Alejandra Salinas & Aaeron Bergman
Gold, Transferred
For centuries, alchemists struggled unsuccessfully to turn base materials into gold. The key to alchemy was the secret stone, a gift from god, incomprehensible to the intellect. This “materia prima” or “opus” was an enigmatic substance that was given so many definitions that its very existence contradicted itself. However, some authors rose above the charlatans and swindlers who were “easily recognized by their endless recipes, their careless and uneducated composition, their studied mystification, their excruciating dullness, and their shameless insistence on the making of gold.” [1]
In folklore, gold is seen unambiguously to be a symbol of faeces. Furthermore, Freud suggested that “all the interests which the child has had in faeces is transferred in the adult on to another material which he learns in life to set above almost everything else – gold.” But according to several mythologies, gold is the excrement of hell. A similar idea was famously developed about paper money: the devil in Goethe’s Faust created a representative currency to temporarily rescue the royal treasury:
Paper redeemed without delay in gold
Confounds the doubter who had scoffed and taunted.
This men demand, to metals they are wonted.
Treasurer. Twixt us no slightest strife shall cause division;
I love to have as colleague the magician.[3]
Fiat money, gold certificates, reserves, managed money and other representative currencies are arcane formulas used by the alchemists at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other world banks, to transform base materials into glowing golden vessels. Their formulas concretize as cash containing complex aesthetic abstractions in the form of national symbols and arcane security measures such as watermarks, metallic foils, intaglio printing, holograms, threads, color fibers, rainbow printing, microprinting, latent images, blind embossing, and anti-scanning graphics such as EURion and Omron patterns. Paper money provides a tangible, authoritative talisman for abstract faith: a latter-day belief in the enigmatic “materia prima”.
“The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.”[4]
Oslo 2010
[1] Jung, C.G. “Psychology and Alchemy” Routledge, 1953, page 316
[2] Sigmund Freud. “Dreams in Folklore” International University Press, 1958, page 22
[3] Goethe ”Faust” Part II Act I.
[4] The Onion. February 16 2010
Mikko Kuorinki
For the first part of the project A Minor History of Creativity I am working on a 2-channel video with the working title ”The Sun Is Up I Want You Here”. This video presents a stream of thoughts, actions and images collected from the end of April up until the exhibition opening at 28th of May 2010. The work functions as a diary and a notebook for me during this period. It aims to trace and represent how my works develop, and what kind of mental environment they are born from. Any fragment of this video might later develop into the final piece.
My raw materials consist mostly of books, images, sentences and everyday objects. Collecting the raw materials isn’t an organized process, but more like a free and chaotic search operation. The materials are chosen intuitively (a word I hesitate to use by the way), some things just stick with me for a long time and finally end up being used in artwork. ”The Sun Is Up I Want You Here” aims to document this part of the conceptual and creative process. Narrowing down and editing the materials follow later, when the work is starting to take shape.
During last few years I’ve been working a lot with words. I am interested in how we reach outside ourselves to the world and other people with language. Words can tell stories, mislead, share and signify. Language is often poor and inadequate tool for examining the world, but sometimes there aren’t other tools around. I am interested in how simultaneously hollow and full of meaning words can be. This is why I am particularly drawn to titles, quotes and pop lyrics. I am afraid of the world and want to hide from it but art makes me look at it and participate. Artistic practise makes me deal with existence and manifests existence.
Lina Selander
The work I intend to make for the exhibition “A Minor History of Creativity” takes it’s starting point in Palestine. During the last six months I have travelled twice to the West Bank, visiting Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus and Hebron. Hebron seemed an open wound. The city is besieged by the Israelis; it’s full of watchtowers, checkpoints, barbed wire, surveillance cameras and soldiers. The architecture of fear and terror permeates the place. I spent several days there, collecting material. I was observed all the time, by cameras and soldiers. What I would like to do is a film, which consists of still and moving images and text, not voice over. I will not make a documentary. The challenge, as I see it, will be to transport some fundamental part of my experience to this film and, in doing this, relate but not submit to the many perils – emblems, clichés, politically correct and standardized viewpoints etc. – associated with both the specific situation on the West Bank and the expression of my own experiences and sentiments related to this situation. An important parameter is my emotional chaos – should I tame it in and by my work, or should I let it take me to places where I perhaps would rather not go, neither emotionally nor aesthetically.
