page number:
51 / 104
file:
Kjell Rylander Archives
document:
Backstage Antics
author:
Glenn Adamson
dd-mm-yyyy:
25-02-2012
at first. Nor are an artist’s “findings” easily transported to another researcher’s practice, as a historical account, sociological analysis or experimental result in chemistry would be. Despite these challenges, the practice-based PhD is probably here to stay (for reasons of funding, if no other), and it is now being exported to other countries, including Norway. Though he is technically not a doctoral student, Rylander could be considered an emblematic product of this system, and also as an example of how it can best be navigated: that is, to use it against itself. At first his work comes off as diligent and studious, amply stocked with the elements of self-reference that graduate students are expected to produce. Much as a conventional PhD student might liberally populate the pages of a dissertation with footnotes, statistics or charts, Rylander gives us shelving: the literal underpinnings of his work. Arranged in a way that suggests both the drying racks of a pottery and the rolling stacks of a library are little objects in which handmade and readymade blend seamlessly. They strike one as jottings, notes toward a future work, but they are arranged like an archive. This is just one way that Rylander’s exhibition Kontentum submerges the evidence of his practice into the practice itself, so that there is no real space between them. He plays on the inherent fascination of spaces of making, the back rooms of the studio with their prosaic furnishings, so familiar to the artist but exotic to others. His art lives backstage, and he is more a prop manager than a leading man. The aesthetic range of the work is generic, and the materials are close to devoid in personality: unpainted MDF, metal storage units, edges of plates hard to identify. Here are the crushed paper cups he encounters on the way to the studio, subtly limned with porcelain to mark them out as objects of careful attention. There are the plaster molds necessary to make his slipcast objects, and examples of his own undergraduate student work. Taken as a whole the show is a palimpsest, in which Rylander’s personal past (including the time he spent as a carpenter before coming to art school) is compiled for careful evaluation; yet we learn very little about him. One work (or is it two?) in Kontentum sums up his approach beautifully: a pair of found office shelves topped by the trimmed rims of numerous plates, as if a kitchen cabinet’s worth of crockery had sunk magically into the shelving’s metal depths (fig. 1). The two sculptures are more or less identical, but one is displayed upside-down, admitting a view into its dusty interior (fig. 2). This doubling and inversion serves as a literal symbol of looking at things from multiple perspectives, like a good researcher should. But the rationality is troubled by a hint of madness – as if sense itself, as well as the object, were being turned on its head. (The effect of absurdity is dramatically heightened by the application of tiny accession numbers to