Carnegie Art Award 2010

Carneigie Art Award består av fire innslag: en vandreutstilling med utvalgte kunstverk, dokumentasjon av utstillingen i bokform, en film som portretterer de deltagende kunstnerne samt priser til fire av utstillingens kunstnere.

Carnegie Art Award retter seg mot kunstnere som er nordiske statsborgere eller bosatt i
et nordisk land. Samtlige nominerte kunstnere har blitt invitert til å bidra med opp til fem kunstverk før utvelgelsen av kunstverk til Carnegie Art Award. Til Carnegie Art Award 2010 er 148 kunstnere nominert. Juryen var samlet i april 2009, og valgte ut fra innsendte bilder, filmer etc. de 23 kunstnerne som skal representere årets utstilling.

KUNSTNERE 2010

Kjersti G. Andvig,no Jukka Mäkelä,fi
Anastasia Ax,se Ylva Ogland, se
Tone Kristin Bjordam,no Jorma Puranen, fi
Milena Bonifacini,dk Seppo Renvall, fi
A K Dolven, no Torben Ribe, dk
Saara Ekström, fi Sigrid Sandström, se
Mads Gamdrup, dk Astrid Sylwan, se
Felix Gmelin, se Egill Sæbjörnsson, is
Kristján Guðmundsson, is
Marie Søndergaard Lolk, dk
Kristina Jansson, se Marianna Uutinen, fi
Sergej Jensen, dk Hannu Väisänen, fi
Camilla Løw, no

Essay fra katalogen:
THE PAINT WON'T DRY by Iwona Blazwick

In 1974 the American artist Dennis Oppenheim soaked two rags in turpentine and stuffed them up his nose. As he inhaled the fumes he reminisced to camera about student days in the painting studio. The resultant film is played on a TV monitor which sits on the floor in front of a large metal pan containing 5 gallons of ‘turps’. As we watch Oppenheim become intoxicated, the fumes inducing an increasingly delirious flow of consciousness, we ourselves may start to swoon as the toxic perfume of the studio assails our nostrils. Recall is a wry, Proustian meditation on the smell of oil on canvas and all its associations – painting as drug, as heroic gesture, as nostalgia.

The performative, phenomenological and discursive aspects of Recall might also describe approaches to painting in 2009. Citing a work made over thirty years ago is itself significant, as so many contemporary artists overtly absorb and reflect on the legacies of post war avant gardes. The artists who have been brought together from across Scandinavia through the Carnegie award, incorporate time capsules in their work. One echoes the action painting of Pollock (Anastasia Ax), another the orgiastic gestures of the Viennese Actionists (Felix Gmelin). The expansive voids of International Yves Klein Blue find a contemporary manifestation in immersive skeins of shocking pink (Marianna Uutinen). Matta Clark’s urban archaeologies are translated into the sedimentation of a painting (Marie Søndergaard Lolk). The avant garde’s own rallying cry in the form of the manifesto segues into a multi-canvas work to find its place alongside pop culture slogans and logos (Torben Ribe). As one cultural commentator recently observed, “The culture of the present-day does not thrive on progressive ideas of the future but the appropriation of languages and cultural forms produced by the progressive ideas of the past.”
As with Recall, these diverse bodies of work move back and forth in time – between iterations of the past – and an insistence on the here and now.

Painting today can be understood as performance. First in a purely material, structural sense. Pigments flow and interact, unleashing their chemical and alchemical potential; the dynamic power of paint’s plasticity or its capacity simply to cover other things, adding a skin or mask to an object, is set in motion (Milena Bonifacini). Action may also be located in the body of the artist as performer – spitting ink like an ejaculation (Ax), or using paint as substance or prop in a staged encounter (Gmelin). We might also find ourselves entering the space of a composition as protagonists, as colour and form stalk off the wall and stride into the third dimension, entering and defining the space of the viewer (Bonifacini, Camilla Løw). As Alan Kaprow has remarked, “Before a painting, our size as spectators, in relation to the size of the picture, profoundly influences how much we are willing to give up consciousness of our temporal existence while experiencing it. What we have then is art that tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to fill our world with itself, art that in meaning, looks, impulse seems to break fairly sharply with the traditions of painters back at least to the Greeks.” We become participants in an environment that is no longer a representation but an optical and spatial event.

In order to capture time based actions – coloured pigment exploding in liquid – two naked bodies covering each other in paint – the camera has entered the space of painting. By bringing in the technologies of photography and film, artists are able to capture the kinetic fluidity of paint before liquid dries into static surface (Tone Kristin Bjordam). They can also animate its subjects, giving images an uncanny life of their own that may be comic or poignant (Egill Sæbjörnsson, Seppo Renvall).

