IN OSLO
Bad Objects #4
Everyone agrees that Peder Lund’s Oslo gallery space, in Tjuvholmen, serves as a brick-and-mortar excuse for a business that actually operates elsewhere, on the global fair circuit. Among the fifty artists and estates represented by the gallery, only a few are from Norway. Gallery assistants hide behind pocket doors, hoping viewers will find the QR-code checklist for themselves. “They don’t even announce their openings!,” one friend admonished. Sometimes these semi-private openings even end earlier than scheduled, the better to limit interaction with the general public. Yet I was happy to visit this strangely personless space, which contributed an unsettling aura to the gallery’s exhibition of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Flowers and Mushrooms, 1997-2006. First presented at Tate Modern in 2006, the 45-minute film anthologizes a large series of photographs taken through double exposure: one artist shot a roll, wound it back, and handed the camera off to the other. The resultant images – vibrant macro shots of flowers and fungi – appear quite artificial, particularly in the digital slideshow format, in which they slowly dissolve into one another, as in old desktop screensavers. They are lush images, gently psychedelic, sort of meditative, sort of kitsch. There’s a complex relationship here between the organic referent and the technological apparatus, but I’m not sure that’s why the work remains enjoyable, which might be more attributable to the easiness of this material, its beyond-obvious subject matter. And, from some decades remove, a number of pleasant, bygone associations: fin-de-siecle innocence, acid house, amateur photography, obsolescent modes of computing and image-making. From Vincent Pécoil’s essay on the series, quoting Warhol: “In France they weren’t interested in new art; they’d gone back to liking the Impressionists mostly. That’s what made me decide to send them the Flowers; I figured they’d like that.” Counter Regis Debray, maybe we’re all French now.
Except perhaps the Norwegians themselves, who are still yesteryear Americans. The scene in Oslo is less animated by easygoing nostalgia than by the ambient tension of, I don’t know, New York in 2019? Protests against the genocide in Gaza are too polite, some say, but there are many protests, and many are quick to point out various structural hypocrisies, often born from a familiar, uneasy alliance between liberal identity politics and the private funding of art institutions. “Artwashing” remains a favored term. Invited to an opening at the National Museum later in the week, I asked an artist I met if he would be joining. He said no, no he would not; the exhibition was a celebration of “blood money” and “that boring spider” (the Louise Bourgeois one, which, in any case, never materialized). The “blood money” was supplied by the Fredriksen family, who may have accumulated their wealth through nefarious drilling contracts, but have also enabled the museum to exhibit blue-chip artists, primarily major artists of color: Mark Bradford, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Suzanne Jackson, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, Yayoi Kusama, and Wangechi Mutu, as well as Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Roni Horn, and Robert Longo, among others. In press photos, the art-collecting daughters of John Fredriksen, once Norway’s richest man, appear both appropriately evil and excessively Scandinavian, like descendents of Henrik Vanger from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For the past six years, the National Museum has arranged long-term loans of artworks from the Fredriksen Family Collection, and since 2022, the museum has hosted works from the collection in exhibition at Søylerommet, a new gallery space within the museum designed to look like a showroom for Acne Studios. At the reception, a sort of anxious energy hovered around the museum lounge, where mostly staff congregated and chatted tersely. Earlier that day, a sit-in had been staged in response to the museum’s decision to bring a textile by the Israeli artist Noa Eshkol out from storage, and now here we were at another potentially tone-deaf event. Would some form of protest re-emerge? Introduced to me in a funny way, the exhibition’s curator burst into nervous laughter, spraying a mouthful of water all over my (Acne) suit. Yet a few minutes later, her prepared remarks went forward without interruption and some of the tension dissipated. A noise performance by Isak Ree T. was briefly disrupted when a Yamaha keyboard toppled and came clattering to the ground, but the performance quickly resumed. Unlike the curator’s spit, it turned out this accident had been planned.
Despite certain austerity measures, the situation in Oslo appears largely optimistic. State-funded artists studios are being pushed out from the city center, but is that really the worst we can say? A new gallery district is beginning to coalesce, organized so that the city’s disparate art scene will become more readily navigable. Although perhaps a natural consequence of being a visitor, welcome surprises seem abundant: something new around every corner, a Bjarne Melgaard pop-up hidden in a department store on a weekday afternoon. The point of contention here is akin to the one faced by a second-tier city in the US; it’s related to the Peder Lund dilemma, as well. Support “the community” or aspire toward “the international”? During such conversations, I was reminded of a scene from Kristoffer Borgli’s satirical film Sick of Myself, 2022, in which an Oslo-based artist announces the title for his next show. It will be called The Damage. (The dramatic weight of this title is already funny, given that the artist’s work consists of stealing pieces of furniture and presenting them in whimsical formations.) “Why do Norwegian artists exhibiting in Norway always pick English titles?,” his girlfriend rejoins. “It’s an international scene,” he counters. The film then cuts to a close-up of the exhibition title affixed to the gallery window: Skaden.
Back in New York, it is difficult not to feel as though contemporary art is a moribund form and that its most potent manifestation now hews rather close to self-elegy. Surveys, retrospectives, and restagings not only appear in museums, but just as often in commercial galleries, project spaces, and non-collecting institutions. This fall, most of the shows we’re eager to discuss adhere to these backward-glancing categories: Cady Noland ventriloquizing herself at Gagosian, which also includes vintage works by Steven Parrino, who died in 2005; Nayland Blake’s time-bound survey Sex in the 90s, at Matthew Marks; Diane Simpson’s retrospective at the Academy of Arts and Letters, the most recent sculpture of which dates to 2021. At CICCIO, an apartment gallery in Brooklyn Heights, a great two-person show by Thomas Eggerer and the late artist Jochen Klein elucidates latent connections among IKEA and designed utopias, the New Left and the Red Army Faction. It first appeared at Printed Matter in 1996.
I’m currently reading the artist Henry Belden’s novel Failson, just published by Seven Press. There is an unexpected amount of looking back in this book, even though it is set two years in the future. It centers around a shot-for-shot remake of The Ring, 2002, with the same cast, twenty-five years later, in 2027. (Failson’s fictive Naomi Watts: “It was surreal returning to the role, after all these years, copying my own performance… Doing [the] film was like retracing my steps, a sort of origin story – does that make any sense?”) On Instagram, Belden noted that the novel’s yellow cover refers to the sensational “yellowbacks” of the late nineteenth century. In his social media carousel, Belden includes an image of František Kupka’s painting The Yellow Scale, 1907, later repurposed by Penguin Classics for its cover of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, first published in 1884. In the painting, the male subject suggestively fingers a yellowback novel; on the Huysmans cover, he becomes the novel’s louche protagonist Des Esseintes. It’s incisive of Belden to draw this comparison between his novel and Decadent literature. The Decadents believed, and productively dramatized their belief, that everything had already been done and said, that culture had, as Huysmans wrote, “reached the October of its sensations.” If there’s a way out for Huysmans, it’s in pure artifice, a perversity of style, and in an embrace of garish extremities, if not a nauseating sense of maximalism. Yet for all its provocations, Against Nature is also a novel about redecorating an old country house, about bejewelling an ancient tortoise to death. What else can be done but to remake the past?