contemporary art magazine issue # sixteen december ... - Karyn Olivier

MOUSSE / MATIAS FALDBAKKEN / PAG. 12 MOUSSE / MATIAS FALDBAKKEN / PAG. 13
Matias Faldbakken, Newspaper Ad # 14, 2007 - courtesy: the artist and STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo
Credo che il mio uso della parola “negazione” rifletta, da un
lato l’accezione universale del termine, come espressione di
delusione e, dall’altra, un tentativo di continuare a credere
nella potenzialità, proprio attraverso un approccio negativista.
Qualcosa di simile alla riformulazione dello slogan di Obama fatta
dal mio amico Happy Tom: “No, We Can!”
Stai partecipando a mostre un po’ dappertutto, con sempre
maggiore visibilità, e continui a vivere a Oslo, contribuendo a
rendere la capitale norvegese una città fortemente emergente nel
panorama artistico internazionale. Hai mai sentito la necessità
professionale di trasferirti altrove? Che impressione ti sei fatto
della migrazione berlinese di molto artisti nordici?
Mettiamola così, io non sto a Oslo per il bene di Oslo. Sebbene
qui vi sia una scena probabilmente più vivace e più orientata
internazionalmente di quanto non fosse alcuni anni fa, continuo
a considerare Oslo come un buon posto dove ritirarsi e stare
alla larga da quella parte del mondo dell’arte che meno mi
piace, come la socialità professionalmente forzata e l’interazione
business-oriented con altri artisti e operatori. Può darsi che la
mia non sia una buona scelta dal punto di vista della carriera
ma, d’altra parte, passare il tempo ad annaspare nell’occhio
del ciclone, non credo sia neanche quella la migliore soluzione.
Mi muovo il necessario, quando ho delle mostre e partecipo,
così, quanto basta alle dinamiche dell’art life. Per quanto
riguarda Berlino, credo che, per molti artisti scandinavi, sia stata
sicuramente una buona scelta, probabilmente molto migliore di
Oslo, in termini di alcol a basso costo e vitalità dell’atmosfera.
Recentemente hai avuto alcune mostre importanti negli Stati
Uniti. Come è andata? Hai l’impressione che il tuo lavoro sia stato
recepito diversamente rispetto all’Europa?
Non ho un’idea della ricezione ma, per me, è sicuramente
importante cercare di esporre in America. Buona parte del mio
lavoro è, infatti, una sorta di traduzione scandinavo/europea
dell’arte e della pop culture americana. Dunque, sì, vorrei davvero
lavorare di più negli Stati Uniti, per capire meglio le differenze tra
l’interpretazione americana ed europea di quello che faccio. Poi,
il mio primo romanzo è, proprio adesso, in corso di traduzione in
inglese e sarà divertente vedere che succederà. Il modo in cui
il linguaggio americano viene elaborato in norvegese (e in altre
lingue nordiche ed europee) è un tema linguisticamente sotteso
a tutti miei libri. Sono davvero curioso di vedere quanto di questo
lavoro andrà perso nella traduzione inglese.
Un’ultima cosa: credi abbia ancora un senso parlare di nordic
art? O si è trattato di un fenomeno temporaneo, inevitabilmente
destinato ad essere inglobato nel sistema artistico
internazionale?
Non sono mai stato interessato alla categoria di nordic art.
Ma m’interessano la mentalità e la sensibilità nordica, lo stile
di vita che determinano, ed è in parte anche per questo che
continuo a vivere qui. Come cercavo di dire prima, l’influenza
dell’America è molto evidente in Scandinavia, così come anche
la nostra lontananza dall’Europa, da un certo punto di vista.
Mi piace pensare alla Norvegia come un paese isolato e, allo
stesso tempo, senza una vera identità. Prendiamo da fuori giusto
quello che ci serve. Questo tipo di dualità è descritta in qualche
modo nel mio ultimo romanzo, Unfun, dove l’ambientazione è
decisamente norvegese ma, allo stesso tempo, la storia potrebbe
accadere dovunque.
Having emerged on the European scene in
2001 with his controversial novel The Coka
Hola Company, the first part of a ferocious
trilogy about the public and private vices
of Scandinavian society entitled “Scandinavian
Misantrophy”, Matias Faldbakken
is now split between the international
popularity of his writing and the hermetic
nature of his contemporary artwork. An
innovative heir of Situationist extremism,
the Norwegian artist expresses a desire
for rebellion as a total, dissolutive negation,
combining pop culture and nihilism,
anarchy and conceptual precision.
