Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.05.2011, Blaðsíða 22

Mountaineers of Iceland • Skútuvogur 12E • 104 Reykjavík • Iceland
Telephone: +354 580 9900 Ice@mountaineers.is • www.mountaineers.is • www. activity.is
SUPER JEEP & SNOWMOBILE TOURS
22
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 5 — 2011 The exhibition is supposed to remain open until
May 15. Entrance: 600 ISK, cash only.
Art | Controversies
Sicily 212 BCE. General Marcellus sends
a soldier to find the mathematician Ar-
chimedes and bring him to his court,
out of sheer curiosity. Archimedes was
renowned for his science, but had also
lent his mind to inventing war machines,
which Sicily used to resist the general's
invasion. The soldier finds Archimedes on
the beach, doodling geometry in the sand.
“The general wants to see you”, the sol-
dier says, to which Archimedes' only reply
is to go on doodling. “General Marcellus
wants to see you”, the soldier repeats,
and Archimedes keeps on drawing. Com-
pletely perplexed by the mathematician's
lack of understanding the soldier says
for the third time: “Don't you understand,
general Marcellus himself has summoned
you to his court?” Archimedes looks up
and replies: “Let me finish my equation.”
The soldier waits a while, then runs out
of patience and lifts his sword and strikes
Archimedes who falls dead. Or so it went
according to French philosopher Alain
Badiou, who uses this anecdote to explain
his concept of a 'philosophical situation':
Between state power and arts (in this
case mathematics) there is no relation.
Nothing in common. Confronted with this
lack of relation, we must invent, we must
think, but we must also, he insists, take
sides.
Reykjavík 2011 CE. “The arts, con-
flated with the creative industry, are in-
creasingly associated with societal ser-
vices and marketing agendas, and are
governed by the State and municipal bod-
ies, as well as by business agents, plan-
ners, directors, and entrepreneurs—all of
whom favour utilitarian outcomes to art,
such as international networking, nation
branding and economic growth, to name
a few. Artists become agents, part of the
'managerial class' suited to solving socio-
cultural problems. They are soft versions
of the technocrat and the bureaucrat.”
So write the curators of Koddu, an
exhibition that opened in two spaces in
Reykjavík on April 16. The text strikes a
note familiar to anyone even only briefly
familiar with the humanities during the
last two decades, but completely new
as an agenda from within the local arts
scene. The curators go on to state their
main goal: “[...] to create an account of
the relations between iconography/im-
ages/language and ideology in contem-
porary Iceland before and after the melt-
down and, further, to address core ideas
of national identity and its construction
within a small nation.”
CONTROVERSY
Koddu is not just the most controversial
art exhibition in town, it's the only art ex-
hibition that's been controversial in this
town since 1970, I'm told. It’s somewhat
unexpected key selling point is an ongoing
debate between the publisher of award-
winning monstrously luxurious € 620 12
kg. coffee-table book of illustrations, ‘Flo-
ra Islandica’, and the team of three cura-
tors who made an installation of the book
smeared in food, from dairy products to
salami. The illustrations are smeared to
the point of being unrecognisable, where-
as the identity of the book itself remains
clear. The curators borrowed the publish-
er's blurb and named the installation 'The
world's most beautiful book'. In this work,
Icelandic food products, i.e. nature as a
smelly cycle of rot and filth, strikes back at
the lusciously colourful and detailed gift-
item imagery of nature commonly utilised
for nation-branding.
Now, this somewhat standard, even
banal, work of iconoclasm has become
such a minefield of insults and offences
given and taken that even merely attempt-
ing to describe the narrative surrounding
it means risking a libel case. So much,
however, is clear: The exhibition was at
first to be opened last fall in a museum in
the small town Hveragerði, famous for its
green-house harvest of cucumbers and
more recently a marginal neo-Nazi scene.
The museum directors then took offence
at the exhibition's direction and wanted
to soften the tone somewhat. According
to the curators this amounted to censor-
ship. The museum directors, however, in-
sist they were simply acting responsibly:
museums are 'based on traditions', must
'preserve a certain image' and so are 'nat-
urally conservative'—from this standpoint
the curators over-dramatised the whole
affair, for the sake of publicity and self-
aggrandisation. From the standpoint of
authority so was, of course, Archimedes'
stupefying martyrdom.
A BRUTAL WEIGHT
In comes Nýló: Reykjavík's Living Art
Museum, established and run by artists
since 1978, as ‘a platform for progressive
exhibitions and critical discussions on
experimental art practice'. Nýló took on
the exhibition, in cooperation with Aus-
trian patron Francesca von Habsburg. The
opening took place in two locations simul-
taneously: In Nýló's own exhibition space
and in the Alliance-house, right west of
the city centre, which has served various
art-related purposes in recent years.
