An increasingly nostalgic art-historian, such as myself, will unavoidably subscribe to the notion that everything was better before – not least the exhibition openings. Consider for example Yves Klein’s succès de scandale Le Vide at gallery Iris Clert in 1958. To begin you had the pompous endorsement in the periodical ZERO, where Klein proclaimed that his paintings were now invisible, but that he in his upcoming show would nonetheless make a clear display of them. Then there was the event itself, where an audience numbering between 2500 to 3000 poor souls had to stand in wait while only small groups of ten were allowed in too admire the empty, white-pigmented hallway at a time. In the days following the opening people continued to come. Some spent hours in the cramped space without uttering a word, others experienced shivers or broke down in tears. It was, in Klein’s own words, «a total and complete success».
We can hardly hope the spring program that lay in wait for us at Norwegian galleries, kunsthalls and museums will be equally scandalous. Most excitement was perhaps tied to We Are Living on a Star that opened at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in the end of February, the first large scale exhibition to deal with the terrorist-attacks of July 22, 2011. Those who foretold that these events would become an important point of reference for Norwegian art after 2011 turned out to be wrong. Only a few artists have engaged the subject so far. The goal of the exhibition, as stated in the press release, is to explore the concepts of normality and free speech in light of the terror. An angle that in no way comes as a surprise considering how the debate that have garnered the most public attention in Norway in the wake of the attacks has been over whether the actions of Anders Behring Breivik should be interpreted through an ideological or a pathological lens. With the exhibition now on view, it turns out its stated objective is somewhat misleading; thematically it’s both more expansive and less concise. (link)
Freedom of speech is also a topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art this spring. The exhibition Grip friheten! Take Liberty!, opening on April 11, marks the anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution. With three anniversary-exhibitions in two years, the National museum is well on its way to become a national anniversary museum. The museum allowing its program to get clogged up by this kind of memorial-style exhibition-making is not without its adverse effects. One problem is how it takes up large portions of their exhibition schedule, making it harder for the museum to develop a more comprehensive profile and program. Worse yet is when the museum waive all critical considerations upon taking the assignment, as was the case with the exhibition Kongelige reiser (Royal journeys) in 2012. I can’t think of any other public institution that would be prepared to display the same level of servitude. Luckily the exhibition Grip friheten! Take Liberty! signals a return to criticality for the museum. The aim is to interpret, reflect and comment on the philosophical and political ideals of 1814 from the point of view of the present. Themes covered are democracy, national identity and personal freedom. The exhibition will feature work by well known artists like Jeremy Deller, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken, Marianne Heier, Susan Hiller, Superflex, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Ai Weiwei.
The museum also gives us a retrospective with Aase Texmon Rygh – Aase Texmon Rygh. Modernism for ever! – the very first Norwegian, nonfigurative sculptor, who at the age of 89 is still going strong. Her works are associated both with Concretism and the more organic and referential strain of the abstract modernist cannon where you find artists like Gabo, Brancusi, Giacometti, Hepworth and Moore. Some might remember her work from Documenta two years ago. With a grand retrospective of the artist’s production spanning 60 years, there should be reason to hope that we will get an in-depth and thorough presentation of her oeuvre and its place both in the Norwegian and international annals of modernism.
The Astrup Fearnley museum, the last on my list of big contemporary art institutions in the Oslo area, has shown very little interest in Norwegian contemporary art the past few years. Their last stunt was the somewhat arbitrary overview Lights On. A more fitting name would have been Lights Off, because since then their searchlight have been nowhere near the Norwegian art scene. This winter and spring, however, the lights are back on; first there was a presentation of Bjarne Melgaard’s work, and on March 21 the Danish-Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset opened with Biography. According to the museum this is a midlife retrospective as well as a playful exploration of the exhibition format, which the duo has always considered «a work in itself with all its narrative, choreographic and social opportunities».
The Vigeland museum and the Stenersen museum – Oslo’s two municipal museums – are placing their bets on rather established names this spring. In March a new public sculpture by Anders Sletvold Moe, called Passages of reflection, was inaugurated at the Vigeland museum. The first exhibition of the year at Stenersen was Sverre Koren Bjertnæs’s solo show Nervous Fluids, which opened in late January. With close to 300 works spanning drawing, photography, video and wooden sculptures carved in Sri Lanka, it is the artist’s biggest exhibition to date. Despite the fact that the visual theme of a lot of the works appear to be his young girlfriend’s exterior, the artist states in an interview with Aftenposten that he has turned his back on what he calls «unhealthy art». Next in line is the the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911), for whom the issue of health was less a coquettish, metaphorical concern after he was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia in 1878. Still, during the five years he spent at a psychiatric clinic he created images that anticipated Edvard Munch and also the surrealists’ employment of spontaneity and insanity as tools for exploring the unconscious. Ennå hersker jeg tungt over avgrunnens dolk (Yet I continue to rule heavily over the dagger’s abyss) opens on April 11.
