To ANN ROSÉN - an artist
text by Monica Nieckels
Director, Swedish General Association of Fine Arts

I read that the world is full of failed IT projects. Surely, but also full of failed art and human lives that did not become what had been imagined or desired. Why do we still step over the remains with new dreams and new hopes in view? Convinced that we in particular will succeed. How do you sell and package such a conviction as an artist?

Our own time is hard to see. Contemporary art drowns in a flood and is silenced in the flickering media noise. But every now and then some artists manage to make the broth transparent and for a moment we see more than just the outlines. Our gaze becomes a thermal lance, inwards and outwards. We summarise our positions and make use of our experiences and shape an insight. Art fills this function and the artist is sent to make us see and become more profound.

But where did beauty go? The beautiful picture, the oil paint on canvas, the perfect shape. The handmade unique object that ornaments our walls and increases in value and is bought and sold at auctions. Rest assured, it remains, but not alone. Ever since the beginning of the 20th Century it has existed side by side with the ready-made object that has been declared to be art. That is, the thought and the intention is what counts as well as the creative craft.

But what are we going to do with all artists? What is their role in a time where fiction overflows reality? Larger than ever. Because we have difficulty discerning what just has happened to us from what has been played out on TV. We did see the bombs falling over Baghdad, how the tracers lit up the sky and heard the sirens and the rumble. Was it a story, somebody else's nightmare or our reality?

Are the artists those who find truth for us, at least as small fragments? Can they make us see the beauty of the broken vase when the roses are gone?

Sure they can! If we just dare open our eyes and use all our senses. Let us prepare more space for them, because they are necessary to us.

For who can better formulate the brittle, fragile and the whispering in everyday life? The shrill, monotonous and empty? The pompous, exaggerated and grotesque? The beautiful, wise and compassionate? The passions, love, life and the final - death?

 

Monica Nieckels
Director, Swedish General Association of Fine Arts

translated by Kai-Mikael Jää-Aro