contemporary art in sweden?

We do not claim we have ever reached – and indeed we hardly ever tried to reach – some overview of swedish art, to see where the hell there might have been fresh imaginative-investigative reveries-interventions pursued in this particular sphere, this problematic sphere which to us seems more or less completely doomed and derailing-diverting as a place, but which obviously remains an area where many scattered impatient minds will go to pursue occasionally perfectly surrealist instincts, in the absence (or mere isolatedness and relative weakness) of large-scale integrative ludic-experimental-utopian projects that would frame and boost all creative compulsions in a more adequate context...

Instead we have just tried to memorise those somehow interesting artists who have crossed our path or caught our eye during the past 25 years, and often we've failed to do even that. A certain polemical lack of interest in art, simply to counter the still dominant confinement/misunderstanding of surrealism itself as being a tendency in art, has indeed usually kept our attention elsewhere.

But with a tool such as a blog, we could at least present without further commitment an imperfect list of such artists whose work at least somewhere has some such freshly disturbing aspect – or rather only of those websites (usually but not always personal ones) that may perhaps betray this (thus it is clearly not an exhaustive list of swedish artists who remain under serious or absentminded consideration whether we like their stuff, since many have little or none web presence or keep the most interesting sides secret).

This will inevitably be quite haphazard, there be old and young, schooled and raw, unknown and famous, professionals and notorious amateurs, most are brief and/or indirect acquaintances but a few are very good friends (or are our own). We will eventually turn out to be thoroughly mistaken about some of them, while we are not at all ashamed that we have missed numbers of perhaps interesting ones. Some we admire but some are just cases where we would like to emphasise or seriously suggest a perhaps not obvious surrealist aspect.

Kristina Abelli Elander

Tove Adman

Hawk Alfredson

John Andersson

Annan konst (Postfuturistiska sällskapet)

Nina Bondeson

Christofer Dahlby

Edvard Derkert

Diabolik

Anna-Stina Ehrenfeldt

Markus Ekeblad

Leif Elggren

4X

Alan Friis

Gomfilm

Maria Hagelby

Joakim Hansén

Jens Hedin

Inuti

Martin Jacobson

Lisa Jonasson

Kolbeinn Karlsson

Rose-Marie Klintman

Jenny Källman

Monica Lehn-Domnick

Lars Lerin

Maria Lilja

Per-Ivar Lindekrantz

CM Lundberg (mobile blog) (official site)

Lars-Gösta Lundberg

Linda Lysell

Petra Mandal

Valeria Montti Colque

Iwo Myrin

Mia Mäkilä

Nationalgalleriet

Nicole Natri

Niklas Nenzén

Johan Nobell

Gabriella Novak

Åsa Nylén

Ulf Rahmberg

Gerald Steffe

Matti Steiger Lundmark

Natalie Sutinen

Uno Svensson

Bogdan Szyber & Carina Reich

Fredrik Söderberg

Otmar Thormann

Janie Varades Söderberg

Bo Veisland

Marcelo Videa

Kristoffer Zetterstrand

Emilie Östergren

Renaissance Fountain

Verwandtschaftseinheiten:



"In the parched path
I have seen the good lizard
(one drop of crocodile)
meditating."

Lorca, from The Old Lizard



"I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes...My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke..."

(Friedrich August Kekule relating (possibly cryptomnesiacally) his discovery of the chemical structure of the benzene molecule in 1864)

"It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely with and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything."

Plato, from Timaeus, (The Construction of the World)


"This symbol appears principally among the Gnostics and is depicted as a dragon, snake or serpent biting its own tail. In the broadest sense, it is symbolic of time and the continuity of life. It sometimes bears the caption Hen to pan - 'The One, the All', as in the Codex Marcianus, for instance, of the 2nd century A.D. It has also been explained as the union between the chthonian principle as represented by the serpent and the celestial principal as signified by the bird (a synthesis which can also be applied to the dragon). Ruland contends this proves that it is a variant of the symbol for Mercury - the duplex god. In some versions of the Ouroboros, the body is half light and half dark, alluding in this way to the successive counterbalancing of opposing principls as illustrated in the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol for instance. Evola asserts that it represents the dissolution of the body, or the universal serpent which (to quote the Gnostic saying) 'passes through all things'. Poison, the viper and the universal solvent are all symbols of the undifferentiated-of the 'unchanging law' which moves through all things, linking them by a common bond. Both the dragon and the bull are symbolic antagonists of the solar hero. The Ouroboros biting its own tail is symbolic of self-fecundation, or the primitive idea of a self-sufficient Nature - a Nature, that is which, à la Nietzsche, continually returns, within a cyclic pattern, to its own beginning. There is a Venetian manuscript on alchemy which depicts the Ouroboros with its body half-black (symbolizing earth and night) and half-white (denoting heaven and light)."

Text from Project Ouroborus at the University of Minnesota



To illustrate that our size is midway between that of the Planck scale - the smallest possible size - and that of the observable universe Joel R Primack and Nancy Abrams introduce the Cosmic Ouroboros, a serpent swallowing its own tail.



