Vi - en dokumentation of kulturrôdgiveri / We - a Documentation of Cultural Affairs

by Staffan Mossenmark and Joergen Svensson.
The National Swedish Radio, Stockholm 1997. 65 pp., illust. Trade, $ 60.
ISBN: 91-630-5917-7.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson


In 1995 the Swedish artist Joergen Svensson (b. 1958) was appointed to work six months as an advisor at the Swedish Department of Cultural Affairs. From the beginning, Svensson was skeptical with regard to the meaning and purpose of this work, and he declared that he wanted to document it and to use the material in an art-project. He wrote a diary and took some photographs. Some of the material is presented in the book "Vi: En dokumentation om kulturr?dgiveri" (We: A Documentation of Cultural Affairs), which Svensson did in cooperation with the Swedish composer Staffan Mossenmark. In order to develop the theme of art versus politics, and feeling versus logic, Svensson commissioned Mossenmark to convert his diary into music!

In the printed text of the diary, every name of appearing individuals has been replaced by a golden dot. When composing the string-quartet, Mossenmark reproduced the 27 pages of the diary layout, only keeping the golden dots. On every page, he then projected the structure of an ordinary score, thus converting the golden dots into golden notes of certain pitches. The string-quartet was composed by "filling in the gaps" between these notes. The performance of the string-quartet by the Swedish group ^?Flux^? is presented on one of the enclosed CD:s. On the two other CD:s the diary is recited by the actor Christer Fant.

The project oscillates between the "ordinary gossip" of the diary and the refined, modernistic abstraction of the music. Visually, the golden dots, and their random orientation on the pages, is a picture of the random events within every well defined and logical structure, be it the structures of life, art or society. The single individuals - ^?we^? - are reduced to equal and anonymous parts of the social/textual/musical structure. In retrospect and with some distance, ^?our^? trivial everyday life may seem more universal.

The photographs, which are printed in a separate section in the end of the book, are taken with an ordinary pocket-camera in order to avoid the "artistic" approach. But in the book, these photographs has been transformed. The bright colors of the cheap color print has been converted into black and white, and the edges of the photographs has been faded. The effect is highly un-naturalistic. Behind the surface of everyday life there appears to be "something else", but this "something else" is, in fact, an artistic construction achieved through the technology of photography and printing. Copyright Leonardo and I.S.A.S.T., 1999, all rights reserved.