The work of Espen Dietrichson hints at the basic problem of utopian thinking: the freedom it presupposes, or prescribes, entails the curtailment of other freedoms. Moreover, utopian freedom is always associated with visual codes that direct chaotic, arbitrary and contradictory experiences. The high-tech engineering of vehicles and the construction of city walls are two examples. In the former, the dream of ultimate freedom of movement is realised by means of mechanical devices that reduce one’s bodily actions to minute movements of the eyes and hands. While the medieval proverb Stadtluft macht frei (city air brings freedom) captures the principle that all citizens are equal before the law, the city-state provides the earliest example of behaviour regulation, with city walls serving as defences against hostile attack. More than ever before, social and urban space constitutes a regulated extension of the military-industrial complex, involving surveillance technology and the control of freedom of movement and speed. In contradiction to the limitations on freedom of movement imposed by social and physical technologies, the democratisation of such technologies could form a precondition for this freedom.

The dream, or utopia, of this freedom is implicit in many of Dietrichson’s projects. What they offer are not so much illustrations of the problem of freedom as conflicts between movement and place, standardisation and autonomy. Many of his sculptures possess a monumental quality that requires the viewer to enter into, or circumvent, them. They may be vehicles that would block out the view of the external world for the imagined driver, or they may take the form of potentially self-guided objects (missiles, unmanned bombers), which, with their unrestricted freedom of movement, suggest the impossibility of averting attack. One characteristic these works share with imaginary utopias is their negation of the spatial dimension, whereby utopia (the non-place) is the art of the vanishing trick, which, in urban planning tends to take the form of preparations for the genuine dematerialisation of space as a physical reality. Similarly, with their inspiration in monuments and architecture, Dietrichson’s sculptures amount to prototypes for constructions with no conceivable use, but whose physical appearance one might expect to find anywhere.

But there are also reasons to dismiss the reception of Dietrichson’s works in terms of formal aesthetic perfectionism and industrial design. This aspect of his works seems to correspond neatly with the traditional formalism of modernism, which we now associate with the superficial aesthetics of corporate culture and mass production. A comparison of this kind, however, overlooks the field of tension that Dietrichson establishes between form/construction and the self-negating actions his works imply. For example, despite their sturdy appearance, these objects are constructed from unstable materials, which suggests a reversible course of movement, conceptually short-circuiting their own point of departure. The sculptural premise is formal, while the action/movement is its consequence, but squeezed in between the formalism and logic of these works, and pushing to get out, is a self-generating scepticism, inserted like a silently detonating bomb.

It is impossible to ignore the fact that many of Dietrichson’s works are indebted to the technology of warfare and the effects this technology has on our visual perception. An important point to note here is that the sense of sight and techniques of visual representation have, in themselves, played a decisive role in the development of military technology. Without exception, cartography, cybernetics, radar, long-distance communication, satellite surveillance and ballistics have been developed according to the logic of warfare and subsequently pursued in civilian contexts. In this regard, one can agree with the words of the philosopher and urban planner, Paul Virilio, that ‘total war is total freedom’ (or a continuation of war by other means). Technologies developed for the control of territories, and to predict attacks, depend on the quickest and most unimpeded movement possible. This logic is transferred to civil society through demands for efficiency and security, on transport systems and in communication technologies but also in the control of individual behaviour and the restriction of the right to linger in certain places for any length of time. Accordingly, the notion of freedom as a neutral and seemingly objective functionality is indirectly, yet fundamentally, problematised in the formal and mechanical character of Dietrichson’s works.

The logic of disaster

Now man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner: either as a savage, when his feelings rule over his principles; or as a barbarian, when his principles destroy his feelings. The savage despises art, and acknowledges nature as his despotic ruler; the barbarian laughs at nature, and dishonours it, but he often proceeds in a more contemptible way than the savage, to be the slave of his senses. The cultivated man makes of nature his friend, and honours its friendship, while only bridling its caprice.

