DECEMBER 2021

After a month of inactivity on this blog it is time to reactivate. Maybe because the world seems to be closing in again and Covid is reinventing itself from season to season. 

Reading is one of the things that I have used most time on in 2021. I keep finding more books and new authors who are oriented to themes to which I return continually. Things that feed into whatever I am (trying to) work with myself.

Craig Wells: Emergent Ears

Emergent Ears is a little book published as part of Craig Wells' Phd submission at the Dept. Art, Design and Music at the University of Bergen. The book was accompanied by a double LP of new music released under the artist name Vonrik Haug (Three other albums are released online through Apple Music). The album and book were launched at the opening of his excellent exhibition at Lydgalleriet, Bergen - an immersive, multi channel installation with sound  that combined field recordings and digital synthesis. Craig joins the growing cohort of sound-writers whose work makes an essential contribution to sound studies and the expanding field of sound art. Craig and Lydgalleriet are also publishers of a small series of booklets in the Blue Rinse series, related to a concert programme of the same name. Two of these feature texts by artists I have been collaborating with in 2021, Tijs Ham and Magdalena Manderlova, and others in the series are by Alexander Rishaug, Andrea Parkins, Francisvo Lopez and Craig Wells himself. Well worth checking these out, contact Lydgalleriet to get them!

Blue Rinse publications: Tijs Ham and Magdalena Manderlova

Among others whose books I have recently enojoyed are Kate Zambreno, Moyra Davey and Terju Cole, all of whom address themes that chime with my artistic and academic interests. Drifts by Zambreno and Index Cards by Davey both return repeatedly to questions around photography, memory and writing and often cite Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, WG Sebald, Chantal Ackerman, Chris Marker and Rainer Maria Rilke. Teju Cole's new essay collection Black Paper is a timely publication, combining analysis of today's global social-political situations with a deeper historical gaze, including a text on Carravaggio which is one of the finest pieces of art historical writing I have encountered.

Photographer/filmmaker Moyra Davey and novelist Kate Zambreno address similar themes

In one of his essays in Black Paper, Cole discusses painting in a way that I find engaging and insightful.

The following quote would quite well describe my own relationship to (contemporary) painting and seems to me to be a description of the practice of my colleague Jon Arne Mogstad, a painter with a deep knowledge of tradition and the will to reinvent continuously.

    " I am drawn to painters who are in a proper present tense, painters who have a well-calibrated relationship with what painting has been, who manifest what painting is, and allow for what painting could come to be. Such artists are convincingly contemporary, their practices and gestures confirming their inheritance of the lineage. As custodians of the history of painting, they know their place in it. They are twice timely: just in time and right on time."

Elsewehere in the same text, Cole discusses a work of Julie Mehretu, another artist whose work I have admired since first seeing it in a group show at the Drawing Centre in New York in the late nineties. Her works were for me a highlight of Documenta 13 in 2021 - though I felt they were challenged by unsympathetic hanging in Kassel.

Jon Arne Mogstad's studio in November 2021, with works in progress.

Julie Mehretu's painting Conjured Parts (tongues) discussed by Teju Cole in Black Paper

Detail of Julie Mehretu's work at Documenta 13

Aside from reading, making notes and sketches and updating documentation of recent projects, photographing the changing weather conditions in the environs of home and studio seems to be an appropriate way of spending time these days.... Winter has arrived in Bergen with sometimes spectacular results.

The sad news of the last days has been the death of Alvin Lucier, a composer whose work has such profound significance not only for avant garde music but for much of contemporary culture. Lucier was one of the references discussed in "Reiterate, rerun, repeat", the exposition I co-authored with Michael Francis Duch for the March 2021 edition of Vis, Nordic Journal for Artistic Research.

I will be sitting in this room for most of the winter.