“Matts Leiderstam. Grand Tour”

The most striking impression left by Swedish-artist Matts Leiderstam’s exhibition Grand Tour at the Grazer Kunstverein is of the sheer, wide variety of objects. Books are laid out across tables, paintings lie around and on top of books and are mounted on easels, slides lay atop light boxes and are projected by carousels onto walls, and even an architectural model stands in the back, on one of the ten tables populating the galleries. Given the altogether literal nature of the objects, their material diversity clearly evidences exploration (with ideas in various forms) rather than experimentation (with these materials) – the latter being the logical expectation of such formal diversity in an art context. In fact, the artist’s conception of the exhibition’s subject – the Grand Tour, the centuries-long tradition of artists’ and the wealthy’s eye-opening journey through Europe – can well be thought of along the terms of exploration and experimentation, together. Through his artistic practice – of browsing the field of art history, finding surprisingly suggestive objects and traditions and subsequently constructing complicated, pseudo-scientific scenarios through which to shed light on his findings – the artist effectively casts a staid, stable history, conceptions of artistic production, and norms of the presentation of art all in a new light.

Where Leiderstam paints a picture, he does so remarkably in the literary sense of the phrase; in this exhibition we find a story told – a story of methodical efforts conjoined with a taste for the subversive. Take Table 3 (After Gustave Courbet), for example. The artist has focused his attention on the well-known Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, but he has collapsed the original subject matter together with one of a highly personal – or, even to say, tangential – nature: over the course of time, somewhere in the area of the original setting, sites have developed where homosexual men casually meet for intimate encounters. Literally by forcing one context onto another – by juxtaposing an art historical text containing a reproduction of the famous painting with the Spartacus Gay Guide 96-97 – Leiderstam generates meaning that is subjective and provocative. One asks oneself, “Was there some question as to Courbet’s sexual orientation, which I have forgotten?”

A similar type of self-doubt plagues the viewer when confronted with two canvases depicting two similar but non-identical views of a picnic bench amongst trees. Ambiguously installed on easels between Tables 3 and 7 – notably, facing away from Table 3 (After Gustave Courbet) – the canvases’ point of reference is altogether unclear to the visitor. In fact, viewers have to refer to the exhibition booklet found at the entrance in order to discover the reference that is being made. (Keep this in mind, as the exhibition booklet will become one of many points of reference with which the viewer is confronted.) The two paintings depict views of a highway service area in the vicinity of Montpellier, the region where Bonjour Monsieur Courbet was set. In this way, Leiderstam’s paintings serve to redefine Courbet’s subject in terms of the space’s changed identity in a much later time.

Even given the significance that investigated themes such as identity, sexuality, and suppression hold for the artist, questions of bias nevertheless feel a bit out of place here. Objectivity – both as a working method and a means of presentation – clearly holds a valued place at the heart of a scientific process; however, in the context of Leiderstam’s exhibited work, objectivity is merely feigned by the passivity of objects filling the gallery space. Whatever quasi-scientific or, rather, quasi-academic impression the artist’s practice suggests, it is the artfulness of his presentation – the way that the Spartacus guide hides beneath a book here, is elsewhere laid open – which indicates that Leiderstam’s intent is expression. Still, unlike most contemporary painting and sculpture, there is no particular immediacy or personality in the objects that Leiderstam exhibits. (A quietly humming and perhaps lazily clicking slide projector and carousel are in fact the most vibrancy one can find.) Leiderstam’s voice, nevertheless, beckons the viewer – metaphorically, of course – as one nears the magnifying glass perched above a picture (The 8th Duke of Hamilton with Dr John Moore and Ensign John Moore, for example) or a passage in an art history book. Leiderstam speaks through the contrived nature of the setup: “Look what I found, what curious event or nuance, from which we had previously only averted our eyes…”

