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Ane Hjort Guttu

How to Become

a Non-Artist

In the winter of 2006, I started observing my sonEinars experiments with form. Einar wascreating small arrangements around the house,combining objects or moving them to new places.I documented the arrangements, wondering if afour-year-old related more freely to objects andmeaning, or if he had any concept ofcomposition. These are two egg cups. Einar arranged

them on the edge of the sofa, unaware of hisactions until I took out the camera:

Some days later, he hung a hanger fromanother hanger and held them up.

It was winter; thats the reason for the flatflash in the pictures. It seemed dark all the time,and there was no snow. It just rained and rained,

and we were inside the apartment. The egg cup and hanger arrangements have

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something in common aesthetically. They consistof two unitary objects placed together in asymmetrical relation. The objects arerendered more abstract and less functional, andconsequently they become qualitativelydifferent. Both compositions express mirroring perhaps a fundamental human experience of arelation?

We witness the same mechanism in thepicture in the previous page. Einar has arrangedthe identical night lamps so that they illuminateeach other, like one face looking at another face.

Einar could have been interpreting thelamps as faces, since he often pursues animateobjects. We might suggest that these lamps arelooking at each other, if that thought givesmeaning to Einar's actions. However, to claimthat this work meansor symbolizes two faces is

a total misunderstanding, and unfortunately toocommon in prevalent concepts of how artfunctions. This work below looks much like theprevious one. However, Einar doesnt understandit as a visual work at all. Rather, he is testingwhat it is like to blow into two balloons at thesame time.

The act is not performative, because Einardoesnt intend to be noticed while acting. Inonetheless took the picture and thereby made itvisual. Without this picture, Einar's act ofblowing into two balloons would have been goneforever.

Below we can see a work that implies a kindof animism. The banana was tired and needed akettle holder as a blanket.

This work started with lashing two-sidedtape around the stereo rack. After a while, thepaper on the outside of the tape was removed,exposing the sticky surface. Then you could stickthings onto it:

On the left page is a worn sock and areceipt, but they can be swapped. For example,they can be swapped with ribbons.

A very different expression:

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Here tape has been used to attach a book to

a chest and to close the lid of the chest.

However, the primary intention was probably notto attach the book or to close the lid, anddefinitely not to create an abstract composition,but to practice taping.

One might call the work on the opposite

page performative. During the performance, itwas announced that the lopsided frying pan wasFinland, while the level frying pan was Norway.Could this be interpreted as Norway being moreproper than Finland?

Einar has never been to Finland and hedoesnt know what a nation is. He probablydoesnt have any associations whatsoever withthe concept of Finland. Finland must be anempty word, useful only as a parallel to the word

Norway, of which Einar has a fullerunderstanding he knows, for instance, that we

live in Norway. Unfortunately, it is still not veryclear what makes the level frying pan Norwayhere.

A less interesting work: its like someonearranged something without any distinctpurpose.

In my opinion, the combination of rubberboots and tiles above has no clear meaning.However, it illustrates a tendency in Einarsinstallations: an exaggerated principle of orderand symmetry, where the symmetry is superior tothe logic. It is irrelevant whether the objects havea connection, as long as theyre arrangedsymmetrically.

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This principle of order is evident in theimage of the candle, too. A washer is placed ontop of a candle, not because this combination is

interesting or logical, but because the hole in thewasher fits the candlewick.

I gave this cauliflower to Einar and askedhim to make a sculpture out of it. He just placedit on the table and said it was done. Then he saidhe wanted to photograph it. This might imply that

Einar believes objects only become interestingwhen photographed. It is therefore lessimportant to spend a lot of time creating a form,and more important to take a snapshot asquickly as possible.

For Einar, initially the point was to create acomposition. After a while, this shifted to the

action ofphotographing the composition. In anartistic context, this shift would have significantmeaning. But in the process used by Einar and I,it didn't make much difference whether the pointwas to create works or to photograph them. Themediated reality and the reality itself wereequally real and interesting.

Einars interventions in the apartment wereincreasingly imperceptible, like this (a photo ofEinars father placed in the chest) ...

And the image on the next page, a variationon the hanger composition, questionablebecause I believe Einar copied his earlier work tomeet certain expectations.

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To me, these repetitions of hangers in

different contexts do not seem very inspired.

The picture on the previous page shows aremote control on top of a computer bagsshoulder strap. It's an important work becauseits uncertain whether it was deliberately made

like this, or whether the objects were randomlytossed there. I couldnt get any certainty on this,and when I thought about it, it suddenly didntmatter anymore. The meaning was equally clearor unclear regardless of whether it was aconscious work or not. I no longer saw thedifference in principle between the egg cuparrangement, the cauliflower, and the remotecontrol. One of the egg cups was turned upsidedown, thus representing a more originalaesthetic choice. They looked more like art, andthis was intriguing. But, after a while I

understood that even if some of these objectslooked like art, they werent art. Or if they were,then the cauliflower and the remote control alsohad to be art. The placement of the remotecontrol, communicating in some way with theshoulder strap, had an aesthetic dimension. We had come full circle. We had moved fromfunctional objects, to sculptures, to ready-mades, and then back to functional objects.Neither Einar nor I had noticed any differences,any breaks or borders.

This is Einars photograph of his toy car. It isnothing special, but there wasn't anythingspecial about the egg cups either.

Everything became equally valid: aesthetic

or non-aesthetic, art or non-art, form andcontent or no form and no content. Many things

look like art, but are not. And many things do notlook like art, but are art, or not.

As we traveled down this road toward theabolition of the universal idea of good and badform, this new attitude toward thingsinfected my surroundings, as if I were inside azone where all things could be the result of ahigher formal awareness: the roads, the chewinggum on the sidewalk, the yellow light over thecity on our way home from the kindergarten. Or itcould not be; it didnt matter anymore.Everything became art, and in the same moment,nothing.

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How To Become A Non-Artist is excerpted from a 2007 videoby the author.

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Ane Hjort Guttu, (b. 1971), is an artist and curatorbased in Oslo. In recent years she has explored issuesof power and freedom in the Scandinavian post-welfare state through video works, picture collections,sculpture, and photography. Guttu also writes criticalas well as poetic texts, and several of her projectsdiscuss art and architectural history. Recent projectsand exhibitions include: Bergen Assembly, Bergen,2013; Society Without Qualities, Tensta konsthall,Stockholm, 2013; Learning for Life, Henie Onstadkunstsenter, 20122013; The Rich Should be Richer,

Kunsthall Oslo, 2012; and West of the East, Y Gallery,Minsk 2012. Her forthcoming projects include:SydneyBiennial, Australia, 2014; In These Great Times,Kunstnernes hus, Oslo; Les Ateliers de Rennes, France,2014; and a new short film for Tensta konsthall,Sweden.

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