluxus-based SÚM movement had begun to rock the boat with lyrical vehemence and eventually fell into the warm lap of public collections, though the market was still far from being persuaded by their work. A third artistic wave hit our frosty coastlines in the early 1980s with Punk and Neo-expressionist painting that was in vogue all over the Western world at that time. This wave, too, subsided and, with a few notable exceptions, left only some slick, academic copies of itself.
Jón Óskar is one of Iceland’s rebels. He has not received much acclaim at home, either from public collections or the general public. Not that Jón is altogether misunderstood or unappreciated, as evidenced by his nomination for the Carnegie Award last year, but his works have probably been considered “too much” – too large for the living room, too unruly, too alien for Icelandic tastes. In 1980 Jón travelled to America and studied art in New York. There, he bathed in the strong currents of Postmodernism and the spirit of the metropolis, the point-of-view that regards the world as its own navel, accepts no boundaries and spills over every restrictive framework. Jón is in his way not unlike a metropolis: unbridled in spirit, alert, wide-ranging and aggressive — and his attitudes are not easily contained in the small context of Iceland.
A work of art is inseparable from its creator, bearing his likeness in one way or another, revolving around him and reflecting his own attitude to life and the Zeitgeist of his contemporaries. Jón Óskar’s paintings are no exception. Dark and brooding, colossal and foreboding as they tower above us, they are at once threatening and seductive. They hold the night, gloom and extinction, expressed with cool stoicism. Jón Óskar sometimes turns up in the guise of the worldly clown, clad in sheepskins, and we are suddenly alarmed and taken aback. He reveals to us the loneliness we all fear and shatters the hope that perhaps deep down inside something bright and sweet resides. Jón takes life black without sugar, preferring to face things as they are, not how we might wish them to be. This is the attitude we sense in the merciless beauty of his works. He does not distinguish between life and art but keeps all the doors of his perception open. He plumbs the depths and everything that is caught in his net is hauled on board and spread out on the canvas.
Jón Óskar’s exhibition at the Akureyri Art Museum is not a traditional retrospective; it is not based on selected works, or on a particular theme or period. Everything is given equal weight and levelled out, with one work following on another as if by chance, covering the walls from floor to ceiling all around the two main galleries of the museum, so that in comparison, even the old outsider Stefán from Möðrudalur could have been accused of wasting wall space.
The exhibition flows over into the west wing where U.S. artist Adam Bateman has mounted a huge stack of books, a veritable Tower of Babel, like a pylon in the sea to save our senses from drowning. Books contain the whole world as symbolic meaning, but words are merely signifiers that usually prove insufficient when ‘the shit hits the fan’. Words are only sound-bites in the void, vibrations of the air, and written characters are merely symbolic units, devoid of content, which can be arranged in different ways, dissoluble ink, dried liquid. To underline this, Bateman sometimes treats letter types like sand that can be shovelled this way and that to no discernible purpose, or they appear as flies that have dropped dead in piles from the pages of history, empty shells of their former characters. In other cases, Bateman has found it necessary to disinfect the written word, throwing books into the washing machine and setting the spin to ‘delete brainwash’. In one video, we glimpse the title Modern Drama through the glass front of the washing machine, soon to be turned into a wet paper mass, a pulp fiction that can take on a new post-dramatic meaning.
Jón Óskar himself has designed the exhibition catalogue, in which the words and images that these two artists have used to express their world views have been collated into a pastiche reminiscent of pulp magazines about the rich and famous. Jón has had a profound influence on the layout and design of books, magazines and web pages in Iceland through the paid work he has done in these fields when his art did not support him. Everything crowds together on these pages, photographs of artworks, all sorts of advertisements and texts by Icelandic and foreign writers and old friends who discuss him and his art. Jón Óskar incorporates all these eclectic materials into his realm and publishes his own mouthpiece on whatever comes his way. His method is not necessarily any less objective or monotonous than what is practised in the so-called free and independent media, where everything seems to come from the same source, the stinking mouth of hell. If the bulk of the ‘magazine’ revolves around the ‘hard news’ from Jón Óskar’s world, then the coverage of Bateman can be seen as a curious item from distant lands. Whether in Icelandic or English, the interpretation of the works rises from the field of ink where the characters — these ‘black beans’, as Buddhists often refer to text — have been carefully planted in hope of a fruitful harvest.
