Rooseum-TEXTS ON THE ARTISTS

Anna Gudjónsdóttir

As our knowledge of the biological sciences increases, a fundamental change occurs regarding our ethical as well as, perhaps, our aesthetic notions. In the future, the flora and fauna of countries will surely stand alongside art, language, and all other forms of cultural heritage. Today many artists work directly with qualities found in nature. Anna Gudjónsdóttir, together with Till Krause, runs the gallery Museums ferner Gegenden und Galerie für Landschaftskunst, in Hamburg. The gallery consists of one room and a yard, both of which are used for exhibitions. Krause and Gudjónsdóttir are interested in historical and contemporary concepts of nature and landscape, and they exhibit artists who use different methods to give shape to these issues. In addition, they work with another group of artists on a project on Falster, in Denmark, that deals with reflections on similar questions. Here, permanent works as well as projects are realized.

Using a crystal-clear Icelandic lake as her subject, Gudjónsdóttir has taken photos of the willowy vegetation and the beautifully imbued bottom. Down through the water another world is revealed, yet the clarity of the water makes it an integrated part of the one above the surface; only a glass-smooth surface separates the two worlds. Under the water live four different kinds of trout, which she has captured and portrayed with the camera. In this exhibition at Rooseum, she is presenting paintings together with her photos of nature, underscoring the painterly aspects of the photos; at the same time, the two different methods of depicting nature complement one another. The work Verzeichnis der Rabenhügel 1-29 (1998) consists of photos of mounds of raven droppings Gudjónsdóttir took on Iceland. These heaps give extra nutrients to the grass, thus building verdant oases-unique, small places in the otherwise barren Icelandic landscape. One senses the raven's presence and its means of altering the landscape. The images of the trout and the spoor left by the raven become a portrait of the unique circumstances that define the world we share with animals, and of the traces left by animals, which enrich our life.

Anna Gudjónsdóttir : Raven Mound

Anna Gudjónsdóttir : Untitled

Maria Hall

In recent years Maria Hall has worked with only three colors. She says that she wants to paint herself free from color and form. She wants to get away from the beautiful, beauty in color and form, and to avoid the hierarchical relationships associated with painting's formal processes. Also, by abating her painting in this manner she avoids stylistic development in her work. In her painting she attempts to avoid representation and the pictorially recognizable. The eminent illusionism in the history of painting is barred. Likewise, no room exists for modernism's abstraction. Instead there is an effort to antagonize our perceptions, possibly to prompt us to waver in our vision, to compel us to experience something that is perhaps, even, unpleasant. Overwhelmed by all the images constantly surrounding us, our vision has become nearly automatized. To counter this, Hall attempts to create paintings where our vision is disoriented, where there are no fixed points to get one's bearings. Pictorial space is banned from the paintings. The surface must be impregnable with indeterminate color and form. Hall creates a state of uncertainty, both for herself and for the viewer. Painting of this sort-the attempt to paint into a state-can be understood as both demanding and inaccessible. The disorientation is difficult and uncomfortable for the viewer. In establishing these objectives for her painting, the artist must eliminate considerable amounts while at the same time intensifying her vision. She develops a keen sensitivity for nuances and sharpens her own faculties of perception. There are traditional pictorial purposes behind Hall's obliteration of painting's expressive abilities, but it is possibly foremost a philosophical challenge to our ingrained vision.

Maria Hall: Afterwards

Maria Hall: Untitled

Carl Michael von Hausswolff

Carl Michael von Hausswolff participates in various art projects where he can act in the borderlands in which art can function as a channel or filter. He is also active as a musician, researcher, and composer, with particular focus on experimental music. In his installations, he uses electronic equipment, which, through a number of connections, generate both sound and pictures. At Rooseum, von Hausswolff has, among other things, hooked up to the building's electrical system in order to read different types of electrical activity that either run continuously or are activated by various devices. There is even a registration of the electromagnetic radiation within the building. An oscilloscope, which is filmed by a surveillance camera, measures and produces an image of this activity; then the image is projected on the wall by a video projector. In conjunction with this, other electronic equipment produce sound. These circumstances are created at the moment by electronic impulses inside the museum, which are then immediately transformed into a representational form on its walls. At Documenta X, in 1997, von Hausswolff exhibited Electric Fence Controller (1988-97), a thin electric fence that encompassed a garden. The electricity produced a sound audible on the building's second floor, from where it was possible to look down over the area and the slight, orange fence. The serenity that visitors could experience in the garden vanished when they viewed the installation inside the building, where the offensive noise blared in their ears.