The fence on the video was erected to protect the Palestinians from settlers throwing stones at them. In places, the netting is covered by rubbish the settlers have thrown down from their homes, a measure of the contempt they show for the Arab inhabitants of the city.
Ursula Nistrup
Text proposal for A Minor History of Creativity
Could connections be established between:
- A sound recording of the melodic sounds of the horns from boats sailing the Bosphorus Strait between the European and the Asian continent.
- A video recording of a shortwave radio, placed on a table in a studio. A length of white cotton string is attached at one end to the radio’s tuner, extended through the room and connected at the other end to a tree outside. When the wind moves the branches of the tree, the string is pulled, thus turning the tuner and switching between radio channels.
- A sound recording of a Laughing Dove (Streptopelia senegalensis) from a backyard in Istanbul.
- A sound recording made in the city of Hanoi between the hours of 3 and 5 in the morning, when everything becomes quiet in stark contrast to the rest of the day.
- Seven Super-8 films, all recordings from the same Scandinavian garden and all entitled “House and Home”.
- And a You Tube video entitled “On The Idea of the North”, a video interview with pianist Glenn Gould, in which he discusses and plays excerpts from his composition, created from human voices. The voices assemble layers of incomprehensible dialogue with a Northern theme. The video portrays Glenn Gould as he and his hands guide us through this alternative musical composition.
In addition: Krisi Peltomaki, Situation Aesthetics: The Work of Michael Asher; Celine Condorelli, Support Structures; and Edward Said, Musical Elaborations.
These components form a patchwork of material for my ideas for new works. Some of these components will appear in the first part of this project, The Weather Forecast.
This work will continue my investigation of an aesthetic language for sound with the intention of challenging the term ‘aesthetics’, which is often used when defining visual elements. I will look at the relationship between a piece of composed music and an unplanned auditory event which is experienced spontaneously, by chance, and which will never be repeatable. It is also a part of this project to explore the ‘exotic’, the ‘alien’, and its corresponding concept, namely, what we refer to as ‘recognizable’. What makes something exotic? Does the exotic spring from ignorance and a distorted imagining of something unknown? How can this be used as a step towards learning something new, or towards favoring the exotic?
Additionally, within the project I have a strong interest in decoding an auditory situation; in creating an idea and an image via something you listen to. Something unplanned as you become aware of sounds you are hearing at random. I will also work on a short collage film that links ideas from the composer Glenn Gould’s work “The Idea of the North” with the footage I have from the recognizably Scandinavian garden.
Mathias Kristersson
What is has not always been and will not always be. Only that what is not, never has been and never will be, is eternal.
In 2008 I made a sound installation with this title. In a black box the audience could follow a couple preparing breakfast on an ordinary day. A discussion arises as they try to decide what to serve for dinner for their friends later that day. The discussion evolves into a genuine fight, which comes to an end when one of them smashes a glass against the floor.
By way of surround sound technique the visitors were caught in the middle of the fight. The movements and voices of the couple could be followed as a three-dimensional incident in the space. The visitor was thereby positioned in an intimate voyeuristic spot. As if they were witnessing something very private, something you would normally not have access to. But the characters were not there. There were no bodies to follow and nothing to watch. It was like re-collecting a memory, which was fixed to the structure of the four walls.
The idea I am presenting as part of “A Minor History of Creativity” is a development of this theme. I will try to depict a displaced occurrence. A person who has been in a room is no longer there. For “The Weather Forecast” I will present a model in the scale of 1:6 of an empty gallery space. On the walls and floor people have left imprints. Along one wall the imprints of two backs are visible, on the other wall the imprint of a shoulder can be seen and on the floor there are a number of footprints.
The model represents a method. The fact that these imprints are placed in a gallery is only one of many possibilities. They might as well have been in a public space. For example, I imagine imprints of a crowd of people on the facade of a house or in a pedestrian tunnel as another potential work.
Emptiness is a recurrent theme in my work. My language-based works are more concerned with the deficiency of language than with language itself. Often what turns out to be the most interesting is the collapse of our communication.
In ”What is has not always been…” I decided to let the fight be about something ordinary and commonplace as a way of pointing to the constrained structure of the fight instead of the subject of the fight. The words are just empty shells; the emotions are controlled by the dynamics and the verbal frustration. The emptiness is also apparent in the fact that the bodies are absent. You only hear the sound of their bodies – nothing else. In ”Body Prints” you only see the imprints of the bodies – nothing else.
