GOLD
ERLEND HAMMER
“Øystein Aasan’s works function as a game of visual contrast and compare. The modernist grid is taken on a play date with images from the leftovers of a visual history associated with popular culture. Aasan picks these images from old magazines or from collecting copy negatives and the images are mass-produced and potentially limitless in quantity. As such they are examples of the norm in art post-pop. Both through references and the use of found imagery, post-modernist art keeps seeping through the cracks of the modernist grid. Or perhaps rather the grid is being superimposed over the found image. This could easily be interpreted as an attempt to re-describe the, assumed literary, qualities of referentiality that we normally ascribe to post-modern art. The result is a feeling of visual tension that is optically immediate, but also conceptually striking since what is at stake is the very distinction between modernist and post-modernist ways of understanding the image. Aasan’s work makes the connection between grid and multiple obvious by combining them in objects that themselves appear anonymously unique.”
- Erlend Hammer, Lautom Contemporary catalogue for Liste 2009.
Sometimes when I am starting a new text and I don’t know how to begin, I randomly browse through books that I think might be somehow relevant to what I’m going to be writing about. Often this just leads to me sitting in the middle of a pile of open books, not really reading, not really writing, just looking at sentences, sentences that may as well be about when a particular book was first published, where the author was born, details about whoever has written the preface or what kind of images have been used for the cover. This kind of information makes up a large part of Øystein Aasan’s work. A piece may include parts of the front page of an old magazine, an ad for a movie or the image of one of those actors whom we always recognize, but never really know anything in particular in which we’ve seen him perform.
Stripped of their function as submitters of information these texts and images that at some point had clearly specific purposes become de-contextualised, free-floating signs. They continue to hint at specific information, but rarely let on precisely what this information might be. They turn into signs that serve no other purpose than being signs, signifying all over the place. It just doesn’t necessarily matter what they signify. Information is treated as matter. Whatever affinities exist between certain texts and certain images are explored in a way that suggests a subtle play with precisely the randomness of these affinities.
(Kenneth Goldsmith has said: ”we don’t need the new sentence, the old sentence, reframed, is good enough.” Goldsmith’s work is almost entirely based on quotations, in fact that is often the sum total of text in his pieces. “A New York Minute” is a transcription of a year of morning weather forecasts from New York local radio, “Day” was written by copying the text of an issue of the New York Times, in full, each page transcribed indiscriminately from left to right and made into an 800 page “novel”. Rarely has anyone had such a good opportunity to adopt Truman Capote’s criticism of Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Goldsmith’s work is an obvious attempt at developing a Warholian non-creative practice within literature, but non-creativity is not Aasan’s concern.)
Aasan does use found images that originally appeared in potentially unlimited editions, but that often were not realised as such. On the contrary, these images were often intended for widespread commercial use, but ended up rejected and forgotten and Aasan’s work represents a kind of mining of these resources. This, in fact, is the real evidence of how image-saturated our society is, not the thousands of images we are surrounded with and see everywhere, but the existence of all those images that we never see. Quite a few artists have tapped into this source of almost endless supply, but what is particular about Aasan’s is that he focuses primarily on images related to popular culture.
The primary medium of popular images is photography. Photography came about at the tail end of the Industrial revolution in Europe. Art was coming out of close to a millennium of increasingly successful representations of reality, beginning most importantly with the re-discovery of the central perspective. These two facts, the excitement of the possibilities created by Industry and the excitement created by the possibility of finally capturing reality, fuelled the development of photography as a form of art. Meanwhile photography was used for many other purposes than art, unlike painting or sculpture, which is not generally something non-artists do for fun. Photography got itself into a lot of trouble precisely by being so available and for many years people who were interested in photography as art had great difficulties defending the idea that “photography is art.” This resulted in photography developing a great deal of theory that contributed little to general art discourse, and photography, through the lack of inventive use or interesting interpretation, quickly turned academic and is today perhaps the most stale of all forms of art.
The last twenty years have seen a consistent exploration of an artistic practice that involves using found images for various purposes. It started out as mostly motivated by political concerns, when it was called appropriation art, and then developed into a more art theoretically motivated post-modernist exploration of intertextuality where the use of found images in itself became an aesthetic strategy. Since the 90s, developments in popular music, mostly rap, have caused art theorists to adopt the term sampling for artistic use of material originally created by others. Sampling, the way it developed in rap, and the way it has been used in contemporary art theory, has been a very important element in our understanding of the importance of context sensitivity and the potential that is found in the act of re-contextualisation. But today, as an artistic strategy, sampling too has become predictable, stale and boring. It is not longer particularly interesting that an artist can use material that someone else originally made and claim authorship over it, nor is it very exciting to keep making these “new connections” all the time.
