Spot on Mogens Møller

In the general consciousness, Mogens Møller (b. 1934) might have been somewhat overshadowed within the background team of the art scene, which for many years, besides himself, consisted of Stig Brøgger and Hein Heinsen — the trio that, among other things, was behind the still-controversial "Fredens Port" on Tagensvej. But recently, Mogens Møller has genuinely emerged as an individual artist. Both the North Jutland Art Museum and Malmö Konsthall have opened their doors for an exciting painting exhibition (which can be seen in Malmö until May 29), and now Stalke Project in Nørregade supplements this with an interesting installation of three bronze-patinated plaster sculptures.

The vase-like sculptures are traditionally displayed on pedestals, yet they simultaneously integrate into their local environment, marked by rectangular wall panels in olive green, light brown, and steel gray, partly with titles engraved: Vegas (pictured), Phoenix, and Delphi. This highly ambiguous accompaniment — which sends signals both to the Thorvaldsen Museum (the colors) and to Greece and American science fiction (the titles) — aligns well with the sculptures themselves, which seem to merge elements of classical and science fiction-like fantasies. For instance, Phoenixbreaks its antique vase profile with a pair of UFO-like discs, while Delphi unfolds an inner atmosphere that suggests a genetic experiment.

Amid their wide-ranging references, the sculptures, however, have a striking calmness that makes the objects conducive to contemplation. And not least, their quality endures.

JW

Note/Stalke Galleri

THE STORM BELL.

The sculpture is called The Storm Bell. It concerns warning systems in two ways: historically and in the present. A little further up the street, with the name “Ved Stormklokken” (By the Storm Bell), the city’s largest bell, "The Storm Bell," used to hang. When the enemy invaded or a fire broke out, the bell rang across the city to alert and summon help. The damages and disasters caused by war or fire had something directly observable about them—one could even say something local—where everyone knew who or what had caused the damage. This meant that the city’s residents could take direct action against something that was happening and had a tangible cause.

The sculpture is called The Storm Bell, and the man walks and stands on “history.”

Under his feet are parts of buildings such as roofs, walls, and pillars. Through the oval window, on one side, a stylized flame flickers, while on the other, the beginning of a sword protrudes.

With this theme, I aim to link the sculpture to its place.

We can all rejoice that, precisely these days in Haderslev, the old “gossip well” has been rediscovered in the town square! We rejoice because, through the centuries, we can imagine the people exchanging words at the well about this and that.

Today, no such well exists—it has been replaced by many other “wells,” one of which is Haderslev Radio.

The Storm Bell, too, is gone, replaced by other and much more complex, often global, warning systems, systems that require experts and large organizations to operate and manage—and where the individual feels helpless.

When local politicians in the 1960s, armed with fine calculations, competed with one another in prestige projects, it was difficult for the individual to say no with a compelling argument.

And when we now look at the last empty eleven floors of, for instance, Herlev Hospital, we can no more connect them with the old sword, or ring a bell to "extinguish" the hole in the ozone layer with a bucket of water.

What was once near and tangible in The Storm Bell’s time has now become distant and intangible.

For me—and surely for most others—it has become difficult to understand the world. In the age of mass media, we have the whole world on the screen in our living rooms in an instant—but the screen is not the same as standing by the well. The screen is an illusion, and through mass repetition, the boundary between fiction and reality is erased.

"Dallas" and "Dollars" become as real or unreal as Chernobyl and the Iran-Contra affair.

The sculpture is called The Storm Bell, and it exists in the age of illusion and mass information. A time with information about anything and everything, sending us in all directions simultaneously, even as we realize that everything is distant and intangible.

For that reason, I wish to place a new Storm Bell—a different perception of the world than that of "the expert," science, and the large organizations.

The sculpture is called The Storm Bell, and the man carries an egg. One can interpret the event in any way—like the fairy tales of "Seven-League Boots" or "The Flying Trunk"—or as a hybrid creation.

The man appears “androgynous”—it is unclear whether he is entering or leaving his origin.

The distance between the sculpture's individual expressions of architecture, body, and egg is too great for it to express a cohesive meaning about the world and its place. The sculpture lacks an overarching center to hold its parts together, and its direction and placement on the small square fail to connect with other meaning-creating parts of the city.

One could say that when a bell rings—whether deeply or loudly—it does so because of something external to the sculpture, between the observer and the sculpture.

The sculpture expresses absence. The world is not within—but outside the image. The absent is present in the sculpture, at the edge from which the viewer continues. Thus, it becomes both an internal and an empty riddle, provoking and attracting other riddles.

The Shape of the Vase

An Expedition Through Time

Art
Mogens Møller at Stalke Projekt, Nørregade 7C. Wed-Fri 2–5:30 PM, Sat 12–3 PM. Until April 30.

