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2008 Fall

Børre Sæthre: Greetings to Futures Past

In 1970 Børre Sæthre was a 3-year-old living in suburban Oslo, Norway. At that time, in a suburb of Osaka, Japan, one of the largest World’s Fairs ever staged, Expo ’70, proposed the incongruous theme “Progress and Harmony for Mankind." The inherent contradictions of this overarching theme, as articulated by futuristic pavilions, early robots, and computer stations on display in Expo ’70 continue to be ever more pertinent today, and have seemingly permeated the private skies elaborated by Sæthre’s immersive installations. “Progress and Harmony for Mankind” insinuates both the dreams and fears of a future-oriented generation. Sæthre’s messages, as much as a greeting to futures past, are also a leave-taking from innocent dreams, a sad goodbye. 

Although already eclipsed in time, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey has been a prescient reference in many of Sæthre’s works. Early computer nostalgia gone awry—reminiscent of the sinister aura of HAL-9000 haunting the optimistic space-age office modules of Expo ’70—dominates his spatial manifestation of the vintage science fiction set as locus of present-day psychological drama. In this way, Sæthre’s scripted environments approximate the uncanny quality of dreams, the pervasive containment of the cinematic experiences of his youth. Like 2001, as well as other influential films of the period such as Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), his work relies heavily on the significance of otherworldly ambiances, and a collective inclination toward irrational encounters, for example, with animals or unearthly phenomena. At once austere and saturated with clandestine fantasies, these spaces comprise confessions, secrets, and voyeuristic longings that linger within seemingly impermeable interiors. 

The framework of design methodology, or the artist’s attempt to maximize the residual friction between style and non-style, retro and high-tech in his work, is described by Sæthre as a learned vernacular—“functional aesthetics as psychological damage”—that he developed through growing up in an ultra-modern, wipe-clean interior. A realization that even these plastic environments can absorb emotionality, everyday trauma and frustration served as motivation to subsequently heighten this fact in works that rupture pristine surfaces—revealing their failure to conceal the abject, the depressive, the unpleasant. 

Lustlux, the now-defunct, Cronenberg-like corporate identity assumed by Sæthre for numerous of his early artistic productions (1996-2003), insinuated the irrational sexual undertones embedded in presumably benign marketing constructs. With Lustlux, Sæthre’s deployment of graphics, furniture, lighting, etc., served to interrogate corporate iconographies to reveal the habitual, and perhaps involuntary, functions they are designed to perform, challenging the potentially numbing effects of their ubiquity. 

Previous works engaged conceptual artists' historical concern with social space via a collision with strategies of modern luxury design. The diorama-like austerity of his early spatial environments may reference listless waiting areas, decadent private lounges, and functionless office modules. The presumably value-free economies of such places are often disrupted by unsettling details (coyly-positioned taxidermy, vaguely erotic photographic tableaux, intermittent light and sound) to shyly shatter the promise of lucidity inferred by the stylized topographies of modern design—yet another paradigm of the future that was imagined in the past.

Excerpted from "Located Near the Symbol Zone…" by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Lia Gangitano for Børre Sæthre, ed. Marianne Zamecznik, Bergen Kunsthall, 2007.