Jón Óskar’s exhibition is likely to close itself over the viewer’s senses like a plastic bag over one’s head. This feeling of suffocation brings to mind the Death of Sardanapalus, which Delacroix painted in 1827–1828 from Lord Byron’s eponymous tragedy. The painting depicts the Assyrian king and hedonist Sardanapalus sometime in the seventh century before Christ, reclining on his death-bed as his enemies’ army is about to gain the upper hand after a two-year siege. Sardanapalus has had his most precious things brought in, as well as his favourite concubines, horses and slaves, all to be slaughtered in his sight so that they may accompany him to the land of the dead. His treasures are to follow him to the grave so that no one else can embrace the fairest maiden or ride the most magnificent stallion. Sensuality shines from every brush stroke, stifling the horrific panic and pain that has been staged in the painting. Objects and lecherous flesh melt into a Baroque-like pattern that writhes up the canvas in a frantic visual ode.
Human lives are often sacrificed for ideas (usually bad ones). Artistically speaking, Jón does not seem to have any compunction about such sacrifices; on the canvas at least, he has taken part in one of the most famous battles of the United States, with his exhibition in 2005 called George Washington Crosses the Delaware, based on the painting of that name by Emanuel Leutze from 1849. Jón Óskar’s pictures seethe with historical and personal references. In his book, Friends & Lovers (1994), Jón, like the ancient Sardanapalus in his tomb, gathers together his favourite people, in roughly printed photographs taken on different occasions. He himself is nowhere seen except perhaps as a cut-off arm laid across a shoulder, the heavy paw of friendship, the pointed index finger of the Almighty. (This pyramid is still under construction, for he intends to publish another
volume.) Of course, this is not to suggest that Jón Óskar would destroy what is most dear to him, but in this collage of portraits, the lives of these people are treated as his own. And wherever the hand of God is at work, we can always expect an act of either creation or destruction.
Adam Bateman plays on a decidedly more minimal note, as befits his Mormon origins. He was born in Utah, where Laxness set his novel Paradise Regained and where Bateman runs his own art centre and artist’s residency. Like Jón Óskar, he studied in New York and returned with grand ideas to his home state, which has little in common with the skyscrapers and speed of the big city. The amassed knowledge of books is like the mass of people in the skyscrapers that writhe with emotions and opinions, though little of this thought and feeling will ever be expressed in writing. We are the fragments of loose type that compose the ever-changing social structure of meaning, garrulousness incarnate.
It is fun to be a fat fly on the wall among Jón Óskar’s and Bateman’s works and to try to make sense of their dialogue. They are both harvesters from the vast sea of experience, drawing in their nets laden with dying fish – and of course, as flies on the wall, we are also the bait. In this encounter, as we say in Icelandic, the devil has probably met his grandmother — and that is bound to be a joyful reunion despite the rather sulphurous atmosphere.
Hannes Sigurðsson, Director
Akureyri Art Museum
Press release
Carnegie 2006
Jón Óskar has a history of working with series of monumental portraits, ornamental patterns and, in latter years, photographic portraits. His preferred materials have been oil and encaustic wax on unprimed canvas or paper, with a colour scheme limited to near-black and waxy brown. This combination of colours, materials and surface treatment gives Óskar’s works a characteristic dry and rough materiality. The two large paintings in this exhibition have the yellowed appearance of old manuscripts, overlayered by an intensive palimpsest of sketches, symbols, signs and figures. In addition to his habitual colours, these canvas surfaces also bear splashes of red, green and white, like a reminiscence of Pollock.
