N.O. Oskar Holmberg's Page
N. O. Oskar Holmberg
Profile Information
- Website
- http://www.theseobjects.com
- College / University
- Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
- Program
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) + Media Arts (Sound)
- Graduation
- 14 November 2007
- Member type
- Artist
- If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?
- Drawing, Performance, Photography, Video
- I am...
- (b. 1984) Sweden. Moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2004. Studied at PSC and RMIT. Exhibited in numerous group and pair shows at galleries like Kick, Westpace, TCB, The Substation, Brunswick Arts, Off The Kerb, and Red Gallery. Performed at Fore Paw among other places.
Currently not represented.
- About my artwork
- Sound makes love to you:
Experimental computer-based generative audio-visual and video/audio-concrete performance with strong emphasis on chance, maths, drone, glitch, minimalism and psychedelia.
Photographs hate you:
I have exposed, undeveloped rolls of film in a glass jar at home, years old, that have come with me where ever I have gone in the world. They are my most precious photographs, as long as they stay undeveloped. They are physical traces of my life spent, more tangible than fleeting memories, but still not available for experience anywhere but in my mind.
With photography in its traditional form, with photosensitive chemical emulsions, I have found profound beauty in the latent image; the image that exists and doesn’t at the same time. This has to do with, for me, an inescapable sense of let down, or disappointment, in the way which the photograph turns out, physically, in relation to my idea of the photo as I find or ‘capture’ it. In a way the real photograph is recorded by my body, organically, stored as a memory growing increasingly vague with the passage of time. The act of photographing with a camera then, no matter what the type or format is, is merely an empty imitation of the photograph carved into my brain by my eyes and other senses. This aspect of photography is avoided until the film has been developed, and the film, until then, serves as a physical reinforcement, almost magical, between the interior experience of memory, and the experience of the external world outside (how truly interior or exterior our understandings of these concepts are, as in person in relation to the exterior world, is one of those ancient philosophical conundrums).
If one imagines the concept of the latent, the thing that exists but doesn’t, but take it up one notch, then perhaps we can imagine the world around us as a mass of fleeting and flowing photographs, ready to be captured. Even though the act of recording something with the camera creates a photograph that didn’t exist previously, the world being part of the ingredients, we should still be able to make this stretch of imagination for my next claim. (Now, let’s get rid of “graph” in photograph, the “engraving”, and just call them “photos” - something like an image, but still existing in spirit before it is photographed.)
Photos latent ‘in the world’ are alive and organic, and when we ‘shoot’ them, we kill them in a way; make them static; dead. Perhaps then we as photographers in some regard work like hunters. Not hunters for survival, but the recreational kind - like fishing. A fisherman is always hoping for The Fish, that will prove his manhood and allow him to give up fishing for good. (The father of the kid next door, where I grew up, for example.) I see myself in this body of work as chasing after something that’s not quite there. Maybe it never will be and isn’t supposed to be? Each new image, although they are part of a series and make a larger whole, tries to out-do the previous one; tries to be better than. Out-do it how, you might ask?
I have been trying to get to the bottom of this obsession that is fine art photography. A small fringe of people that run circles around themselves, spew their brains and hearts out on paper, and for some reason see this as the most important calling in the world. I’ve slowly started regarding it not so much a community in the plain sense of the word, but more a cult. Esoteric insider knowledge is required to fully grasp and appreciate much of the work produced, and the fetishism over the photograph as an object. What are they really doing? Killing the flow of life, these photos, shooting it, taking it home, ‘mounting’ it, ‘nailing’ it, then ‘hanging’ it. The object extracted is then looked at repetitively, penetrated with the eyes over and over. A photo is turned into a photograph, which ends up being a kind of necrophilic rape-doll, used for extracting pleasure according to the fulfilment or subversion of certain culturally (or subculturally) established variables. In this sense I feel guilty in making photographs.
Now, this is perhaps a gross exaggeration of what really goes on, but I still feel like I need to make the photos self-aware. The characters and symbols in my Paintings of modern life (Baudelaire, Impressionists, Jeff Wall, etc.) tries to illustrate this exploitation. In a sense, the characters in the photos are ghosts, not people. They are the unseen people of the world, or even our own local society, which are the victims of our violent consumption in the space of a consumerist world.
- Artists I like
- Jeff Wall, Stephen Shore, Rineke Dijkstra, Alec Soth, Richard Barnes, Edward Burtynsky, Patrick O'Hare, Ray Johnson, Santiago Sierra, Martin Parr, Gursky
Xenakis, Ligeti, Henry Flynt, David Tudor, Tony Conrad, Terry Riley, Clara Rockmore, Xiu Xiu, Free Choice
- The centre of the artworld is
- another city
Artworks
N.O. Oskar Holmberg's Blog
Flash, Volume 1
Monday, June 2nd, 6pm, 2008 at KINGS Gallery Lvl 1, 171 King St Melbourne VIC 3000 kingsartistrun.com.au Featuring Jeana Bajic, Simon Berman & Lachlan Mooney, Anna Gilby, Ben Mastwyk, Molly & Eve, and my humble self. "An enticing one night exhibition comprising Video, Performance, Sound & Photography" Curated by Victoria Bennett & Clare Rae COME ALONG!
Posted on 19th May 2008 at 5:16am —
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http://umlautampersand.wordpress.com/
Umlaut.
Please check out my site
cheers,
Frank Fu
I like your avatar picture a lot- you look very fierce ;-)
Greetings
Vale
Thanks for comments. I like your artwork (photo) too - very much.
Roma :-)
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