Roger Andersson, Letters from Mayhem,
with text by Albert Mobilio (Cabinet Books, New York, 2005)
There is no doubting the quality of Roger
Andersson's draughtsmanship in his new book Letters from
Mayhem: it is confident, beguiling, and occasionally inventive.
The book consists of illustrations incorporating each letter
of the alphabet within an imaginary landscape of Scandinavian
flora, discarded packaging and anonymous 'youths' - somewhere
between wasteland and wonderland. Their aqueous tone and precision
draws on a few precursors, not least Albrecht Dürer and
Lucas van Leyden who, rather like Andersson, "inserted
comments on sex, politics and commerce into illustrations of
religious stories and folklore." (press
release, Sarah Meltzer Gallery) One might also detect,
in the pictorial elaboration of the capital letters, traces
of medieval manuscript illumination, although here 'illumination'
is treated, unsurprisingly, with some irony.
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| Roger Andersson, Letters From
Mayhem, S, 2003, watercolor on paper, 35 x 35
cm; image held here |
Drawing upon the minutiae of teenage
kicks, heavy metal, fairy tales and cartoons, Andersson's alphabetic
commentary makes nostalgic allusions to the romantic decadence
of lost youth and its vague libidinal longings. However, neither
precise draughtsmanship nor prestigious reference can save this
garden of vices from all too easily becoming walled in by its
own platitudes and clichés: a place where hallucination
stands for profundity, vapours for spirit, and where poetry,
such as Albert Mobilio looks for in his accompanying texts,
is mistakenly thought to result from the facile ornamentation
of decay.
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| Roger Andersson, Letters From
Mayhem, 2004, Cabinet Books, New York; image held here |
Perhaps all this ponderous navel-gazing
is employed by Andersson to articulate some sense of adolescent
confusion and ruin. Certainly, the drug culture which develops
from this confusion is sometimes blind to its situation, constructing
an elaborate metaphysics of irresponsibility and conspiracy
in order to prolong the bad faith of infantile freedoms. But
from time to time this potentially ruinous situation has also
carried the political weight of counter-culture. As Walter Benjamin
noted long ago, "the true foundation of impertinence is
the childŐs displeasure that it cannot conjure"; that is
to say, the frustration that the child experiences when the
full potential of 'conjure' - to plot, swear together, play
tricks, and most importantly, the capacity to evoke or imagine
how life might otherwise be lived - is diminished by the schedules
and structures of adulthood. If this bond between impertinence
and the desire to conjure is broken, the former also diminishes
in meaning and potential, thus consigning to irrelevance the
insolent rebellion of those who do not belong.
Perhaps this shift from rebellion to
irrelevance is as simple as the displacement of a letter: here,
letters do not form mayhem but come from it - and thus mayhem
makes its exit.
 |
| Roger Andersson: Letters from
Mayhem, D, 2003, watercolor on paper, 35 x 35
cm; image held here |
Even if it is now the case that the
subversive content of recreational drug-use has been, by and
large, commercially recuperated by a cynical market eager to
promote the spectacle of consumer hedonism, Andersson cannot
articulate the complexities that have led to this situation
because of the uniform and often trite manner by which he approaches
his subject. Where Andersson might well have put his talents
at the service of remembering this past content, instead his
repeated format fragments the act of remembrance, seals its
remnants within a hermetic environment, washes them over with
nostalgia, and so reduces them to the same weightless irrelevance
throughout. In doing so, he makes a gimmick of the 'great squandering
of oneŐs own existence' that is teenage delinquency, even when
he attempts to present it as a Lord of the Flies-like
return to superstition, brutality and ignorance. No doubt the
latter is sometimes the case, but had Andersson been more attentive
to his subject, he might have noticed that this 'great squandering'
is also akin to the experience of being in love, and more importantly
for us here, that of poetic imagination.
Tim Stott
is a critic living in Dublin.
Do you have an opinion on this article? If so, please click
| Responses so far |
| Comment 1 |
this tim stott is quite a good writer, i've read a number of
his reviews... but does he see ANY hope of a successful
artwork? is he ever approving?
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| Comment 2 |
A Critic's Response to Just Criticism
I have recently been asked (indirectly) if I see any hope of
a successful artwork and therefore any grounds for writing
something approving. The short answer is: Yes; and I would
advise my anonymous critic to read more of the reviews I
have written on this website, where there may be found
approving comments aplenty. The longer answer does not
admit of a simple Yes/No answer. Below are a few thoughts
on the criteria for 'success' and an attempt to answer the
charge of being 'disapproving'.
Perhaps the first criterion of 'success' is that a work
engages one on some level. Without this primary engagement
one cannot play the game of art, and, strictly speaking,
there can be no work to criticise. So, in a sense, most of
the works that I have written about have been successful,
as far as I am concerned, otherwise I would not have
written about them (perhaps my critic already knows this
but it is very difficult to write about something in which
one has no interest whatsoever; although sometimes one has
no choice).
This first criterion is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for 'success' - there must be more. Having
engaged with a work one can then begin to play. This
emphasis on play should not be understood as a
trivialisation of art. All the description of art as play
tells us is that art only 'happens' under certain
extraordinary conditions which must be adequately
understood by all parties involved. So, a further, more
specific, criterion of success is that a work plays, and
plays well - i.e. that it understands the rules of
the game and makes an imaginative, innovative response to
them within the specific limits of its constituent media.
The next criterion is the extent to which the fiction that
is art corresponds to the other great fictions of our world
and the current state of affairs in which they are
organised. This is not so much a question of truth as one
of relevance. This correspondence is rarely direct
or straightforward, and, of course, there are limits; but
still, art can, sometimes, loosen the hegemonic grip that
other descriptions have upon the things of our world, thus
de-naturalising these descriptions and opening them up to
creative imagination. In turn, if it is not to have too
tight a grip upon its own description, art must understand
its own internal contradictions - it can never be
self-evident or self-justifying.
Now, if art were contradictory in itself then making these
contradictions visible would be a success, but it would
also show that art fails at the very same time that it
succeeds, because it cannot ever agree with itself. Still,
at its best, art can present its own contradictions as
correlates to those of the social milieu in which it takes
place, and it can make indirect demands upon this milieu
through 'wordless gestures' and by maintaining the elusive
dream of something other than what is.
These criteria are by no means exhaustive, and as far as I
can tell I adhere to them no more nor less than one should
adhere to any set of rules. Writing about art can never
give conclusive answers about its puzzling subject, and
must therefore also fail to agree with itself and with
others: but when one considers that in times past one's
failure to answer a riddle was often fatal, artwriting now
gets off rather lightly. Hopefully, this need not lead to
light writing.
So, am I ever approving? Only if a work is successful.
Tim Stott
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