Projects 2003

F for Fake – Christian Andersson questions truths


F for Fake – nothing is genuine. The title of Swedish artist Christian Andersson’s installation comes from the Orson Welles film of the same name. Andersson plays with the idea that artists are actors playing magicians. In the opening of his film, Welles states that magicians are actors playing magicians, Viewers often accept that artists engage in slight of hand to trick us into experiencing a moment of the sublime, before reason inevitably kicks in – oh, I get it!

A single, purplish spotlight illuminates one wall of the gallery. The beam seems to throw its light between its own two shadows. But what casts the shadows? There are no other light sources to account for the two shadows. The magic trick here is a coating of phosphorescent paint; the shadows are created by masking parts of the painted surfaces. In a sense, the spotlight illuminates its own shadows. It takes a moment before viewers realizes that there is something strange about what they are seeing. What at first seems perfectly natural becomes unnatural.

Christian Andersson has been greatly influenced by conceptual artist Dan Graham’s conceptual/perceptual trickery. Andersson’s previous work is infused with elements from the popular culture of the recent past. Philip K. Dick, lava lamps, and 60s sci-fi imagery function as floating signifiers, but also attempt to reflect the way the past saw the future, both in art history and pop culture. F for Fake refers to Bruce Nauman’s neon sculpture The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mystical Truths. Nauman’s spiral also inspires viewers to contemplate the nature of their truths and the impossibility of this task.

Christian Andersson’s works have been shown this year in the Malmö Art Museum’s Nya Hamn exhibition, at the Adagio exhibition at the Gävle art centre and in the Greyscale/CMYK exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Andersson worked in his exhibition at MUU Gallery at the NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art) residence in Suomenlinna in spring 2003. NIFCA has produced the exhibition in collaboration with MUU ry.

Further information:
Marita Muukkonen , NIFCA
tel. +358-9-686 43 108 / +358 40 5040 112
project@nifca.org

Timo Soppela, MUU
tel. +358 9 625 972, muu@muu.fi

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