Mostly through specification – by highlighting, cropping, and magnifying – but also through juxtaposition, reproduction, and, generally speaking, by altering the conditions of an artwork’s, object’s, or piece of information’s presentation, Leiderstam exercises control over the conveyance of meaning. The inclusion of an edition of the Spartacus International Gay Guide on each of the first three tables encountered by viewers is a perfect example of this. By decontextualizing, recontextualizing, or fundamentally changing the nature of his subjects, Leiderstam projects his agenda onto them. In this way, contexts make the referenced artworks appear to be active, motivated to reveal deeply hidden secrets. Thirsty for insight as well as intrigue, the viewer, trained to find revelations in or be shocked by contemporary art, then also searches for something hidden in these situations. It is in fact these constructed situations, in all of their complexity – following the artist’s conflation of the practices of connoisseurship, scholarship, and the appreciation of art objects together with intrigue, most evocatively of a sexual nature – which animate conventional histories, contexts, and inanimate objects.

In order to address so very many practices within the art world, Leiderstam includes their physical tools. His traditional realm – that of the artist – is exemplified by his painted works which are on view – small-scale sketches as well as large, finished canvases – the latter of which can be found mounted dramatically in wooden easels. The wooden crates scattered throughout the exhibition – often out of the way but not out of view – could be considered as an affirmation that the objects on view are works of art and not merely research materials or technical equipment used in the presentation of art. (Although some of the objects might fit these descriptions, surely not all of them do. Or, at least, this ambiguity is nevertheless a product of the situation in the galleries.) The peripheral presence of the crates could also have been a logistical decision made by the Grazer Kunstverein – a placement based on limitations of space, and, here, the crates’ effect would be to emphasize the exhibition’s presentation in this particular location.

Another practice referenced by Leiderstam, connoisseurship, rarely takes place in sight of the viewing public, causing the experience in the gallery to feel like a peek behind the scenes. Connoisseurship can be conceived of as having at least two objectives: to pinpoint the specific identity of artistic efforts as well as to appraise their value. It is the light table, corroboration with scholarly works, and, above all, the magnifying glass, which signify the ultimate attention to subject matter and technical detail – i.e., authorship and technical mastery – that denote this first sense of connoisseurship. With precisely these tools, Leiderstam exercises his motivation: not to authoritatively locate works within their historical milieu, but rather to locate in historical works nuances that resonate with his preference for iconoclasm. In the case of one of Canaletto’s canal scenes, depicted in Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, the focus of a magnifying glass held above the reproduction of the painting falls not on the original artist’s treatment in oil paint of contemporary life, but instead highlights apparently homosexual behavior between two men and the reaction of one of their contemporaries. In the detail that Leiderstam paints, which can be found here, on Table 1, the apparent look of aversion on the passerby’s face is pronounced, as is the joyful display of the two other men’s affection. In a way, the potential for Leiderstam to exaggerate the reality evident on the surface of the original canvas is unavoidable, since in producing this detail, he is presenting what he found in the detail, not simply representing the detail.

Concerning objects like this detail reproduced in paint by Leiderstam, it becomes clear that in this exhibition – just as in art for some time now – there is a conversation occurring on the subject of reproduction – both the quality of reproductions and also the notion of authorship. In the first place, there is a relatively literal conclusion almost necessarily arrived at when comparing the reproduction of a painting in one book versus its reproduction in another, and that concerns the quality of the reproduction – that is, the quality of the printing and how true, or alike, the printed image is to the original. The fact that it has been scaled down is logically self-evident. However, only in the context of the original work or other reproductions – as is the case here – are qualities such as coloration (or discoloration), contrast, or sharpness evident. In a more abstract sense, it is also possible, in the context that Leiderstam offers, to evaluate the representative capacity of the detail – with its cropped focus and more drastic change in scale. While a detail may offer a closer look at a notable aspect of a work, it also contains the capacity to obscure meaning – much like what is occurring in Grand Tour – by changing a context or doing away with it entirely.

