Doing Time - Tony Karlsson Savci

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Doing Time

Tony Karlsson Savci

May 14 - Summer 2025

Texts by Andria Nyberg Forshage + Antics

The first time Max went to New York was to celebrate his mom’s birthday. He bought a pair of Ray-Bans and his card got canceled because it was the first transaction he made in the US. It was right before he started art school and didn’t really know the ins and outs of life.

Max has known tiny for a long time. They must have met sometime when Max studied in Gothenburg, it may have been with Alice and Claes and that gang, or maybe in connection with Max and Emilio and Lars having Revenue. Anyway, they got along, both having a playful approach to art and creation. Tony did a thing at Index 19 in March 2016, raising the price of the drinks and donating the profit to Ingen människa är illegal.

Max and tiny had a band called Jazzkatt, or maybe it wasn’t a band but more of a gang, together with Alexandra Karpilovski. They played at the NUDA paper release in April 2017 at Young Art on Karlavägen, they’d been models and had a photoshoot with clothes from Anders Haal before. They played music at the concert or the performance. Flute was a favorite instrument. Max walked around on all fours pretending to be cat, meowing and stroking himself up against against people’s legs. He wrote a text for that thing:

Blickandes över de
östermalmska vyerna
möttes en ljummen afton sex ögon det stod skrivet i stjärnorna att; med smekande steg
och tanken på deg
att vara jazzkatt
det är vårat kneg

tiny and Max did an exhibition at Alma in March 2017 that was prompted by painting and drawing at tiny’s studio at Konstfack. They wrote things like I AM AN ARTIST, AWAKE and JAG SKA BARA VARA MIG SJÄLV on canvases in different colors. They also wrote AWAKE on rocks and painted at Max’s house with Zhala. Tony invited Max to Ann-Sofie Back’s company party in Värtahamnen, it was just before the company went bankrupt. Max, Tony and Zhala made a pillow room, there was karaoke and cute lamps and it was all very cozy. It was quite a messy party but lovely in every way.

They made music together, hung out quite a lot in Bagarmossen and later in Skrapan, and at Konstfack, went to events, burned incense. They were at Daniel Iinatti’s gabber party on a boat on Söder Mälarstrand and walked along the shore in the morning. It was sometime after that that they drifted apart. They found other contexts and other patterns in life.

Intermission

Max showed tiny’s work to Katarina and they agreed that it would be nice with a studio talk. After a big show at Södertälje konsthall and a 3-month residency at ISCP via Konstnärsnämnden, we were curious to see what tiny would do with the promise of a gallery show. We had casual Google Meets studio visits during those 3 months in New York—the city that produces 30 million tons of waste every year—tiny in the morning after yoga class and Antics in bed in the evening.

tiny describes how masses of Amazon packages were delivered to the residency every day to the artists that resided inside. It’s pandemic really, how out of touch artists often are with their materials. An exhibition text can make many idealistic claims but completely leave out the fact that the whole show was bought on Amazon or Clas Ohlson or was printed on demand, be the artist an intellectual or not. These cardboard boxes that had delivered the other artists’art to them became tinys’material. Max’s and tiny’s art thus have in common that it’s often made up of what art normally thrusts away. There is something as destructive as it is resourceful in this movement.

Art is a big black hole. Max and tiny pick up what’s on the event horizon, turn it into art and thus feed the hole (we are no physicists). tiny describes how they took a walk by Hudson River every evening, getting to know its meandering landscape of debris. A grey piece of plastic caught their eye. They passed by it on several occasions, awaiting the momentum to pick it up. It travelled all the way to Antics, you can find it on the floor in the first room—in case the artist didn’t change their mind about the work and took it out of the show.

Art that has a pretense of being in control of itself is often not very good. tiny makes no claim of being in complete control of their materials or people’s reactions. We’ve conversed vividly with tiny about art, that of others and that of their own, yet we’d find it both impossible and meaningless to pin down exactly what these works are supposed to be. Hence the effortless control.

Katarina likes to paint a mental picture of tiny in New York, saying that the works are jazzy in a 50s NYC zig- zaggy kind of way and tries to remember what movie poster with four leaning rectangles that they remind her of. She realises that she pictures their studio as Stella ́s studio filled with his Black Paintings in Hollis Frampton’s photo series The Secret World of Frank Stella, ”what you see is what you see”. She tries to find Elaine de Kooning’s Pure Paints a Picture to give to tiny but it’s nowhere to be found on the blogs. Her referential impulse goes crazy. It’s apparently a regret that she didn’t buy one of David Hammons snow balls, showed some skin in a Jack Smith film or had her work appropriated by Louise Lawler in that show at Metro Pictures or lived next door to Bettina, too old to under take the Whitney Independent Study program and too constantly emerging for a MoMa Retrospective. Anyone from NYC is probably laughing now and probably for reasons that she will never understand. What are we aiming at? At the constant always-already has been. Didn’t take that picture of Adrian Piper in wet paint, didn’t fight with Jack Goldstein, but come to think of it one kind of did. There’s a constellation of stars in each local universe. Katarina asks if tiny has been to any rooftop parties. tiny is blushing. What you see is what YOU see.