Friedrich Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)

Schiller was motivated to write by disillusionment about the course of the French Revolution, its spectacular terror and eventual ideological emphasis on a despotic ideal of reason. The leader of the Revolution, Robespierre, even fashioned a special cult for this religion of reason, Culte de l’Être Supreme (The Cult of the Supreme Being), which was intended to endow people with a new authority following the abolition of religion and the aristocracy. In opposition to this unequal antagonism between the authority of reason and the tyranny of feelings, Schiller advocated the liberating potential of art, a term he used in its broader sense, which also covered science and teaching. Comparable to the dynamics of form, reason places itself above nature once the latter’s arbitrariness has been overcome; according to Schiller, this amounts to a new form of barbarism, this time turned against the diversity and richness of experience. It is only when nature is embodied in art and afforded an autonomous status that life takes on an independent value unencumbered by reason. Accordingly, Schiller’s didactic essay has fulfilled a programmatic function for the artistic avant-garde throughout its 200-year history, as both bourgeois idealism and revolutionary romanticism. What these seemingly disparate positions have in common is their emphasis on the potential of the fragment, and the moment, to convey meaning, regardless of any deterministic, temporal perspective. In other words, experience is constituted as much by a horizontal openness to impressions and intuitive forms of perception, as it is by a vertical rationality subscribing to a cause-effect model.

As with Schiller, the English philosopher and politician, Edmund Burke, showed an initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution that quickly turned to disappointment. However, Burke, was inspired by an ardent conservatism that persuaded him of the necessity to reject idealism while simultaneously being the unlikely harbinger of romanticism’s later artistic ideal. At the age of 28, he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in which he responded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prioritisation of emotion over intellect in matters of art and ethics. Whereas the Enlightenment sought to illuminate the world and to investigate its constituents in the hope of achieving a more truthful world-view, the romantics undermined a wholesale belief in reason by insisting on the unfathomability of nature. Burke claimed that art’s tendency to portray nature as cruel and terrible constituted a challenge to causality and order. For the same reason, he advocated political conservatism in reaction to the French Revolution and the effects that would follow from the ideal of reason being put into practice. According to Burke, the French Revolution is an example of hubris leading to inevitable catastrophe, with reason in the driving seat.

Considering the extent to which Dietrichson emphasises hubris in his works, it would appear to be one of the primary sources for his art, a kind of anti-art that turns against the aesthetic itself. Despite their engineered perfection, his art objects inherently resist formal codification. While they might remind us of specific objectsand minimalist art, this reading is counteracted by their simultaneous suggestion of absurd functionality. In turn, the implied specificity of function is undermined by the destruction of the objects through their imagined movement. But this antagonism between (aesthetic) form and (instrumental) function might be more precisely described in terms of force relations, causing these essentially static objects to vibrate with a kind of potential energy. Viewed as installations in an exhibition context, what they suggest most strongly is the movement between forces rather than the movement of objects; alternatively, they amount to components or fragments of a kind of grammar of force relations.

Illusionism or trickery?

Typical of Dietrichson’s works is that their initial, non-expressive concepts entail, with reference to the autonomous logic, an inherent necessity for consummation, as pointed out by the artist himself:

[…] as in the case of Blind Dragster or the fish labyrinth, but also in many of the drawings, such as Sketches for a Mechanical Sunrise, which is a series of calculative drawings. The underlying necessities and inferential moves are things I find it interesting to retain in the finished works. For me it is more about tracking down the objectivity implied by the necessity or maverick logic. It is a method that can free me from having to feign a position or of gesticulating in the work process, but it does not mean the entire work can be viewed through this prism.

