Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood
By Andreas Schlaegel
An essay about the art project Black Hole by Sigmund Skard
Østmarka, Oslo 2015
http://www.osloutmark.no/sigmund-skard
I once had a girl, or should i say, she once had me
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), The Beatles (1965)
At Oslo Utmark Sigmund Skard‘s installation and performance Black Hole plays on the paradoxical
entanglement of concepts of nature and culture. Only one eternal truth can patch up the universal gap:
Murphy‘s law.
There‘s a slight drizzle, it‘s cold, and when I arrive
a small group has already gathered, artists,
friends, family, kids a dog or two. It‘s a decidedly
casual thing, refreshingly lo-fi, and everybody
appears well prepared for the occasion –
functional wear sets the mood. We take off.
It‘s a short hike into the forest, from the parking
lot behind the bus stop Solbergliveien. After a
few hundred meters the scattered group takes a
left turn, off the main path, and goes up the hill,
into the forest. As we progress, it gets steep, the
path gets muddy, and where the blank rock
appears, it‘s slippery. But no one minds. We have
practically entered an area that is very close to
the city, but clearly something else. Different
rules apply. Hiking boots are de rigeur.
Having slowly settled into the pleasantly scattered
trot, eyes nailed to the ever changing
ground, we‘ve suddenly arrived. The Black hole
of the title turns out to be an ensemble of objects
mounted to trees along a part of a hollow. The
first object looks like a trap for insects. Hanging
on eye-level, suspended from a branch with a
simple butcher‘s hook, it consists of a 10 l plastic
water canister, filled five centimeters high with a
clear liquid, possibly water, but maybe something
else (poison?). Just above the liquid there is a
hole with a small black tube protruding into the
inner of the container, providing a channel from
the outside to the inside (or the other way
around?). It occupies its space so easily, so
naturally, that it makes me wonder, if it was here
from the start, maybe to trap some insects for
scientific purposes?
It reminds me of a classic piece of concept art,
Michael Craig-Martin‘s An Oak Tree (1973),
consisting of a glass of water on a shelf, with a
text, declaring the glass of water an oak tree.
Craig-Martin‘s piece is like an act of magic. But
Skard refuses the magic bit, instead leaving the
viewer with their own associations. At the same
time containers are a reoccurring topic in the
artist‘s work, in Landskap med blått hav (Landscape
with Blue Ocean, 2003) a water canister
makes an appearance, with a window cut into its
body, and a piece of clear perspex inserted, to
see a small rowing boat inside, in front of a
mountainous landscape glued to the back wall.
Or the Mandarin in the Bottle (2008) performance,
that in a video documentation shows the
artist seated, meticulously taking apart a manda-
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in and reassembling it inside a bottle, like ship in
a bottle. With this in mind, I have the feeling the
ship or the mandarin may have simply escaped.
Maybe the black hole of the plastic tube offers
freedom from the container. I wonder, am I really
outside looking in?
Another piece is even more laconic, consisting
only of a string of tea bags hanging from a tree,
like some kind of decoration, or spiritual offering
to the tree Surprisingly, they are hardly affected
by the rain, when we look at them. The sculptural
gesture of this piece is so light, the intervention
hardly even registers, even more than the
canister, its simply a displaced product from a
home or the supermarket ten minutes down the
road. But then it‘s a cultural plant in its dried form
that may have been grown in India, or at some
other exotic location, and is transformed here
into a dangling, a necklace, or simply, in a
coproduction of global scale, producing droplets
of cold tea, with Norwegian Rain, for no one in
particular, or for anyone passing by. By the time
of writing this I wonder if the piece survived so
far. I‘m curious to what will happen to it, precisely
because it is so ephemeral. It happens in the
head more than in reality. But what reality is this
anyway?
While the first two pieces could be understood as
having been placed nearly by accident, coincidence,
serendipity or happenstance, the other
two of his objects are placed in custom designed
- for lack of a better expression - vitrines, leaving
no question to their relationship to the site. Even
if the individual pieces have about the sizes of
birdhouses, they are decidedly alien to the
location, made of perspex and wood painted in
glossy enamel paint. Rather the opposite is the
case, it‘s as if the site posed questions to them.
