Josefine Östberg Olsson - 2017
When Josefine Östberg Olsson presents a work, it's rarely just about exhibiting something already produced or intervening in one art discussion or another. What we often encounter in the exhibition room itself are instead sculptural traces or props from a kind of staged situations that engage directly in a socially complex context. For her, it's about an art that takes place, in a way that can appear grumpy and irrational, but which thereby also forces us to reevaluate the contexts the work becomes a part of.
In the master's degree work Shift into Racing Strip in the Still of the Night (2016), for example, the public space around Götaplatsen and the parade street Avenyn in Gothenburg was at stake.
At Gothenburg's art gallery, where the exhibition itself was shown, the installation of parts from a car race the artist staged along the Avenyn, which with its 201 meters turned out to be exactly as long as a racing track, made up the installation. The starting point for the work was the different worlds that live in parallel around Götaplatsen, at the top of Avenyn, with on the one hand its art institutions and on the other hand the raggar and car culture that takes over the place on certain days and nights. The sculptural part just inside the entrance to the art gallery's rotunda, consisted of metal details and car headlights that were supplemented every twenty seconds with a soundtrack from a race that was activated by a sensor at the same moment the visitor entered the art gallery. In an almost intrusive way, Shift into Racing Strip in the Still of the Night thereby opened up a new room for reaction, where the installation itself could refer as much to something that will happen as to something that has already happened. Josefine Östberg Olsson is an artist who makes as much use of traditional exhibition spaces and what the viewer experiences there at a given time, as of what is outside the exhibition space, regardless of whether it is the urban public space or another time. That is, one before or one after the time the viewer interacts with the work in the exhibition. When I saw her master's work, I was reminded of what she, after many years of artistic experimentation, presented two years earlier at her graduate exhibition with the paintings Midnight Demon, Scorch Barracuda and Challenger in the Night (2014). The starting point for these car-painted monochromes was a series of broken vehicles, which could no longer be driven. Perhaps we can say that these works mark the artistic zero point that has made her later works begin to intervene directly in the empirical reality outside the art room itself, and at the same time make it part of its form. A form that in this case reflects a tension between different "cultural" worlds in society, without letting the work of art resolve its contradictions, or even less reconcile its different forces and interests.
Another example of this is the work WORKHORSES (2015), where Östberg Olsson employed a group of unemployed people who, according to the labor market policy at the time, were considered to belong to Phase 3, that is, the last stage before you become insured. In this work, the unemployed's "job" was to play on state-owned Svenska Spel's Jack Vegas machines, which are sometimes called workhorses among players, wearing T-shirts with the same print. They can pick up its t-shirts in the gallery room. As a gallery visitor, you don't know if this is really going on or not. The only thing you encounter in the exhibition room are the contracts between the participants and the artist; contract detailing the playing schedule, payment agreement and the addresses of the bars where the playing took place. There is also a wardrobe with hangers where the unemployed hang their T-shirts when they are not working. A work that created unpleasant, almost absurd connections and conflicts between the political consequences of the so-called line of work and a game-driven economy.
The game economy is something that is also dealt with in an ongoing project that was started around the same time. On the poster for Your Local Gambler (2014-) you can read: "Become a venture capitalist tonight / you invest you get the profit". By staging, among other things, "drum battles", "burn-out competitions" and "wrestling matches", the psychological mechanisms of gambling addiction are investigated. The artist himself takes on the role of bookmaker and organizer, and the audience is transformed into actors with both the power to end the game and to confirm it, but never the ability to stand outside the work of art. At Moderna Museet Malmö, a "drum battle" is arranged where drummers compete to see who can play the longest. The artist himself goes around the audience and collects the audience's bites in this bet in the name of art, in this allegory of our contemporary economy.
When we put aesthetic judgments into words today, we are not limited to the beautiful and the sublime, that is, the terms that are perhaps primarily associated with the origin of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline; children of both enlightenment and colonial modernity. Often, we instead use words like interesting, thought-provoking, sweet, nice, etc. These reviews lack a strong cathartic function. That is, they are relatively mild, hardly revolutionary or shocking. The reason why terms like these have taken over aesthetic judgment is a complicated story. But one of the reasons is likely that the interest of various avant-garde movements in shocking a bourgeois observer has increasingly come to be associated with an anachronistic heroic masculinity and a capitalist predatory drive where shock and disaster have taken on a constitutive function.
Josefine Östberg Olsson's art breaks this norm. But it is hardly a one-way return. The aesthetic category that means the most to her is goosebumps. A physical reaction she associates with a maxed-out electric guitar riff or a revving V8 engine. But as we have seen, her work does not evoke those kinds of effects directly on the exhibition site, but instead places them as a possibility, 'outside the picture', as in the case of Shift into Racing Strip in the Still of the Night.Unlike many other artists who have worked with the rock'n'roll and motorcycle culture we associate with the origins of youth culture in American films such as Rebel Without a Cause by Nicolas Ray and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, she has neither an exoticizing, ironizing, documenting or critical scrutinizing relation to its way of life, attributes and rituals. Rather, there is an almost factual relationship to this rebel-related culture that Östberg Olsson is a part of and makes use of in his art, as well as an insistence that even if its attributes have been hijacked and deradicalized, it still carries an ability to hiss and take place even in contexts where it usually does not belong. Maybe that's why - because her works never give the impression of being solely about the contexts the materials for the works are taken from? A feeling that is reinforced by the titles of the works, often formulated in CAPS.
Text by: Fredrik Svens
Art theorist, Akademin Valand, University of Gothenburg
