A LOT – MORE – TOO MUCH

Hannu Castrén

The artist’s self-portrait is a speciality of portrait art. The most important feature of the self-portrait is the face and, when the artist personally is the model, the mirror is an important aid. From the viewpoint of the self-portrait tradition Kimmo Schroderus’ Self-portrait of an Artist with his Favourite Tool is a shockingly deviant artwork. And that was undoubtedly the artist’s intention. The self-portrait, in fact, has no head.

The artist has at the same time outrageously broken the rules of classical figure composition in cropping the head from the body right at the neck. This in particular is why the headlessness of the self-portrait is accentuated. The mistake is thus a conscious one, and absolutely right in terms of the aims of the picture’s content. The beheading strategy smashes the restrained analyticalness of the genre and shifts attention to something quite different. The theme of the leather work has first been photographed, which reinforces the clinical exactness of the operation.

In his essays on photography Roland Barthes has carefully analysed what happens when he directs his gaze to the side of what the photograph has intended as its main subject. People’s faces tell us a lot, but there are equally revealing details in the clothing, pose and surroundings of the person being photographed. They give the finder hints of the reality outside the photograph. Schroderus’ self-portrait relies on the same idea, but here the onus of finding things does not lie with the viewer. The maker crops the specific area where the self-portrait’s main elements are, ready for the viewer. Schroderus’ methods do not include hints, rather his works even at their most ambiguous, are open. From the viewpoint of the self-portrait, headlessness in particular is precisely the ‘punctum’ defined by Barthes, that eye-catching detail, that wound, that is the origin of the alertness of the interpretation.

One of the elements is the work’s name, which fills half the picture area. It goes round the sewing machine at the heart of the picture field. Schroderus has said that when he grew so tall that he could no longer find himself off-the-peg clothes in a style that suited him, he had to learn to make them himself. He quickly figured out that a sewing machine is also an ideal implement for art. In the early stages, he made outfits for performances. Next came Soft Book (1994), which is an edition of 50 numbered copies. When using leather he immediately noticed that it is both a brilliant and unusual material in visual art. Leather also proved to be more practical than cloth. Leather became his main material right up to the last years of the 1990s.

Kimmo Schroderus’ self-portrait could also be characterised audaciously as a special variant on the milieu portrait. After all, the leather work focuses the main attention specifically on the surroundings through which the artist wants to view himself. The sewing machine refers to the way the thing is made, which is also accented by the work’s title. But, despite that, at the centre of this milieu is the artist’s naked body. The chest and arm are covered in tattoos, which at least at the moment the work came about still situated its bearer specifically on the eye-catching margins of the urban lifestyle. A tattoo is an image of the self on the surface of the skin. As visible signs of a conscious decadence, tattoos also manifest the idea of the aestheticisation of reality emphasised by postmodernism.

In the light of the vitality manifested by Schroderus’ output, it is rare for the tattoos in the self-portrait to symbolise, albeit playfully, the relentlessness of life, the threat of death, death. In 1996, he completed a series of three portraits of tattooed people. The figures are also headless and depicted from the back. The tattoos provocatively stand in for all that characterises the traditional portrait. As the number of tattoos increases, they expand into biography.

Thus, the sewing machine is revealed as the artist’s favourite tool, but… the genitalia also dominate the picture in a way that means that the status of favourite belongs to them. The tension is, nevertheless, already dispelled in the picture itself: the sewing machine, consigned to the feminine sphere of the home, fulfils the demands of instinct, drive energy right down to the final stroke of perfectionism. That is why it does not detract from the self-portrait’s heroic atmosphere, but rather is the guarantor of its originality.

Yet another startling observation can be made about this self-portrait: it is a synthesis of the artist’s production up to that time, but actually even more a synthesis of what the artist will do in the years that follow. Four Women with the Attitude from 1995 is a series of erotic women’s bodies, which very naturally links the self-portrait to its milieu, becoming its one dominant member. This because then the discourses of gender power avoid coming too close.

Portrait of a Couple is thematically linked to the self-portrait and the women series, even though it was not made until 1998. The idea of the work could be thought of as paralleling the other two, but for some reason its execution has been left to a later stage. There is justification for thinking specifically this way, since by going a few years back from it we get to the starting point for the next phase in Kimmo Schroderus’ art, when he began to do a new series – Sculptures for Two.