Let’s start off by talking about your background. You gained
international recognition first as a novelist and writer and only
afterwards as a visual artist, although the two activities seem
to be thematically related to each other in your work. Did that
happen by chance or did you simply start writing before making
art?
I studied fine art (at the Academy of Fine Art, Bergen, Norway
and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main) but after finishing my
education I was completely disillusioned with working as an
artist. Many of my art ideas were language-based and I decided
to knit them together into a narrative, then tried to have it
published by a mainstream publishing house. I had the idea that I
had more freedom to combine artsy elements with entertainment
in a literary format. And I guessed that the distribution was
better and the audience more heterogeneous when it came to
literature. The book was eventually published and I became
known as a writer.
I’m interested in knowing how you deal with the discrepancy
between your books and your visual art. Your pieces as a
visual artist are often hermetic and require some background
about your work to get into them, while the narrative of your
books opens up a direct critique of society that is accessible
to everyone. Do you try to follow different critical paths when
writing and making art, or do you just consider them two different
expressions of the same discourse?
Both my art practice and my writing have been about negation
and negativistic strategies: hate, misanthropy and so on. My
books are deliberately easy to read and entertaining, whereas
my art is, as you say, more hermetic and mute. I think one of
the qualities of visual art is to be a public concern and at the
same time more or less inaccessible to the general public. I have
an equal interest in entertainment’s ability to enter the public
imagination on a bigger scale. I use my books to “popularize”
some of my ideas, to see how they float in the marketplace, and
I use my art more as a tool for doing silent, negativistic gestures
without any intention of convincing, impressing or communicating
with an audience.
Due to the translations your books have had in recent years,
I would imagine you have received a lot of feedback, not only
from critics but also from normal readers of different ages and
educational backgrounds. I’m curious whether the same thing
has happened in the art world, and which of the two systems
(literature/visual art) you have felt more challenged and inspired
by up till now.
If I get feedback in connection to my art it is always through
other artists, professionals or institutions (by getting invited
to a show and so forth). The feedback on my literature is much
more extensive and more varied; I get to read everything from
hate blogs to fan mail from teenagers. There is also a certain
academic interest in my books, several papers and dissertations
have been written about them and so on. But as I said, I don’t
make visual art with the same intentions as I have when I write
– although the same themes run through both fields. There are
a lot of advantages with being in the more withdrawn place of
visual art and a lot of disadvantages with having your product and
ideas spread all over the place – and that is why I am doing both.
It’s quite interesting this way in which you split up your activity
for two different sorts of audiences with different expectations
and levels of investment. It seems to me that today there is
a clear gap between artists engaged in real critical practices
and artists trying instead to unsettle and disrupt the dominant
meanings in very predictable ways which turn out to be just
a reaffirmation of the same discourse they were apparently
struggling against. How concerned are you with these issues?
I have the feeling, in part because of what you said earlier, that
being engaged on a more popular level as a writer helps you keep
your critical practice grounded in a truly genuine and authentic
terrain.
Artistic or activistic provocation was kind of a theme for me in
my first two novels. The books talk about provocation as a tool
and at the same time they are tongue-in-cheek ‘provocative’ in
their themes and execution, testing out the tools they are talking
about. The dialectics between unsettling “truths” revealed
by critical practice and the means for disseminating them is
always interesting. There is a discrepancy between the neurotic,
self-reflective academic/bureaucratic artist with limited selfconfidence
and a lack of audience, and the no-holds-barred and
not-too-researchy show-and-media-oriented hands-on type of
artist. The difference between the two is always funny. The art
seminarist and the more public wild-card artist both seem to be
problematic figures, and art in the hands of both of them is more
often than not unlikeable. I am a fan of art’s unlikeability, and
that’s why I borrow a bit from both.
Some critics wrote about anarchism in your work. To me it
seems in some cases you’re stretching anarchism to the point
where it becomes very close to nihilism, as in One Spray Can
Escapist, where the same word sprayed over and over again
on a wall becomes totally illegible, or in the Newspaper stacks
where the content is made unrecognizable through multiple
scanning. In your artist’s book Not Made Visible it’s clear how
you’re interested in articulating your work in a way close to the
Situationist approach of negating culture as the only way to
preserve its meaning. In this respect, you’re dealing more with
harsh sarcasm than irony.
