MA 2010. Text by Marit Paasche.

Art as Experience[1]

For most artists there are some problems to which they always return, like an incompletelanguage seeking to be pronounced. The unsolvable logic of these problems – like certainmathematical theorems – is a source of energy that spurs the artist to repeatedly seeking butnot actually wishing for its solution. Identifying and articulating these problems in a way thatis relevant for one’s own art practice, is a difficult task that takes patience and a strong back. Therefore, many artists end up with problems that are too easily solved.

This is the point where Sara Korshøj Christensen astonishes me. Already at a veryearly stage of her art practice, she has established a solid framework, from which she canrepeatedly attack her unsolvable problems, using different materials and angles freely andwithout prejudice. It is also manifest in her way of expressing relations between aestheticalpractices and more general implications of being an individual, while keeping the aestheticalaspect inside, not applying it as an identifiable layer on top of the general experience. Thisconcept of the aesthetic becoming inherent and integrated in the general experience becomesclear in her late paintings from 2010.

In the artist book The ultimate solution to absolutely everything you could possibly imagine, from 2009, Korshøj Christensen uses these insights together with her sharp wits. Thebook is created around the image of a brain as a labyrinth filled with 149 dots, one by onedisappearing as you turn the pages, until the labyrinth (or brain) is finally empty. Or – if youflip through the book the opposite way – the brain is gradually filled up. This apparentlysimple logic shows us how a system can take the form of an object (an issue she playfullypursues in the installation Straight & Level). The system is also an image of the striving toproduce aesthetic experiences, and the important insight that being an artist is to endure andrepeat patterns, hoping to transcend them.

Marit Paasche

[1] After John Dewey: Art as Experience. Capricorn Books, G.P Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1934