Satellite Art
project with USA 1966
DAGENS
NYHETER
The largest daily news paper
in Sweden Bonnier AB
This article below about: "TIME"
by Ture
Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom,
was
published in Dagens Nyheter
August 29,
1966.
"TIME" was televised September
1966
in the Swedish National
Television.
Signed:
DIA
(Dick
Idestam-Almqvist)
-----------------------------------------------
TV
"exposes" the present in electronic pictures
during the Jazz Festival.
So the artists
Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom say, of current interest as they are for the
coming jazz festival within the Festival of Stockholm. Some time during
the three days of the jazz festival (Sept 16 - 18) the two picture
experimenter's new film is shown on TV.
It is ready made for TV with
the apparatus of the TV and with the basic function of the TV before one's
sight.
Some year ago Sjolander and Wikstrom brought about a sensation by
exposing pictures on giant billboards outdoor's in Stockholm's City.
If you had something to display you shouldn't fence it, neither in the museums nor among the private art
galleries, but expose it where people are to be found, they
thought.
So consequently
they have chosen the biggest medium of communication, television, for their
latest exhibition.
Sjolander -
Wikstrom are fully conscious of the topicalness of today, another reason for
choosing television. What else can be more actual than to demonstrate the formal
possibilities of TV, and what else can be more actual than mirror the present
while you are demonstrating these formal possibilities?
"Scanner"
re-interprets.
"Time" is the
name of the exhibition, which is based upon various actualities that
Sjolander-Wikstrom have come across during the spring, for instance "Gemini" and
foetal-pictures.
The main part is
taken up by the very much to fore avant-garde jazz-musician Don Cherry and his
quintet at the Golden Circle.
The pictures are
run through a specially built "scanner", an apparatus that in the ordinary cases
is producing "real" pictures, but which in this synthesized
state is "re-interpreting" what the camera has seen, and
thus is creating new pictures. The technicians and the artists have decided what
the apparatus looks like, and the apparatus has decided what the pictures look
like.
The present is
reflected.
Consequently the
couple Sjolander-Wikstrom is demonstrating a phenomenon that is very much up to
date just now: the electronic "machine"
picture.
The Korean
Nam June Paik is for the moment sitting at the Swedish Radio and is
working with similar things. He will show his result at the festival of
Fylkingen "Visions of the Present".
Ture Sjolander
and Bror Wikstrom hold that they by "TIME"
have accomplished a total reflection of the present. Novelties and actualities
have been interpreted by an apparatus that per se is a novelty and an actuality.
A vision of the present.
Their Ideas they
spread in different quises like rings on the water. "Time" will be shown at ABF
(The Worker's Federation of Culture) during the festival, still
pictures of the film - made on silk-screen - will be exposed, and an
edition of 300 prints have already been sold to MULTIART, the darling of
Kristian Romare.
Finally a
summary of the film will be edited in book-form very soon.
And then,
furthermore, Sjolander-Wikstrom are negotiating just now about contributing at
the festival which the Americans of "Fylkingen" are planning in New
York in October.
Possibly parts
of "Time" are going to be transmitted by satellite.
DIA
(Journalist Dick
Idestam-Almqvist)
Dagens Nyheter
Sweden