STUDIO THOMAS ØVLISEN

The following text by Andrianna Campbell was published in the book Technofossil Tumbleweed (Atlas Books, 2018)

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Plastic possibilities: Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed 

Two years ago, standing between a field of David Smith sculptures and a copse of trees, I squinted, intent, on reading aloud from a flimsy piece of paper. I related Thomas Øvlisen’s proposal for a Future Techno Fossil Amphi Theater project to the almost-hundred people gathered. While the leaves rustled above, they perched and listened on a particularly hot day. They describe later, the magic of the words floating on that thick summer air as is wont to happen in upstate New York. Øvlisen’s proposal summoned the invisible project in their minds, solidified it into a picture on the landscape, as if the amphitheater was already an installation on the grounds of Storm King sculpture park. Øvlisen’s attraction to techno fossils, as subject, began back then in 2016. As he describes it, “techno fossils describe our current society in a perspective of millions of years. They suggest that we have already created a layer in the earth’s crust with plastic sediments—almost indestructible man-made materials, a first in all creation.” Though the amphitheater has never been realized Øvlisen would eventually cross-breed his interest in techno-fossils with the natural world in the conceit of a tumbleweed. In his November 2016 exhibition at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen both themes (techno-fossils and tumbleweeds) would coalesce in his ongoing practice of creating portable sculpture. 

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Have you ever encountered a tumbleweed? It is a dry nest of entangled brush. Faint memories come to mind of such a diaspore, a naturally occurring plant that detaches from its roots, rumbling down a road in a ghost town in New Mexico. Its shadows made distinct by the harsh grazing light of that almost barren landscape. I recall, the silhouette of a group of twenty-somethings shambling through town. Our paths blocked by those very tumbleweeds; large disseminules taking up space and standing like animals in the road. They were on some migration path. They were evidence of some natural dispersal of organic matter. Not one tumbleweed, but so many carried on the wind to nestle between the ruined shacks of a nineteenth-century brothel and a few decrepit homes. Compare the scattering of these waist-high tumbleweeds to the 79,000 metric tons of trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that constitute an island in the Pacific Ocean. 

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In the Anthropocene, a term given to our geological age, the chief material embedded in the strata of the earth bears the remains, impressions, and traces of human production. Microplastic—a technofossil—makes up much of that at 94%. Though they congregate at varying elevations, the tumbleweed and the techno-fossil serve as examples of dispersals: one involved in propagation and the other at the end of its use value as rubbish. They are not quite opposites but nearly so for seeding the ground precedes growth, and plastic functions to destroy the wildlife that ingests it often resulting in their death. In a state of extreme irony, micro-plastics’s powers of pollution derive from their propensity for indestructability —that is to outlast all other materials. Despite these differences, for both the tumbleweed and the technofossil, circulation is intrinsic to how they operate in the world. Both became for Øvlisen, the two major themes in his sculpture exhibition Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed project on view from November 25 through January 4 of 2017. This essay first explores Øvlisen’s sculptures in Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed as art objects imbricated in the history of minimalist sculpture, and also as Øvlisen envisions them—as objects moving in a network of other vibrant matter. 

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During the exhibition, Øvlisen showed five sculptures (fig. 1). Their measurement all at nearly 3 x 3 x 3 feet defy the academic tradition of sculpture because of their lowness to the ground. To the eye, all sides look of equal length and are involved in the idiom that Robert Morris articulated in his mirrored cubes from 1965 (fig. 2), which in at least one iteration were 3 x 3 x 3 feet. The cubes when you approach them reflect your image. They seem to float in the room often times reflecting the white walls around them with only their seamed edges disrupting the ongoing pleasure of seeing one’s self and one’s subsequent displacement along their mirrored corners. Morris’s cubes have precursors in examples such as Tony Smith’s Die 1962, a 6 foot steel cube, and successors in Donald Judd’s Untitled (Six Boxes) 1974 (fig. 3). However in comparison of minimalist sculpture and Øvlisen’s oeuvre, it is Larry Bell’s cubes that come to mind. The most iconic and frequently exhibited Bells are made of clear glass.  Yet, initially when he developed them in 1962 (fig. 4), they were covered in colorful stars and stripes. For instance, Bell’s Untitled from 1964, is a green glass cube with an array of hues. For Untitled, Bell used chemicals, which blocked certain bands of light. By doing so, he created an ellipse on the glass, accented by zebra-patterned bands of viridian green, Prussian blues, and onyx black.  Øvlisen shares with Bell an attention to the creation of a painterly surface more than one expects on a cube. These early Bells, comparable to Øvlisen’s Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed, differ from the monochrome cubes, which we usually associate with Minimalism. Think of the Bells, which because of their variegated patterning oppose the uniformity of tone and materially cohesive surface one sees in Morris’s mirrored cubes or even the above mentioned six reflective brass boxes of Judd.

