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Gallery K, Oslo, February 10 – March 11, 2012

Translated and edited by Michael Holtermann and Kenneth Kiesnoski.

“Climate Confusion Assistance” is a collaboration of two artists, both prominent yet very different in expression and approach. The gallery was transformed using mint-green walls and purple carpet, in addition to custom-made Bless furniture, which are hybrids between design and art, reminiscent of office and gym items. The setting reinforces the impression that the exhibition, “Climate Confusion Assistance,” will live up to its name.

Contact between Melgaard and Bjertnes was first visualized in 2000, when Bjertnes exhibited in Melgaard’s Norwegian Anarchist Faction gallery. There, he attracted attention with his monumental painting of eight teenage girls, which united individual characteristics in a collective identity. The relationship between the two artists resulted later in Bjertnes’ painted portrait of a melancholy Melgaard, which was artistically related to the excellent drawings Bjertnes showed at the exhibition “Happiness of Henry Darger” at Gallery K in 2009.

The dialogue took on a more challenging and intensive character when Bjertnes followed Melgaard’s example and moved to New York last year. They decided to test the potential of collaborative play on paper, based on their different approaches using drawing tools such as charcoal, color pencils, and crayon. The payoff came quickly; when the two exhibited at Maccarone Gallery, New York, it was considered one of the 10 best exhibitions of 2011 by well-known New York Times art critic Roberta Smith.

Although the two work together based on mutual artistic respect, their collaboration is a system with an inherent tension that requires both completely individual expression and the ability to instantly respond to the other’s advances and ideas. The contrast between the playful writer dazzle and decided hand of Melgaard and the exaggerated, plastic-rooted form that characterizes Bjertnes’ repertoire on paper, does not, however, short-circuit the energy of the visual interaction.

Such close-working artistic pairings are not a new phenomenon. Paul Gauguin (a former ghost in Melgaard’s pictorial universe) and Vincent van Gogh shared a utopian moment together, creating a new style in “L’Atelier du Midi” in Arles. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque described themselves as “bound together climbers” in the simultaneous exploration of cubism’s new formal ground. Surrealists’ experiments with so-called “cadavre exquis,” where the same drawing went from artist to artist, was a branch of the same phenomenon.

Artistic duos of greater relevance to Bjertnes and Melgaard would be Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Their collaboration in the mid-80s was also based on a close friendship, and resulted in a revitalization of both their work in their final years. According to their common friend Keith Haring – who was present during some of Warhol and Basquiat’s joint painting sessions in “The Factory” – Basquiat’s energy and impulsivity, transforming visual and verbal elements, served as playful resources for the more emotionally camouflaged Warhol. Self-irony also played a role when the duo posed in boxing outfits on a poster. It was well-rehearsed role play that both referenced the sport’s tradition of ethnic contrasts in the ring and the generational conflict between challenger and defender with which they were associated in the art scene.

“Mannerism Now” is proclaimed on one of the Bjertnes/Melgaard drawings. But this is more than a simple graffito. A part of the joint project has been to work with color photocopies of paintings by leading Mannerist artists such as Agnolo Bronzino, Francesco Parmigianino, and El Greco. Mannerism was long considered a artistic epoch exemplifying decay. With its artificial attitudes, thematic complications, and split character, it represented the diametric opposite to Renaissance-era concepts of harmony. Mannerism’s rehabilitation in art circles occurred parallel to the Modernism’s rebellion against Expressionism and symbolism.

In the show, the deep-pink copy of Parmigianino’s major work, “Madonna with the Long Neck,” becomes subject to a double, drastic intervention (akin to the “modifications” that Melgaard’s predecessor, Asger Jorn, called his transformations of kitsch painting). The overgrown Jesus figure – in Parmigianino’s masterpiece elongated in a position with overtones of a Pietá – with the exception of a foot wiped out in their version. The biblical protagonist is, from Bjertnes’ side, displaced by an almost animal-like face. It’s enclosed by Melgaard’s mask-like outline and wide-open eye-line to render a doubly demonic gestalt.

Bjertnes has even more clearly acquired stylistic lessons of Mannerism in the drawing “Resurrection of Guilt.” It shows a devilish, ejaculating monster, which is a physically distorted physicality in blue, purple, orange, and black crayon, a sexualized, untamed creature with thematic traits that are well known within Melgaard’s tremendous fictions. The latter’s fascination with 16th century artists can perhaps be most clearly traced in the sense of the use of complex style, which echoes in formal exchanges between rugged and sophisticated lines.

The studiousness of Mannerist art also finds a parallel in the  installation elements — the mint-green walls, purple carpet and custom furniture — which the duo’s drawings to play out against. “Climate Confusion Assistance” indeed.

Deep Inside Savannah

Visit the website Deep Inside Savannah.

