My cousin is visiting with me for a couple of days, and since I ran out of ideas for sightseeing after one day, yesterday found us sitting in a bar and me forcing him to lie to the camera; this is the resulting video. You will note that it says “01” which is indicative of my ambition of making him lie some more. The next time I’ll set the audio levels lower.
[x_video_embed no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]
As my residency is coming to a close, I’m getting to the things I’d initially thought I’d get done the first week. Like for example putting up a presentation of Gallery Titanik where the residency is housed. With the co-operation of Kimmo Modig, the director of the gallery, I finally got around to it.
[x_video_embed no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]
Sara and Tura woke me up this morning with a cake and a song, possibly related to my birthday. You know how it feels being woken up by a five-year old stomping on balloons? Fucking adorable, that’s how. The chocolate cake was excellent and so sweet it’ll cause diabetes in fish downstream of the sewage treatment plant.
For once I wasn’t too stressed out about my birthday, and proceeded to have a nice day with Sara at the demonstration against building high-rises on our allotment gardens (annoying GP TV autostart link) after which we drove Anna and Jan to the airport. They were running a tad bit late, and Jan informed me on the peculiarities of Gula Faran en route, seeing as I’d be driving it back. It’s funny that; In driving school I was never taught that if the outside temperature is higher than 30°C the brakes might not take and not to “rev more than 3500 rpm on fifth or it’ll downshift to fourth. Or maybe third.”
I’m not good with travel-induced stress, having missed important flights and trains and hating myself for it, and I was glad of not being at the other end of Jans phone when people already at the airport were calling and wondering where the hell we were. “We’re there!” is such a patent lie in that situation: If we were, you wouldn’t be having that phone call, now would you? My reaction might hark back to being a kid, waiting for my parents to come home from shopping, looking at the clock and dreading it would pass the time when they said they were going to be back. Not that the fears are the same, but time is a recurring theme, is what I’m getting at.
Back home, with only slightly ominous rattling as accompaniment, we had dinner and I manhandled Saras Nintendo. Super Mario Bros is still fun, although the platformer feels so much more limited than I remember it. The breadth and story I imbued it with as a kid isn’t there, replaced by an eagerness to complete the levels and find speed runs and easter eggs. Compared with how boring it feels on an emulator with keyboard, having the joypads indent my palms is all that is required to want to jump over more blocks. I am now looking for a NES.
That which is outside the norm only becomes revolutionary if enough important people are threatened by it, or if in itself it changes something. Since art doesn’t really do “real” these days, the former criteria is most often in evidence when discussing the rebellish of art. So if no-one cares about your molasses performance, it’s not necessarily bad, only non-threatening. So before we ask what art is in this day and age — and how it might become revolutionary — we ought to know whose definition we’re working with.
There’s no difference between an art thing and any other thing, only your added value of labour remains. And since traditional labour, with behaviours and signs particular to the artwork, has given way to labour which looks remarkably similar regardless of what you do (At a desk, before a conveyor belt, fiddling with bits and bytes) how do you value your labour as an artist? There is only performance left, regardless of what you do; Art objects left as droppings are useful only as proof of a presence — as long as an animal shits, at least we know it’s alive, sort of. Whenever you pull the squeegee across silkscreen you create value, often regardless of the outcome as long as you’re able to properly frame what you’ve done and why.
In an e-flux editorial, we read about the art world:
In essence, these attempts mistook the art establishment for being in the business of producing an aura of authenticity, when in fact the real commodity has always been this attention itself, the care and custodianship bestowed upon objects by this system.
Sven Lütticken continues, in the same issue of e-flux in Art and Thingness, Part One: Breton’s Ball and Duchamp’s Carrot with tracing our relationship to the art object from modernism to today:
While many surrealist objects emphasize that they “function symbolically,” the readymades do not. In this, ironically, they foreshadow in their own way the future of the commodity, in an archaic guise: they announce the profusion of goods that are bought for their coded distinctiveness in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the 1970s this becoming-sign of the object would lead Jean Baudrillard to diagnose fundamental changes in capitalism by supplementing the categories of use value and exchange value with his concept of sign value. […] This triumph of fetishism—of commodity fetishism as an active agent—results in object-signs that suppress most traces of their history, of their trajectories. Their lives seem to be lived in a realm of pure semiosis.
The article is a roundabout way of saying that branding is all there is, and that the value of the art brand is decided by a very small segment of the total market. An art value oligarchy.
The readymade bears no semblance of value from the original object. The conceptual work only bears the symbolic value of the material used. The post-modern infuses the banal with value, regardless of what the object is. In this last instance, when there’s nothing interesting left to say about the objects of art, only being an artist has value, and that is a buyers market where the threshold for newcomers is non-existent (Higher art education is a leaky levee, stemming the tide of people with ambition and time on their hands.)
So let’s just have fun. Lets exist on the margin between accepted society and the art world, and let’s not ask permission but rather forgiveness with our fingers crossed behind our backs. If we’re lucky we might just upset the right people.
I’m getting the hang of this whole “gardening” thing. It mostly consists of moving a whole lot of earth a very short distance — usually just inverting the vertical position of a “shovelful” — and exterminating everything which grows there, supplanting the thriving and natural state of things with a chastised vassal fief, creating orderly rows of ambitious homogeny and thrift. A colonialism of dirt, one might say. I’m currently looking for a pith helmet and should anyone volunteer as my “man servant” or “boy,” I promise to be a lenient master and offer perks, such as an abundance of radishes.
