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text for momentum
by Will Bradley
One of Jakob Kolding’s
collages is of the title, author, publisher and date of J.G. Ballard’s
short novel Running Wild. In Ballard’s story, a group of children
growing up in an isolated commuter enclave in the south of England
act out an almost ritualistic series of killings and disappear.
It’s a detective story, except that the identities of the murderers
and their victims is clear almost from the start. What’s missing,
as it almost always is in Ballard’s worldview, is any clear identification
of the motive. The sequence of events unfolds as if there was no
other course, a psychotic reaction to the initial conditions, an
escapist fantasy brought about by the fear that otherwise, in this
carefully planned environment, nothing would ever change. Kolding’s
work is grounded in the experience of growing up in a rigidly planned
new town suburb, the kind of place that sprang up throughout Europe
as the ideas of a generation of visionaries - Gropius, Le Corbusier,
Van der Rohe - became the basis of the education of a generation
of architects and planners working on the rebuilding and expansion
of urban areas in the fifties and sixties. It was an idealistic
time, but Kolding takes the visual language that originally framed
those ideals and reinvents it so that it can begin to talk about
what’s happening now. The logic of the architectural plan; the pale
hard-pencil lines of Le Corbusier’s megalomaniac designs for the
radiant city; the revolutionary Constructivist transformations of
two-dimensional space; the precision of Moholy-Nagy’s collages;
the unreality of town planners’ models with conical trees, plastic
cars, no crime, no dirt and plenty of benches. Kolding takes it
all on board and dislocates it, warps it, and brings it into contact
with its own future, loving the lines and shapes of Modernism and
playing with its angles and abstractions even as he takes it apart
with glued-on quotations and hand-written comments. It’s a political
landscape that Kolding depicts, but also an emotional one. Cut-out
concrete buildings get strung together with no regard for realism,
still you can’t help thinking you’ve walked down those streets.
The neat, isometric pencil drawing of a 2-flight concrete staircase
in an untitled work from 1998 is a symbol of the whole Corb-inspired
architectural movement at the same time as it’s a place most of
us see every day in a thousand towns and cities, embedded in the
memory for whatever reason, an iconic symbol that’s also a platform
for experience and for action. The way Kolding uses the white space
of the collages is key to this, the cut-outs floating on the paper
like those moments of clarity or realisation that light up an otherwise
ordinary day, significant details that connect regardless of physical
time or space. These are places without a built in focus, where
buildings and streets repeat in preset patterns, and consequently
places where small changes become significant - the texture of surfaces,
rain on concrete, the dead time of early evenings, a radio playing,
a new car parked in your street. Then there are the figures that
inhabit Kolding’s world, an assortment of the real and the fantastical,
DJs and disaffected youth alongside characters from Star Wars and
Batman movies. It’s the continuum of modern life, where the images
of the Hollywood universe are as real as the images of the Bauhaus
universe - where Darth Vader is a stronger and more recognisable
figure than any of the heroes of Modernism, and where your childhood
hero is as likely to be the kid down the street with a set of decks.
The new world of sixties planning versus the new world of the Death
Star or Gotham City, the same tension that Kubrick foresaw in “A
Clockwork Orange”, filmed on the then brand new high-rise estate
of Thamesmead in South London. The other source here is the post-punk
cut-up graphics of fanzines and album covers, an aesthetic that
grew out of a reaction to the pastoral, inward-looking, de-politicised
world of hippie-rock, with the idea that this imagery and landscape
belongs more to the people that live in it, consume it, and give
it meaning than it does to its erstwhile creators. The citizens
of these new towns were given responsibility for a precious thing
- the future. But instead of miraculously converting into the people
that the planners imagined, automatically fulfilled by their shopping
centres and recreation grounds, they carried on just like the rest
of us, preoccupied with jobs, money, excitement, security, music,
love, football, fighting and children. Kolding’s work is the bridge
between what you could call the folk art that came out of this situation
- punk rock, home-made graphics, minimal techno, grafitti art, casual
fashions, custom cars with kilowatt sound systems - and the institutional
ideas that created it. In the process it celebrates and questions
the work of both sides, drawing up a territory where the sweeping
ideals that might have informed architects and planners are now
being taken forward on a micro level by individuals who are simply
trying to change their own lives. Like the actions of the children
in Ballard’s story, Kolding’s work develops from a set of given
environmental conditions. Unlike Ballard’s resigned narrative, Kolding
believes that it’s not too late, that the logic of the situation
is not inescapable. The aesthetics and politics that gave rise to
the Modernist landscape can be stolen and reworked, reassembled
into images that have the same seductive power but fragment and
decentralise it, and so avoid simple conclusions.
Originally published
in catalogue for Momentum, Moss, Norway, 2000
ISBN82-994634-1-6
Will Bradley is a
writer and one the initiaters of The Modern Institute, Glasgow,
Lives and works in Glasgow
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