Gardar Eide Einarsson

XXL Bathroom

In a staggeringly vandalistic touch, the Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson has filled entire toilet walls at Karriere Bar with broad, black felt pen strokes. One model for the work is provided by conventional felt pen graffiti on white walls in bar toilets. An act of protest, a sort of ‘I was here’ marker, and a piece of wanton destruction insofar as it is something the bar owner could happily have done without. The other inspiration for the work is the giant single colour painting – modernism’s favourite format – the monochrome. The monochrome is about temporal and spatial experience inasmuch as it is too large to be viewed from one vantage point and all at once. The viewing experience was conceived as one that grants the spectator autonomy, but some find it overwhelming and angst-provoking. And on the topic of vandalism and monochromes, it is worth noting that paintings by the artist Barnett Newman, which are among the most dazzling and famous monochromes in art history, are also, statistically, those most prone to vandalism. In Gardar Eide Einarsson’s works, it is these two visual worlds that intersect. Graffiti, skater culture, hardcore typography and street experience collide with modern art’s simplicity and stringency. The shape of a cube, which in the minimalist sculpture’s idiom would be in a white metal frame à la Sol De Witt or in bent metal à la Donald Judd, is articulated, in Einarsson’s version, as a cage of wire fencing. No longer an abstract reflection of form and perception, it becomes a concrete experience of physical control in the form of confinement. Einarsson seems to be saying that acts of disobedience such as using public sculptures as skate board ramps or scrawling felt pen graffiti on public toilet walls may be a protest against what is perceived as oppression. The white walls that he took to with a pen are ‘normal’ in our society, a neutral ground. By imitating ‘normalcy’, albeit in an inverted form – black instead of white, felt pen instead of paint roller – Einarsson shows that the very notion of ‘normal’, and the way that idea dominates everything else, has a lot in common with extreme mania. As Einarsson formulates it in another work:

THOSE WHO AGREE WITH YOU ARE INSANE
THOSE WHO DO NOT AGREE WITH YOU ARE IN POWER
SOME OF THOSE IN POWER ARE INSANE AND THEY ARE RIGHT
[Gardar Eide Einarsson, uden titel (Those in Power), 2004]

(NH)

Gardar Eide Einarsson, born 1976, Norway

• artwork