[x_video_embed no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]
I’ve lived in Gothenburg for almost as many years as I’ve wanted to visit the star observatory in the park, and not until yesterday did I actually go. Bus 60 took me and Sara to the top of the hill, and after a while Olle and Helga joined us at the small building which houses four telescopes and dioramas left over from other, probably upgraded, museums.
At the observatory, a gawky guide shuffled us around telescopes swaying in the wind, requiring constant adjustment to remain fixed on the Pleiades or twinkly Sirius. The stars look nothing like in the movies, and even less like the colour-composite images NASA releases. Turns out that when you’re looking closely at bright dots, what you see is slightly larger bright dots, and even more dots around those. It’s dots all the way, so to say, which was the sentiment of one vocal woman, who exclaimed “you have got to be bloody shitting me, I can see as much in my binoculars at home!” It was a tense moment, and with the exception for a brat who just wouldn’t shut the hell up — his parents resigned to his annoying existence — twenty or so people held their breath, expecting the woman to lay into the poor, bumbling, guide. She was somewhat placated by seeing the Andromeda galaxy.
At the end of it all, we got to see some constellations and their constituent stars, and even got to see a blurry Saturn with a blurry ring. According to the other guide — the jovial one with the nose ring — this popping of ones Saturn cherry is a big moment in any stargazers career, and we did our best to feel properly awed. It was very nice to see it for real, and next time I’ll be in a city with a bigger telescope I’ll do my best to sneak a peek at the other planets. Not buying my own telescope yet though.
In any other city I wouldn’t hesitate to move about, but here in Warsaw I have old habits and they are difficult to break. My expensive Apple phone finally became useful with some creative use of offline maps and the GPS, and me and Tomasz managed to bus about with a minimum of confusion and lost time. Tomorrow we’re heading to a barn and then to a commentator for an interview; we’re actually watching the guy on TV right now, and I’m trying to come up with a lighting strategy. Somehow, it’s far simpler to tell other people how to take pictures than to improvise yourself, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.
The Internets did lie to me as for the weather – I was told, in no uncertain terms, that there’d be 8 degrees and sunny today, but I really should have packed something besides my optimistic jacket. Also, I ought to be a better brother to my brother and get him a present, seeing as it’s his birthday today. (Which reminds me that I missed Matildas birthday three days ago. Oh well, I guess we’re even now)
[x_video_embed no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]
Fridges are ultimate todo-lists, I’ve discovered. I’m going to Poland for a couple of days with my brother. I haven’t been for a while except for funerals, so it’s a good change of pace tagging along to something which is less depressing. I don’t know how I’ll fit all the orders for Zubrowka, but I’ll manage somehow. I might be difficult to get hold of, but SMS ought to work as usual. If there are requests, I might upload video and stuff! How about that!
[x_video_embed no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]
Last fall I got a grant in order to take some time off, buy some equipment, read a book and hopefully produce some new art. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve done fuck-all since I got that grant except working on non-art related things. What the grant money did get me — in addition to a very nice knife, new running shoes and tights, an unending supply of freshly squeezed juice and some new in-ear-headphones — is some peace of mind and a bourgeois disposition. Just cause I’m not flat out broke, I suddenly felt that getting a stockbroker account was a “sound idea” and it feels as though I’m spiraling into a bad habit which will end up with me crashing at the end anyway, when I’m back to hand-to-mouth.
The new apartment is nice enough but I keep putting off inviting people. I don’t know if it’s cause I’ve still not gotten around to getting a proper lamp in the hall, where the rechargeable flashlight is getting electronically incontinent, or if I’m in a reclusive state of mind of late. I have an adjustable table which goes up and down at the touch of a button, and standing at it I can watch the ferries pass my window, which is nice and occasionally disconcerting, creating an illusion of the whole building moving. I would have liked to have learned the names of the ships by now but they don’t seem to stick. Perhaps I need a diagram.
Earlier today, my barber Hasse told me of a friend of his who, having spent his life and career on land, decided to fulfill his dream and signed on to a ship at the age of 57. He had dreamed of going to sea for all his life, and when he finally badgered the shipping line to give him a chance he concluded after the three month stint that it sucked balls. The moral being that you set some goals for yourself in life, and even if those don’t become fulfilled at least you did some fun stuff along the way, made some good friends and didn’t start a genocide or something similarly awful. As morals go, it’s not that bad.
When my paternal grandmother died last spring, we stopped by in Sanok to check in with my fathers father. Although not totally estranged, the relationship wasn’t very cordial and he hadn’t yet met dads second wife of fifteen years, nor their kids. The meeting was short and somewhat strained, but since grandfathers refusal of taking chemotherapy had left him with only a handful of months to live, dad thought he’d make an effort.
The previous occasion that I’d spoken to him had been almost ten years ago. Dad called me up on Iceland while visiting grandfather who had taken ill, and asked that I talk with him. I told shortly of what I was doing and where I was, and he sounded very weak and grateful that I’d taken the time to speak with him. The stories I’ve heard about him has him pegged as a dick, and perhaps illness had brought awareness of this to the foreground.
Regardless of his feelings, he died two weeks ago from metastasized cancers. When we met him in spring he had a brisk step and keen, albeit weary eyes. He’d cut back on the amount of work and now went to his tailors studio only to keep himself occupied during the days. He was living with a woman who cared for him, and if he was wanting for anything it was certainty that he’d die with dignity, which he’d found lacking as of late.
When I last saw him, I was ten or twelve. He gave my brother a straight razor and me a paratrooper knife. “When the Russians attack at least you can take one with you” he said. Mom confiscated the razor. I used the knife when I parachuted ten years ago, but have not killed any Russians. My brother went to the funeral a week ago, while I stayed at home, tied to work, sending my regards to those left behind, and from afar.
Now both my parents are without parents.