Odd weeks: Eva Löfdahl

The room at Moderna Museet is a work of art. Interbreeding Classified branches out like a classification but with neither a beginning nor an end. The branches have names:
· “Triploids and souls”, a large group of watercolours.
· “Lucky with the Weather – The Sudden Development”, photos from Cap Verde and Bagarmossen, etc.
· “Seed-leaves, moving”, “Hearts, the Asymmetry of Dualism” and “Triploids and Others”, watercolours.
· “Interbreeding Classified”, computer printouts, and “Pilgrimages”,

A classification – but of what?

On rooms
Several years ago, a seminar was held under the heading “On Rooms”, in connection with Eva Löfdahl’s completion of the work “Straining Gnats and Swallowing Camels” for the Chemical Training Laboratory at Stockholm University, which was commissioned by the National Public Art Council. The work consists of a long, narrow opening in the floor. While working on it, Eva called it the “ditch”, whereupon people seemed to relax. This creation of a space between an existing building and a new one – glazed, incorporated with the floor, apparently of an arbitrary length – was there to behold. Or to ignore, if one so wished. A ground-breaking, wholly decisive work of art in the public domain. Eva Löfdahl had been commissioned to give a public building an artistic addition – and she chose to break out!
“This gap takes the shape of a potential room, the form that is necessary to create a foothold for the conception of another room,”* she has said. Many profound things were said at the seminar – but none concerning the actual work itself: for how does one approach a glassed ditch into which a wire basket with a spoon strung onto it has been lowered just under the glass surface? The spoon lay there, vibrating, between one and the other.

“Distant places attract expectations.
They are defined and named. At closer range they become more tangible and harder to grasp. We need to create order so that we can process our surroundings.”**
In the Stendörren National Park, a few miles from Nyköping, I was reminded of what Eva Löfdahl had said. The fair and yet barren landscape of the Sörmland Archipelago lay open for a long walk – but every five yards my walk was interrupted by a wood-framed sign informing me of what there was to see. Order became excess order, nature was dissolved into facts. For a museum officer whose job it is to convey and present art, this forest of signs that hid the trees was a reminder that all explanations are precarious.

…but both.
Eva Löfdahl devoted herself to performance at an early stage. In the artist group Wallda (which included Max Book and Stig Sjölund) she produced a highly personal version of the housing exhibition Bo80 – “Boplats Otto” (Abode Otto). The conceptual basis has been strongly accentuated in her oeuvre, but for Eva Löfdahl there is no either/or: thought likes to be dressed in colour. At Moderna Museet, words are manifested in watercolour, on the short wall she has pinned up a plethora of beings, grouped in families, and the exploration of “Interbreeding Classified” takes place against the backdrop of an abstract, striped score.
All classifications have an inherent logic, and an exhibition is no exception. Neither one nor the other – but both.

Ann-Sofi Noring

*From Eva Löfdahl’s description of the sketch for her work “Sila mygg och svälja kameler” (Straining Gnats and Swallowing Camels) for the National Public Art Council.

**Foreword to a letter. Catalogue text for Arkipelag, Stockholm Cultural Capital, 1998.

Addendum:
The Swedish Nationalecyklopedin has the following entry on Eva Löfdahl:
“By creating different types of paradoxical metaphors, where familiar visual and mental structures are crossed, she strives to visualise a multitude of enigmatic and aesthetic levels of meaning in the fragmentary worlds of symbols and images of contemporary man.”
Honestly, that’s what it says.