by Professor Øivind Storm Bjerke
Rolf Aamot has always been a restless and experimental artist who in particular has
realized the potential of developing his figurative language through the use of technological innovations. The technological side of his art alone could form the subject of an entire study. Technique has never been his goal, however; rather it has been a means of creating images. Rolf Aamot has been an active artist for almost fifty
years. His first major work was a commission to decorate the Museum of Paleontology in Oslo, which he concluded in 1955, the same year that he graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Art, Crafts and Design. During his time at the Academy, which he attended from 1958 until 1960, Rolf Aamot studied under Aage Storstein and Alexander Schultz – two painters whose roots can be traced to the efforts of the 1920s to unite figuration and abstraction under the impression of cubism and neoclassicism. In other words, Aamot had a very traditional academy education.
Aamot began his career as an artist at a time when young innovative pictorial
artists perceived themselves – and were perceived by the general public – as messengers for abstract painting. That is, abstract painting as it emerged in contemporary France. These painters paved the way for the evolution of three different directions: lyrical abstraction in painting, constructivist painting and spontaneous informalism. Irrespective of the choices made by individual artists, there was general consensus among them that images were two-dimensional and that everything in a picture was on one plane. Respect for the fact that an image was flat became a central issue. A successful picture is initially a decorative pattern on one plane, before it appears as anything else – e.g. a tree. A successful picture forms a visual whole consisting of material, color and shape which confirm the image’s two
dimensions. Contemporary paintings were essentially decorative paintings that
sought an ornamental expression. Illusionism was the domain of photography.
Even within the field of photography, the tendency has been that photography in
the 1950s and 1960s that wished to appear as ”artistic” noticeably attempted to
arrange a motif on the surface, so that a picture appears as though it attempts
to represent an arrangement of surface figures. Light and dark are transformed
into abstract patterns and appear as though their intention was to fulfill a compositional form taken from a recipe book describing good composition in paintings. It is remarkable in any case how such a great deal of photography that has regarded itself as ”artistic” has for long periods of time endeavored to capture sections of motifs and carry out cropping, which results in the picture appearing to be a harmonious entity where the format of the picture that is perceived of as a surface
is confirmed, whereas amateur photography to a far greater degree perceives the
motif as action in space. We can see this as the result of the fact that throughout
the period during which photographs have been taken the goal of the most prestigious
artistic technique until recently – painting – has been to address the surface.
In his later artistic career, Aamot has moved in the opposite direction of creating
images that are flat. On the contrary, Rolf Aamot has been concerned with creating
space. In particular, this has made it difficult to pigeonhole him in relation to
his contemporaries. Aamot’s imagery emerges in an environment where there
are dominant references to art history, which to some extent can be claimed
to conflict with the content of the ideas that the artist wishes to communicate.
If we use the term ”photography” in its literal sense as ”drawing with
light”, then Rolf Aamot has been a photographer who has seldom or never
been associated with photography. He is an artist who for almost 40 years
has been in the forefront when it comes to experimenting with photo-based
forms of visual expression within fields such as film, video and electronic
art, which he has materialized in the form of individual images produced
as laser paintings and now also as conventional chemical photography.
Aamot’s pictures raise our level of awareness, through their accentuation
of space, that photography is an art form that is linked in equal measure
to performance art such as the theatre as it is to paintings.
In 1969, Rolf Aamot presented his works at the Munch Museum, where he
applied the term ”visual theatre” to his work. On 24 February 1969, in a
full-page spread in VG, the Norwegian national daily, it was announced that
a new theatre had been founded in Oslo: ”The Visual Theatre, instigated by
the ”never-resting graphic artist and painter Rolf Aamot, 34, a campaigner for
the artistic use of our mass media such as film, television and newspapers”.
According to Rolf Aamot, the basis of ”visual theatre” is that our existence is not
linear and that life and art fuse to form one entity. The artist’s task is to ”program
so that the onlooker can be faced with choice, and thus take a creative role”.
Aamot wanted to bring people back to art. Not in the form of figures taken from baroque paintings, from the romantic period or contemporary modernistic figurative
painting. For Aamot, art is not a means with which to decorate, be it for everyday use
or for festive occasions; rather it is a means of recognition and acknowledgement.
Aamot has chosen to focus on two aspects of recognition: social and political
aspects. In his art, people return in the form of these two dimensions. Art should
be returned to the people and people should be in art. The best way he as an
artist can reach out to the people is through the mass media, since the mass media
is the most effective and decisive system in our time for reaching out to people
- and thus a network that forms a spider’s web that captures unsuspecting visitors.
Of key importance in Rolf Aamot’s world of ideas are knowledge of how the
media exploit images and the visual dramaturgy they use to achieve their goals.
According to Rolf Aamot, good forms of media distinguish between ”I” and ”we”
- they offer a sense of belonging, proximity and intensity, while at the same time
respecting individuality and multiplicity. The ideal is to produce a social space that
allows both individual and collective autonomy using dialogues as the ideal form of
communication. ”Interaction in social space has been the forte of the labor movement
” (Aamot). For Aamot, culture is interaction and the art he seeks to produce
is art that fosters and strengthens interaction. Aamot believes that modern mass
media represent new public spaces and the powers that be seek to gain power over
this public space. Anyone who today seeks power seeks to control the media. In
this perspective, Aamot’s artistic project appears as an attempt to counter power.
Aamot’s pictures contain no mottoes, no figurations that we can identify directly with
political figures, events or current affairs – yet his entire artistic practice is deeply political.
In 1966, Rolf Aamot recorded the first ”music video” on Norwegian television -
using music composed by Arne Nordheim. At the time of its broadcast one year later,
it was the first time television had been used as an independent artistic medium.
Art needs to be included in the task of creating our total environment. The places
people meet and are attracted to each other and repelled from one another appear
as stages where the visual theatre unfolds. It is a dialogue theatre, where the dialogue
can be read not in the form of verbal statements, but in the form of
visually available shapes and colors. In this theatre what is most important
is vision and what one senses through vision. It’s not that strange that Rolf
Aamot has never received a central position in contemporary art, considering
that the dominant trend right from the 1960s has been to deconstruct and
to give less priority to vision in deference to words and their power.
Rolf Aamot’s own contribution to this genre was his visual music. His visual music
consisted of visual tones formed through the mechanical and electronic processing
of light. Aamot has experimented with light and movement and
how the interaction of these two components can be crystallized in the
form of an image. Aamot’s pictures in the form of laser painting, film and photographs can best be perceived as presentations of an electronic foundation
that forms scores that can be presented in several different ways.
Rolf Aamot’s pictures have an expression that is enticingly beautiful. The reason
why we perceive Aamot’s images as being beautiful in the conventional sense has
to do with the fact that his artistic style can be related to a generational style
which we associate with the abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. If one
gets bogged down in these references as a background for understanding the
pictures, however, one will often miss out on the fact that behind this visual
expression Aamot has quite another frame of reference, one that breaks radically
with many ideals on which the Parisian school of abstract painting was based.
Review of Rolf Aamot’s exhibition at the The National Museum of Photography
- PREUS PHOTOMUSEUM, Horten, Norway, 2003
Rolf Aamot has always been a restless and experimental artist who in particular has
realized the potential of developing his figurative language through the use of technological innovations. The technological side of his art alone could form the subject of an entire study. Technique has never been his goal, however; rather it has been a means of creating images. Rolf Aamot has been an active artist for almost fifty
years. His first major work was a commission to decorate the Museum of Paleontology in Oslo, which he concluded in 1955, the same year that he graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Art, Crafts and Design. During his time at the Academy, which he attended from 1958 until 1960, Rolf Aamot studied under Aage Storstein and Alexander Schultz – two painters whose roots can be traced to the efforts of the 1920s to unite figuration and abstraction under the impression of cubism and neoclassicism. In other words, Aamot had a very traditional academy education.
Aamot began his career as an artist at a time when young innovative pictorial
artists perceived themselves – and were perceived by the general public – as messengers for abstract painting. That is, abstract painting as it emerged in contemporary France. These painters paved the way for the evolution of three different directions: lyrical abstraction in painting, constructivist painting and spontaneous informalism. Irrespective of the choices made by individual artists, there was general consensus among them that images were two-dimensional and that everything in a picture was on one plane. Respect for the fact that an image was flat became a central issue. A successful picture is initially a decorative pattern on one plane, before it appears as anything else – e.g. a tree. A successful picture forms a visual whole consisting of material, color and shape which confirm the image’s two
dimensions. Contemporary paintings were essentially decorative paintings that
sought an ornamental expression. Illusionism was the domain of photography.
Even within the field of photography, the tendency has been that photography in
the 1950s and 1960s that wished to appear as ”artistic” noticeably attempted to
arrange a motif on the surface, so that a picture appears as though it attempts
to represent an arrangement of surface figures. Light and dark are transformed
into abstract patterns and appear as though their intention was to fulfill a compositional form taken from a recipe book describing good composition in paintings. It is remarkable in any case how such a great deal of photography that has regarded itself as ”artistic” has for long periods of time endeavored to capture sections of motifs and carry out cropping, which results in the picture appearing to be a harmonious entity where the format of the picture that is perceived of as a surface
is confirmed, whereas amateur photography to a far greater degree perceives the
motif as action in space. We can see this as the result of the fact that throughout
the period during which photographs have been taken the goal of the most prestigious
artistic technique until recently – painting – has been to address the surface.
