This being an essay (“An attempt, endeavor.”¹) I will try to accomplish several things: explore some reccurring issues in my own practice; investigate how other artists whose practice I find adjacent to mine relate to the issues that I have experienced; elaborate on ideas concerning autonomy and sharing of experience; draw an outline for future work through the experience gained so far.

The work and concepts of a group of artists: Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Victor Grippo, Alberto Greco and in this quintet quite alien and notably younger Heath Bunting is hard to collect under a common term, but this is not even desirable as it would tame, undermine and maybe even extinguish the very core of their practices. I will, however, try to examine some common characteristics of these artists’ practices, the clearest of which is their individual ambitions for collective work for proposing “unfinished, ‘open’ works”² and participatory processes rather than closed works (finished by the artist in the studio and put on display for an interpassive³ audience). This in particular is what interests me the most. Another shared characteristic is found in the “many implications for the future interrelationship of art and life”⁴ in their works and a mutual seeping of one of these into the other as in “the yin-yang disc [where] the lozenge of dark contains a seed of light, and vice versa”⁵. A space where experimental processes can find a (temporary) refuge. I find this is something which is often ignored and/or frowned upon as a contamination of the pure, something I see as an illusion incubated by a strong (Western) belief in Dualism⁶ (good and evil, light and dark, art and life etc.), while the following takes place behind the smokescreen of Dualism: “from Chaos comes the ‘myriad things’, like the seeds in a gourd or the chopped-up goodies in a won-ton”⁷ as each individual experience of the process is incorporated and “the water in a spillover-vessel which flows out, letting each stream find its own channel, fertilizing the earth, bringing everything into becoming.” A first breath of the new air is drawn and at once fills the lungs of the collective work. This is effectively demonstrated, both literally and metaphorically, in Clark’s Air and Stone (“not an art object but a proposal: simply inflate an ordinary plastic bag, seal it, place the stone in one corner and squeeze the bag between your hands”⁸).

Growing up as white, lower middle class and male in a small but quite wealthy town in south-western Sweden effectively screened me from any existing organized search for autonomy. But regardless of that I always felt in opposition to claims of authority and moral absolutism. Provoked by hierarchies around me and the requirement to position myself inside these I searched for autonomy in everything around me. Usually I ended up feeling that the autonomy I found was not much more then a façade in front of a brick wall of authority, but nonetheless one, I observed, which was full of small cracks through which something shone from just behind the bricks. When I came into contact with political parties whom with I shared some viewpoints I was often repelled by their togetherness I could for some reason not imagine myself in any such band of brothers. Instead, some years later I found myself on the verge of adulthood in the nearest city, Gothenburg. During this time I also first encountered the concept of psychogeography, stumbling upon Guy Debord’s Théorie de la dérive in some corner of the internet (originally published in Internationale Situationiste #2 Paris, December 1958). I was unemployed at that time and occupied myself with activities something like those the driftingDebord wrote of many years earlier; exploring corners, pathways and hidden islands in between the used spaces of the city. I was also occupied with creative writing for my own pleasure, inspired by the lyrics and poetry of Saul Williams, Sufi masters (Hafiz, Rumi) and the beat generation (Kerouac, Ginsberg etc.) The synthesis of creative writing (as a window to imaginary spaces) and music (as enchantment and pathway to bodily movement) was interesting to me, but was not close to me in a direct way e.g. in jamming, musical composition and/or writing lyrics. Instead I found myself working with words, drawn imagery and temporal unauthorized installations here and there often in the same islands I had earlier been drifting among something which had become a sort of quasi drifting-scouting-crafting-documenting activity. This specific synthesis of activities and the continous search for spaces to operate within seems close to what Hakim Bey writes about the in The Temporary Autonomous Zone, of being in search of “‘spaces’ (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones.”¹⁰

It seemed to me Bey was not interested in absolute truths and I continued to explore with him how a TAZ could be started and how it would inevitably vanish “leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because indefinable in terms of the Spectacle”¹² as soon as it had become “named (represented, mediated)”¹³. The core difference between Bey’s TAZs and other attempts to reach the (anarchist) dreams of a free culture lies in its invisibility, making it utterly effective and ensuring that “the State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it.”¹⁴ The reference to Debord’s spectacle made me curious and I soon found out that what had brought me to this text was obviously the events in Paris around 1968 and specifically the notion of how the use of poetry effectively forms the basis of revolutions¹⁵. Wherever I go I seem to return to being interested in poetry (in both a literary and very broad definition) as potent motor and even as change agent. I wouldn’t call it the sole source of my view of poetry, I remember sometime during my growth encountering, through a newspaper article concerning some demonstration or black/red/green political rally, a piece of anonymous graffiti (remediated as printed text) from Paris sometime during the uprisings in 1968: Sous les pavés, la plage! which can be translated as Beneath the paving stones the beach!

The experience of these actions was always between that of vandal and voluntary community worker, with a tingling feeling in my stomach sometimes and a proud feeling of doing good things before disappearing from the scene into the masses or shaded corners of the city. Bey suggest the act of disappearance as a very logical radical option for our time:

I find my own work to be continually looping back into and operating within borderlands between western dualities. For the exhibition Information Wants to Be Free my practice consisted of “leaving everyday objects, carefully composed according to a complex set of binaries and word pairs”¹⁹, my attempt was to source pre-existing objects from all over everyday life and simultaneously organize these (and their specific sites, specifics of installation etc.) according to a quasi-taxonomic practice and create a chaotic self-destructive field of objects that are “stubbornly defying fixed meaning.”²⁰ A poster was presented in the space of Platform One Gallery with photographs depicting the objects installed and their environments overlaid with (con)textual material: council bylaws, notes concerning the selection and strategy for specific items and their placement, a text describing Abraham Maslow’s Law of The Instrument, practical information of Wandsworth Common Railway Station, an alchemical poem, an article concerning The Philosopher’s Stone, notes concerning three important strategical decisions for the project etc. My efforts to counteract the expected process of creating a work (physically, conceptually, politically) was a way of taking actions to a point where sense and nonsense fused into something which wouldn’t fit into a Dualist world (thus proving it false, an illusion).