MATERIAL INTO A FLIGHT OF FANCY “Place the focus on the viewer instead of on the artist. The important thing is what happens in the viewer’s body and head (physically and intellectually) in the encounter with the work in the space. The viewer’s experience,” David Svensson notes in his work journal. A bit further on, I come across a quotation from Anna Gerleit’s Att möblera konsten/Furnishing Art: “Ever since Marcel Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool - and gave the world its first readymade - the artworld has been unthinkable without household goods.” Conceptual artists have appropriated Duchamp to such an extent that we are perhaps at first unable to notice how significant he also is for an artistic project like that of David Svensson. Duchamp’s famous statement(1) about an artwork being the result of a collaboration between artist and viewer, indeed, that there is no artwork prior to it having become one through a kind of osmosis in and through the viewer’s consciousness, is not, of course, a precondition for Svensson’s work alone. Duchamp saw this as the way all art comes about. But in Svensson’s works we see not just the intellectual potential of this fact, but above all its poetic qualities. If it is the viewer’s experience that is the actual work, then it is a state or a special type of presence, and hence something much more transitory than the artefact that is called ‘art’. In this case, Duchamp’s choice of the objects that he elects to call readymades - there are not many of them - is important, and not just the basic act. Duchamp’s readymades - the bicycle wheel on the kitchen stool from 1913, the bottle drier from 1914, the coat hanger from 1915, the urinal from 1917 - are meditative, grotesque, surrealistically beautiful, but they are above all everyday objects that temporarily avoid fulfilling their normal functions, and instead become magnets for interpretation, viewing, questions, wishes, which are a part of the viewing of art. When, by dragging the pile of an ordinary wall-to-wall carpet against the grain, Svensson ‘draws’ a beautiful shadow image of a tree in the pile and places a couple of cushions at the foot of the tree (Below the Fig Tree, 2001), he employs Duchamp’s poetic-everyday way of carrying out his part of the collaboration on the artwork. Household goods, everyday furniture, get a brief respite from their function. Film projection screens that are set up as paintings, revealing a pale, luminous beauty (Clarté, 2001), offer another example. The brick wall put up for the purpose at Tromsø Kunstforening in 2003 is yet another one, at least in part. The carefully constructed brick wall was built for the exhibition and pulled down afterwards. Its only function in this context consisted of allowing the viewer to see the beauty in the way the light filtered through the small holes in the brick. Here David Svensson is perhaps showing an even greater affinity with the special viewer-and-user aesthetic developed in traditional Japanese culture. From the work notes; Soetsu Yanagi (…) writes: “Seeing led them (the tea masters) to use, and use to an even deeper seeing. Without use there is no complete seeing, for nothing accentuates the beauty of the thing so strongly as its proper use.” In another place in his notes he mentions Japanese screen walls. The refined, poetic arrangement of the brick wall’s ‘screen wall’, or for that matter his own screen wall made of acrylic paint from 2001 (more on that later), really is reminiscent of the Japanese garden masters’ or tea masters’ way of arranging an entire environment for a momentary poetic insight. The famous arrangement from the 13th century in one of the Emperor's Gardens in Kyoto, where a house was given a golden roof so that at a particular time in autumn it would be reflected in the moonlight in the little lake below it, is an example of the Japanese aesthetic’s capacity for transforming the thing into poetry. The material becomes language, the object a sign. This is another way of understanding Duchamp’s insight about the collaboration between artist and viewer. Svensson has this unusual capacity for transforming material into a flight of fancy. He himself offers a beautiful image of the situation, in photographs in which the artist is lying in the uppermost reaches of an enormous green tree, photographed from an air balloon (Contemplation in the green, 2002-03). Phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty think the human being’s capacity simultaneously to see both the actual object and what it represents, that is, its poetic function, is one of our finest qualities. For Merleau-Ponty there is an essential difference between comprehending and transforming the world via the conventional language or via seeing, seeing that always has an extension into the arm-hand-body. This is also an essential feature of Svensson’s way of thinking via images. In his notes he often returns to the work’s spatial properties - he quotes Adolf Loos, for example, when the Viennese architect speaks of the crucial importance of large theatre salons for the experience of the little theatre box. Without the broad view out over the salon, the box would be intolerably claustrophobic. It is as though the body gets freedom through the gaze’s capacity to, in this case, dupe the body into feeling that it is not shut in. (Svensson