Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

The physicality (the gum from the artist’s mouth) reads mainly
as an index of contempt; it is a tool, or a sign – an arrow
pointing to the catastrophe of an America that appeared, for
the moment, to proudly, even pornographically, celebrate its
most base and regressive elements. In Ekblad’s more recent
work, the focus is on the elements for their own sake, without
there being much of a goal, hierarchy, or direction. More and
more it is the process that is emphasised. Recently, the artist
has been making sculptures by drifting through different cities,
sometimes with friends, wheeling around a trolley filled with
cases of wet concrete. During these perambulations, the artist
finds, in her own words, “tools and bits and things” and sticks
them in the concrete; when it dries, the cases are discarded and
the sculpture is revealed.
The affirmative tradition has often been a musical one, or
rather has looked to music as a model of a self-justifying art:
Cage was of course a composer, and Nietzsche’s early reverence
for Wagner, as well as his evocation of Dionysus as the emblem
of the fullest, purest reality, are both well known. Moreover,
mystics of all kinds have often said that sound is ideal as a tool
for meditation, because a sound cannot really be heard after
it has passed, but only in the present. It is not surprising to
find Ekblad calling upon these same energies. Usually she does
this through titles, whether copied directly (Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds) or, more frequently, as a fragment or variation
(Political Song for Jessica Simpson to Sing). Crucially, though,
the title is often taken from a song that Ekblad was listening
to in her studio while working on that piece: it thus refers back
to the moment of creation. Obviously, this moment belongs
to Ekblad alone. But the recurring song titles, like some of the
painterly gestures, are indicative of the need to share that
immediacy, to share the moment of exultation, when artist, like
audience, becomes merely a vessel through which energy,
which is beauty, flows.
When language approaches music, when it is closest to song,
it is called poetry. Ekblad is, of course, also a poet. She writes
the way she sculpts: by combining and transforming found
elements, whatever they may be, and wherever she finds them
(and one does not have to search very hard for words). As in her
sculptures, she is fond of using local elements: French phrases
for a poem in Paris, for instance. Moreover, her poetry forms
a map of her sensibility; much of what we have been trying to
say here on her behalf, and on behalf of tradition she inherits, is
written in her poems for all to see. There is total receptivity to
the flow of forces, and especially to sound, for instance, in Fare-
Ye-Well: “The chimes of bells she faintly hears/be all ears – Be
ALL ears.” And in O’ Radical Modern Way Of Life there is a list
of sculptural materials, and again attention to the specifics of
the particular moment: “knickknack, bric-a-brac, neglected metal
sheet/– A Radical Punch, brewed on a wee lil’ Credit Crunch.”
There is a final parallel to be made with the great paragon
of the affirmative tradition. Nietzsche took the title The Gay
Science from the Provençal term “La gaya scienza” – the term
that troubadours used in the Middle Ages to refer to their art,
the art of poetry; it was this creative power, which was at the
same time a concrete science of affirmation – this specific
unity of “singer, knight, and free spirit” – that he looked to for
guidance, like a star. Crossing from negation to affirmation is
merely the beginning, and in itself it is no guarantee. But poetry,
whatever poetry is today, or still means (it is not a force or
metaphor like any other, since it encompasses every metaphor,
every force) is there to point the way.
DaviD lewis
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