Quest For Fire

“In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth

When the land was swamp and caves were home

In an age when prize possession was fire

To search for landscapes, men would roam

Then the tribes, they came to steal their fire

And the wolves, they howled into the night

As they fought a vicious angry battle

To save the power of warmth and light” 1

Just think. Midwinter in the old days. Dark and cold and awful. The pantry is perhaps more than half empty. There they sit, shivering and freezing, their fingers and toes blue with cold. Fear and psychotic anxiety, superstition turned up to 11. Best to appease the barn gnome just in case, we'll take all the peace of mind we can buy for porridge. I'm not saying that Santa Claus doesn't exist, mind you. Since the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Santa Claus has been the symbolic patriarch of capitalism, essentially running an unimaginable gift economy. We sing that Santa Claus sits on the lawn with his Christmas porridge, so good and sweet. That was in the old days; here, the same Santa Claus sits on an electric tricycle—a wheel man, a scrap elf, for that matter. I can relate. The outfit found its savior in a scrap heap or a garbage dump or something. To claim that he is out cycling is stretching it a bit, but spinning is definitely present in this leg still life. He sits backwards, no one can say why, and spins away. On an embroidered fabric in imitation wood.

The exhibition is accompanied by the sound of honest work and institutional waste. When I heard about Santa Claus Keller Skousen at the recycling station, or the garbage dump as it used to be called, I was blown away. What the hell are people throwing away full-size Santa Clauses now? It reminded me of the streets of Berlin after Christmas.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Maybe Santa Claus has lost his magical powers and has to try to start over again – the first magic trick: making fire. “Magic tricks are always fun, both for the person performing them and for those watching,” writes American author Walt Disney in “Mickey's Magic Book” from 1975. “How many times have you sat and pondered over some matches, for example?”

Keller Skousen's IG handle is @grill_ting, and already here we see a deep interest in wood. Spin on the rock. Teach a naked person to spin. Petroleum is now what it once was, among other things a plastic wooden table. Here, too, someone has been playing with fire. So the plastic has not burned like a wooden table would, instead it kind of melted in a weird way. It is an imitation like the wood the carvings are made from. An imitation wood carving of a hand holding a tool made of a real stone.

I can relate to pyromaniac instincts—we wrapped toy soldiers in gunpowder rags and office paper and set them alight with lighter fluid and air rifles and everything else we could find that would burn. It was fun until it wasn't anymore.

Text by Rasmus Hungnes

The exhibition is supported by Statens Kunstfond.

1 Iron Maiden - Quest For Fire (1983)