Henrik Olesen
Festival of the Unconscious
2023
Collage on wood, acrylic, print on paper, glue
12.6 x 15.4 x 15.4 in. / 32 x 39 x 39 cm
Henrik Olesen (b. 1967, Esbjerg, Denmark), lives and works in Berlin. Olesen’s work investigates how identities and bodies are constructed and regulated by various political, social, and cultural forces. These concerns are manifested through architectural interventions, collages, and sculptures often made of readymade materials, and particularly refer to the formal language of specific art historical moments such as Minimalism.
Festival of the Unconscious was part of a series of six boxes included in Exposées, a group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2023 which positioned AIDS “as an interpretative grid through which to reconsider a broad range of artistic practices that were exposed to the epidemic.” Olesen covered the inside and outside of a painted plywood box with images sourced from mass media, many of which relate to the AIDS epidemic. Reproductions of AIDS medications and prescriptions are juxtaposed with photographs of landscapes filled with trash, photographs of consumer items (a screwdriver, USB stick, batteries, gluestick, a bottle of poppers), gay magazine clippings, a train ticket, a bank withdrawal slip, and reproductions of famous 19th century paintings (a Courbet seascape and a Manet lemon). Olesen’s box thus “dirties” or brings down to earth lofty Minimalist aesthetics, particularly those informing the slick industrial surfaces and box forms of Donald Judd.
Olesen’s projects are often based on in-depth research and feature collage:
Collage, more generally, is central not only to Olesen’s way of working but to his way of thinking. Collage is when all that is bi- becomes poly-. It collapses information, injecting ambivalence and disjuncture into it. Like William Burroughs’s cut-ups, collage makes language dirty, in both the erotic and the distorted sense. Olesen’s work insists that one can be reductive while also being generative—his is a productive politics of refusal.
Collage is an untrained, DIY method of construction as opposed to an artistic production requiring skill, hired help, or technical know-how.
Festival of the Unconscious is also representative of Olesen’s longstanding interest in using the social and political histories of homosexuality and homosexual identity to structure to his work. Olesen has compiled examples of “sodomy laws” from around the world as testimony to the persistent criminalization of homosexuality; assembled a vast atlas of images of homo-social and homoerotic representations in art and cultural history; and created a historical and imagined portrait—in photo-text collages and sculptural objects—of British mathematician Alan Turing.
The image of the red screwdriver relates to the red screwdriver appearing in Olesen’s 2008 show on Alan Turing, in which he first presented the screwdriver and screws as symbolic of his artistic and practical construction of Turing’s biography through a system of collaged fragments of images and texts. Olesen started making “screw paintings” in 2011, and which were featured in the 2017 Wattis Institute exhibition, “The Walk.” Olesen attached rows of metal screws to canvas with hot glue to produce work that playfully inserts sex and the body into the cleanliness and sexlessness of the modernist grid:
Underneath everything, there’s dirt. Most of the time, we regulate and contain it. We cover it up with floors, roads, buildings, even entire cities. When it spills, we sweep it up—it’s as if we were hiding or repressing it. Henrik Olesen adds dirt to the neatness and sexlessness of conceptual art. He is drawn to surfaces that are scarred, deformed, uneven, and deliberately rough. He works against all that is antiseptic and towards an art that recognizes desire, profanity, obscenity, perversion, and jouissance as productive and emancipatory forces. If Olesen is dirty, it’s because he takes the culturally constructed boundaries that separate man from woman, gay from straight, normal from abnormal, and dirties them up. He queers all that is fixed and organized, replacing it with the dissolved and the disorganized—the polysexual.
The structure of the box formally manifests boundaries between outside / inside and the public / personal, with collaged elements on the inside more hidden and inaccessible than those outside, and the entirety of the images impossible to behold at once from a single vantage point. Olesen has used cardboard boxes in his work since at least 2010 in his “Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork” presentation with Galerie Buchholz. The first series of plywood boxes with collage stylistically similar to Festival of the Unconscious were presented at the Schinkel Pavillon in 2018 and at Galerie Buchholz in 2019.
Provenance
dépendance, Brussels
Exhibitions
Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Exposées, February 17 – May 14, 2023
See also
Henrik Olesen at Galerie Buchholz
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Henrik Olesen, June 26 – October 21, 2019
Galerie Buchholz, Henrik Olesen, May 2 – June 29, 2019
Schinkel Pavillon, Henrik Olesen: Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!, September 8 – December 21, 2018
The Wattis Institute, Henrik Olesen: The Walk, March 16 – May 14, 2017
Galerie Buchholz, Henrik Olesen, January 24 – March 5, 2016
Galerie Buchholz, Henrik Olesen: Hysterical Men, September 20 – November 23, 2013
Galerie Buchholz, Henrik Olesen: “How do I make myself a body?”, December 11 2008 – January 31, 2009
Galerie Franco Noero, Henrik Olesen, November 5, 2011 – January 14, 2012
MoMA, Projects 94: Henrik Olesen, February 9 – May 23, 2011
Studio Voltaire, Henrik Olesen: Mr. Knife & Mrs. Fork, October 9 – November 7, 2009
Galerie Buchholz, Henrik Olesen, October 14 – November 15, 2005