In 1993, together with Leif Elggren, von Hausswolff established the state of Elgaland-Vargaland with its own constitution, passport, national song, embassies, and a coat of arms. The country is made up of all the border territories between countries, all areas outside countries' territorial waters as well as mental and perceptive territories. The nation grows slowly at the rate which people seek citizenship.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff: Home, Sweet Home

Carl Michael von Hausswolff: Oscillogram #2 - Possibly One Or Two
Presumed Deceased Individuals Interruptedby Radio Silcence

Anders Kappel

The tension between nature and civilization functions as the primary theme in the large charcoal drawings on paper that Anders Kappel currently has on exhibition at Rooseum. They are complemented by a sculpture in diabase and an installation along the same theme. The dynamic between the concrete object and pictures of the same creates meanings and interpretive possibilities on various levels. In these works it is possible to discern both a fascination and a criticism regarding perceptions of nature as amelioratory/healing or threatening and beyond one's control. There is trace of irony in the images of the rigid person placed out in the middle of nature like some stranger. Look how this creature attempts to make it in the wild; look how she tries to master the real world using only knowledge from a handbook, and how she rationally and methodically seeks to avoid nature's dangers and pitfalls. How, really, will she manage? Kappel seems to ask, while at the same time his answer lies in the work's formal properties. Pictorially, he works through the theme of nature versus civilization in several steps, both conceptually and purely physically and spatially. Within the pictures, figures and signs from various contexts are placed side by side and overlapping. Some are illustrations taken from survival technique handbooks, which seem somewhat comical in their neatness and pedagogical fervor; and some are solemn, almost sad, pictures of a person who has lost his sense of direction. Within the picture plane he builds up an impasto of color formations-markings or primitive characters-as if to deny pictorial illusion or to remind the viewer that the picture also has physical properties. Once again, he poses man's constructions against the "natural." Here, art is one in a series of survival strategies, and as such its formal qualities are accentuated.

Anders Kappel: Shelter

Anders Kappel: Method of pitching lean-to

Joachim Koester

At the core of most of Joachim Koester's work lies the question of how to describe an event. The impossibility of completely reconstructing a course of events leads him to emphasize the fictitious aspects within a presentation, but without ever losing touch with the realism at the work's base. The actual incident or subject is related to the method of storytelling. By stressing certain formal qualities, by employing different familiar narrative forms-or signs for these-he creates a dramatic episode. With accentuation placed on how stories are interpreted he succeeds in conveying experiences that exist somewhere between fiction and reality, between sociological investigation and drama.

Koester's art testifies to a strong interest in pure formal qualities: which narrative means to use and how to create tension by, for example, allowing contrasting pairs to pass over one another. In the work Pit Music (1996), a video (projection) of a string quartet performance, he makes use of the narrative possibilities that existed during the filming of the actual event and combines them with the drama of Shostakovich's music. Joining music and pictures and rendering certain parts in slow motion produces a fluctuation between documentary and fiction, giving a fairly ordinary occurrence a dramatic and even somewhat poetic character. In Day for Night, Christiania (1996), a series of photographs of the Danish alternative society Christiana, the images appear to have been taken at night. However, Koester shot them in daylight but with a special blue filter that invests the photos with a dreamlike, almost ghostly, quality. With these images Koester attempts to depict day and night in the same photo, perhaps as a parallel to dream and reality in the social experiment that is Christiana.

Joachim Koester: Sandra of the Tuliphouse
or How to Live in a Free State (The Ellipsis), 1998.

Joachim Koester: Sandra of the Tuliphouse
or How to Live in a Free State (The Ellipsis), 1998.

