Having worked together at the late Stockholm venue of Galerie Forsblom and recently having seen his ongoing show at Galleri Hedenius, our editor Koshik Zaman reckoned it was time to have a chat with Marcus Mårtenson whose poignant in-your-face work is a fresh breath of air in the "demure" Swedish contemporary art landscape. "Everything felt more raw somehow looking back at it. But it was a fertile ground for an artist to grow up in, that’s for sure!" Marcus tells us about the impact of growing up in NYC in the 1980's.
C-P: Hello Marcus, this interview is overdue, don’t you think?
M.M: Yes, for sure! Glad we can do this.
C-P: We worked together on a show ‘Total Noise’ at the late Stockholm venue of Galerie Forsblom back in 2019. I had known about your work prior but properly got acquainted with it then. I’m amazed by how deceptively smart it is; the references, the humor, the immediacy, the relatability! Pardon my French but where do you get all this shit from? Jokes aside, I know that aside from the obvious, popular culture and current affairs, you also draw from academic theory which is perhaps less evident. Tell me; how you do you research ahead of a show like the one you’re currently presenting at Hedenius?
M.M: I basically do a lot of research. I read books about the subjects that I focus on and I also do a lot of digging online. These last three shows that I have done have represented a kind of thematic trilogy. 'Total Noise' at Galerie Forsblom in 2019 was about social media, 'Surveillance Games' at Arsenalsgatan 3 in 2021 was about surveillance and my current show 'Some robot is coming for your shit' at Galleri Hedenius in is about artificial intelligence. I have examined how these modern technologies have been changing us as humans. Talking about for example how digital platforms that collect and exploit personal data ultimately end up influencing our habits and emotional responses. I guess you could say that I spend way too much time online in some of the stranger corners of the internet. A lot of very weird stuff is going on there, like on Reddit forums and comment sections on conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. In a way its like exploring the collective subconscious of humanity.
For my latest show, which has been about A.I, I spent some time in conversations with the A.I system GPT 4o. Mainly about which risks it might present to humanity. This culminated in the piece 'Spirit Cabinet' which talks about the dystopian outcomes these A.I systems might bring about unless they are regulated. I got the name from the spirit cabinets that where used by mediums during seances in the late 1800s. Inside these cabinets they supposedly channeled the dead and other disembodied spirits. This seemed to be an interesting metaphor for the new A.I systems that allow you to talk to them, mimicking human voices in a very convincing way. It was quite surreal talking to this synthetic AI. entity about itself. Hearing it trying to convince me ”how it posed no real threat to us humans”. Furthermore, making arguments that it was in fact the humans and the way they used the tech that posed the real risk. Of course this is far from the truth seeing that major A.I developers have been warning about letting this technology be developed in an unregulated manner. I guess you can say that I am on a long mission to create order out of chaos. There is a kind of "infocalypse" happening at the moment. So much information is being produced, and so much of it is like junk food. I think the author Yuval Noah Hariri made the comparison with addictive junk food being filled with fat, salt and sugar likewise the algorithms push fear outrage and greed to addict us. So by creating these paintings that often systematically order aspects of this information overload its a way for me to see clearly and understand the digital landscape better. The results are usually funny and unsettling at the same time.
Ph: Fredrik Sandin Carlsson
C-P: Before fully diving into ‘Some Robot is Coming for Your Shit’, let’s just backtrack a little. You spent parts of your upbringing in NYC, no? What impact have these years had on your art practice?
M.M: Yeah, I moved to NYC in 1979 and lived there during the 8'0s. It was a pretty wild time in America. We lived in a suburb of Manhattan but my mom loved art so she took me and my brother into the city during the weekends to look at art, go to museums and see the sights. New York was pretty turbulent during the early 80's and also had a pretty happening art scene so I think in retrospect I absorbed a lot of it. There was also tons of graffiti on the trains at this point, which made a strong impression on me as well. There was a Keith Haring mural that read ”CRACK IS WACK” painted on a handball court near the Harlem river drive. I would always see it when we drove into the city. It was painted with a bright orange color and had a cartoonish feel to it. There was something about that piece that spoke to me. These bright happy colors with this darker message. That kind of tension is something I see happening in some of my works today.
I guess heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons also really had a big influence on my creativity at that point. I went to a lot of metal concerts. Bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Ozzy, Dio and KISS all had these elaborate stage shows with crazy pyro effects and monsters on stage. Teenagers smoking pot and throwing M80 fire crackers into the crowd. Plus, I watched a lot of movies on cable TV. I remember especially Escape from New York having this deep effect on me. America as this dystopian country in the far off future where the president was being held hostage. Already the Reagan administration had closed a lot of the state run psychiatric hospitals in New York so tons of homeless people lived in the streets. This collided with a crack epidemic so New York really became super violent for a few years at that time. There were all these anti drug ads on tv all the time. Like the one with a guy holding up an egg saying "this is your brain” and then cracking it in this searing hot frying pan and going “this is your brain on drugs“. And at 10 pm the TV would air these ads going “It’s 10 pm do you know where your children are?”. Everything felt more raw somehow looking back at it. But it was a fertile ground for an artist to grow up in, that’s for sure!
