Clout

Clout, 2018, is a site-specific installation that consists of a huge wall-paper mural; a clarinet fused with a pipe; two framed drawings: an organic interpretation of the famous textbook graph of the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem one one and a hand wiping something away with a cloth on the other; and finally a art rug picking up the patterns and shapes in the mural on the wall.

The huge wallpaper artwork by Jens Fänge both serves as a tribute to theory as to the history of our school. You will see depicted objects: a glass, a piece of paper or cloth, and a cigarette butt. 

Fänge has added a hand clearing and wiping away the smudge that obscures our understanding of societal structures. We can also see cues that speak to social scientists, like when Fänge makes Adam Smith’s invisible hand visible in a drawing. Or perhaps it is Eli Heckscher’s lifeless hand – a reference to his hand as seen in the oil portrait on the wall – as he departed before Bertil Ohlin received the prestigious prize? Fänge also presents an organic interpretation of the famous textbook graph of the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem. The model sprouts, grows and almost seems to turn into natural science. 

Fänge’s entire pattern is also consciously similar to the geometrical features characteristic of the works by 1950s Swedish concretist Olle Baertling. Fänge winks to Baertling: from the balcony outside the room you can see a steel sculpture by the latter on the lawn outside the school. Baertling on the outside communicates with Fänge on the inside.

Fänge also plays with our wish to connect the dots, just like good social analysts do. We see a clarinet fused with a pipe. Two objects: you inhale from one, you exhale into the other. One is black, one is white. There is something similar in these two objects, but how do they come together? When René Magritte presented us with an image of a pipe and the accompanying explanatory text “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” he reminded us that this was not an actual pipe, merely a representation of one. Fänge’s pipe surely is a pipe. But it is also a representation of something else.

The play with representations shifts our attention to one of the key questions of our time: what can we trust in this world of deep fakes, alternative facts, and machines creating words, images, and sounds that only have a vague connection to “truth”? Theories are linguistic artifacts of reality, constantly begging the question of what reflects what. You may ask how a pipe fits into a clarinet, as you may ask how a theory fits into reality.

Jens Fänge (b.1965 in Gothenburg, Sweden) studied at Valand Art Academy, Gothenburg between 1989–1994 and now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Fänge has been exhibited regularly at galleries and art institutions since the mid 1990s. He gained international recognition in the early 2010s and his work has since then been exhibited in e.g. Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, and Shanghai.

In 2018 Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm presented the highly acclaimed solo exhibition Drömmarna (The Dreams) by Jens Fänge. Fänge has executed several public commissions and also created the diplomas for the laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature between 2014–2016. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts since 2017.

The installation has been made possible with the support of Lena & Per Josefsson, Elisabeth & Martin Wiwen-Nilsson, and Carl Hirsch