Iceland review - 2004, Qupperneq 36

A British modern music journal, The Wire, once
described Reykjavík as a city where you can
“stumble across one good contact … and an
entire community of experimental artists sud-
denly opens up to you.” (January 2002) That
one good contact has materialized, albeit semi-
permanently, as a building. The opening of
KlinK & BanK has floated Iceland’s experimen-
tal art scene one more fathom closer to the sur-
face and has brought new life to a community
of young artists, many of whom see this project
as a revolutionary move for the city’s creative
community.
The story of how this building came into the
hands of the artists is unprecedented in
Iceland. The National Bank of Iceland, finding
itself with prime real estate in downtown
Reykjavík, decided to donate a building with
nearly 5000 square meters of floor space to
artists living in Reykjavik. To plan the building
and oversee its operation, they contacted the
ten visual artists who run Gallery Kling & Bang
and asked them to convert the building into a
workspace, gallery, and veritable factory for
young artists and musicians.
Nina Magnúsdóttir is one of the ten core mem-
bers of Gallery Kling & Bang, which recently
had its one-year anniversary. The gallery was
started originally to promote young artists, but
has recently been asked to host prominent
artists visiting from abroad such as Paul
McCarthy and Jason Rhoades. “When we start-
ed our gallery, [Gallery] Hlemmur was also
going, but now there isn’t much else that is
really covering that edge of art,” Nina tells me
outside of her office in the compound. Nina
has become the administrative head of the
KlinK & BanK project.
A RETRO CYCLE OF
APPROXIMATELY TWENTY YEARS
KlinK & BanK is not the first time in Iceland’s
history that artists have taken over a house and
converted it into a workspace. As sure as a
band with that Joy Division sound, or legwarm-
ers as a fashion statement, everything that is
happening now has happened before in some
form or another.
In the winter of 1982, at a time when the punk
movement was peaking in Iceland, approxi-
mately forty to fifty people moved into the JL
House at Hringbraut 118, a building that now
houses part of the Reykjavík Art Academy and
the Nóatún grocery store.
The house was called Gullströndin Andar (or
“the golden beach lives again”) after what
Pétur Hoffman, “the King of the Dump”, called
that stretch of coastline when it was still a
landfill for the city of Reykjavík. Bands like
Útangardsmenn and Oxma played there fre-
quently, and the artists, some of whom lived
and worked there, painted to the music of the
time – in the style of the time, using shipyard
paint, flouting intellectualism.
It was an exciting time, but according to
Gudmundur Oddur “Goddur” Magnússon, “no
one feels particularly romantic about it.”
Goddur is a professor of graphic design at the
Icelandic Academy of the Arts. He has a work-
space in Klink & Bank and he was around in
1983, documenting the Gold Beach movement.
THE NINE MONTH DEADLINE
Part of the ambiguity of KlinK & BanK lies in
the uncertain time frame that the artists are
working with. When the old newspaper build-
ing was donated by the bank it was only for a
period of nine months, which means that
everyone will most likely have to leave in
October. The building has actually already
been sold to developers who plan to tear it
down to build more apartment buildings. The
building is right in the centre of the East End,
an area that is in heavy development.
The general attitude among the people work-
ing in the building is that if they work hard
enough in the space and create something
worthwhile out of the project, then KlinK &
BanK can continue in another space. “Initially,
it’s more of a concept than a roof,” says Nina,
“but with the roof we have the possibility to
make the concept happen. That’s kind of the
original idea - that we could find a roof some-
where else.”
From a short walk through the building, it is
clear that it could take some time to get every-
one out in October. Over the past three
months, life has crept into the many corners of
the house. There have been concerts in the
“Russia” space upstairs. Vesturport, a local
independent theatre company, has put on sev-
eral shows in an elevator shaft in the base-
ment. Two full-length albums have almost
been completed in two of the small recording
studios in the music area. This is not even to
mention the other one hundred artists who are
painting, sculpting, weaving, sewing, and oth-
erwise creating in offices throughout the com-
pound’s three floors. To top it off, last week-
end a young woman named Saga glued all of
her possessions together in the “Berlin” space
downstairs and then left for Denmark.
The whole thing is almost too much to grasp,
like some sort of artistic hysterical chaos. But
that, Nina insists, is part of how it has to work.
“There is no way of controlling this energy,”
she says with enthusiasm that removes any pos-
sibility of argument. “I think it’s quite impor-
tant to realize when you’re trying to organize
something like this, that you don’t organize it
too much. It’s very easy to kill things with too
much organization. Of course, it’s a balance.”
IS IT PUNK, IS IT NOT PUNK?
All this talk of anarchy and chaos when dis-
cussing KlinK & BanK might lead some to think
that the building is full of leather-jacketed
toughs sporting bright purple Mohawks. The
fact is, the artists & musicians in the house, and
the generation many of them belong to, are
far from punk. This, according to Goddur, is
another main difference between the Gold
Beach movement and this one. “The anger isn’t
as obvious with this generation. Everything
with them is cute. But they cannot stay cute
forever. This generation will start to bite.”
Whatever fashion they use to get their mes-
sage across, it is clear that the people working
in KlinK & BanK are the doers in music and art
in Reykjavík. “KlinK & BanK is not a movement
of rebels,” Goddur explains while showing me
his scanned-in photographs of the Gold Beach
group. “It’s a movement of people who want
to be taken seriously. Many of them have
already made something of a name for them-
selves.”
He lists off names to strengthen his point.
Birgir Örn Thoroddsen, (“Curver”), runs a stu-
dio with two other producers in the house.
Under the name Tími, they have scheduled
weekly seminars about music in the meeting
room of the house. Kitchen Motors, an art and
music collective, held their fifth birthday party
in the house. A crowd of about two thousand
people were treated to a day-long concert and
retrospective of their work. Snorri Ásmunds-
son, a visual artist who uses his national identi-
ty in many of his more conceptual pieces,
recently ran for president. The artists in the
house are planning an exhibition in July deal-
ing with the image of the artist as madman,
which will coincide with the next open house,
titled, appropriately enough, “Carnival”. The
schedule of events in the house is proudly dis-
played in a wall-sized calendar in the house,
where people can add their own events and
match itineraries with other members.
While most people will have to wait for the
open houses to see the inside of KlinK & BanK,
others have been more lucky. That “one good
contact” mentioned by The Wire is still around.
Nowadays though, instead of merely giving
you a vague schedule of underground events,
he can take you up the street and give you a
guided tour.
Alex MacNeil is a staff writer.
“If we had put in just visual
arts [in Klink & Bank], it would
have been all the visual arts in
Iceland. We thought that […] it
was much better to keep the
project in the realms of what we
think is contemporary and inter-
esting, so we wanted anybody in
any art form to be able to join.
All this gives the house a life
that you can’t find anywhere
else in Iceland.”
“I’ve talked about it for years
in visual art circles that we
have to do something - that no
one’s going to do it for us. […]
Then you get into the position
where you have to stand up and
be a woman of your words. Now
I just have to do it.”
“The similarities are many
between the two houses, but
there are several main differ-
ences. With [Gold Beach], every-
one knew where things were
heading. It was all about paint-
ing and this anti-intellectual
expression. KlinK & BanK is
bigger, and in a sense more
anarchistic. It is too big to
control and nobody knows where
this is heading.”
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