The story of The Story Came Off - english

By Marie Norman Nyeng

Video Installation

The Story Came Off is a two-screen video installation by Sixten Therkildsen. When sitting and watching one video with headphones on, it is possible to glance over and catch images from the other video at the same time. The one video, entitled The Narratives, consists of old 8 mm film recordings of domestic scenes and cherished events such as birthdays, parties and fishing trips. An accompanying soundtrack can be heard with five narrative stories written by Sixten Therk-ildsen, in which historical facts revolving around the political reality of street riots and social un-rest in 1960s USA are taken up. Also appearing in the narratives are extracts from The Port Huron Statement, which was written at the beginning of the 1960s by the organisation Students for a Democratic Society, as a reaction against conservatism, egoism, overcapitalism and, more concretely, against inequalities in American society and against the American involvement in the war in Vietnam. In his narratives Sixten Therkildsen makes the historical facts and the idealistic extracts from the manifesto fit together with the video track of images from the 8mm film foot-age via his own fabricated passages, which resemble anecdotal memories.
Running time for The Narratives is 19 minutes.

When one moves to the other video in the installation, entitled The Emailcorrespondence and puts on the corresponding headphones, one can hear a reading of an e-mail correspondence between the artist and a member of the family whose old 8 mm film footage is seen on both video screens in the installation. On the visual track of The Emailcorrespondence the people in the fragments of the grainy film parts are all clearly aware of the camera’s presence, whilst the audience is introduced to the artist and the family’s story concerning the footage. Running time for The Emailcorrespondence is 13 minutes.

In The Story Came Off Sixten Therkildsen makes use of already existing material, as in many of his other works, which he then manipulates and sets in new contexts.
In the project here he utilises existing raw material in order to investigate how we remember the past, and how we will construct our own history in the future. In this work it is 8 mm film footage from the 1960s that was recorded by an Italian-American family, and which one must assume was never intended to have a larger public life than the family itself and its friends – which is the starting point for the artist’s narrative work. In addition, he also utilises 1960s USA, its historical facts and the idealistic manifesto The Port Huron Statement as found objects. He in-serts these actual elements in his frame for the work by allowing them to enter as partial ele-ments in his own anecdotal narratives, which are reminiscent of personal memories. Finally, he also makes use of the actual e-mail correspondence he had with a member of the family that recorded the film footage, directly in his work. In this way Therkildsen allows the layer of reality fragments to constitute the principal elements in his investigation, and in his presentation of possibilities for interaction in and with the world.

Raw material: 8 mm films from the 1960s

For the project The Story Came Off Sixten bought a number of old 8 mm films, which were be-ing put up for sale on the internet auction site ebay. Amongst the old films the family name Amiano appeared again and again on the boxes which the films had been sent to be developed in, and had also since been stored in. When one had shot film on one’s 8 mm film roll in the 1960s, one wrote one’s name on the outside of the box, of course, before it was sent to be developed – and it was also returned to the owner in the same box.
The odd situation, where personal and domestic film footage like this family’s was being put up for sale on a worldwide auction by a third party, awoke Therkildsen’s curiosity.
Sixten Therkildsen began to write letters to everyone with the surname Amiano in the USA. In short, he looked up the name in the telephone book and attempted to make contact with eve-ryone who had that particular surname. After some time Jeanette Amiano replied to the in-quiry. All the coincidences formed a synthesis. Sixten Therkildsen now had contact to the family who, sometime in the space of the 1960s, documented family gatherings, Christmases, birthdays and weddings with moving, silent pictures.

Raw material: The Port Huron Statement

In the finished video installation the artist himself is perceptibly present as the sender of the work. Here it is clear that Sixten Therkildsen takes the original, existing material from 1960s USA as a starting point. Apart from the 8 mm films he also takes the idealism of The Port Huron Statement as a starting point in his investigation of the interaction between private, domestic events and societal relations. It is a text that is based on a draft by Tom Hayden and at the first conference of the Students for a Democratic Society, in 1962, it was adopted as the political manifesto of the organisation. In the manifesto Tom Hayden, who was president of the organi-sation in the school year 1962-63, puts into words the student movement’s resistance to the existing societal order by pointing to inequality and race discrimination in American society and, in addition, USA’s warmongering in the surrounding world. One of the many programme points in the text is that one should rebel against the American two-party system and instead intro-duce a form of welfare state with a governmental programme for combating poverty. In other words, The Port Huron Statement was a critique of American society’s failed attempt to “create peace in the world” and of the whole “American way of life.”
Sixten Therkildsen utilises fragments of this text in order to incorporate idealistic ideas from the same era as the 8 mm films were shot. Through his combination of the ideological text of the time and the private 8 mm film footage, he points not only to the difference between the do-mestic and the societal, but also to a possible exchange between the two domains.

