Tom Friedman (född 1965) är en amerikansk konceptuell konstnär som fick sitt stora genombrott i början av 1990-talet. Sedan dess har Friedman vunnit internationellt erkännande ifrån såväl publik som kritiker och hans karriär har kantats av soloutställningar på bland annat South London Gallery, London; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago samt konstbiennalen i São Paulo.

Curator: Richard Julin

”Green Demon”, 2008
Expanderande cellplast och blandteknik, 231 x 109 x 91 cm

”Original Sin”, 2008
Garn och spik, 142 x 259 cm

”Untitled”, 1990
Ståltråd, varierande mått

”Untitled”, 1989
Tandkräm, 111 x 93 cm

”Untitled”, 1990
Toalettpapper, 13 x 10 x 10 cm

”Vanishing Point”, 2006
Fotogravyr, 107 x 100 cm

”Monster Fly”, 2008
Plast, hår, ståltråd, damm, trä och färg, fluga: 1.3 x 2 x 0.8 cm man: 0.7 x 0.7 x 2 cm

”Untitled”, 1996
C-tryck, manipulerat fotografi, 8 x 11 cm

”Untitled”, 1997
Lera, hår, fiskelina och färg, 13 x 10 x 2 cm

”Untitled”, 2008
Träpluggar, kuddstoppning och färg, 127 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm

”Monster Collage”, 2008
Anatomibilder, fotografi på papper, 345.4 x 304.8 cm

”Milkbone”, 2008
Pappkartonger och papper, 91 x 139 x 31 cm

”Untitled”, 1995
Läkemedelskapsel och Play-Doh, 0.6 x 1.9 x 0.6 cm

”Nobody”, 2002
Konstruktionspapper, 167.5 x 25 x 66 cm
Inlån ifrån Fondazione Prada, Milan

”Open Black Box”, 2006
Svart konstruktionspapper, 348 x 348 x 348 cm

”Untitled”, 1995
Bläckstråleutskrift på papper, 28 x 22 cm

”Alphabet”, 2008
Blyertspenna på papper, 107 x 94 cm

”Caveman”, 2006
Lambda-tryck, 99 x 71 cm

”Untitled”, 2004
Färgpenna, grafit och kol på papper, 86 x 99 cm
Inlån ifrån Donald B. Marron / Lightyear Capital, New York

”Hollow Man Offering Nothing To No One”, 2008
Ugnsfolie, glitter och klister, 167.5 x 61 x 96.5 cm

”I’m Not Myself”, 2008
Bläckstråleutskrifter på papper, 156.8 x 156.8 x 16.5 cm

”REAM”, 2006
Animerad film av 500 bläckteckningar

”Untitled”, 2009
Färgpenna på papper, 162,6 x 162,6 cm

”Untitled”, 2001
Handgjorda bin, 0,6 x 1,3 x 2 cm

”Up In the Air”, 2009
Blandteknik, varierande mått

All verk inlånade av Tom Friedman såvida annat ej anges.

ARTIST TALK MED TOM FRIEDMAN

FREDAG 5 FEBRUARI KL 16

Chefsintendent Richard Julin samtalar med Tom Friedman om hans konstnärskap och arbetet med utställningen ”Up in the Air” på Magasin 3. Samtalet är på Engelska.

SPECIALVISNING AV ”UP IN THE AIR”

TORSDAG 11 MARS KL 18

Chefsintendent Richard Julin guidar genom utställningen “Up in the Air” med Tom Friedman.

Interview with Tom Friedman by curator Richard Julin in relation to the exhibition (pdf)

Richard Julin: The oldest piece of yours in the show at Magasin 3 is Untitled, (Toothpaste applied to the wall, 1989). How do you feel about that work today, twenty years later?

Tom Friedman: I have shown this piece many times. It’s a necessary work in a grouping of works that have to do with my history. It represents my beginning, and I grow from this point. It’s a point of reference.

RJ: I know you’ve been inspired by Sol LeWitt and I like to think of his Wall Drawings in relation to the above-mentioned work of yours. Is Sol LeWitt still someone you think about in relation to your recent artistic practice? Has your relationship to his art changed over the years?

TF: Yes, but it’s more archetypal. It’s not a conscious inspiration. It’s a parallel investigation that has to do with the immediate experience of the thing and how that thing affects the viewer.

RJ: The brand new work Up In The Air was made with this show in mind. I recall walking around our spaces with you, planning this show and you totally lit up when entering our exhibition space downstairs. Immediately you started describing this piece, as though you’d had it in mind and were hoping for a space that could harbor your idea.

TF: I have been thinking about open systems. A way of expanding people’s focus. This open space presented to me an opportunity to explore this idea. Initially I thought of constructing a variety of objects that would hover, suspended close to the ceiling, but decided to present the objects spaced within the viewers space, to expand their sense of space.

