Melancholy without regret

Flying in over Stockholm’s archipelago I saw the resemblance to the thousands of small islands and what goes on in my mind at the moment. My thoughts are like the islands; sometimes connected to other islands creating a conglomerate of related thoughts, some are small, some are big, most are completely isolated and abandoned etc. Impressions were many during Grand Tour, and I’ve got some serious digestion to work on now. There is no way I could try to sum up the previous weeks right now when it totally both really inspired me at the same time as it totally fucked me over. At least I can tell you that it has started enormous processes.

Blogging has been a good thing for me; it has helped me to keep track of myself. I read some of the submitted material today and I realise that I must come across as the shallow person I really am and not the “intellectual” that everybody dreams of being portrayed as. I try to console myself with that even shallow persons can sometimes say something of interest. I am happy that I followed my intentions though, to tell the blatant truth about what I did in a sort of experiment. “This is how it is. This is how it works.” It is for certain not the right way to make business of course, it is probably only the highway to the Betty Ford clinic ;), but on the other hand it is always better to look back to things you’ve done and possibly regret, than to look back and regret the things you didn’t do.

I went from Bergamo with thoughts on production of content, to the finished product (which I didn’t like) in Venice on to a situation completely about the market. The complete opposites belong to each other undoubtedly. Bergamo-aftermath gave me enough input to last a lifetime I guess. Venice disappointments will last a lifetime too, or at least until 2007. However, to my complete surprise, the Basel experience was the opposite of what I expected it to be I am less jaded and cynical after Basel than after Venice. I guess that is because I saw some really good pieces installed in a very good way. And it is refreshing/interesting to see for instance a performance by Marina Abramovic in Unlimited at the fair this is something very rare, she almost never do these exhausting performances any more. The fair seems to have more guts than most biennale curators. Surprising indeed, but I guess they can afford to be bold.

I am now back in Stockholm—the city of tranquil boredom, out of money, out of focus, out of the buzz of the most interesting art and discussions, but I am back with my beloved computer and I will have time to do research of artists, to read catalogues, to figure out what to make of all the information acquired, what to do next, how to do things better. I’ve certainly no regrets, but it is a melancholic state of mind that I’m in. I feel the post-biennale-syndrome hit me with great force, when I can only sleep for 4 hours, feel stressed out of the things I need to do/didn’t do and so forth, and also the outage of discussion with others. Thank god for Skype and MSN!

I wish that I could have made time to give you more in-depth reports from Venice and Basel (and Bergamo as well) but really it proved impossible, and also this is why we have criticism blogging is just a shallow diary, while criticisim is at least supposed to be well thought of digested commentaries. Now, I know there were a lot of things I just mentioned in a breath, like “Tino Sehgal did great work”, and perhaps you are wondering what he showed etc. If there is anything you’d like to know more about PLEASE don’t hesitate to ask me! Please also visit the site again in a week or so, I will keep up updating with URL’s and images when I receive/find them.