Folie a Deux/Savannah

Somehow, the video remained unaffected. The discharge of smoke and the strangely familiar flash of light, the indisputable decision made by velocity and propulsion, the splitting of bone and spilling of contents upon impact…. all of these facts failed to dim the soft, flesh colored flickering that issued from the gloss of a distant screen. “I love you,” her voice promised on a looping video tape,stage lights glittering off of a sequined gown that had melted to her leg when she’d accidentally dropped a lit cigarette onto her lap. “Ohhhhhhhh” she whined into a microphone, “Aren’t you happy for me? I love you…” So strange that this moment should remain even as her insides began to pour out in an unfathomable river from her nose and mouth, a tide that seemed to cease and then push forward in time with the ticking of a cooling engine. Flashing back and then forward, processing the past at the same time as she experienced the terminal now. “So weird,” Savannah thought, “like trying to watch three movies all at once!”

How fast it all happened! How accelerated the whole production felt when it sped by from beginning to end without being paused or fast forwarded and then rewound again. “So THIS is who I am!” she thought when she saw the white light of a distant projection booth, its incapacitating and incandescent glow suddenly aimed at her instead of the screen. “What? Which script is this from? I don’t remember this scene…..” She was drifting in and out so quickly that it was hard to tell if she was at the beginning, middle, or end, and it took her a second to process where she was when she heard it: her name, her real name, someone was saying her name. “Stay with me, Shannon!” over and over until she was finally reminded of what she’d done, of the car she’d crashed and the broken nose and the panicked phone call and then finally the gun. The gun!!! A sweeping light as her brain tried to register that voice, howling and animal and begging her to hold on because help was coming! “Don’t leave me, help is coming! Shannon! Savannah? Don’t leave me!”.

She felt a strange static electricity as her wires crossed; there was a broadcast that was finally flickering in…. Something from very far away, something from some years before, a voice that said “You’re beautiful, I want you, you’re beautiful,” in a low voiced whisper that she always knew would be gone just when she’d come to expect it (where was everybody always going to without her?). Such a distance between both voices and no time left to cover it, only the words she’d said standing at a podium and glistening in a rainbow of light and sequins. “I want to thank all the critics who voted for me, and all the ones who didn’t……I love you,” she told them, “and if you don’t love me, I’m sorry!”

Lights out.

December 8, 2011. Visit website, click here.

Bjarne is a gangsta’ kool kat, he has a rough Norwegian accent too, sounds like Ahhnnohld Schwarzenegger.

There’s Bjarne and his friend Rich Munson with Alissa Bennett (one of the beautiful women of Luxembourg + Dayan Gallery).

3. This is Sverre Bjertnes, he’s Norwegian, he’s a friend of Bjarne’s, he’s draws beautiful pictures and he’s doing a collaboration show with Bjarne- check him out at White Columns in March of  ’12.

4. This picture isn’t finished, but I like it already.

5. I really like his studio, it’s grand and grunge and gangsta’ all at once.

6. This is a collaboration between Bjarne and Sverre.

7. Collaboration works on paper, really beautiful ones.

8. It’s love hate here, see where it says “Any social construction is a prison,” funny, man, that’s what I’ve been thinking all week.

9. Don’t tell me you don’t like it.

10. It’s signed by both artists, what is it? Oh, I know, it’s a marsupial on crystal meth morphing into a racehorse, of course!! Why didn’t I see it immediately?!

11. Bjarne as Walter E. Kurtz (Brando) in Apocalypse Now- it’s gripping.

12. Get it?

13. Great text.

14. Wow, look, there’s a portrait of Alissa Bennett herself… comely.

15. There she is again… shapely.

16. This is Bjarne’s big painting.

17. This is what I felt like part of this week as I was blogged by the art mob.

18. Nice lips on that doggie, it’s a strong image.

19. There’s more, and it’s consistent.

20. I like this one, too.

21. Read the painting: “The price of hating others is loving yourself less.”

By ROBERTA SMITH, New York Times

Published: December 16, 2011

You can complain all you want about the art-world money-go-round and the celebrity circus spinning in its widening gyre. Prices are up; so are mentions of Art Basel Miami on Page Six. Artworks seem only to get bigger and shinier, and spectacle — participatory or not — is becoming the new normal at museum exhibitions of contemporary art. Note the record crowds lining up to gawk at Maurizio Cattelan’s career immolation at the Guggenheim or whiz down Carsten Höller’s tubular slide at the New Museum.

The year was full of dismaying sights, as the art world kept jumping the shark. Who can forget Francesco Vezzoli’s dreadfully slick, churchlike installation at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea in February? Who can remember? There’s been so much sludge under the bridge since then. Art and life imitated each other in countless, sometimes hair-raising ways. Not least: At this year’s Venice Biennale the oligarchic yachts moored outside the Giardini were answered from within by a huge upturned military tank. It was the most ostentatious element in the extremely expensive, and thus institutionally dependent, institutional critique offered by Allora & Calzadilla at the American pavilion.

