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Nowadays artists want to exist for real, to be part of it, to be into the world party, where the pavement’s stones are learning to fly and the walls are screaming canned paint. Artists want to be in the world as theirselves and not just as links in the symbiotic chain of the ostrich’s art farm ivory reservation, where there always is a new Newton reinventing the gravity laws of fame. Those fucking 15 minutes do not shine anymore. Not enough. Therefore pirated copies of the Recycled Truth are being distributed by thousands in the spider woman’s web, or burned in snipers’ home computers with the subcomandante’s pipe blowing weed in the cd cover of burning illusions, where there still be rebellion and hope to burn.Knutte Wester used to play laid-back soul music with a band, or add sound collages and percussion to Xenakis concerts. He has made one documentary film about a witness to a Swedish past that has definitely gone to oblivion, another about very actual youths trying to find alternative centres in a smoky periphery= instead of a revolution. He documented the usurpation of the taxpayers’ public space by the wonderland sexy tasty glamour of multinational consumer oracles. He has made interior installations, where in a mix of research and sculptural skills he shows the horror of beauty, the insanity of intelligence, and the delirium tremens of science. In his latest project in Boliden, Knutte established a room for meetings and creation to welcome the unwelcome forced nomads, in the middle of the desolate blue snow of the exile camps. Where inactivity and apathy is the killing virus he has made a place where forgotten people can recover their names.
There is something called relationistic aesthetics: smiley boys and girls acting super-smart in the arty petri-dish environment of art galleries, with twenty lines in the newspaper as the proof that it really happened.
Knutte Wester’s Boliden project is NOT to be misinterpreted as that kind of a trendy relationistic phenomenon. Knutte is making art for real, Real Art, in the real world, with real people coming from real wars, with real traumas. Knutte is giving back something he has learned on his way trough academy and life, at the same time he is giving back a forgotten dimension to art and showing a possible path for other artist to join.
Art is not a goal but a means.
Gustavo Aguerre, FA+ Stockholm 2003-02-19