Underskog

Her eh…Sky

at Podium,
Hausmannsgate 34.
0182 Oslo

Welcome to the unveiling of Kristian Skylstad last work – ‘’The Bell Ajar’’

…
Reception Friday 5.11.10

at 9pm

To exchange a..

To sacrifice a lifetime of joy for a moment of bliss.

This is not a cheap and dull depiction of my generation of humans. It’s not a
down boiled story of nine old kids/young men enjoying the peak of their

lives-so-far. It’s not a cementation of the universal boyhood becoming
manhood toxic paradox that everybody with a penis must inevitably encounter.
It’s not a representation, not at all. It’s not a legacy in the making.

A legacy of how they are now, a legacy of how they hopefully will be and become

and behold it all… soon. This is not a confrontation with the self; it’s not a conversation with the selves of all these protagonists of tomorrow. This is not a campaign of perfectly bright minds fucking with the brightness, amplifying the density of the bright and clear and young mind. This is not punk aesthetics. This is not Norwegian nasty. This is not and will never be a good old story of bad young storytellers. It’s not a tale of epic proportions reflecting the essential and defining characteristics of today’s youth. It’s not about the generation of surfaces. It’s not something that belongs in books on shelves in homes of humans and this is not a juxtaposition from the misfortuned and famed. It’s merely a juxtaposition from the small jungle of Danes.

So we’re seated on this small Island in the centre of the country, with nothing but ourselves and everything we need for the week. We’re already high, and the overall atmosphere is slowly taking a hold of our foundations, transforming every thought into a potential masterpiece, letting every tiny feeling evolve from nothing into anything. We all chew on the last words said, reading the agreed importance of letting go of reality for a while. It seems that we all take this for happiness. I look around us and I see everything I want to see. Three I’. Imaginity. We hold on to that idea. It seems that we all take this idea for healthy. what a waste of bad behaviour having us all the way out here instead of somewhere where we would make a difference.

An idiot angel, I sit here and I imagine that.
I imagine an angel as an idiot; a dribbling foul-mouthed badly shaved sweat-soaked idiot Angel with ten empty beer cans and nothing to lose. I imagine this Idiot Angel confessing a lot of bad intentions in a hymn of destructive futuristic notes. I stir up the image, feed it fable-fuel, and suddenly I imagine this Idiot Angel crawling and falling down giant slides of time zones, landing six years from now right in front of my dumbstruck face that already knows nothing of any kind of sense of relevance, telling me it might never be too late.

Not sure I understand. It gets blurred now.

Waking up again, surfing my surroundings, finding nothing of significance, at first, but then
everything feels as if normal and well known. I watch everyone around getting foothold of reality. They recognize. I recognize… The glowsticks are all around us. 1500 of them, approximately, some might still be up on the street, creating a hermetic liquid fundament for the vehicles making their way. They might still turn any by-passer into a piece of instant art. Wonderful. The glowsticks are there, surely, and they somehow create an alternative space of immeasurable happiness, right there, only, right there. But only we, the nine, understand. This is not to be documented. It’s happening. I remember naked people lit up by the chemically conjured sticks that suddenly took over the events. I remember them running towards cars slowing down, passing by, and then speeding like when late for supper. Pitch black. Multiple fantasies on street level. Polychromed asphalt. I remember these strange things happening with one of the houses in the area. Something with a doorbell and the nine singing lollipop – lollipop – ooh – lolli – lolli – lolli.

We haven’t talked since the happening, but now someone tells me that he is the kind of person that
would buy, rather than burn, every Beatles album when Yoko Ono joined in, just to be sure
of knowing every aspect of the forthcoming downfall. He just realized that, he tells me. I tell him he must be a genius then. A genius of knowing forthcoming downfalls and being able to use them constructively in interest. I lay my head a bit to the left, so that I can see what is going on behind my two fellow fugitives, who sit across the table. My two friends on the run from reality, as we all call ourselves. Very poetic, very pathetic. The genius keeps talking, now more determined of what he had just realized was going to change his life. The only life he has, as he says. I lay my head some more, and now I see the bizarre image of what seems to be adults playing with each other. ‘adults are getting younger, when children should get older.’- the statement I tell myself. It’s bizarre, this event. Bizarre and incredibly alarming. One friend is trying to stand on his head, spinning his legs in a frenzy, screaming ‘NOTHINGNESS IS WHERE HE WANTS US TO BELONG.’ The other friend just stands there, a few feet behind the spinning madness, crying softly, sobbing some unrecognizable words while holding his right hand to his left chest. He starts scratching his left chest, easily at first, then increasingly aggressive. The music starts. Soothingly amplified drones of tones engage in a loving dance. Fatality approaches, we know that now. This is some sort of seriousness. He scratches harder and harder. Blood appears from his skin. The sobbing sounds attains an understandable level and I am sure that I hear the words ‘I have to reach my soul to know.’ Everything turns unrealistic, but the sane heart-skipping chock wave that normally occurs at these points of seriousness, fails to materialize. The spectacle kicks in and thoughts come out. I suddenly feel my hand holding something. I look down and see several long sticks of several wonderful colours, glowing and madly glancing in the total darkness of night. I turn my sight towards my friend whose chest is getting more read in each tick of the watch, which I have already mislaid, and then I get the idea. I reconsider, read some mental letters, but make up my mind. A throw. The muscle mechanism of my shoulder begins and soon my whole arm is in motion. Moved into motion, and made into myth, my arm gets filled with ultra active tension. The tension of a swing away. I think of sports moments, where the tension of any finale is unbearably vital. Almost crucial. I consider myself. Imaginity. At a peak-point I finally let go of the glowsticks, leaving them airborne and grown up, ready for the show. Cast into uncontrollable responsibility of the potential masterpiece. ‘Master your peace and be as free as possible,’ I whisper at the glowsticks. The tempo is turned down, slow motions. Cast into the fire of the incalculable void that we like to call the future, I see the glowing sticks of several colours float in open air, breathing free for the first time. They create history, as they go, they create their own beginning in freedom. I feel all this while feeling nothing at all. It’s a weird set of emotions. Everything and nothing. Deported and free, the glowsticks hit my bleeding friend in the stomach. He is looking down, concerned about something, stirred up by the insides of his left chest, and he sees them. Several glowing sticks of several glowing colours hitting his stomach, making their way to the point where the elastic feature of fat validates and then bounces them back into the dark void, where only their own presence light up anything. I look at this and I say ‘nothing brighter than a glow stick at the edge of night.’ And at the peak of already determined anxiety, my friend seizes his excavation of his soul. He stops the dig and looks up instead. Music ascends in a passive-aggressive manner, encloses the tension a bit longer. The slowed motion of my sight deprives me of any realistic chance of having my mind at hand in this weird wonder-wired happening, but what I do get my friend saying is this; ‘I’m sure that I don’t understand.’ He looks composed now, clarity of some sort, but when he finally opens his mouth, no sound is made. Nothing. He repeats these mute words, that much I understand. He repeats them and I finally make my way to understanding them.

I don’t see anything… I really don’t see anything… I see nothing and this is real. Maybe it’s time to wake up.

That’s what I tell myself.

- Louis Scherfig

Yes.

And a quote:

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

That’s more a question but a quote too. The guy who is dead..

Welcome

The guy who wrote it is dead so he doesn’t care if i credit him.

I think.