Rønning / Reynolds – ARMANI / Dada

Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, november 2011
Generously supportet by the residency program W17 and our publisher Feil Forlag.

ARMANI/ Dada press release:



ARMANI / Dada is a new tendency in art.
Rub my ear with your wet finger; we amplify each other’s highs and lows.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying ARMANI / Dada. How does one become famous? By saying ARMANI / Dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying ARMANI / Dada. ARMANI / Dada is the world soul, ARMANI / Dada is the pawnshop. ARMANI / Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. And in questions of aesthetics, the key is quality.

Like Kate Moss doing Ashtanga Yoga gigantically sculpted in marble. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm and all I can think of is Kate Moss's enormous pussy.

The dadaist manifesto, is that the whole thing? I dunno, it was the first hit on Google.

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We are also proud to present Tahi Moore (NZ) and MouNTaiNMisT (NO) as text contributors for ARMANI / Dada.


For purchase pleasse contact our publisher Feil Forlag by clicking here



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PROPERTY PORN press release:



Modernist criticism in the 1960s brought a surplus of moral commitment that was the relic of an earlier dream of art as the focus on an ideal public sphere; a total gesamtkunstwerk encompassing both citizen and city - the avant-gardian idea of a liberated subject in a collective. Beware of what you wish, runs one moral of modernism as seen from the present, because it might come true – in perverse form.

Today you don't have to be filthy rich to be cast as designer and as designed - whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face (designer surgery) or your lagging personality (designer drugs), your historical memory (designer museums) or your DNA future (designer children). This designed subject is the offspring of the constructed subject so vaunted in the post-modern culture of the 90’s.

Grünerløkka has recently been transformed into such a Kreuzberg-Epcot Center dream for lifestyle junkies and retro nostalgists. In this silicon city scape where use-value is replaced by art-value, individuality is expressed in every nail and the dialectic of reification and reanimation continues with greater intensity than before. On the one hand, as a digital reordering transforms artifacts into information, it seems to fragment the object and to dissolve its aura absolutely, leaving object autonomy in flux. On the other hand, any dissolution of aura only increases our demand for it, or fabrication of it, in a compensatory projection that is now very familiar. Digital reproduction enables aura to be located and constructed as a searchable entity in a third site beyond site/non-site.

You could say autonomy is a bad word, but it’s not always a bad strategy: call it strategic autonomy, an agent for aura production.

Tanga Volante Designers Club (TVDC™) was founded in 2011 to demystify artistic intentions and motives, and to promote both conscious and involuntary performativity through curated projects and events. Recent projects include ACICS - pure affect by Rønning/ Reynolds at MFAPS, Oslo and RETRORESPECTION by Ragna Bley at Semikolon Gallery, Oslo.

Click here for exhibition walk-through video

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ACICS pure affect press release:



Sound mind, Sound body, Sound environment.
Staying true to this philosophy, every innovation, every concept, every idea recognizes the essence of the best product.

With social responsibility we conceive products with high functionality and quality design. As consumers take responsibility for the design of their daily lives we answer the needs of these individuals as the body takes on the form of the soul. We are contributing to a long term sustainable society, acting responsibly and with products that are manufactured in an ethical and environmentally sustainable manner. In so doing, we create liberated spaces for self-design that are perceived as areas of integrity, sincerity, and trust.

Acknowledging that politics has already situated itself in the aesthetic field, and as Joseph Beuys celebrated everyone as artists, we facilitate everyone as artist-designers, with ethical, political, and aesthetic responsibility for their environment. Striving to build upon our technological advances we push the limits of what we can learn from the body and its needs. We pledge to bring harmony to the body, the soul and the living world.



Click here for exhibition walk-through video



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Introduction to New Realness published in MÅG issue 4

L: Linnea Sjöberg
H: Halvor Rønning
M: Martyn Reynolds

L: This staging you’ve been doing here in your living room looks very much like an everyday situation, and it doesn't really relate to you as an artist. But that’s maybe what you want?

H: There’s no room for exaggeration in a ’realness’ performance, which is what we’re both working on. When something is exaggerated its credibility is questioned, so I think it's interesting to look for the balance between a careful composition and something relaxed and casual. I like that something can appear random, but actually is totally staged.

L: Why am I a key in this project?

H: I’m very fascinated by your project and how you’re doing a full time performance as a ’career woman’, the way in which you’re living it to make it real. You don't seem to have a border between performance and life.

L: Yes, it's like maintaining a role. I think in general one has to adapt to several different identities, but I use this role as a career woman to actually come closer to the understanding of the role of an artist. But with a distance. It's important that I’m not becoming a career woman – I only try to maintain the surface. But I’m still in this gray zone between my daily life as an artist and this role I'm performing. I’m aware it can be a very general thing to say "I’m criticizing the role of the artist by maintaining the role of a career woman”, because maybe this is something that regards everyone who works with art.

