Untitled, by Arti Grabowski

Uppsala Art Museum

In his performance, without title, in the Art Museum of Uppsala, Arti Grabovski attacks a wall from the inside, and later tries to mend it by sewing with a rope.

Arti Grabowski is a sculptor. SU-EN talks about his work as a rock-performance. It makes sense in an equivocal manner. The white wall he presents to the audience has volume in the room. It is as we could see the marble block of the sculptor and his efforts to realise its inherent potential. It is almost like we could see the sculptor in the treatise On Music by Saint Augustin sweating in his struggle to imitate the ideal world and to make a manifestation of human liberty in the media of his Art. On Music is an aesthetic manifesto written by the saint around 400 a. d.
We are all seated as in a theatre. In front of us there is the white wall and we can hear sounds from behind the wall, telling about someone using machines and tools. Suddenly a circular hole is sawed through the wall. An arm projects, radiating with power and competence. The arm examines the wall around the hole and the disappears for a moment and returns with a stencil, which it attaches to the wall. The stencil is then sprayed with colour and removed, leaving the word revers written laterally reversed in red. This is the opening of a series of unexpected events, who in retrospect seem meaningful, in the internal logic of the work which holds the audience in suspension all along the performance. Nothing, or close to nothing can be figured out in advance.

The wall turns out to be a big box, with a let-out where the artist can sneak in and out. The wall gets marked by a series of break-through more or less exactly formed after used pieces of brick, or wounds brutally torn open and afterwards stiched together with a thin rope, through holes drilled for the seam. It's the same rope that the artist tied himself up with, in order to handicap himself, while clinging through the holes of the wall.

Behind in the background a cement mixer is occupied breaking bottles. Heaps of broken glass are produced this way and the artist awkwardly tries to dispose of them on top of the walls of the box. This gives a dramatic character to the work as falling glass beads may fall on the face of the artist, or cut his feet up when hey have fallen to the floor.

An intriguing lyrical logic takes form in front of us The work seems to present an interpretation of the artistic creative process on a very basic level. We ar looking at a screen. Objects are projected in the screen. Voids opens up in the screen as apertures towards the world and inwards, but they are seamed together with rope. It is as we saw the invisible body write on the screen of consciousness. A phenomenological manifesto.