| Through his particular brand of iconoclasm, Matias Faldbakken spears the premise of today’s pop culture ideology, the territory of the hipster intellectual. His work of the past few years is boldly about negation, challenging modern social mores with a surprisingly novel form of anti-art. His definitive 2009 show Shocked into Abstraction at the National Museum of Art in Oslo featured, among other things, canvases and piles of VHS tapes left as they’d been placed there by art handlers. Also on view was an enormous wall of stacked Marshall amplifiers. An outdated piece of technology that has long been surpassed by modern digital sound, the amplifiers are still in high demand as stage props to imply an authentic vintage feel. |  |
Éva Pelczer
Through his particular brand of iconoclasm, Matias Faldbakken spears the premise of today’s pop culture ideology, the territory of the hipster intellectual. His work of the past few years is boldly about negation, challenging modern social mores with a surprisingly novel form of anti-art. His definitive 2009 show Shocked into Abstraction at the National Museum of Art in Oslo featured, among other things, canvases and piles of VHS tapes left as they’d been placed there by art handlers. Also on view was an enormous wall of stacked Marshall amplifiers. An outdated piece of technology that has long been surpassed by modern digital sound, the amplifiers are still in high demand as stage props to imply an authentic vintage feel. The audiences are in on the illusion, and the mint-condition amplifiers are the symbol of a collective willingness to suspend disbelief for the fantasyland of vintage cool. Here, they provide the backdrop for what Faldbakken terms “an absurdist play without an exit.”
Faldbakken’s visual work dabbles in satire, courting irony with a kind of calculated apathy. Whoomp There It Is (2002), one of his openly provocative early pieces, involved the artist placing and replacing liters of milk on an upholstered bench in a newly gentrified neighborhood whose resident junkies weren’t leaving quietly. The literal nature of this piece decreased in later bodies of work, and Faldbakken transitioned into images from the entertainment industry and finally to the pared-down electrical tape “paintings” of I Don’t Think So (Midway Contemporary Art, 2007) and The Way of the Bummer (Simon Lee Gallery, 2008). Both shows also exhibited Faldbakken’s first forays into picture and advertisement distortion. His Scan of Miserable Man series (2008) gave a prescribed context to grainy photos randomly sourced from popular magazines and newspapers, while his Newspaper Ad (Billboard) pieces (2007) rendered the subjects meaningless (or meaningful?) after Faldbakken magnified the dirty margins of newspapers and pasted them onto gallery walls billboard-style.
It would be refreshing to see the kind of intentional lack of artistic effort Faldbakken displays in Shocked into Abstraction from someone outside of the mainstream it plunders. Faldbakken has been hailed as one of the most promising new voices in contemporary art, and the demographic to which he belongs hasn’t gone unnoticed by the artist. He said in the #07 issue of Mono Kultur, a German art magazine, that “the biggest problem” he has is “of course being mainstream: being white, male, and heterosexual.” Either in spite or because of this, Faldbakken is shaping up to be a definitive artist of his generation, with his work reflecting the kind of highbrow ennui that is prevalent in today’s well-educated young adults that are, by socioeconomic circumstance, unmoored to professional and financial stability.
There is nothing new about giving form and meaning to negation by claiming there is no form or meaning, but Faldbakken knows this and uses the pastiche as a tool to get at the inauthenticity of postmodern culture. He makes this more literal in his latest show, The Hhills, which was on view at the Standard gallery in Oslo until May. The work consists of a row of school lockers, apparently crushed by lever straps that tightly encircle the metal object. The title, a (misspelled) reference to a popular American MTV show, and the chosen object, a sturdy but mauled emblem of adolescence, evokes a kind of overgrown, commercialized youth in revolt. It reflects the generation whose growing pains now extend well into its 20s and 30s, and whose latently developed sense of identity and taste is still shaping the direction of contemporary pop culture. But The Hhills is more a participant than a judgment call—Faldbakken is still a member of this generation, inevitably and firmly rooted in its cultivated self-awareness.
