For the past twenty years, Leif Holmstrand has been working with crocheted costumes, ropes, trash, nets, baby carriages, torture, infant bodies, furniture, and images that are free for whomever to reproduce in whichever size and on whatever surface they want. He has made films, curated exhibitions, released at least four albums, published some forty books (fiction and poetry), participated in an unknown amount of performances and solo exhibitions, written poems about working-class-female-fatness under the pseudonym of Anna-Maria Ytterbom, hanged himself as his alter ego Sally Rattermann, and made small brass signs with the names of the various medications he takes for insomnia, anxiety and schizophrenia, and so on.
It feels like I haven’t mentioned enough, maybe because I haven’t said that this all seems to be part of an ongoing process which cannot be separated from the artist’s life. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never met Leif. But I think of him as Leif, the most mythic artist we have in Sweden. In the monograph De Profundis (Or From Above) (2021), which was published this spring, Leif’s friend, the art historian Björn Fritz, writes: “The border between Leif’s life and art is often unclear to me. I don’t know how to put this, but Leif is a slut.”
In the far corner of the artist’s retrospective at Marabouparken just outside Stockholm, there’s a photograph which seems emblematic of that ethos. A big cock and balls appear exactly in the middle of the image. On one side of them, a blue fingerless glove ends in the green sleeve of a knitted sweater, probably part of the blue hood that is covering the person’s head and face. Their lower body is naked, as they stand among several liquor bottles and artist’s materials on the floor. The ceiling looks like it’s been decorated with some sort of fabric, but it’s trash from the streets of Berlin, brought into the artist’s apartment. It’s not Leif in the picture; it’s someone who participated in a several-month-long performance during which various “activities” took place in the apartment, at the same time as Leif sold sexual favours elsewhere. The net with trash reappears in a sculpture placed straight in front of the photograph, on the opposite side of the gallery. It’s a rendering of the birth of Venus. Venus is wearing a black garbage bag, and pulling the net of trash from the deep. A self-portrait?
The exhibition folder states that the sculpture provides us with an image of creativity as entwined with cruelty and pain, but also with the decaying body, sexuality, and swimming in garbage. Leif “reverses the value system and pronounces garbage as society’s foremost cultural expression,” it says. There is a Nietzschean sensibility here for the new ways of living and thinking that people in unfavourable circumstances are forced to create, and for the beauty that momentarily exists even in illness and despair.
Still, everything is so nice and clean. The works on the walls hang in straight rows, and the other ones are lined up in a diagonal running from the Berlin photograph across to the other side. I sit in the kunsthalle’s characteristic stands looking down at the exhibition, thinking it looks empty. I’d like to see Leif there performing non-stop instead of just a couple of times during the duration of the exhibition. All the time, every day. Leif there on the floor. Am I being unreasonable? Since when are the desires sparked by Leif’s art supposed to be reasonable?
I leave the stands and walk among the works instead. They are just as still there, as if they’ve all become sheer memories of themselves. I’ve seen many of them before, and I suppose they’ve always generated a tension between two aspects. On the one hand, they have appeared to me as remnants of some practice or context unknown to me. I’m late, and the party has moved on. But they have also had a very particular presence – skewed, as if they didn’t have time to go home and change after the party – a presence in which we act as if they aren’t fundamentally deviate. So my feeling has been that the process continues somewhere, and that something else is what we are left to try to grapple with. Sometimes that aspect of “afterward” has been completely abolished by the fact that the garbage has smelled so much, here and now. At least once during Leif’s career, artworks have been removed from the exhibition because of the stench from the trash. But that mixture of afterwards and presence is missing at Marabouparken. The baby carriages in nets, which usually hang a few decimetres above the floor and look humiliated and helpless – but still alive – now hang high above the other works. They look like defeated prey that someone proudly wants to show off.
In Awakening Film (2020), the artist walks around sorting garbage and sits among the sacks; it looks like a performance. In Leif’s books, I have encountered several awakenings, where people try to understand what has happened. There is a lot of smearing, snot, bodily fluids, possibly shit, that makes the newly awakened face stick to the pillow, entirely without an overview of the situation and how they ended up there. But this movie is a black-and-white silent movie. The images are as if at a distance; the colours and sounds have faded. I understand: this is a retrospective; the process is over, so now we do something else with the works. It’s as if Leif is now going to become Leif Holmstrand.
I’m not saying that this is necessarily a failure. What is an artist, whose art is life, supposed to do with a retrospective? How should the works be shown retrospectively, and not as part of a process that is ongoing and already has plans for tomorrow? I imagine that the exhibition is the answer to this difficult question. Solution: highlight themes in which individual works can stand on their own, more or less independent of the process and practice. Downplay the destructive and highlight the constructive. Downplay what Fritz calls “the not-so-wholesome homosexuality” (Jean Genet, Divine, William Burroughs) and emphasise the “rainbow-coloured contemporary queerness” (Eurovision).
The photo series Holy Helpers (2018) is also something of a starting point for the exhibition. In these digital collages, we see a grotesquely made-up and angelic Leif (against a background of garbage bags) ready to guide queers through all the lonely difficulties of life. The darkness isn’t scrubbed, but the context emphasises care and community. I think it’s a good approach, which enriches my reading.
On the long wall, there are a number of even-sized, black, crocheted wall sculptures: Breeder-Covers (2017–2018). “Breeder” is a derogatory term for heterosexuals who reproduce, which clarifies why there are twenty-four sculptures: this is, of course, an Advent calendar awaiting Santa Claus, who is the father of all children. Ridiculous, perhaps. But as Leif writes in his novel Förkylningen (The Cold, 2017): “At the same time, I know that the ridiculousness beneath the surface has always been and always will be what’s magnificent, the secretly sublime: reality.”
Santa captures a set of issues regarding sex, reproduction, and masks. And under the crocheted black covers there are metal plates that bear the names of various specious of slime mould, which apparently have several “gender positions” and multiply in other ways. This connects to Leif’s costumes, which are to be understood as identities in themselves that are reproduced by the person who puts them on – much like the function of a Santa costume. Breeder-Covers seems to be about other ways of reproducing predispositions, which rather than childbearing are perhaps more akin to the twin model. And slime mould.
This is how the works seem to be connected, by concept rather than process. In the retrospective application of Holmstrand’s art, we get to pull and sort through threads of ideas. It is a smart solution that takes over the function of criticism to make offensive works the subject of interesting conversations. The effect is not as immediately powerful as Leif usually is, but perhaps it means that I will be able to see completely new aspects of the works once the process starts again. I’ll have to go to his performance come November.
