When I was doing the preparatory work for Rummaging, I met a lot of young artists whose art I found difficult to understand. I put it to one side and moved on. Afterwards, when I was reflecting on my way of working, this impression returned. Which art speaks to me and why? Which trends have made major breakthroughs in the last decade, and what mark has this left on my approach to art? For me, the artist’s role has largely been about asking questions. Nothing wrong with that, but, taken to its negative extreme, this art has become the only contemporary means of personal expression. That is why the art that I could not grasp at first sight gradually took on a special luminosity. The artists that I chose to invite to the exhibition were driven by a preoccupation with the formal aspects of objects, spatialities, the visual and material. This became my starting point for the continued work on the exhibition. I asked myself: Why is this interest in the viewer’s bodily and sensual experience arising just now?
As the work progressed, points of contact with an earlier art began to emerge. They pointed towards the – for me, myth-enshrouded – Sweden of the 1980s. These points of contact came up both when I read old exhibition catalogues and journals, but also in discussions with the generation of artists in which I had developed an interest. Artists who, like me, were born in the 70s and 80s. I realised that these feelings of affinity could help me to put my thoughts about contemporary forms of expression into words, by mirroring them in the art of that time, and the art discussion that was going on then. So, what is this 1980s that I am talking about? It is not specifically the 80s of the decadent, dystopian city, or the excesses of ‘wild’ painting. Rather, what I have in mind is a mutually overlapping group of artists, who were interested in art both as a form and as a possible meeting place. A moment when Swedish artists were exploring and expressing themselves in site-specific art. When art’s closeness to choreography, music and new media provided new impulses. This re-reading of our contemporary history is given topical relevance in Rummaging in two ways. Partly through being the connecting thread linking the choice of artists, partly through the programme of accompanying events that spans three Wednesday evenings. I see it as a creative re-reading that is not just a way of formulating a strong tendency among today’s young artists. It is also a way of retroactively directing attention towards what makes the 1980s into a historic turning point today. For me, its radicality lies in the way that the artists affirmed the unnecessary, the absurd and the tentative. They rejected things that had been formulated in advance.
I see an important point of entry into the work of a number of the exhibition’s artists in Eva Löfdahl’s art. In an interview with her I read a claim that artists of the 80s “seemed to bring things into focus in a new way, to extend the way of looking at things”. Löfdahl replies in her highly individual fashion that, within the giving of shape to things in itself, there can be created densifications of and distanciations from the sense of reality. The experience of an unconscious space, one that is not visible, but perceptible in glimpses. Laconically she wonders whether, after visiting an art exhibition, we “come out at the same place again or whether we come out at the same place again?”. I interpret her art as reflecting a desire to break away from an, as she herself puts it, habitual way of seeing.
Löfdahl has left her mark on Rummaging in many ways. Jennie Sundén and Åsa Norberg (b. 1977, working in Göteborg) are system disintegrators. They break up both contemporary and modernist form languages and construct their own. One recurring stylistic device is the repetition that can be traced back to an idea about rationality, but also to an expansion, an endlessness. Kerstin Persson (b. 1979, working in London) and Suzanna Asp (b. 1976, working in Stockholm) give visual form to painting’s relationship with reality. They use the minutest constituent parts of painting to create new kinds of spatiality. From the virtual spaces of painting they find their way out into actual space, and have their works add a charge to this in-between space. Their preoccupation with the relationship between the surface and the three-dimensional space puts the viewer in a place that involves both looking at something and being inside it, frequently at the same time. The same kind of ambiguity is employed by Christin Wahlström (b. 1979, working in Göteborg). In the exhibition we are faced with a wall in which the linen insulation has been exposed. Is this a sculpture, an unfinished wall, or has the wall quite simply been reversed? Wahlström has been working with linen as a material for a long time now, and we can trace it back to the painting canvas, which she literally winds up and reworks. The artist Max Book also talks specifically about disrupting habitual ways of seeing. This has been the focus of the art and writing that he has done since the early 80s. His painting was closely linked with what was, at the time, new technology, and with the way it was shaping our existence. This also occupies a large space in Anna Wignell’s (b. 1974, working in Stockholm) artistic work. Her works are often given forms that bear clear references to the digital image, the digital video medium and moving images.
The Ibid exhibitions of the 1980s are an important reference point for Rummaging. Jan Håfström, who was one of the driving forces here, along with a number of other artists, resorted to using abandoned factories in order to get away from the illusory space, within, for example, painting, by working directly physically with space. “Materiality and conceptuality enter into each other,” as he himself puts it in Kris magazine. This opens up a number of links with the current exhibition. Ebba Bohlin (b. 1976, working in Stockholm) uses a variety of reworkings to bring out sublime dimensions from space as such. Familiar objects and everyday materials, as well as the walls that surround us and the surfaces on which we move around, are used to lay bare existential themes.
For Johanna Gustafsson Fürst (b. 1973, working in Stockholm) the specific exhibition space and context are always the starting point for the choice of material and the mode of expression. She moves freely between disused factories, vacant apartments and conventional gallery spaces. A large dose of humour is combined with a powerful urge to twist and turn our expectations of the art experience. In conversation Gustafsson Fürst talks about her affinity with the artist Ann Edholm. A fertile common denominator is the way they both position the artwork in the exhibition space. The work involves a viewer who is in motion, becoming part of the viewer’s space and time. “To walk is to see” as the writer Tom Sandqvist appositely describes it.
Fredrik Auster and Viggo Mörck’s (b. 1978 & 1980, working in Copenhagen) art also exists in a space between a factual and a virtual space. In a number of pieces they have worked with free-hanging screens, on which they project abstract graphic images. Between the screens the viewer discovers a person, who is performing simple, monotonous movements. I am struck by the congruencies between Auster and Mörck’s art and Margaretha Åsberg’s legendary choreographies. They share a similar drive to find expressions in which the dancer’s body and the setting become one. They use a slowed tempo and reduced bodily expression to seek out a language that acts like rudimentary signs, indicators for the viewer’s own reflections, without being either psychologising or narrative.
Chance, the unexpected, and processes that take place over time recur in the works of Gabo Camnitzer (b. 1984, working in London). Form and material are given a lot of room, which challenges the viewer to be active and to explore. He combines destruction with creation, frequently by using music as the triggering impulse. Bands are invited into his works to play for the public. Camnitzer’s art reminds me of what happened at Kim Klein’s alternative exhibition space BarBar, which was run for a couple of years during the early 80s. BarBar provided a breeding ground for a young generation of artists who primarily investigated the art of installation through music and other modes of expression. The common feature here is the desire to take creative risks.
Rummaging’s retake on a bit of the 1980s should not be understood as a nostalgic looking back and a longing to regain lost ground. Nor is it as an attempt to re-establish power positions and taste hierarchies that have already been renegotiated. Rather, it is a gesture that, on the contrary, short-circuits all notions of linear development. Through turning back to a certain historical point in time, and to a number of artistic projects, what are created are incidental art histories out of minor narratives and singular connections.
Camilla Larsson, curator