PASSAGE: WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION
20 OCTOBER –9 DECEMBER 2001

PASSAGE - works from the collection, No. 1, 2001

ABSALON
FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES
MONA HATOUM
BRUCE NAUMAN
RÉMY ZAUGG

"I made the selections for this exhibition a few months ago, long before the catastrophe that struck the world on September 11 of this year. The artists participating in "Passage" are all concerned with the darker side of life. Each and everyone of them displays, with remarkable clarity, the fortitude that is required to create the mental and physical space for addressing current and, in many cases, universal questions-the passage that is needed when making art and when encountering it. These magnificent works represent strength and a ray of hope." (David Neuman, Director Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall)

PASSAGE consists of a group of works, in which the artists exhibit, with exceptional clarity, the power required to create both a mental and a physical space in which topical issues may be discussed - a passage required both in the works of the artists and for the viewer. The public will have the opportunity to re-acquaint themselves with works shown in previous exhibitions and see important works by artists who have not previously exhibited at Magasin 3. The curator of PASSAGE is the director of Magasin 3, David Neuman.

PASSAGE is the first in a series of exhibitions which will expose different facets of the Magasin 3 collection, which to date consists of nearly 500 contemporary artworks. The collection is focused on the individual artists who have been presented in Magasin 3Õs exhibitions since 1987.

PASSAGE will inaugurate Magasin 3's new exhibition space, which will increase the total exhibition space by 400 m2 (4,000 sq ft), creating Magasin 3 as Stockholm's largest exhibition space for temporary exhibitions.

CONTENTS:

About the works- quotations by the artists and excerpts of texts about the artworks.

Folder no 2.
4 pages, black and white, not illustrated. Texts in Swedish/English.
Published 2001 by Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.

I made the selections for this exhibition a few months ago, long before the catastrophe that struck the world on September 11 of this year. The artists participating in "Passage" are all concerned with the darker side of life. Each and everyone of them displays, with remarkable clarity, the fortitude that is required to create the mental and physical space for addressing current and, in many cases, universal questions-the passage that is needed when making art and when encountering it. These magnificent works represent strength and a ray of hope. (David Neuman, Director Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall

ABSALON
The volumes are constructed in such a way that despite the relatively small sizes, I will not suffer from lack of space. In their quality, these Cells are more mental spaces than physical ones. As mirrors of my inner life, they will be familiar to me.

The project's necessity springs from the constraints imposed on my everyday life by an aesthetic universe wherein things are standardized, average. This project reflects the calm that I need. I feel its realization to be vital. I would like to make these Cells my homes, where I define my sensations, cultivate my behaviors. These homes will be means of resistance to a society that keeps me from becoming what I must become. All the decisions attendant on their construction have been chosen. I will be happy to live out these choices.

(Béatrice Parent & Angeline Scherf, Absalon, Cellules, Musee d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, 1993)

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES
Gonzalez-Torres describes these pieces as decorations for a party no one came to and as sources of rejuvenation.

These works consist of strings of ordinary light bulbs, which the owner can install in any manner. While the lights evoke a festive mood or spiritual presence, they are also fragile and ephemeral.

"I'm trying to negotiate my position (...) And finally, above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here (...) I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art."

(Pamphlet, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, "Traveling", organized by Amada Cruz, Ann Goldstein and Suzanne Ghez, 1994)

MONA HATOUM
I chose the title Quarters because it suggests a division of town appropriated to or occupied by a special class of people (like Latin quarters or Chinese quarters of a city) - a kind of ghetto where housing is very basic. It also suggests official, institutional lodgings like army quarters or prison quarters. And there is the expression 'drawn and quartered' which refers to a medieval form of torture.

There is also an architectural dimension to this work: with five bunk beds to each unit - looking more like shelves or racks, it is about the sense of people living in layers above one another in urban environments. Environments where uniform, box-like, regimented architecture is provided as accommodation.

This work, like a number of others created between 1992 and 1996, deals with issues of containment and barriers through the use of repeated modules and grid structures, to create a very rigorous and ordered environment. In a lot of these works there is a fascination with the grid, an ordered and rational reality, but it is pushed to such an extreme that it becomes dehumanising and almost fascistic. It is about the will to order and in a sense an order that is imposed by a section of the society that gives orders and wants to shape human beings into containable, controllable entities.

(Mona Hatoum, Stockholm, summer 2001)

BRUCE NAUMAN
Naumans's hanging sculptures are deliberately heavy-handed and refer to the world outside the studio. They are infused with metaphor, dominated as they are by inverted chairs, which serve as explicit surrogates for human victims. (...) these sculptures provide an unmistakable critique of totalitarian regimes (...)

Although Nauman had worked previously with the chair as an abstract form (...) he now had in mind images of electric chairs or chairs in which suspects are seated while being interrogated.

"I thought of using a chair that would somehow become a figure: torturing a chair and hanging it or strapping it down."

