Kalle Grude
No Problem
The Skylight Hall and the Cabinet
08.08.—08.09.2024

The exhibition is made in collaboration with curator Gustav Elgin.

Kalle Grude’s exhibition presents works from close to 40 years of artistic practice. The exhi­bition reac­tivates and establishes a dialogue between a selection of Grude’s projects from the early 1990s until No Problem (2024), a series of digitally enlarged charcoal drawings, made specifically for the Skylight Hall at Kunstner­forbundet.

Two principles seem to cut across an otherwise diverse artistic practice: coincidence and inter­action. Grude is particularly interested in un­pre­dictable situations that occur during interactions between the artist and participants in his projects – from simple, mechanical toy soldiers and indus­trial grinders to complex beings such as the artist himself, mice, exhibition audiences, and algorithm-based software. This nomadic movement across media and collaborators should not be mistaken for a lack of sensitivity towards their specificity. When Grude seeks out established territories like the computer, the mouse nest, the office, cabin architecture, or the archive, it is with an outsider’s desire to acquire a local language, even if this sometimes comes across with a thick, alienating accent.

While preparing for this exhibition, we have never once entered Grude’s studio without him pausing for a few minutes to observe an abstract figure about two metres long. It is made up of the countless marks left by the handlebars of his bicycle over the 35 years he has leaned it against the wall. There is, in other words, a third element that marks his practice and daily life, namely the unreserved need to inscribe his surroundings in an aesthetic register.

One consequence of Grude’s nearly all-consuming curiosity is that he has, at times, functioned as a seismograph for some of the key developments of the turn of the millennium. Traces of the mass mediation of the Gulf War, the introduction of the personal computer, and the transition to a digital information society can be found in his project, but also the expanded potential for ecological interaction, reuse, and degrowth.

Kalle Grude (b. 1946) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo. His works are often process-oriented and open collaborative projects, characterised by subtle humour and a genuine curiosity for different life worlds. He navigates freely between media, such as installation, software, sculpture, drawing, and architecture. Grude has exhibited extensively in Norway, Germany, and China. He is represented in several public collections, including the National Museum, KORO, and Trondheim Art Museum. His educational background includes the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (1967–1974) and the National Academy of Fine Arts (1980–1986). Between 1996 and 2018, he was a lecturer at the Bergen School of Architecture.

We would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who has contributed to Grude's projects over the years. For this exhibition, our thanks go out to Iwan Thomson, Jana Winderen, Jenny Trømborg, Kenneth Korstad, Lotte Konow Lund, and Tarald Lundevall. A big thank you also to PERI Norge AS and Unisystemer AS for the sponsored materials, and to the Arts Council Norway and Norwegian Visual Artists Fund (BKV) for the production support.

The exhibition was made in collaboration with curator Gustav Elgin, who has also written the exhibition texts.

About the works

No Problem (2024)

Grude’s ongoing drawing practice has followed him since his days at the art academy in the 1980s. He scribbles and sketches on copy paper, meeting notes, and coffee filters, often using a ballpoint pen or charcoal stick made in the oven in his studio. In No Problem, five such drawings have been scanned and enlarged in Adobe Acrobat, printed on twelve A3 sheets, and taped to a plywood board measuring the standard size of 1220 x 2440 mm.

Recently, technically upscaled artworks, like the Getty Foundation’s macro­photographic docu­men­tation of Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altar­piece, have seemed to offer a high-resolution view of the artistic subconscious. The fact that the enlarged images in No Problem are drawings, the medium where we might suppose the connection between artist and work is at its most immediate and uninterrupted, seems to doubly reinforce the enlargement’s promise of privi­leged access to artistic subjectivity. Here, however, printer margins stretch across the drawings like a grid, and viewed up close, they disintegrate into a mosaic of pixels and visual noise, a consequence of Acrobat’s digital scaling as well as the scanning process. What emerges is not an isolated artistic intention but the effects of purely technical procedures.

While Grude has stayed in the background in his previous projects in favour of external colla­bo­rators, the anonymity in No Problem seems less of a choice and more like an unavoidable effect of today’s increased technical filtering of human perception and production. If these drawings no longer allow us to distinctly identify the artist, they nonetheless appear unequivocal in their assertion that we must not only learn to coexist with the technical objects that perform this filtering, but also be curious about their specific ways of sensing and expressing the world.

April 1992 (1992)

During the Gulf War, Grude lived in New York. Here, he developed an interest in everyday technologies and produced a series of experimental short films based on answering machines, traffic lights, and mech­anical toys.

On the return to Norway, he brought with him a load of mechanical G.I. Joe action figures, purchased from a street vendor in Times Square. For his exhibition April 1992 at Tegnerforbundet in Oslo, ten of these action figures were equipped with four plotter pens each and secured to a string attached to a nail in the centre of a drawing sheet. Through­out April in 1992, the motorised soldiers crawled and drew spirals around the nail, confined by massive steel frames. While a few diligent and precise workers plotted nearly perfect paths, others had idiosyncratic tics – inaccuracies in the mechanical clock­work that manifested as undu­lating patterns[1]  in the finished drawings. The mecha­nical figures had become beings whose movements and markings, were meant to be read as meaningful within an aesthetic rather than purely technical register. Grude appears to suggest that every tech­nical object, even the most automated and mass-produced, has something that is eerily reminiscent of a personality.