The works are by nature furniture sculptures. They naturally furnish the rooms into which the artist steps when he closes the door of his studio. Schroderus’ art emerges from personal starting points. His own life and the ideals linked with it are the main motive for his choices of subject matter and aesthetic. At the same time, the furniture sculptures also manifest the breakdown of one important boundary. Schroderus in fact rejects one of the modern age’s persistent conventions, in which the private and the public are separated strictly and in genderising fashion. The design of the furniture sculptures repudiates this repressive division and proclaims the unfettered joy of the life of the senses and the drives, or at least the possibility of great happiness between two people.

In 1997, the main work in the series, Sweet Dreams, emerged. It is a ritual site of romantic passion, the shape of the bed is the epitome of a Kama Sutra temple. A grandiose baroque leather decoration edging the bed is like a frame, inside which the art of love takes place. In the same year, at the Mänttä Art Festival the bed was surrounded in the exhibition space by some works from Series of Eleven Mirrors completed a year before.

When the viewer, aroused by the bed, stood in front of a mirror, he or she found behind his or her mirror image and the erotic act in random variations. We also observe in the climax that now, for the first and only time, a face appears in Kimmo Schroderus’ production. This is the viewer’s face. At its most extreme the face on the surface of the artwork reveals a portrait of a human being, inhibited in its privacy, that censors itself from being made public, a portrait which spurred on by voyeurism sees its own subconscious. Thus, what emerges is a special milieu portrait, in which the viewer appears in a carnal landscape that rebuffs his or her Stoic self-control.

Both the mirrors and the bed are also highly characteristic of Schroderus’ one foundational artistic viewpoint. Now that the central ideal of modernist art has been distilled into the thesis ‘less is more’, Schroderus takes just the opposite view. He prefers to ponder, in the finishing-off phase of his works, what can still be added. He thus his work is not predicated on simplification, rather, his aesthetic eye wants a lot, more, too much. Frequently, his viewpoint comes out at the point where high culture and popular culture meet. The artist evidently favours the latter. In his latest large steel sculptures, too, the same principle dominates and directs the working process, even though the viewer could easily think differently. Copiousness of detail is a part of Schroderus’ art, but at a certain degree of copiousness they merge into a uniform surface and form. It is in that phase that the artist is satisfied with the end result.

The Sculptures for Two series was transformed at the end of the decade to deal with the themes of powerplay, conflict and destruction that arise in a relationship. In this case, the furniture sculptures also take on a more simplified, more conceptual look. At the same time, the artist chose wood for his main material. The most startling artwork of this period is Because I say so from 1998-99, which in its mood is the most perfect possible opposite of the bed sculpture. It came about after the failure of his marriage.

A table made of cherry wood is, in its outward form, pretty much an ordinary table, i.e. in an exhibition space it refers to the ready made. The artist, however, has made it himself from start to finish. The handiwork required for the table progressed in a special way that matched the name of the work: in a process of continual breaking and assembling. The cracked table surface is a surrogate victim for the passion that has taken the shape of a couple relationship and also come to an end in it. It is made just as though it were the result of a painful performance that has taken place in solitude.

This romantic hopefulness takes us back to If Not Today Then Tomorrow from the year 2000. Schroderus has said that a thought process for an idea can take him a very long way. This work took eight years. Musing on the right make of car took its own time, too, until he chose the Volvo PV 544. Then he still had to find one, which he finally managed to do with almost no effort via a newspaper advertisement. The soft forms of the car match the artist’s choreography perfectly. A great deal of time had been taken up by the decision that the car was to be in no way in working order or mobile. When he found a car, Schroderus still removed some extra bits from it so as to emphasise the nostalgic sensitivity of the end result. The work represents contemporary ruin romanticism. The artwork’s intimate mood, which accentuates closeness, arises from an intermediate terrain somewhere between a melancholy tango and a love-hungry rock ballad.

In the creation of the car work more time was also spent on the choice of material for the seats, since leather would have been too obvious and steel too cold for the purpose. At the end of the decade, Schroderus went through a financially difficult period, when some expensive exhibitions did not sell enough. By chance, several artists’ residencies came up at just that time, and provided a positive solution. First, Schroderus lived for two months in New York, where the carwork took on its final form in sketches. After that, he spent the early autumn in Trondheim, Norway, where he made his first experiments with metal rods.