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Øvlisen constructed his cubes of polysterene, fabric, and epoxy. He built them and then painted them with auto lacquer. In some cases, Øvlisen’s fabric already had stars and stripes printed into its weave. The artist also included broad gestural brushstrokes to constitute the surface. There are layers of applied paint, rubbed on, and then sanded off. Øvlisen has a history of working in this manner for decades. Though his interest in techno-fossils as subject may be new, he came to make work after a process he developed as an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design. While a student, Øvlisen started working with auto lacquer for his Monument Valley exhibit (fig. 5?):​ Art making in school is like putting together a puzzle. So, for the Monument Valley exhibit, I had appropriated the process of an auto body shop and I had simulated the weather and the elements. I used Monument Valley as the perfect image because it is a natural landscape named “Monument” and it’s the perfect example of what is wrong with our cultural belief in dominance over nature. 

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Despite the origin of this way of working over two decades ago, Øvlisen developed these processes beyond their initial instantiation as painting and into sculpture. Clearly the look of the auto body shop, with its junk heap of cars in various states of disrepair evincing the corrosive properties of time, already held for Øvlisen some kernel of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Furthermore, his earliest exploration of this theme focused on nature as it became firmly rooted in culture. As the artist notes, working at the intersection of art, culture and nature related to practices in the history of art and also to a Western cultural tradition of domination of the natural world. 

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In terms of an art history, the weather-worn appearance of Øvlisen’s cubes recalls John Chamberlain’s jagged assemblages such as Essex 1960 (fig. 6). Made of a medley of crushed colorful car parts, Essex is large at 9' x 6' 8" x 43’; rather than proving to be intimidating, its scale allows the viewer to have an one-to-one relationship with the sculpture. Like the surface of the Øvlisens, Chamberlain’s works show the discoloration of having been weathered. The rust, an orange-red oxidation, prominently features in the work and acts as a repetitive stroke of color. 

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The Øvlisens also readily bring to mind César’s prisms, which like the Chamberlains are also made by compressing automobiles. For instance, César’s Compression "Ricard" 1962 (fig. 7) is a squashed hexahedron. The letters R D are visible on Compression "Ricard" but the complete text is no longer legible. Like the barely readable letters adhered to the metal parts, Øvlisen covers or obscures stars or other distinctive shapes in his cubes. Also akin to the prismatic melding of compressed parts in the César and Chamberlain, which they achieved by forcing formerly incompatible parts together, the Øvlisens also cue us in to an aggregate heterogeneity. In his case,  an amalgamation of colors provide a similar tension to crushed car parts. We see in all three a glimpse of a partially obscured snippet of color, alongside a dynamism of unusual shapes. This effect is also achieved in Øvlisen’s cuboids by a technique of layering paint, which allows him to evoke a tension of elements that do not quite fit but are fitted together in his admixture of plastic, pint and fabric. What is intriguing about these Øvlisens is that what César and Chamberlain do in metal, he does in paint. 

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Øvlisen could also be unwittingly in a material dialogue with César. His polystyrene cubes are made of nearly the same stuff as César’s blob-like expansions, which were from a homogenous melted polyurethane foam. Again the Øvlisens confound what we expect. As one sees in César’s Expansion n°14, 1970 (fig. 8), the melted plastic behaves as one predicts oozing outward in smooth ice-cream like layers. Øvlisen’s sculptures in Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed do not look like plastic rather they resemble the deterioration that weather enacts on metal. Also, instead of a play on a mutability between hard and soft seen as in César’s Expansion n°14, Øvlisen’s cubes evince an experimentation with plastic whereby he integrates a trompe-l'œil effect. His plastic disguises itself as hard metal. This play invokes dualities in the history of academic sculpture. If we think of sculptures and statuary of prior eras as precious, because they were made of bronze and other fine materials, then even the totemic presence of the Chamberlain should bring to mind the car industry and Detroit “gold.” The Chamberlains indicate a certain monumentality and domination over nature reminiscent of post-war automotive boom in the United States.. Instead of continuing this dialogue, Øvlisen’s cubes are monuments to now, an age with fewer and fewer erected bronze statuary and more gargantuan assemblages of trash.