At the same time, the project's title, April 1992, implied that the drawing was a sort of time index, a cross-section of a «duration» that Henri Bergson on several occasions illustrated with the activity of «pursuing an uninterrupted line.» However, the soldiers did not draw continuously, but were committed to the gallery's opening hours – they had Mondays and after-hours off, and Grude estimates that each drawing contains around 120 working hours.

To determine that the work habits and individual pers­on­alities of toy soldiers resemble human soci­ality is not a matter of humanizing technical objects, but rather recognizing that human gestures are fixed and crystallized in the working structures of these technical objects. The toy soldiers reenact and repeat military movement techniques, the Gulf War as a historical event, and not least, the drudgery of nameless Taiwanese factory workers (in the later exhibition Taiwan Universe from 1997, the focus shifted to the mass producers of the figures).

Grude demonstrates that it is merely the lack of aesthetic attention that separates the sign world of technical beings from that of humans, an attention that Grude demands when he connects the soldier’s work to the premises and opening hours of Tegner­forbundet.

Ting (1992 – 1994)

The impulse was to free up space in a jam-packed studio, and between 1992 and 1994, in collaboration with friends, colleagues, and family members, Grude built a massive, motor-driven steel grinder. 152 objects were randomly selected from the studio and photo­graphed by artist colleague Mette Krogh. The objects were measured, described, and assig­ned archival numbers.

During the exhibition Ting (1994) at Trondhjems Kunst­forening, and later at Galleri Wang (1994), the objects were fed into the grinder and ground to powder. The photographs were digitized, and the hexa­decimal codes of the JPEG files were printed on office paper. The powder and strings of printed code were continuously sorted into the drawers of twenty Remington Rand Kardex archive cabinets, the indexing system that revolutionised information storage in the early 20th century and remained the standard until digital solutions took over in the 1990s.

Massive and unruly objects were atomised into data, which were then reorganised as more manageable infor­mation. However, when measured against the project’s original objective, to clear space, the project was a spectacular failure. The archive’s volume grew beyond all proportions: printed and digital photo­graphs, archival des­criptions, thousands of pages of code, countless bags of dust, twenty notoriously heavy Kardex cabinets, and the 250-kilogram steel grinder. More­over, the project mobilized a significant number of people and work hours. The apparatuses that produce information and the systems required to maintain data organization are cumbersome and energy intensive. Information belongs to the earth rather than the heavens, in spite of what cloud storage providers would have us believe.

AbA II / III (2006)

Art by Accident was a collaboration between Grude and architect Jan Løchstøer. AbA II, their second collaborative project, took place during the exhi­bition Interface and Society at Henie Onstad Art Center in 2006, and was later displayed as AbA III at the Summer Exhibition at Kunstnerforbundet in 2010.

During the exhibition period, a camera surveilled six female mice in a plexiglass cage as they built nests in books on linguistics, logic, and the philosophy of language. The image data was processed in real-time by a computer program that, based on the mice’s move­ments or interference from the audience, gene­rated 22,822 statements composed of an adjective, verb and noun, drawn from a lexical list of philosophical terms. The so-called ‘AbA-logical statements’ were dis­played on three LED screens and continuously printed on a strip of paper by a continuous feed printer. In the exhibition No Problem, the LED screens display the state­ments in the same order as they were generated during Interface and Society.

The program was an early exploration of computer vision, where a program processes and translates visual signals into readable output. Here, similar to Ting, AbA II performed a dual gesture: an enzymatic breakdown of information in the mice’s mouths and stomachs, and a simultaneous reformation of infor­mation by digitally converting the mice’s move­ments into logical concepts. For Grude, the mice’s diagonal and indifferent movements through human information structures appear to have the capacity to reformat entrenched thought patterns (he has, for instance, claimed that a philosopher with writer’s block could benefit from reading through the entire list of 22,822 state­ments). Yet their nest-building also provided inspiration for Grude’s architectural practice, and observing non-human beings as creative agents became a significant principle in another project made in the same period, Shelter for a Rock, a Tree, Two People, and Four Birds (2007).

Shelter for a Rock, a Tree, Two People, and Four Birds (2007–2011)

Shelter for a Rock, a Tree, Two People, and Four Birds is the title of an art project and functional cabin in Bamble, Telemark, which was constructed using PERI formwork panels and Kee Klamp scaffolding pipes.

Shelter was designed by Grude and built in colla­boration with students from Bergen School of Archi­tecture during the summer months between 2007 to 2011. The collaboration included the mayor of Bamble, who selected the building site, the tree, and the boulder that the structure winds around, as well as the industrial design of PERI and Kee Klamp. In other words, a set of external parameters beyond Grude’s control – or more precisely, parameters that Grude deli­berately refrains from controlling – were decisive for the building’s location, design, appearance, and afterlife.

While rainwater is channelled evenly between a cistern and the tree, birds are invited to nest in four integrated birdhouses. As in Grude’s other projects, such interactions with the local ecosystem unfold as a temporary and open process. The construction allows for disassembly with only a hex key and a screwdriver, and since the cabin has no foundation but is screwed and strapped to the ground, it can be moved practically without leaving any traces. The scaffolding system is intended for reuse, and the formwork panels are recycled from the construction industry. Shelter is mobile and modular and has, both literally and figuratively, a minimal ecological footprint.