Raw material: the historical facts

Tom Hayden, just like Jeanette Amiano, originally hails from New Jersey, and as Amiano reveals in the e-mail exchange, she knows a little about Hayden both as a prominent left-wing figure in the 1960s and later as a member of the American congress. Because both the family that Therkildsen has made contact with, and Tom Hayden, are originally from the area around Newark, New Jersey, maybe this is the reason why the e-mail correspondence soon starts to centre on the disturbances in Newark in 1967. These disturbances are also a central, pivotal point in one of the narratives Sixten Therkildsen has put together.
The six days of unrest from the 12th to the 17th July, 1967, were sparked off when the black taxi driver John Smith was arrested for a minor offence, and was then subjected to violent and heavy-handed treatment. In the city rumours spread that Smith had died in police custody, even though he had been taken to hospital, and it provoked massive anger in the city. After six days of unrest 26 people had died and 725 were injured, and the police had made around 1500 ar-rests. Furthermore, the costs for the material damages in the city streets were in excess of 10 million dollars.

The riots were provoked by race problems in the USA, and in connection with the fact that re-cently it was the fortieth anniversary since the riots took place, there has been a large focus on the significance of the disturbances for Newark and the state of New Jersey. In this connection, the New York Times wrote how the episode had marked Newark as a national symbol of racial inequality, police brutality and urban despair.
What is remarkable in relation to Sixten Therkildsen’s investigation of how we remember the past or arrange the past when we remember it, is that the article in the New York Times also reports how there is a dispute as to what one should call the events which happened in those six days in 1967. Some describe them as riots; others describe them as rebellion. Those who wish to remain neutral call them disturbances.

The adapted raw material in Therkildsen’s narratives

The installation The Story Came Off show, as mentioned, the two image sequences in 8 mm film that Sixten Therkildsen has edited together, and which are viewed on two separated screens. As it becomes clearer when one, as a viewer, sees the installation, along the course of his work with the project he sent his narratives to Amiano and asked her to comment on the way he had attached the moving pictures of her family to his own stories.
Sixten Therkildsen’s narrative universe has its starting point in the small coincidences and curios-ity that provides meaning for the way in which we associate with one another and the way in which situations form; whilst he simultaneously allows the narratives to unfold in relation to ex-isting and actual societal understanding or politico-historical events.
This is also valid in the stories that are part of The Story Came Off. The extracts from The Port Huron Statement, which he has written into his stories, have been changed from the original present tense to the past tense. In this way the idealistic text glides almost unnoticed into Therkildsen’s fabricated section on the situation, which was filmed by the Amiano family’s pro-ductive amateur cameraman back in the 1960s.
By doing so, Sixten Therkildsen does not merely place his interpretations of what occurs in the silent film clips in relation to the politic situation in the society of the time, he also gives the viewer the possibility of playing along with the notions he has of, for example, the attitudes of the guests and the bride and groom in the wedding story, regarding their positions on what went on in society and their role in this society.

In a similar way extracts of The Port Huron Statement form part of the story of how one Christ-mas it had been necessary for the narrator to buy Christmas presents not only to his own chil-dren, but also all his friends’ children, because the friends were busy working for the right to or-ganise themselves into trade unions. Here an extract like: " We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity," becomes a part of the story of the incredible amount of Christmas pre-sents, which the children in the pictures open up.
And in the story of the utmost successful fishing trip on a pleasure boat, where one sees the satisfied men heave up one fish after another out of the sea, the extract can be heard:" Man had unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It was this potential that we regarded as crucial and to which we appealed; not to the human potenti-ality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. "

Sixten Therkildsen makes the 8 mm films momentarily melt together with his own narratives in glimpses of sliding transitions between the public and the private, where the humorous in the private parts of the narratives makes the public parts more human. He focusses on the personal story and makes it tell of universal experiences between people by taking a starting point in the experiences of the past and blending them with a contemporary vision. When he places layers of historical facts and ideological assertions together in his own narratives it creates possibilities for these to supplement and contrast with the 8 mm film images, and in this way make the pro-ject into a narrative of human relations to one another and to the reality we live in. By telling the stories through a “we-perspective,” they become stories of the collective and our communal ways of forming history in the world. With the “we” Therkildsen employs he writes himself into the action, whilst simultaneously distancing himself from what goes on in it.

