Resurrection of the God-image

I visited Moderna Museet in Stockholm recently and was intrigued by the late Ola Pehrsons work, which centers around the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) while maybe more succinctly addressing the media and how the Unabomber-story took shape and was transmitted. The bleeding of the image into reality and how reality becomes image, which may very well ring a Baudrillardian tone, pervades Pehrsons work. His sculptures in colored clay are made in such a way so as to appear two-dimensional: color is used to flatten a three-dimensional object to appear as a two-dimensional object trying to appear three-dimensional. This was what caught my eye more than anything, because I had been working with this exact effect myself, though coming from quite a different angle - that I suspect is really not all that far from Pehrson, save for some metaphysical refurnishings.

Similar to Pehrson my work moves in the liminal zone between 2D and 3D: sculpture flattened to appear as illusory image, which also in part transitions into such, with the intention to erase the dividing line between the illusory and the physical. The way I read Ola Pehrson this formal gesture stands in analogy with what happens with the very pervasive modern media: the division line between IRL and the digitally mediated is dissolving. This does not mean that we are receeding from reality into an ungrounded simulacra, I’d rather ally myself with Beuys, who argued that imagination is real: conceptions and simulations are real, because thoughts are real - they have a physicality and thus necessarily follow a logic grounded in reality. What the melting together of the imaginary and the concrete rather shows us is that the division between them always was somewhat arbitrary. It’s a historical fact that it was a lot more diffuse in premodern societies, where myth and the everyday were parts of a continuum. Maybe that is the difference which made it so that it was at that time absolutely obvious that God, in some “form”, “existed”; while it today is obvious that God, regardless of “form”, does not “exist”. It is at least an empirical fact that the majority of the premodern illusory painting depicted the divine, also outside of the west: there is a strong connection between the image and the God-image; even if the latter seems to be a species of the former it is almost as if the genus, the image-without-God, had to be invented through subtraction. What this development led to in the end was a will to get away from representation and illusion, which resulted on the one hand in a fascination for the material in itself, on the other hand a fascination for the process, the act of creating, which subtracted painting and became performance: action which does not create an object but an event, which is only objectivised as memory. Both of these trails, the material and the performative, are found in Beuys. Also on display at Moderna Museet are some of Saint-Phalle’s shoot-paintings, whose essence could crudely be said to be Rauschenbergian combines with the added dimension of performatively shooting the pieces, so that paint leeks from the cans and jars embedded under a crust of plaster, redoubling the iconoclasm.These artists, together of course with the Lance of Longinus himself: Marcel Duchamp, have by and large set the tone for art up until today, even if there is a different view towards individual expressions as compared to an avant garde which comprises the collective front of a grand narrative.

In art schools in Stockholm in 2019 the material-fascination echoes loud and clear, some speak of New Materialism, at the same time there is a trace of the intermedial, to use digital elements, and also traces of returning figuration, of illusion. Of course figuration never dies, but it isn’t present as a reactionary remainder or as one-off personal style, there is new life to it, it is starting to be synthesized with this New Materialism in interesting ways. Somewhere here I find myself. I want to search for expressiveness and potency for meaning-symbolisation in the material and in the act of creation, also in life and the living around the creation where the artist is formed, while at the same time resurrect the illusion, representation, figuration, and: the God-image. Because is it really a coincidence that in a time when materialism and figuration is synthesized, when reality and the digital is synthesized, that theism is making a comeback? Among young today it is increasingly trendy to be a Christian, and even more so to practice Wicca or astrology. These religious forms appear highly personal and idiosyncratic, but they are nevertheless forms genuine faith. When the delimitation between the digital and analog - the virtual and the concrete is no longer perceived as so clear then the premodern World-view return, although in a new form. And how wrong is really this impulse, when we seem to not be very far away from superintelligent A.I. and the melting together of individuals mediated by smartphones joined to their bodies with Brain Computer Interfaces? I lean towards saying that the apocalyptic religions, that is to say the Abrahamitic religions, saw this coming to some degree, even if they of course couldn’t conceive of precisely which form it would take. Wagner said that Hellenic art when it was detached from Hellenic religion only can function as a luxury product, and that for art to once again serve to provide togetherness and collective meaning-formation then art necessarily has to be connected to what he terms The Religion of the Future. Beuys was also moving in this direction: social sculpture as an experiment in organization to find a way to reharmonize the human with nature. That is the spirit I attempt to channel: the reintegration of forms in a boundary-dissolving gesamtkunstwerk which in it’s creation-performance is a kind of worship, a serving of God’s will, to bring light to the despairing, to catalyze faith. First and foremost it is an intuitive-inspired conjuring of the Religion of the Future, with mantras of Integration and Reconciliation: of opposites, of forms, of traditions, and of humanity.