The theme of the little book, Trick, Depth and Game, by the painter, Per Kirkeby, is the painterly excesses of the Norwegian artist Peder Balke (1804–1887). Kirkeby writes that, by looking at artists such as Balke, Turner and Delacroix, we can discover an alternative historical realism. This depends on identifying a range of painters’ ‘dirty tricks’, such as how texture can be used to create calculated, dramatic effects, and how experimentation with new perspectives can change perception. Kirkeby maintains that the pervading art historical distinction between pure abstraction and less honourable effects has traumatised art in relation to its history. This is why he finds it so important to solve the enigma of Peder Balke and to thereby understand why the elevated and sublime can only be achieved through the ‘dirtiest of means’. For example, Balke’s outsider position as a small-town painter-decorator allowed him to eschew the codified illusionism of (Norwegian) national romanticism, and hence to make use of techniques that differed radically from those of his contemporaries – marbling, or the use of sponges or combs on wet paint – which would have seemed a profanation of academic dogmas. Kirkeby affords Balke a central position in ‘Nordic mannerism’ on account of his highly individualised dramatisation and use of effects. This also characterises the independent artistic status of what Kirkeby identifies as ‘sick’ artists (or genius associated with mental illness) such as Lars Hertevig, Ernst Josephsson and Carl Fredrik Hill.

Dietrichson’s toying with monumental formats introduces mannerism into the debate, although it cannot be deemed particularly Nordic. The photo series, ReverseFountain, depicts swirling vortices in harbour basins and canal systems, from Venice in Los Angeles to Kristiansand in Norway. In terms of both their voids and their scale, these sculptural objects/interventions are reminiscent of, for example, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, both from 1970. It is this appropriation of Land Art’s gesticulatory metaphysics of liberation that makes ReverseFountain a personal exploration of the relation between artistic entrepreneurship and the mythologisation of immaculate nature – a mythologisation that the Land Art movement proved unable to avoid, and which inevitably resulted in its fossilisation following the death of its central figure, Robert Smithson, in a helicopter crash in 1974.

Yet, ReverseFountain is not so much a distant comment on an historical trend as much as it is a series of approaches (in terms of the means employed) towards the production of realism, or objectivity, beyond the glass vitrine of high modernism. Above all, there is the melodramatic aspect of the maelstrom motif, a centre that is empty while at the same time sucking in everything in its proximity. The planning and technical construction of this water feature on a 1:1 scale, together with the sculptural prototype and photographic fiction, are the fragments that contribute to the concept of the monument: the fountain as symbol of cultivated nature inverted into brutal natural force.

Dietrichson’s problem is non-romantic, in the sense that it touches neither on the subliminally elevated nor on the sensational, but derives instead from an interest in constructing what is arbitrary and unforeseen. Kirkeby denies that mannerism can be attributed to the melancholy and marginal, or characterised as ‘sick’ art and classified as peripheral. On the contrary, Kirkeby suggests, mannerism is about pushing effects ‘out into a manneristic maelstrom’ of excesses, a path that skirts around art’s programmatic illusionism. In this respect, Dietrichson’s mannerism belongs to an undefined praxis somewhere between art, craft and trickery.

Fountainhead and maelstrom as melodrama

Utopia and dystopia, optimism and fatalism, are the extremes of the future narrative. The notion of progress is inextricably linked with the image of the enterprising and promising entrepreneur. Conversely, the downfall of civilisation and the idea of cultural regression are associated with the loss of intellectual prowess and technological daring. This duality is not only relevant to narrative genre but also to sociology and philosophy. At the same time, classics like Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932) or Oswald Spengler’s historical-philosophical work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22), are intensely sceptical about this kind of linear, irreversible time perspective. And yet, the simultaneously nostalgic and future-orientated character of the entrepreneurial spirit has shown an inveterate ability to perpetuate itself, through its parasitical relationship with other archetypes encapsulating creative activity.

Arguably, philosopher, Ayn Rand, was more successful at dramatising her philosophy of objectivism (a direction of thought that emphasises the individual’s ego-centred autonomy) than she was at developing the ethical foundations of her philosophy. Best known is her novel, The Fountainhead, from 1943, in which the devotion to modernism of the main protagonist, the brilliant architect, Howard Roark – based on Frank Lloyd Wright – represents the lonely crusade against the traditionalism and narrow-mindedness of his profession. In her novels, Rand ascribes to her principal characters the rational virtues and objective qualities that are a necessary precondition for the development of the future-orientated society. These qualities are most significantly expressed in the independent individual striving for integrity, who is indebted to Nietzsche’s master-morality (as opposed to the slave-morality of society’s non-egocentric ‘henchmen’). Contrary to the world-view of the late-romantics (in which the transcendence of the genius is perhaps most closely associated with Wagner’s art-religion, but also with the European rhetoric of a master race that paved the way to World War I), Rand is crucial to the shaping of America’s official cultural self-image in the post-war period.

