Update on copyright law suit

The public prosecutor has decided to drop the charges against Markus Andersson. I wrote about this story in another post two weeks ago.

However, the suspicions of copyright infringement still stand. The complaining part, photographer Jonas Lemberg, says that he is of the opinion that the prosecutor has misinterpreted the intentions of the law. The Photography Union has filed an appeal, and if that fails, they are planning a civil law suite against Andersson.

Under construction

Bonniers Konsthall opens in September, but some interesting events will take place outside the building before that. Gabriel Lester’s large video installation Seen, that will be projected onto the wall of the new building, takes off on the 5th of April, and will be followed later in the spring by works from Daria Martin and Annika Ström.

It’s much to early to predict what will become of Bonniers, but the approach – with focus on new contemporary artists - looks promising, and the architecture of the building itself is simply amazing!

Art for kids

Apparently Moderna Muséet in Stockholm has guided tours of the exhibitions for babies aged 0-15 months. Yes, their parents can come too! I really fail to see the point of this. Isn’t it easier just to take the kids to the local supermarket or something? Unless you believe art to possess some strange mystical qualities that speak directly to the human soul… what’s the difference?

I also found an interesting perspective on art for substantially older kids in this post on ionarts. It’s a bit old, and the fresh link was contained in this article with a hilarious picture of the author, Charles T Downey, glancing at Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, to the right of the text. I’m sure he is a good guy, and I feel rather bad about making fun of him but when I writes "Because the students in this class are 10th graders, I obviously could not teach this much more daring Courbet painting, L'Origine du Monde (1866), which is not for the faint of heart..." it makes me wonder if he has actually met a 10th grader? Or heard of the internet?

Bored with good looking art?

Sometimes, when I've already had my fix of overworked minimalism and aesthetically correct art, I go to Svensk Konst and press random links to works by artists I know nothing about.

It's very far from the best of what Scandinavian art has to offer. In fact, it's quite the opposite. But it probably gives a more representative picture of what most artists are actually doing in their studios these days.

And every once in a while you stumble on something you really like.

Deconstruction by Light

If there is such a thing as subjective minimalism, Torbjörn Johansson defines it perfectly. But the term sound like an oxymoron to me, and if you go to far from the common interpretation of something you end up playing with words. But since Johansson’s aesthetics is so very similar to minimalism there is a need to say that it’s not. A critic at the site omkonst.com writes that "his intentions seem more like those of the painter, than those of the colour analyst."

Torbjörn Johansson works in many media, but is perhaps at his best when working with light. His latest installation Colores Apparantes uses light to deconstruct the dimensions of the room. It’s confusing, and beautiful.

I like a lot of his earlier stuff too. For example The Worlds Most Boring Man, and The Stair.

Concretism is the new pink

If you want that arty Nordic Design feeling in your home, get something concrete! It's not very avantegarde anymore, but if you want something to show your good taste a fabric from Olle Bonniér should do the trick.

Sarcasms aside, it does look pretty good, doesn't it?

Crate Art

The best resource for information on street art - Wooster Collective - supplied this adorable piece of "crate art" from Melbourne, Australia.

Going Oldschool

Old school Scandinavian landscape paintings by Bertil Almlöf are currently on exhibit at Konstakademien in Stockholm. A few readers have commented on me being overly interested in the conceptual aspects of everything I review, but I'm trying to better myself here, folks. Just look at the beautiful lighting and composition of these paintings. And enjoy.

Two artist blogs worth while

I actually don’t know very much about these guys, but I really recommend a visit to Semiophile and Studio of Ashes. The first blog belongs to an Austrialian painter named Ian Gutierrez Romero who is getting better for every time I go there to check. The second belongs to an artist who I think is Mexican, or at least Mexico based.

High Valley Blues

In Sweden he has been called Mr Art. His name is Jockum Nordström and last year he was named artist of the year at the prestigious Armory Show in New York.

His work consists of drawings and collages made with great attention to detail. He is a storyteller, but the stories are both open ended and closed at the same time. Half frozen in time, half in motion, though the direction isn’t always forward.

Nordström started his career as an illustrator, and continues to work both fields. But after his massive breakthrough on the international art scene he is hardly driven by the need for cash. In fact, he explained in a recent interview that he often makes illustrations for free or very cheap, and makes his money on the art.

And, he lives just a few blocks from me, in the suburb of Högdalen just outside of Stockholm.

Sorry about that last remark, but sometimes we all have to show off a little, don’t we?

Trading cards for very strange kids

From the same source as the Lego Giddens set I mentioned in an earlier post, I found these Theory Trading Cards. I’ll start off with a Marx, raise you a de Beauvoir, and top off with a Foucault.

See if you can beat that combo!

Memory in The Making

Mikael Lundberg’s art is found on the border between art, technology and science. In his Traces of an Ongoing Memory installation from 2004 he let salt crystallize from water in an open tank. The result was both visually astonishing and conceptually interesting.

