Fart Evighet Bevis | 11.41 Minutes
Directed by Trond Nicholas Perry, Filmed and Edited by Audun Amundsen
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Allready from the very beginning, when I was invited to participate in the Bluss-event, I knew that it would pose numerous difficulties and previously unexperienced challenges. Within a timespan of two weeks, six artists, with six entirely different practises were to make and co-curate an exibition covering a large area of some of the most beautifull and majestic outdoors in the whole of Norway, in the heart of the norwegian fjords. Due to the beauty of the place and the sensation of scale involved, I found it meaningless to try and stretch my work over larger fields of nature, as they seemed neverending, thus giving a feeling hopelessness in trying to overcome the spectacular beauty allready there. Instead I tried to focus all my energy on a thirty square metre plot of land surrounded by mountains on one side, and the fjord on the other, putting in it a sort of energy packed ritual place so strange that it would stand in total contrast to its surroundings, giving a sensation of "What the hell is going on here? This doesnt belong here!" I believe that by juxtaposing elements totally foreign to eachother, one creates a void of strangeness and absurdity that can only be filled by the spectators participation in the form of free assosiation.
So I went for a walk, and found a great big log.
I made a hole through the lenght of it and put a cable through it.
The log was placed in a hole in the ground, as a totem, with a light bulb on top of it. A circular trench was dug arround the log and filled with stones, allowing me to make a ring of fire arround it. The cable going through the log and under the ground (under the ring of fire, so that it wouldn't be burned) was attached to a bike with a bike generator on it. As I was biking on a bike with no front wheel, supported by peices of lafted wood, the light bulb on top of the log would glow along with the pace in witch I was biking. In the ring of fire arround the log I hammered five thick poles of fresh pine wood. Fresh, so that they wouldn't be burned up by the fire they were standing in the midts of. On top of four of the poles there were mirrors reflecting a laser coming from the fifth one, creating a pentagonal fence of lasers surrounding the the totem, only visible when the smoke from the fire and the dirrection of the wind allowed them to. On the bike was me playing an old Kalimba and doing an improvised monologue about quantum physics and the semiotic model.
The reason why I am describing this piece of art so detailed is to illustrate the complexity of it, and thereby the situation I was in, making it. I was totally dependent on my surroundings helping me out in the process of creation. The log was sawed and given to me by some woodsmen, and the three metre long hole through it drilled by the local ship preservers. The thick and straight logs of fresh pine wood was given to me from a special supply of pine wood (destined to be transformed into paper), from a local farmer along with the wood I used to make the ring of fire. The other farmer, who owned the land I was on, more than willingly allowed me to dig a hole in the ground for a totem and a trench for a ring of fire where I could act as a total nutter, as long as he decided upon the space where this ritual should take place. Bike and bike generator was supplied to me by participating artists Beth Hamer and Will Foster, who are both concerned with the importance of renewable energy.
The meaning of the piece, as far as I'm concerned, was to use any material and resources at hand to project my dreamlike picture of a strange scenario with a person in it, into the public. And to see what processes I had to go through in order to do so. Every person has dreams and strange images that go through their heads, and these are usually just left in this ephemeric state. My work as an artist is concerned with what happens when you grasp one of these images, and make it as real as it was when you froze it in your mind. From experience I find that the results often look very original when made real and put in the open. There are allways highly intricate problems and hence sollutions when one wants to make a dream come true. For me they often manifest in small hand made parts that makes the actual picture stick together. So the craft and the object and the story made in the making becomes the actual piece itself. As to the symbolic value of all the different elements this particular art piece consisted of, that is a discussion so big that it won't fit this page. How an audience percieves it when confronted with it? That is totally out of my reach unless I do a systematic gallup poll to find it out.
The question at hand is wether Bluss was an act of social participation, or just begging.
There are no standards or pre-set parametres for what a successfull art piece concerned with social participation looks like. The given situation is totally dependent on the characters involved in it. I believe that an artists job in such a situation is to coordinate and administer the resources he recieves from his surroundings, and then transform them into an art piece, ideally one that its participants feel somehow attached to and partly responsible for, and that this experience, combined with the quality of the art-piece is interresting enough for them to feel that their efforts and help in creating it is returned to them in the experience they get from seeing and experiencing it live. In my case it was an absurd sculpture made out of ideas on quantum physics, lasers, logs, lightbulbs and bicycles, and the goal was for it to be strange enough for people to actually gather up and watch it.Them and their prescence being just as important as the archetypal art piece they were watching. I tried to make it as obvious as possible. "This is an art piece, and you are watching it. There is a space between this juxtaposition, and that is where meaning lies."
When the performance was over, the crowd cheered merrily. I have no idea why, but i guess they do.