adds that the theatre box is an interesting image of how the upper class was able to take part in the activities of the masses - involved and yet secluded, maintaining control). As in Loos’ theatre box, often, our whole body is involved in reacting to Svensson’s works - our sense of balance as well as of seeing, as, for example, in the hammock for several people to rest (Visiona, 1999) or in the oval yellow indoor balloon or giant pouffe (Glow Ball, 2000), or when we are faced with his (Illuminators, 2001, 2002-2003, 2003). What could at first seem like a variant on the work of Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, or a contribution to innovative design, is more a poetic intensification of the viewer’s presence in the space. By manipulating fundamental spatial factors such as light temperature and the viewer’s sense of balance, Svensson gets us to experience that we really are right here, right now. A little surprisingly, he refers to Walter Benjamin’s mysterious concept of the Aura,(2) which can be both the artwork’s physical existence in a certain place at a certain time, and a person’s experience of absolute presence in the world, while lying in the grass, contemplating the branch of a tree, and over there, beyond the blue mountains. For Benjamin, the aura is bound up with authenticity - the genuineness of the artwork that can be traced through the way the object itself has been worked on by different hands, but also the genuine aspect of a personal experience that involves the senses, the body, and our capacity for poetry. The way I understand Svensson’s works is that he wants to conjure up Aura in both of the senses that Benjamin invests in the concept, but that what is important is the viewer’s sensory experience when faced with the work, in its space. Moreover, the Illuminator works look like they had a physical aura, in which they radiate light like a heavenly body that has come so close to the Earth that it transforms everything in its vicinity. Or why not like the aura that spiritualists speak of, and which so fascinated the early abstract pioneers? They thought that not just every human, but every living being, plant or animal, is surrounded by this spiritual radiation, which especially sensitive people were able to perceive as a luminous cloud of colour around the figure. Svensson himself sees associations with the Illuminators as with bodies, when he writes about them: “The textile cloth refers to the painter’s canvas. It is also a thin skin, a bodily envelope that surrounds the object, a superfice separating inside from outside.”(3) Svensson also resembles the early abstract artists in his double agenda - we have spoken of the works’ poetic implications, their capacity to engage the viewer in the space in an unusual way. But an equally important track through his art leads into inquisitive formal investigations of the possibilities of the painting. Glow Ball, Visiona, Illuminator, Clarté, Screen, the last made in two versions, in 2001 and 2003, Folding Painting (Perfect Lovers) from 2003, not to mention Untitled (concave) and Eyes from 2002, or for that matter Below the Fig Tree; they (too) all twist and turn classical formal painterly problems affecting, for example, the relationship between the pigment in the paint and the canvas, optical light phenomena, shade/light, perspective, two and three-dimensionality, reliefwork, and more. The questions often come from American 1950s and 60s formalism, the solutions are, of course, contemporary, and Svensson’s own. Just look at how fascinated he is by an optical phenomenon - when the viewer stands at a certain distance from the black, high-gloss painting Untitled (concave), the space is reflected upside down in the black reflective surface. He is a formalist, even if the inverted image of the space and the viewer in it can also be linked to his desire slightly to modify the viewer’s ingrained way of relating to what she sees. But then we also have two black convex paintings, both circular and with the same diameter as the concave one. He calls them Eyes, thereby introducing a totally different register into the picture. He himself says a good title is a signpost to the unknown, both clear and secretive.(4) Another work that seems thematically to belong to the same group is Folding Painting (Perfect Lovers). Two flat black-lacquered paintings are placed in a corner so that they mirror each other. A reflection contained in Svensson’s notes on Josephine Baker’s house by Adolf Loos seems to take up the same set of problems (the note deals with JB’s swimming pool): “Swimmers can see their own body reflected in the window frames, superimposed on top of the visitor’s eyes, whose shadowy form is cropped by the frame. They thus see themselves being seen by someone else, the narcissistic gaze is interposed as a layer on top of that of the voyeur. They find themselves in an erotic network of gazes that are inscribed into each and every one of the swimming pool’s glass apertures. Even if nobody is standing there, every window - from every direction - signifies a gaze.” This network of gazes - erotic, poetic, meditative, or neutrally recording - is the viewer’s contribution to the creation of the artwork. David Svensson’s apparently clear, but in fact labyrinthinely misleading artistry provides us with the preconditions. Gertrud Sandqvist Notes |