The ever optimistic lines of transportation have always amazed me. I’m thinking in particular of the means of representing »travelling« consensually applied in movies, mainly during the black and white era when location and so called authenticity were not that important. You have seen it at one time or another. The map, covering one or more continents. And then the single line representing a train, ship, bus or aeroplane – sometimes a combination – taking off from the point of departure and thenplowing its route forward in time and space, making a seemingly eternal mark on the vast territory it covers until it reaches the destination and the map fades away. And thus we are there: the new setting, the other part of the world, disembarked from the epic, seamless line of transportation. They don’t do that anymore. We-the-audience have no longer any need for the animated representation of travelling from one place to the other, because we know all about transport and we know quite a lot about storytelling and we also know the shrinking world by heart, so why bother watching this line as it stretches across the globe. Time passes, yes, but not quality time, right? We need to se the line of transportation as much as we need to see an animated sequence wherein the hero goes to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, changes his underwear.
And yet, as I watch these artefacts that comprise the project called Breathe II, as they lie spread out on my table; I cannot help but seeing them as the starting points for so many lines of transportation. And so I imagine these lines creeping across the continents. One of them being the strange sounds of Henrik Rylander; as he discards everything from the recording of three wind instruments – melodica, saxophone and slide whistle. Everything, that is, except inspiration. The breathing ins that make possible the breath-ing outs.
And there, another line representing the travels of Anna Perssons video »000316«. This was presumably the date when she stepped in front of a mirror, breathed on it to create a film of mist and then used her index finger to write »Anna for ever« in it. Long since disappeared from the original mirror, the writing still recreates itself on the mirror on the tape in the box travelling to its destination somewhere on the other side of the imaginary line.
Yet another one of these lines diverge into seven separate lines, each with its own destination. The somewhat mystifying project »The Wheatgrass Foundation«, which – according to its Swedish representatives – will significantly revolutionize the world economy, is providing one wheatgrass-growing kit to every continent.
These and several other lines, representing poetry, pictures, sounds, and all kinds of mixed media and mixed ideas, are taking off as I write this. I have no idea which artefact goes where, and it really doesn’t matter anyway. Naturally, I’m imagining things. Like the deep concentration on the faces of those Germans suddenly immersed in Gunnar D Hanssons suggestive tract on a mound of stones. Fragments like these – for fragments they are in a larger picture – will arrive and settle in Johannesburg, Mexico City, Trond-heim, Tel Aviv, Karlsruhe, San Francisco and Rome. To name but a few of the destinations. So what is this larger picture, apart from an imaginary globe of maps strung together by imaginary lines of transportation?
Naturally it’s about communication and rhizomatic growth of meaning. It’s also a matter of exploding the institutions and reaching out (as it always has been, at least as long as anyone cares to remember). The location for the Breathe-2 project is uncertain. Some may say that its main locus is the web-site, whatever place that is. Others would claim that the different geographical sites – the galleries, coffee shops, hang outs, stations, offices, studios, museums – around the globe are the de facto loci of this project. Buzz words like globalization comes to mind. But if so, when does it all end? If this is an exhibition, surely it must have a final date? Well, it hasn’t. The gods of societal entropy will decide the separate endings of the different components of this project.
The Swedish poet Bruno K Öijer once wrote a poem short enough to quote in full. It’s called »The Wife Adressing the Astronaut« and it goes like this:
you suffocate me
ever since the day
you floated in space
and put the earth
behind your thumb
Now, this was written about twenty years ago, and it’s meaning has somehow changed along the way. Back then, it spoke of the distance you may feel as you regard our planet in a vast universe of possibilities. The feeling you get when you return to the small town of your childhood after having settled down in the big city – only much more existentially and poetically profound.
But today the shrinking feeling grows stronger each and every day. We are in the process of creating a giant thumb of mono-culture under which we place the once great globe of maps. And it hurts somewhat. It’s getting kind of hard to breathe due to the pressure. There are less surprises and soon, everywhere you go you will end up feeling right at home and there will be people waiting there, with things to sell, and you will by these things because you recognize them to be looking quite nice. And we will confuse pressure for safety and develop allergies towards the unfamiliar. This is why Ezra Pounds modernist credo »Make it New« still echoes in the wind tunnels of art: to give us the chance to breathe a little more freely once in a while. If all a particular work of art gives you, is that warm, fuzzy feeling of recognition; well in that case it probably isn’t art at all, but a part of that giant thumb. So bite it. The thing about Breathe 2 is that you are never allowed to see the big picture. The separate components are there to boost you in their own right, wherever your point of entrance happens to be: from the »Border«–suite by Pia Nykänen and the elegiac elegance of Fredrik Nybergs »The Eastward Years« – to the wet word kisses from Pamela Jaskoviak, the mindful bar fling–advice of Dana Sederowskys stickers and the dramatic reports from Bo Melin and Andreas Nilsson as they drive around Europe in search of Ken Keseys psychedelic bus.
But the main part of this project is always somewhere else: perhaps dwelling in the lines between the components – the lines that will fade as the works eventually find new ways to continue their separate stories. There will be no turning back.
In his last will – as Annie Dillard reports – the Rabbi Yehudah Hechasid, who was a kabbalist and ethicist of the twelfth century, left a number of precepts for sensible and holy living. Number 46 says: »Don’t write in a book, ‘This book belongs to –’, just write your name, omitting ‘This book belongs to –’«.
Jonas Thente
Critic at the Swedish morning
daily news Dagens Nyheter