In his later artistic career, Aamot has moved in the opposite direction of creating
images that are flat. On the contrary, Rolf Aamot has been concerned with creating
space. In particular, this has made it difficult to pigeonhole him in relation to
his contemporaries. Aamot’s imagery emerges in an environment where there
are dominant references to art history, which to some extent can be claimed
to conflict with the content of the ideas that the artist wishes to communicate.
If we use the term ”photography” in its literal sense as ”drawing with
light”, then Rolf Aamot has been a photographer who has seldom or never
been associated with photography. He is an artist who for almost 40 years
has been in the forefront when it comes to experimenting with photo-based
forms of visual expression within fields such as film, video and electronic
art, which he has materialized in the form of individual images produced
as laser paintings and now also as conventional chemical photography.
Aamot’s pictures raise our level of awareness, through their accentuation
of space, that photography is an art form that is linked in equal measure
to performance art such as the theatre as it is to paintings.
In 1969, Rolf Aamot presented his works at the Munch Museum, where he
applied the term ”visual theatre” to his work. On 24 February 1969, in a
full-page spread in VG, the Norwegian national daily, it was announced that
a new theatre had been founded in Oslo: ”The Visual Theatre, instigated by
the ”never-resting graphic artist and painter Rolf Aamot, 34, a campaigner for
the artistic use of our mass media such as film, television and newspapers”.
According to Rolf Aamot, the basis of ”visual theatre” is that our existence is not
linear and that life and art fuse to form one entity. The artist’s task is to ”program
so that the onlooker can be faced with choice, and thus take a creative role”.
Aamot wanted to bring people back to art. Not in the form of figures taken from baroque paintings, from the romantic period or contemporary modernistic figurative
painting. For Aamot, art is not a means with which to decorate, be it for everyday use
or for festive occasions; rather it is a means of recognition and acknowledgement.
Aamot has chosen to focus on two aspects of recognition: social and political
aspects. In his art, people return in the form of these two dimensions. Art should
be returned to the people and people should be in art. The best way he as an
artist can reach out to the people is through the mass media, since the mass media
is the most effective and decisive system in our time for reaching out to people
- and thus a network that forms a spider’s web that captures unsuspecting visitors.
Of key importance in Rolf Aamot’s world of ideas are knowledge of how the
media exploit images and the visual dramaturgy they use to achieve their goals.
According to Rolf Aamot, good forms of media distinguish between ”I” and ”we”
- they offer a sense of belonging, proximity and intensity, while at the same time
respecting individuality and multiplicity. The ideal is to produce a social space that
allows both individual and collective autonomy using dialogues as the ideal form of
communication. ”Interaction in social space has been the forte of the labor movement
” (Aamot). For Aamot, culture is interaction and the art he seeks to produce
is art that fosters and strengthens interaction. Aamot believes that modern mass
media represent new public spaces and the powers that be seek to gain power over
this public space. Anyone who today seeks power seeks to control the media. In
this perspective, Aamot’s artistic project appears as an attempt to counter power.
Aamot’s pictures contain no mottoes, no figurations that we can identify directly with
political figures, events or current affairs – yet his entire artistic practice is deeply political.
In 1966, Rolf Aamot recorded the first ”music video” on Norwegian television -
using music composed by Arne Nordheim. At the time of its broadcast one year later,
it was the first time television had been used as an independent artistic medium.
Art needs to be included in the task of creating our total environment. The places
people meet and are attracted to each other and repelled from one another appear
as stages where the visual theatre unfolds. It is a dialogue theatre, where the dialogue
can be read not in the form of verbal statements, but in the form of
visually available shapes and colors. In this theatre what is most important
is vision and what one senses through vision. It’s not that strange that Rolf
Aamot has never received a central position in contemporary art, considering
that the dominant trend right from the 1960s has been to deconstruct and
to give less priority to vision in deference to words and their power.
Rolf Aamot’s own contribution to this genre was his visual music. His visual music
consisted of visual tones formed through the mechanical and electronic processing
of light. Aamot has experimented with light and movement and
how the interaction of these two components can be crystallized in the
form of an image. Aamot’s pictures in the form of laser painting, film and photographs can best be perceived as presentations of an electronic foundation
that forms scores that can be presented in several different ways.
Rolf Aamot’s pictures have an expression that is enticingly beautiful. The reason
why we perceive Aamot’s images as being beautiful in the conventional sense has
to do with the fact that his artistic style can be related to a generational style
which we associate with the abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. If one
gets bogged down in these references as a background for understanding the
pictures, however, one will often miss out on the fact that behind this visual
expression Aamot has quite another frame of reference, one that breaks radically
with many ideals on which the Parisian school of abstract painting was based.
Review of Rolf Aamot’s exhibition at the The National Museum of Photography
- PREUS PHOTOMUSEUM, Horten, Norway, 2003