THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT

I believe that 2006 is the year of post-theory. For quite a long time now, we have been seeing art that has tried to get away from conceptual and abstract theoretical apparatuses, so as to get closer to reality. Why so? In a world that is experienced more or less via the filter of the mass media are we incapable of facing everyday events without reference to ‘reality’ as it is presented – and interpreted – in the mass media. We quite simply do not trust ourselves. Or should I say – I do not trust myself.

This uncertainty about what is my own opinion or someone else’s about what I am experiencing around me is something that artists have been investigating since ‘the mass media’ became a concept over a hundred years ago. In a variety of ways. The expressionists reacted by asserting their egos. The cubists analysed. The surrealists fled. The pop artists accepted and incorporated into their work a kind of dual attitude to what is real and what is fantasy – reality and fiction.

But today, in 2006 – we should be aware of the extremely complex nature of the question of what is true or false, of what is my personal experience or imposed experience!? Besides, is it at all possible to separate these pairs of opposites?

When you confront David Svensson’s artworks what is activated is specifically – contradictions. There is, on the one hand, a distinct trace of Marcel Duchamp. By appropriating everyday objects, occasionally by manually reproducing them, he poses meta-questions about the nature of art. We recognise a brick wall, an elegant light fitting or old-fashioned braiding. In the space of art, however, the recognisable is transformed into something else. Into what I don’t know… but I feel a strong individual hand in the process. It is as though Svensson wants to say that, in spite of everything, there is a human factor underlying the apparently industrially mass-produced object. He re-humanises the impersonal object.

And yet, on the other hand, there is also the opposite of his Duchampian play with what the material represents; his work is also about – the immaterial. Light. Atmosphere. Uncontrollable change.

For example, in Svensson’s Inner Light (Absent Images) from 2001 we clearly find the subtle interplay between something recognisable and something beyond the recognisable. In a straightforward yet subtly aesthetic way, he uses projection screens. The screens alone prompt memories of evenings at home with my parents and relatives, when the latest slides of the summer holidays were shown to cries of hilarity. Or the turgid lessons at school in which we were shown interminably tedious pedagogical images of the development of biology. In today’s digital PowerPoint world the screens evoke a nostalgic glow.

But, in the next instant, that nostalgic glow is transformed into a sophisticated interrogation of visual perception. As a result of the work’s site-specific character – its appearance and number of parts depend on the site in which it is shown – the screens glow differently depending on their age or make. They have the same function – but they are still different.

Suddenly my thoughts take flight. Sure, it is beautiful. Seductively beautiful. But Svensson also adds another significance. The screens are intended for projecting, for example, memories or information. But to what extent are these memories and information common to us all? It is as though the screens’ ‘individuality’ points out that I too have an individual interpretation of what is projected on the screens. But it is not pictures that we are seeing. Instead, it is changes in the light. Thus, the screens acquire a double explosive force. The light shifts and charges them with emotional moods that I can interpret in terms of my own presence of mind. But they are also objects that remind me of my own history, of pictures that I have seen on similar screens before. How do I share my own experiences of what I am seeing and have seen with my fellow human beings? Svensson’s re-humanisation of impersonal objects is specifically about this conflict. He provides us with an artistic apparatus, so that I will dare to trust what I am seeing. Simply, yet smartly, Svensson succeeds in combing a significant aesthetic experience with social comment. There are nuances in reality.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “mirror wells” from the 1960s – which were later developed into complex installations – are an interesting reference point. By laconically and ‘impoverishedly’ (arte povera) placing the mirrors on the floor, Pistoletto developed the Duchampian idea that the viewer or the context is the artwork. You can mirror yourself in the work. Physical changes in the surroundings, in the form of changes in the light or the visitor, create an ‘interactive’ artwork in which the object is not the main focus, rather, the artwork is the actual encounter between the object and the viewer. A form of ‘relational aesthetic’ before the concept was coined in the 1990s.

The track leads on to 1960s Los Angeles: The “L.A. Look” was the rubric for artists such as James Turrell, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengtson and others, who in various ways wanted to interpret the “plastic culture” of California – everything is mutable and interchangeable. The changeability of the individual was interpreted both as a longing for freedom and as existential angst. James Turrell’s light installations, in particular, have perhaps become the most outstanding examples of 1960s Californian sunshine-coast utopias: materialism in the form of objects is suspended and you enter into spaces (or see mountains from a distance) that are immaterial experiences of light. Crudely put, Turrell exaltedly aestheticised the hippie movement.

OK, back to the subject: Is David Svensson a hippie? No, he isn’t. But it is impossible to avoid the fact that he actually wants to get us the viewers to suspend the meanings of things – so as to imbue them with new meanings. There is a highly uncommon humility in his artistic work. He wants to allow us to dream or to let our imaginations run wild in the encounter with the works. It is as though he is relying on us. His artworks are suggestions. Not assertions.

This is an elusive aesthetic that becomes even more interesting when it comes face to face with the public. His public artwork Light Box, 2004–2005, in the Conventum conference centre in Örebro, literally challenges our experience of time, light and, to a certain extent, space. When it gets dark, a walkway between two buildings is transformed into a bright cube of light that illuminates its surroundings. The building comes to life at night. The city never sleeps.

