|
||||||||||||||||||||
Biography
Back to frontpage
Jan-Olof MALLANDER
Born 1944 in Helsinki, Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki.
In the winter of 1972-73, the Cheap Thrills Gallery , founded by Jan-Olof Mallander, was converted into a macrobiotic restaurant. For a few weeks, the gallery served the public vegetarian cuisine instead of art. The experiment was the forerunner of the first vegetarian restaurant in Finland. When Mallander, a macrobiotic himself, was some time later seen in a restaurant cutting up a juicy steak, he merely said: " Know your enemy .."
Biography
Jan-Olof Mallander has been active in and around art in several roles, including those of an artist, poet, critic and gallery owner. As a writer possessing a sharp pen and direct approach, Mallander has often awakened fierce debate. After matriculating from the Swedish-speaking Comprehensive School in Kulosaari, Helsinki, J.O. Mallander worked on a luxury liner, finally ending up in New York. It was there that Mallander first came in contact with underground culture. Back in Helsinki, he studied communications, aesthetics, literature and art, but never completed his studies. In 1968, he began work as the editor of Iris , a magazine published by the Trade Union of Finnish Artists (SKA), as well as writing art reviews for the Swedish-speaking newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet. Mallander contributed regularly to Taide magazine, and also worked from 1971-1974 as the art critic of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Through his articles, Mallander spread international ideas throughout the Finnish art world. His writings covered such issues as American trends in art, Conceptual Art, and Pop art, and also presented the ideas of such artists as Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, and Joseph Beuys. Mallander's own artistic career was launched in 1968 in an exhibition held at the Kluuvi Gallery in Helsinki, entitled "Thirteen Deviating Opinions" which featured works rejected by the jury of the Triennial exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts. During the thirty years that followed, Mallander has participated in, and also organised, several group and solo exhibitions in Finland and Sweden. In 1971, he founded the group called Harvesters (Elonkorjaajat), which consisted of artists involved in the Cheap Thrills Gallery. Later on the gallery, which operated from 1971 to 1977, acquired a legendary reputation for having introduced Finnish and foreign artists whose works departed from the mainstream. Vegetarianism, alternative lifestyles and Eastern religions have always occupied a central role in J.O. Mallander's life and artistic production. He has worked actively in the alternative publications Aura, Suomi and in the Oraansuojelijat group.
Article
Letters in the Middle of Helsinki
The majority of Jan-Olof Mallander's work can be placed within the context of Conceptual or Minimalist art, which in terms of gesture and form are slight, but whose content is all the more far-reaching. Conceptual art, which Mallander was preoccupied with in the 1960s, was a kind of counter-force to the painterly and sculptural idiom of mainstream art then current in Finland. Public sculpture had, in fact, been the object of fierce discussion in Finland at the time. The naturalness of the wooden sculptures of Kain Tapper enraged critics, and the funereal monument by Kauko Räsänen, popularly dubbed the Holey Angel, was regarded as unseemly. In spite of the furious debate, the tradition of plastic, free-standing wood/bronze sculpture was quite strong. J.O. Mallander's conceptual paper sculptures were, in 1972, so exceptional in this country, that they were not always recognised as sculpture at all. Mallander made the sculptures gluing sculptural Lettraset letters, a U, an O or a T, or a hyphen, on postcards mostly depicting architectural or landscape views of Helsinki. The pictures were printed as posters. Confronted by the posters, viewers instinctively search for a connection or a solution to the riddle - why some specific letter or punctuation mark is associated with the image in question.
At the time, J.O. Mallander's paper sculptures only cost a few marks apiece. In the 1970s, art was supposed to be affordable and available to all. The idea was that one should be able to collect art even on a labourer's wages. However, Mallander's idea was to use his art as a bridge to something other than the continuous flow of commodities. For him, it was important to be part of the spiritual flow of ideas and to communicate on the same level as artistic discourse. Although at that time his sculptures did not seek to promote a sense of responsibility for the excessive and unnecessary production of goods, from a contemporary perspective, he seems to have been a positive eco-artist, refusing to produce more material in an overloaded world. And what was important, with respect to the Finnish climate: paper sculptures work in all weather conditions.
Demand for a Free Realm for Art
J.O. Mallander has been called a jack of all trades and an pentathlete. He has consciously sought to give voice to and realise his own ideals, which have included conceptuality in art, progress in the spirit of the avant-garde, and internationality. In the 1960s, Mallander was active in the early stages of the Finnish Trade Union of Artists (SKA), but he was never caught up in trade union politics. On the contrary: he became a relentless critic of politically committed art. For example, he parodied the prominent leftism of the 1970s art scene and its Marxist models in his postage stamp collage of 1969, where Marx and Engels converse, through text bubbles, each in his own stamp. Later on, Mallander left his job in Iris , the journal of the artists' trade union, disappointed by the reforms the union ostensibly pretended to advocate. In his mind, the union was not capable of genuinely calling the artist's role into question.
In the 1970s, J.O. Mallander's views received quite a lot of publicity in the field of art. He loudly demanded freedom for art, and proposed that art should occupy a territory outside society. In a realm of art populated by artists, art could serve as a tool leading towards a more balanced mankind and society. In the case of Mallander, this meant a conscious move away from the prevalent values of society, although, by cherishing the myth of the Bohemian artist, it revealed a need to be appreciated by his own era. As early as 1970, critics gave Mallander the esteemed E.J. Vehmas award.
The 1970s in Finnish art are ever more rarely labelled the decade of Realism and Constructivism. Increasingly often, it is the neglected sidelines that are given prominence. Today, no one can deny the achievement of the members of the Harvesters Group, which freely banded together through their affiliation with the Cheap Thrills Gallery. In retrospect, the Finnish and international artists coming from outside mainstream art and presented by the gallery in 1971-77, are easy to peg down as having been progressive and visionary. For example, in 1974, Mallander organised in his gallery an invitational exhibition of international postage art entitled "The Head Museum for the Eighties, an International Post-conceptual Show" , which apart from its environmentally friendly attitude can also be regarded as a statement on the financial problems of art museums and galleries, and the "art freight" being flown around the world.
An interest in Eastern religions, as well as a lifestyle geared towards the purity of both body and mind, has occupied a central position in J.O. Mallander's art. However, the undercurrent in Mallander's various artistic phases (exemplified by Pop art, Conceptual art, Underground, or Minimalism) has always been to question the power of money and matter. In the spirit of Eastern religions, Mallander's art, too, seeks to achieve harmony through seriality and repetition.
Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger