ADAM GIBBONS IN CONVERSATION WITH ØYSTEIN AASAN, PUBLISHED HERE: HTTP://WWW.AMNUDENDA.COM/SESSION_10_OYSTEIN.HTM
Øystein Aasanin conversation with Adam Gibbons.
AG: The sculptures we’re talking about were constructed in relation to the space of La Vitrine gallery in Paris.
ØA: The room is not so big it’s 70SqM, it’s a store front, it’s one long room about six meters wide. The frst thing you meet, straight in your chest is one of these big display units. It is constructed so if you want to see the pictures which are underneath the plates you have to see them from a rather sharp angle, and the piece is installed so it already has an angle when you enter the room but not so much that you can see the plates underneath, it’s something that you discover after walking around. Then on the right hand side is the memory game piece. There’s a time thing in it so most of the time it’s blank and then an image comes up and it stays for a minute or two and then it’s fve minutes or so until the next image appears. You have to have some patience. Then once you’ve gone through those two pieces you have like a large structure in front of you; you see the collage behind the structure, through it, but you can never really see the whole thing, if you don’t pass the structure you have to walk back and forth so your view is always obstructed somehow. When you come up to the collage you need some distance to take the whole collage in otherwise it’s completely fragmented and then you’re encapsulated by the structure and then you walk into the structure... exactly where the structure is, the ceiling is quite a lot lower than the rest of the space and the
structure is made to ft underneath that part so you then feel like you’re enclosed in an additional space. When you walk up to the collage again the ceiling is 60cm diference in height so the room opens up again and you have a totally diferent feeling about the room.
AG: I think we agree we can talk about this installation as if it were a single work.
ØA: It was slimmed down to something that stays together.
AG: Aesthetically it has a kind of uniformity; the materials provide the sense that this is a series of sentences operating on the same register. Within that there are diferent phenomena: Turning things into image, seems to be something that happens repeatedly in your work; employing strategies for notionally making image out of something that is not initially image. Another thing I would identify is associated with density, of meaning and of space; fnding diferent ways for structures to function alongside each other, sometimes in opposition to each other. This is particularly evident with the collage and the structure in front of it, which makes such a particular viewing circumstance.
ØA: I think it’s also always a contradiction from the very beginning this idea of a picture of how you deal with space, how you move around as a viewer or how you control; you lay some lines where the viewer would preferably go and at the same time all of them are kind of images. I really don’t make sculptures, which are three dimensional in a traditional sculptural way.
AG: How would you characterize that distinction?
ØA: At least how I imagine it is: Sculptures capture space, they occupy a specifc space all the time and they have this three dimensionality which is very clear, but if I make a sculpture it’s more or less 2 dimensional. I’m not interested in the space it occupies or volume, I’m totally ignorant towards this somehow. I’m only interested in how it controls the space, more like a barrier than a sculpture. It would force the viewer into specifc situations in relation to the piece or the whole exhibition space for instance. The moment you have a three dimensional sculpture in a traditional sense you have 360 degrees of viewing points and I don’t. I usually have at most 4 or 5, which are ideal situations for viewing the sculpture. So you reduce some of the possibilities that the viewer has relating to the work, but that means you also control it in a sense. It’s the same thing with an image, with an image you don’t have so many ideal viewing points. I was always very keen on this quote from Ad Reinhart who said in a discussion with Donald Judd, ‘sculpture is something you bump into when you back up from a
painting’, I think it’s cool to have it the other way around too, you have to back up from a sculpture to bump into a painting! (Laughs)
AG: It’s very much to do with determining the viewer’s experience.
ØA: I thinks so, it’s a very integral part of how you make meaning in a work, it’s something that comes from the theory we read at art school, which was the groundwork for what I worked with later on of course, we read ‘Specifc Objects’ and this Laura Mulvey text, which has just come back into print, ‘Visual and Other Pleasures’, where she uses a Freudian methodology to deal with two bodies of work by Victor Burgin and Barbara Kruger. She talks about language a lot, for example shifters in language and she talks about density and displacement and things that come straight from the Freudian textbook, and masculine and feminine and both of these bodies of work made that situation diferent, they turn it around somehow. What Mulvey says is that a work of art is always feminine because the viewer is always active so the viewer is always masculine so she tries to establish something that goes the other way around; that the work actually requires something from the viewer that makes the work active and masculine. This was something I thought about a lot with the collages, that I wanted them to really require something from the viewer, and I think it’s a little bit the same with the sculptures as well that they... you would never be able to just walk into a room and see it and that’s it. There’s always some sort of trick that you have to involve yourself in somehow.
AG: There has always been a dialogue around otherness in relation to the spectator and the (art) object and as soon as that becomes gendered it takes on another set of complexities.
