“I Can Speak!”

is filmed with a stationary camera placed in the back of Arnes’s ‘99 model Citroen Xsara. In our upcoming show we plan to show it in a loop, in a space where the public is expected to walk past and thus catch one, two or three minutes of the piece, not the whole thing.

A man wearing an oriental straw hat drives slowly around suburban Oslo neighbourhoods, presumably on his way somewhere, apparently unsure of where exactly to go, and never quite reaching his destination. The duration of each excerpt equals the duration of his ‘Teach Yourself Chinese’ tape on the car’s CD player, which encourages him to learn the four tones of the Chinese language by endlessly repeating the following words: “M_, má, mã, mà – t_ng, táng, tãng, tàng – sh_, shú, sh_, shù”
In our recent collaborative exhibitions, Arne and I have been looking at the concept of the ‘antihero’ in art. Whether such a figure does in fact exist: The artist that openly flaunts his own doubts about art’s ability to say something meaningful, the artist stripped of his role as an authority, the artist as a clown.
Woody Allen has been a source of inspiration, for obvious reasons, and we chose a quotation from ‘Annie Hall’ for an exhibition we did last year: “I’ve been killing spiders since I was thirty”.
To us, “I Can Speak!” (the title comes from a George Saunders short story), represents a kind of an artistic ‘foetal position’, in which the artistic message is reduced to its initial basic stages, in this case represented by a beginnner’s linguistic learning course. The idea is that, lacking important issues to discuss and something real to fight for, the artist tries to find his way around the labyrinth anyway, using the lack of meaning as an asset. And this is the point: The apparent lack of meaning will in turn make up the rules of a new game that nevertheless speaks about creativity and artistic activity, a kind of pseudo-dadaism.
At its best, the video piece echoes Kafka’s ‘The Castle’, at its worst, it will make viewers feel nauseous and happy about every single empty everyday phrase – “how are you”, “take care”, “long time no see”, “hasta la vista” etc, etc…