Countertalk 2007

Written by Cecilie Tyri Holt, Kunst for Alle

Jannik Abel and Natalie Holland on art and the human being.

Street art is not an established term in the art world. It seems like most people consider street art to be nothing more than graffiti, tags, Hip-Hop- and they consider this a closed environment.
The term street art is not always used because this specific form of art is not always tolerated. Being attentive, you will find street art everywhere. In addition to graffiti, there are stencils, stickers, posters, video-projection and street installations. Jannik Abel works within this street art environment. She describes herself as an artist, and not necessarily as a street artist.
Abel argues that it is important to distinguish graffiti, which Abel refers to as “name culture”, from street art, which focuses more on a “picture culture”. She describes street art as post- graffiti movement.
If you choose to express yourself through street art, you will probably not get rich. Street art is giving art to the city. Is street art an idealistic form of art? –yes, to me it is a counterweight to all official signs, and the goal of the street artist is to make the city a better place.
At the Øya Festival in Oslo in 2006, Abel participated in a project with Electronic Arts. She made a 27 square meter large painting called “Warning there might be hope in the streets you are unaware of”. The festival participants where invited to make their own individual marks in white, on the black part of this painting. White on black is meant to symbolize hope. This particular painting will be sold at an auction later this year, and the money went to Amnesty International.
Abel has nothing against cooperating with the commercial industry, as long as she can maintain complete artistic freedom. As already mentioned, street art is illegal and that is why all street artists have pseudonyms. Is this anonymity a goal in itself, or is it simply a necessity? – it is without a doubt a goal. In this way the art is more important than the artist. Abel brings this idea into her work as she signs all her paintings on the back. Paradoxically, street art is therefore an anonymous form of art, though performed in a very public arena. How important or un-important is it to know the origin of a painting. It’s completely irrelevant when it comes to street art! But I do feel a certain ownership to my projects. That is why I never ask someone else to put up any of my stickers or posters. I need to know that they will not be used in disrespectful way. One should respect the city. It is not about a need to be seen. Someone has said that: “a city gets the street art it deserves”, and I agree with this.
Jannik Abel has spent six years in San Francisco. She studied art photography and printmaking at the Academy of Art Collage, and art history at the San Francisco Art Institute. Photography is an important element in her art. She uses street art in her paintings to balance the planned from the unplanned. “The urban landscape”, “the city’s nature” and “urban nature” are seemingly contradictions and often used to describe Abel’s paintings.
- Industrial landscapes are so structural. There is no contrast between the urban and the natural. This is our landscape. Furthermore, she has no problem defining some of her paintings as “naturalistic”. To explain this, she gets out a painting in black, white and grey, with a coarse texture. –This is what a wall looks like.

Natalie Holland was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. She was also a student of Odd Nerdrum. As a classical artist she has got a highly naturalistic expression, and she mainly paints based with a models. In terms of a theme, what is your art about? – It deals with phenomena in the western world. I am very interested in our civilization; our time and our culture. My two last thematic exhibitions dealt with happiness; how people define it, and how they try to obtain it. The search for happiness has become a human right – a contemporary phenomenon. Very simplified, I think that happiness today is all about three things: to get rich, famous and beautiful – preferably all at once. Some of my paintings focus on the price we pay for “happiness”. What’s striking to discover, is that one hardly needs any time at all to define what makes one’s own personal happiness.
Holland mainly paints human beings. In some of her paintings, she creates a contrast between the classical painting’s use of mythology, and that of today. The painting “City Angel” portrays a young girl in jeans, leaning on a metal fence. There is nothing extraordinary about this painting. Yes, there is – she has got angel wings! If one takes a closer look at this painting, one will notice that her wings are tied onto her. They are not real.

What kind of relationship is there between the art and the artist? –Well, it would be wrong to say that the relationship does not have any significance. First of all, a painting has the ability to outlive its’ creator. Second of all, if one knows who the artist is, the artist will live for hundreds of years, it is some sort of ticket for immortality. But that in itself is not all that important for me right here and now. What’s important is to experience the way art moves people, and that I might have made a small difference in this world.

