At the End of the World.

Obrestad light house  What if?  Five artists, different techniques  until Sept. 25

On the edge of the land, and at the end of the world, where land and sea meet: A lighthouse, five artists, wind, waves, sunlight. Put together the five produce quality art worth seeing. The exhibition “What if ?” manages in fact to make use of the local spirit of the place – its genius loci – both in a metaphorical and a concrete sense, in very interesting ways.

The end of the world, the sea edge itself, becomes for True Solvang Vevatne also a place for expressing thoughts about the final times. In a bunker from World War II she has constructed a shelter room full of dried and canned food, water, a toilet for the recirculation of urine, a bed, reading material, a first aid kit etc. The inspiration comes from American preppers, people who prepare for a life independent upon the help of others in case of a catastrophe. Vevatne calls her work “A. Hansen’s strategy”, and asks what does an average human being need to survive, but also what kind of life can be lived in isolation and shut off from the rest of the world, like for instance on a deserted island.

To Antti Laitinen the island is not deserted, since he has built it himself. He sits there under a frail tree on one of the photographs, which together with a video documents the building of a mini island of 200 sandbags, pulled out from the beach during a period of three months by the artist himself. A new land freed from the mother land?

A dream of a virgin and untouched island in the South Seas? A metaphor for the absolute and existential solitude – a concretization of Sartre’s words of man being sentenced to freedom?

In the context of the exhibition it may be tempting to see Laitinen’s island as an absurd metaphor for a complete withdrawal from a world that has gone completely off its hinges, related to Vevatne’s withdrawal to the shelter room – as if they both defy the thought in John Donne’s poem: “No man is an island / entire of itself.” An important piece in this context is a video performance where British poet Lemn Sissay renders his poem “What if?”; very critical of our understanding of what is progress: What if we got it wrong? What if we weakened ourselves getting strong? The video is shown in a room with a big boiler – a boiler room in a double sense – a remnant from a phase in our industrial development, now in ruins, distant from the established white cube that is art’s traditional preserve.

This is what makes an art visit to Obrestad light house so special this summer: The exhibition shows an intelligent use of place and space made for completely other purposes, here and now contributing to our experience and understanding of the art displayed here. Rob Smith uses a radiometer, an apparatus invented by Sir William Crookes in 1873, and a symbol of wrongful conceptions of science: Crookes maintained that it was the pressure from the sunlight that ran the solar mill inside a tight glass ball; today we know that the blades of this mill are run by thermic effects. Smith has placed it highest up in the light house, and he projects the filmed result in a cellar room, where not least the daily doings of German soldiers in the forties may still be sticking in the walls.

The contrast is great between the rough soldier’s life that took place here and the frail sun mill; and a new contrast is projected in the next room: Yael Bartana’s video “Kings of the Hill” displays an extreme macho culture, where men are driving their four wheel drive dune buggies on the beach, while the women are passively watching. The car used as a potent penis extension is here a commentary to the photograph of the smiling German soldiers riding on a cannon barrel, exhibited in another room in the lighthouse.

War and the destruction of the environment as a manly form of activity on the one side, and withdrawal and escape as a survival strategy on the other: Together they make up a wholesome exhibition that is rich on perspective, with both obvious and more subtle threads between the different artists, and between art and the spirit of the place – here on the edge at the end of the world.

TROND BORGEN