STIG LARSSON & THOMAS NÄSHOLMICKE REPRESENTERANDE MEDDELANDEN19.06.1975

(English translation of the text extracted from the exhibition poster:)

NON-REPRESENTATIVE MESSAGES

This text is not the result of exact knowledge of a problem, but rather of an awareness of its existence.
It is not a theory derived from practice, but a complement to practice itself.

A sign’s cause is what signifies. Or rather, a sign’s cause is to explain.
Because if we do not know everything, we must explain.
Thus arises the story.
The image is a tool for the handicapped — a comfort, even a healing one.
To deny the image as a bearer of information is to deny the will to know, the root of knowledge.
That we do not do.
The sticky pot is the self-evidence of the overindulgent society; to deny this under prevailing circumstances is to remain naïve.
The media producers’ cannibalism defends itself by the victims’ willingness and their worship of the polished surface.

Certainly, one can detect a striving for neutrality.
The relativistic theories of the fin-de-siècle created a game of uncertainty.
One spoke of chains, processes, perhaps coincidences.
One painted willingly empty spaces, gaps, white surfaces.
Everything was simple.
But the absence of Fontana, Reinhardt, Stella, etc. speaks volumes.
“The emperor has no clothes,” cried the children.
Yes, he has mixed together air and matter.
Between Dada-realism’s concrete cut and Van der Velde’s opposites lies an ocean of thought, all summarized in:
“I am not the self I seem to be.
Always a slave, always the representative of an ideology that does not even recognize me as that which speaks of the discrepancy between myself and the world, where I am both the thief and the hero.”
I am an antipoem.

An ideology is born, it dies, it is created and destroyed.
We find ourselves in a kind of middle ground.
We no longer distance ourselves from these private and intimate regions of the artist, but find ourselves increasingly in the public realm.
We use the sluggish, repetitive melody of the radio regulated by the night/day cycle.
Through this, we do not answer the question of historical narrative, which is always labeled as unreliable.
Our practice is more an attempt to find a method than a final answer.
Let us speak, then, of a trailer, since its impact is minimal —
because our practice is more an illustration than something definitive,
because we (our work) still carry traces of bourgeois ego-(ethno)-centrism,
because everything is still under examination.

STIG LARSSON — THOMAS NÄSHOLM
Umeå, March 1975

Thursday, 19 June 1975, 17:00–20:00
Galerie S:t Petri, Fack 7, 221 01 Lund, Sweden