In an impressively short time, Espen Dietrichson has developed a unique and unmistakable artistic language. With several monumental solo exhibitions and a number of major one-off projects to his credit, it is now time for the book. This monograph about Dietrichson’s work is also Torpedo Press’s first publication in this format.

It is always tempting to organise and categorise an artist’s output so as to make it easier to identify and describe. What one can hardly avoid noticing in Dietrichson’s work is its basis in architecture and various kinds of mechanical conveyance. His sculptures paraphrase recognisable structures, but their construction involves a logic that is new and idiosyncratic. For those who still want to place these works in an art-historical context, it is possible to find references to minimalism and artists such as Donald Judd, to Dan Graham’s glass and mirror structures, to Robert Smithson’s land-art projects and to Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts.’ Another crucial aspect of Dietrichson’s work, one that has undergone rapid development in the past two years, is his sketch-like drawings. Simple yet complex, these drawings amount to images of futuristic potential, representatives for a multitude of ideas.

What strikes me time and again, however, is that Dietrichson’s works are generally imbued with an insistent dualism – they are the outcome of contrasts and contradictions. They are both monumentally ponderous and ethereally elegant at one and the same time. Their construction is admirably meticulous, leaving us in no doubt about the artist’s fascination with mechanics and engineering. They are reminiscent of prototypes or working models and radiate something industrial and masculine. Even so, they are recognisably unique. Their hand-made quality and sculptural finish also suggest something organic and personal. At first glance, these sculptures appear functional and full of promise, yet on closer inspection they seem to be constructed in a way that makes them self-defeating. This adds an element of humour to the viewer’s encounter with them, although beneath the surface there lurks a sombre seriousness, with several of the works being almost violent in character. This tension between potential and dysfunctionality runs like a common denominator through all Dietrichson’s work.

I met Dietrichson for the first time in spring 2004 in his studio at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. It was just before his graduation exhibition, and I remember there was barely standing room due to the sculptures and materials spread about the place. In the middle of the floor stood a massive packing case with the stencilled text This side up, just beyond it some objects resembling go-carts, and in one corner a glass tank full of black liquid. It was clear that Dietrichson had already participated in several exhibitions and was now using the tiny studio both as workshop and storage space. It was already three years since his first exhibition, ‘Debut,’ which took place at Galleri 21:25, the exhibition space for students of the academy, at Vestbanen in Oslo.

Although I must confess to not seeing ‘Debut,’ it is an exhibition that has managed to impress itself on my mind as if I had been there; the upper section of an apartment, sliced in half horizontally at head-height, hovered above viewers, allowing them to move from room to room unhindered by walls and doors. In formal terms, Dietrichson had based the work on several different apartments he had lived in, creating from them a kind of hybrid adapted to the gallery space:

“I was driven less perhaps by conceptual considerations than by a wish to make it as realistic as possible. I was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the apartment and the relatively raw industrial venue. The interesting thing about removing the lower section is that almost all the information is lost. It becomes less narrative and more sculptural.”

This awareness of the concrete aspect of sculpture has been a recurring theme ever since and Dietrichson devotes considerable attention to the surfaces of his sculptures, with nothing left to chance. In conversation, it often seems that he is more preoccupied with external appearances and sculptural qualities than with the conceptual dimension.

As a debut exhibition, I would contend that this one was notably ambitious; the artist aimed high (as he continues to do) and it worked brilliantly. Even so, I doubt whether this unseen project would have made such an impact on me if it were not for the rather more modest invitation card, based on a contact print from 1935 that Dietrichson found in a drawer in the family`s summerhouse. After a bit of Photoshop cut-and-paste work, the image was transformed into one of a house floating in the air. Standing on the ground, a ladder is leant up against the wall of the house high above. Four people are standing about beneath the house. One cannot tell from the picture whether they are surprised to find the house floating in the air, or whether everything is just as it should be. The image is mysterious in a liberating, surreal way; it simply fires the imagination. Dietrichson says he chose this picture because it captured a mood of positive, forward-looking expectation that was further enhanced by the manipulation.

“I have always been concerned to keep hold of this positiveness in my work. Even the destructive works contain an optimism in the hope or expectation of redemption.”

In the same way that this invitation card served as a kind of pointer to the exhibition itself, ‘Debut’ may be seen as foreshadowing Dietrichson’s later works. The project seems to encompass all the elements the artist has since been developing and commenting on in his art: an interest in architecture and site-specificity, the interaction between idea and realisation, and not least in the relationship between space and sculpture. Dietrichson uses the gallery space as his starting point both physically, in relation to scale and limitations, and as a mental platform and source of potential, as for example in the works Blind Dragster and Yellow Sculpture #1. Evident in all cases is the interplay between the concrete and the abstract, which seems to be a fundamental feature of his work – the tension between what is real and imagined.

