Introduction to :

CLOCKWISE – NEW NORDIC CONTEMPORARY ART ,  exhibition Vejle museum 2002


 extract  :By Stine Høholt ARKEN Museum ofModern Art

The French artist Colonel  for several years has worked with differentmappings of the worlds of art and culture. Thus, he has reflected on theperceived existence of a unique, authentic, national identity, and the caricaturedforeigner’s idea of cultural assimilation.  He uses his subject area,whether an art institution or the Danish nation, as anthropological site.However, in Colonel the subcultural is not central. Instead, he deals with“the ordinary Dane” and specific cultural areas that he maps out with a focuson intolerance, misguided kindness and hypocrisy. Humor is an important ingredientin fragmentary works that quite matter-of-factly show us the artist as culturalanthropologist — or “funny sociologist, ” as he prefers it.

The exhibition features two Colonel videos, I want to look Danish, I wantto look like you (1999) and Invisibility (1999), both thematizing integrationand differences, as well as the art project

L’imperméable (1988-2000). Colonel is an exponent of a distinctlyprocess-oriented and dialogical art that does not kowtow to art-historicalrequirements for beauty and genre divisions, but instead offers the viewernew forms of communication by moving into the social sphere through long-termactivities. His L’imperméable project exemplifies this practice. Itconsists of a number of coats printed with text and images, coats the artisthas worn in various art contexts: walking around Paris, at biennials aroundthe world or in videos such as Invisibility in this exhibition. L’imperméableis part of Moving Exhibitions, an unfinishable mobile project, critical ofinstitutions, which has both a conceptual aim: it is about creating new strategiesfor the artwork and the exhibition situation, and an existential aim: inthese works, Colonel creates his own personal “cabinet of wonders” of internallyconnected stories about himself, his art and the world around him which,it is likely, no one but the artist himself can connect with respect to allinterfaces and historics. Colonel’s practice is manifested as a type of transcategoricalart that gathers inspiration from ethnography, anthropology, journalism andcultural theory. It points out that, although art may not be the best didactictool, humorous-artistic language still holds a potential for penetratinginto cracks that are beyond the reach of didactic statements. His is an artthat, apart from its fragmentary nature, its many piled-on details, its humorand irony, follows a clear, productive strategy, centered as it is on aninterest in charting various forms of ideological, cultural and social representation.