An Interview with Matias Faldbakken
"I make things all the time but I have a hard time calling it work."
Matias Faldbakken is an artist of relentless contradiction. He produces by destroying, he works hard to avoid labour and he critiques his culture and its institutions by making major contributions to them both.
Faldbakken was raised in Norway, his mother an artist and his father a celebrated writer. He studied art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the National Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, but he began his artistic career as a writer. He says he did this “in spite of [his] dad’s writing” and used the pseudonym Abo Rasul for his first three novels, The Cocka Hola Company (2001), Macht und Rebel (2003) and Unfun (2008), which were significantly popular in Europe. These books, known as the Scandinavian Misanthropy trilogy, are dark critiques of a twisted Nordic culture, characterised by sneering hipsterism, indulgent violence and consumerism.
Unlike those of many artist-writers, Faldbakken’s books are literary, which is to say, he writes novels that deal with narrative and characters, and consciously works in the tradition of literature, rather than the vast, nebulous category of ‘artist writings’. Most recently, he published The Waiter (aka The Hills) (2017), his first book in English and the first under his own name, which takes a somewhat quieter, gentler approach to his signature disdain for the culture of abundance. He considers all his books “easy to read” and populist, which is his way of sliding his subversion into the mainstream.
Faldbakken’s visual work, on the other hand, wears this rebellious impulse in its very aesthetic, and tends toward a kind of dingy Minimalism: a garbage bag taped to the wall; a framed cardboard box, a room of old gas cans. This work, unlike his writing, requires the niche context of the white-walled artworld, and somewhere within it there is also a critique of capitalistic production. And yet opposing this force is an obvious appreciation for mundane, repetitive labour – such as tiling – and a fetishising of the materials of construction, from concrete to rebar to piping.
One of his often-repeated, iconic gestures is a row of metal lockers, wrapped in lever straps and crushed with what must have been immense force. The work is both a celebration of aggressive masculinity and a kind of destruction of that very impulse. He describes this “intervention” as vandalising his own work, but also states that he detests vandalism as an artform.
In this way, Faldbakken’s work consistently resists the clear reading of his fiction. He often uses words like “foggy” and “fuzzy” to describe his artistic thought, refusing to allow intellectual ideologies to dominate the power of an object. He prefers to negate than to state, so he undercuts himself at every step, and the contradictions pile up like art.
Ross Simonini: You are undeniably productive, but your work repeatedly points to an inner conflict with labour. What’s your relationship with productivity these days?
Matias Faldbakken: I’ve said that my work operates in the space between being operative and inoperative, or in the gap between being productive and nonproductive. That all of the stuff I’ve made has been some sort of production of reticence; I’ve put my reticence on display. The works should be productive refusals. It’s all negative production, sort of, the works are products of negative sentiments, its negativity turned to a productive key. Imaginative dissent. Iconophilia and iconophobia combined. Etc. I guess it all started with a personal dislike that morphed into a more existential concern: from a young age I dreaded the idea of getting a job – being conventionally productive seemed utterly meaningless at the time (teens). I figured art (drawing, really) could be a way out. It was essentially an escapist choice. Over time this has resulted in a lot of obsessing around what kind of contribution ‘art work’ is. And further, how grotesque the sanctioned ideas of ‘productivity’ and ‘growth’ inherently are. Etc.
RS: Do you work as little as possible?
MF: I make things all the time, but I have a hard time calling it work. It’s not exactly labour. I’m fortunate to have come in a position where I can define, more or less, my everyday. I’m trying to take this position seriously. That is, to use it to the best of my abilities, maximise the potential, whatever the potential of such a position may be. I’m serious about it, not as work, but as a life choice made partly in opposition to the idea of work. I don’t really get people who want art activity to be treated like a profession. ‘Profession’ is what you abandon when you become an artist.
RS: When did you begin to live entirely off of your art and writing?
MF: Around 1999 or 2000. I had a part time job at this anarchic art school in Oslo for a little while after my studies and used my spare time to write my first book, The Cocka Hola Company.
RS: Do you live your life according to the negativity expressed in your work?
MF: I’m a pretty conscientious guy. But in my work I’ve tried to figure out why and how an approach fuelled by ‘going against’ has seemed the most natural and also the most effective, honest, energising and also entertaining for me. I guess parts of my output might look bleak as a result of this. Whatever politics is in there is set to a tragic tune; there’s an optics of the tragic.
RS: Do you generally compartmentalise art and life?
MF: I guess I’m never really working and never really not working either. It’s a liquid state. I’m always open to ideas (to work with) and always open not to work (with those ideas).
RS: Has family life and children changed your work in any profound ways?
MF: I’ve always had kids around, so I don’t really know what work life is like without. When I was nineteen or twenty and started my studies, I moved in with a woman and her three-year-old son right away. I lived with them until he was ten and I was twenty-seven. When I turned twenty-eight I got my first kid and now I live together with three of them (sixteen, fourteen and seven years) and my fiancée. I’ve pretty much had kids in the house for twenty-five years or so… I’m guessing that I would have lived more abroad if I didn’t have kids. Plus been less dictated by the rhythm of the school- and work-life calendar. But who knows about discipline and stuff like that without the structure that kids force upon you? You have to cough up money for the basics when you have children. I’ve always insisted on earning by making art or writing, not getting a job. Perhaps this can explain something of your productivity question too. Also: in all my books, there is a child theme. That would perhaps not have been there without kids always running around.
RS: Do you feel distinctly Norwegian in your sensibility?
