Lars Toft-Eriksen: Your video portrait with cigarette (2000) is part of a series of works in which you paraphrase works by Edvard Munch, in this case his Self-Portrait with Cigarette from 1895. Could you discuss your thoughts concerning this work and your interest in Munch?

A K Dolven: As a Norwegian artist, you grow up with Munch. I wanted to face that this painting – often the first image in books on Munch – of the cool man, with the cigarette and the hand with the brush disappearing under the edge of the frame, is a portrait of the artist as such. I found it interesting swapping him with a strong teenage girl with a remote control. She looks at us, a bit from above as the screen is mounted high. She switches on and off music – garage and drum’n’base – from the year 2000. This is her period of time. She has control. The Marlboro Light takes 6 minutes 18 seconds to burn out, without her smoking the cigarette. That’s also the length of the work.

LTE: Why did you decide to explore the concept of these works through the medium of video? What were the advantages of using video?

AKD: Video has time and movement in addition to the image. I found that interesting in dialogue with Munch’s works. I wanted to confront Munch’s images from a contemporary standpoint through the use of video. The music of the time underscores this.

LTE: In this series on Munch, you also paraphrased his works Puberty (1894) and The Kiss (1897). Can you tell me a bit more about your approach to these two works by Munch?

AKD: The image of puberty – the young and fragile girl sitting with her hands folded on her lap – is timeless. We see her today as well, for instance on the tube or bus with earphones, escaping into her own world and merging with her own threatening shadow. The girl in my work brought her favourite music, a drum and bass piece lasting five minutes and twenty-nine seconds. That became the length of the work. We can just hear the treble, as if emitted from her headphones. The Kiss is staged in an underground club-like setting, to the steady beat of house music. Like Munch’s painting, my work shows two lovers locked in an embrace. As if time is suspended in the heat of the kiss. The length of the kiss is the length of the work. An overexposed 16mm film merges the lovers’ faces into a single bleached form, much like Munch’s painting. Bodily boundaries blur, and distinct elements appear like blotches on an abstract canvas. The slow and passionate movement of hands betrays the impossibility of this image of contained desire and unfreezes its painterly stasis.

LTE: Painting within the last ten years or so has again become a much-favoured approach, however with an expanded notion of painting implying that it is not necessarily limited to paint on canvas. Your work cuts across traditional boundaries of media and technical approaches. Still there is something specifically painterly in much of your work, even if it’s photo – graphy, video, or installation. What are your ideas surrounding painting, and how does your work within other media relate to notions of the painterly?

AKD: I just use different tools. You can call me a painter using different tools if you want. As an artist, I am actually not that interested in this talk about technique and media. If Edvard Munch worked today, he would use tools like film and video. He did fantastic experiments with photography. Film, video, and photo are just different tools. I paint. I draw. I paint on canvas and aluminium. I work with sound and installations. Spray can, knife, and brush; these are all just tools to express what you want. What you want to question is the central issue of the work.

LTE: You started your career as a painter and still work with painting, and painting is clearly at the core of your work. Your series of white paintings may be understood within the context of a romantic and modernist tradition of painting as a static expression; however, they also seem to relate to temporality through subtle changes in the use of white. Time is of course also an issue in your video work. You even mentioned this aspect of temporality in relation to portrait with cigarette.

AKD: Actually, I did not start off as a painter. I have always worked in different media. I started with art within the music scene. Bands and concerts were my arena. I did Super-8 films as stage projects with musicians. I did LP covers and posters. At the Academy of Art in Oslo in the early 1980s, I was part of a group of students who called themselves The Annex. The group wanted to break down the boundaries within art; between painting, sculpture, and printmaking. We started a class with guest teachers. That way we got input from international artists with a background in all kinds of media. Those were three fantastic years. The issue of time plays an important part in my works. Looking through a camera lens, you see something. Painting, however, starts off with an empty surface. In that way it is nothing. I appreciate this abstractness of painting as a space for more abstract thinking. I need both the concreteness of video and the abstractness of painting, because of the nature of the concepts I deal with.

Time as matter interests me. When you look at a painting, no one tells you how long you should look. Film or video, on the other hand, has a certain length. You are sometimes even told the length of the work. You are in a way served when watching video and film. This is not so much the case when you look at a painting. Perhaps it’s more demanding to spend time looking at a painting. My white paintings are in my opinion not only white. They have a wide range of colours in them. If you spend time with these paintings, you will experience this. Furthermore, they reflect the surroundings, as well as the time of the day. I always paint in daylight, that way there is lots of light in them from the outset. Therefore, they can withstand more darkness than one might think.

LTE: Your paraphrases on works by Munch, as well as your series titled Madonna with Man, relate in some way or another to a canonical and, one may say, masculine history of painting. The girl in your portrait with cigarette is a strong contrast to Munch’s Self-Portrait, and she takes a critical position to the masculinity represented by Munch. In these works, there is a feminist voice opposing this tradition of painting. Can you elaborate on your thoughts concerning the feminist aspect of your works?

AKD: Well, I am a woman. I identify with other women. Men have lots of women in their work. I don’t believe they get this question when they use women in their work. But of course I am a feminist, as everybody who believes in equal rights is.

LTE: You made portrait with cigarette more than ten years ago, at the outset of the return to painting in contemporary art, within an expanded notion of painting. However, it still seems that traditional easel painting is holding an ever-stronger ground. In your opinion, what is the status of painting today as compared with ten years ago?

AKD: We will always paint. The way we paint will always change according to changes in culture and technology.

Source attribution

Lars Toft-Eriksen, Interview with A K Dolven, in Selene Wendt and Paco Barragán (red.), When a Painting Moves … Something Must Be Rotten (Milano: Charta, 2011).