Lars Ø Ramberg: BRAINSTORM (english version)

Lars Ø Ramberg BRAINSTORM

English

The City of Oslo’s Art Collection

Per Hess

From Daring to Sharing… to BRAINSTORM As a curator, I am always proud on behalf of art when an artist delivers a work that is compelling and good. It is important that art benefits society, and one of the most important functions art can serve is to play a part in society and its many processes.

BRAINSTORM is a magnificent work to contemplate. Lars Ø Ramberg has confronted the task with immense vigour and patience, completing it without a hiccup. The art is in place, the many details have been resolved, and the work has been produced to the highest standard without compromise. Deichman Bjørvika takes possession of a work that carries a message about art, knowledge and creativity. It is a work that addresses the library’s function and serves as an emblem for Oslo’s new venue for knowledge and enlightenment. With the potential to become a limitless experience, BRAINSTORM is a reference point that puts the building and its contents on the map. It is about more than just enlightenment. It takes us from the days

when knowledge was arcane and dangerous to the present, when everything is shared on the internet, as Ramberg’s working title, From Daring to Sharing, suggests.

The work also reminds us that light is fundamental to our lives. Enlightenment, knowledge, thoughts, ideas and creativity are all centred in the brain. Like the internet, our brains work at the speed of light.

The responsibility of leading the effort to find art for this public space at the heart of the city has been inspiring. For both me and the art committee, the burning ambition has been to find the very best solutions in the choice of art and artists, and sites for works within this many-faceted building.

The art committee has worked well as a team. Their approach has been consistently solutionoriented and clear-sighted, and they have shown a deep understanding of the significance of the task and the need for excellence in execution. A rewarding collaboration, not least in light of the fantastic result.

Foto: Werner Zellion

Foto: Per Hess

Photo: Werner Zellien

Gunnar Danbolt

Lars Ø Ramberg: BRAINSTORM BRAINSTORM In the central atrium of Deichman Bjørvika, an installation hangs somewhere between the floor and the ceiling. It consists of 400 m of slender, 20 mm diameter neonlight tubes. It has the curious appearance of a chaotic tangle of interconnected lines – white, yellow and a touch of blue – a profusion of illuminated cords swirling about above our heads. What does it signify? And why is it hanging in the atrium of a public library?

To answer this question, we must start with the artist himself, Lars Ø Ramberg. As one of Norway’s foremost conceptual artists, Ramberg works primarily with ideas or concepts. As a movement that originated in the United States in the 1960s, conceptual art comes in two forms, and Ramberg has worked with both.

The first is the theoretical, and a good example of this direction is Ramberg’s ZWEIFEL (DOUBT) from

2005. In this, he spelled out the word of the title in 6m-high letters on top of the Palast der Republik, the parliament building of the former GDR in East Berlin (constructed 1973–76). Although this “people’s palace” has since been demolished, Ramberg’s aim was to have it preserved, albeit with a new function as a Palast des Zweifels (Palace of Doubt). The message of his work was that DOUBT is the cornerstone of any democracy, and doubt had little space to breathe in either the GDR or under the earlier Nazi regime. Reviewing Ramberg’s work, the Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote enthusiastically that ZWEIFEL should be adopted as a logo for the new Germany.

The second form of conceptual art, referred to sometimes as the stylistic, sometimes as the poetic direction, uses a physical work to illuminate an underlying concept. It is this form that we find exemplified in Ramberg’s work for Deichman Bjørvika.

Ramberg’s Initial Concept – From Daring to Sharing As the well-read artist that he is, Lars Ø Ramberg picked up on the concept of daring invoked by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (published 1784). As a motto for the Enlightenment, Kant adopts the phrase “sapere aude”, from the Roman poet Horace (65 – 8 BC), meaning “dare to know”, or “dare to acquire knowledge”.

It is a motto that tells us a lot about the mindset of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that also gave rise to the Deichman Library in 1785.

The second word in Ramberg’s original concept is sharing, and it is no less important. Up until the 1950s, knowledge was disseminated primarily through the medium of the printed word, just as it had been in the Enlightenment period, with a little help from radio in latter years. In the 1960s, television was added to the mix. Over the past fifty years, however, we have seen a revolution in the field of information technology – with the advent, first, of the computer, and subsequently, of the internet and various social media. Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, the iPhone, etc. are new phenomena that make knowledge – both true and false – more or less ubiquitous. Most information is now just a mouse-click away. The basis for this development is something

few people had even heard of fifty years ago, namely digitalisation.

This phenomenon has steadily allowed modern information technology to take over our lives, and to such an extent that we now share information all the time, almost regardless of where we are.