RJ: From the different things we discussed when you came to Stockholm the first time and later on in your studio, the new piece Up In The Air seems to be at least two things in parallel: a sort of summary of your art practice to this point, including art historical references and almost an encyclopedia of ideas for the audience; at the same time a comment on the current state of the Western world. Are these observations in line with your thoughts and intentions?

TF: If one followed the progression of my artwork one would notice that it is very disparate. Although the alchemy of material exploration is somewhat a focus, the real focus is an exploration of space. Disparate ideas and the form these disparate ideas can take is what I am interested in. The thought is that to construct a specific point of focus, and another that is conceptually distant from the first creates an interesting phenomenon.

RJ: Do you have a favorite piece in “Up In The Air”?

TF: My favorite piece is a butterfly that is actually a cutout of a Damien Hirst print. I participated in a show that Damien and Bono from U2 created for the Red Auction. Bono sent me an Ipod, and Damien sent me a print, as a thank-you. While I was working on, “Up In The Air,” I had a studio visit with Simon DePeury and wanted him to cut out the butterfly. He was reluctant, possibly because of legal reasons, and so I cut it out. Also, I asked Simon to bring something I could put in “ Up in the Air”. He brought one of his gavels, which is placed in the exact center of the piece. Although the piece has no specific form, there are some rules to its installation, and one is that the gavel goes in the exact center of the installation.

RJ: The word “patience” comes to mind when I think of your art. First of all your work is so well crafted and very often clearly must take a huge amount of time to create. Is the artistic process for you divided between ideas and craft or is the period of making the artworks a fluid process for you that changes the outcome of your pieces?

TF: Because each of my works seems so specific it gives the impression that the piece flows seamlessly from an original intention. It is actually a very convoluted path from its beginning to its resolution. I struggle to find a certain clarity in each piece. The amount of labor involved in my work fluctuates from piece to piece and is dictated by the ideas and my specific working process with each piece. Maybe from the outside it seems like patience, but for me it is just a means to an end. It’s something I have to do.

RJ: In relation to patience I also think that you in a sense hope for patience from your viewers. How is your relation to the viewer of your art? Is it important to you to “direct” viewers toward specific thoughts in your work?

TF: I am interested in the full spectrum of possibilities, drawing on my discoveries of these possibilities as a way to slow the viewer’s experience. Art, for me, is a context to slow the viewer’s experience from their everyday life in order to think about things they haven’t thought about. Or to think in a new way.

RJ: In the process of creating the exhibition at Magasin 3 it has become clear to me that you are very interested in the curatorial process and acutely aware of space, the way artworks relate to each other and how these matters create meaning. Do you think of “exhibitions” in general – of your art in groups of works?

TF: When I produce a body of work it is always made for a specific space.

I gather as much information as I can about this context and proceed to merge this context with my ideas. I am very particular about the relationships between the pieces. I don’t think about the construction of meaning. I think about creating a catalyst for thinking. Meaning is too concrete. I want the viewer to think in different ways. I want to propose an on-going process of investigation with no conclusions.

Richard Julin is Chief curator at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.

The interview was made in December 2009.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Tom Friedman at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall (pdf)

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts: but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” (Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626)

The world is tumultuous and unpredictable, rife with violence and also filled with hope and possibility. New discoveries, modes of thinking, and technologies expand the boundaries of what and how we know. Religion, politics, science, philosophy, business, and art intersect, sometimes with great friction. Wars rage on and disruption lurks around every corner. Extreme opulence and extreme poverty co-exist, as some enjoy abundance to the point of waste, while others barely subsist. Economic over-extension has led to a dramatic and precipitous bubble bursting, plunging the previously prosperous into bankruptcy and despair. What are our values? What will endure? When, if ever, will prosperity and stability return?

Such was the state of the world in the early 17th century in Europe, as the Thirty Years’ War (really, a series of wars, that went on for more than three decades) raged on until the Peace of Westphalia brought it to an end in 1648 (…other wars would ensue, of course). The “tulip mania,” an economic bubble brought on by the speculative market in tulip bulbs resulted in financial ruin for once prosperous Holland when it peaked in 1637. Religious and political tensions wracked all of Europe. And through it all, some of the most important artistic and intellectual advances emerged. These were the times that brought us Shakespeare’s plays, Sir Francis Bacon’s philosophy, Rubens’ massive religious and political paintings, Caravaggio’s radical vision of faith rooted in the mundane, Bernini’s ecstatic and noble sculptures, the classical restraint of the French artists Lorrain and Poussin, the triumph of everyday life painting and the still life in Holland, and ultimately the poetic, preternatural calm of Vermeer, who was born as the “tulip mania” hit and war raged. Art has always thrived in times of conflict, and survived periods of boom and bust, responding to new challenges and new moments with fresh answers in the form of new subjects, techniques, and ways of experiencing it. Innovation has never been in short supply.