The concept of the individual as a source of self-realisation and creative super-forces is also a reaction to the powerlessness of the romantic-sublime position when confronted with the destructive forces of nature and destiny. It is no accident that Howard Roark is a protagonist rooted in modernist architecture’s complex of objectivity, functionality and cool formalism. In this sense, Rand’s objectivism is interesting primarily in terms of dramaturgy. Or, to put it another way, the successful formula for the tale she tells about her modern hero, the entrepreneur, is what makes objectivism interesting, and Rand herself achieved world fame thanks to the Hollywood film version of her novel, with Roark played by Cary Grant. Regardless of the marginal position this philosophy holds today, it contributed fundamentally to the popularisation and mythologisation of the entrepreneur as the mover and shaker of society in late-modernism.

At the opposite end of the scale to utopian future fiction, we find the ill-fated counterparts to the creative entrepreneur – mad scientists like doctors Frankenstein and Moreau, who arrogantly challenge nature and are punished as a result. In contrast to the creative avant-garde’s ‘good’ entrepreneur, they belong among the avant-garde’s ‘evil’ creators. In Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea, fantastic journeys and eccentric characters are crucial ingredients. This was the first book to describe submarines with dimensions similar to those of modern atomic submarines and the main character, Captain Nemo (Latin: no one), is an interesting forerunner to the much later cosmopolitan terrorist. As heir to an Indian principality annexed by British colonial powers, Nemo has devoted his life to science and to an unterritorial existence as a politically militant rebel beneath the surface of the sea.
The book ends with his legendary submarine, the Nautilus, being dragged down by the notorious Moskenesstraumen:

We knew that at the tide the pent-up waters between the islands of Ferroe and Loffoden rush with irresistible violence, forming a whirlpool from which no vessel ever escapes […] It is thither that the Nautilus, voluntarily or involuntarily, had been run by the Captain. It was describing a spiral, […] and the boat, which was still fastened to its side, was carried along with giddy speed.

Moskenesstraumen (further immortalised in Edgar Allan Poe’s horror-story ‘Into the Maelstrom’) symbolises Nemo’s self-destructive drive. The unconstrained war against 19th century imperialists (especially the British) by the vengeful, brilliant anarchist ends with him falling victim to his own hubris in the Moskenesstraumen.

The novel bears the scientific positivism and romantic doomsday fatalism typical of Europe towards the end of the 19th century. But, as an analogy for the critique of civilisation, the submarine and the maelstrom represent both the encapsulation and the gaining of a two-fold momentum in the novel. Nemo’s motto isMobilis in mobili (motion within motion), and when he ultimately steers the Nautilus into the swirling void and inevitable death, it amounts to his comeuppance for having taken fate into his own hands. In Poe’s story, by contrast, the narrator happens to be inside the vortex, carried along by the immense wall of water, from where he philosophically contemplates nature’s divine wrath, watching whole ships and flotsam plummeting into the depths, before rising back to the surface by some miraculous means. What both these stories share is the image of the maelstrom as a dissolution of the surface, forming a funnel or passage for a journey, the end-point of which is depicted as a kind of literary wonder of the natural world. But, whereas the image of the vortex in Poe’s case constitutes an existential climax, for Verne it is the misfortune of the rebel’s war against the power ruling the waves. As it happens, Captain Nemo is resurrected in inexplicable fashion in one of Verne’s later novels, The Mysterious Island, thus contradicting to some extent the deterministic conclusion of the earlier novel.

