It 's one of those dry, cold, clear and sunny winter days. You know what I mean? It's been cold and wet for a few days , and hazy, like it is by the sea, one of those cold that goes right through your clothes , right through one, so that one feels himself humid cold , not just cold.
But now the cold is dry , as it is in the mountains. When it does not even feel cold . When you can throw himself into a snowdrift and almost fall asleep , because it's so nice .
It's Sunday , and people smile . I do not know if they smile because I smile , I smile because they smile . It suddenly feels like everything should be fine.
I have a sort of talent, or talent, or trait. It is not very useful and not directly to the delight of anyone else, but myself , I think it is a bit interesting.
I associate sites.
I can be inside a church in Uppsala and suddenly think:
"This is just like the one where the hot dog stand in Helsinki ... "
Or: a street in Amsterdam can remind me of a frontage on Grand Canaria. Places echo each other. And now it is happening again .
I stand in the escalator going up in Kulturhuset . I'm almost up to Café Panorama . I meet a father with two winter clothing stuffed kids, one on the arm and a hand in hand. They are happy, tired , satisfied. Then it strikes me : this is like that ski hotel in the mountains. People are happy and tired after a day in the snow , and now they're hungry and going home to the hotel to eat. Kulturhuset is a mountain top , and when you look out through the large panoramic windows you see a lot of other mountain peaks: Högtorgsskraporna is a mountain range for pollock, Old Post Office down at Vasagatan and Nordic Light Hotel is not far from it. People down at Plattan has just come down the hill and will be up again.
I get off the ski lift in front of the gallery , sort of kicking off snow and enters . I stop just inside , and scroll a bit among the posters . Thinking of buying two . Thinking about what I have for wall space. Thinking about. Looking at the posters again . Thinking of buying them anyway. Afterwards.
So I sigh . Might as well take the bull by the horns :
This applies Joan Jonas . She is apparently a living legend in video art , and she has a ... blah , blah, blah ... I've sat and skimmed through the net and I do not remember anything . Something about Fluxus that she was not but that she was influenced by . Or who influenced her.
This would be so much easier if you used the puppets .
There are many videos of Joan Jonas posted on Youtube . I'm watching one called Vertical Roll from 1972. It's a black and white film , where the image " rolls " as the TV picture could do before, when something was not set correctly. Within the rolling , we see images of a woman in what I assume is the belly dance clothes. And the sound , rhythmic , sounds like when you turn two wood planks together , again and again , or maybe that step in a lighthouse.
Come on now, concentrate...
The Guide , Carl Tiberg , is walking around informing people of the upcoming show. He has his breton sweater on, but no wellies this time . We are about six people who are biting. A lonely man, a man and a woman, I , and two sixty- year-old women who either arrived or are on their way to somewhere . They have rolling cabin bags. Or, one has, so I guess it's just who she is going away. Or they are both on the move but really great at packing. They talk in a southern dialect. We can call them Kristina and Ulrika . They start by complaining that their clothes are warm, as if they could expect to Carl Tiberg could solve the problem of warm outerwear nddoors.
" Why do not you take them off? " He suggests. They cluck laughing, shaking their tousled cropped heads, as if to say that they understand why he is the guide and they are only visitors.
Kristina and Ulrika are interested in art in a way I try not to be: the measuring, comparing, judgmental way . A bit like the people who come to TV shows to get their art and antiques valued : They want to know if it's art, why it is art, and how much people are paying for it .
"She has painted all of them there fish herself? " They wonder, and points to an installation that hangs from the ceiling.
We walk around inside the gallery looking at TV screens. It's often quiet, for there are headphones so to be able to make out the words to the various films .
Video art is difficult. It seems so easy to judge , because it reminds so strongly about TV and film. It's like TV shows to opt out , something you do not have time , which means that you might have missed something better on another channel.
But something happened , where the arts center . It was just at the end , we all stood and watched on a TV screen that was built in a kind of peep show .
I was really freaking hungry, and had like disappeared into myself in thought , like that which you do when you then not remember what you were thinking about , when I suddenly realized that this was not so much about what I was trying to understand , or what the artist was trying to say , but what the work inside her told . It sounds weird , I know, and perhaps it was due to low blood sugar, but there , looking at the TV screen over the shoulders of Christian and Ulrika I suddenly got an insight. It's not me who should understand what the artist is trying to say . It is about letting the work speak.
I sat on my bike, a so-so four blocks away when I remembered that I forgot to buy the posters .
