AN OPEL
KADETT AND
Hannu Castrén
Kimmo Schroderus graduated from the Department of Time
and Space of the
Performance art can relate to sculpture in the form of
conceptual references through the artist’s body and body language. As a
sculptor, Schroderus does not greatly value conceptualisation, at least not in
its purely intellectual and intangible form. An artist’s work must also be
physical, endowing the sculpture with a concrete feel of materialism. Only then
can the sculpture justify its existence and express its own truth. Confusing
jargon has no place in the sculptor’s studio; it is useless when it comes to
welding a seam, for example.
Without formal sculptor’s training, Schroderus has had
to learn all the major techniques by himself. Fortunately he is driven by a
strong belief in humans’ capacity to learn and internal insight as to what we
should focus our energy on. The sculptor’s workshop is in the industrial district
of Nurmijärvi. There he has realised how important it is for an artist to adapt
to loneliness as a professional characteristic. Working by himself, he can
schedule his work to allow each piece just the leisure and persistence that it
needs.
At the studio is a work in progress with the working
title 90 º. It is scheduled to be completed in time to be
the newest piece in the Kiasma exhibition. The artist points at the plaster
moulds for the piece and says he has never before made such carefully constructed
moulds. Even if the technical implementation of a piece includes some original
and inventive solutions, they should not be visible or palpable in the finished
sculpture. The work process with its tensions keeps the sculptor’s perfectionism
in a constant state of alertness. That is also what gives him the greatest
pleasure during the work, although it is often backed by a chorus of cursing.
It is not at all bad for a young artist to be
ambitious, particularly when he is talented and full of an energy that allows
him to channel that talent. Schroderus has said that in the early years he had
a great yearning and hurry to “take over the world”. In that sense the art
world is paradoxical, because as soon as it has launched an artist with great pomp
and circumstance into what is deemed the vanguard of contemporary art, it
starts closing doors and kicking him or her out. Schroderus considers that he
has made it through the closing doors without losing his self-confidence, and
admits that even negative experiences have turned out to be educational – i.e.
beneficial to a sculptor who is always willing to improve.
Schroderus simply had to change his strategy and step
out of the spotlight, which had proven to be fickle anyway. He took up artist’s
residences around the world and stopped rushing. He tried reclusion as a work
method and found it to be favourable. Once his ambition and energy were bounded
within the studio, the artist could feel unconditionally free.
From this self-made state of freedom, Kimmo Schroderus
returned to the centre of attention with the Ars Fennica award in 2004. The
award included an extensive exhibition tour around
Different
works, same attitude
Kimmo Schroderus became familiar to the wider art
audience as early as the 1990s, with his pop-style objets d’art, and
particularly his pieces made of sewn leather. The works’ creative core
consisted of the artist’s uninhibited ability to import the content and visual
nature of popular culture into high-culture art. He probably did not even
consider such concepts, or work in the conceptual whirlpools formed by their
relative hierarchy. The coupling was natural and felt right. On the younger
generation, the works had the effect of a collection of perfect pop songs. In
that sense at least, Schroderus’s exhibitions caused no problems related to art
education or accessibility for museums.
Self-Portrait
of an Artist with his Favourite Tool (1993) is
an apt reflection of the artist’s approach in the 1990s, when leather was his
main medium and the sewing machine his most important tool. From the point of
view of content, the self-portrait can be seen to contain a triangular arrangement,
whose points are the sewing machine, the tattoos and the genitals. They replace
the head as the attributes that define the artist’s self-image. While handicrafts
have historically been a woman’s work, tasked even with controlling the morals
of the female sex, in this piece the tattoos and masculine sexuality ritualise
the sewing machine perfectly as a man’s tool. The piece almost contains an
artistic manifesto, whose empowering effect can be recognised in some of
Schroderus’s later works.
A juxtaposition with sculptor Noora Schroderus’s piece
Faithful Friends (2009) gives a good
impression of the pivotal change in Kimmo Schroderus’s work. Recognisable in
the miniature sculpture is a male figure reminiscent of Kimmo Schroderus; in
front of him stand a number of tools for shaping and welding metals. The artist
stands before them in readiness, as if enchanted.
Both pieces bring out an important characteristic of
Kimmo Schroderus’s identity as an artist: he wants to master all the techniques
used in his pieces, and that can only be achieved by doing almost everything himself.
This has become a criterion for the artistic ideas he decides to follow through.