Back to Dietrichson’s studio in 2004, where the artist was busy preparing for his degree show at the Stenersen Museum. The objects I noticed in one corner that looked like go-carts were in fact the graduation pieces Blind Vessel and Dog Race Car. While the former resembled a sophisticated go-cart, one would have had no way of seeing where one was going. This work is essentially built for a catastrophe, a vehicle that has lost the ‘race’ before it has even begun. In Dog Race Car, one can imagine a dog driving the car by navigating with its sense of smell. These works are superbly constructed as technically functional objects, yet they convey an almost humorous madness in being totally unviable for the user. As sculptures, they function instead as transcendent agents of absurd scenarios. Another enthralling thought experiment is suggested in the contemporaneous work Fish Quest. This consists of a perspex tank filled with water and a labyrinth, which a goldfish must navigate in order to get to a reservoir of food and fresh water. The chances of the fish succeeding are minimal, but it is the idea that it might do so that captures our interest (as it turned out, the goldfish did, in fact, solve the labyrinthine problem).

This interplay between suggestion and realisation is perhaps most evident in Dietrichson’s ReversFontene (ReverseFountain) of 2005/2006. This project was first exhibited at Sørlandet Art Museum’s anniversary exhibition ‘10 x 10’ in 2005, where it was presented as a ‘working model’ consisting of a one cubic metre tank filled with ink, in which an artificial whirlpool was created, and a photograph of a harbour with a similar (but in this case digitally-manipulated) maelstrom. This sober presentation alludes to how one might actually create a reverse fountain, with the artist aiming to get as close to constructing one as possible. In pursuit of this goal, he set up a website where people could donate money to help make the project a reality, and spoke with engineers about the possibility of constructing a real maelstrom. He also created an artist’s book with a series of photographs of lakes, canals and fjords on which he had superimposed such whirlpools.

This use of proposals (the idea and its imagined implementation as a work) places ReversFontene alongside works by Claes Oldenburg and Terje Nicolaisen. Both artists have made proposals for absurd and humorous monuments into something of a trademark. In 1965, Oldenburg began to make drawings of fantastic proposals for sculptures representing everyday objects. Oldenburg’s use of the term ‘monument’ to describe these anti-heroic suggestions deliberately turned the traditional notion of public sculpture on its head. Nicolaisen’s humorous proposals include, for example, Artdisposalchamber, a recycling system for ‘the return of ready-mades back to the real world,’ or Untitled (Sliding Door), in which a pliant, electrically-powered sliding door travels around the town along existing tramlines. While ReversFontene may be less humorous (which is not to say that the idea of a little maelstrom in one of the canals in the Venice district of Los Angeles does not prompt a smile), there can be no doubt that the project possesses something of the same ethos.

ReversFontene is first and foremost a dramatic monument, a possible manifestation of something terrifying or catastrophic. Its monumentality and drama reside not in something we can see, but in what is absent – in the reversal. In most situations, monumentality is associated with scale, but in this case the dimensions are not shown – we can only guess at them. The architectural historian, Mari Lending, has used the term ‘invisible monumentality’ in connection with the new library in Alexandria, designed by the Norwegian architects Snøhetta, to which she ascribes a monumentality that is nourished by absence. The same could be said of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, where the experience of absence is addressed metaphorically. In the same spirit, Dietrichson’s ReversFontene can be said to function as an invisible monument, whereby the gesture of setting in place a nothing can induce a sense of dramatic presence.

Drama and destruction seem to be a common feature of Dietrichson’s works – perhaps best illustrated by his brief video work Wire, from 2005. In this, a model red and white airship with a built-in motor hangs by a wire from the ceiling of a small room. The camera does not follow the airship’s movements, but is fixed on a single point in the room. What we see is the flying object sweeping back and forth, accompanied by the sound of it hitting the wall, from which it rebounds. Most of the time, the airship is out of the frame, but we hear the intense and unpleasant sound of the motor – until the dirigible has crashed into the wall so many times that it loses its battery and breaks down completely. There is a silence before the whole thing starts up again, as if the craft were condemned to eternal self-destruction. Dietrichson has used airships as a central element in several works, for example, Paper Aeroplane and Paper Missile, alluding to a fascinating and beautiful object which may be seen as a symbol for belief in the future, for inventiveness and courage, which also carries with it a history of violence and drama.

The characteristic of the working model apparent in the sculptures is taken up and expanded in Dietrichson’s drawings. These resemble working drawings and easily bring to mind Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches for various flying machines, or the drawings for the Monument to the Third International which the Russian artist and architect, Vladimir Tatlin, prepared for the World Exposition in 1919. Quite possibly, history would have taken a different course if these ideas had come to fruition, and it is this prospect that gives drawings of this kind their almost mythical status. Dietrichson’s drawings capture this mystique and take us a step further.

It is a long way from Dietrichson’s tiny studio at the art academy to the one he had at his disposal for a year at Bomuldsfabriken, a period that culminated in an extensive solo exhibition in Arendal. By the time we began preparing the exhibition ‘Sketches for a Mechanical Sunrise’ at UKS, Dietrichson had just moved to a new studio at the disused military base on the island of Hisøya in Arendal – an even more vast facility with an industrial atmosphere. Here he built his biggest work to date, Triplane, which formed the centrepiece of the UKS exhibition. An oversized, mutant aircraft with three fuselages and a shared set of wings – hemmed in by the walls of the gallery and by its own dysfunctionality – is at once so simple and so massive. Works like this are allowed to live their own lives and this gives the viewer scope to move and breathe. Indeed, Dietrichson’s strength as an artist is that he dares to propose large-scale projects while also possessing the ability to put them into practice. “It is not an image of a dystopia, but of a sunrise.”