Øystein Aasan’s work exists perfectly located in between these two stale forms of artistic practices, which, obviously, sounds bad. But that is all the more reason why the way he has turned it into such an interesting project. Because what his work does is to use photography in a way it isn’t normally used, and to use other people’s images, from wherever he might find then, without using them to ends that involve “clever” new combinations. The images are simply re-framed, within the already existing framework of a highly individual and developed aesthetic sensibility that makes sure that the images, whatever they are, are made to serve the purposes that the work demands. They are stripped of their individual desires and simply put to use. The result is that not only is the use of found images re-vitalized, and photography itself is given a new lease on life.
Grid envy
Aasan’s recent work is also full of grids. Since Rosalind Krauss identified it as a staple structure throughout the history of art, and not simply the radical beacon of a modernist avant-garde that many had imagined, the grid has become notoriously shifty. The grid represents order, stability and progress. Our conception of it is entirely urban, it’s the square relative that grew out of the city planning of 18th century Paris. It’s New York. And New York, incidentally, is the centre of Modernist art, not only because actual artistic activity went on there, but because it was the place where Modernism was defined. It was where Clement Greenberg and, most importantly, MoMA began writing the history of the 20th century. It’s also where all the artists moved from, fleeing west to ranches and to California when Modernism was over. Manhattan is forever a modernist location, it’s the seat of the idea of the 20th century. The city itself is near-perfectly gridded. If you know the alphabet and how to count you’re never lost. It’s geography by numbers and logic, and you’re as far away from nature that you can possibly get. So however many grids Krauss is able to discover, the practical value of the grid remains an important signifier of modernity. The history of the grid is not merely a history of a visual phenomenon, but contains the entire intellectual history of Western civilization, the city, prison cells, crossword puzzles and Pac Man. When you go to The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria, you find that the most worn path runs along the outside of the grid. The grid stands for comfort. The grid is the opposite of the labyrinth, which indicates pre-modern chance, mystery and chaos.
The archive too is a way of making order where it was previously lacking. Aasan’s archive is a collection of sketches, notes and references that have either been transformed into existing works, or left behind as research or for future use. Creating such an archive is a way of writing the history of the existing work. The desire to do so is a way to include the history of the work in the body of work itself. It involves placing the work within a carefully crafted and curated framing.
The archive will remain in the collection of the artist and cannot be exhibited outside of the artist’s home and work space. As such the archive already becomes more than merely an archive, it becomes a complex work in itself. It already was, in the sense that the structure of the archive has sculptural qualities that clearly makes it recognizable as Aasan’s work. The different notes and sketches are to some extent already works in and of themselves, even if they are only really parts of one larger work, which is the archive in full. These works also exist in an unusual space in between being actual works and the structure on which works are presented.
This is particularly true because Aasan already has a practice of showing “display unites”- shelf-like structures upon which framed, individual works, are hung and presented. This way of controlling the presentation of the works resembles how many artists, like Jorge Pardo or Tobias Rehberger, often manipulate the gallery space in a way that makes it difficult to separate the work from the context (as if we need this separation), but Aasan’s display units are themselves objects that remain almost inseparable from the framed works, whereas the framed works can easily be exhibited without display units. In this sense the units function almost as a highly elaborate, spatial and sculptural sort of expanded frame, and can be sold along with the work. It is therefore not surprising that Aasan also talks about perhaps, more seriously, building actual furniture one day.
The added contextual element of how those who wish to see the archive need to actively seek it out within a setting that is quite unusual. Getting to see the archive involves taking part in a large-scale framing of the spectator’s experience. The archive also represents considerable practical challenges on the gallerist’s part, such as the need for someone to be present in Aasan’s home if he is not there himself when the archive is on display.
Most importantly it represents a challenge to the visitor that she is able to avoid falling for the temptations that present themselves when she is invited into the artist’s personal home. Looking for connections between Aasan’s work and living spaces can easily become similar to what goes on in Marfa, Texas, where the cult of Judd is kept alive because the opportunities for “connecting the dots” are so (freakishly) ample. The presentation of Aasan’s archive, however, is interesting precisely because of how it differs from the Judd experience. Visiting Judd’s various living/ work spaces in Marfa, as part of the tours organised by the Donald Judd Foundation, it is striking how extremely and orderly staged everything is. You have various Judd relics spread throughout the tours, ready for adoration, a kimono carefully draped over a daybed, a pair of slippers under a wooden stool.
