EXPANDER — exhibition tour by a space definer

Hannu Castrén

Kimmo Schroderus was awarded the Ars Fennica Prize in 2004. The series of exhibitions associated with the prize have already been held at the Art Museums in Hämeenlinna, Kouvola and Joensuu. The summer before the exhibition tour, Schroderus made two major sculptures, Dark Cloud and Expander to go with the overall retrospective of his work.

Schroderus had had the idea for Expander in his mind for some time and he became more and more convinced about the sense of the idea when he started sketching and carrying out technical experiments. The artist has always worked in this way when he has been aroused by some essentially new attractive idea. He may carry the idea for a sculpture in his mind for years alongside other projects, until such time as he decides to realise it. The approaching exhibition tour and the need to supplement his work brought Expander to the top of the agenda. The artist had originally planned to start building this large steel sculpture that was commissioned for the University of Joensuu after the Ars Fennica tour.

Although the nucleus of the art of Kimmo Schroderus is based on long-term thinking and ideas that become certainties over a period of time, he does not in any way deny the importance of physical work in art. There is no hierarchy among the different elements involved, except that the idea has to include a prescription for the physical work stage. Otherwise it becomes too intangible and evaporates from the mind of the artist. For Schroderus, visual exuberance is more important than austerity bordering on the immaterial. He has, indeed, said that he also enjoys long, monotonous phases of work immensely, when the idea not only controls the plot, but also adapts to the physical work done by hand. There is always a certain amount of organization between the different elements when the artist is acquiring the necessary materials and planning a timetable for his work and that of his assistants. The action phase proceeds on the creative contract principle.

Unafraid of conventionality, Schroderus avoids theorising about art, emphasising handcraft and technical skills, plus the indispensable importance in the art of the sculptor of doing things with one’s own hands. This approach was also one of his key selection criteria when he was curator for the Mänttä Art Festival in 2003. In the light of the above, the title of the exhibition could also be interpreted as a polemic: Sculpture.

Apart from sculptures commissioned for specific public places, Schroderus has constructed all his large sculptures in component parts, so they can be dismantled and put together again. In Dark Cloud and Expander, he increased the standard width of the components from 80 cm to 120 cm, as he thought the doors to the spaces where they were to be exhibited were large enough for the components to be moved. They also differ from previous works in that, because of their large size, they could not be assembled in the studio. Even before he became an Ars Fennica candidate, Schroderus had visited ‘Studio K’ while planning Expander to get the feeling of its visual effect. At the construction stage, ‘Studio K’ became like a second workshop where the artist worked up the sculpture into its ideal form in his mind’s eye.

The most exciting thing about Expander was whether the ‘telescopic’ limbs were going to remain firm and straight even at maximum extension. It was only at the Hämeenlinna Art Museum that Schroderus was able to see for the first time how well the sculpture matched his design, or whether he was going to have to rely on a smaller back-up alternative. The sculptor found that his risk analysis paid off and Expander worked in the gallery just as he had expected. This single-sculpture installation was not finally ready until it was actually there, on site.

Describing the construction process of Expander shows how its artistic and technical realisations are almost one and the same thing. According to the artist, the work is constructed on a very simple idea: the purpose of the work is to take command of the space. Once it has made contact with all its limbs in the space, it is secured in a stable position. Equilibrium is achieved in a different way in each different space, and in this sense, Expander is a nomadic work which, as a travelling object, completes itself over and over again. One might even think that the more whimsical the space, the more effectively the Expander demonstrates its power as a definer of space.

Schroderus has compared the Expander to an instrument, since usually the beauty of an instrument communicates its fitness for purpose and vice versa. After this aesthetic positioning it was easy for the artist to choose good old bolts for tightening the nested steel tubes so that they are firmly fixed to each other. Besides their practical function, the rows of bolts on the surfaces of the tubes are like a brutal yet beautiful decoration — or like the hairs on some strange creature.

When the functional shape of this peripatetic space definer is compared to an instrument, it immediately brings to mind the latest industrial robots or space technology. Closer still are the sci-fi fantasies of popular culture, the age of robots that appears in films, comic strips and 3D animations that represent the sci-fi genre. The artist seems to have intentionally dressed and dramatized the rational form of the Expander so that it becomes detached from real time and attached to a dim, distant future. The time it represents has not yet arrived, but it is already shaping our existing worldview.

The fine-tuning of the details is sufficient for a temporal shift and for the rectilinear formalism of the work to change into something narrative and emotional. The dramaturgical change also causes the equilibrium of the Expander within the space to be highlighted more than ever as the tension of equilibrium, which the viewer experiences momentarily as an illusion of movement. It is no surprise that anyone stepping into the space is liable to be startled and scared into thinking “It has noticed me”.

Translation The English Center