The first is a slightly underwhelming one-liner: a
roll of toilet paper in a holder, placed in a little
wooden box, with a perspex front. The bottom of
the box is open, making the toilet paper accessible,
as if inviting the passersby to take advantage
of it. The paper is funneled through a small
wooden frame, turning the embossed floral
patterns on it into an image, that contrasts with
the raw vegetation of the surrounding. More
irritating is the idea of the use of the toilet paper
– and the contrast to the forest, or in other words,
the clash of concepts of pristinely preserved
nature and, well - human nature. Legendary
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anarchic TV comedian Lenny Bruce once summed
up the moment of the birth of civilization.
According to him it was when one stone age
person said to another: don‘t shit where you eat,
my friend! Well put.
As this is being written I have seen photographs
taken of a wasp taking over the piece, starting to
build a nest. I don‘t know if the wasp can use the
toilet paper to create the elaborate paper-like
structure of its nest, but it shows, that in this
space, shared by so many different forms of life,
the piece could operate in a completely unexpected
way, and be it, a nesting place for wasps.
Wasps as such are also a nice comment on the
concept of Arcadia, the place where one can live
in peace and beauty. Again it is a work with
relatives in some of the artist‘s previous objects:
there‘s a piece, where the artist ran his old belt
through a similar small wooden frame, presenting
the signs of wear, the widened holes and the idea
of the artist slimming down or growing bigger as
an image. Or another one, literally called Oneliner
(2014), with a small roll of paper and a
pencil, and the option to draw one continuous
line, in homage to Piero Manzoni and his legendary
Linee (1960) drawings made with a pen
mounted to a rotating roll of paper, creating lines
of a length of up to 7,2 km. Once again, Sigmund
Skard shows a very clear understanding of scale,
and a valuable sense of understatement, that
opens a different can of worms. If Manzoni was
obsessed with the hybris and myth of the artist
genius, Skard‘s little frame captures, in the artist‘s
words, „a tiny fragment of infinity.“
The same goes for maybe the most enigmatic
piece in this presentation, a box of perspex
containing a stack of three spools of black
insulating tape. Running through a hole at the
bottom, the tape emerges at the other end,
dangling outside the box, only to be jumbled up
in three loose black balls. It looks as if the vitrine
had testicles. Bruce Nauman comes to mind, an
early video piece showing a close-up of the artist
applying black paint to his testicles, in unnerving
slow motion. Nauman, with his works brimming
with ethereal Beckettian nonsense, or existential
too-much-sense is one of the artists that may
have served as source of inspiration for Sigmund
Skard. Then again, he always manages to steer
away from pure spectacle, keeping it real, with a
healthy dose of everyday banality. Here it

appears to be a model for a black hole, and the
progression through it, turning the order of things
on its head and objects into anti-matter upon
entry at the point of event horizon. Or science has
us believe.
But what attracts most of the attention is the
centerpiece. Today, and only today, it‘s ready for
performance. Set between two trees, the hollow
it nestles into, between the mountain and a ridge,
provides a natural theatrical background. The
artist prepared bright orange lines between the
trees, spanning over and past a large pile of
roughly rectangular wooden blocks, which had
been sculpted from fallen trees collected in the
area. Arranged to a pile, as if waiting to be
chucked into a fire, they laid there, half submerged
in a big black puddle of unclear depth.
The puddle accumulated only that day, when the
artist arrived the stack had been sitting comfortably
in green moss, from one day to the next it
appeared to have been swallowed up by a
swamp.
Enter the artist, clad head to toe in elegant and
decidedly urban black, Skard climbed onto the
slacklines, like a trapeze artist. But far from the
elegance of scantily clad circus ladies, he moved
along with a comical, exaggerated style of
walking, to balance on the elastic lines. This way
he moved back and forth between a smaller
second pile of wooden blocks, this one orderly
stacked on one side, and a plastic sack of earth
attached to the opposite tree on the other side.