The archive is remarkable for the way it blurs the barriers between what is and what isn’t normally available from an artist’s ouvre. For most people, of course, the only available works are still those that are actually shown in exhibitions or at fairs. Most spectators will never visit the archive. Its existence, however, still makes all the exhibited, and sold, works, somehow become more closely related. They become, in a way, representatives of the archive, the ambassadors of an expanded reality, that for most spectators remains imagined. The archive becomes an image in the spectator’s head as a kind of mothership, the place where all these works originate, and where we might ultimately might find the answers to whatever questions turn up when we meet the other individual works. The archive turns into a mythical Babylon, or tower of Babel, an imagined key to it all, like the imagined book that Borges describes that would potentially explain all the other books. This book, however, is precisely the kind of final answer that reality cannot and will never offer us. There is no fundamental piece of information that will make all the other questions disappear, no final piece of the puzzle. There is only more experience.
And the most important part of the archive is ultimately the way its structure invites the spectator to engage with it. Just like the bookstore or the library, it offers a truly analogue pursuit of information. The sculptural quality of the structure is important primarily because of the way it continues Aasan’s habit of giving information a physical presence.
Image vs Experience
While it’s tempting to look at the forms into which the images are trapped, it is just as interesting to look at the images themselves since they offer a treasure trove of forgotten information, and their entertainment value is not to be underestimated; there are some truly funny images to be found in these works. What Aasan does, of course, is not simply to use these found images just for laughs. By hiding them behind the gridded structure, he literally obscures them and makes them even harder to figure out, as if their content and origin weren’t already hazy enough. The result is a delight in how the images become twice removed from us, first in the way they are broken up and hidden so that simply making out the actual images becomes a task in itself, and secondly when these optical obstacles have been overcome, in trying to place or make sense of where the images themselves came from in the first place.
Aasan’s way of using images is not critical in the straightforwardly ideological sense of a lot of “appropriation art.” Instead it offers a much more fundamental exploration of how we approach and understand images. And he locates this understanding in between the original and the multiple. The collages are themselves originals, and they also make use of intended multiples that have by scarcity alone have become originals through pure chance. A more populist way of using the same technique might have been to use already famous, or more contemporary, images, but this would have been a much more crass form of using found images. It would have become a typically banal form of “media critique.”
Aasan’s use of decidedly post-modern images (rescued from the rubbish heap of popular culture) that are trapped within, or escaping from behind, grids, not only shows how our understanding of these images are dictated by still prevalent modernist ways of understanding images, but also highlight the connections between post- and pre-modernist images. In fact a lot of the image production today, and especially a lot of the image production from which Aasan draws his material, is comparable to iconographical image use as represented in pre-Institutional art, whether in medieval religious use, or post-Renaissance portraits as idolatry. Recent discourse has focused on showing that the idea of the singular, original artwork was itself a singular original invention of modernism and that post-modern art and its embracement of the endless supply of popular images, is related to a longer tradition of not thinking about images as original one-time only events. Renaissance art did the same thing as post-modern art in terms of how images functioned.
This, however, may not be an ideal to reach for since in both cases the purposes that these images ultimately served were ideological on behalf of a power structure of which it is perhaps still important to offer criticism and resistance. In one sense Aasan’s grids function as reminders of these relationships, but they could just as well be seen as advocating the use of the grid as a way of holding this non-modernist way of “reading” images at bay, fencing it in so to speak, in an attempt at reigning in the infinite reproducibility of the “simulacrum.” It is important to note that the fact that they are collages make them not just images, but objects. The collage and its image-as-object was the most important intermediary step between painting and conceptual art in so far as it represented the realisation that “art” is something that is activated somewhere in between the image and the spectator.
This was always a big part of the way relics functioned and part of Aasan’s appeal is the re-objectification of the post-modern image-icon. It draws on the realisation that the Fountain today exists almost exclusively as image, and that this doesn’t threaten its relic-status, but rather mass-produces it. The post-modern image and its reproducibility is re-connected with its pre-iconoclastic status as relic, and Øystein Aasan’s work turns us onto a variety of questions about how images work that is much broader, and part of a much longer history, than simply the relationship between modernist and post-modernist images.