Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.10.2012, Blaðsíða 24

24 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 16 — 2012
SOUND THE ALARMS
While a lot of local bands
take the weeks before
Airwaves to rest and
recuperate for the
upcoming madness,
others are taking the
opportunity to get
their new material out there. Our cover
guy Skúli Sverrison just released an
album with Óskar Guðjónsson named
‘The Box Tree’ on September 21. Folkster
singer Jóhann Kristinsson has just
put out his new album ‘Headphones’
which is now available on Gogoyoko,
where you can also find the first single
from Þórir Georg’s upcoming record ‘I
Will Die and You Will Die and it Will be
Alright’. Then there’s Nóra, who have a
fresh new album hitting the shelves in
November right after they come off their
Airwaves gig.
CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME
Meanwhile, in addition to their new album ‘Elegy’ coming out on
October 8, hip hop band Epic Rain are on
tour through France and Italy all month
until they come home for the festival.
Also on tour is Sudden Weather Change
doing a clean sweep of the American
west coast. They play their first show
tonight at The Echo in Los Angeles
and finish up in Brooklyn at the Grand
Victory. We wish them grandeur and
victories!
CELLULOID VS. COUCH
POTATO
In the world of visual entertainment, RIFF is still on for
a couple of days and
then the movies will
be back to good ol’
popcorn munching
fare. Over at the
Sambíó Reykjavík
theatre you can catch
(among others) Lawless, a crime film
written by Gothic gunslinger Nick Cave,
political-spoof The Campaign starring
Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, and
the booty-shaking madness of Step Up
Revolution (aka Step Up 4Ever!). If the
last one is as great as the first three Step
Ups, we smell a Razzy award!
If you’d rather not put on pants and leave the house, RÚV (Icelandic
National Broadcasting) has you all
set up with stories. Tuesday evenings
have season 3 of the Showtime series
The Big C starring Laura Linney as a
cancer-ridden woman hiding her illness
from her family. On Wednesday nights
you have the Lifetime TV drama Army
Wives, following the lives of, well…
army wives. On the same night there’s
also the Grey’s Anatomy spin-off Private
Practice, but lagging one season behind
at number 5. Weekend nights are all
set too, with movies like Pretty in
Pink, Broken Flowers and (speaking of
Razzies) Jersey Girl!
October
WHAT THE EFF IS
GOING ON???
ART
Unfurled at majestic full length
across the middle of the gallery,
stained with oily pockmarks and
rusty striations, “Cloth Collapsion”
looks like some kind of ancient, time-
worn scroll—a key document from
a not quite lost civilisation, rescued
from the ravages of the elements and
displayed as an artefact for curious
museumgoers. The only thing miss-
ing, really, is the writing. There is a
kind of history inscribed, but it’s a
record of biological time, not of hu-
man civilization.
Leaving art to nature and chance
A similarly humble pose, in a more
specifically art-historical context, is
struck on one of the facing walls by
Harpa Árnadóttir’s white paintings.
Harpa coated her canvasses in layers
of pigment and glue so that they
would crack; the crisscross of hairline
fractures maps a molecular logic too
fine for any painter to replicate. The
artist has forsaken all visual content
save for the material properties of her
medium itself. And, as with Jóhann,
what results is a ghostly vision from
the future. The mixtures Harpa ap-
plies to her canvas merely speed up,
rather than delay, the fate they share
with all paintings. Despite the heroic
dedication of art restorers and the
generators keeping the exhibition and
storage spaces cool and dry, canvasses
crack and colours dim.
Harpa is among four Icelandic
artists whose work was selected by
curator Hafþór Yngvason to sur-
round “Cloth Collapsion.” All have
devised processes by which nature
and chance might take their course.
For her “Material Landscape Project,”
Guðrún Einarsdóttir blended her oil
paint with chemicals so that it would,
when splashed onto a canvas, stay wet
and continue to disperse in unpre-
dictable ways for as long as a year or
more. Very close-up, the coagulated
veins of paint look like packages of
Ramen noodles. Ragna Róbertsdót-
tir contributes a piece of tarnished
silver, like an occluded mirror, and
several glass plates onto which she
has poured salt water and let dry. In a
more inorganic way, Sólveig Aðal-
steinsdóttir prints film exposed and
handled in a dark room, capturing
the play of stray ambient light.
There are a number of parallels
to be drawn. In his notes, curator
Hafþór invokes a couple of rather
cheeky predecessors: Marcel Duch-
amp, who allowed dust to gather on a
glass plate left out in his studio, and
the Icelander Kristján Guðmundsson
who, in 1969, exhibited an iron-
ing board covered in chickenshit
deposited there by his hens. He
titled it “Environmental Sculpture.”
Removed from debates over the
artistic methods and valuations,
“Cloth Collapsion” also has a whiff
of the archaeological grandeur of
Richard Serra’s oxidized monoliths.
And Jóhann’s use of industrial waste
in his sculpture, and the facing walls’
patterns of decomposition, spreading
oil and salt water recall J. Henry Fair
and Edward Burtynsky, whose large-
format photographs frame landscape-
despoiling pollution as alarmingly
beautiful abstract compositions.
The most inexorable process of all
Additionally, the random-access
methods on display here have an in-
verse in the Conceptual and Minimal
schools, wherein artists will some-
times surrender their decision-mak-
ing process to some kind of schema,
whether technological or a logic of
their own devising. From 1960, Fran-
çois Morellet's “Random Distribution
of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd
and Even Numbers of a Telephone
Directory” is an obsessive, imper-
sonal, red-and-blue static array made
exactly as it sounds like it was made.
Sol LeWitt produced instructions
for geometrical wall drawings to be
executed by installers. The point is to
efface the agency of the human artist,
often in the face of some encroaching
impersonal technology—or else, as is
happening at Hafnarhús, to contest
any such timeline of succession by
reverting to eternal orders.
What all these abstract pieces have
in common, though, is the beautiful,
uncanny impression they give of cor-
responding to some kind of secret law
of nature, regardless of how advanced
and man-made the materials. And
it’s nature that all of these “material
landscapes”—to borrow Guðrún’s
title—evoke, as in Ragna’s islands
of crystal formations, or the wavy
splashes of illumination, like the
Northern Lights in Sólveig’s photo
prints. This natural beauty, with its
minimal colour and embellishment,
is spare, even weathered, and perhaps
stereotypically Icelandic. In their def-
erence to, and articulation of, natural
and inexorable processes, the works
in “The Power of Passage” are more
than a little stoic. They genuflect
towards the most inexorable process
of all: time.
- MARK ASCH
Surrendering To Time “The Power of Passage”
at the Reykjavík Art Museum
Read more from Dan at his blog
www.societyvernacular.com
“The Power of Passage” at Reykjavík Art Museum’s Hafnarhús is centred around Jóhann Eyfells’ “Cloth Collapsion,” a
monumental metres-long canvas steeped in industrial effluvia. The nearly 90-year-old Reykjavík born sculptor made
his name working with metals, forging them industrially or welcoming in varying degrees of organic imperfection.
The Power of Passage
Reykjavík Art Museum
Hafnarhús15SEPT 6JAN
www.artmuseum.is