Taking a handful of the earth, he approached the
pile, and, hovering over it, spread the earth on
the top block of the pile, as if it was cement. Then
he went to the orderly stored blocks, took one,
turned around, and set it carefully on the spread
earth on the pile. Once the blocks had grown to a
small stack of four or five blocks, it collapsed,
causing a little commotion in the pile, to a
deadpan expression of the mute artist. His
deadpan and muteness connects the persona he
presents as a relative also of early slapstick
comedians, like Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton,
the man who never laughed. Much like the work
of these silent film era actors, who were trained as
stage artists and of unique physical fitness,
Skard‘s performance is not quite as dangerous
but still an intensely physical one,. His body and
posture plays an as important role, as his expression.
There is a sense of continuity there, to the
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performances of artists like Marina Abramovic or
Roi Vaara.
But what sets him apart from their approach is not
only a sense of humor, but also one of humility,
that makes his work hardly imposing and keeps
pathos at bay. A clear indication of this quality is
on display here. The small kids in the audience
are mesmerized, by the grown up and his futile
attempts at making use of his building blocks.
They recognize not only the toy, the action, they
also recognize the Mr. Bean-like character, and
themselves in it - probably in much the same way
as adults read the metaphors of the enactment of
this balancing act of making ends meet and
building things up.
The difference is that much of Skard‘s work is
imbued with tragedy: trial and failure are reappearing
characteristics. Yet unlike the endurance
works of Tehching Hiseh, for example, whose
extreme performances last for a whole year (living
outdoors in New York City for a year, or punching
a punchcard every single hour every day for a
year) the existential quality of Skard‘s lies on a
metaphorical level, it remains theatrical. He uses
props, and the displayed objects have this proplike
quality, they are themselves banal, made of
cheap, recognizably everyday materials, assembled
in a way, that shows no apparent skill as
such, but it‘s still about the meaning. In this,
these pieces function a lot like poetry. The words
are readily available, anyone can write poems. In
this piece it could be seen as if Skard was
attempting to rebuild or even to grow a tree. He
uses the right materials - earth and parts of trees,
all originally found in nature, but both used here
at odds with it. The wood is rectangular and the
earth is pre-packed in a plastic sack. But that‘s
not the reason the tree-building fails - like a
poem, it‘s a matter of composition. The paradox
that Skard presents is the failed composition
delivering a compelling piece of art. If we
continue the idea of building the tree in our
head, and the stack had grown to a height that
could have competed with the other trees, it still
would never be a tree.
So what is it? It‘s exactly the opposite of Michael
Craig Martin‘s oak tree, it‘s a black hole! And not
the dark puddle, but the result of all this artistic
performative activity. We could exaggerate, and
say it amounts to nothing - except the traces of

someone having tried and failed. But, oddly, the
sense of defeatism, that permeated the atmosphere
of this piece, was oddly reassuring. If all is
doomed anyway, there‘s nothing wrong with
failing.
In an earlier video piece, the artist, seen from his
chin down, can be seen sitting at a table, with a
candle stump. Lighting it, he takes another candle
stump, putting out the first one with it, and
sticking it on top, repeating this with several
candle stumps, until the candle stack reached the
height of his mouth. Then he blew it out. Would
the candle have burned all the way down? Or just
burned for the length of one stump? Does it
matter? With the motif, the idea is already
implanted in the viewers‘ imaginations, now it‘s
up to us.
In the forest, the performance continued, until all
wooden blocks had become part of the big pile,
a tiny stack, maybe three blocks high remaining,
and the performance was over. Sigmund Skard
changed back into his regular clothes and into his
familiar self, nowhere near the austere and
essentially mute artist persona adopted in many
of his performance works.
The next day he took down the lines, and
removed all traces of his presence, except for the
earth and the wooden blocks in the puddle, that
remained as an odd sculpture. „Does it look like
someone attempted to build something here?,“
he asked. It took a small reconfiguration of the
blocks to make it really clear that this was more
than just a pile, rather a failed stack. With all other
traces of the work removed, the pile and the
stack emerging from it, had, in spite of their size,
had turned into only a small, even humble
sculptural intervention into the landscape. As
nature will run its course, the wooden blocks will
probably decay, and eventually fade into the
landscape completely, in effect continuing the
process of decay, the trees had entered, since
they were felled. Many of them had already been
rotten from the start.
When Skard cut them into shape, the artist
observed many being full of fat white larvae. „So
much protein - I could imagine being a woodpecker.“
Woodpeckers could be regarded as a
symbolic animal for Sigmund Skard‘s work. A bird
that flies, builds nests and behaves perfectly like
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birds do, except for sometimes, when it smashes
its little head against trees. What looks like an
absurd attempt at self-annihilation magically
leads to the emergence of food, and life goes on.