In other words, the idea must facilitate an unconditional physical and
technical work process; otherwise it will fade away into lightness. This
personal principle was also a central criterion when Schroderus curated the
Mänttä Art Festival in 2003, building the largest-ever exhibition of Finnish
contemporary sculpture.
Schroderus’s artwork contains many surprising
methodological shifts. These shifts do not always arise from the fact that the
artist has squeezed dry a certain theme, medium or method; they are more due to
the fact that new ideas begin to rise to the surface so strongly that they
inevitably banalise the ongoing form of expression. In this sense, boredom is a
good companion for inspiration, because it can bring on the end of a period and
file completed artworks in a historical collection. The artist’s vision is thus
dominated by a boundary-breaking attitude towards the materials and forms of
sculpture.
At the turn of the millennium, plastic, leather,
fabric, concrete and wood were replaced by steel as Schroderus’s most important
medium. That was also the time of the artist’s first monumental public
commissions. Already in the Ars Fennica exhibitions, he had included sculptures
welded together from steel bars, and he adopted the same technique for the
public works. The largest commissioned pieces were Kuru (2001–2006) for the City of
Schroderus says that he had enough steel-bar-bending
when making Surge, his largest piece until then, and decided to do something
completely different from then on. The piece Expander already contained an
impulse for a stylistic change, on the basis of which Schroderus continued
working as soon as the commissioned pieces had been installed. As Noora
Schroderus’s piece indicates, however, the artist has by no means given up
steel and welding; they remain his absolute favourites.
Four Sculptures
Most of Kimmo Schroderus’s exhibitions are somewhat
like miniature retrospectives, including both sculptures seen before in
previous exhibitions and all-new works. This is partly due to the fact that
large sculptures are slow to complete and produced at long intervals.
The artist also clearly wishes to express that when
placed in a different space and paralleled with new pieces, even a familiar
sculpture can be seen from new viewpoints. The context begins to act as a kind
of museum guide, providing content for a dialogue between the works of art.
Expander is a unique piece in this sense. Contemporary
sculptors consider the relationship between sculptures and space as carefully
as they ponder every detail of the piece. Optimally, the form and the space
become fused to the extent that the surrounding space can form a part of the
sculpture’s artistic being. This space-orientation means that the finishing
touches to each sculpture’s artistic aura are put when installing the piece in
the exhibition space. Schroderus defines Expander as a sculpture that adjusts
itself to the space available. As a spatial element, it is an “absolute” piece.
The sculpture is robotic in appearance. By inventing and developing robots, humanity
strives to find untiring replacements for itself. The purpose of robots is to
complete the tasks that humans are unable to do, because of the efficiency,
precision or dangerous nature of the work or – perhaps increasingly in future –
due to the mental displeasure caused by it. Thus it is no wonder that
Schroderus should call the Expander a tool with which the sculpture’s spatial
relations can be determined with instrumental precision. It is as exact in performing
this task as a spirit level is in its own domain.
Expander adapts to each space, meaning that it is
always a different piece. As the space changes, the sculpture moulds itself
into a new variation on the same theme. Before long, the exhibition spaces transform
it into a serial sculpture, as was already the case on the Ars Fennica tour. Expander
was exhibited in Kiasma’s Studio K in 2005; in 2009 it returns in a radically
different space. Thus we bear witness to a new version of the Expander’s series
of spatial conquests.
The only way to bring the variations and the
sculpture’s nomadic nature to an end would be a public or private acquisition
which would permanently place the piece in a specific architectural setting. The
work is well suited to that, too, because as an absolute overtaker of a space
it would adapt seamlessly to being one aesthetic element of a larger entity.
While Expander is an indoor sculpture, Bogey (2006–2007) was designed for the
exterior world. The artist calls Bogey the “fat brother” of Expander. This
humorous definition indicates that the sculpture’s monumental nature arises not
only from its dimensions but also from the recognisable clumsiness used as a
visual effect. That being the case, the construction of thick, cylindrical
limbs also contains a counterforce. Bogey can be placed in nine different
positions, which supports the idea of the sculpture’s potential for dynamism. It
has the ability to move by rolling.
Expander and Bogey share the artist’s wish to choose technical
solutions due to their purely aesthetic significance. This is why there has
been no effort to hide the bolts that grip together the Expander’s telescopic
limbs or hold together the Bogey’s extremities. On the contrary, their size is
exaggerated to emphasise their visual role and effect in the sculptures.