Variable star V838 Monocerotis, photo by NASA



"The crocodile, which emerges silently and mysteriously from the waters of the lakes and river, could be likened to the primeval mound and was thus believed to embody the elemental powers of creation. Although a treacherous creature, it was considered a benefactor of the land, analogous to the Nile itself whose threatening floodwaters nonetheless ensured the perpetuity of life. Herodotus (writing in the fifth century BC) tells of our traditional belief in the elemental power of this beast and its ability to transform human beings into something approaching the divine:

'When anyone, be he Egyptian or stranger, is known to have been carted off by a crocodile or drowned by the river itself, such a one must by all means be embalmed and tended as fairly as may be and buried in a sacred coffin by the townsmen of the place where he is cast up; nor may his kinfolk or his friends touch him, but his body is deemed something more than human, and is handled and buried by the priests of the Nile themselves.'"

from introduction to Krokodilopolis (Per Sebek)




"How does the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!"

from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"I have often," said Smee, "noticed your strange dread of crocodiles."
"Not of crocodiles," Hook corrected him, "but of that one crocodile." He lowered his voice. "It liked my arm so much, Smee, that it has followed me ever since, from sea to sea and from land to land, licking its lips for the rest of me."
"In a way," said Smee, "it's sort of a compliment."
"I want no such compliments," Hook barked petulantly. "I want Peter Pan, who first gave the brute its taste for me."
He sat down on a large mushroom, and now there was a quiver in his voice. "Smee," he said huskily, "that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and bolt." He laughed, but in a hollow way.
"Some day," said Smee, "the clock will run down, and then he'll get you."
Hook wetted his dry lips. "Ay," he said, "that's the fear that haunts me."

from Peter Pan, by James M. Barrie

"In the Orphic tradition, "Time" was personified as one of the main protagonists of creation. The folk-etymological identification of Cronus with "Chronos" then allowed for an attractive metaphorical explanation of Cronus’ cannibalism: the story symbolically signified the way time "eats" or takes away all things it has earlier produced. /.../
Probably drawing on earlier Phoenician creation stories, the Orphics also envisioned "Time" in the form of a cosmic serpent winding itself around the universe. When the first astronomers began to model the universe as a sphere rotating on an axis, this serpent was linked with the outer circumference of the cosmos or with the ecliptic band. The ancient Near Eastern image of the ouroboros or tail-biting serpent, which had existed long before in Egypt, was then used to represent this cosmic serpent wound around the earth."

from Myth as Metaphor by Rens Van der Sluijs

"And when we fell together

all our flesh was like a veil

That I had to draw aside

to see the serpent eat its tail."

Leonard Cohen, from Last Year's Man

Unfinished Works

"Sometimes it may happen that a speculative artist may, by his own eccentricity, think out for himself some new method in Alchemy, be the consequence anything or nothing. He need do nought in order to reduce something into nothing, and again bring back something out of nothing. Yet this proverb of the incredulous is not wholly false. Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it. The good is least good whilst it is thus concealed. The concealment must be removed that so the good may be able freely to appear in its own brightness. For example, the mountain, the sand, the earth, or the stone in which a metal has grown is such a concealment. Each one of the visible metals is a concealment of the other six metals."

Paracelsus - Coelum philosophorum

Paddling towards siren shores.

Collecting the yeast of urns from distant star-beaches.

Hurry love.

Not now, I am evaporating.

Famine! Famine!

Searching for warty toads at the bottom of the waters that flooded the summit in spring-time.


Getting out of the oyster bed (before the page).



Taking the dead end of metaphor.

LOG:

I have made numerous pencil sketches that were abandoned before their ideas were outlined in their entirety or had grown to a full motive. On a whim I transferred some of these unfinished sketches more or less randomly from white papers to papers with structured backgrounds.

During this process it often happened that the "unfinishedness" as by magic was drastically removed from the visual appearance. Forms took up my hints and began to tell a story, or started to break down the motive. The ones showed here became alive to me. But since the sketches neither were properly "finished" according to my original thought nor deterred totally from what was vaguely intended to be there, I played around with the idea of expressing the process of transformation in terms of a "negation of the negation", or akin to how psychoanalysis manages to outline the structure of the unconscious by projecting the ideas of lack and desire upon it.

Because from this dialectic an agreeable analogy seem to present itself. Namely that the transformation of the images come to display features of the original "non-element" at another level of meaning. (From the Paracelsus quote, I even constructed the phrase "unconcealing the incomplete features" for the process, thereby alluding both to how the matter embedding the metal ores is removed and to the sense of precognition which is involved in creation.)

The new level of meaning referred to remains, I would think, qualitatively percieved as the artist´s familliar sense of animistic euphoria, as when the work suddenly becomes alive and other. But the further implication of this change is that the artist´s dethronement or removal is actually suggested, since the suspicion that "thought is flowing forth directly from material reality" begin to make its glorious claim. This gets me back to why the drawings were abandoned to begin with: it can often be very tedious to have do all the thinking, planning and manual labour for oneself.