That the birds survive this radical specialization,
that they don‘t damage their brains, that their
brains and skulls have adopted to this bizarre
behavior, however, is next to nothing in relation
to the way civilization has affected the way
humans live -the human condition. I look at
screens and miraculously food appears. Sometimes
at least.
Repetition is a powerful tool, things get stronger,
on many levels. Some become less unusual, even
ritualistic, predictable. Something starting out as
alienating will eventually turn into something
reassuring, maybe even in spite of itself. The
repetitions in everyday life, the technoid beat of
daily routine, are reflected in the artist’s use of
repetition as an artistic means, to build up power,
like waves, like increasing momentum. The
symbolism becomes a forced one, anything but
effortless. Yet still sometimes their remarkable
simplicity carries surprising power. Skard calls this
strategy „amplifying“ and tells me that many
works are based on taking objects and actions
from the everyday, and subjecting them to this
process of amplification until they start to, as the
artist puts it, „come into focus, become important,
become...something!“
This something can be very little, and nonetheless
create very powerful imagery. As when the artist
uses his own body as a container to transport air
from one end of the room to another, for example,
by inhaling under a chair and exhaling in the
far opposite corner of the room. There is no clear
end to this performance, rather the artist decides
when an end is appropriate. The performance
Moving Air hovers between lightness – its subject
is invisible, the way Skard moves through the
space is deliberately casual - and heavy symbolism,
with associations ranging from the very first
to the last breath, and to expiration and inspiration.
Even if the lightness wins, it still feels strange
to walk through a room of displaced air, it‘s not
nothing. It reminds me of being alive. It‘s a good
experience.
On our way home I wonder, when the concept of
nature changed from that of an unchangable
essence to that of an authentic, untampered-with

landscape. Probably it coincided with the
invention of the autonomous artwork, in the
Netherlands in the early 17th century. It all
makes perfect sense.
Suddenly, with the noise of breaking twigs and
the rustle of leaves, a man on a mountain bike
breaks through the bushes, comes to halt, and
under his breath implores, where am I? Where am
I?
I don‘t know. It turns out, he lost his race. Not
that he came in last, but he got lost. Sadly we
can‘t help him. We can‘t help the character in
Sigmund Skard‘s performances either. But we can
say thank you. Thank you.
Andreas Schlaegel has for nearly ten years now been trying to keep an eye on the Norwegian art scene from
the perspective of an outsider. Educated at Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main and Goldsmiths College, London,
he is an artist, writer and curator based in Berlin, and has focused on exploring the potential of collaborative
formats between sculpture, performance and exhibitions. This practice also informs his teaching, as at the
Oslo art academy KhiO, where he curated, the degree show of the MA program in 2013 at Kunstnernes Hus.
His criticism and essays are published regularly by international art magazines, such as Frieze, Flash Art,
Spike and Billedkunst, and many others, as well as in publications by art institutions such as Kunsthalle
Düsseldorf; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MUSAC, Leon; Aspen Museum, Colorado; Schirn Kunsthalle,
Frankfurt/Main; Thyssen Bornemisza Contemporary, Vienna, and many others.
Sigmund Skard (b. 1952, Sveio, Norway) works in the grey area between art and reality. New forms and
qualities of known and everyday material are used as basis for minimalistic and low-key works of art –
performance, sculpture, object, photo, video, land art. The aesthetics and use of materials can be associated
to the Fluxus movement and Arte Povera; spartan, absurd, playful and down to earth. Expression and
themes are sober and pragmatic, with roots in country traditions and taoism. Skard has studied at the
Academy of Art in Oslo (KHIO) and exhibited or performed at places like Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo, Örebro
Art Hall, Kunstbanken Art Centre (Hamar), Gallery BOA, The Armory Show (NY), Sogn og Fjordane Art
Museum, Vestlandsutstillingen, Gallery No Place. www.sigmundskard.com
Oslo Utmark is one of Art in Oslo´s 17 temporary art projects in 2014/15
Supported by Oslo Municipality and Arts Council Norway
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