And yet there were also close encounters with artworks past and present in all mediums for which to be deeply grateful. I was mostly in New York, which — despite the booming success of the Hong Kong art fair, a wealth of interesting-sounding exhibitions in Europe (especially London) this fall and the multifaceted curatorial triumph of “Pacific Standard Time” in and around Los Angeles — remains the art capital where the greatest number of people participate in the largest, most random multi-tiered scene. There is certainly more art in New York’s museums, galleries, alternative spaces and outlying artist-run showplaces than any one person can see, much less digest.

Hats off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the extraordinary cultural revelation of its new and expanded Arab Lands galleries and to the Museum of Modern Art for its once-in-a-lifetime de Kooning retrospective, memorializing an artist who never stopped trying in a show that never lets us down. The Modern also deserves our thanks for continuing to aerate its permanent collection with artists previously absent from its overly compact version of art history.

In addition there was the Whitney’s retrospective of Glenn Ligon’s serene but barbed art; the New Museum’s summation of Lynda Benglis’s subversive sculptural tendencies, as well as “Ostalgia,” its examination of recent art from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. At MoMA PS1 antic videos by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, screened among their equally antic assemblages of Ikea furniture, felt alive and of the moment.

Around the time of Occupy Wall Street, Creative Time convened “Living as Form” at the Essex Street Market, showing how artists are stretching their work into the social realm. Not everything in it qualified as art, but that wasn’t the point. Society needs all the creative thinking it can get, and artists are a prime resource. My favorite display documented Park Fiction, an artist-led effort in Hamburg, Germany, that managed to have riverside property slated for development rezoned as a park by, in essence, “performing” picnics and other recreational activities on its turf. Elsewhere Performa 11 delivered two knockouts: Liz Magic Laser’s “I Feel Your Pain” and Ragnar Kjartansson’s “Bliss.”

Then there were the small for-profit institutions, also known as commercial galleries, presenting new work by artists of all ages, filling in art-historical gaps and fomenting imaginative group shows.

The notable historical efforts included Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse Walter years at Gagosian; the revelatory survey of Picasso’s truly most significant other, Georges Braque, at Acquavella Galleries; Romare Bearden’s historic collages at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery; Jack Smith’s films and photographs at Gladstone Gallery; and the Pace Gallery’s homage to de Kooning’s figurative impulses. You can still catch the extraordinary selection of medieval panel paintings that the London dealer Sam Fogg has brought to Richard L. Feigen & Company on the Upper East Side (through Jan. 27).

Outstanding gallery group shows included “La Carte d’Après Nature,” Thomas Demand’s meditation on art about nature at Matthew Marks. At Luxembourg & Dayan “Unpainted Paintings” assembled works by 32 artists who declined to rest on that medium’s laurels.

Exceptional was “After Shelley Duvall ’72 (Frogs on the High Line),” organized by Bjarne Melgaard at Maccarone as a bookend to “Baton Sinister,” his obstreperous exhibition, with his students, at the Venice Biennale. At Maccarone, Mr. Melgaard’s collaborations continued, most impressively with Omar Harvey and Sverre Bjertnes, while several outsider artists were added to the mix. This furious, scenery-chewing conflagration of the political, the sexual and the formal pushed the curatorial envelope in all directions.

In the galleries artists at midcareer or beyond presented stellar work, starting with Christian Marclay’s prodigious, time-telling splice-fest, “The Clock,” which enthralled audiences at the Paula Cooper Gallery (and later at the Venice Biennale). There was also David Hammons’s aggressive articulation of painting’s pictorial effects into real space at L&M Arts; Ellsworth Kelly’s continuing refinement, in subtly bulked-up reliefs, of black and white at Matthew Marks; Kara Walker’s big, bold new drawings at Sikkema Jenkins; and David Salle’s latest paintings at Mary Boone, which reprised earlier motifs and strategies with such verve and conviction that they felt new. Metro Pictures provided a nearly 40-year retrospective of the local hero B. Wurtz, whose delicate assemblies of ephemeral materials just say no, with wonderful poetry, to the costly materiality and outsize scale of so much contemporary art.

Several impressive debuts include David Adamo’s sculpturally astute installation at Untitled; Jason Polan’s impromptu drawings at Nicholas Robinson; Anna Betbeze’s shaggy-rug paintings at Kate Werble; and the entrancing landscape drawings of the British artist Tom Fairs (1925-2007) at KS Art.

After all is said and done, I can only say: We get to live through this, a time when people continue to make art that isn’t missed until it arrives, an unbidden and suddenly essential gift.