Indeed, my use of the term “anarchy” has been closely linked
to a nihilist fantasy of absolute freedom through total denial.
Matias Faldbakken, See You On The Front Page Of The Last Newspaper Those Motherfuckers Ever Print, 2005 - courtesy: the artist and STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo
Concerning the Situationists, I am mostly interested in their
strategies of withdrawal, rejection and general unwillingness,
their distaste for everything that surrounded them. I have never
seen my work as ironic, rather sarcastic, and in relation to the
books a bit satirical perhaps. Dark and violent humour, yes. But
ironic? No.
Your practice is all about linguistic tactics, disrupting the concept
of the text as a monolithic and stable whole, as when you write
sentences in aluminium electrical tape, making them become
almost abstract and unrecognizable. In a way, you’ve directed
this practice of textual deconstruction at yourself as well, like
when you signed your first book as Abo Rasul, deleting your own
identity.
As mentioned earlier, the distinction between a language-based
practice on the one hand, and a visual, physical practice on the
other has for me always been followed by a conflict between
a verbalized criticality and a more irrational and non-verbal
approach. The gesture of self-deletion is obvious when I abstract
my own verbal statements and make them illegible. I guess the
space between the stuff that makes sense and the stuff that is
incomprehensible is the space that interests me the most. The
space between messages of almost totalitarian regime simplicity
and gestures of uncommunicative abstraction is a space of
potential, I think.
The sincerity of your practice to me emerges at its best in your
refusal to point to any solution or utopian direction. You don’t
take any precise stand. But I wonder if you consider negation as
a sort of utopian approach anyway. As though negation could be
the first step towards a possible change.
I guess my use of the word negation is partly a expressive
formulation of a worldview based on disappointment, and partly a
way of believing in maintaining potentiality through a negativistic
approach. Something like my friend Happy Tom’s remodelled
Obama campaign slogan: “No, we can!”
You’re now exhibiting everywhere, getting more and more
visibility, but you’re still based in Oslo, contributing to its
emerging role as an art capital in Europe. Have you ever felt the
professional necessity to move somewhere else? What do you
think about the wave of Nordic artists who have moved to Berlin
in recent years?
To put it this way; I am not staying in Oslo for Oslo’s sake. Even
though there is a scene here that is probably livelier and more
internationally oriented now than earlier, I still consider Oslo
a good place to withdraw and to keep a distance from the part
of art life that I like the least; the professionalized socialising
and the businessy one-on-one interaction with other artists and
players. It’s probably not an ingenious career move, but, on the
other hand, standing in the eye of the storm, waving your arms
is not necessarily the final solution either. I get to go here and
there when I’m doing shows and I get my fair share of art life
then. I guess the life of the Scandinavians who have gone to
Berlin is good, probably far better than Oslo due to the cheap
drinks and lively atmosphere.
Recently you had the chance to do some significant shows in
the United States. How was it? Did you think your work was
understood somehow differently than in Europe?
I have no idea about the reception, but for me it makes sense
to try and show in an American context. A lot of my work has
a Scandio-European take on American art and American (pop)
culture. So, yes, I would really like to show more in the States,
just to learn more about the difference between an American
and a European interpretation. I’m having my first novel
translated into English now, too, and it will be funny to see how
that goes. The way that American language is working its way
into Norwegian (and other Nordic or European languages) is
an underlying theme in all of the books at the linguistic level.
I’m really curious about how much of that will get lost when
translated into English.
One last thing. Does it still make sense to talk about “Nordic art”,
or was it just a temporary phenomenon that inevitably had to be
assimilated into the international art system?
I’ve never been interested in Nordic art as a category. But I am
interested in Nordic mentalities and sensibilities and ways of
life, which is partly why I’m staying here. As I mentioned above,
the American influence is very visible in Scandinavia and at the
same time we are cut off from Europe in a way. I like the idea
of Norway being isolated and at the same time without any real
identity. We just buy into whatever works for us. This duality
is kind of described in my latest novel Unfun – the setting is
distinctly Norwegian but at the same time the novel could take
place anywhere.