According to the artist, the name of Bogey reflects
the conflicts in the sculpture’s being. A bogeyman is simultaneously a scary
and a charming figure. In the style of sculptor Henry Moore’s philosophy, Bogey
makes visible the forces arising from the opposites of life, which cannot be
portrayed by following beauty ideals. Mythologies discussing the conflicts of
life are rooted in the history of humanity, but Bogey appears to transmit
mythological content more from the future than from the past. The sculpture’s
form and mood are dominated by a futuristic perspective that naturally
influences our current view of the world. Bogey spent the winter at the edge of
the park in the town of
Visually, Bogey bears a relation to the planned pair
of sculptures The Caveman Keeps Watch
and The Caveman Awakes, with which
Schroderus won the sculpture competition for Highway 6 organised by the City of
Two residences in
The idea for Dark Cloud arose on the same hiking trips
whose waterfall shows inspired the large steel sculptures. Schroderus says that
he had the idea to bring together clouds and mountains in the same sculpture. The
piece hangs in the air so that viewers can walk beneath it. Seen from below, it
looks like a cloud, but from a distance the profile is that of a mountain
range.
The name can easily bring to mind discordant
interpretations related to global climate change and environmental disasters. That
transforms the sculpture’s subliminal mood into feelings of fear, shock and
pessimism. That was by no means the sculptor’s primary point of view, however. Schroderus
emphasises that he considers critical content to be an artificial addition to a
piece, which he greatly wishes to eschew. Central to his art is the reality
that appears through the choices of materials, forms and polished technical
solutions. Thus at the work stage, the idea serves the sculpture rather than
vice versa.
In carefully concentrating on the work of art,
however, Schroderus is not a representative of dispassionate formalism. By
focusing all of his energy on fulfilling the laws he has planned for each
sculpture, the artist definitely creates new levels of seeing, experiencing and
thinking for the viewer, in relation to both sculpture and the present reality.
Once the sculpture is complete, its multiplicity of meaning is the viewer’s
problem. The more varied the interpretations, the more pleased the artist!
90º
Kimmo Schroderus’s art is based on the principles of
memory and design. His initial outlines can consist of quick sketches and
annotations made during the progress of his work. The actual completion of his
sculptural work, on the other hand, may be preceded by computerised designs
based on calculations accurate to the nearest millimetre. Another important
approach for the sculpture is to make a miniature model of a future piece. His
models could also be called miniature sculptures.
According to the artist, a three-dimensional miniature
is often the only way to test ideas to see whether they are worth putting into
effect. For his latest piece, 90º, he made two different models. One relates to
the trajectory of a car making a handbrake turn. Schroderus carried out
handbrake tests on gravel and measured the required space for the motion from
the tyre marks. This data was transferred to the model.
He went on to base the large piece on a different miniature
that examines another popular and traditional vehicular trajectory. This
rotating motion can be achieved with a rear-driven car, by sharply turning the
steering wheel while stepping forcefully on the accelerator. A rear-driven car
is fairly easy to rotate around its nose in controlled fashion. Done on plain
tarmac, this manoeuvre is known as burning rubber. According to the artist,
this creates “a fabulous stench of exhaust gas and burning rubber and lots of
noise, without any sense.” The car does a full circle which can be repeated
until the tyres wear out.
For the piece, Schroderus bought two 1970s rear-driven
Opel Kadett cars, which contribute a realistic nostalgia to his handling of the
topic. It used to be a popular car in
90º is a tribute to the culture centred around burger
vans and garages. The youths who drive around and meet in these places may be
gripped by a sudden urge to burn rubber as the evening falls, after which
nothing will stop them. When a driver receives this compelling command from his
gut and steps on the gas, he can feel completely in control of the most
despairing, passive or isolated life for just a few seconds. For a moment, the
circle hems him into the centre of the world –
a timeless time and a state of incorruptible freedom. Making a full
circle forms a part of the spiritual practices of Zen monks. It feels good to
consider that a perfect circle made in an Opel Kadett is no less significant
than that.
If his work calls for internal cogitation and a boost of faith, Schroderus goes out to enjoy the evening quietness of the industrial area and practises a third interesting motion in his car: skidding. He will repeat it until the trajectory is imprinted in his body’s memory. This could be called a form of sketching done by the artist during the course of his work.
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, 2009, Horror Vacui A Museum of Contemporary Art Publication 120/2009
Translation Eva Malkki