It is a performative exhibition, an at-
tack on a collective imagery, and the
sheer amount of works involved gives it
a brutal weight that suffices to explode
the silent consensus about the function
and utility of images in this country. Sure
enough there are individual works within
the exhibition that conquer their own
space and open up more interpretive or
non-interpretive dimensions: I will name
only Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson's video in-
stallation, which resembles Alan Clarke's
1989 short film ‘Elephant’ but takes his
imagery of meaningless serial murder to
a place all its own. The strongest impres-
sion, however, remains that of the exhibi-
tion in whole, as one collage. As such the
exhibition succeeds: those who intend to
continue using the thoughtless imagery
of Icelandic 'children of nature' for nation-
branding cannot claim innocence in so
doing from now on. Their motives will al-
ready have been revealed.
MORAL RIGHTS
The exhibition is an act committed on
the collective visual consciousness of a
country. In these terms the success of
this bountiful exhibition will be partly de-
termined by the number of visitors. Enter
Kristján B. Jónasson, representative of
Crymogea publishing house, who two
days after the opening had not yet seen
the exhibition but either asks (according
to himself) or demands or threatens a
lawsuit (according to Nýló) if the gallerists
do not instantly remove ‘The World's Most
Beautiful Book’ from the exhibition, claim-
ing a breach of the author's moral rights.
Now, Nýló was founded by the art-
ists who caused uproar during the 1970
Reykjavík Arts Festival with a pile of bread
erected and displayed on Skólavörðuholt
(artist: Kristján Guðmundsson). That con-
troversy, only one of many surrounding the
ground-breaking SÚM-group, reached
far beyond the arts scene and became
the matter of actual church sermons on
degeneracy before being removed by the
city's health authorities (Archimedes vs.
the Surgeon General). Today Nýló seems
to be going through a mid-life identity cri-
sis, facing itself having become an insti-
tution. They hesitate in the no-man's land
between State logic and artistic dedica-
tion.
Nýló succumbed and removed the
work on the April 20. The curators de-
manded that the work be de-censored,
and that the museum should remain
closed until the book was back in place,
as the totality of the exhibition had been
violated with the item's removal. The cu-
rators reinstalled the book themselves,
while Nýló closed its part of the exhibition
over Easter. It remained closed on Tues-
day thereafter, and then sent out a plot-
thickening press release: the ‘World's
Most Beautiful Book’ had vanished.
WHAT IS AT STAKE IS AT STAKE
The book reappeared inside a black
square container installed at the centre of
the exhibition space in the Alliance house,
i.e. outside Nýló's own premises. Visitors
can no longer leaf through the book but
merely observe it through a glass pane
at a moderate distance. Crymogea now
demand that the curators destroy ‘The
World's Most Beautiful Book’, in the pres-
ence of the publisher's representatives, at
the end of the exhibition. Nevermind the
potential market value of the most dis-
puted piece of art in Iceland for decades:
given the spirit of the feud and the prin-
ciples at stake it is unlikely that the cura-
tors will give in.
What is at stake? Precisely the defini-
tion of what is at stake is at stake: accord-
ing to the publishers it is legality and re-
spect for authors' rights. According to the
curators it is art’s role within or against the
capitalist nation-state. Curiously enough
it seems that the Koddu curators are more
willing to take the case to State courts in
order to force forth a principled ruling,
which might set an example, whereas
Crymogea seems intent on reaching 'an
agreement' about destroying ‘The World's
Most Beautiful Book’. Various cynical
perspectives remain open: that this is old
money (Francesa von Habsburg) attack-
ing the Icelandic boom nouveau-riches'
lack of culture; that it's all just a personal
affair between curator Hannes Lárus-
son and illustrator Eggert Pétursson; that
it's an interesting legal paradox where
authors' moral rights meet with private
property rights (the exhibition bought
this copy of the book...); that it is a feud
between the dominant patriarchal book-
world against the feminine/feminist sub-
versive tactics of visual arts; or, as pub-
lisher Kristján B. Jónasson trivialised the
case when someone asked if 'people can't
handle a dialogue': “A dialogue about
what? Food?”
Words
Haukur Már Helgason
Photography
Maroesjka Lavigne
The Koddu Controversy
Sources:
Ásmundur Ásmundsson, Hannes Lárusson and Tinna Grétarsdóttir, Koddu, exhibition Catalogue, Reykjavík 2011.
Alain Badiou, "Thinking the Event" in ‘Philosophy in the Present’, Polity 2009.
„En þetta var geggjað fólk!“, Eyrún Óskarsdóttir's 2008 BA art studies thesis on the SÚM-group.
Various news media and one Facebook status.
“Koddu is not just the most controversial art
exhibition in town, it's the only art exhibition that's
been controversial in this town since 1970, I'm
told.”