Espen Dietrichson

Espen Dietrichson’s works occupy Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall with incisive precision. Sculptures of vehicles and architectural structures appear to have both visual and functional qualities, yet they also carry less obvious meanings. These works give an immediate impression of crystal clarity and unity; they appear specific and lucid, almost self-explanatory. Here you will search in vain for unnecessary fripperies. A vehicle fitted out with a motor stands pointing towards a ramp, a tower carefully crafted of wood embodies modernistic stylism through the rhythmical repetition of its elegant modules. But the functionalism is consistently undermined – the motor is useless, the ramp leads nowhere, the construction is unassailable.

Concrete Abstraction

In recent years Espen Dietrichson’s style of expression has been economical and concentrated, but not simplistic. As abstract statements his works are in fact highly ambiguous, for what psychological, existential conditions do these substantial artefacts suggest and visualise? Perhaps it is an urge to excess, albeit played out in a subdued manner. These works become metaphorical entities; the vehicles are en route to somewhere less local, where they represent something other than themselves, their different meanings purring steadily. In linguistic theory, the symbol – the concrete picture of something else – is the vehicle of the less explicit metaphor; meaning lies behind the concrete linguistic image. The forthright and immediate essence of these sculptures is at the same time reminiscent of something else, more impenetrable, but not inconceivable. A feeling of obstinacy mixed with impotence and bottled-up stories. Dietrichson’s works signal a concrete abstraction, or, if you prefer, an abstract concretisation. This cool-headed approach certainly does not exclude a certain wily humour; there is turbulence beneath the coolness. This new objectivity turns out to have a mildly absurd middle name.

As an artist, Dietrichson is not easy to situate in the landscape. He demonstrates superb skill in his handling of materials, to which he relates with a physical directness approaching perfection. The insistence that these sculptures are what they are in virtue of their material presence and their own internal logic, and that beyond that all interpretation is up to the beholding eye, makes it hard to associate Dietrichson with the more theoretically grounded conceptual currents in contemporary art. References to modernism, for example, seem appropriate, but these works do not stand or fall on their references being understood. Neither do Dietrichson’s works make convincing sense as forms of social interaction. Admittedly, his creations are attractive to the observer, who might believe that participation is part of the game. But this social generosity, often associated with so-called relational art, can be highly deceptive. The illusion is compact.

Model-Like

In some ways, Espen Dietrichson’s sculptures resemble models, objects whose outer aspect gives us a feeling of knowing them well – as perspicuous and concise entities. What happens when the model, which usually functions as a copy or sketch in the production process, itself becomes the artwork? As a category, the model is interesting, since it implies a study at a distance; it represents something as yet unbuilt or illustrates something that does not exist in other real places, 1:1. The model can also express an ideal, but is in itself an empty container, available for all sorts of projections and fantasies. This limited, invented world becomes a condensed substitute.

In Dietrichson’s case, the fact that we perceive his works as models creates a tension, since the sculptures are unique and do not physically refer to anything. At the same time they stretch the concept of representation, since they possess the model’s conventional property of being utterly unreal, not least in their dimensions and use of colour. These sculptures seem to have just been unpacked, yet they possess a certain human dimension. Their improbably pure primary colours and impeccably smooth, shiny surfaces produce a sense of something hyper real, disorienting crossovers between toys and utility objects – stylised and attractively streamlined. At the same time, the scale strikes us as disturbed and the gallery space as misleading; what is a signal yellow model plane without a motor doing in F15’s project room, and why does it occupy the room from wall to wall? In Airplane Project: Yellow Sculpture (2005), things are brought into the equation that we find both attractive and threatening.

Transport Stages

Travel, displacement through time and space, is a frequently used phenomenon in all forms of art, not least in film, often serving as a source of condensed images of dynamic development. By definition, travel takes one from one location to the next, but it does not do so quite as it ought to in Dietrichson’s sculptures, in which the transport phase is sabotaged even before it can get started. Vehicles, a suitable expressive device, have long been a feature of Dietrichson’s artistic practice, for example in Blind Vessel, which was shown at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall’s “Fra kaos til kosmos” (From Chaos to Cosmos) in 2004. The capsule shape of this work, with an upholstered and hermetically sealed and sightless cockpit, places any prospect of triumph beyond reach. Technically speaking, several of the structures look as if they might be aerodynamically viable, with mounted propellers and motors – functional in themselves, but destructive within the bodies of these sculptures. Were they to be set in motion, the hopeless internal loop would render them utterly destructive. Thus the chain of events has a predetermined conclusion.

Blind Dragster (2006–07) takes the racing car as its model, but not in a futuristic spirit; here neither the machine nor the speed is likely to be unassailable and victorious. The yellow car’s energetic curves presuppose activity and forward motion as its functional raison d’être, but a black electric plug hangs above it, disconnected. The white-painted tyres stand stolidly at ease, in a sculpturally enduring position. The positioning of the car, in dialogue with a ramp, creates a field of pent-up tension that fills the room. At least, this is how it was when the work was shown at Kunstnerforbundet in February 2007; deep within the room, it stood with its nose pointing towards a ramp that led up to a window at street level. In this narrative standstill, the highly charged energy seemed to shrink the surroundings.