Authorship, moreover, comes to the fore when Leiderstam produces painted reproductions. Just as before, with his potential exaggeration of what is depicted, Leiderstam changes the original images in several ways in the course of reproducing them. Whereas he sometimes passively alters images – for example, when he is incapable of painting with the same exact materials, procedures, or capacity as his predecessors – at other times he is active in the alterations. His limitations as a painter are simply impossible to ignore, given his altogether brazen decision to pair his paintings with reproductions of the “masterworks” that inspired them. In one sense, he forces his work into the company of accepted masterworks; in another, he forces the viewer to acknowledge that the quality of his paintings falls short of their precedents. What could be considered a kind of “humility in the age after master narratives” is simultaneously evidence that the value of Leiderstam’s art is found in its conceptual rigor and the finesse of its presentation. By supplementing images with alternate versions, reproductions, and texts, Leiderstam is generating artistic meaning based on the nature of difference extant between art historical sources, source objects, reproductions, altered versions and extraneous material. The focus, however, ultimately lies in the difference between historical artworks and Leiderstam’s most personal interventions.

For the reason that the artist does not engage in the age-old master narrative of one-upmanship, instead laying his efforts as a mine field in the vicinity of a source work’s historical standpoint, his being a better or worse painter than his target has no effect on his ability to explode the meaning of his target’s masterpiece. Unattached to tradition, Leiderstam, in his painting, moves freely from large to small scales, from complete reproductions to focused details, from figuration to landscape to abstraction, from finished work to loose sketch. A small canvas lying on Table 1 in fact sticks out as a very liberal interpretation of or reflection on Vesuvius by Johann Christian Dahl. It is so radically different in scale and so loosely painted that it is practically an abstract painting in its own right, merely inspired by the composition of the other painting. It is precisely at this intersection – between reproducing another artist’s work, altering the source in the process of reproduction in order to manipulate its meaning, and freely calling upon vastly different formal identities as a painter – where the questions stand, provoked into being posited: What games is Leiderstam playing with the identity of art and artists, his own included?

There is a tradition in art of the “master’s copy,” wherein one recreates a work of particular quality, most often as a student, intending to learn how a work was made or how to make a good work, and other times simply as an homage. Although this procedure is at work here, the motivation is not the same. The works addressed by Leiderstam in Grand Tour are selected for their being masterful, yes, but also for their relevance to the world outside of the straight, white, male, institutional canon. These works either already exhibit some counter-canonical content, perhaps over time they have developed a subversive connotation, or Leiderstam found in them some resonance that was particularly meaningful to him. In most cases, it appears that the last was the case, and that this resonance was between the physical setting for a historical work and the modern reality that gay men have recently used the setting as a cruising site. The objective of Leiderstam’s “extensive research” and his subsequent presentation is not about representing the universe depicted in a specific work, but about scratching at the surface of history and revealing something fundamental to reality.

For a prime example of Leiderstam’s active manipulation of a work, take his treatment of Hubert Robert’s The Artist’s Studio. The original painting is described in the following way within another copy of the aforementioned text – Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century – found, here, on Table 8-9: “The statue of a young man on the left of the picture is extraordinarily lifelike, and its pose, turned towards the artist, almost seems to be trying to attract his attention.” Leiderstam, however, subverts this relationship. In his reproduction, the depicted painter looks directly outwards. By turning the attention of the painter, the subject of the picture, towards the viewer, this sense of attraction is deflected onto the viewer. In fact, the depicted painter, conceived of as a substitute for Leiderstam, himself, suggests Leiderstam’s active, perhaps provocative surveillance of the situation. Viewed another way, in that Leiderstam had the same struggle with the figure’s attention during the course of creation, it is as if Leiderstam were reflecting an experience through the canvas or figure as if with a mirror.

In fact, Leiderstam repeatedly turns the gaze of paintings’ subjects towards the viewer; this is the case in the painted reproduction of The Artist’s Studio as well as in the painted detail of Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Moreover, the artist repeatedly invokes self-portraiture or presents objects that carry a structural emphasis on the experience of the artist – ie. plein air paintings, depictions of an artist’s studio, or even documents or products like those picked up along the Grand Tour. Scattered throughout the exhibition, these representations of subjectivity have the effect of snapping the viewer back from being immersed in the meta-narrative of an investigation into art and history to acknowledging the immediate narrative of a contemporary artist’s – namely Leiderstam’s – personal undertaking.