/NN

Now available is Josie Malinowski's book West of Pure Evil (Oyster Moon) (available through Lulu and strongly recommended). There is no such a thing as an octopodiphilic sect and Josie Malinowski is not its high priestess. In order not to try to metonymically characterise the book through an allegedly representative quote of its quantitatively dominant sinister tales (o what a storyteller) and perverse nursery rhymes, we'll cite a seemingly traditionally surrealist poem:

A few years of the wasteland

She wouldn’t testify to the homicide but she did categorise my fish:

The ephemeral fish, a-wandering through the desert plains,

bleating like lost souls trying to find meaning in food.

‘If he has some, I’m having a canvas-bag full of horse shit’ one

announced,

and in agreement another leapt up and smacked a boy on the buttocks.

The boy stared on in pure bewilderment.

His mother, seeing the cacophony of evil brewing beneath the smiles

of merchant’s pimpled faces,

hauled his ruddy backside up and threw him in his cage

(shared with pet marsupials).

A trumpet sounded and the race began.

Thirty thousand eggs jumped on the backs of cockerels

and whipped them till a thick layer of cockroach skins

plastered the floor and made for poor footing.

Disappointed, three men clad in Hawaiian shirts took out their machetes

and started lopping off limbs at random.

The third, the cruellest and most arbitrary,

started with his own foot to show how serious he was,

and not more than three decades later the area known as Legland

was a haven for the more daring tourists

or those with a penchant for absolute schadenfreude:

pleasure at seeing one’s companion’s arm lopped off

as she holds out a peseta to a starving child.

The moon shone down orange on a beaten up tramp enjoying the

spectacle quietly

from a disused army bunker where he stored jars of blood

and nail clippings to sell to scientists for a small sum;

he was saving to buy a razor blade to slit his wrists

and jump into the nearby lake where they said paradise awaited those

who gave up their earthly bodies to it.

Having achieved his goal several weeks later the tramp,

far from the paradise he craved, was raised up on a dais on the sand,

pulled along by snakes driven by fire and fury,

destined to spin forever in a cloudy night.

It was 3 ‘o’ clock.

A haggard child crawled by on its belly calling ‘slaughter! slaughter!’

After this, nothing else was known – except that a few greasy slabs of

horse meat

were seen with a priest, fuelling the next great scandal,

which I’ll tell you about after supper.

Ant hill chewing on a fence + Gravel in a pit

A sound and an object found in the same area during a walk in Stockholm 2010-07-09.

Yes the marble eyes

here the corner unfolds

for the horsemen in the narrower chamber

your glass jars

fish in gathered hands

for the mountain that yields to

the whole body's obsession

and the relics that raise their eyes

into sand

the stifling bushes in the room

yet still in the spine

the silent hanger, the pearls

translated by EL & Merl Fluin

My Marble Eyes are Still Working

/ NN

The Drowned and the Inevitable

- Automatic horror movie soliloquy


Casual newsbreaks. Entities in waiting. Legitimacy calls. Crackdown. As if.

Dreams are about something. Casualties add up to it. Schools of fish being herded by the stars. Wait for daybreak. Do not touch the stones. Do not add water. Remove the bad tissue and do not follow the sparkles scuttling along. You have no idea. Do you want to talk about it?

When I was a small baby last week, there was a bad neighbor with good shoes. We had no idea what to sing, and it attracted a colony of guillemots. Crabs were sticking to nightmares, fieldtrips gathered in other lunchbags, and none of us ever went to school again. That's how I remember it. It might be just a story to you.

The last time I saw that wooden statue, I couldn't refrain from yelling at it. And for all that time, not a single cloud darkened the sky. A goose with two heads. A fairytale with a long fermented tail. Agony will please us. Just get on with the chores. No one will see these droplets. We will all be able to sleep sweetly.

Being told that there is an answer to that pain. We didn't expect anyone to emerge from the woods so soon. There was a fine mist, that's all. Looking down from the treetops. Not knowing. It is a craven bridge and it is running high. A fit of cramps and it all crumbles. It is all just a particular kind of bird. I have no wish to remain alone here. We wouldn't be anything but similar ghosts in this shade. Matter has a fragrance of lemon and seafood. We are encircled by scrapings.

Crabs running down the trunks. Please open this particular door.

Biting splenic flexure

Some lockjawed angel who breathes through a tube
found a baby in a limekiln just a hand’s span from Sodom.

All the mums and dads and grans and uncles
clamoured to know how the trick was done.

Trip wires, rabbits or geomancy
or the insertion of eels into intimate combat,

little fangs biting the slackjawed angel
whose pelvis was crushed beneath the wheels of the sun.

John Andersson: There's a nightly rainbow

John Andersson:

There's a nightly rainbow

(from Lucifer, 2000)







I.


In her brown whale eye

I see the corners pack off

Through the whirling world

Through the articles





II.


There's a nightly rainbow

A few can see

And by it's end

lies a golden farm

In the farm there's a man

Trembling in a web

Hold up your lantern

He's completely dry

Lift up his hand

From the table dust

And read the words

Written on a case





III.


In the sky shines a moon

Radiating bloomy ways

I can see no bone to pick

Nothing in the wind






1980

The text above was lifted from the recently updated digital poetry archive of the surrealist group of Stockholm. The image at the top by J A is titled ”John Andersson ser på valar”.