Sting, Hitchcock, Gonzalez-Torres, Beuys, Foucault and Magnus Sigurdarson

Every breath you take

Every move you make […] I'll be watching you

The rejected lover becomes a stalker in the famous hit of English band The Police, from 1983. As a manner to cope with the situation, his despair is transformed into fixation on his ex. In his video, The Mentally Incapable Sniper, Magnus Sigurdarson acts as if in a desperate state, but without any apparent reason. Looking for a target for his mental projection, he breathes in - zooms with his camera - and exhales - zooms again. Every breath he takes keeps him as far away as before from what he is looking for. His arbitrary gaze carries no threat; it is impotent, destined to compulsively keep on scanning. It is not that of a voyeur, he does not know what focal point will gratify him. Jeff, the photographer in Hitchcock's Rear Window from 1954, suffers from boredom after an accident has left him with his leg in a cast. He takes to spying on his neighbors and consequently gets implicated in a murder case. The subtext behind the thriller implies that what Jeff sees through his rear window mirrors his own life. This subtle theme is blatant in Sigurdarson's exhibition. In the artist's frantic search for a subject he knows that he is after himself, that is his dilemma, his scrutiny is perpetually outwards, no matter if he zooms in or out.

In an early experimental video, while still living in Puerto Rico, Felix Gonzalez-Torres held a video camera to his face and operated the zoom manually back and forth. Suggestive, amorous expressions and exclamations, "New York, New York, I love New York!" implied a twisted desire for the city where he would later thrive as an artist.

Sigurdarson expresses mixed emotions towards Miami in his video work, with the thrusting lens of the camera and his heavy breathing. Sarcastically he claims, "I love Miami and Miami loves me!" His works does not seem to offer the reconciliation, as did the performance that he is alluding to, when Joseph Beuys came to terms with America. The title of his work conjures up hostility, for a sniper is out to get someone. He has but one moment, the right time and the right place, to perform his mission. But this sniper does not know his target until he comes across it, in the mean time everything and everyone is a possible prey. The Mentally Incapable Sniper underlines this with the wondering eye, the artist lets the viewer in on his plot. When Michel Foucault traced the history of prison in Discipline and Punish, in 1977, he emphasized the invention of the panopticon*.

There, a single guard can watch over many prisoners while remaining unseen, resulting in the prisoners policing themselves. Sigurdarson suggests to his audience that they are under a similar surveillance, creating awareness that not only are they looking, but they are also being looked upon.

* The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.

Art Statement

Miami is fiction. It is a city with a fictional state of mind that is  actually real, because you are living it; it is an endless summer vacation.  It is a resort away from life itself. Still, all the nonfiction elements of life are  visible and vibrant at any given moment. You crash your car and you  deal with the insurance company. You keep cans of beans and water in  your closet for the hurricane season. You keep a bottle #84 sun block  in the glove department of your car; the everlasting postcard  scenarios of the gradients of liquid greens and azul blues vividly  caressing the golden beach; a black Jaguar passing you slowly as a  living metaphor of the "animal within": the slick four wheeled Pardus  is out there looking for a juicy Mustang. The city is half naked, if  not naked. The lusciousness of the bodies and the mesmerizing stealth  of the newest condo on the block contrast the ever-fading middle class  of the city.    Miami is a paradise;  Disney World is paradise; the U.S. is paradise. Paradise is just  paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it  is paradise. There is no other. The city has given me a new language,  a silent one, LOOKS. I have not yet fully adopted it but I am trying  to understand it. I look at it in amazement and wonder why all of  this just makes me more melancholic!   

I love Miami and Miami loves me. 

Magnus Sigurdarson   

Biography

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1966, Magnus Sigurdarson studied art at Studio Cecil and Graves, Florence, Italy (1988), The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (1992) and Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA (1997). He currently lives and works in Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include “Headline News” at Deluxe Arts, Winwood (2006) and “Divine Intervention” at Marina Kessler Gallery (2005), both in Miami and  “Skitsofrenia” at The Living Art Museum (2005), Reykjavik, Iceland. Recent group shows include “Photo” at Jacob-Karpio Galeria (2006), San Jose, Costa Rica, “The Other Project” at The Shanghai International Biennial of Urban Sculpture Exhibition” (2005), Shanghai, China, “Pretend I’m not Here” at The Chinese European Art Center (2005), Xiamen, China and “Momentum 04” (2004), in Moss, Norway.

Magnus Sigurdarson is The Friendly Artist; he aspires to face the unknown, to break down barriers and to communicate to an audience. He is organic and ecological, if all artists were like him, the world would be a better place. Still, he is aware of his limitations, he is not a romantic; he can only work within his artistic margins and then leave it to the audience to work on the rest. He sets a standard: “My work is process, now you have to work on yours!” The relationship between artist and viewer is not based on giving and receiving, to Sigurdarson it is a mutual agreement to work though visual and conceptual barriers to reach an enlightening experience. Take as an example his placement of a black monolith, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey, out on a small island in a lake in the center of Reykjavik (“A Public Art Work,” 2001). The gesture is symbolic for his projects. A three-dimensional black object, perplexing and alluring, an embodiment of the unknown; what people do not know, they do not see. They experience it as something totally incomprehensible – it is The Other. The way to get to know it is an intellectual journey, an effort that has to be made on one’s own behalf. Sigurdarson symbolized this by placing it in the middle of a lake where no boats sail. Winter came and the lake froze. People would access the island by foot and encounter the monolith: a simple weathered plywood box, with flaky, black paint. It is all about the journey and not the destination.

