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HANS MARTIN ØIEN

Jan Åke Pettersson

Since the middle of the eighties Hans Martin Øien has been creating sculptures that are difficult to find equal to in Norwegian contemporary art. Yet many people regard them as very familiar, as if one has seen them before somewhere.

If one looks more closely at his often complex composite objects one may feel tricked. They are not what they appear to be in either form or function. He has himself classified this type of work as Follies, foolish and silly constructions that only mimic their references to the better known historical objects that one would expect were the source. One of his first works in this series was a reconstruction of a Viking-age building which archoelogists were quite certain had existed but of which the form was unknown. After thorough investigation he came up with a proposal to this Mikill Hirstofa that in its symmetrically built up framework was both based on log-cabin style cogged joints and on stave church construction methods from the middle ages. Into this classical architectural construction he installed a pair of 17th century door leaves decorated with his own personal wood carvings. Above the whole he finally placed a central tower in the romantic style that made this colossus on the feet of a Norwegian farm storehouse even more confusing. It had surely not been his intention to point out the possibility of these historically co-existing techniques and styles being combined in some master-builders head. It was rather that he desired to decompose, or analytically take apart the different ethnic style elements in a national historical story and merge them together into a new identity.

This artistic strategy as represented by Hans Martin Øien was in the eighties was referred to as Postmodernistic. For more than a hundred years modern art had been connected to a linear historically developing thought process where natural imitations, historical consciousness, and hand craft had to give way before an increasing degree of abstraction and theoretical enchainement, until the conceptual artists of the seventies appear to have fulfilled the idea of presenting works that no longer took their expression from physical objects.When the idea of a continuously progressive art development finally had imploded, histories flood gates opened once again. This time not as a cyclic return of the ideals of an indivual epoch, but as a limitless resourse where eveything was equally possible as was allowed. This in turn opened things up for artists to retrace their tracks and produce completely new hypotheses, not just about the subject of art, but also about who we really were and which world we lived in.

After his categorical debut work Øien extended his time period register to include industrialism's technical appliances, mechanical forms as ill-placed, but fully working components in hopelessly dysfunctional mobiles. Together with elements of an, as yet, unrevealed wood-carving,where he could place fragments of unknown organic patterns that meet straight-lined wood cuttings inspired by abstract French post war paintings, he established his combination of of extremely confusing objects. On one of these constructions, the triangular formed Grind, he applied in addition three head-shaped forms in a spring-mounted meeting between primitive machine technology, the Viking age and Death Metal.. On a photo-sketch of this work he has added over each of the head-shapes theGreek words logos,nous, and eros - reason, sense, and yearning for beauty. These are central concepts in Plato's philosophy and it is suprising that such a down to earth and pragmatic person, in other terms an Aristotlean artist type such as Han Martin Øien, asks the observer to think along these lines. This association to the foundation of idealism is hardly as far-fetched as his sculpured groups. In these massive and towering works each individual detail gives a clear impression of being filled with some substantial meaning, an immediate, urgent significance that disapointingly always seems to crumble when one attempts to catch it. In spite of the fact that a work such as Grind contains obvious symbol forms, It must be pointed out that his sculptures in their whole do not represent anything in particular. Nevertheless they obey the traditional laws of esthetics in their construction and, as such, the objects appear as they should, but do not behave as they should once the get inside our heads. Their visual appearance can be described as reflecting what Plato called 'the beautiful skinn', a shadow display on a cave wall that we with great trust relate to, totally unaware of the true and rationally explanatory light that in fact is behind the superficial hullabaloo we are watching. When Øien misleads the observer it is not therefor to to blur or hide his historical refernces, but rather to expose them free of all the interpretation -theortetical sediment that has attached itself through the years and so to use them in a new way. Only those who understand an objects essence know that appearances can deceive.