ØA: In the renaissance you talked about an ideal perspective for instance or when people did murals it was always a male perspective; the height of the male was always the ideal viewpoint. There’s this whole discussion around the white cube that in terms of proportions it also favours men. When I make works they are related to my own physicality, which is not really female. This is also OK; I make the pieces for myself.
There is something I was always very interested in the relationship either between text and images towards sculptures. I was never really trained as a sculptor, I had lots of photography, lots of theory I did some kind of sculpture in art school but not really that much. I painted, that’s what every body did in my school. Somehow I’m extremely interested in images but I have this need to do sculptures and I think this need is this biographical thing that somehow I need to build something. My father and grandfather were cabinetmakers. My great grandfather too, he was quite accomplished he had his own business.
AG: And you worked with your father?
ØA: All the time, also with my grandfather. He had a house next to my parents, on the same land, he was there every afternoon to fx the house, have a cup of cofee, get away from his wife I suppose. (Laughs) So when I was a kid, not in school I was actually with him. And he was quite good but he was not capable of making anything that looked elegant. Everything looked a bit too thick and a bit too massive it was just too much volume in what he did. He couldn’t make anything really fne. I’ve seen some of the furniture that my great grandfather made and they were very, very beautiful, in the design department so to speak. My father’s also really good at making things that are really elegant.
AG: You get itchy hands?
ØA: Absolutely. Then the sculptures are ways to deal with images but with 3 dimensions. I’m also very interested in this larger structure that surrounds the work. At one point it became really apparent if I’m interested in what’s happening here in my own practice and I’m developing this, this also means I need to think very closely about the larger things, why you make these works and how they feed into the next and so on. That’s when I started the series of sculpture called ‘display units’. Which are an empty structure, it’s nothing in itself really, it’s only like the plates in between that actually matter and they often come from literature for instance or from photography. They’re only 40cm deep and you can see them from both sides, they’re really not sculptures in the traditional sense.
AG: Your sculpture pieces are a bit like a shelf or a frame: A way to contain the image or the idea.
ØA: Absolutely. I read texts about exhibition design for instance, display design and theory about this which is slightly the same thing, you know you would contain larger ideas within them, like a structure, you’d build up a physical structure that the viewer is supposed to follow. When I work with text I very often work with things that are secondary to the main text, one text piece for instance is called Reading Hemmingway Without Guilt but it doesn’t quote any actual Hemmingway, it’s only critique’s and theoretical works about Hemmingway’s work. So it’s again a secondary structure to the primary structure if you think of his work as the primary structure.
AG: There are strategies you use for demanding the attention of the viewer and making them invest in the work. With the slides work, it’s very interested in photography, it’s primarily about memory, which is inherently linked to photographic practices. You’ve set up this game around that, it’s the same with the collage; you don’t immediately encounter this image because it has been deconstructed in quite a physical way, deliberately.
ØA: I always think if you make a piece there should be one section you can understand without having any prior knowledge of the artist. There should be one entrance that you can say ‘here’s something I can understand’ and then there should be at least three or four other things in that piece that you could discover after a little while.
I always thought that if I worked with things that are physically related to the viewer, or optically also, that there would be some mechanism built into every work or every exhibition that you can understand just from being present in front of the work. This would be the easiest way to access a work. You would feel or understand it right away and then you could start building small traps for people in-between but I think there should always be something that you can get from the beginning.
AG: With the grids in the collage; in a way you have to play some perceptual game in order for your senses to take the work in at all.
ØA: Before your brain starts working on a piece, the way you approach the work physically and visually, this is the frst step, this is your frst experience of an artwork. This is after all visual art so that’s where you begin and then you can start thinking about it later. My work is also dry, it’s not really fancy it’s not Popish in any way really, so you need this mechanism built in there.
AG: I was interested in this idea of game playing; you’re asking the viewer to participate?
ØA: When I’m working on it I think of it more like rules, I make specifc regulations for myself. It has more to do with trying to contain me than the viewer but then it comes out as a game because you have specifc parameters and I always think you don’t make rules unless you’re willing to break them. If you see you get a better result by breaking the rules you’re going to do that.
AG: But then for the viewer that’s quite hard to do, to break the
rules, they’re confned.
ØA: Probably. From exactly this you end up with results you wouldn’t have got otherwise. You keep some rules and some are lost in the process of making the works and then when you display it, it pops up again but then maybe its more settled and then it’s kind of like a game. Also physically, how people would walk around this space in Paris, maybe people aren’t entirely conscious of it but it’s quite regulated, from how the piece is put up and constructed you have to move in quite specifc ways to see the work.
AG: It’s a very narrative sort of architectural proposition in a way. It’s efecting the viewer emotionally quite deliberately.
ØA: Every space does.
