SEVERAL FRIENDS

The exhibition Several Friends, which opens February 13 in The National Gallery is an attempt to shed light on the important period when formalism gave way to informal values in art. Retrospectively it seems obvious that art based on formalistic principles had run into a certain impasse during the World War II while other values were pressing ahead. This seems evident in the light of American art of the post-war era, with regard to the paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Barnett Newman (1905-1970), the method overshadowing the result in the case of the former and the size of the works threatening the formal emphases in the paintings of the latter.

In middle of the fifties the Japanese Gutai group broke all conventional framework and rule by confirming that the method of Pollock was nearer to the performance than to traditional painting and in 1957 the French painter Georges Mathieu (b. 1921) visited various countries painting in front of an audience in the costume of a samurai. The Italian-Argentinian painter Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) cut and poked his paintings in the fifties calling the result Spatial Concept or Concetto Spaziale and the Frenchman Yves Klein (1928-1962) painted monochromes, showed empty, white exhibition rooms but had guests at the opening drink a blue cocktail which took several days to leave the body. In addition he had living models smear their bodies with blue paint and stamp themselves on the support instead of painting them as his predecessors had done.

It was around 1960, as art therapist Sigríður Björnsdóttir mentions in Hilmar Oddsson’s documentary film on Dieter Roth (1930-1998), that the latter’s visual focus of interest shifted from cosmos to chaos. By then Dieter Roth, a trained graphic designer, had been quite absorbed by optical and kinetic art, mostly based on orderly serial principles, which was a logical continuation of geometrical abstractionism, dominant in Iceland from 1950 to 1955. When he settled in Iceland in 1957, it was a group of artists, poets and writers, centred around the art review Candide, who became his most solid friends. These included Einar Bragi (1921-2005), a poet, translator and an editor, and Hörður Ágústsson (1922-2005), a painter, theoretician on architecture and a graphic designer, who were deeply affected by the young Swiss designer and artist. By then Ágústsson had begun examining abstractionism from the point of serial and optical methods, which were Roth’s main preoccupation in the fifties, as can be seen from the many bookworks he created during his first years in Iceland.

However, Dieter Roth was not the only one to sense the changes in the air, with his works from the end of the fifties the sculptor and architect Jóhann Eyfells (f. 1923) indicated the recession of formal emphasis before a new vision where earth itself and the soil had become an informal mould for his works. At the same time Erró (Guðmundur Guðmundsson, b. 1932) was making himself known in Paris as one of the main representatives of narrative figuration, which was another name given to Pop Art on the Continent, where the emerging society of production and consumption was sarcastically displayed. Erró was supposedly the first painter to turn his back on the aesthetic principles which predominated in Icelandic art and instead focus his attention on the uncouth teeming plethora of the industrial society in a detached cynical way. He was also the first Icelandic artist to stage happenings and performances, in the beginning of sixties, in the wake of these art forms.

Yet informal art does not only target the infrastructure of the artwork but its categorical subdivision as well. From the 18th century drawing was clearly distinguished from painting as painting was from sculpture. Architecture was also a special field, only indirectly connected to draughtsmanship. Around 1960 Moderna Museet in Stockholm purchased Monogram by Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), which is in the form of a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its body which stands proudly on a horizontal platform which happens to be a painting. The classification of paintings and sculptures seemed to be faltering and installations were not far off. Happenings and other time based art, which aforesaid Rauschenberg practiced as a dancer with the company of choreographer Merce Cunningham (b. 1919), or as a stage designer for his works and those of composer John Cage (1912-1992), did not follow any given rules of classification into visual art, dance or music. The Swedish born American sculptor Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) created an exhibition in the form of a store, with e.g. painted plaster sandwiches. The Frenchman Ben Vautier created a small boutique as a work of art, furnished with everything which he had on sale in his shop in Nice and the American happening artist, Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) played his piccolo together with other musicians in his environmental work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. His happenings turned out to be 200 in total, many ending in an unexpected way.         