With his artistic intention of the Follies Øien was in some ways a parallel to his American colleague Jeff Koons, who in his use of the modern consumer society's gaudy objects, among other things, focused attention on the art-police's disdain for the popular taste. But Øiens challenge to the art establishment lay also on a different level to references to folk-art and other historical forms of expression. When he started using wood as the main material in his works it was in a period when trend-setting art circles regarded this as totally outdated. When he, in addition, insisted on producing his objects himself by using old hand-crafting techniques, he made it no easier on himself in a world where it had become usual for artists to order their digitally laid out sculptures direct from the factory. His wish to differ from the established pattern in chpoice of materials and in his own hand-craft was also shown in a series of quite ironical works from the mid-nineties thatwere termed The Artists Hand. With plaster copies of his own hands attached to relatively simple, but still historic refering wood sculptures, he resurrected the old thoughts of the romantic period regarding the artist as a creative genius. In this tradition it was not only the art work itself that was considered, but also the inspired hand that had created it. As an authentic artist it was not sufficient to come up with the design, One also had to be able to execute it. In Øiens universe it was necessary to be a 'self-made man', attached to his artistic project even when the power was out. This is why he chose, significantly enough, to exhibit his series for the first time in a darkened stue at the Folkemuseet in Oslo. Accusations of being reactionary and of not standing on the side of progress in art never seem to have affected Hans Martin Øien. As a response to such narrow-minded attitudes about his activity, he also started using digital technology towards the end of the nineties, in a series of wall mounted works that often accompanied his more organic formed free-sculptures in dfferent installations. These constellations, as they were called, were two-dimensional reliefs where sheets of glass with digital photo collageswere mounted in a contrating composition of flat varying shaped wooden materials. Aided by different lighting types the photographic motives created a floating, dematerialised picture that provided him with yet another possibility to emphasize the deliberate romantifying side of his production. As a follow on to this he also started on the series Abstrakt Figurasjoner, 2000. Here he not only created a wall based work with elements of colourful patterns most reminiscent of an urban graffiti artists new interpretation of Norwegian 'Rosemaling'. He had also constructed a series of tall sculptures which, with their symmetrically constructed forms and head-shaped tops were clearly possible to associate to human forms. In contrast to the majority of his earlier works, these did not have direct historical references, just simple mechanical-industrial components that created clear breaks and functioned rather as opposites to the more organic main elements. Here he had put the main effort into thorough surface treatment of the different types of wood to provide the individual forms their own lives. Some are smoothed like skin, others look like textiles, some give the impression of being made of metal. When he in addition colours several of the elements, he contributes to the fact that these strange forms are interpreted as bodies, or better put, as classical sculptures where one is left with the feeling of having been in the presence of something baroque.

Then Hans Martin Øien changes course. In his latest sculptures that are being premired at Hauger Vestfold Kunstmuseum he has suddenly become literary. He tells long and short stories about individuals and types in our problematical age that easily could have been picked out of the Sunday supplement to any one of the tabloid newspapers. Here are the happy gay couple, here's the immoral flasher with his ambiguous victim. Here's the terrorist guarding his captured jounalist and here's the graffiti artist in heroic battle with a prejudiced public and the competing taggers visual contamination. But these stories are told in a language that puts them at risk of losing their emotional gravity and substance and therefore are in danger of collapsing as valid stories. This is because the sculptures are enlarged Lego figures, safe and optimistic bursting plastic toys that usually only are able to convey their meaning in the fantasy world of children. When he in addition has dropped all requirements regarding hancrafting execution and built his standardised models of cheap scrap materials from used packing cases one wonders if these stories are so important to him after all. It appears rather that he has created a new type of deceptive Follies and has provisionally crowned his artistic career with a fairly low-key assessment of the consequenses of globalisation. When the west's media tell the same story for the thousandth time, when we have the same opinions and share the same ideals, then isn't it time to break away from the robot-like existence and find other viewpoints? If we continue to travel in the same direction as before, who are we really, and how does the past look that has placed us in this position? Hans Martin Øien has no answers to these questions. He just poses the questions, as he basically has always done in his art.