Reality Check
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark
Chris Burden, The Flying Steamroller (1996)
The first thing you see when walking through the Statens Museum for Kunst’s garden is Chris Burden’s The Flying Steamroller (1996). Operated by museum assistants, it slowly accelerates as it circles around a platform, lifting off the ground once its reaches a certain speed. It looks quite unbelievable; ten tonnes of steamroller are not supposed to fly. Yet, inside the museum, another suspension of tradition awaits: the institution has organized its first ever exhibition of contemporary art since it opened in 1887. ‘Reality Check’ is the single largest presentation of contemporary art in Danish history; taking up 3000 square metres of gallery space, the survey of work from the mid-1990s to the present comprises 62 works by some 39 international artists. Curated by Marianne Torp, the exhibition concerns itself with three general tendencies – documentation, reinterpretation, and re-contextualization – and aims to investigate the conditions determining our concept of what is real. The premise is in no way new, though, in addition to the contemporary pieces, ‘Reality Check’ comprises various contextualizing works, such as Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you (1971) and some more recent work by the likes of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Bas Jan Ader, I’m too sad to tell you (1971)
One of the more intense pieces is Album (2005) by Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska, in which, with uncanny attention to detail, she has erased herself from every family picture in a photo album. It is a strangely self-destructive piece that clearly manifests just how dependent reality is of how it is represented. Other works play with the physical structure of the institution, such as Annika von Hausswolf’s image of a radiator, hung on the wall as a radiator – a trompe l’œil that gets you every time, as does Ceal Floyer’s film of an electrical socket projected onto a wall. Elsewhere, a thoroughly researched work by Danish artist Henrik Olesen documents a history of homosexuality (Variations, 2008) and consists of a pile of images with written notes on the back, laid out on a table for the viewer to leaf through. As the order in which you read the texts and see the images can fall out in a thousand different ways, Variations opens up myriad alternate readings of our pictorial history.
‘Reality Check’ is one of those exhibitions whose significance may very well turn out to be greater than the impact of the work displayed. It is certainly a milestone in the museum’s history, and may even turn out to be a paradigm shift. The SMK wants to present itself, strategically, not only as a space for storing tradition, but also as an institution that experiments with contemporary art – a strategy that could dust off the museum faster than any renovation job.
Matilde Digmann
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