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Øvlisen’s initial installation at the gallery was a spread out organization of all five works. Gallery-goers could move them, stack them, and sit on them in any way they chose. Through Instagram, and following the hashtag, #technofossiltumbleweed, we begin to see the different configurations that the sculptures would take on over the run of the show. On November 25, 2016, Soren Solkaer posted a photograph to their (his, her?) Instagram account of the view through Øvlisen’s Fearing Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting 2016 of two low sculptures framing a slumped tired child on the floor. The snapshot captures multiple vantage points of the exhibit: a close-up view through the hollow work and beyond its sides a sweeping look at the show. More than the allowance for a one-to-one comparison with the folded body of a child, the close-up allows us to be privy to an intimate examination of the sculpture’s interior four sides. Layers of color, evincing pigment, rubbed in, and faded off the surface are emulative of plaster applied to a harder base. As we may discern in the close-up of the Solkaer snapshot, we see how Øvlisen’s cubes rather than moving towards a refinement and continuity of surface are irregular and much closer to Bell’s early experimentations with hue in his early cubes. 

Nevertheless, Øvlisen’s cubes also relate to Morris’s own in terms of the demands placed on the viewer to participate. Akin to Øvlisen, Morris’s mirrored cubes, which while resembling  glass were actually perspex, a transparent plastic.  In the Morrises, the mirrored surface insists on co-opting the truncated body of the spectator, which is reflected back at the viewer. In doing so, Morris lodges the body of the gallery-goer into a situation predicated on a feedback between perceiving and being seen. Looking was for Morris et al, as it relates with Minimalism, a means to engage with phenomenology. As James Meyer notes of Morris, he was trying to find a language for making a “co-extensive spectatorship,” where the viewer is inextricably linked to the object that it is looking at. The mirrors bring the viewer into a constant feedback with the sculptures. The viewing body disrupts the cold materiality of Morris’s cubes, which made in glasslike perspex have a cool surface and lack color. However once engaged with the extension of a body, or many bodies, they attain a seductive allure. It is this allure that concerned Morris. In an interview, the art critic Jack Burnham asked Morris why his beams, plinths, and cubes were so gray implying also a level of frigidity. Morris responds that he in no way found them gray or cool:   

The relationship of the body to them in some kind of way that  ...

[can’t] really define. I just think that there are certain shapes that 

one can get that charge from...As far as [the early works being 

sensual], they’ve always been...physical [for me]: The whole idea of 

volume, the lightness playing against the volume, there are all these 

relationships you are manipulating. About the weight, about the 

lightness, how much you want it to appear as an unknown material. 

And how much that unknown material, that kind of strange otherness' 

of the material, 'otherness' of the thing, plays against the physical 

part of it.

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The shared participation in looking is in the Morris augmented by their “otherness” or strangeness of their materiality. For Morris, it is the otherness of the material that allows them to float in the room and only be anchored by a visiting body. Øvlisen’s cubes are also engaged with an exploration of “otherness” in material. In his case it is polystyrene; Øvlisen combines the focus on geometry and seriality that one finds in Minimalism with the gestural attention to the pictorial surface of mid-century abstraction. Though it is one that is divergent in means from the Morris for the Øvlisens have a non-reflective surface. The otherness one finds in the Øvlisen’s  cubes, pull you in by their revelation of a complex materiality. Rather than reflective, they appear to absorb the process of their making into their skin, akin to Franz West’s sculptures. Take West’s  Homemades from 1989, made of papier-mâché, wood and steel, which have irregular surfaces and which tell a history of being assembled at home rather than fabricated say in a factory. West’s Homemades are in keeping with Øvlisen’s layered surfaces, rubbed and sanded, which also evoke the stroke of the hand and in doing so also a measure of sensuality.

Moreover the preemptive participation that Morris forces on the spectator is also at work in how we are meant to interact with Øvlisen’s cubes. Øvlisen’s sculptures in most of his recent exhibitions have been portable. Visitors to Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed may not just participate through observation but were also instructed to touch and move the works around. The artist, through a well-worded press release, and instructions left with the gallery attendants encouraged the movement of his work. Furthermore, for Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed Øvlisen wanted the circulation of sculptures in the gallery to be documented on Instagram. The images taken during the run of the exhibition served as a pedagogical tool of what was possible for visitors to do with and to the sculptures during the exhibition. 

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Early documentation of the show evinces the artist’s concern with making known the work could be sat on. Jens-Peter Brask, a curator who stopped by, took a photo at the Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed opening of the artist and his wife, sitting on Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing 2016 (tk?). They are seen in profile facing away from each other. The opposition and the tension between their two heads certainly conjures early performance art such as the Marina Abramović and Ulay performance from 1977, Relation in Time, where the artists’s bodies face opposite directions. Only a long braid of hair connects them. In the Brask photograph of Øvlisen and his wife, the view of the sculpture makes it appear less like a cube and more like a jagged painted rhomboid. The side facing us is weathered pink, emphasizing purple and green brushstrokes. The adjoining plane is blue, white and imprinted with a floral pattern. Connecting the two parts are two white V shapes: the one on the top right-side-up and the other on the bottom inverted like a caret. The artist and his wife, both have long blonde hair, which though not connected by a braid mimics the V-shape of their seat. Thus the V functions as a knot between them connecting two halves and thereby also encouraging our reading of Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing as a relation in time in the gallery space. Øvlisen and wife demonstrate one possible way to engage with the sculpture. 