Arguably, such is the state of the world today. And like the great artists and thinkers before him, Tom Friedman faces difficult times and difficult questions with a keen eye, a skeptic’s distance, and, thankfully, an extremely healthy sense of humor. He is an artist with a philosopher’s bent. Without irony, he recently remarked (in the context of a talk at a museum showing his work), “I make things and the art context is where they belong. If there were another context they could go there.” He articulates that he is interested in making art that draws attention to the processes of looking and his works clearly reflect this.

Friedman asks fundamentally philosophical, and specifically epistemological, questions about how we know what we know, and by extension, how we see what we see or perceive what we see. His aim, in his words, is to “slow down the process of looking,” precisely because we live in a world of information overload. Perhaps human experience has always accommodated intellectual and sensory overload. Our postmodern world has its own endless military conflicts and various tulipesque manias: the stock market crash of 1988, the dot-com bubble of the mid- and late 1990s, the subprime mortgage crisis (and related, concomitant on-going crises) unleashed in 2008. Now, however, these crises are documented and communicated by a 24-hour news cycle with global and instantaneous reach and seem to be a different animal altogether.

It is this current context of cultural static and strife that nourishes Friedman’s drive to question and to create. The two are inseparable within his process. Fortunately, Friedman directed his considerable intellectual and imaginative resources toward the discipline of art, but he could just as easily have become a magician (a childhood hobby), a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, a musician, a comedian. He pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, and as a practitioner of over twenty years he brings these realms of inquiry to bear on his work. His has a rigorous and supple mind, and his stance is that of a not-entirely-amused outsider.

Up in the Air, Tom Friedman’s new work that debuts at Magasin 3 on the occasion of an exhibition by the same name, takes the form of an enormous still life. It is the centerpiece of an exhibition that showcases Friedman’s extremely varied production. Friedman’s oeuvre celebrates diversity of form and materials, and resists easy categorization. He is at once a sculptor, a draughtsman, a painter, a photographer, a participant in “new media,” and a conceptual artist. His materials tend to be drawn from the mundane and the familiar, and are then transformed by Friedman’s “mad scientist” imagination. He makes works that are dazzling in their technical skill and discipline, while seemingly simple or straightforward. He has a magician’s love for sleight of hand and the trickster’s impulse to remind us that things are not what they seem. Friedman’s works invite questions about what is real, about how we see. They beg questions that are sometimes benign and gentle, and sometimes menacing, and often these notes are struck within the same works.

Both Up in the Air (the work of art) and “Up in the Air” (the exhibition) invite the viewer into Friedman’s uniquely complex world where science, popular culture, dreams/nightmares, fantasies, fears, politics, and humor coexist. They are not neatly or antiseptically separate, but rather experienced all at once. The new work, Up in the Air, is Friedman’s response to the financial collapse that engulfed the international community at the end of 2008. It is, as he articulates it, an artwork that explores the notion of the “open system,” as opposed to a closed system (which his artistic practice has also considered). Friedman appropriates these notions from the laws of thermodynamics and applies them within the realm of art and the experience of viewing. An “open system” continuously interacts with its environment, whereas a “closed system” does not. Up in the Air celebrates the idea of the open system, as it is a potentially infinite installation, limited only by the all too familiar mandates of time and space. The objects that together create the work are all handmade, a notion which defies our expectations. Since it is suspended from the ceiling, literally floating on air, this assemblage is at once a kind of giant collage and a brilliant riff on the great tradition of trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) painting. Also, Friedman’s choice to make a complex, multi-faceted work that engages the ceiling invokes predecessors as varied as Michelangelo, Mantegna, Le Brun, Tiepolo, Delacroix, and Duchamp (with whom he has the most in common), among others.

Friedman’s operatic ceiling is not a painted illusion, but rather a joyously cacophonous celebration of the stuff and the “thingness” of everyday materials. He employs all manner of objects, all laboriously handmade in his Western Massachusetts studio. They are variously abstract and representational, literal and metaphoric. His subject matter is all that is relevant to our time, and specifically to American (and/or Western) consumer culture. Friedman admits an obsessive relationship to complexity, and our ambitiously consumerist culture is the kind of open system that fascinates him. He employs a scientific methodology of modeling (both through drawing and an almost zen-like meditative practice to imagine how the objects will behave in space), particularly when his subject is a complex system. He creates without judgment, however, and employs a kind of “equal opportunity” playfulness, even when the objects he creates have sinister associations. Offsetting the grimness of objects that signify death or fascism or oppression (all of which play a role in Up in the Air) he juxtaposes them with objects or experiences that express levity.

