Catalogue text. "Calling The Lower World!"
LISTENING
TO THE NEWS on my way to Kallax Airport, I hear that scientists have
discovered a community of bacteria deep below the surface of the Earth.
The bacteria have clearly existed there for eons – totally unknown to us.
I don’t know how the scientists have reasoned, but I presume the
bacteria once burrowed their way down deep into the Earth, firmly
convinced that they would find something.
But could they have any idea of what they would find?
I too have sought out places firmly convinced that I would find something.
Once I took part in a workshop in Cape Town. It was autumn 1996.
The workshop was called the ‘Thupelo Workshop’.
Thupelo is an expression in the Sotho language that means ‘to teach by example'.
The basic idea was to gather together a group of artists – mostly
local, South African artists, but others from neighbouring countries
and one or two, like me, from further afield.
We worked together and shared our experiences.
Ten years later in Orsa, in Sweden’s most Swedish province of Dalarna,
I attended the ‘Knock on Wood’ symposium, where eight Chinese artists
and eight from Sweden worked together for two weeks. Once again I
discovered how well it suited me to work side by side as openly,
intimately and intensively as you do in a workshop.
My hands conjured into existence a cockroach figure, a figure on a donkey and a loudspeaker tower ‘just like that…’
The following summer I rented a studio in Beijing where I continued to
work on the loudspeaker tower motif, this time painting it in Chinese
ink.
An entire group – ‘The Girls of Calais’ – had sprung up around the sculpted version of the loudspeaker.
Gregory Coates, my artist friend from Allentown, christened the tower ‘Information’.
‘Information’. The name alone inspired me with all sorts of ideas.
That autumn things took a different turn.
It may not have meant much to anyone else, but it did to me – a ‘mouse-girl-devil’ appeared before my very eyes.
Chance plays a part in all our lives.
I saw the small piece of wood in a tiny little stand where a man was
selling chisels. It was in Izmailovsky Park, the gigantic market in
Moscow. I was there hunting for a suitable water tap to replace the one
stolen from ‘The Water Carrier’, a sculpture of mine that, as it
happens, was a product of the Thupelo Workshop in Cape Town.
To tell the truth, the stand was little more than a piece of coarse
cloth spread out on a table, but the tools lying there were fantastic –
and the man had made them all himself.
Beside them on the table was this remarkable piece of wood. Walnut from
Kazakhstan. A piece of a root, maybe. Or a knotty growth from one of
the branches. I bought it, but it was lying around for more than a year
before I began to work with it. It was some time after I had returned
from China.
My original idea was simply to fashion a kind of Chinese hair-do on a
little female figure, something I’d seen on a stick puppet in Liu Li
Chang. Or perhaps it was in the subway. Or on another sculpture.
I owe the extraordinary yet quite wonderful shading in the face of the
girl to my relative lack of interest in wood. I regard it simply as a
medium to work in and, if there are subtle colour shifts in the grain,
they end up where they end up.
For me, she was new, mysterious – and slightly scary.
A ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’
Late November 2007.
My ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’ was just a few days old and it was very much a
last-minute impulse to add her to the other things I’d already packed
in my case.
Thupelo International Urban Workshop 2007, Cape Town.
It was my third workshop.
Twelve years had passed since the first.
One morning Jill Trappler, one of the prime movers behind the Thupelo
initiative, arrived with a plastic bag stuffed full of wooden dolls,
voodoo dolls, which she lent to me.
She knew exactly what was going on. There’s no better way to illustrate
the way the workshop works: ‘What I bring with me; what I will take
back’.
In the corner of the studio that I shared with five other artists, I
had spread out sketches, fragments and drafts, some hanging, some
standing, others merely piled up. This was also the first way I chose
to present my work.
There stood my ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’, staring at me along with all those other voodoo dolls.
‘What I bring with me; what I will take back.’
Several versions of ‘Information’, a Chinese monk – or was it a Chinese
actor? – were the props and figures I experimented with together with
the ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’.
But I couldn’t call her that. And who was she actually?
I worked with paper, enamels, Tipp-ex and shellac in a collage.
My entire way of working changed. Dissolved, so to speak.
Or was I gradually becoming aware of other possibilities in my working process?
Back in my studio in Stockholm the fragments from Thupelo broke new
ground, blazed new trails for me. I painted and sewed my way into a
whole new world.
Then, in the car on the way to Kallax, as the news item about the
bacteria drew to a close, the reporter rounded off with the words, ‘So,
that’s today’s good news from the World Below!’
‘Yes,’ I thought. ‘That’s it! Good News from the World Below.’
Of course! The ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’ was a Messenger from the Lower World.
I had three exhibitions planned in Stockholm for spring 2008. The idea
was that they should all be called ‘inFORMATION’ (1, 2 and 3).
Suddenly, one of them took on a totally different direction.
For the exhibition inFORMATION 1 on Hälsingegatan, I arranged two installations: ‘Good News from the Lower World!’
Now, here I am in Beijing, preparing what will be a large, composite
work on this theme. The initial result will be a studio exhibition – a
tentative start.
I have some picture fragments to use: a Cockroach Girl, a Messenger, a
Chinese monk/actor and the loudspeaker tower, Information. ‘What I
bring with me; what I will take back.’
As I am writing this, the final preparations are being made for the
Olympics in Beijing. The police have set up road blocks around the
village I live in to check all the cars driving in and out.
Information and Control.
And there are recent news reports from Sweden that parliament there has
voted in favour of a law to snoop on its citizens’ private lives.
Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) will be given the
power to monitor all cross-border e-mail and telephone conversations,
both incoming and outgoing.
When I was a small child you could vaguely hear the sound of other
voices on the telephone line. It was as if there were another world
somewhere inside the phone. Sometimes it was almost as if people were
shouting to one another. Now we know that other people are there,
listening to us without us being able to hear them.
Information and Control – but also a Lower World.
I think about how the scientists searching for those bacteria thought,
and how I myself think when I try to make use of – make sense of – all
the fragments that I surround myself with, as I rearrange them into
something that I hope will form a meaningful whole.
My current exhibition in the Huang Hua Studio in Beijing is not the end
of a journey, not a finished work, but just the first few spades of
earth in the project ‘Good News from the Lower World’.
Originally, I had thought of calling this exhibition ‘Newsletter from
the Lower World’. But, somehow or other, that spoilt the effect of the
best part of the title – in other words, the ultimate objective.
But it’s a call from me to the Lower World. And you know what they say: ‘Like question, like answer’.
Beijing, 1 July 2008
Torsten Jurell
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Texts by Jurell 