Matias Faldbakken: bureaucratic vandalism

(Installation view of Matias Faldbakken, PORTRAIT PORTRAIT OF OF A A GENERATION GENERATION, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 29 March-23 June 2012. Photo © OCA/ Vegard Kleven)

Artist, writer, intellectual, and lover of vodka: Matias Faldbakken is a man of the world. For the first time he is exhibiting a broad range of works in Belgium. His “Portrait Portrait Of Of A A Generation Generation” at Wiels further explores what Faldbakken himself calls his “bureaucratic vandalism”. The show presents famous Norwegian sculptures, turned upside down and filled with vodka.

“The basic idea of the exhibition is pure tongue-in-cheek,” Faldbakken told us on the phone from Oslo. “I wanted to transform iconic Norwegian sculptures into containers for alcohol, and more particularly for vodka. So I turned them upside down – they are hollow inside, you see – and hung them up from racks. I chose works by two very well-known, dead Norwegian artists.”

The works in question are sculptures by Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943) and Arnold Haukeland (1920–1983). Between them, the two have dozens of works on display in the parks and on the squares of Oslo. While both are rather bombastic in style, there are big differences. Vigeland often took humanity and family life as his subject matter, whereas Haukeland’s abstract steel sculptures were intended to suggest progress, with a typically 1950s belief in the future. The exhibition was on show this spring in the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo, and according to Faldbakken, “The visitors there were moved, even shocked. The works are familiar to everyone in Norway, but they won’t mean so much to most Belgians. So reactions here won’t be so strong. I didn’t only choose vodka because I’m very fond of it: in the past I had already made dozens of works that were about intoxication. I want to explore the limits of rational thought in them. Alcohol fascinates me, as a means of bringing about a mental transgression, as a key to escapism. Alcohol has, at one and the same time, liberating and potentially destructive effects.”

We had to read the title of the exhibition very slowly in order to understand it. Says Faldbakken, “Doubling is a formal technique I often use as a writer. Really simple: I just write every word in the text twice. You might expect that the content would then become doubly clear to the reader, but of course the text just becomes more abstract as a result. It creates confusion. Paradoxically, as you actually take away information by adding the same thing to it. In the exhibition I copy images, I repeat signs and techniques, in a kind of Warholian way. The title, by the way, refers to Portrait of a Generation, an aerodynamically designed metal sculpture by Haukeland dating from 1969. That is included in the exhibition too.”

Creative destruction
It wasn’t easy for Faldbakken to get to borrow and exhibit these works. “I had to negotiate for a long time and then go through a whole administrative procedure. But the Vigeland Museum and Haukeland’s sons understood that this action has a logical place in my work. In a sense, my intervention brings these sculptures back to life, as they have a somewhat outmoded image. But the project certainly has two sides to it: on the one hand I pay a tribute to the sculptors; on the other, I poke fun at their works.”

(Installation view of Matias Faldbakken, PORTRAIT PORTRAIT OF OF A A GENERATION GENERATION, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 29 March–23 June 2012. Photo © OCA/ Vegard Kleven)

At dOCUMENTA (13) last summer Faldbakken presented Untitled (Book Sculpture), 2008-2012. The work involved an intervention in which he violently removed books from the shelves of the municipal library in Kassel. It looked as if a vandal had hit the place: the shelves were almost empty and on the ground lay untidy heaps of books. Says Faldbakken, “Certain destructive interventions can be highly creative and aesthetic. And that’s exactly what I’m looking for as an artist. In a sense, my work is dramatic: I always have to break something up in order to create something. I call it bureaucratic vandalism; with actions like that I want to arouse physical discomfort. My techniques are really very simple. But I also try to keep it functional. During dOCUMENTA (13), for example, the public could still borrow the books.”

The son of Knut Faldbakken, a celebrated Norwegian novelist, Matias Faldbakken is also active as a writer himself. His publications operate in parallel to his artistic practice: here, too, he includes spoilers so that his writings are open to different interpretations. Faldbakken’s trilogy Scandinavian Misanthropy (2001–2008), for example, is a pretty complex non-linear narrative. Says Faldbakken, “There are certainly links between my works as an artist and as a writer. Techniques, attitudes, and themes recur in both kinds of practice. And yet I try to keep the two separate as far as possible. My visual art is more abstract, silent, non-communicative and non-generous, while I write in a more flowing way and use a lot of humour. As a writer I am almost burlesque; as an artist I’m bone-dry. After the opening in Wiels, by the way, I’m going to start working on a new book. I haven’t had time for that over the last few years. The more exhibitions I do, the less I write.”

Matias Faldbakken: Portrait Portrait Of Of A A Generation Generation • 15/12 > 3/3, wo/me/We > zo/di/Su 11 > 18.00, €8, WIELS, avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, Vorst/Forest, 02-340.00.50, www.wiels.org