AG: As you’ve said before it’s quite dry work but there is this evocation of emotion that takes place, maybe there’s a particular register in which the viewer responds to that and I fnd that is to do with architecture, specifcally, in terms of the narratives we understand in relation to architecture.
ØA: I think, if this is not too blunt or a simplifcation: When I work with collages this is kind of cerebral, it’s thought out to a certain extent, although a lot changes when I’m physically making them. The way it will be in the space where it’s installed, this can be more emotional, it’s more about how you feel and relate to diferent spaces or when I look at a model I can already start thinking – this space will close in on you here and open up there and you’ll have this feeling... Maybe there’s some kind of division between the brain part and the emotional part.
AG: Once you have an installation, and maybe this is why it’s good to talk about the works together as one thing; as a viewer in the space you experience only one thing, you experience the cerebral and the emotional simultaneously. With the slide show, you have to wait for something to happen; maybe time is a material, quite deliberately, in building that feeling.
ØA: When I make pieces I think that it should require something, you shouldn’t just see it and that’s it, this is where the time aspect comes in, I think art can and should be demanding in a way, you should ask something from people, they are not there for a joyride or anything!
AG: Associated with time there’s this circularity implied by Finnegan’s Wake: the frst sentence turning into the last sentence which is extended to the Adam and Eve story, presented via images of the sculptures by Tilman Riemenschneider, it makes for an undetermined beginning and end to the work.
ØA: The mirrors as well you see several refections at once.
AG: The ‘sculptures’ made me think about Nauman’s corridor as well, very powerfully determining how the individual feels and moves in a given space.
ØA: I wouldn’t make a corridor but I’d maybe make other things that were more invisible. For me it’s interesting to do things that are less obvious, they would experience both the emotional and the information the dryness and not really be conscious of what trick I put into place to make sure they relate to the work in the way I want them to. It’s not so strict though, it’s open but I like having a certain control over the viewer.
AG: It’s quite a conventional control in a sense. In relation to say institutional architecture, say in a museum where you’re given a prescribed narrative in terms of how you pass through the building processionally; in a sense you’re encouraging something similar to that even in the white cube space which is more obviously has less interpretive elements and less rooms, none the less the structures are operating within that vocabulary.
ØA: This piece was originally made for a project space in Berlin
called Corridor, it looks more or less the same apart from the project space was much smaller and the previous piece was going around a corner because the space was literally a corridor and it was very narrow and ‘L’ shaped and I thought it was one of the most interesting places where you turn.
I had a small print out from an architectural plan and this drawing made the blue print for the sculpture but super abstracted and then the picture was on the wall, nearly on the ground and the sculpture was around it so you’d never have one clear view of the image, the resource material, this was like the clue to the whole sculpture but you could never really see it, you had to move back around that corner to ever see it at all so I thought about exactly this efect but then I was interested in concealing the source material somehow to make a trick on how you would not really ever see the original drawing but I thought this time I was more interested in that efect in itself not obstructing the viewer. Also it’s a lot bigger so it has a completely diferent physical relationship.
AG: Does it have any other genesis apart from obstructing the viewer? There’s nothing representational about it?
ØA: Not really, as I said: When you back up it closes in on you, it’s like a monster that sneaks up on you. There’s nothing representational, it’s constructed with triangles and plates screwed face to face. It’s quite modular. In this case I constructed the pieces individually and then I put the show up and moved it until I felt it functioned in relation to everything else. It was the only thing not set from the beginning; I decided how it would be there. The way it’s constructed is specifcally to make sure you don’t see everything on the other side of it. It was the most efcient way of making the sculpture, the formal qualities are purely for this reason. I looked at Japanese screens for instance in connection to this, you have the semi-transparency of them.
It’s like a negotiation, you have to have the space around to determine the shape it takes. Also when I think of the collages and this modular system that moves I’m really not very interested in stability, I like pieces that can be reshaped or rebuilt, just by placing it diferently you can have a completely diferent logic to it. I’m not so interested in these kind of fnished works where you determine once and for all how things will be. Donald Judd for instance was very interested in permanence, if he installed a series of sculptures they were not to be moved. Paul McCarthy on the other hand, his pieces are never fnished, even with huge installations which are
sold he can always come back, there’s a contract, he can come and rework it if he feels like it.
AG: Working with some of the same ideas over a period of time, there’s this process of editing, be it the found material you use as a starting point or the parameters you make for the viewer, by the way it’s displayed the viewer also goes through this editing process.
ØA: I’ve also shown things where you put so much work up it can be clear from the formal way in which work is presented that you will never get through it all, with Finnegan’s Wake for instance it’s quite obvious you’re never going to read it all.
I wanted to show the collage, the space was arranged around the fact I wanted to show that one piece then I tried hundreds of diferent things. The display unit was the last thing I decided on, I had 2 or 3 other diferent solutions but for some reason I ended up with the display thing. Sometimes it’s not so obvious why you choose one thing over another, it can be just like a hunch, somehow you get a feeling something is going to work out and it fts.
