A two part installation made for the first promovation of doctors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 2006. The work, commissioned by the Academy of Fine Arts, was installed in the staircase of the Ateneum building in Helsinki.
Because the event was meant to honor the theoretical aspects of making art, Andersson used a chapter from Derrida’s book The Truth in Painting, where Derrida comments Immanuel Kant’s concepts of a ”free beauty”, where Kant disconnects art from everything, which has some kind of use or other interests connected to it. Kant compares Art to a wild flower, which is cut (with a pure cut).
Instead of cutting flowers, Andersson cut different fruits in halves. The halves were put on podiums on the staircase, where the promovated doctors, and others artists graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, walked in a procession. Spoons were stuck into the fruits to give the brave ones a chance to jump off the procession to eat a slice of the fruit.
The other part of the installation dealt with architect Adolf Loos and his rejection of ornaments. Ornamentation has been used to beautify buildings for ages. To provide a building with individuality, quoting the architect Louis Sullivan. Andersson, who has created contemporary ornamentation in many of his projects, cannot see any reason why our age would continue to build on Loos’ ideas.
For the installation Andersson emptied his bathroom cupboard for things and assets used for beautification, like shampoo bottles, shaves, electrical hair dryers etc. He made drawings of these objects in a vector program and created an ornate circle, two meters in diameter in white painted aluminium with a sheet of semitransparent red acrylate inside. Behind the red acrylate are six computer controlled dimmable lights, which react on Loos’ text, Ornament and Crime, read on a looping CD.
Photograph:Hanna-Kaisa Hämäläinen/Kuvataideakatemia