Ramberg’s original concept was to visualize this transition from daring to sharing in a form that would be both insightful and aesthetically interesting.

The BRAINSTORM Installation As the installation approached completion, Ramberg shifted the emphasis. From Daring to Sharing was turned into BRAINSTORM. Central to this change is light itself, supplied here by neon tubes. For light has been a symbol of knowledge since way back in history, and there too we can speak of enlightenment.

With its chaos of luminous, sweeping lines, BRAINSTORM offers an almost physical experience of the movement and speed that characterize modern information technology. The fact that thoughts can now be shared between people and cultures almost instantaneously amounts to an allencompassing brainstorm, one that effectively allows the entire world to be involved in an exchange of thought that has the potential, at best, to crush prejudice and clear the ground for new and unknown insights. At least, that is the promise that BRAINSTORM represents.

Photo: Werner Zellien

Photo: Per Hess

Photo: Per Hess

Photo: Werner Zellien

The Design of the Building In 2010, the proposal Diagonale by architects Lundhagem and Atelier Oslo was unanimously selected as winner of the competition for the new Deichman library at Bjørvika.

Deichman Bjørvika is a contemporary and functional building of high architectural quality. The design is an asset to the city over and above the library requirements that it had to fulfil.

The name Diagonale refers to the sight lines and movement axes within the building. Three diagonal light wells cut through the body of the building, stretching from each of the three main entrances through the floors right up to and through the roof. These provide illumination and give every floor a unique spatial plan, with the associated potential for varied use. The light wells create visual contact between the floors, and between the city and the library.

In its form, the building is a response to its surroundings – it adheres to Bjørvika’s block structure while

respecting sight lines to the Opera.

The projecting upper storey solves the library’s need for floor space while also giving the building a distinctive profile with a clear orientation towards the city.

The building meets the energy efficiency requirement of passivehouse equivalence, and the requirement for a 50 % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in relation to material use, energy consumption and transport.

The library is equipped with a highcapacity ICT system, allowing for extensive use of digital platforms and self-service. An important architectural goal has been the development of a new type of space to accommodate an innovative concept of the library.

Photo: Werner Zellien

The City’s Art

The City of Oslo has its own art collection that is installed all over the capital, in a thousand different places, outside and inside the municipality’s many buildings and the city’s public spaces – in short, where people work and live. The collection extends from the 17th century to the present, with emphasis on Norwegian modernist art and recent art from the last 10 years. The City of Oslo’s Art Collection is organized as a specialist department within the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Every year, 0.5% of the municipality’s investment budget is allocated to art in public spaces – a very ambitious initiative the city can be proud of. The artworks in the collection are procured by direct commissions to artists, advertised competitions, donations or purchases. Lars Ø Ramberg’s BRAINSTORM is the latest addition to the collection. In addition to managing and disseminating the city’s art, the City of Oslo Art Collection also manages extraordinary projects, such as the osloBIENNALEN. The osloBIENNALEN is a dissemination and production platform for art in public spaces.

See more of the City of Oslo’s Art Collection at kunstsamlingen.no

Lars Ø Ramberg: BRAINSTORM, 2020 About the Artwork Artist: Lars Ø Ramberg Technique: Neon installation Production: Signex AS in collaboration with Nordiska Neon & Diod AB Project manager: Else Haavik, Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo Curator: Per Hess The Art Committee: Per Hess, Svein Lund/Nils Ole Brantzæg, Knut Skansen/Kristin Danielsen, Vibeke Skaiaa Funding: City of Oslo Art Programme with support from KORO Owner: City of Oslo Management: Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo, is responsible overall and has driven the art project to completion. Municipal Undertaking for Cultural and Sports Facilities, City of Oslo, also has the management of the artwork.

About the Building Name: Deichman Bjørvika Address: Anne-Cath. Vestlys plass 1, 0150 Oslo Client: Municipal Undertaking for Cultural and Sports Facilities, City of Oslo Architects: Lundhagem AS and Atelier Oslo AS About the Competition Invited artists: Ai Weiwei, Carsten Höller, Lars Ramberg, Marte Johnslien, Bente Sommerfeldt-Colberg, Do Ho Suh, Doug Aitken Jury: Jeannette Christensen, Kristin Danielsen, Svein Lund, Vibeke Skaiaa, Per Hess The secretary of the jury: Yngvild Færøy About the Catalogue Text: Gunnar Danbolt, Per Hess Cover photo: Werner Zellien Print: 07 Media AS Design: Marte Velde Koslung, Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo