Stenersen Museum, Oslo

October 18 2008 – January 4 2009

Group show presenting 40 Norwegian painters from the last four decades.

WORK #1

Artist Self-portraits, Joyo Art Salon Co. Fujian China 2006

Oil on canvas, 40 cm x 30 cm

The artist commissioned the artists in a Chinese oil painting factory, who make their living replicating old masters, to do a self-portrait of themselves. There were no guidelines or restrictions given, and they were at liberty to paint in any style they wanted.

WORK #2 ( click here for image of work )

Yesterday Is Crowding Up My World #1

mdf, finer, palisander 199 cm x 219 cm x 50 cm

Curated by Åsil Bøthun, Hennie Ann Isdal and Kjetil Skøien

Artists : May Elin Eikaas Bjerck  Eivind Blaker  Paul Brand  Marianne Bratteli  Kristina Bræin  Bjørn Breistøl Båsen  Jan Christensen  Jørgen Dobloug  Steinar Elstrøm  Thomas Falstad  Per Formo  Hilmar Fredriksen  Katrine Giæver  Jens Hamran  Thomas Hestvold  Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen  Steinar Jakobsen  Veslemøy Sparre Jansen  Olav Christopher Jenssen  Per Kleiva  Sonja Krohn  Josefine Lyche  Miles McAlinden  Irina Melsom/Hans Askheim  Jon Arne Mogstad  Hanne Nielsen  Magnhild Opdøl  Mary Owens  Arvid Pettersen  Thomas Pihl  Pushwagner  Alf Salo  Siv Blankenberg Skottheim  Morten Slettemeås  Mette Stausland  Magnus Thoren  Dag Thoresen  Anne Vistven  Lars Monrad Vaage  Liv Ørnvall

CATALOGUE TEXT

“Hey folks, you’re all individuals.”

The Chinese Self-Portrait Painter: “I’m not.”

The work “Chinese Self Portrait Painters” (2007) consists of a series of self-portraits painted by men who work in a Chinese art factory where they each specialise in copying the work of an Old Master from the Western Canon. These painters were invited to paint their own portraits when Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen made an order of 9such portraits from their factory.

The painted self-portrait represents the most striking example of some of the most important elements in pre-modernist European Art History. Through the act of transferring his own face onto the canvas the artist injects the art with his very person and confirms art as a practice in which an outstanding individual creates something as a means of personal expression. It is the apotheosis of the Self. After Leonardo there was no way back and all paths lead to Van Gogh, that old cliché of lunatic self-expression.

At the same time the self-portrait represents an example of individuation, the most important element in Western philosophy over the last two thousand years. This development, the seed of which was planted in Greece and which properly began with Humanism, shot speed with post-Reformation Christianity, the Project of Enlightenment and Modernity, then eventually kicked into another gear with the creation of psychology as a science around the time of the Industrial Revolution. In fact “Psychology” invented itself at precisely the moment when Capitalist economy was going into overdrive, when the process of individuation had reached sufficient critical mass so that now the average person, not only the genius artists, had an idea of having a self. It achieved the position as our leading explanation of the world and created “The Century of the Self” filled with its desires and ideals of continuous individual re-invention.

As China transitions from Communism to Capitalism we are witness to precisely such a remarkable act of transformation, but in a strange paradox because the Chinese worker isn’t used to having a Self.  And it’s this selfless worker of Communist China who is asked to turn into the perfect consumer that can make possible in China the kind of perfected market economy that other parts of the world can only dream of.

Hansen’s work highlights these issues through the brilliant revelation of this through a stroke of inverted logic. The painters whose training it is to merely imitate different individual styles (and they do so brilliantly, they paint in very different manners) in a completely factory-like way that would give Andy Warhol an industrial strength hard-on of selflessness are suddenly asked to express themselves and what happens is remarkable: they immediately lose all sense of variety. The end result is ten different people painted in almost identical style. When they are asked to paint their own faces, to put something on the canvas that represents something more personal than what they normally do, their individual selves disappear only to be replaced by a standardized conformity that is strikingly bland. When copying the West they recognize difference, when looking at themselves they see only many examples of the same.

The idea of copying an Old Master alone shows China’s incompatibility with the idea of individuation that is so central to Western Art History. This reveals a profound uncertainty regarding what it means for China to suddenly take such an interest in, and become such a major player within, the Artworld. Why should they be interested in our art if the very thing that has driven its development is actually incompatible with most of the other stories they are used to telling about the world? It gets more interesting if we shift our view from the artist to the spectator. The Chinese may not be ready to create art, but they are ready to consume it, and the reasons are social more than they are intellectual. We imagine that the Artworld is enriched by its expansion to include what post-colonial theory has taught us has been “the other.” So we automatically perceive this move into new territories and the subsequent availability of new practitioners as something positive. Primarily, however, this expansion represents how the only avant-garde is now geographical. Moving away from (“leaving behind”) the historical tendency towards material or conceptual developments, the Artworld has long since taken on exactly the same role as market economy. It is today merely mirroring Capitalism’s colonial attempts at controlling the world, one “individual” at the time.

Tags: 40/40, art, Åsil Bøthun, Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen, Hennie Ann Isdal, Kjetil Skøien, Kowalskiness, kunst, stenersen museet