Between Aalborg and Malmö lies Copenhagen, and on the way from one city to the other with his large and important exhibition (to which he will later return), Mogens Møller makes a notable stop with an installation at Stalke Projekt. In the gallery’s open basement space, he has placed three large sculptures. Their placement in the rooms is emphasized by a painted area on the wall, and their conceptual and intellectual significance is suggested by the titles: Delphi, Phoenix, Vegas.

The associations immediately start to flow. From the cult objects of the ancient world to the new cities with old names, from mythology’s grand images to the landscapes of modernism. From stars to places. Mogens Møller plays with distances and dimensions, both physical and mental, pulling time into and telling a story about history. The common denominator for all this is symbolism.

The three sculptures are variations on the vase, the shape of the vessel. The slender, tall amphora (Delphi) is instantly recognizable, but it has undergone a transformation toward more ambiguous and complex forms in the two other sculptures, which, for example, appear to merge the vase with the planet it rotates around its own axis. Various spheres and kinds of matter meld together. Mogens Møller has previously explained why the vessel has become an important sculptural form for him in recent years, where it is varied and reworked in different contexts: he sees it as both object and concept, with a practical-aesthetic function and a historical dimension. Stripped of its content, it is open to everything: it can be filled with meaning, but at the same time, one can never fully know what it contains. Put simply, it can "contain anything from the smoke of a papal election to the sound of summer birds, strontium, or condensed milk."

In the suggestive, almost magical installation at Stalke, one is immediately captivated by the monumentality of the sculptures, then by their dual effect—expressions for which I cannot immediately find better words than: intangible presence. The multifaceted forms and dimensions evoke a sense of being both near and far at the same time. Our associations orbit around them like Saturn's rings, and moving between them in the bare room becomes a journey of discovery, back and forth through time.

ØYSTEIN HJORT

Art and Science

Exhibitions

Mogens Møller. Stalke Project, Nørregade 7 C, Copenhagen. Wed-Fri 2-5:30 PM and Sat 12-3 PM. Until April 30.

The exhibition, as well as the concurrent one at Malmö Konsthall and the preceding one in Aalborg, is accompanied by an impressive catalog. The new functionalist typography makes use of strongly contrasting grotesque fonts. Heavy, thoughtful articles. It has been a long time since such effort has been put into figuring out what art could be used for—at least in a context where it can still serve as an illustration.

The texts in the catalog revolve around the so-called "paradigm shift," which natural science—at least superficially in an aesthetic sense and in a realm confined to narrow physical-mathematical boundaries—seems to be undergoing. It is a kind of general reorientation towards another direction or perhaps, more precisely, towards a different understanding of direction altogether.

Else Marie Bukdahl quotes Prigogine, saying: "What should we say about the world that has brought about the transformation of modern science?" It is a world, as we experience it, where we understand that we are part of it and can therefore comprehend it as a natural world, but where the old secure convictions have suddenly disappeared. Whether it concerns music, painting, literature, or customs and traditions, no model can claim legitimacy anymore; and there is no longer any exclusive model.

Art historian Lars Morell distinguishes himself markedly from the text-heavy catalog with his sense of humor, saying, among other things, about an analysis of Hegel and Jens Baggesen as test subjects:

"Baggesen has crawled up on a little hill. In the midst of his synthesizing contemplation, a fox runs down the hill. Immediately, Baggesen’s enchantment disappears. Baggesen realizes that the central figure's synthesizing contemplation is like an inverted pyramid with the point touching the ground. When a fox runs by, the great narrative risks collapsing."

Mogens Møller's works at Stalke Project are precisely double cones with their tips pointing outward as warnings at sea. They are executed in patterned plaster and balanced on the tips. On the cones is painted a square field, a monochrome painting in situ, and there is a spotlight that casts a shadow. It is not possible, as Morell claims, for the different activities and their distinct spheres in a "postmodern epistemological space" to be united in a central figure, such as "the subject," which is the classical modernist artist archetype. However, direct experience is still the only truly effective gateway to the experiences that art can provide, and Mogens Møller shows that fortunately, it is not impossible.

In all its simplicity, by placing quite a few objects in a room, one can move everything into another dimension. It could be called "classical" if, as Ezra Pound undoubtedly doubted, he hadn’t long ago said that it is no longer of importance to mark a work's definitive "classification" in the great stylistic and art-historical catalog.

The paradigms shift, but it is still natural science that, to a large extent, shows the way forward. There is a tendency in new criticism to let individual works become illustrations of art-historical theories.

This seems to interest many artists because it provides access to intellectual power spaces where art otherwise isn’t really welcome.

Nevertheless, one can occasionally see that paradigms do not change enough, but the great narratives seem to persist.

The direct sensory experiences and perspectives in an installation such as the one Mogens Møller has created, however, reach much further and deeper into poetic contexts, which totally transcend the modernism marked with footnotes that attempt to be "new philosophy."

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