You Bastard

One more Bastard

Currently there are several idealistic, non-commercial, artist-run galleries emerging in Oslo, but it is Bastard that - since it’s opening in 2005 – seems to articulate this position most clearly. The gallery’s name suggests a strategic blurring of the line, to quote the gallery’s distant relative Allen Kaprow, “between art and life”. This indistinctness fits well with artworks you are likely to encounter at a Bastard-exhibition which tend to be raw, open and relationally charged. Bastard also tend to favor hacking, appropriation and other low-cost procedures. Culture clash, a recent exhibition of video-art, demonstrates this principle clearly. It consists of one commissioned work only; the rest is downloaded from the internet. Several of the artists behind the pirated material, like Paul McCarthy and Cindy Sherman, are – in the process of appropriation – actually bastardized themselves; dragged down from the pedestal and exhibited afresh.
The Bastard-way of art making is fundamentally connected with how, and where, it is shown. Its location is parodying the grand architecture of great institutions: it is situated in the middle of nowhere, the gallery space itself is dirty and worn - there is not even a signpost outside signaling that there is in fact a gallery present. The apparant anonymity of the gallery nevertheless has specific functions which reaches outside the art-space itself. Without giving out that it is a gallery it blends in with its environments almost seamlessly. You have to know its there. This site-specificness gives it a chameleon-like character which, in fact, fits remarkably well with its all-over profile. Last year the gallery was transformed into a pizzeria; there was nothing that revealed that it was a gallery that fed you the pizza-slices. Again, you had to know it was art. Before Anders Smebye and Marius Engh started Bastard the place actually used to be a pizzeria. This show, executed by the artist-group aiPotu (consisting of Anders Kjellesvik and Andreas Sique-land), makes the very core of Bastard manifest: by repeating the pizza-making within the frame of art Bastard takes on an ironic attitude towards the art-system and the conventional form of the art-object itself and presents a low-key take on relational aesthetics that, in all its site-specifness, generously anchors the gallery in its immediate surroundings. This is underlined by the fact that the art-pizzeria was entirely constructed of found objects or props already present in the gallery. In the way its name and architecture are put to work in its environmental connections and immaterial processing of art as concept and institution Bastard manages, then, to revitalize the practice of making and using art and draw up a few coordinates that weren’t there from before.

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