A double Trojan horse. On Matias Faldbakken

In his recurrent appropriation of everyday objects, Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken is immediately connected to diverse conceptual trends. This Duchampian strategy is often combined with a twisted relational aspect: in Shut down / TURN OFF (2004), in which he appropriates from the Windows XP toolbar, all that is left of the original interface are the enormous icons on the wall, elevated to the iconic or mythical status of the art-object. The regular functionality of the Windows’ icons thus becomes a free-floating waiting to be developed by the viewer.
This cool and clean conceptualism is developed in other directions in All that fall (Standard (OSLO), Norway, 2004), where the iconography of counter-culture is cut free from its common environment and used as props in a drama about the sterility of subversive positions. The exhibition shows, among other things, a heap of over-sized Marshall-speakers and a baseball bat hanging from the roof wrapped in plastic. The instruments commonly used as symbolic weapons directed towards the establishment are, as is pointed out by Frankfurt philosopher Herbert Marcuse, always already commodities. The stylistic elements of Punk-rock and gangster-rap are, the Norwegian artist states, branded through-and-through like everything else in the age of late capitalism. Faldbakken gives his reflection on the commodification of art yet another form in his video-installation Getaway (Fotogalleriet, Oslo, Norway, 2003). The video shown is shot from a motorcycle wildly racing on different highways around Sweden, the driver obviously risking both his own and other people’s lives in his obsession with speed. Faldbakken’s point here is that the risk involved in driving a motorcycle at 299 km per hour stands in comic relief to the ‘risk’ taken in showing the video or, from a more general point of view, the ‘dangers’ in involved in being an artist at all. In sum Faldbakken appropriates a work representing and documenting risk, which looses its element of real danger within the exhibition.
But Faldbakken himself is also appropriated as a functional producer of dissident opinions. He is, to (again) paraphrase Marcuse, written into the repressive tolerance of the art-institution and is forced into playing the rules of the game. Still there’s more to Faldbakken than this: to get a firm grip on what he’s actually doing, and what singles him out, we have to take a closer look at his involvement with literature. He has in fact written two novels, CockaHola Company and Macht & Rebel (Cappelen, Norway: 2001, 2002). Both novels contain loads of anti-social elements like child-pornography, incest, Nazism and different forms of crude racial and cultural discrimination. Ironically both novels, despite their explicit content, became bestsellers. What happens here is that Faldbakken, in a way, succeeds in establishing a subversive position. That is, his books don’t really put forward any dissident opinions that last, but the anti-social core of his novels make them more like viruses or an infection, predicting a possible disease within the social body. What he does with literature, then, is smuggle elements into the commodity-form of the literary work which are radically unsellable.
If we compare Faldbakken’s role as an author with his dramatis personae as an artist he is not really identifiable with either of them, which brings us to the single most important point about his work: it is a dramatization, both of himself as an ‘author’ and as an ‘artist’. ‘Matias Faldbakken’, then, ultimately refers to a continual conceptual performance, which, by going back and forth between the literary and artistic fields, succeeds in establishing a point of reference and reflection without being strictly reducible to either ‘literature’ or ‘art’. Being accepted, consecrated within both worlds, he can look at art from the field of literature and vice versa. Moreover, he can test out and process whatever he’s doing in one field within the institutional machinery of the other. Faldbakken’s work is what you could call a double Trojan horse.


Kjetil Røed is an art, film and literature critic based in Norway

(Teksten er en preview i en artikkel som vi publiseres i Contemporary Magazines Oktober-nummer om konseptkunst.)

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