On recent works by Ulrik Weck

Ulrik Weck has made a series of sculptural installations mimicking bookshelves, with books made out of found pieces of wood, sometimes raw, sometimes meticulously bound in paper. Although unreadable, one cannot help delving into the books. Pieces of old board tell good stories too, and so the reader is prompted to read differently from the way usually dictated by books. On the other hand, however, the work is like a restriction, in that the reader cannot access the imaginary literary content of the books and, as such, is being kept from a secret.

“All you see, I owe to spaghetti” , Sofia Loren once said, answering a question about the secret behind her beauty – [All you see, I owe to spaghetti /For the lovely S.L., 2008]. Whatever Loren owed to whom, spaghetti did most likely not have a big part in it. But by not claiming luck, magic or divine interference directly she managed to infer exactly that. She mocks the idea that there could even be a recipe for (her) beauty. She says that she is just the same as all other Italian women, when – obviously – she is quite extraordinary. The difference is inexplicable and people just have to deal with it; like law. This is a brilliant example of how, when being faced with subjection to rule, Loren turned the tables and became the rule herself. Furthermore it shows the negotiation between the ordinary and the extraordinary [spaghetti and divine beauty] that that specific operation precipitates.

In his book on laughter – first published year 1900 – the French philosopher Henri Bergson gives a definition of laughter as both law and anti-law. He describes how, in a society defined by rules and regulations, it is an imminent danger that citizens should follow the rules too closely, and become stiff, un-flexible and un-dynamic. Society can hardly make a rule against following the rules, so instead laughter is used as punishment for being too stiff. And a very efficient punishment too (as anyone, who has ever been laughed at will know). The more organized forms of laughter prank and slapstick show, that laughter is no joke. It is a dead-serious way of constituting structures of domination and order.

In the transformation, in the late 1960s, of art into non-physical objects, concepts and ideas by which artist sought to reduce art to it’s core rules and gestures, many perceived a final break. In his work Ulrik Weck wonders what is happening to the finality of that break, as it is doing its second or third round on the art-historical circuit. The sentence: “I will not rip off John Baldessari again” [Rip Off (2008)] repeated over and over again in red handwriting, implies the problematics of ambiguous coda: What happens when you copy the original gesture of copying. The canvas, that one way up says ‘for sale’ and the other way up ‘sold’ [For sale/ sold (2008)], asks a similar question about the gesture of selling/ selling out. In terms of breaking the rules and making the gestures, there seems to be a common fear of exhausting the material.

The kind of beautiful work Behind bars ²⁰⁰⁸, consists of a loaf of bread sitting on a pedestal; inside the bread there is a stainless steel file. Maybe this goes to say that one thing is being new, another thing is being necessary. It is the oldest trick in the book and it is illegal, immoral and anti-social when Ma’ Dalton – of the comic strip Lucky Luke – bakes a file into a loaf of bread, and takes it to her four delinquent sons in prison, for them to break free. And yet it is impossible to argue against her doing so: 1) because one doesn’t know,
the file is hidden; 2) because she has to do it, it’s her children; 3) because she is doing it.

Niels Henriksen, cph 08