Reviews:

Simply on the Way Towards Simplicity

Lars Bent Petersen: Selected Works 1989-95. Stalke Kunsthandel. 

“WILL IT last forever, have I done the right thing...,” the voice in the headphones asks. This is the first of Lars Bent Petersen's works one encounters at Stalke Kunsthandel. It sets the tone for a very intimate and personal exhibition that consistently revolves around universal human uncertainty.

His previously strong, almost assertive political engagement steps into the background here, and instead, one experiences private uncertainty expressed in a confident artistic manner. There are glimpses of politics, but it is more politics as a phenomenon in private life than an actual stance, such as when in Self-Portrait he juxtaposes a picture of the government hanging over six ghetto blasters, each playing its own pop song, with an abnormally photocopied image of the artist himself at the age of three or four, receiving his first kiss from a girl.

Lars Bent Petersen's works are mostly extremely simple: nine diary pages with an accompanying selected image for each. A jacket hanging on a hanger with the serial text in the lining: "A lonely boy." Or A Simple Sentence (I Love You), consisting only of the title written in Italian, black on a white background.

SIMPLICITY tends to tip over into the simplistic, such as when he, with artistic-politically whip-tight timing, pairs a postcard of the beautiful Cindy Crawford with the lovely monumental State Museum for Art. Or was it the other way around?

It’s hard to gauge the depth of naivety in Lars Bent Petersen. I think there’s more irony at play than one might suspect, but a great honesty sometimes hinders the finer nuances. It can seem clumsy when he is political, but often very subtle in the private context. The private extract becomes a universal experience in his best works.

For example, the crumpled diary pages in display cases are directly touching and thought-provoking in the piece Not a Day Worth to Mention. A simple expression, a banal experience—with an address to everyone and anyone.

KARSTEN R.S. IVERSEN

The Personal Experience

Stalke Kunsthandel presents selected works by Lars Bent Petersen from the period 1989-95.

Lars Bent Petersen’s exhibition at Stalke Kunsthandel is a good and occasionally quite thought-provoking thematization of personal experience. It often draws lines from the private sphere to the contexts of popular culture and political/social relationships.

These themes are woven together in Lars Bent Petersen's Self-Portrait from 1993, where personal engagement wedges itself into the interpretive gap between different titles of pop songs and headlines from political and social realities.

Here, two spheres of meaning collide and illuminate each other in an interesting and meaningful way, especially in relation to the importance of images. Petersen’s other works set this in perspective through photographs, juxtaposing the National Gallery of Denmark with the supermodel Cindy Crawford and Eckersberg with Pulp Fiction. Here, the contrast is a bit overly staged and obvious, while there is more substance in the encounter between the headlines and song titles, which not only illustrate a point but establish a larger associative space where possible connections can be considered.

Near and Far Surroundings

The exhibition also emphasizes a more direct, personal, and self-exploratory tone, which in these cases points out the biographical framework of the works and evokes recognition and thought.

Lars Bent Petersen’s Diary from 1994 captures with both seriousness and humor the often problematic relationship to the near and far surroundings.

In many of the other works, personal experience becomes the object of a more objective and "documentary" investigation, most successfully in the three small display cases, each containing a crumpled diary page, a date, and the text: Not a Day Worth to Mention.

“It must have been something really bad—or maybe simply nothing happened at all?”

It is up to the viewer to satisfy their curiosity about the private experiences conveyed, which, despite their documentary approach, are never explicitly explained.

The Objective Perspective
This "objective" perspective is also found in A Sentimental Sentence from 1993, where black text on white-painted furniture creates a temporal-causal space of associations. For example: "If I had done it, it would have happened." The logical-theoretical sentences are contrasted with an everyday quality conveyed by the furniture, and in the exhibition’s context, these sentences more concretely point to the choices of existence and their consequences.

Towards Fluxus
At the same time, the installation’s white-painted furniture evokes associations with Fluxus artist George Maciunas’ Chair Events, a work included in Rene Block’s collection, which was heavily debated with Lars Bent Petersen as an active participant. Otherwise, his more direct political engagement is not evident in the exhibition’s works, most of which have not previously been shown in Copenhagen

.

A good, small, retrospective exhibition that often intimately and interestingly revolves around personal experience and the relationship to social and cultural contexts.

By Andreas Brøgger

The Artist Seen as a Young Pup

If you want to see the works of one of the artists who the day before yesterday received a three-year grant from the Danish Arts Foundation, you can do so until May 3 at the Copenhagen art gallery, Stalke.

Eric Andersen, who for the sake of order should be classified as a Fluxus artist, once said in an interview something to the effect that he had nothing against the world except that he thought it was too perfectly arranged.

This attitude can sometimes be found in contemporary art, and for example in Lars Bent Petersen (born 1964), who was granted a three-year stipend by the Danish Arts Foundation the day before yesterday, and who is currently exhibiting in the Copenhagen gallery, Stalke Kunsthandel. But one may with equal parts irony and seriousness ask whether the artist himself isn’t expressing a similar dissatisfaction with the world when Lars Bent Petersen creates loose diary pages and makes art about dilemmas such as If I had done it, would it have been right?

In Lars Bent Petersen’s retrospective yet thematically cohesive and installation-oriented exhibition, the private meets the near and far (large-scale) political realms, without necessarily being explicitly connected. Why? Because the world doesn’t hang together.

For example, in the work Self-Portrait, there is no connection between an image of the Nyrop Tower, cassette players with pop songs, and a photo of Lars Bent as a boy, receiving his first kiss – for what? – 25 years ago. But it is, after all, the sum of a life’s memories and images that are voted on. Today’s pop songs, the fall of the government, recollections. It all meets in our heads, but where is the connection?

Where is the connection between large-scale political events and banal pop songs, which are demonstrated in another way, where titles are placed in the spotlight for global events: Suzanne Vega’s Luka and Wounded in Korea. What is the connection here  between a photo of the National Gallery of Denmark and one of Cindy Crawford? Surely not?

Just a few years ago, there were answers and explanations, straightforward ideologies and beliefs, conspiracy theories, and political explanatory models, but today there is nothing. We are finally at a zero point, with the freedom that provides.

Here begins Lars Bent Petersen's tentative and searching mapping of a world that necessarily must take its starting point in personal reflection. It is the raw and naked attempt, in the sense of illusionless humanity, to grasp existence with all its banality, emptiness, desires, and needs. For example, the need for love.

This investigation takes place through the banal and obvious things from the world as we know it. Naturally. Where else would one begin? Where else would one find a bearable artistic expression, purified of clichés? Here – in dreams – responsibility emerges. This is Lars Bent Petersen's art.

By Torben Weirup