The big structure is kind of central, it’s kind of not a work, it’s a bit the same as a platform I built for a show at PSM Gallery in Berlin, by the entrance. I didn’t consider it as a piece on its own, it was more like an architectural part of the show it was an important part of the show but it acts as an intervention.
I would never consider selling something like this, it has a diferent function.
The structures are dependent on the other works being there, otherwise they’re just boxes.
AG: With the three diferent works, the slideshow, Finnegan’s Wake and then the collage, do you make particular connections between those three works? In a way they’re all telling stories or referencing stories, I kind of see them as containers, vessels.
ØA: Whatever I take as the source material if it’s a flm poster or Finnegan’s Wake, it’s not really important to me, it is to a certain extent but it’s not something I really burn for. Where I make it my own is by working with it or by displaying it or transforming it into something else so I think this is on a content level, there isn’t any connection between the flm poster and Finnegan’s Wake, except that I chose them and started working with them. The way it has been worked with is the thing that binds them together. The memory game contains all of it because it has all of the ideas that I had for the show, photographed, but again re-worked.
AG: The slideshow is a key in interpretive terms.
ØA: There’s also a note in one of the slides where it says ‘clue work’. I wanted to regenerate that loss that the viewer would have if they took their time and watched the whole slideshow; they have a possibility but it’s taken away constantly. You stand there and look at this slide and then suddenly it goes and you wait and you’ve probably already forgotten what it was. If you wanted to though you could stand there and watch and memorize every one and then you would have every clue for the exhibition and many more. I then thought this is interesting in terms of Finnegan’s Wake which describes a situation which is like a beginning and an end in a circular way and describes the situation before Adam and Eve, I thought this was important as well, before the beginning somehow. Specifcally it talks about a river that runs past Adam and Eve, and I thought this is a
nice metaphor. There’s this Zen saying that the river always stays the same but the water always changes so I though if you have a river run past Adam and Eve then it comes from somewhere, it pre- dates them, but the Devil’s Canyon is diferent from those two pieces it does not really deal with memory.
AG: If the viewer is going to make sense of Devil’s Canyon they are very dependent on memory because the image has been dissolved, you can’t read the whole image in one go, if they want to see a cohesive image they have to negotiate the structure, but also the collage because you’re making the image very difcult to be read in a conventional sense.
ØA: And you have to piece it together so there is the risk, the fnished image doesn’t really exists, only as an afterimage in your mind so of course that has something to do with memory it’s true. I also thought if you walk in front of the structure you’d see one part, walk a little bit further and then you would think ah, OK so that’s like the frst part of the text in the image you know you would, your view would always be obstructed so you’d have to see one part move then see the other and so on so that’s true.
AG: Apart from the collage: Devil’s Canyon, you’d also talked about doing a flm script from this material. Are these materials like toys for you, like starting points you can pick up?
ØA: Yeah it is like that, I think I pick things up out of pure fascination, I love Western flms and that’s why I bought the negative of the poster, because it’s a B-Western...
I think with any art there’s stories and you just choose things because they are just fun or you’re interested in it, but then you fnd specifc uses for it, more than it having a quality in itself that you have to exploit, it can be like a neutral kind of material that you can transform into something that has a logic or has meaning in some ways.
AG: Does that exist, the neutral material?
ØA: No, of course not, but sometimes you can at least fnd materials that don’t have obvious references. I have this whole stack of press kit photos from Hollywood
And most of them are actors that you’ve never heard of so they just become portraits and if you cut away the text for instance you have no obvious reference to what it actually is, it could be, I could have taken those pictures. This I’m interested in, the meaning and the logic comes into how I process this thing, not the material itself. At some point I stopped taking pictures myself because the pictures that I wanted to take weren’t really available, and the pictures I took never ended up as pictures.
If I think of how many images we have around us now, if you go on Facebook you can look at anyone’s pictures! Thousands and thousands of pictures. There are plenty of pictures and most of it is completely anonymous, none of it ends up as an icon or a prized image, it just vanishes after a while. And it’s the same in Hollywood, it’s like a mechanism the industry, this is also one of the reasons I was interested in the copy negatives the collage is made from.
When you bring an image from this Hollywood machinery into an art machinery, the machinery has diferent sets of rules. When I then take one of these negatives and print it up and make a text next to it for instance, then I need to put in some rules, I’ll make an edition of 5 and sign them and this wasn’t necessary before. You replace the machinery with another machinery, you take one set of rules and disband them and make up another set of rules.
I think sometime it’s very interesting to look at the negative spaces, something that is kind of overlooked or something you take for granted but like everything it’s what you do with it. It only makes meaning in the moment you rework it.