(Ed. Joan Simon, Bruce Nauman, Exhibition Catalogue and catalogue raisonne, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1994)

RÉMY ZAUGG
Zaugg: I am convinced that the Middle Ages had a wholly different consciousness of the image than we have today. We have totally different experiences of images. Television images are something different than the Grünewald altar. We gaze into the distance, we sip a whiskey... Now I challenge you to describe a certain image you saw yesterday. Presumably no image remains from all of your yesterday evening spent in front of the television, except one of yourself or your partner, how he or she sat or lay back on the couch. I think that each and everyone that saw in image in a church in the Middle Ages carried it within himself fore a long time. We have to once more reconsider our definition of the image.

Audience: That's easy to do if you put yourself in the place of the image, if you postulate an "I" of the image. Which doesn't work in the case of the television image...

Zaugg: It's important that we learn to draw distinctions. We have a general concept of "images." Under the concept "movies" we can subsume Hollywood as well as Godard. They're all movies, but then there is film and there is film. A pulp fiction novel and a piece by Beckett are to me different, even though both can be called literature. The concept "image" also meant something different in the Middle Ages, or in the 17th century, than it does today. We still use the same word, even though the world is different. This is why we no longer know what we're talking about when we're discussing images. Are we speaking of easel paintings, photographs, television images, video images, graphics, electronic images? And what would it mean if we today had to assume that an image means something different?

Audience: Within art historical writing, one often says today, that essentially everything is an image. Television images reflect the whole history of images, they are the result of composition, etc. One even claims that images created by artists have lost their privileged status. Genuine images are democratic television images.

Zaugg: What can I say about that? The television image relates to a Mondrian like Blick to Max Frisch. The television image is in fact even more demonic. Day in and day out it degrades films to a kind of haphazard irresponsibility. Precisely so. The current image flux is something irresponsible. Imagine that Blick or Bild-Zeitung would print a novel by Beckett together with inserted ads for cauli flower, minced meat, and massage parlours. And then imagine that you during breakfast, talking to your friend, our at lunch, eating salad and spaghetti and discussing with your colleagues, would sporadically glance at Beckett's text. It's quite simply not the function of the television medium to convey an image to is. Its intention is not to impose an image on the mind of the everyday consumer. Television wants to inform and entertain: information deals with the word, and entertainment with an image-anecdote and an accompanying word. But why should we at all speak about television? It has nothing to do with images, absolutely nothing. In my visual expression, every element counts, since all of them are necessary. If one of them changes, the expression becomes altered. Perhaps not entirely, but still altered. And the expression I wanted to convey is distorted. Let us take an example. In art, the edges are of decisive importance. All production of images is a problem about edges. You have to work with the edge if you want the image to be a self-contained world and not just a fragment. But each monitor shows a different version of the same original image, sometimes it is cropped more, sometimes less. That's why I stopped working with video. I worked with minute precision, and when I saw the same tape being played on another monitor, my image had been amputated by an inch or so. I really gave it up. The haphazard, the irresponsible, that's not my thing. In my images I deal with necessity, responsibility, and commitment. A world "where it could be the one way just as much as the other" is not my world.

Audience: So the television image, which moves quickly and is fragmentary, would be the opposite of the image. And the image would somehow have to do with permanence?

Zaugg: We're just avoiding the topic - in a learned, well behaved, civilized and elaborate language. This has to stop. An image, what is that? You open the kitchen door in your parent's house, and there is your father, on his back on the floor, dead. You will carry this image within you for the rest of your life. What you carry within you, that's what I call an image. Now you can begin to see what I mean by an image. Let me give you another example: the chock, the affective brutality, the trauma I experienced in front of the image Day Before One. I still remember in what room it was hanging, what was beside, it, what the walls and the floor were like. I still carry this experience within me. It has not faded away. It has not lost any of its acuity. It has remained just as it was when it came to me.

(Bernhard Fibicher, Rémy Zaugg: Reflexionen von und über Rémy Zaugg, Kunsthalle Bern und Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nürnberg, 2000)

ABSALON "CELLULE NR. 6", 1992
Indoor prototype, wood, cardboard, white painting, 300 x 220 x 220 cm

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES "UNTITLED (FOR STOCKHOLM)", 1992
Size varies with installation,12 strands, each 12.8 m, 504 15-watt light bulbs, 6 m. extension cord, porcelain sockets

MONA HATOUM "QUARTERS", 1996
Mild Steel, 4 units, 275.5 x 517 x 517 cm. Dimensions of each unit: 275.5 x 80.8 x 183 cm

BRUCE NAUMAN "UNTITLED (SUSPENDED CHAIR, VERTICAL III)", 1987
Welded steel and steel cables, 91.4 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm, installation dimensions varies

RÉMY ZAUGG:

"MEN JAG/ VÄRLDEN/ JAG SER DIG", 1994-96
Varnish on wood, 230 x 205.2 cm
"ETT SJÄLVPORTRÄTT", 1992-96
Varnish on wood, 235 x 210 cm
"OCH OM/ NÄR JAG TALAR/ VÄRLDEN/ INTE LÄNGRE/ FUNNES", 1996
Varnish on wood, 184.5 x 164.7 cm
"AND IF/ THE WORLD/ AS I START TO SPEAK/WOULD NOT/EXIST ANYMORE", 1996
Varnish on wood, 233.2 x 208.2 cm