ARTLAND

Some spring-photos to celebrate Easter and the come-back of sunshine!

If you happen to be in Baltimore soon, don’t miss the Kinetic Sculpture Race.

Every year the amazing American Visionary Art Museum's arranges this parade. The self-made vehicles and their entourage moves though the streets, on the water and into mud. Imaginative, inventive, intensive. Workshops are arranged on the museum in beforehand for those who would like help in construction. The winning vehicle is not the first one over the finishing line, but the one which arrives somewhere in the middle. This year it is on May 3^rd.

I share one photo from my visit last year. If you are in Baltimore, don’t miss the museum, it is a one-of-a-kind-museum of visionary art.  You bring it with you in mind and thought for a long time.

The architect of Kunsthalle Rostock travelled to Louisiana to get inspiration in the sixties.  The city art gallery of Rostock was built in the end of 1960 in a park, almost like the museum of Modern Art in Denmark, but by a lake instead of the sea.

It was the first modern contemporary art gallery in DDR and it opened with grand ideas of an international program under the motto “Tor zur Welt”. The large windows with a view to the park, a beautiful inner courtyard and spacious rooms in several floors creates the impression of a little sister to Louisiana. Their collection hosts paintings, sculpture and graphic art, a lot from the DDR-times, but it also spans back from 1920 and forth.

The Baltic Sea-Biennial (Ostsee/Mare Balticum) was created here in the 80ties and 90ties, and now our co-operation within Art Line will awaken the idea of art in the Baltic region again, despite the tough economic times.

Here are some photos from Art Line meetings in Rostock Kunsthalle. On the photos are project coordinator Kristina Koebe, director Uwe Neumann, curator Ulrich Ptak, curator Agnieszka Wolodzko from CCA Laznia, curator Martin Schibli from Kalmar Konstmuseum and Art Line crew Annika Thelin and Aje Björkman.

A cardboard with a few holes was tied to a tree-trunk in the centre of Rostock. When getting closer I discovered that there was paper tied to many trees. When coming even closer one could see a hand-written text saying “Hilfe!”, as if a note from the trees themselves. When almost tipping over the small valley one could see their friends, already sawn off.

Here’s a photo of an important machine.

When using it a wonderful smells spreads in the neighbourhood. Not many have the strength to resist.

Since the spring is reluctant, we have to rely on this machine.

Can you guess what it does?

With it you bake the cones, awaiting to be filled with Italian ice-cream…

The blue anemones are in bloom under the giant oak-tree but hardly visible in the thick fog of today.

When in Poland the last two times I met sunshine and warmth and I expect Germany to salute the spring when it’s time to take the ferry over this week.

In a performative art project taking place at the City Gallery of Gdansk, the artist Iwona Zajac is letting young students transform her. Every third day she also invites an artist to create an installation on one wall of the gallery, in dialogue with her project.

The Ideal Lab is a project Iwona Zajac has been working on since 2008. This time it’s students working in her studio at the Gdansk shipyard, “The Young Crew”, who re-make, re-create and change Zajac into an ideal woman. Or, try out different ideals for women, ideals flooding over media.

In what seems like a never-ending make-over-mania in magazines and TV, you need to change to become a person of significance. The message is easy to understand. I thought it was an April fools' joke when I read that a handbook “All you need to know about surgical operations” was published in Sweden. Such an everyday title. Could have been “All your need to know about Italian cooking” or “All you need to know about travelling in Spain”.

I come to think about the video “Doll-clothes” from 1975 where Cindy Sherman dresses herself up in different clothes, in a paper cut-out-doll-manner. She gets out of her flat plastic pocket in an album and realizes, like Eva, that she is naked.  After picking a dress she dances around on a chest of drawers, when large hands seize her and put her back into the album again. Watch technique from the beginning of the video-technique-era for artists, still of present interest:  http://vodpod.com/watch/1092523-cindy-sherman-doll-clothes-1975

Gdansk Galeria Miejska is open a few days more for this project, until April 8. Here you can also cuddle up in a small dark video-room with wall-paintings.

If you are not in Gdansk this last week of the project, you can see a permanent work of hers - one of Zajac' murals can be seen during a visit at the Contemporary Art Centre Laznia. In the staircase on the highest floor you can even meet her in a self-portrait, or is it maybe her own mother? You can’t be sure since the mural is about the relation between herself and her mother. Still, one white spot on the murals remains, but the work is soon to be finished Zajac and curator Agnieszka Wolodzko says.