MF: I live in Norway and pretty much always have done. I’m never a tourist here, I feel like a tourist everywhere else. That might just be a matter of habit, though. I guess the language thing runs deep. I thought a lot about this when I was recently overseeing the English translations of The Hills: the Norwegian language is one tool, one material, and English is another. It was like trying to make the same sculpture in concrete and then in iron – and then pretend it’s the same piece. The basic components are not the same and you end up with two different products. In that regard I guess my sensibilities are ‘Norwegian’, because I will never get as close to English or any other language.
RS: The press release for your show last year at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Effects of Good Government in the Pit, calls you ‘famous’. Do you feel famous? Is fame an element you address in your work?
MF: No, I don’t feel famous. I’m not famous. I’m thinking out loud here but there is no such thing as true, spectacular ‘fame’ on the art scene. The kind of fantastic orbit that people who really sacrifice themselves (including their physical bodies and faces) to the screen are launched into – the inexplicable circuit that merges overexposure and mystery – doesn’t really exist for artists or writers. Put the biggest art star next to a dull one, like, say, Bruno Mars, and you’ll see, you can’t compare them. I’ve been interested in how ideas disseminate into a wider public, so I’ve always kept an eye on the entertainment industry. What catches the popular mind and what doesn’t? How do some fringe ideas become (pop-)cultural juggernauts?
RS: How did you come to use a pseudonym for your early writing, but not your art?
MF: The pseudonym was practical: my dad is a well-known writer in Norway, and when I sent my first manuscript to the publishing houses I did it anonymously, to get a neutral evaluation. I decided to stick to the fake name when the first novel was published in 2001, so the reviewers wouldn’t compare my book to his or something. But after a few months a tabloid paper figured out my identity and it’s been in the open since. Still, I stuck to the name for the next two novels since they all formed a trilogy, they were one thing. This latest one, The Hills (or The Waiter, in English), is freestanding and there was no use for a fake name there.
RS: Would you describe yourself as a ‘sensitive’ person, like the titular character in The Waiter?
MF: Ha ha, yes, sure.
RS: Are artists usually ‘sensitives’?
MF: I have no idea about other artists. Some seem really torn, but so do taxi drivers and my accountant.
RS: Are you interested in using fiction as a vessel for personal philosophies?
MF: I’m interested in both fiction writing and art production as ways of thinking through practical means, through material, through the retina, through hands-on activity. Writing is also hands-on, even though it’s situated in an immaterial realm; you have to get at it, almost physically, and drag some vague ‘vision’ down onto the paper. Philosophy, I’m not sure. That’s an academic discipline I don’t know too much about. I went to art school in the 90s, so in effect: no education.
RS: Another way of asking that same question is, do you think art is an effective means to critique culture?
MF: I’m not that into art being specifically about the art industry. That seems like a zero-sum game. But as a field of imaginative dissent, I think the art zone (still) has potential. A space for new forms of thought. A place for creation of concepts – visual, material, verbal, productive or not – that goes against the grain. Knotty ideas that won’t immediately float anywhere else.
RS: Did you choose The Waiter to be your first book in English or did it just happen?
MF: It just happened. English is a narrow market for translated literature; the other books weren’t bought. They did a test translation of Unfun into English but it was cancelled as soon as they read it. The publishing house said it was due to copyright problems (appropriation, quoting without source, etc) plus defamation-of-character difficulties (I used some real-life characters as fictional figures). But I suspect that the English and American markets were already more sensitive to certain issues than central Europe was at the time. The trilogy is a medley of insensitivities towards today’s trigger topics; race, trauma, gender, identity, abuse, stereotypes, sexism, etc. One of the approaches in the trilogy was to write a comedy where you could hardly see the fun. It was in effect trolling in book form before the idea of the troll became a political reality. Plus, the books are not ‘well’ written, so they might just look like crap for a serious literary editor.
RS: What do you mean when you say they weren’t well written?
MF: Syntax, composition, rhythm, flow, structure, technique, all kinds of traditional craft concerns that are still very important for editors and critics – and readers, I guess – were truly disregarded in those first three books.
RS: Is your visual art a kind of fiction?
MF: Tricky question. I don’t think I see it as fiction. The artworks I’m most happy with are the ones where some (verbal) principle is inseparable from the physical execution and the visual look, the aesthetics. Although there can be some verbal spark for a work, there is never a ‘story’. I don’t see my works as metaphors, either. The things are things, the images are things, the stories become things, too.
RS: After years of working this way, what kind of relationship are you trying to create between the verbal and the aesthetic?
MF: I don’t feel like there’s much of a relationship, on a practical level. I’m making visual and verbal stuff in spite of each other in the studio, not because of each other. The one work mode pollutes the other rather than enrich or ‘pollinate’. The way I’m often just inventing randomly while writing doesn’t work well for me as a visual artist. When making art I try to hand myself a simplified, clear task: ‘Squeeze lockers with ratchet straps’ or ‘tile an untileable object’ or ‘draw that one motive until it’s exhausted’. Then the visual result, the aesthetics, is a product of that premise. But on the other hand, this system for producing is totally stained by free-range fiction invention. I don’t have much of a plan when I’m writing. I’m taking ideas and building them out and messing them up instead of trying to unravel and clarify. I’m switching to one method of working when I’m sick of the other. I’m trying to keep things urgent that way. To avoid routine and mannerisms that quickly arise when you get too comfortable with one way of making things. But I’m running the risk of incoherency and self-sabotage.
RS: Do you consider literature and art to be expressions of a similar compulsion?
MF: For me it is. The same urge to grasp stuff and cough up ideas lies behind both. Although they are different instruments that sometimes blunt each other.
RS: So then, do ideas generally present themselves as inherently visual or literary? Or will either do?
MF: As I’ve chosen to split my output, I have a hope that there is a basic separation somewhere deep down, between, say, verbal ideas and visual ones. But, weirdly, the more I work like this, and the closer I look, the harder it is to find that divide.
Originally published in ArtReview in 2019