The Sylvia Fractions
Bengt Olof Johansson
Text from The Sylvia Fractions catalogue, Kalmar Art Museum, 2013.
The Sylvia Fractions includes the works
Karlsson Lundgren has since his time at Valand Art Academy worked consequently with developing the film media for his own artistic purposes. During more than ten years, this work has resulted in a number of works where the moving picture plays a central role. This is also the case in The Sylvia Fractions, where the short film Y’all Better Quiet Down! /Hallå, kan ni lugna ner er! is one of the three parts of the installation. As in almost all of his earlier film works, this is a staging of something that has, in one way or another, actually happened. In this case a powerful defining speech delivered in 1973 by the transactivist and Young Lords member Sylvia Rivera, in the Washington Square Park in New York City, where she accuses a relatively new formed LGBT (LesbianGayBiTrans) movement of being white, neoconservative, excluding, racist and transphobic. Rivera is thrown off the stage, and after this incident she leaves the political arena as well as New York City for 20 years. In Karlsson Lundgrens staging, the documentary elements are left behind until only the text remains. He purifies, enhances and adds new excitement by distributing the speech among a group of Swedish speaking young people, reciting as if it was a classical Greek drama. The camera carefully explores faces and tiny gestures. The room where the film is staged refers to the exhibition room, where we as spectators experience it. Similar but different. A displacement toward the contemporary, urging us to search for new meaning in the present.
The second part of The Sylvia Fractions, titled The Jane/Joan Dialogues, is comprised of a large amount of documents and objects, displayed on nine tables. Everything is related to a film adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical book The Bell Jar. The film fell into oblivion, but one person who felt she was being identified as lesbian in the movie, sued the screen writer as well as Plath’s estate. The person Sylvia Plath becomes, in this context, uninteresting. The center of Karlsson Lundgrens work is rather how Jane, through the case, creates a double by making sure she is within the gravitational field of the icon Sylvia Plath. A paradox, since the double nature is a central thematic entity in Plath’s novel. Karlsson Lundgren uses glass prisms, representing his own eyes, on the top of the materials presented on the tables, to lift out parts of these confusing and never ending journeys on the border between fiction and reality, thereby creating his own fictional tale through the characters of the drama. In this work, the archive as idea and expression is central in Karlsson Lundgrens mode of operation, a method that was developed when Conny Karlsson Lundgren, as one of three artists in the exhibition HÄR II (HERE II) at Kalmar konstmuseum in 2010, related to the museum’s collections. Karlsson Lundgren chose to delve into Lotte Lasersteins artistic work with The Lotte Series Pt I—IV. As in that work, he strengthens a queer reading to destroy all attempts to shut the obvious into the closet again.
However, an artist acting as researcher, digging deeply into different archives and with the same care as the researcher extracting material, should not be confused with the researchers intention of uncovering “truth”. As important as the information that can be unearthed, is the archive as idea, function of memory, appearance, its material properties and also as a testimony of a society that in the case of many archives, is more about control than information.
The implications of the increasing number of artists using the archive as a starting point in their endeavors, would lead one to suspect that this is a sign of something much larger and more important than a trend. Something that takes on the proportions of a paradigm shift. The Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni for example, states that the archive as an artistic starting point is the definitive proof that the French revolution now is implemented and brought to its completion. The Universal as idea has shifted, from being a given entity to strive towards, to something that the individual must create from his or her own context, and that we are referred to the archival knowledge in order to find something we can call common ground.
In the third part of The Sylvia Fractions, Karlsson Lundgren focuses on the astronomer N R Pogson, who in the middle of the 19th century, for reasons unclear, was moved to India. Then a colony of the British Imperium. Pogson initiates a close working collaboration with his eldest daughter, Elisabeth Isis Pogson, and with a recommendation from her father she is also the first woman applying for membership in the Royal Astronomy Association. She is rejected, and their joint work is recognized much later. Using, among other things, material from the Madras Observatory, one of their findings from 1866 is presented, an asteroid named 87 Sylvia. Something as invisible as an asteroid is suddenly plainly visible to all. Just like the family history of the Pogsons.
What, then, do these three Sylvia have in common? What are the “fractions of Sylvia” the artist wants us to relate to? This is how Conny Karlsson Lundgren describes his work: “I am attracted to the idea that human rights movements and groups that have fought for social or civil rights are said to come from people who leave their closed rooms and start to communicate, share stories and compare experiences with each other. As we are unique, yet have common experiences, these experiences must be connected to overarching structural conditions. By working in the same way—comparing stories, letting experiences co-exist—I am attempting to do something similar. I want to find these specific structures”
The artist is thus inviting us in to, in the ways of art, open and associatively, approach a deeper understanding of the greater contexts of a hard social and political reality that often plague the individual that is different from the norm. That Russia recently outlawed LGBT persons only shows the immediacy of the problem. In Kalmar, the premises of the RFSL (the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights) were burned down over ten years ago, and the organization did not reappear until September of this year. But Conny Karlsson Lundgren also asks a fundamental question regarding how we can be related, but without a universal demand that we have to. The Sylvia Fractions creates a dynamic space for things to emerge, rather than a space to consume. If the thoughts that emerge are Universal, or just thoughts that work, is less important. As long as it happens.