An installation by the young Gdansk artist Justyna Kuklo is placed in an intimate  corner by itself. “My grandmothers table” consists of a low round table with an embroidered table-cloth. “Circles”  are made in the old handicraft bobbin lace, or pillow lace, from which detailed and intricate patterns can be done. Extremely  time-consuming work.

The pink nuances of the embroidered pattern  are visible through the transparent glass tea-cups which are turned upside down over these parts of the table-cloth, as if to catch and keep them in place. The lace-parts are outside of the cups. The embroidered motifs are the secrets and intimate talks in between women of different generations getting together and sharing thoughts over a cup of tea or some handicraft. If you look closer you see embroidered genitals, a uterus and other sexual facts of life.

The installation is part of the exhibition Laznia Damska, The Women’s bathhouse, which started on March 8^th at Contemporary Art Centre Laznia in Gdansk and is one of their ongoing exhibitions. This spacious art gallery was a bathhouse from the beginning. Every year CCA Laznia presents several women artists from the Gdansk-area starting off at International Women's Day. In Poland it is a festive day and the celebration of economic, political and social achievements of women is vivid. History, presence  and future in one day. Justyna Kuklo compress the time by speaking to her grandmother and mother, and giving both them and other women a tribute to their silent homework.

Justyna Kuklo started at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk in the Department of Painting and this is her graduation work for Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles last year. During summer 2008 she participated in the performance of the artists’ group Plaj when taking part of “Neighbours”.  Dancers and painters co-operated in creating new space, time and absolute presence.  See photos and text under “Utställningar/Neighbours – Grannar - Sasiedzi” on this website.

- I know only 35 movements, she says in a frail silent start of the performance “Unknown pleasures”. She dances some of the movements, and state their number at the same time. She compares the repetition it to our existence.

- And, the movements are not even mine! she continues. Somebody else invented them, I just repeat them. We smile and see the abyss at the same time.

-The evil eye, for instance, she says. Her mutual understanding and agreement with the audience changes. She distances herself from us by looking at us with dangerous eyes while swirling around in her dance-moves. It is a play, an act.

- So many messages! one of the actors exclaims over and over again. He is constantly surprised by all the ideas Michael Jackson spread in his videos. In a hilarious flow and mix of monologue and dance he tries to explain and understand where Michael Jackson got all his great ideas from, but always end up with “-I have no idea.”. The figure in the play repeats and live through the acts of the music-videos. The audience laugh and gulps at the same time.

The other dancers/actors are trying to catch our attention, but “Michael Jackson” speeds on. He does not hear anybody else, the others are only allowed to be actors in his run-through of the plots.  It’s lonely up on the stage for the others. She wants to please us and smiles. We don’t know whom to look at. The woman holds up A4:s with the names of birds to the other man on stage:  “chaffinch”, and he whistles and imitates. The “Who’s bad”-lyrics is heard from “Michael Jackson”. The tempo is speeded. Next, the turtle dove, and “Who’s bad?”. The nightjar screams and screams, MJ sings higher -Who’s bad? And it all turns out like a crazy duel.

One actor performs long dialogues from movies, for instance Wim Wenders “Paris, Texas”, played from a jukebox on stage. A giant inflatable bottle of the body fluid gall perform a dance and becomes deflated. If you had too much of the black gall in your body you became melancholic the idea was in antiquity. Here the gall is with mango-taste. A giant rabbit rides the automatic amusement-park-elephant. A man and a woman, sometimes behind masks, nods and nods in the same pace.

“Haunted dancehall” and “Music for a darkened theatre” are the first parts of the trilogy which ends with ” Unknown pleasures”. The scenography is a deserted fairground, a former amusement park. Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber are one of a kind in Sweden in creating a very special mix of performance, theatre, interaction, drama, dance and art.

It is unpredictable.

About longing and belonging,

perishable transient life.

Our memories and the archives of our lives.

The disappearance of all memories.

Two beckoning cats, the ones we usually meet with their upright paws moving at a Chinese restaurant stands by the nodding couple on the counter in front of the paste-balloon-wall. Maybe they wish us good luck while waving goodbye as the stage turns dark.

A voice says: We learned how to evaporate. How to come to nothing.

The solo-presentation of Oscar Guermouche at Kalmar Konstmuseum is pumping male adrenaline and creating a slick white orderly space aesthetics at the same time. It is coherent, albeit or because of these opposites.