To return for a moment to The Artist’s Studio, although exchanged gazes are perhaps the most charged aspect of the work, it is a bust of a woman, a dog, the light coming in through the window, and the artist at work that are most formally pronounced. Thus – following just this kind of multiplicity of information – does relevance, in a general sense, appear as a live ground on which visitors to the exhibition must tread. As well as needing to constantly evaluate Leiderstam’s relationship to sources for the insight into the artist’s motivation that they evidence, visitors’ are also confronted with a vast pool of sources, wherein the specific point of interest is not always contained or explicit. This is the necessary consequence of an exhibition such as this one, so busy with objects and inanimate contextual information that the result is somewhere between a cacophony of tangents and a dull drone of irrelevancies. Visitors to a contemporary art exhibition are not fully accustomed to reading texts, for one thing. As a result, viewers either struggle with the fact that the artist is not more generous – showing videos, paintings, sculptures, or other, more easily digestible, visual material – or viewers simply do not commit the effort required to register, evaluate, and digest the information present in the form of text. In one sense, it is to Leiderstam’s credit that a sense of intrigue still permeates the space. In another, it is exactly the vitality of subversion that draws the visitor in and around the installation, and it is the contrast to the staid canon of straight art history that positions visitors alongside Leiderstam, sharing of his iconoclastic agenda. Much as the voyagers – in the reality that Leiderstam sees – confronted with novelty, excitement, and sensual pleasure along the path of the “Grand Tour,” visitors can indulge in the provocative subtext of the exhibition.

Much as the “Claude Lorraine Glass” on Table 5, which is described as, “pleasing and useful for viewing eclipses, clouds, landscapes, &c.,” but which significantly obscures and alters reality, Leiderstam’s Grand Tour puts novelties on display with an intermittent heavy-handedness that supports the viewer’s feeling of having come to a substantial meaning. To compare the presentation of Table 6 with that of Table 4 will aid in highlighting this fine line relating relevance to irrelevance, and objective truth to subjective significance. As presented on Table 6, Leiderstam addressed Pierre-Jacques-Antoine Volaire’s The Eruption of Vesuvius throughout several stages of activity. Intitially, his interest in the unusual context of its installation at the Art Institute of Chicago led him to discover that, for a time, the painting was owned by a couple living in the city of Leiderstam’s birth, Göteberg, in Sweden. Leiderstam then painted a reproduction of the painting while in the museum and subsequently photographed his reproduction in a museum setting, in a volcanic landscape like the one depicted in the original, and in a domestic setting like the one in Sweden in which the painting hung. Clearly, the resonance of the work’s provenance with his personal background was a primary motivation for the way in which Leiderstam undertook this process. In contrast, Leiderstam found no such rich personal relationship with the painting of Niagara Falls by an anonymous artist that is considered at Table 4. Nevertheless, like with The Eruption of Vesuvius, he reproduced it and photographed it against a backdrop of the depicted landscape. Ultimately, the relative parallelism of the processes presented at these two tables puts the viewer in a dangerous position, left either to assume that the undertakings share the same logic of personalized motivation or that neither was motivated by any such personal relationship.

Explicit or not, accurate or not, convincing or not, Leiderstam’s artistic process and mode of presentation – it should be made clear – posses a value which does not derive from the promise of intrigue, of iconoclasm, or of demonstrated nonconformism. Leiderstam’s work, which appears to hold the consolidation and critical treatment of existing subject matter as an ideal, rather states that there is beauty exactly in process, design, and incisive thought.

With Grand Tour, Matts Leiderstam attempts a daring feat: to emphasize the anecdotal in art – an activity which carries with it the inherent risk of misrepresenting the art being taken as a subject. For, were this to happen, any insight into the structural nature of art and history would be artifice, an outcome which would be methodologically opposed to Leiderstam’s sober but artful expression. In fact, Leiderstam’s art avoids appearing shallow, since the connections it builds between rarified artworks and provocative themes, such as sexuality, is founded on the artist’s largely personalized and always thoughtful considerations. Moreover, the artistic activity embodied by Grand Tour does not overly trivialize its mostly canonical subject matter. Leiderstam’s is a sincere type of investigation, treating forms and concepts simultaneously, borne only out of earnestness.

REVIEW of the exhibition by Tessa Friederike Rosebrock