The accidental model

As in the territorial antagonism between the rebel’s underwater war and the conventional war on the surface, the surface, as such, offers an image of both perfection and destruction – the surface as a dimension of the world that not only suffers puncturing, injury, gashes and friction, but can also be polished, perfected and smoothed. This is reflected in Dietrichson’s evidently self-annihilating, yet visually forceful, sculptures and their lack of personal engagement or humanistic characteristics. Conceptually, these objects seem to possess an autistic disinterest in their surroundings and their own social function, owing their appeal to geometric design and engineering details.

In these works, logical structure and perfection of form intersect with the anarchy of movement and forces. It doesn’t really matter whether those suspended forces are viewed as the potential cause of an accident, or as encounters between materials and speeds, they are models of fateful meetings, or embodiments of encounters between a vehicle controlled by a dog, or ink washes describing airy elegance and potential annihilation. The technically meticulous video work, Wire, shows a small propeller-driven object flying around a room, colliding with the walls until it ultimately destroys itself. This anticipates the design of later sculptures, such as Blimp and Paper Missile, constructed from materials like thin rice paper or felt. In Fish Quest, this modelling of fate has been taken yet further, in an aquarium shaped like a labyrinth through which a goldfish has to find a route in order to reach a food supply. By virtue of their tactile and unassuming formats, these models for problem solving and annihilation are like miniatures of Jean Tinguely’s self-destructive, kinetic sculptures Homage to New York (1960) and Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962). Dietrichson, however, employs a more subtle irony that plays on the rationality and objectivity of his forms. The smooth surfaces and self-contained nature of these sculptures imply both capacity and ruin, often referring simultaneously to freedom of movement, static architectural symmetry, destructiveness and weightlessness.

On this side of modernism, there is always aesthetic disquiet. In its demand for an art that would reflect the restlessness of a highly industrialised modernity, Futurism advocated an amoral display of energy and an unconstrained aesthetic in unlimited warfare, as glorified by the poet and aviator, F.T. Marinetti, on witnessing Mussolini’s carpet-bombing of Ethiopian villages. J.G. Ballard’s novels, The Atrocity Exhibition(1970) and its sequel Crash (1973), describe characters with an uninhibited and pornographic craving for violence, death and mutilation, triggered by traffic accidents involving fatally injured or murdered celebrities. The reader is subjected to an experiment that began when Ballard himself exhibited car wrecks at the London gallery, The New Arts Lab, in 1970. Already, in this early exhibition, Ballard was testing audience reactions. A topless female reporter, hired to cover the opening for a local TV channel, was molested by visitors, while the audience’s behaviour degenerated into vandalism in the gallery. Ballard makes similar use of calculated destructiveness and desire in his two books, in ways that expose the reader to a constant eroticising of the machine and the body in constellations that mingle classical art, industrial violence and psychological alienation. One recurring theme is the staging of accidents as simulacra, insofar as the protagonist feels quite simply cheated, by the mass media, of the authentic experience of death associated with popular icons of the 1960s such as James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and JFK. Thus, crowds are assembled in large stadiums to watch spectacular car accidents and killings, played out by costumed actors in life-threatening reconstructions.

Dietrichson’s drawings of aircraft, visually situated somewhere between science fiction and military high-tech, are perhaps even more enigmatic than his monumental sculptures with their unbroken surfaces and volumes, filled to bursting with a perfection that can hardly be contemplated without considering their potentially destructive force. This is even truer of his drawings of missiles, which have ceased to be form and assumed the quality of pure movement. As in op-art, what is reflected is the eye’s own movements and its inability to fix on colour and form, in a way that suggests a more direct and visual potential for destruction. Hanging there in silence, they become almost the antithesis of movement. In the maelstrom, flotsam and other irregular objects move with corresponding speed, while it is claimed that a cylindrical object would move more slowly, as if its very shape negates movement in the mass of water. With their calculated precision, these drawings become emblems of movement, in which the maelstrom and the missile mutually annihilate each other in a weightless mobilis in mobili.