Abel on art and the human being:
How will you characterize your work method? – I see things that people have seen before,

but in a different way. I put together different pieces of what one has already seen in order to see something new. I make visual the unseen, explains Abel. She has got a studio in the middle of Oslo. The city very important in Abel’s art, it is actually the very starting point for the whole creative process. Many people would probably argue that asphalt, big cranes and scaffolds are impersonal elements in the city picture. How personal and subjective is your art? – My art is very personal. In the city I look for traces and marks, and the different items represent different things. My paintings are a documentation of our time seen from a personal perspective. I’ve got a lot to say. To be allowed to express to oneself visually through art is only possible in an art world that is open and open-minded. Abel seems to be some sort of a wonder-child within the world of art. She came back from San Francisco in 2000, she held her first exhibition at Gallery Christian Dam, and her paintings sold from day one. She must have hit a nerve in her time. What’s exciting about Abel’s art is the combination of past, present and future. In her studio she has got something she calls a “memory-bank”. The memory-bank has compartments and drawers filled with traces left by humans. There is a lot of history in Abel’s drawers. She has collected photographs, things from the street, “junk”, templates, books, and license plates.
What is the human being’s role in your paintings? – I have thought a lot about just that. I often choose an industrial area as my starting point. I do that because there are no people there. However, it is important that someone has been there. I look for traces.
The human beings are rarely a motive, but do you think about your audience when you work? – yes, when I was working on the project at the Øya festival last year, I got a lot of feedback from the audience. Art should be more available. There are so many arenas out there where art could be shown. The art should reach out to its’ audience, the audience should not always have to seek out the art. I’ve tried to find alternative ways to show people my work, my website (www.luckyoneway.no) is just as important as the galleries.

Holland on art and the human beings:
One can conclude that Natalie Holland works within a 17th century tradition where the figurative painting did not have any competition. In the 17th century the motives were limited to the members of the aristocracy and church decoration. Reflecting on this similarity to the Baroque area and the Classicism period, it is safe to say that there is a link between Holland and the great Caravaggio.
Caravaggio painted traditional religious motives with a twist; he added normal people from the streets as models. Holland on the other hand, portrays people from her own time, but in a classical way. How subjective and personal is your art? And is art necessarily an expression of the individual? – Art is always personal to me, both as a artist and an observer. We choose and we defend what we personally like, regardless of whether it is politically correct or not. The same goes for objectivity. I almost don’t think that it is possible to be completely objective, objectivity is no natural part of human nature. So yes, art is an expression for the individual, for the one who creates the art, the artist herself. Even if the term “art for the masses”, exists, there are still actual people responsible for the art. What role does the human being play in your paintings? – I work figuratively, and figurative art always deals with storytelling. Humanity is a natural centre in my storytelling. The stories I tell are taken from our time. They are almost all stories of people I personally know, or people who are interesting to me. Often, these stories are unusual stories from real life, and I simply work with them.

The story-tellers and the trace-finders Jannik Abel and Natalie Holland, are first an foremost, contemporary artists. They represent two very different artistic expressions of our time. They have a different starting point, but they have a common goal. This goal is to comment on their own time. They do this in two different ways. Holland uses the human being and the individual as a starting point in order to say something about different sides of her time.
Abel, on the other hand, searches for traces left by people. These traces, whatever it is; pieces of cardboard from a burned down studio or an old receipt, she uses it directly in her paintings. But she also wishes to leave her own marks. This is why she is does her own street art projects. The two artists meet out of a common wish to leave a trace . Abel by directly shaping the city landscape, Holland by using her art as a ticket to immortality. I move from past to present to try and see where we are headed, says Abel. Whether it is with a direct or with an indirect starting point when it comes to human beings, Abel and Holland manage to open the eyes of the audience. In two different ways, they have made room for reflection about our own time.
Past, present, future.