Every Town was Paris Every Day was Sunday Every Month was May Every Sound was Music Johan Zetterquist
Exhibition 30 Nov 2005 – 7 Jan 2006
Rather than exhibiting in a gallery, Johan Zetterquist conquers it. Bright orange paint and intriguing black shapes cover the traditionally immaculate white walls. Inspired by the urban subcultures of punk, heavy metal and street art, the rectangular graphics dissolve in strong drippings and merge the gallery space with that of the city. The private sphere gets the look of the public domain and, in this manner, the artist intends to disrupt the sterilizing character of the ‘white cube’, the invisible contextual bubble that most rooms designed for the showing of art exercise over it. The gallery walls may be unavoidable, may be a surface somehow estranged from the rest of society, but are now at least deprived of its previous embedded assumptions of false institutional neutrality.
Against this background, Zetterquist presents his thought-provoking ‘Proposals for Public Art’: texts, illustrations and scale models that borrow official legislative language, and combine it with an appearance of absurdity to carry out a subtle but unashamed socio-cultural critique. His pieces remind of the kind of project presented to an administrative organism (with it’s titles and subtitles and according visual material), but have the content of a Beckett scene and, even, a hint of joke written on a public toilet; the resulting displacement makes an art that could equally be defined as conceptual, postmodern and poststructuralist.
Similarly to, for instance, Lawrence Weiner’s oeuvre, his works are as much the preceding abstract idea, as it’s written form or, indeed, the implementation of the proposed act. Although Zetterquist does not investigate the practice and nature of art in the way the 60’s did, his is significantly an art of the mind, in which words and the chains of associations that words create in the viewer’s imagination, play the principal role.
If the theory is true and language is certainly the actual origin of human perception and understanding of reality, as much as the generator and reproductive structure of cultures and societies, then Zetterquist attacks the system from the inside, at its basic pillars, democratically proposing – and not imposing – a change of values. Pushing the frontiers of correctness, but never being explicit, his conceptual art aims to change the urban landscape as well as to put into question the collective divisions between what is considered acceptable and unacceptable.
In this respect, his ‘Proposals for Public Art’ flow in two directions. On one hand, works such as Proposal No. 18: Free LSD and Proposal No. 666: A Proposal to Turn Crosses on Church Towers Up-Side-Down seem to mischievously redesign culture according to a different set of values, whilst simultaneously pointing at existing beliefs and hypocrisies in society. The simple words ‘drug’ and ‘church’ create an unavoidable and significant reaction in the visitor’s brain that discloses the degree of socio-cultural charge carried by certain terms.
On another hand, titles that could be taken for an absolute pointless absurdism like Proposal No. 15: Tear Down the Erskine High Rise in the Gothenburg Harbour and Replace it with a Much Much Bigger Copy or Proposal No. 2: Highway Island. A Highway Intersection on an Island Unreachable by Car are actually rather a comment on real-life absurdities as, for example, the unstoppable and sometimes unnecessary over-construction done in the name of a mythicized need of development.
Nevertheless, as Roland Barthes would say, we shall not search for answers in the Author. Already announced by the title of the exhibition (a kitsch line quoted from a random romantic song), Zetterquist’s propositions do not reflect his own real convictions. Or, more important, it is not relevant whether they reflect them or not, but it's cultural connotations and what each individual starts upon them, as well as the personal conclusions that should arise from this experience. In an art world overflowed with the use of violent, shocking or scatological imaginary, the use of intelligent humour and meaningful absurdity arises as surprisingly subversive, as an intellectual art that playfully criticizes the comfortable approval of the status quo while making no concessions to political correctness.