The incorporation of the moving image also offers a document of the act of making. One artist (Ax) has herself filmed as she produces a painted environment and includes the footage alongside the finished installation. A sequence of expressionistic canvases incorporates a small projection of the artist’s father and a friend undertaking erotic experiments with paint (Gmelin). These fragments of filmed documentation give direct access to the narratives and histories that lie behind a painting’s surface. Defying linear time, these synchronous presentations of actions made prior to the paint drying, move process from the past tense into a continuous present.

Projections are also used to give a kinaesthetic quality to the canvas with moving light and shadow animating pigment (Renvall, Hannu Väisänen). Why struggle to depict movement or even colour on canvas, when canvas can itself become a screen? Herein lies a deconstructive impulse, as colour is understood as an effect of light. As the artist Tacita Dean has commented, “Learning that colour is a fiction of light is one of the primary shocks of growing up: that this hitherto deeply physical thing is just a reflection, and that nothing can keep its colour under the cover of darkness, are monstrous things to understand, even for my adult mind. Yet there is something about colour’s frailty at its twilight moment of oblivion that also brings out its magnificence…you watch in thrill and panic as this vivid world is slowly tarnished by night…the axiomatic blanket of night, both woolly and indistinct, denying finally the mysterious illusion of colour.”

Absence of colour, through variations on black, white and grey can also, like the loss of one faculty, heighten other senses. A group of monochromes inserted in speaker-like boxes punctured with machine made holes create a silent fugue. They operate a dialectic, triggering a sense of diversity through order; and sound – through muteness (Kristján Guðmundsson).

As well as evoking time, materiality and space, many of the artists included in the Carnegie Prize play with optical perception to activate a phenomenal experience of painting. Shapes and colour change scale and move in and out of focus (Mads Gamdrup). Paintings may offer an almost archaeological sedimentation of layers and textures (Marie Søndergaard Lolk); found bits of textile might mimic paint (Sergej Jensen).

Complex games are played with abstraction and representation. The use of perspective, the illusionistic rendering of surface and space, fragments of figuration, all offer a brief glimpse of reality, only to refract back into pure geometry (Sigrid Sandström). It’s as if our cognitive senses are tempted to recognise mimesis, to organise line and colour into pictorial illusion but are then confounded by the internal logic of the work.

Painting today does however, also retain the traditions of pictorialism. What kind of imagery can we find among the artists gathered from across Scandinavia? The genres of landscape, still life or portraiture still hold sway, but are redefined.

Organic cellular form might offer a way of organising surface pattern (Jukka Mäkelä, Astrid Sylwan). Nature and light have always been a preoccupation and also find expression through photo-realism. By examining how the landscape captures light through reflection in water and against the silhouettes of trees and land masses, one artist takes the indexical objectivity of the lens to the edge of the painterly sublime (Jorma Puranen). Another examines how nature enters the space of culture through the still life. Flowers and fruit are always ingredients in Vanitas paintings. Pictured in contemporary interiors they seem un-natural, even artificial – exotic blooms or out of season fruits appear on our tables as the products of hot-housing and industrial agriculture (Saara Ekström). This sense of the artificial also lends the presence of flora and fauna in contemporary pictures an allegorical quality.

This sense of story telling, even of magic, characterises many of the works in this contemporary survey. Single paintings seem to hold together in one space the literal and the expressionist impulse, the observed and the imagined. The virtuoso use of the brush to render architecture also allows for the creation of impossible buildings or fantastical interiors (Kristina Jansson). Found objects and pictures are assembled to create atmospheric, devotional even theatrical spaces that offer clues and props to some hidden narrative (Ylva Ogland). A piece of fabric, unworn clothing evokes an absent presence (A K Dolven). We might understand these works in terms of portraiture, as artists use memorabilia to delve into autobiographical sources. The image can become like consciousness, its surface punctured by the return of the repressed. The spectator may be cast as witness or detective, piecing together narratives from symbols or scenarios, in one case realised through an actual knitted interior (Kjersti G. Andvig).

A succession of movements dominated the 20th century; but there are no longer any orthodoxies. Rather, there is an exhilarating sense of freedom that characterises contemporary practice. It roams around a wide arena which can equally embrace the phenomenological experience of the abstract and the literal; and the commemorative, psychic and semiotic potential of the pictorial.

London, June 2009