Dale in Sunnfjord Norway was a major turning point for Schroderus. He worked there in a small village in the late winter of 2000. The residency workshop had brilliant tools specifically for working on wood. There he made car seats out of birch and some smaller sculptures out of pine. This all culminated in a hike in the mountains and valleys. Just at that time of year, nature puts on a magnificent waterfall display, which began to fizz grandiosely in the artist’s ideas.

Schroderus’ spell in these residencies thus marked a time of artistic contemplation, on which his subsequent works were founded. The waterfalls and the precipices that surround them in the future also began to take on sculptural form and to be combined with the earlier experiments in the use of steel rods. When the city of Helsinki commissioned a sketch for a sculpture for the Itäkeskus shopping centre in 2000, Schroderus knew where to begin. The commissioning body also set the condition that flowing water was in some way to be part of the forthcoming work. Between the final agreement and starting the work, the artist was still driving his car through Finland to Norway and from there south along the coast, a total of 6000 km.

Kuru was made out of acid-resistant steel in 2002 and is awaiting installation in the Itäkeskus’ Tallinnanaukio Square, in Helsinki, where it is to be joined by its own stone basin and water flowing down indentations in the sculpture surface. The starting point for the sculpture and its form bring to mind a heart-stirring part of Finnish art history, which begins with national romantic waterfall landscapes and follows the national line to 1960s informalist nature romanticism. Such a tradition, however, has not been Schroderus’ conscious model. Via the theme and the spiritual meanings it represents, informalism serves at most as a covert influence on an artist identity that mainly draws on popular culture, even though when looking at the sculpture we can easily think that the emphasis is the other way round. The artist’s relationship with nature is thus not a direct one, but rather complex in a way that reflects our time.

After flourishing for a few years, informalism and the nature mysticism it involved declined at the beginning of the 1960s, when young artists became interested in the its diametric stylistic opposite, Pop Art. In Kuru the artist has brought the opposite sides together so that it is no longer possible to recognise a contradiction. Kimmo Schroderus has said that, when making Kuru, apart from the waterfall, he was compelled to think about what a spaceship that hit the earth would look like. Only in this way did the water drapery shaped out of steel rods and welded together get a sufficiently capricious formal tempo and movement effects.

Instead of closed form Schroderus is interested in the illusion of it. That is why he leaves the background to his sculptures open. Tallinnanaukio Square is narrow and this means that the ‘deception’ can last for a long time. The work is initially convincing in its block-like intactness, until its shell-likeness is revealed. After this revelation, the illusion is exploded, but at the same time, the sculpture takes on a totally new and autonomous power. According to the artist, it is the case that if the sculpture is good on its positive side, it is also good on its negative side. The shell-likeness misleads the viewer like a false perspective or stage set. It thus calls into question or even banalises the recipient’s profound experience, since the sublime does not reach as far as the other side. Schroderus thus operates naturally and precisely with a high-and-low aesthetic, in a way that is characteristic of his generation.

Staging is a key word for defining Schroderus’ output in general. In his steel sculptures the staging comes out in quite a new way that provokes the eye and the emotions. The public commissions have also crucially changed the nature of the design and the realisation. While the sculptures had previously been placeless and take up a position according to changing exhibition spaces, the public outdoor sculptures are site-specific. Site-specificness incorporates the surrounding space as a fixed part of the work and of its visual effect. Nature is now responsible for the sculpture’s endlessly changing dramaturgy. The changes in the seasons and times of day are reflected in Kuru’s shiny surface and kinetic structures so that this one work acts just like a series of works.

Once Kimmo Schroderus gets his Ars Fennica-prize exhibition tour started, he will set about making his biggest sculpture to date for the campus of Jyväskylä University. According to the small-scale model, the sculpture will be set up on a steep slope and look there as though it is in a continual state of free-fall. The sculptural courage and controlled tension generated by this instability characterise well the mutually supportive pairs of opposites in Schroderus’ artistic thinking at the moment. – They are now central elements in the milieu of his self-portraits.


Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation ARS FENNICA (2004) Kimmo Schroderus Ars Fennica 04. Helsinki: Like.
Translation Mike Garner