When was the last time I saw this? Men in their prime, daring to address their own corporeal weaknesses without self-pity.
It is no “female” confessional art. However, two unusual exhibitions, by Magnus Wallin and Ulf Rollof, at the new gallery complex on Hudiksvallsgatan, use the artists’ own pain as starting-points. Completely without the kind of reality-boasting that is universally prescribed at the moment.
At first Magnus Wallin (Galerie Nordenhake) seems low-key. The gallery space is a well-lit functionalistic box, and the hanging is light and sparse. In the past, this video artist has made animations dealing with issues of normality/abnormality, putting together frantic narratives about the cult of beauty and normative aesthetics. His stories have resembled computer games, and it has been evident that his experiences of oppression have been informed by a minor disablement.
But this time he is quietly homeing in on the very physical defect that has hitherto been his internal engine. The stunted hand becomes an elegant cloven hoof, made of silvery aluminum. Useful as a handle—but it has also been transformed into something diabolical. Or are the hooves alluding to a sacrificial lamb?
The title of the work is “Once upon a time”, and like the fairytales, Magnus Wallin’s sculptures are about transformation. They’re still uncanny, because they touch on the same subjects of supression and submission as his earlier videos. But they’ve been instilled with a simplistic beauty, which the artist has extracted from the very oppressive aesthetics that his works attack.
It’s brilliant. I think of trophies. The stirrups, “Sport”, are yawning jawbones, made of polished bronze. The wastebasket with a plastic bag is a rib cage basket. The exquisite bracket lamp is a woman holding a scalp to the light.
Victorian interiors often “tamed” felled wild animals. Lamps on tripods made of hooves, inkpots made of paws, rugs with bears’ heads … An interior made with parts of human skeletons may not be all that far off. But it is a bold move. Magnus Wallin runs the risk of becoming propagandistic.
But he is not. It has to do with the clear shapes of the objects, and his self-searching attitude, which is the opposite of self-pity.
In the back room there’s a video in which the artist, wearing a funnel on his head, is doing strange things on a table, on top of a naked, kneeling man. The scene brings to mind anatomical dissection tables, the kind we’ve seen portrayed in art ever since the Renaissance, where the patient, or the corpse, serves science and its thirst for knowledge. But what is Magnus Wallin doing in the video? He is breaking eggs and baking fig leaves, which are used to cover the pictures of an anatomical textbook. He is the scientist in his laboratory. He is the Renaissance artist in his studio. He also resembles a Dadaist, or Paul McCarthy, going about his ritualistic and absurdistic sticky business.
But first and foremost, he is Magnus Wallin, seeking the truth, but also concealing it, in a long artistic tradition of confusion and inquisitiveness.
—Ingela Lind
(Translated by Niclas Nilsson)