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In another photograph seen a day later on the Alice Folker Gallery Instagram page, is also of Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing. Moreover though the side facing us is the same, its green edge no longer rests on the floor. Now it is tilted up and to the right. Like the tumbleweed, the sculpture’s migration is important to the artist. Øvlisen alludes to the possible circulation of objects in his title by the use of the word tumbleweed. Tumbleweeds indicate dispersal. Though the five sculptures were originally installed spaciously apart in the gallery. Eventually gallery-goers began dispersing them around the space. Two days after the opening, the artist posted a photograph showing three boys carrying three of the five sculptures. The photograph was an informal snapshot. The boys are caught holding the sculptures at different heights. In any other situation, one could imagine them in the midst of an illegal act. Like cat burglars they hold the works in a levitated state.  

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Gallery-goers quickly understood that one could sit on the sculptures and move them around the gallery but also one could stack them. There is a photograph, taken and posted by Josephine Fity, the gallery’s director, which is an instruction manual on to how to interact with the sculpture in the gallery. Posted two days after the opening, the photograph serves as reminder to visitors that the works are not meant to be stationary. In the Fity photograph, a woman stands in the middle stack of three sculptures. Feeling Fleeting Fearing Floating Falling 2016 is at the bottom. Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing 2016 is in the middle. We watch as a man passes Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing Floating 2016 to the woman standing in the middle of the hollow sculpture. This is the last cube and it will be placed on top. The moment captured in the Fity photograph, are of gallery visitors in the midst of activating the work. Yet, stacking allows for a contemplation of the titles of these works, which express the witty language of word play. 

Feeling Fleeting Fearing Floating Falling

Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing

Falling Feeling Fleeting Fearing Floating

Fleeting Fearing Floating Falling Feeling

Fearing Floating Falling Feeling Fleeting

When stacked, we see Øvlisen’s titles, as jumbling of 5 words. The 5 sculptures composed as 5 words are also a 5 x 5 configuration even though it is a linguistic one rather than a physical one. For the artist, all the sculptures had some aspect of the words:  Feeling Fleeting Fearing Floating Falling. In repetition the words begin to resemble the movement of plastics, from pristine objects that interact with human beings, to those fallen on the ground, to those drifting away, and finally to those perhaps feared. The words lack meaning on their own and acquire signification only in their interchangeability.  

The sculpture’s lack of singularity, the way they only seem to relate in relation to each other replicates the interconnected futures of material on our planet. Though there is a certain facility to discussing these works in the history of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, their concerns are about the dispersal of matter most acutely noticeable in our current decade. Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed takes up concerns of a slow apocalypse that artists and poets across the arts grapple with. For it is as William Matthews writes, “No day is right for the apocalypse”:  

No day is right for the apocalypse,

if you ask a housewife in Talking

Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River,

Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag.

A grotesque parody of the primeval muck

starts oozing out. And behold,

the plastic bag is magic;

there is no closing it

No day is right for the apocalypse: not today, not tomorrow, not yesterday, none of these days are prime for apocalypse. Yet the D-day, the atomic bomb that we so expected would be the end of days, the virulent infections have given way to a slow silent apocalypse. Our primeval muck is contained by techno-fossils. It is a parody of nature as Matthews writes in the “Waste Carpet.”  So too attractive surfaces of Øvlisen’s cubes, elicit not solely our attention to the art object, but also to the vibrant matter of everyday. In this manner, the humor and play in Future Techno Fossil Tumbleweed belies a far darker reality. As the Dutch cultural theorist  Johan Huizinga, writes on play, “All play means something.” Here is referring to the games of our youth but also the play-element as it manifests in war. Øvlisen’s sculptures shuttle between an open ended interchangeability of play, which visitors enact in the gallery and the limits of possibility in the more dire techno-fossil future. For plastic possibilities are just that, pliable, malleable in one meaning of the word and in another meaning indestructible and rigid. Øvlisen, of course, trades in these ambiguities of how so much of what is produced in our age finds itself destined for accumulation as art objects, precious, carefully painted and sanded to be collected, documented, and cared for or as technofossil tumbleweeds, they are anxious objects on a trajectory to that a fearful island floating in the Pacific.