Once tiny was back in Stockholm, we went to Bagarmossen to pick up tiny + two enormous suitcases filled with art and took it from there.

SKRÄPETS HISTORIA
Andria Nyberg Forshage

Om samtiden framstår som en oöverskådlig labyrint är det en tillfällighet. Repetitionens logik förblir densamma trots skiftande omständigheter. Det som blir över efter upprepningen är skillnaden mellan då och nu. Alltså har skräpet en historia. Det följer en rytm som saknar rutin men gärna spelar på lotto. En återkommande startpunkt för skräpets historia är avvikelser från en normalfördelningskurva, vilket kan tolkas som queer. Genom att samla och sortera skräpet i en slumpmässig ordning tecknar konstnären ett porträtt av samtidens återkomst. I dess tomma mittpunkt upprepar sig samma form som på dess utsida. Utlyft och upphängt bildar skräpet en spegel som enbart reflekterar sig själv och därför inrymmer historien som totalitet.

Annorlunda uttryckt: historien upprepar sig som ett landskap. David Wojnarowicz fångade detta väl när han i sina memoarer, Close to the knives:A memoar of disintegration (1991), reflekterar över en färd genom den skräphög som av dess grundare fått namnet Amerikas förenta stater. Han skriver:“Maybe the enormity of the cloudless sky is a void reflecting the mirrorlike thought of myself.”Där himlen och avgrunden sammanfaller med en själv uppgår både det transcendentala och den inre upplevelsen i samtidens nihilism. Skräpets historia är jagets historia, men utan dess innehåll, eftersom det redan har konsumerats. Kretsloppet närmar sig nollpunkten. Logistik, hanteringen av komplexa flöden, syftar till effektivisering av denna process. När skräp levereras samma dag som det skickas uppstår en feedbackslinga som överför egenskaper från insida till utsida och vice versa.

Ett exempel på det kallas zoonotisk överföring eller smitta, som när en form eller gest överförs från ett medium till ett annat. Genom cirkulationen av innehåll tenderar upprepningen av betydelser mot kollaps. Ett annat
sätt att skildra ihållande påfrestning är genom konsten och dess effekter på kroppen över tid. Porpentine Charity Heartscape beskriver skräpets betydelse för en transestetik genom begreppet allostas, som syftar på en överbelastning av komplexa och sammankopplade system såsom immunsystemet, det endokrina systemet, hjärt- och kärlsystemet och nervsystemet. I sin essä “Hot allostatic load”(The New Inquiry, 2015) skriver hon under rubriken TRASH ART:“When it was really bad, I wrote:‘Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all

i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome”. Den ökade stressen på kollektiva system som ansamlingen av skräp utgör indikerar hur transtillstånd blir till allmäntillstånd.

Skräpets historia drivs av en motor som tidigare kallades klasskamp men idag är bättre känt som kundens tillfredställelse med det genomförda köpet. Genom att leverera varor och tjänster enligt en nyskapande mall skapar konstnären ett mervärde som kommer samhället till gagn. Kvar efter utbytet blir högar av skräp. Det lämnas på gatan, sorteras i utsedda kärl och förs till soptippar där det bränns, återvinns, eller exporteras. Sophantering är ett exempel på cirkulär ekonomi där vinsten går att upprepa vid varje instans längs vägen mot sammanbrott. Eftersom tempot ökar exponentiellt är det viktigt att erbjuda möjligheter till reflektion och kritisk distans. Här spelar konsten en nyckelroll, eftersom den både bevisar och undergräver föreställningen om tingens inneboende värde. Det kallas för avantgarde och följer samma logik som innovation och hållbarhet.

Historien lär oss att den som går i första ledet i själva verket går i sina föregångares fotspår, men baklänges. Avantgardet går alltså sist, efter det historiska avantgardet och neoavantgardet, och på visst avstånd från transavantgardet. Det väsentliga är att det förblir nyskapande, på samma sätt som undanstädandet av skräp är den nödvändiga förutsättningen för nedskräpning. Gilles Deleuze uttryckte denna dynamik rättframt när han i sin utredning av produktionen av mening (sens) och nonsens, på engelska som The logic of sense (1990), skrev: “Do we then sense the approach of an eternal return no longer having anything to do with the cycle, or indeed of the entrance to a labyrinth, all the more terrible since it is the labyrinth of the unique line, straight and without thickness?”. Där den odelbara tiden överskrider den delbara framträder skräpets historia. Och tiden, visar det sig, gör sig bäst på bild.