Magnús Pálsson (b. 1929), a stage designer by profession, did not find beauty nor seriousness appealing elements in visual arts but rather as constraining demands. As one of the founders of the experimental theatre group “Gríma” – Mask – he had one foot in drama and the other in visual arts. Instead of segregating one from the other he did not hesitate to mix them, often in a grotesque manner. That Pálsson’s and Dieter Roth’s paths would cross was inevitable and in 1961 they established the furniture shop “Kúlan” – the Sphere – together with the architect Manfreð Vilhjálmsson, where they attempted to offer the public an original Icelandic design as an alternative to a standardized importation of furniture. Dieter Roth and Pálsson also shared a profound interest in book art as a form of artistic expression.

Jón Gunnar Árnason (1931-1989), a professional machinist, made ashtrays and beer glasses from cut and polished beer bottles, which he sold in Kúlan, while also exhibiting there sculptures, made of units which could be transformed through rearrangement, hence eschewing the formal integrity of the artwork. As Dieter Roth he was fascinated by kinetic art, especially the works by the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991). In 1965 Árnason became one of the founders of SÚM, through participation in the group exhibition SÚM I, together with Hreinn Friðfinnsson (b. 1943), Sigurjón Jóhannsson (b. 1939) and Haukur Dór (b. 1940). Dieter Roth designed the advertisement in a bold fashion, turning it simultaneously into an invitation card, poster and an exhibition catalogue, printed both recto and verso.   

Hreinn Friðfinnsson and Sigurjón Jóhannsson became, together with Arnar Herbertsson (b. 1933) the exponents of Pop Art in the SÚM group. Subsequently Friðfinnsson became one of the foremost representatives of Icelandic conceptual art in the beginning of the seventies, together with the brothers Kristján (b. 1941) and Sigurður (b. 1942) Guðmundsson, who together with Þórður Ben Sveinsson (b. 1945) entered SÚM in 1968 and were decisive in establishing Gallery SÚM, at the same address as the Living Art Museum was later housed as its successor. Kristján Guðmundsson and Þórður Sveinsson were the initiators of conceptual performance, installations and happening in Iceland, while Sigurður Guðmundsson was the first artist to launch a one-man show at the newly established Gallery SÚM. Sculptor Magnús Tómasson (b. 1943), who was among the most enduring exhibitors at the gallery was also the link between Pop Art and Surrealism with his fine and exquisitly rendered small objects, which are often in form of bodily extensions or prosthesis.

If any of the artists who participated in SÚM exhibitions by the end of the sixties were on a par with Dieter Roth in terms of draughtsmanship it was Róska (1940-1996), the first woman to enter the SÚM-group in 1967. Her spontaneous style and virtuosity with the pencil, pen and brush locates her near such explorers of the conscious as Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and André Masson (1896-1987). With Róska the fragmentation of formalistic art in Iceland was announced in the newspapers, creating a generation gap among Icelandic artists.

The same year, 1965 and just before the opening of SÚM I, the first exhibition of the group, Dieter Roth assisted Musica nova, the independent association for modern music in bringing Nam June Paik (1932-2006) and Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) to Reykjavík, where they introduced performance art and happening to an audience of art and music lovers. With her demonstration performance Golden Car, in 1974, Rúrí (b. 1951) inscribed herself firmly into the group of artists who dispensed with old, aesthetic values and adhered to those who sacrificed formal principles for new informal opening while indulging in dialogue with rising stars of the contemporaneous international women movement in art.  

Dieter Roth did not only leave an invaluable artistic legacy in Iceland but also a family, descendants, relatives and friends, who are still coming forth, paying homage to him as their source of inspiration. Björn Roth (b. 1961), whose works can hardly be separated from those of Dieter Roth, is the first among equals to be mentioned. Without Björn Roth’s generous assistance and sense of planning it would probably have been impossible for his father to accomplish everything he did in the last years of his life. It is also important to mention film director Hilmar Oddsson (b. 1957), who accquainted himself deeply with Dieter Roth’s life and opus, before rendering the result outstandingly in his documentary of the artist.
                                                           
                                                                                Halldór Björn Runólfsson