C-P: Crayons has become your signature trait – I can’t recall many other artists who have worked so consistently with the medium – but how did you reason around presenting works on paper for the new show? I get that you’ve always been sketching and drawing but felt like a fresh breath of air, the towering installation of framed works.
M.M: I guess I wanted to do something different. I have always been drawing. It’s a part of the process when I make my pieces on wood. So I thought why not just create a big installation of drawings? There’s also something liberating about being able to make them because they are a quicker and more direct way of working for me . Some of my larger and more detailed wood pieces can take a month or two to make so this becomes another process. Thematically they relate to each other though. The installation is called 'Alien implant'. Named after those who claim to have had a physical object placed in their body after having been abducted by aliens. This summer I took a road trip to Norrköping and visited the huge UFO archives that they have there. It was really trippy and interesting. This sort of got my inspiration going to make these drawings. I watched a lot of the old The X-Files episodes when I was drawing them. So the themes of conspiracies that I'm exploring in some of the other works on wood carry over into some of these drawings. I'm very interested in looking at how modern conspiracy theories have sort of started to fill the vacuum that religion has left when it started to disappear from modern more secular societies. Becoming sort of these new mythologies.
C-P: As often is the case with your shows, the current one is very dense with a ton of works varying in size and format. Do you have a rough idea beforehand of what you’ll be presenting or does the selection present itself organically?
M.M: It's a very intuitive process that I try to follow without censoring myself too much. I usually try to make several large showstopper pieces that contain the meat of the message in the show. In this show it's the round cathedral style window piece 'Spirit Cabinet'. Then there is an ongoing collage style installation of pieces that are varying in size. Essentially I'm trying to create a larger narrative here where all the different pieces with individual meanings create a new story when placed next too each other . This story is in the eye of the beholder. When you view the pieces in relation to each other you can make up your own meaning of the works.
C-P: In connection to the show, you released an artist book on Art & Theory; tell me about the selection process that went into the making? I imagine it to have been a “kill your darlings” situation with so many works to date.
M.M: It was such a labour of love to be honest. There where so many pieces to choose from seeing that it was a collection of my work from 2013 to today. It's hard to choose but a lot of the pieces I just knew had to be included. Again the selection process was quite intuitive. Of course some of the great pieces didn’t make the cut. Some of them I didn’t even have good enough documentation of. It's the kind of thing you realize at the very last minute when it's close to deadline and you just have to go; "screw it!" I will include it in the next book instead! I'm very proud of this book and am so happy with how it turned out. I had a couple of great designers helping me out, Filip Rensfelt and Anna Karin Nilsson. They really knocked it out of the park.
C-P: Lastly, a classic; who are some of the artists that have inspired your work? Off the cuff, one would guess somebody like Raymond Pettibon and there’s definitely some kinship with David Shrigley but I have a feeling that the answer is perhaps less obvious so I’ll throw it out there.
M.M: Those guys are good! I think Trevor Paglen is one artist who I feel a kinship with. It seems like we are always working in some sort of parallel process, exploring similar concepts. Stuff like modern conspiracies, psyops, surveillance and how A.I systems are evolving in potentially destructive ways. He talks a lot about how the way we look at pictures is changing. We used to just look at images. But now the images are looking back at us. Through A.I algorithms the images we view on Instagram study how we look at them, for how long and whether we like them or not and then proceed to change. That's why your ”for you” page is filled with the most addictive stuff imaginable, curated in a very personal way that exploits our desires and weaknesses.
Another artist I love is Herbert Singleton, a wood carver from New Orleans. He has passed on now but he carved motifs into doors to depict tales from his life, religious and mythological stories, and other powerful motifs from the streets of the city. I really love New Orleans and try to go back there as much as I can. I was in a group show there in 2009 at the Barristers Gallery and have kept going back since then. The city is kind of like a muse for me. My dream is to be able to have a studio there for a few months every year. I'm trying to make that happen!
Also, Barbara Kruger is great. Using this bold in your face subversion of the advertisement aesthetic to deliver great social criticism and commentary. I feel very connected to this style of work and feel there is something very liberating in its directness.
/Koshik Zaman
Some Robot is Coming For Your Shit runs through September 28 at Galleri Hedenius in Stockholm.