Hreinn Fridfinnsson and His Legacy
By Halld�r Bj�rn Run�lfsson
Hreinn Fridfinnsson
It is fair to say that the Living Art Museum, the oldest establishment of contemporary art practice in Iceland, is based on the legacy of Hreinn Fridfinnsson and his colleagues in the movement S�M, an equivalent of Fluxus and Arte Povera. Founded in Reykjavik during the summer of 1965, around an exhibition of Fridfinnsson and three other young artists, S�M was until its dissolving in the early seventies a loose group of artists with as different practice as Op and Kinetic art, Neo-Dada, Junk art, Pop art and later Conceptual art.
Dieter Roth’s influence on S�M and its members is still a matter of debate. What is undebatable is that he supported the venture, for example by designing the poster for its d�but, which recto verso also served as a highly unconventional exhibition catalogue. Just before the opening of the first S�M exhibition Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman held a concert in Reykjavik, at Musica nova, an association of avant-garde music, creating havoc by astounding the audience with their bold presentation. Their performance figured as an introduction to the first S�M exhibition, where Hreinn Fridfinnsson exhibited a door which he had smashed with fist and foot, trying afterwards to cover the two holes by attaching the debris to the door with a thread. By painting the scraps in primary colors he later admitted that the work was meant to be an ironic homage to Mondrian and his geometrical legacy, which had been all-pervasive in Iceland in the early fifties.
Hreinn Fridfinnsson, who was born in 1943 in rural Western Iceland, did not suspect then that only six years later he would settle in Holland, where he became a leading figure in Icelandic Conceptual art together with the brothers Kristjan and Sigurdur Gudmundsson. In Amsterdam his means evolved from the Neo-Dadaistic practice of the sixties to a generic kind of photography with texts in the early seventies. What at first seemed to be a complete rejection of all aesthetic approach – since the idea must not be overcast by the beauty of the execution – soon gathered momentum in a new kind of highly lyrical art where the idea was exquisitely rendered with sparing materials, as if Fridfinnsson wanted to limit his expressive means to the bare minimum.
A set of photographs from 1975, entitled Maybe, Maybe, show identical angles, one as an interior corner of no issue, and another of an exterior corner around which anything could happen. Two years earlier, another set of photographs, called Attending, in full color and fine lacquered frames, depicted one hand holding an oval mirror against the sky, reflecting the grassy earth, and another holding the same mirror against the grass reflecting the sky. Beneath each respective picture the words "Attending Earth" and "Attending Sky" were printed calligraphy, in a manner worthy of Magritte. As early as 1972, in a series of fourteen framed photographs, Five Gates for the South Wind, Fridfinnsson conveyed a poetic idea based on his constructions of five white gates standing freely without fences in the middle of nowhere, inviting the wind of spring to swing them open.
By the end of the seventies Fridfinnsson’s arrangements of photographs had turned into reliefs of symmetrical order highlighting the delicacy of the accompanying materials. A While, from 1978-79, was composed of a small photograph in between a panel, with an exquisite incision of a feather, and a matching white canvas on which a green leaf was painted in pale watercolors. The photograph showed the hands of a mime in white gloves against a black background. With this small relief, done at the time of the founding of the Living Art Museum, Fridfinnsson set a new standard for the generations to come. If Gallery S�M – established in 1969 in the attic of a workshop in downtown Reykjavik – represented Neo-Dadaistic trends in the sixties and early seventies, the artist run local of the Living Art Museum, which comprised the whole workshop building became the centre of Conceptual and Postmodernist tendencies from the late seventies to the early nineties. Fridfinnsson’s reliefs with their double emphases – on the careful arrangement of the ensemble and the conceptual detail – played a significant role in this development.
Although the influence is indirect, a similar sensibility can be seen for example in the works of two Icelandic artists of the second generation from Fridfinnsson, Katrin Sigurdardottir, born 1967, and Margr�t H. Bl�ndal, born 1970, who both had their Icelandic d�but at the Living Art Museum. Instead of Holland, both women sought their post-graduate education in New York, where Sigurdardottir still spends most of her time. Working with miniature models of landscapes, she has been particularly attentive to detail and its revelation. In her first works at the Living Art Museum she created minute paper mobiles in form of small literary theatres visible through magnifying lenses. She developed this idea in an arresting piece in 1997, entitled The Green Grass of Home, made of a plywood suitcase with a peep-hole for internal inspection while closed. The work can, however, be folded out in seventeen sections, revealing a garden landscape done from memory of parks in cities where Sigurdardottir has lived. These are nomadic reminiscences of someone who like the wandering Jew is constantly on the move. In her later works this oscillation between oblivion and memory is carried much further with a subtle care for every detail. In her recent exhibitions of mixed media gouaches the limits between what is retained from the past and what is forgotten often get blurred, leaving a large borderline of mysterious evocations.
By reusing second-hand material and objects Margr�t H. Bl�ndal recycles the commonplace, investing it with her personal care, as if she wanted to give it yet a second life. Dilapidated remains from a household party are reinvigorated, as impossible materials such as melted sugar are cast in a mould together with birthday party balloons which escape the plaster in which they are held. Bl�ndal also produces fleeting poetic remarks, descriptions reminiscent of diary records, and aphorisms on tinted letter sheets of paper, sometimes hanging them in impossible places, for instance on chimneys where they are immediately carried away by the wind. These Air Mail Sheets – as she calls these works, mainly done from 1999 to 2001 – were typewritten and stained with olive oil. Like Sigurdardottir, Bl�ndal continues to develop a tradition of fragile means and delicate methods, which can be traced back to Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s work in the beginning of the seventies.