The direction of travel is less clear in Tripod (2007), a dark, threepart structure with wheels pointing to all points of the compass – a divided and seemingly mobile unit of mystical origin. The simplicity of this abstract formal language is here pushed to such an extreme that the work becomes almost emblematic, only loosely connected to the recognisable world. In a similar way, Twin Propeller (2007) is a permanent self-contradiction that exhibits its own fundamental conflict. This slender, oblong sculpture has been fitted out with a propeller at each end, and would presumably be unable to budge from where it sits. There is something almost irritating about this work, a troubling element that infiltrates and gets between the clarificatory signals which its graphic design seems to suggest.

Airships hold a prominent place in Dietrichson’s output, those old-fashioned, motorised and manoeuvrable wonders that were launched with such lofty visions of the future at the beginning of the 20th century. The airship features in a radically reduced form in the work Blimp (2006), in which a small Zeppelin-like object, made with a plain red material stretched over a frame, lies in a specially constructed transport case. As so often, a conspicuous motor gives a misleading impression of functionality. This dynamic little object – a visual exclamation mark – is rendered passive, yet treated with great consideration – both muzzled and carefully conserved at one and the same time. It occupies a place in the room where the cautious packaging defines the space in which the work functions. The transport case seems to suggest an intermediate station, as if it were trapped in a system in which it never gets delivered to the right address.

The airship’s historically tragic end is echoed in the simplicity of the video String (2005). Once again we see a small, red, motorised Zeppelin, attached to the ceiling by means of a thin wire that makes it spin around. It is forever crashing into a white wall, accompanied by a shrill soundscape. The mechanical will to keep moving seems absurd and fundamentally useless, like the very epitome of a technology out of control. The blindness of an activity heading for ultimate collapse.

Architecture As Standard

Especially in the modernist period, the use of models, with architectural models forming a category of their own, was closely associated with building and futuristic, utopian structures. There is a tradition of unconstructed utopias, not least in Russian modernism, where Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument for the Third International of 1919 stands as the epitome of a collective dream of idealised communication that was in reality being laid waste. Espen Dietrichson’s model sculptures also touch on the monument as such, perhaps most noticeably in Model for an Unknown Monument (2006), in which shiny cubes are compactly stacked on top of one another, from the floor to the ceiling. This black perfection is distorted by a twisted movement in this sketch for a monument without obvious function or essence, a situation that can be interpreted as a fascinating problematisation of the referential function of monuments.

Another crucial reference point for Dietrichson is modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, who, during the 1920s and 30s, represented on an ideological level the anti-monumental architecture of a new age, even if their own buildings soon acquired the status of monuments like any others. Materials were meant to be light and transparent, for building structures that were not necessarily intended to be permanent. Buildings were no longer constructed with the expectation that they should stand to the end of time, but in order to express a more transient spirit of the age – a tool for modern people in the same way as the car was. The so-called international style within modernist architecture cultivated a strict simplicity and mathematical precision, emphasising clinical, mechanical surfaces, but first and foremost: function. Form was meant to reflect use.

Dietrichson portrays this functional architecture as sculpture, stripping it of its instrumental qualities. One example is Reverse Mirrorball (2006), a tower resembling a sky-scraper, consisting of a wooden framework to which mirror modules are affixed. Modules that add up to a larger whole – a signature of architectural modernism – creating a structural rigour and immediacy thanks to the repetition of identical units, almost like in a beehive. Dietrichson’s use of mirrors splinters the surroundings, reflecting both the viewer and other works in the exhibition. At the same time, the mirrors seem to underline the fact that there is no core to this work; only the facade is solid. This complex use of mirrors and the work’s modernist references are reminiscent of the sculptural pavilions by the American artist Dan Graham, constructions that also operate in an unclear zone between architecture and sculpture. The awareness that the space of the sculpture and that of the viewer coincide creates a proximity to architecture, which incontrovertibly surrounds the observer. Graham’s pavilion structures, anchored to minimalist sculpture, create a composite optical effect through the use of different types of glass and mirror, both transparent and double-reflective. By means of these materials, he plays with the viewer’s sense of confusion and illusion in an ongoing flow of reflections and light rays; at one and the same time we see our reflections and straight through them; we see that other people see.

Rubber Architecture (2006) is also an architectural work in the shape of a tower, but this time in two reflective parts set up facing each other. Each separately is held together by broad strips of black rubber, securely nailed to an underlying frame, thus suggesting a restraining principle, as if something had to be tamed. In some ways this composition can be seen as a parody of a dialogical, open and co-creative principle of interaction with the viewer, a principle that has long dominated parts of the art scene. At the same time this negation of openness is rendered ambivalent through the use of mirrors. This inconclusiveness can also be felt in this green/black semi-circular structure shaped like an amphitheatre, although with its dimensions and perfect shine, it would highly unsuitable as a podium for an audience.

In his forty-odd drawings, Espen Dietrichson sketches his structures, both during the planning phase and once they are complete, as technical traces. Also on show are a number of more fantastic drawings, like architectural structures composed of wooden blocks. Dietrichson works consistently with what happens in the space between the sketch and realisation, metaphor and function – after the beginning and before the end.

Line Ulekleiv
Art Historian