I am very fond of this kind of low key conceptual art. The questions under examination might not be the biggest issues, or the boldest statements, but they are carefully and thoroughly examined – often in a very time consuming way.

This beautiful picture is from Lundberg’s Mirage series. These kinds of phenomena are actually very rare in the cold Scandinavian climate. To catch them on camera in this way, the artist must surely have spent unbelievable amounts of time waiting for the right conditions to occur.

What's wrong with the market for Russian art?

Russian 19th century paintings are selling at ridiculously high prices around the globe. Uppsala Auktionskammare recently announced that this Aivazovsky is expected to bring in almost half a million dollars.

Though some of the Russian painters from this time period are really good – most notably the groundbreaking Ilya Repin – Aivazovsky isn’t one of them. I won’t claim myself to any sort of expert on 19th century art, but even I can tell that he has an obvious lack of any real craftsmanship, that his paintings are often badly composed and that his works are poorly finished.

Interestingly enough one of his most interesting pieces, Pushkin’s Farwell to the Sea, is a cooperation with the mentioned Repin. Despite the fact that Aivazovsky was established and actually became rather wealthy during his own lifetime, he could not make a decent portrait and often failed to do landscapes. He produced over 6.000 paintings, among which there are certainly some highlights, but most of them are mediocre at best.

Copy Plus Goat

Photographer Jonas Lemberg – author of this photo – is now filing charges against Markus Andersson – author of this painting – for copyright infringement.

Jeff Koons was once involved in a similar law suit some twenty years ago, and was then found guilty, but I somehow doubt that Andersson will suffer the same verdict. There is, for instance, no goat in the background of Lemberg’s photo. And I can’t for the life of me believe that any court would effectively outlaw painting after photographic images. What would happen to the works of Gerhard Richter, Charles Bell… or even Warhol, then?

Rooseum selling modernist collection

According to an article in todays edition of Dagens Nyheter, the Rooseum in Malmö is planning to sell large part of it’s collection of Scandinavian modernists. Among the items for sale are works by Dick Bengtsson, Cecilia Edefalk, and Ola Billgren (in my opinion the best Scandinavian modernist painter of them all!).

The reason for selling the collection is, according to the museum management, that most of it hasn’t been shown to the public in over a decade. I don’t know which is the most upsetting: that they’re leaving loads of great art in the basement for all that time, or that they want to get rid of it?

The collection is worth 10-15 million Swedish kronors (app. $2.000.000), and even though other art museums are supposed to bid in the auction, most of the art is expected to end up in the hands of private collectors. Taking into consideration that it contains approximately 300 works – some of which represents one of the most interesting periods in Scandinavian art history – the projected price is a bargain.

Hard work in a digital world

There's something manrayish over Ewa Stackelberg's exhibition at Fotografins Hus. As with Man Ray the process in the dark room is equally important as the actual photography. The result is beautiful, but it raises questions about the method. Why would anyone want to go through many hours of this kind of labour only to end up with something that is perfectly possible to recreate faster and more accurate with a digital picture in Photoshop?

Perhaps Stackelberg feels that the process in itself is an important aspect of her work, but in my opinion, modern photography has to be analyzed in a social and cultural context. And that context is largly defined by the available technical solutions.

I'm also hesitant towards the actual content of her pictures. Despite all the technical brilliance it seems to traditional for my taste.

Small blogroll update

Two news to the Personal section of the blogroll (both in Swedish):

1. Apparantly another family member has a blog of her own now.

2. I have redesigned the Lindahl Persson Produktion site. This small PR and communications bureau is owned by myself and my wife.

Ranking contemporary artists

Artfacts has created a ranking system for contemporary artists based on exhibition history, market prices and a few other factors. Listings like this are obviously difficult not get flawed. Currently hyped artists are ranked unreasonably high, while renowned artists with low production rates get low rankings.

Still, it’s far more interesting than the more usual "most influential" rankings that are always topped by Damien Hirst. Artfacts rank artists according to predetermined criteria, not arbitrary judgements.

The top five artists in 2005, according to Artfacts, was:

Pablo Picasso
Andy Warhol
Bruce Nauman
Gerhard Richter
Paul Klee

The highest ranking Scandinavian artist was Olafur Eliasson from Denmark at no 31 - placing him above big shots like Gilbert & George and Dan Flavin.

Sunday evening lazy post

Reading this post at Modern Art Notes reminded my of how good Vija Celmins is, and always have been. Picture Google her name and enjoy this truly amazing stuff.

Super gay or straight?

- The only woman who interest me is the one we seek for the crime of genocide.

- Come now, doesn't your fiery nature ever burn simply for pleasure?

- Not the way you mean it Eros. Not since the day Galactus made me the Firelord!

It's only natural to speculate about the sexual orientations of men in tights. But if you want an in depth inquiry into the sex life of super heroes this is the place to go.