Henrietta Lehtonen

Today some artists present new artwork in a well-known context, or they use the placement or method of presentation of artworks to invite access to information or experiences. Henrietta Lehtonen uses different strategies to help viewers and participants discover fresh approaches to familiar terrain. She makes use of traditional material and media, but she then adds or removes something, which then opens the work to new interpretations or experiences. We are forced to adopt a new perspective, and that which we thought we knew leads us toward rediscovery. She does not attempt to provoke or expose rather she wants to help us toward renewed associations, possibly laying bare our biases about the world. Instead of working in any particular technique or material, she chooses that which best suits each occasion and context. At the 1995 Venice Biennale Lehtonen gained considerable notice for a video project (as part of the work L'Enigma del Campo) presented in the church of San Giovanni in Bragora. In the work, images of newborn babies being held up were projected immediately over a sculpture of the crucified Christ: contemporary pictorial language meets Renaissance representational ideal. The presentation of the newborn child is a central image in Catholic iconography; and, here, the use of a new medium presented alongside the well-known depictions which endow the church with its distinct character gives new life to the iconographical interpretations. Often her work has a social or relational quality, as in, for example, the installation Extra Muros (exhibited in Ghent, in 1994), a café partially elevated on a wooden construction. Here customers could drink coffee from cups hand-painted by Lehtonen, and at the same time, from a new perspective, have the opportunity to closely examine the already-existing relief that covers nearly an entire wall.

Henrietta Lehtonen: Hypnosis

Henrietta Lehtonen: Real Cats

Bjarne Melgaard

Bjarne Melgaard's art is chaotic and excessive, an apparent manic production of images. For him, choosing to do an exhibition assumes a generous attitude, a desire to move beyond the accepted framework. He has spurned purity and minimalism in both art and the art world. When he first began to attract attention, he was doing installations of drawings, paintings, objects, doodles, and other bits and pieces. Today he mostly works with painting and sculpture. The works, often marked by playfulness and intuition, have a directness that conveys the experience of being created on the spur of the moment. It is an art that aspires to escape traditional art history and to have a direct relationship with the public - artworks that in their internal complexity produce their own independent logic. Melgaard is pursuing an art indecipherable in any traditional manner. There is no key or preconceived signification; rather, there is flexibility and openness that facilitate variable readings. At "Manifesta 2," in Luxembourg, 1998, Melgaard presented a large installation, a vast scenery consisting of a specially built indoor swimming pool for Yolanda the Jack Smith Penguin, where the artist said he was "in Search of God within his own limitations." The room was brimming with paintings plus piles of toilet paper, which lent a trashy air; and in the middle of this chaos, visitors could follow a little penguin on a video, trying to "locate myths about artistic genius and suffering in an actual individual's biography."

Bjarne Melgaard: Untitled

Bjarne Melgaard: Untitled

Magnus Wallin

Hawaii is the West's present paragon of a tourist paradise. This ideal, combined with Medieval religious conceptions (primarily appropriated from the pictorial language of Hieronymus Bosch), constitutes the basis for Wallin's work in this exhibition. Nonethe-less, the dominating theme here, as in Wallin's earlier work, is the human body and Western views about various physical differences. Working under the umbrella title Physical Sightseeing, Wallin has created a series of works - such as the film Exit, and now, Physical Paradise-based on physical disabilities. Traditionally, paradise is the picture of an ideal state: a place that is harmonious, beautiful, and perfect in every way. Commenting on this image of perfection, Wallin says that "there are no disabled people in paradise." He adds that depictions of the devil and evil are often illustrated with the use of physical defects, and that these representations can be found in historical paintings as well as in contemporary depictions created by the media and modern information technology.

Wallin's work, Physical Paradise, consist of two parts. One is an animated film depicting a traveler transported through a zero-gravity paradise, a paradise tolerant of physical differences. The other is a series of images mounted in light boxes showing the space ship Honolulu on its flight from earth through history to Physical Paradise. In the film, we are there while Honolulu docks with the space station; we then follow along on a dizzying journey through a series of tunnels adorned with organic patterns. Is this physical paradise an alternative human end station with divine overtones, or a future center for adventure? The artist leaves the question open.

Magnus Wallin: Physical Paradise

Magnus Wallin: Physical Paradise

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