In a video triptych the artist assembles and dissembles his weapon AK5 with a green sack over his head. Associations to the sack lead to Guantanamo and captivity, but the artist is wearing a suit and do it freely. The suit, the other male traditional uniform signals something else. The two other parts show the artist performing push-ups and the other let us follow the movements during inspections of soldiers. It is interesting to think about the relation between structures in the military service and the society as an entirety. The videos are tied together symbolically in the form of a triptych.

How to construct a male identity?

The title ”Ordnung muss sein” sound like a quotation from a German WWII-soldier, but is taken from the Swedish ranger regiment where Oscar Guermouche did his military service.

In “Männerphantasien” texts describing the male body is being transcribed with traditional oil-paint onto white canvases in size 150 by 120 cm, filling the long walls of the museum. The fragments are taken from literature, written by men. Following the conceptual heritage. Existential writers like Jean-Paul Sartre share space with detective stories, adventure novels or famous classical writers like Alexandre Dumas or Ernest Hemingway. The texts are full of admiration and lust for the male body, written by men only.

Other parts of the exhibition relate to pornography collected from the internet and saved as an archive with labels on computer discs. “We want to go to Moscow” is a work with painted text on Swedish flags, taken from marching songs and other information given to soldiers in the Swedish ranger regiment. Connecting the dots between sexuality, erection and warfare.

The small triptych of male environments from a sports centre borrow form from constructivism. As spectator you immediately fill the space with content. It is a hard sad environment.

Urinals in straight lines. Marcel Duchamps in duplication. 

Pipes for water to the showers in a lonesome pattern on the white glazed tiles.

Everyday environments, shaping us into citizens.

And here we are. It is 2011.

How to be Bruce Willis and at the same time drag a stroller with a baby?

How to go blindfolded through the toy-stores full of dark warrior-attributes for young boys?

Think of the Lego-toys made by Zbigniew Libera. How to train a child.

How do we construct male identity and how do we relate to it? What are the connecting dots in society - can we find it in literature, film, internet, pornography, military service?

How to skip the stereotypes?

I came to think about recent films about war, since civil wars are on my mind and in the news every day now. Armadillo is a documentary about Danish soldiers going to Afghanistan to the British-Danish army base with the same name, Armadillo. A film by the Danish filmmaker Janus Metz. I had to see it in parts, since it is painful to follow how war affects people. Understanding and sympathy for the civilians from the beginning slowly changes into a more coarsen view on people, the people they are there to protect. To become indifferent might be one way of surviving the impossible task. The soldiers play war-games and watch pornography in their spare-time. They give candy to children and sometimes pay inhabitants money when they happen to kill their animals. Worse is to experience when civilians are killed by Danish grenades.

I also recall the documentary about lawless Somalia, where another Danish journalist, Rasmus Krath, finds and interviews pirates in a pirate-village in Somalia. In the streets you see men and their weapons. Women don’t live their life in public, they work hard with domestic duties.  It’ s a man’s world. Created by many years without a functioning government, police-force or judicial system. Rasmus Krath brings six kilo of banknotes with him. As a foreigner you have to be guarded by mercenaries. Kidnapping and killings seem more everyday and ordinary than the opposite. Most men chew khat.

I wrote down the explanation why one of the men was chewing khat.

- It adjusts the brain a little.

Makes one become more indifferent?

Explanations on why war are necessary.

Explanations on why men have to be in a certain way to be real men.

All explanations do the same:

It adjusts the brain.

But still don’t make any sense.

Everyday apartment with a twist.

Black bulbs in bracket lamp on the back wall, and mirrors in between.

What happens if you turn the lights on the black ones?

No function?

Not working?

A transparent bulb is placed under a small three-legged table.

On the table is a lamp stand without a bulb.

This bulb is turned on and is shining from under the rim – it’s on a heated race with the sun.

Real or surreal, stillness as in the idea of a bourgeois apartment, with something worrying underlying.

The title is a Swedish word I can’t translate into English. Eftervaro.

To be together, but after something.

After we have left in the evening.

A presence of something.

Or, the opposite to presence?

Can you keep a secret?

There is place for a monologue, a speech.

Just wait until the right moment.

The beginning or the end of a story from a living-quarter? The enigmatic  and surrealistic interior of a sparsely decorated apartment makes you wonder what has happened.

Lisa Gerdin will show her installation at Galleri C Hjärne in Helsingborg for another week. Possible to see day and night through the window. A room of one’s own or for a ghost visitors?