Photo album

Review in Dagens Nyheter by Jan Håfström, June 1996

A narrow corridor at The Gothenburg Art Museum hosts the office of Marcus Hansson.

All though unlikely, this office is part of an exhibition with young photographers from Gothenburg School of Photography. But Marcus Hansson has chosen his own way, meaning he’s had to reduce “the photographical” to a minimum. He has foremost ridden himself of all the ideas concerning form and material. His office contains balloons, straws, notebooks and odd little objects. A video projection shows Hansson puncturing the sky with a needle. The physical result hangs on the wall: plastic bags for the visitors to have, free of charge.

Marcus Hanssons office is a state of emergency, a continuing crisis, a limbo for genres and forms. A shoebox stores “Syringes and condoms, 1992-1994” found in parking lots and parks in Gothenburg, Playa de la Inglés, Rome, Perugia, Köln, Hamburg and Paris. A nine minute long video shows the artist repeatedly shooting himself in the head with a toy gun: “32 days in a row”. On the wall in front of the desk he keeps putting up new Polaroids. Many showing bodies, or parts of bodies, sewn together with needle and thread. These “anatomies” are like an on going mutilation, as in children torturing animals, pulling the wings of butterflies.

These projects are both naked and self exposing, all though that shouldn’t hide the fact that Hansson has predecessors and companions. It could be Boltanski, Mike Kelly or Stig Sjölund. But the most important source of inspiration is, according to Hansson; ”the vibrating sound from Miami Vice”. Polaroids taken of the TV screen fills several large books. CNN in Sarajevo, cop shows, porn, soap operas and commercials in a continuing flow. Hansson has edited it all into a gigantic private holiday album. A ”comédie humaine” where the unsuccessful and banal celebrate a violent triumph.

Other possibilities: “Passing through large cities by train at night, seeing people in their apartments for 1-2 seconds”. Or listen to “ the neighbours fast steps up the staircase”. It is the same world of homelessness and longing that Fassbinder and Wim Wenders have examined in their films. In Looking through Marcus Hanssons photo albums I am reminded of a scene in “Paris, Texas”: the glass cage Nastassja Kinski is sitting in, unaware that life has caught up with her. I get the same frightening notion from notion from this mish-mash: that it is own life I’m watching, unrecognizable.