15. apríl 2005
Fjórir Íslendingar gætu hlotið hæstu listaverðlaunin
Vali verka fyrir Carnegie Art Award 2006 sýninguna er lokið! Dómnefnd undir stjórn Lars Nittve hefur valið 21 norrænan listamann, þar á meðal fjóra frá Íslandi, til þátttöku í sýningunni og þar með möguleika á verðlaunum sem eru meðal þeirra hæstu í heiminum.
Meðan á Stockholm Art Fair stóð vann dómnefnd Carnegie Art Award að vali áhugaverðustu norrænu listamannanna úr hópi þeirra 115 sem tilnefndir voru.
Það er fjölbreyttur og spennandi hópur 21 listamanns sem í haust sýnir verk sín á Carnegie Art Award 2006 og á möguleika á einhverjum stóru verðlaunanna. Verðlaunaupphæðin sem er einhver sú hæsta í heiminum er SEK 1 000 000 í fyrstu verðlaun, SEK 600 000 í önnur verðlaun og SEK 400 000 í þriðju og fjórðu verðlaun hvor fyrir sig og þar að auki styrkur að upphæð SEK 100 000 til yngri listamanns.
Íslenski þátttakendahópurinn er fjölskrúðugur; Steingrímur Eyfjörð vinnur með margskonar tækni, Jón Óskar og Eggert Pétursson eru listmálarar og Finnbogi Pétursson vinnur aðallega með hljóðverk.
Allir listamennirnir eru með sýningar og önnur verkefni í gangi. Steingrímur Eyfjörð sýnir á Nine Comics Festival í Hafnarhúsinu fram til 24. apríl og opnar í maí tvær sýningar á Akureyri, í Galleri + og í Kunstraum Wohnraum.
Jón Óskar hefur nýlokið sýningu í 101 Gallery í Reykjavík og sýnir nú um stundir á Galleria Krista Mikkola í Helsinki. Eyfjörð og Óskar eiga þar að auki verk í einkasafni 101 Gallery. Eggert Pétursson sýnir á i8 galleri í Art Brussels sem hefst í vikunni og Finnbogi Pétursson á tvö hljóðverk á Listahátíð í Reykjavík sem stendur frá 14. maí til 5. júní.
Hlutaðeigandi listamenn, auk Íslendinganna, eru Karin Mamma Andersson (Svíþjóð), Lise Blomberg Andersen (Danmörk), Jesper Christiansen (Danmörk), Erik A. Frandsen (Danmörk), Jan Håfström (Svíþjóð), Maria Lindberg (Svíþjóð), Petra Lindholm (Finnland), Josefine Lyche (Noregur), Sirous Namazi (Svíþjóð), Ole Jørgen Ness (Noregur), Astrid Nondal (Noregur), Henrik Samuelsson (Svíþjóð), Marjatta Tapiola (Finnland), Kira Wager (Noregur), Magnus Wallin (Svíþjóð), Rafael Wardi (Finnland) og Kathrine Ærtebjerg (Danmörk).
Verðlaunahafar Carnegie Art Award 2006 verða kynntir í júnílok og fer afhending verðlauna fram þann 29. september 2005 í Henie Onstad Kunstsenter fyrir utan Ósló. Sýningin ferðast síðan milli höfuðborga Norðurlandanna ásamt Lundúnum og Nice haustið 2005 – vorið 2007. Í Reykjavík verður sýningin í Listasafni Reykjavíkur, Hafnarhúsinu frá 10. júní – 20. ágúst 2006.
Í dómnefndinni undir stjórn Lars Nittve Nýlistasafninu í Stokkhólmi, sitja:Associate Professor Ina Blom, IFIKK - Dept. of Art History, Óslóarháskóla,Maaretta Jaukkuri, forstöðumaður Kiasma, Helsinki.Halldór Björn Runólfsson lektor, Listaháskóla Íslands, Reykjavík.Poul Erik Tøjner, forstöðumaður Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebæk,Suzanne Pagé, forstöðumaður Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, París (hún tekur þátt í júnífundi dómnefndar þar sem vinningshafar eru valdir).