Another symbol of The Other, which Sigurdarson has embraced, are the mammals of the ocean. The butt of people’s longing for another intellectual community in the world, much like the hope for extra terrestrial life, whales are attributed a mystery as a species. In “Mammals to Mammals” (2005), a room was filled with beach sand, inflatable toys and plastic chairs. Video projections displayed, on the one hand, a street parade in celebration of dolphins and, on the other hand, a dance on the beach performed by a professional artist emerging from the ocean. A documentation of actual events and a choreographed performance, the work provided layers of dualities suggested in the title; dolphins and humans, the real and the staged, artist and spectator.

A signature element of Sigurdarson’s projects is the visual materialization of a given process together with a textual statement, incorporated in the title or as a wall text in his exhibitions. Often formally inspired by words of wisdom from ancient literature with religious connotations, they border on advice and deception. This may be accepted as a key that the artist provides for the viewer as to access the physical work or a deviation to lure him into a labyrinth of an aimless search for a conclusion. As underlined before, Sigurdarson is more interested in the process of learning than the actual knowledge. Our fragility is never more exposed than in the open. This aphorism conjoined his installation “Storm” (2001), where an inaccessible space was filled with mounds of salt and industrial ventilators created a swirl of wind, constantly reshaping the white landscape. The text was mounted in one of the two adjoining spaces, the other was sealed with a transparent screen. The installation was the artist’s first statement in his hometown after years of living and studying abroad.

A personal fetish for Sigurdarson is the newspaper. He has the habit of tearing it meticulously to pieces, folding it, stroking it and creating little folds and objects that he leaves behind wherever he goes as a friendly gesture. A symbol of mass media and the obsolete quality of news he also uses newspapers to create large sculptural installations, compiling tons of dated paper. The different works based on these stacks of newspapers have varied in size and structure, sometimes leaning towards the architectural rather than solely the sculptural. At times, Sigurdarson will construct them around a monitor where a video is on a loop. An enthusiast about the notion of melancholy, he for example once included a black and white, slow motion video clip of himself in an urban landscape, gazing aimlessly to the soundtrack of one of Radiohead’s gloomy ballads, Paranoid Andriod (“The Wall,” 2002).  In “Diagnosis of the Obvious – Project Mass Media” (2004), displayed in Moss, Norway, he used 36 tons of local newspapers to build a giant, collapsing wall. There, he incorporated 120 thousand seeds of the Alaska lupine. Again, he was working with a symbol for The Other, this time a plant that is an immigrant in the Scandinavian flora, used to revitalize the expanding sand deserts. Blooming, it casts an alien purple color on the land and it has been the topic of fierce debate where logic and romanticism collide. With regular watering, the wall came alive during the period of the exhibition, the seeding lupine grew out of it and nourished on the decaying stack of newspapers. This time the accompanying dictum was: If we take it for granted that there is something called ME then there must be this other thing called YOU. Moreover, in order for YOU to understand ME and ME to understand YOU, I have to become YOU and YOU have to become ME. If this is not attainable we may have a catastrophic situation on our hands.

A significant moment in Sigurdarson’s career was a trip to China that he conducted with his family in 2005 around a residency program at The Chinese European Art Center in Xiamen. He was literally confronted with every conceivable variation of The Other on an everyday basis; he and his family as an Other to the locals and the foreign culture as an Other to him. He undertook a series of works that he is still carrying out in order to address this encounter. Transferring his discourse from the personal to the political, he poses questions about the progressing globalization, focusing on the homogenization of culture. His work addresses the critical contradiction that the process of breaking barriers in order to understand and appreciate the unknown, will ultimately affect the elements that were foreign to each other beforehand, to the point of no return. The result is an inclination towards melancholy and nostalgia, abounding in Sigurdarson’s latest works. “I’m So Much Better than You” (2005) is a video recorded as a puppet theater, where the artist’s head is displayed with two Chinese hand puppets that he operates with each hand. He bluntly states repeatedly that he is so much better than them and continues to do so as they start hitting him and the scene degenerates unresolved. The video was installed in a temple like structure of stacked newspapers entitled “The Other Project” (2005). 

In his two dimensional works, Sigurdarson has scanned a wide spectrum. Always interested in structure and form, he tends to deconstruct images and display them as blueprints, mathematical compositions or otherwise manipulated. In his hands the well known images of chairman Mao or Che Guevara systematically underwent the various effects in the filter tools of Photoshop (“Divine Intervention,” 2003 and “Che,” 2003). A rural landscape in Iceland is drained of color and depth and dissolved in a grid of squares (“Diagnosis of The Obvious,” 2004), followed by the statement Diagnosis of the Obvious stems from need rather than necessity. Photographic images that he leaves intact are displayed on the basis of their conceptual value, such as an image from a tunnel entitled “Tunnel Vision, Shanghai” (2006). They may also document the artist’s performative gestures: a trip to the Dakota Desert in the manifestation of a cultural clash (“Across America – A Pilgrimage for Keiko,” 1997) or his pink, Scandinavian body posing on an inflated Moby Lounge (“The Great White One,” 1998). The photograph is for Sigurdarson a three dimensional medium. 

Magnus Sigurdarson is eager to communicate with his viewers; his works are an invitation to a platform where exchange can take place. But there will always be a membrane, no matter how thin, between him as an artist and the audience as onlookers. He may position himself or be interpreted by the viewers as a prophet, a researcher or a preacher. Still, it will always come down to the art. He will not go to the level of communication outside his visual and textual expression of individual works, instead he will continue and create new work. To the same extent the viewers cannot fully express to him the way they experience his works, they can only continue to view new ones. In that sense, they will constantly be an Other to each other and that essentially fuels the ongoing dialogue.