Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.03.2011, Síða 29

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 3 — 2011
Mundi (Guðmundur hallgríms-
son) and Morri (Friðrik Sigurðar-
son) started working together in
2006, when they met at the iceland
Academy of the Arts. They formed
a group called MoM, which later
became MoMS when their Ameri-
can classmate, Schuyler, joined
them. After teaming up with Geli-
tin, a group of four Austrian artists,
MoMS began travelling the world,
and have since performed at the
Venice Biennale, Torino’s Artis-
sima, london’s Frieze Art Fair and
new York’s deitch projects.
MoMS is a versatile group and express-
es itself in various ways, through sculp-
ture and painting as well as perfor-
mance art. As it happens, Mundi also
works closely with his real mom. To-
gether they run the Mundi fashion label
and clothing boutique on Laugavegur.
However, MoMS operates indepen-
dently of Mundi’s fashion line and, as
the group explains, the acronym is
somewhat accidental: “Everyone loves
their mothers of course… but we could
have just as well been called PoPS, if
our names were Peter and Paul. Our fa-
thers are also great.”
Although MoMS’ work is often
a collective effort involving various
friends and family, their most recent
exhibition at Kling & Bang Gallery, ‘In-
stallation Penetration,’ was largely the
result of collaboration between Mundi,
Morri, and Raggi (Ragnar Fjalar Lárus-
son). It focuses on a style of painting
they call ‘overkill.’ We caught up with
the group for an interview.

‘penetration’ seems to have several
components; the styrofoam stat-
ues, the pornographically reworked
romance novel covers, the graffiti
style canvases, and—
Morri: The what?
Mundi: [laughing] Graffiti style?
Morri: We just have graffiti elements
there to make fun of them; we don’t like
graffiti that much, so we are making fun
of it.
Mundi: We call it the overkill.
ok, sorry, you have the overkill
canvases, and then the videos and
media section, but is there some-
thing that ties all these elements
together?
Mundi and Morri: The overkill.
Mundi: Reworking every object.
And what’s the difference between
graffiti and overkill?
Mundi: We may use markers like in
graffiti, but we use a lot of mixed ma-
terials, acrylic paint more than spray
paint…
Morri: …accidentally spilled water,
stickers, or stuff I might find on the
street.
Mundi: We don’t have to be so hard on
graffiti either. Of course, there is a con-
nection, but that’s not what our stuff is.
Morri: It is partly a common drawing
style that is familiar to our generation—I
mean anyone born between 1970 and
1990—and partly our own style. It’s a
mixture, a soup, everything goes in it,
graffiti as well. I tag MoMS in one pic-
ture.
is there something you are trying
to kill?
Mundi: White space.
Morri: Yes, white space and [the canon]
of art history, that is, general thoughts
about what art is. We don’t like it.
What don’t you like?
Mundi: Superficiality.
is there any art movement in par-
ticular that you don’t like?
Mundi: I’m really tired of minimalism...
Every exhibition I go to is white space
with small pieces of art spread around
a giant room.
The exhibition seems to be con-
cerned with process, especially the
overkill canvases, but what is the
relationship between process and
end result?
Mundi: It’s not so concrete. We don’t
sit down and think ‘now we’re go-
ing to draw the end of the world.’ We
sometimes begin without discussing
anything beforehand and then we end
up with a picture, and the ideas either
match or they don’t match. Sometimes
we discuss during the process, and de-
cide to make something specific, ‘this
will be an end of the world drawing’
or ‘this will be a face or an alien.’ The
discussion may happen during the pro-
cess but definitely not before. We don’t
do sketch work before starting.
in terms of aesthetics, those styro-
foam statues do not seem to be ap-
pealing to any conventional sense
of beauty, and it appears as if they
were thrown together haphazardly.
do they represent a form of anti-
art?
Mundi: That’s a big part of what we are
doing, throwing things together hap-
hazardly, but that doesn’t have to be
a negative thing. When you work with
styrofoam and hot wire, you don’t have
any second chances, the hot wire goes
in and comes out, and there is a piece.
It’s trash material and it’s supposed to
be trashy… the paintings are also full of
trash, it’s just trash being piled on top
of the paper, so much so that it starts
looking beautiful in the end… I’m so
tired of this concept of art that says ev-
erything has to contain an answer. You
can draw one black line and as long as
the answer and static behind it is good
enough, then it’s ok. But that’s taking
all the fun and beauty out of art and
making it boring.

What role does irony play in your
work?
Morri: It plays a big role, but sometimes
people can misunderstand our inten-
tions. Sometimes there are swastikas
or racism or personal shit—sometimes
we draw a bad picture of a person that
we might love or hate.
Mundi: That’s where stream of con-
sciousness comes into play—getting
everything out of your system, and
not in a bad way. Drawing a swastika
doesn’t mean we are actually Nazis; it
just has to come out for some reason.
Morri: We’d like to believe that nothing
is forbidden.
MoMS also expresses itself
through, often violent, performance
art, such as the ‘piss and cum’ per-
formance, where you pissed and
puked on each other while erecting
a 10 metre high wooden structure,
or the ‘bar fight’ you enacted during
the resurrection of Sirkús in lon-
don. is MoMS working out certain
anger issues in these performanc-
es?
Morri: I don’t think so. I mean with ‘piss
and cum,’ it wasn’t just a performance,
we were also building a huge structure
and we did drawings and graphic de-
sign. And at Frieze, we painted the front
of Sirkús. I also played music. Also, we
did a pizza place performance once,
which was super friendly and family
oriented and we made a balloon tower
in Venice and part of the idea was just
to get people to smile.
Part of us is performance, part of us is
clothes, part of us is graphic design.
But the work we have done up until
now is mostly drawing and sculpture.
i understand there may be lots of
other things going on, but now i’m
asking about the violent aspect of
your performances.
Mundi: I think what Frikki [Morri] hates
about performance is that it evokes su-
perficiality in a lot of people’s minds,
but I don’t think performance is nec-
essarily superficial. Also, we have to
agree, which is definitely a puzzle, be-
cause of course we don’t have the same
opinions on life. So agreeing definitely
forms part of the identity of the final
idea of our work. Regarding the violent
aspect, we want to involve the whole
spectrum, so we have happiness and
violence.
And on the other side of the spec-
trum, is there a politics behind the
more playful acts, such as the bi-
cycle you hung over laugavegur
or the balloon worm you presented
to Ragnar kjartansson at the 2009
Venice Biennale ?
Morri: That is much more important,
the fun rather than the violence. I link
the bike and balloon tower to fantasy.
The bike belonged to our friend Finn-
bogi. The tire had burst seven times
and so it was put in a cellar over the
winter. Then we decided to put it in the
air, maybe because of E.T. In another
way, it represents a challenge to try to
make something beautiful.
Mundi: We like to start on things we
cannot predict where they are going to
lead us. But then you get yourself in the
unenviable position of having to fill bal-
loons forever.
do you, Mundi, approach your fash-
ion line in the same way as you ap-
proach visual and performance
arts?
Yes, I would say my line in the fashion
world is the same genre as MoMS’ stuff
in the visual arts world. I have not yet
used any of the [MoMS] drawings for
[clothing] prints, but we have been
talking about introducing some of the
MoMS stuff to the brand. I think the
creative world is controlled in large
part by fear, fear of being neglected
and consequently, fear of doing some-
thing different. And this fear will make
everything black and serious, and like
we said, superficial and minimalist.
Art | Collective
Mapping out ‘overkill’
An interview with the MoMS boys
Words
Alda Kravec
photography
Hörður Sveinsson