The Log Lady

Depicting nature isn’t necessarily the same thing as landscape painting. Ann Böttcher is the Log Lady of the Swedish art scene. Her detailed drawings of pines and spruces are very far from the traditional artistic takes on nature and the wilderness. She is a story teller, and most of her stories are about human life, though her pictures are almost always devoid of any apparent human activity.

In The Sweden Series, featured at Moderna in 2005, she leaps from anecdotes about children lost in the woods, to analyzing the roll of nature romanticism among right wing extremists, from the so called “Mulleskolan” (a sort of outdoor school for kids about nature) to deforestation caused by corporate greed. It’s ambitious to say the least!

It’s all very good, but her broad perspective is also her main problem. You can see Böttcher’s art as purely decorative and still enjoy it because of it’s aesthetic qualities, but to understand what she is trying to do you need a lot of background information not explicitly contained in the art work. Of course, this is true for a lot of conceptual art, but Böttcher’s case is rather extreme.

Just as with the Log Lady of Twin Peaks you sometimes wonder if the log in the end is just a log.

Building straight

Artist group ak28 presents Canopus today at Liljevalchs. I'm all for examining structures of power and oppression even in unexpected phenomena, but a whole fanzine about gay architecture seems to me like a case of identity activism gone over board.

Along the lines of the American debate on gender oppression in public spaces, Canopus sets out to prove the existence of wide spread elements of gay architecture in society, and ends up with three issues examining the phenomenon of glory holes.

Fanzine author Pablo Bernard explains that ”gay architecture is evidently presented in the urban landscape, and it can be detected - its essence implicit - in the way people interact with the structures around them and evaluate these in bourgeois terms of comfort and well-being."

I think that’s overinterpreting the state of things, to say the least.

Lego Giddens, anyone?

For anyone with the slightest sense of humour, Cabinet Magazine is a must read. They are closley linked to the California based Rebar group i have praised in several earlier posts.

They supplied this link to the Lego building kit of Anthony Gidden’s study at the London School of Economics. The same source also supplies a Lego Michel Foucault that “comes with a Parisian library for the younger children, or the Lego San Francisco S/M Dungeon for the older boys and girls.”

They also effectively ended all possibilities for political satire by supplying this perfectly authentic link.

Squirrel Power at Moderna

I've got to hand it to Anna Wessman for getting the best of the Moderna Exhibition. Her installation Don't tell anyone I said so... was haussed in all the major reviews. One should not underestimate the central placement of the piece as a factor in this, but it also contains most of the elements needed to make Scandinavian critics take notice these days: a stuffed animal, a message of social critique, and a sense of nordic melancholy.

The central idea of the piece is "freedom of speech", and though I find the issue increasingly important in this day of rapidly deteriorating democracies in the western hemisphere, I can't help but thinking that Wessman's take on the problem is rather shallow. Where's the analysis that goes beyond the selfevident "It's important to speak your mind!" and "We're all a bit scared right now..."

On the other hand I have to admit that Don't tell anyone I said so... is very aesthetically effective. I mean, you pretty much have to love a squirrel having a go at public speaking, don't you? If I was Joey from the sit com Friends I'd probably conclude "It's a squirrel. Goood! Freedom of speech. Goooood! What's not to like?"

But then again, I'm not Joey.

Photoshopping excellence?

An interesting take on the impact of photo editing software (like Photoshop) from Gallery Hopper. Fine art photography is never going to be the same when every other kid can reproduce the most amazing effects with a few easy moves on his computer.

Don't Believe The Hype

The Charlie Finch story continues in the New York Observer. If you want a full recap of the whole ordeal I suggest you read Edna V Harris blog. I've mentioned the conflict in a brief, sarcastic, post earlier, but I haven't bothered with any detailed examination of it.

I won't do that now either, but what I have tried to do is form an independent opinion about the painter in focus, Natalie Frank. Of course, that isn't possible, but I feel it's necessary to try. And the blatant sexism aside in Finch's review, I can only come to the conclusion that he does have a point. Or at least half a point.

Natalie Frank's work is bordering on kitch, and the Self Portrait is in a class of it's own. Working in a neo surrealist style she is also bordering on semipornography, but in a rather innocent version. Not like, for instance, the outright obscenities of Odd Nerdrum, but still playing on uncomfortable sexualized symbolics.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it takes skill to perfect this approach. A skill that Frank isn't - yet! - in possesion of. She is still young, and it's to early in her career to predict how she will develop, and I find no reason to judge her work harshly.

But there is also the question of hype. As mentioned in my post on Swedish artist Anna Finney the risks with over selling developing artists are obvious. Not necessarily for the artist herself - often paternalistically regarded as a powerless victim - but for the critics. This kind of exposure of a single artist is, to put it mildly, bad for our judgement. And very few artists are more hyped than Natalie Frank right now.

Happy Birthday!

Liljevalchs in Stockholm celebrates it's 90th birthday today. It opens at 11.00. Free entrance all day. Go see, if you're in the vicinity!