When the idealistic elements in the stories are drawn into narratives about family and the pri-vate sphere, they fall to the ground. For example, the Chritmas story and the involvement of idealistic fragments from The Port Huron Statement – on rebellion against existing norms in so-ciety – become opposed to each other when the thing in focus, in the domestic part of the story, is the large amount of presents received by the children in the film footage. In this way Therkildsen brings in antagonism, which here is understood as a condition of struggle between the private and the public.

The art historical context

Sixten Therkildsen writes himself into the work with his artistic practice and his focus on the in-terpersonal, and the way in which we create relations with one another – in the genres of con-temporary art that have been described as both relational aesthetics and social antagonism by the French curator Nicolas Bourriad and the English art theorist Claire Bishop. Bishop uses the term social antagonism because she focuses on precisely the form of antagonism which Therk-ildsen thematises in The Story Came Off. The term relational aesthetics or relational art, has gained the greatest footing in art history.
With the term relational aesthetics, art is understood as not only thematising interpersonal rela-tions, but also utilising it as a material, which is precisely what Therkildsen does by, amongst other things, allowing his e-mail correspondence with Amiano to enter directly in the work The Story Came Off. Art that can be described as relational draws on the main avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements from the artistic expression of the 20th century, exemplified by the po-litical art from the 1960s and 1970s by Joseph Beuys and Fluxus. It does so with a clear inspira-tion from the way in which the avant-garde movement attempted to combine art and life and to make the human being into the central, pivotal point for the art.

Where the avant-garde movements of the 20th century were very much driven by the desire to break down the distinction between art and reality directly by obliterating the art institution, relational art works with so-called micro-utopian models. The artists who work with relational art, such as Sixten Therkildsen, attempt to create models for how one can integrate in meaning-fully and create relations with one’s surroundings.
This means that their intentions of changing reality happen on an everyday level. They act through small interactions by, for example, creating meetings between people who can be un-derstood as models for how one can live with one another and exist in the world. Simultane-ously the relational artists are not so dogmatic as their historical predecessors. They do not have any utopian aims of breaking down the boundary between art and life; but instead work in a micro-utopian manner, with the question of how art can intervene in life, and life in art.
Even though the audience does not directly form relations in The Story Came Off, the work func-tions anyway as a model for the creation of interpersonal relations and, consequently, as rela-tional art.
The narratives which are part of the project deal with interpersonal relations to a high degree. Furthermore, Sixten uses a totally real, concrete interpersonal realtion as a material in the pro-ject. A relation between the artist and the family in the footage arises, stemming from when Six-ten Therkildsen asked Jeanette Amiano to comment on the narratives in the project he has constructed as accompaniment to the old film footage.

The way in which Sixten Therkildsen uses already existing raw material as found objects in his project is related to the way in which the artists from the artistic movements of the 20th cen-tury – for example, surrealism – have worked with the collage as media. The collage phenome-non has been described as the greatest technique of modern art, and thus the avant-garde ep-och, because it blends the peculiarity of various aesthetic experiences as the artwork’s way of coming to life.
In Sixten Therkildsen’s works in general, and in The Story Came Off, the collages consist of per-sonal human stories and relations to and in the world. These have been cut out, stuck together and converted into new meanings. Where the historical collages were formed on a concrete, material level, the collages seen in Therkildsen’s work are often literary and associative. He makes use of his adapted raw material and his narrative universe of the near and dear to the-matise how we create our personal stories in relation to one another and our present time, and how we choose to remember the past.

Facts

In his projects Sixten Therkildsen works with the relations we have to one another and to the world, by investigating the quirky, distorted and personal ways in which people create stories in the world.
Sixten Therkildsen was born in 1972 and graduated from The Jutland Art Academy, Denmark, in 2003.
In recent years he has participated in international exhibitions in, amongst others, Ham-burg, Berlin, Wales, New York and many parts of Scandinavia.
Furthermore, he has carried out curatorial work and arrangements as a member of the exhibition space rum46 in Denmark, where together with other artists and art theorists he has arranged interventional art projects and exhibitions with artists from around the world