Unlike his Renaissance and Baroque predecessors in the history of art, however, Friedman does not submit to hierarchies of scale. The tiny and the gargantuan are of equal importance in his works, and he moves between these scales with ease. Postmodernity is a knotty landscape and an occasion for Friedman’s unique brand of irreverence and revelry. While the still life painters of 17th century Holland purveyed abundant images of luxury goods that so often depicted bouquets of hotly desired tulips, to bourgeois patrons as trophies for domestic decoration, Friedman embraces the ordinary, even the abject. His uncanny ability to create technically perfect simulacra of commercial goods (foodstuffs, sporting goods, clothing, furniture, medical equipment, light bulbs, cigarettes, etc.) links him to a great tradition of illusionism in art, but he re-creates rather than representing.

There is also an overt wittiness inUp in the Air, found in the preponderance of objects that literally require being “up in the air” to function and signify as intended: clouds, birds, balls (tennis, basketball, beach), hot air balloon, spaceship – specifically the USS Enterprise, of “Star Trek” fame (NCC-1701). In this regard, Friedman signals the specificity of his own time and experience, as an American man born in 1965 who came of age within a particular cultural climate and context. References to popular culture, particularly to television, music, and consumer goods are transparent and unapologetic. There is universality, too. Words appear as single statements: “lies”, “bang” (complementing the inclusion of a 3-dimensional gun elsewhere in the work), and as jumbled assemblages that are difficult to decipher. Language is an abiding theme in Friedman’s work (he once made an artwork consisting of writing every word in the English dictionary). And he is equally compelled by symbols that are fraught with political and cultural baggage: the cross, the swastika, the Star of David, the gravestone, the symbol for yin and yang, photographs of tyrants and dictators. Objects that evoke pure geometry play a supporting role. All of these signifiers hang together, literally, and invite us to try to take them all in at once.

Up in the Air is a meditation on the very idea of representation and, accordingly, of visual and cognitive experience, for it can be perceived as a whole and as individual objects. Caution tape and orange cones suggest that we should proceed carefully in our looking. The field of vision is fraught with minefields of various kinds and Tom Friedman is never content to communicate on one level alone. Against the literalness of the stuff that hangs above is a discourse about representation itself. In his “ court jester” mode, Friedman self-reflexively invokes the processes of representation, as he includes photographs of groups of objects within the array of things being displayed. Likewise, he invokes references to his own past artworks and to the materials of art making (a paint brush, his beloved material Styrofoam); as well as extremely witty references to his peers in the contemporary art world (Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, with their signature, iconic images of the balloon dog and butterfly, respectively). Even the modern master Matisse gets a nod as Friedman creates his own Matisse-y cutout, which he has titled “Icarus,” after the mythical figure who disregarded his father’s warnings about limits. Icarus escaped the labyrinth, took flight on wings made of wax, and flew too close to the sun. The wings melted, plunging him into the sea. In a multi-layered wink, Friedman’s Matisse-inspired Icarus hangs close to a print of the Brueghel painting by the same name , which was a source of inspiration for modern poets William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden. The Brueghel image in turn is physically and visually in dialogue with a propeller hat (another sort of flying object) and a rock (a reminder of gravity’s force). This rich web of references and associations reaches across time and cultural contexts with a universal reminder that we are always “up in the air.” The only certainty in the journey of life is uncertainty: we can count only on change and volatility. At same time, Friedman’s work reminds us that if we let go of the illusion of stability and embrace the firmament of the imagination, great realms of liberation and dynamism are possible.

In Up in the Air, nothing is out of bounds, everything is within the artist’s sights. This new work is a culmination for Tom Friedman who has spent his career investigating the ways that human beings perceive themselves in time and space. Friedman’s art is decidedly of our time (the 17th century did not, alas, enjoy the wonders of “Cap’n Crunch” cereal), but it is also universal in its questions: “who are we, what do we need, what do we believe, what do we contribute, where is it going?” Like Sir Francis Bacon four centuries before him, Friedman’s approach is methodical, rigorous, unrelenting. His artwork resonates with centuries-old aesthetic and intellectual traditions. His artistic mission is always to observe and invent, to delve into uncertainty, to look for meaning. Tom Friedman respects his viewers’ intelligence too much to provide easy answers, but he does us the service of inviting us to look, to question, to discover, to wonder, to embrace the uncertainty and the contingencies of everyday life.

/Charlotte Eyerman

About the author: Charlotte Eyerman lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She is a Director at Gagosian Gallery and previously held curatorial positions at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She was on the faculty at Union College and has taught at Art Center College of Design and the University of Southern California. She has published and lectured extensively on modern and contemporary art, and has curated numerous exhibitions, including “Tom Friedman: REAM,” “Doug Aitken: Migration Empire,” “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” and “Courbet and the Modern Landscape,” among many others. She received a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California at Berkeley. Serendipitously, like Tom Friedman, she was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1965.