H: But not everyone is willing to articulate the relationship between the work of art and the artist's persona. To me your performance is questioning where the meaning of the art work is located. And that’s something I always found very disturbing about the modern idea of the pure art piece – I was never content with the isolated interpretation of art as autonomous. I find art very transparent and reflexive, but this is too seldom taken into account or dealt with. So I’m more interested in the social aspects around the art work – the relation to its immediate social surroundings.

M: Because of recent art history I don’t really want to describe this as a social aspect. I’m more interested in thinking about your practices in the solipsistic relationship between artist and artwork, or the inevitable vanity of artists. Does either of you play games with your constructed environment to reflect yourselves?

L: I was reading the Boris Groys essays ’Obligation to Self-Design’ the other day. And I thought that today as an artist you only need to show the kind of pile of books you have here on your table. I think it’s a very nice illustration of his ideas.

H: I guess it’s where he’s talking about Adolf Loos and modern design as something reduced down to its pure and basic function, and how later this reduction was perverted into superficiality. It turned into the most exclusive visual language of the ’modern man’. After the massive secularization of our society in the last century, ’Self-Design’ turned into the new religion where the design of the body released the religious design of the soul.

M: It’s also great how Groys implicates Joseph Beuys at the end, describing how the Utopian idea that everyone can be an artist has been fulfilled in this total aestheticization of our lives that we all engage in, the aspirations in the Nike commercial. It’s funny, when you mention the pile of books, it implicates Groys's text itself in the very process of Self-Design.

L: Do you know about my project ’GTD 4s810’ – getting things done for Satan? "Getting things done" is a licensed method by an American guy called David Allen. He’s working on an empowerment method for the corporate world. Taking Eastern philosophy with mantras such as "mind like water" as a way of helping employees, and to make the enterprise more efficient. Just to make the workers more like machines.

H: "Mind like water"?

L: Yes, somebody who thinks "mind like water" is someone who can work work work. That’s why I started working on tai-chi, I’m interested in how we can import and apply Eastern philosophy to develop these empowerment methods and to help us cope in our daily lives.

H: Yes, it's crazy how one can turn something very virtuous and spiritual into an instrument to achieve a higher level of efficiency. I mean, there are a hundred thousand philosophies and ways of thinking you can apply to your life. And it's so connected to the ’68 generation of artists and intellectuals who through the late sixties and the seventies were drawn to Eastern philosophy, and inspired a whole generation to think differently about how one could live and think. A very secular culture, but still very religious. I think they left one religion for another, one they created themselves. But for me this ended up in a lot of talk, a lot of understanding, in the end – rhetoric. A way of shopping around for applicable philosophies and a kind of self-manipulation, or a way of constructing a mindset.

L: In your project New Realness you're using transparent plastic and packaging tape. Are you using these materials instrumentally in the same way you're using the gray T-shirt you're wearing today? I have a friend, you know, who is a stylist, and he’s always using some plastic and tape for his installations.

H: Yes, I know, the gray T-shirt is a classic garment for male artists. It’s perhaps ’neutral’ or let’s say ’practical’, but at the same time loaded with signals that depend on the social context. I approach the materials in my projects in the same way – for their own visual and tactile qualities, and as a reflection of the visual culture I’m part of.

M: Yeah, I love the gray T-shirt thing. Like today we both turned up wearing gray T-shirts. I’ve thought before it’s a funny mixture of fake association with a working class uniform – ’look, I’m an artist, I actually make stuff with my hands’, and a classic celebrity exercise outfit – imagine paparazzi shots of celebrity X jogging in L.A.

L: I’m interested in this, because you’re talking about ways in which this operates in countless, thoughtless ways for everyone all the time. But the distinction between ’acting’ it consciously or it being thoughtless is a game I think many artists engage with. Which contemporary artist who would do this kind of thing?

M: Elmgren and Dragseth – you can imagine them sitting outside the Venice Pavilion in their sunglasses, talking about it, sort of flirting with each other, and meanwhile there's this camera pan over to the dead guy in the pool, with this nice "we’re in Venice" kind of music over the top.

Martyn Reynolds (1981) is a New Zealand artist based in Vienna. He graduated with a BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2005. Recent projects were shown at MFAPS (Oslo), Former Bell Street (Vienna), Sue Crockford Gallery (Auckland) and The Physics Room (Christchurch). He is a founding member of Auckland artist-run space A Center for Art (ACFA).

Linnea Sjöberg (1983) is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm. She is graduating with a MFA from Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, Konstfack and Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien in 2011. Recent projects were shown at Nordin Gallery (Stockholm), Forgotten Bar (Berlin), Skånes Konstförening (Malmö).  She is the founder of the organisation GTD4s810 - Getting Things Done for Satan.



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