ULT #2, Overkill

10 fragments on contemporary painting and individual practices 1 I have been told that I work with provocation, with topics hard to define, with a very male pose, with ideas of the genius, with the chaotic, among other things. When it comes down to the basics of how I understand my practice, I just work.

2 A common understanding of the painterly practice is that we work as designers, or even worse, as illustrators of ideas. We have a message to convey to the onlooker of our canvases or panels, and we either succeed in presenting our concept or we fail. This is not how I work, which leads to a lot of misunderstanding about what I actually do.

Explain a set of ten small oil paintings on canvas depicting reversed swastikas smeared on thick layers of paint. Is it fascism, the opposite, or something entirely different?

An immature provocation? What is the intended message here? It is as though people are expecting to be taught something, to be part of a certain wisdom artists are keeping to themselves and sometimes share in the form of an artwork. Truth is, I am fucking stupid. A lot of the time I don’t know what the hell I am doing, but, and this is important, I am fully aware of the ways I work.

3 The artistic practice is based inside a context of comments, judgments and analyses. As an artist, I am a producer of things on which to comment, judge and analyze in this context. So, I produce, stupidly and freely, following my cravings.

4 Let me tell you an unrelated story In Sweden the right-wing anti-immigration party is growing within the government. It is accepted by the general public in the name of democracy. This party, the Swedish Democrats, claim its distance from the horrid history of the second world war atrocities, yet their policies are, in majority, identical to that of a certain group of people around 1937. This is not a rare enough theme around Europe. The dehumanizing of certain ethnic groups is gaining ground throughout Europe. And some are painting paintings for fun to sell to the rich. Just like me.

5 But painting is not only fun. Painting to me is both pleasure and resistance. I’m trying to do the impossible by combining work and leisure. I want to get rid of all invented musts and goals, and instead attain the strength and conviction to be free and trust my invented method of working. The context will have to seek me out, not the other way around. This is an anarchistic way of working. It derives from a deep belief that what we do as artists is always a reflection of the world we live in. Paintings are dangerous things because they force us to decide our relations to them. They make us decide what is good and what is not. What is needed and what is not. What expressions should be exalted and which ones should die away.

6 People tend to confuse anarchism with chaos but they are not related. Painting is anarchism and art is anarchism; not a language but rather a way of doing. It is a method and a compass without a map. Painting and anarchism can, at best, send you in a certain direction without utopian beliefs or end goals. It‘s about “working through” not “working for...”. In this manner of looking at it, I do not beat my head against the wall to improve my paintings, but slam it as hard as I can to be able to paint at all.

7 On top of that various smaller ideas seem to form: thoughts on narration, symbols, meaning, composition, reception, continuity, politics, sex, morals and so on. For me these words hold positions in a complicated network I can’t describe at this point. I work and learn things through my work. I see things and handle them in the form of paintings. I paint to be able to continue painting. Some things have been done before, but I might redo them in the need to feel what it is like to make certain works first hand. You cannot learn what it is like to be drunk by looking at a drunkard; at some point you have to chug some alcohol.

8 I think there is a fear of loosening the rules for painting by a general group of collectors, practitioners and critics. Without a consensus of quality in painting, how can we justify art-educations and institutions at all? If everything is up to the taste of the individual and there is no right or wrong, what is fine art then? I do not know what would happen if we let go of common beliefs in objective quality or a majority rule of what is worthy to be shown to the public and kept in our archives. If anything, I believe that diversity is quality; the focus on variety. I do not want to see tendencies in the art market. They make me yawn. I definitely do not think that schooled artists are by definition highest in competence. This frustrates me. Art has to represent a larger portion of society than the bobo-hipsters on fixies drooling over works that look like Hugo Boss commercials. I want to see a variety of expressions from various sexualities, ethnicities, places, subcultures and classes. It is not the work that has to change but what we view as art and how we define an artist.

Maybe.

9 As an artist I try to make a path for myself and at the same time try to avoid getting stuck in themes I have done or by planning ahead. I stick to a very close time-frame, like a dog. This gives me a broad, confusing history of production and a fragmented artistic practice, as some themes stick and some fall away. The ones that stick seem to be more real than anything I could ever hope to create. I am obtuse, blunt, dumb, watching the world go by, partying, trying to be everywhere at the same time. My work is not primarily about producing great looking paintings, even if I do that from time to time, my work consists mainly of telling the story of how an artist lived, acted and made aesthetic decisions within a certain moment in history, within a certain context. A reaction or ruin to and of life.

10 Walter Benjamin wrote once a novel about a stoned man who lost a million dollars1 by careless thinking and confusion. The stoned man took it with ease and sat down, looking at boats in the harbor, fantasizing where they were from.1 Mark Frygell 1 Myslowitz-Braunschweig-Marseilles: The Story of a Hashish-Rausch, Walter Benjamin, 1930vv