He himself sees one of the challenges of the work as being to make something large and tangible without materialising or building it himself. But rather to remodel – or transform – something that already exists. This is recognisable from his other artistic work. But, in this case, it is about urban milieus and architectonic buildings.

The starting point is the built-on glass passageways between buildings that we often come across in our Swedish cities nowadays. Not infrequently, they are ill-suited, built according to standardised measurements and cobbled together to fit in.

Apart from the purely aesthetic experience of evening and nocturnal wanderers principally getting a floating, indeed, unearthly experience of a luminous body in central Örebro, the work also addresses social questions, albeit indirectly. What do our country towns look like? During the 1950s and ’60s, these town centres were modelled along similar lines: market squares, department stores and hot-dog stands. Residential buildings were built in rings around the city centre and the result was – depopulated, desolate buildings and streets after closing time. All of us who grew up in such places know how cold and inhospitable it was to spend evenings there. Svensson’s Light Box re-humanises one such place. There is light. There is life.

On the whole, for David Svensson light is an important metaphor for – metamorphosis. The whole of his artistic work is about seeing. And to see we need light. And yet, I would not claim that he uses light in a philosophical sense. It is not a matter of – illumination. Or of seeing – the true light. Rather, Svensson subtly uses light to ‘disrupt’ our notions of reality. His Light Plan from 2006 consists of 107 fluorescent light fittings; of four different lengths and eight different shades of white. It takes time gradually to concentrate on what I am seeing. It requires silence. But, slowly, I begin to experience the nuances and realise that this thing with the white light – it really is not that simple!

The starting point is daylight, which varies across the globe. Naturally the light also varies in any single place depending on the natural conditions. But in Light Plan Svensson is interested in the geographical variations – how light is experienced differently because of the latitude or other physical causes. He plays with colour temperatures. He seeks concretely to make visible the way the light at the equator has a warm, yellowish tinge, and the way that the shadings subsequently migrate towards a colder blue-white the further one goes towards the North or South Pole. He use limited means to create a ‘map’ of the preconditions for seeing. Do we experience our surroundings differently depending on the light? Why are acidic sub-tropical colours in Cuba experienced as pastel kitsch in Sweden?

The different rows of fluorescent tubes specifically evoke associations with different geographical latitudes. But they are also about envisaging light as – colour. There is a link here with his Light House, a series of photographs from 2004–2006. In these photographs of greenhouses we can see how the light in them varies. Everything from neutral white to warm yellow or cold blue. In some of the greenhouses we also see how the various light temperatures are used differently, depending on what light the plants need and thrive under.

David Svensson wants to get us interested in coming to a halt, in pondering what I am seeing, to think about what I am seeing… His method is not to put the object first. Night Vision from 2005, for example, is a room installation, with dark film stuck onto the windows allowing varying amounts of light through. You can experience it from the inside – but also from the outside. In the daytime you look out, at night you look in.

This is an intricate play that Svensson is staging. The viewer, space and time are interwoven together. In its way the installation is reminiscent of Dan Graham’s glass pavilions, in which we can easily lose our way, despite their relative smallness. But Svensson focuses more sharply on the actual transparency in the way outdoor city space is mingled, for example, with artworks indoors. The glass window becomes a picture surface in which architecture and events come together. I think of the baroque fold formations that transcend our logic. It is, for example, impossible to follow the folds in Bernini’s sculptures. You soon lose the thread and give up in the face of mathematical superiority. During the baroque period, it was God who was supposed to reveal Himself. In Svensson’s case, however, I interpret this differently. This is more a matter of us ourselves – of myself. I become aware of my own presence. Not unlike when he empties objects of meaning, so as to fill them with new meanings.

Black Tear from 2005 is a black-lacquered Italian ceiling light. We might say that Svensson has extinguished the lamp for ever with black car enamel – transformed a sparkling drop of water into a black tear. A melancholy feeling arises. The title refers to the song Lagrimas Negras (black tears) sung in melancholy tones in Cuba. It is as though the black tear contained a whole world, like Harry Martinsson’s drop of water that depict the small, but mirror the large. At the least, Svensson’s tear reflects the space it occupies. The architecture and the viewer are reflected in the high-gloss lacquer. Its very shape also means that almost the entire room is visible. The work literally enfolds me in its reflection.

David Svensson constantly returns to transformations. But what makes his art so relevant is that he focuses on the process of transformation itself. By, for example, accentuating light and reflections, these works also become dependent on the space and the milieu in which they are shown. He creates a successful dialogue with the viewer. But not only as regards the meaning of the works. To an equally great extent as regards our experience of them. They are in constant flux because of these surroundings – the room, the light, the time, the viewers, etc.

As we have said, when faced with Svensson’s works, what is required is silence and concentration. They are not loud, and they are not prisoners of the academic theory police. Instead, they are there to be experienced. In space, in the present moment, and it is in the moment that his works become a little pocket of resistance to the everyday clamour of the mass media. The distinct unclarity means that I have to come to a halt and think about what I am seeing, but also – about how I am experiencing it.

John Peter Nilsson