April also sees the opening of a new project space in the Stenersen museum’s former café. It will be run by Institutt for degenerert kunst (IDK) (Institute of Degenerated Art), a discontinued art project re-inventing itself now as artist-run gallery. The museum claims they are motivated by a desire to assist the dynamic underground art scene that has evolved in Oslo since the early 2000s in reaching a wider audience. By inviting IDK to take control over part of their space the museum hopes to establish a dialog with the scene. Anders Nordby, Eirik Sæther and Arild Tveito (the artists behind IDK) on the other hand, claim the space will be run independently of the museum and say they want «a kind of battle with the institution over who gets to define the project».
In February Kunstnernes Hus opened the exhibition In These Great Times: a tribute to Karl Kraus (1874-1936) – the pessimistically inclined satirist, dramatist, poet and sovereign editor of Die Fachel. According to its curator François Piron it is «an exhibition of attitudes, a celebration of evil spirit, a claim for idiosyncrasy and the negativity of the artistic discourse, and its ability to take part in the Real, not in the reality». Kraus himself lashed out in all directions and took critical issue with everything from the double standards, corruption and laissez-faire economic policies of the Habsburgian empire to psychoanalysis, Zionism and Pan-germanism. Similarities to Kraus’s literary strategies, like the use of montage, inclusion of documentation and détournement of quotations, can be found in today’s post conceptual art practice. Whether the works of the participating artists Thomas Bayrle, Victor Boullet, Paul Chan, Ane Hjort Guttu, Jenny Holzer, Kristine Kemp, Per-Oskar Leu, Adrian Piper, Lina Selander, Mladen Stilinović and Sturtevant actually succeed in evoking a «Krausian» spirit can of course be discussed.
The leading commercial galleries in Oslo – OSL contemporary, Galleri Riis, Peder Lund, Galleri K and Standard – all appear to be focusing on established profiles. Peder Lund, situated at the very peak of Tjuvholmen continues his alternation between photo-historical retrospectives and exhbitions with work by contemporary artists. First up this season are Constantin Brancusi’s enigmatic photographs of his own sculptures, which have never before been shown in Norway. March 29 the scene is set for the American painter Jonathan Lasker. In Gamlebyen too, where the gentrification process has sped up over the last few years, we can look forward to a busy spring. The German artist collective Jochen Schmith opened at VI, VII in the beginning of March. In Grønland the artist-run gallery 1858, which usually keeps closed during the winter months – they occupy a massive, concrete storage house with a cathedral-like headroom – chose to challenge the below-zero temperatures in January with their Fever Thread; an exhibition of framed poetry inside a makeshift shed, radiant with the orange light from heat lamps.
From Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di at Kunsthall Oslo. Siri Anker Aurdal, Interview, 1968/2013, Plexiglass installation.
F15 outside of Moss will soon play host Susan Philipsz’s first big project in Norway – The Distand Sound. This sound piece takes the coast viewed both as geography and through the lens of cultural history as its starting point. A total of nine different institutions in Norway, Sweden and Denmark will exhibit the work beginning the end of May. Let’s all cross our fingers and hope that Philipsz succeeds in concocting a fusion of place, history and sound that matches her strong contribution to Documenta 13. At Kunsthall Stavanger feminism is all the rage. It starts off with Hold steinhårdt fast på greia di (Hold onto your thing with a very firm grip), an exhibition first mounted at Kunsthall Oslo last winter, that aims to map the impact of feminism on contemporary art in Norway in the period from 1969 to 1989. Showing at the same time is the American artists Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy’s project New Report – a feminist «news station» (brought to us as video and performance) appealing to the audience with the slogan «Pregnant with Information». Their profile deviates somewhat from that of larger news stations like CBS and Fox News, the stories they bring being of a more private character, primarily focused on the artists’ own personal relations interspersed with reporting on very local events.
At Bergen Kunsthall the spring program opened with The Otolith Group’s exhbition In the Year of the Quiet Sun and Eric Baudelaire’s The Secession Sessions. The central piece in Baudelaire’s exhibition, which was dismantled already in mid February, is the film Lost Letters to Max. Taking the miniature Republic of Abkhazia, situated on the shores of the Black Sea, as a point in case the artist raises questions about what constitutes a state. The work, however, becomes just as much a journey through the ethical and narrative dilemmas you’re faced with when conducting a politically charged portrait-interview. Trondheim Kunstmuseum began the spring program with two exhibitions, one of which features the British director and artist Derek Jarman’s (1942-1994) Black Paintings. Created towards the end of his life, as he was dying from AIDS, these works are not only expressions of Jarman’s despair but also display a poetic and unwavering sense of humor. The other exhibition presents us with the Albanian artist Adrian Paci’s newly produced film The Column – which, according to the museum’s website, is “a parable of our global time, where production and transport merge while human value is diminished”. Probably a welcome curiosity in the program if you have a nerdy streak is Art, Anarchy and Apostasy, where the aim is to reconstruct a few of the activities that took place in and around the bookshop Better Books, a meeting point for the avant-garde in London in the swinging 60s. The exhibitor that is most likely to mobilize the largest number of local visitors, though, is Ane Mette Hol, who hails from Trondheim herself, and who the museum have chosen to present in a tête-à-tête with selected works from the museum’s own collection.
