— Christoffer Joergensen's Notes

Make a product of chance look like a product of the imagination.

Make a chance encounter look willed.

From this perspective, the self is a kind of calm around which the worldly spectacle, the frenzy of desire unfolds.

Proudly call yourself an artist once your project redeems you from ever wanting to become one.

Obviously, it’s difficult to determine precisely when that will be the case.

40, 50 years ago the idea replaced style. Today, the template replaces the idea.

I remember Harold Pinter saying that, when he has invented a character, it begins to write itself. The play starts to unfold on its own terms.
So Pinter is like a god that puts elements in the pot, then throws the spark creating a world that, from then onwards, essentially writes itself. Top down spark for a bottom up world.

Kenneth Baker draws our attention to Edward Burtynsky’s

oblique but insistent emphasis on what the camera inevitably excludes. There, if anywhere, lies the truth that is left to photography in the contemporary world: it accurately mirrors not the way things work, but our thunderstruck incapacity to comprehend the total world system . . . We may glimpse local spectacles and calamities, but never see the situation whole. The occasional open horizons in ‘Shipbreaking’, ‘Nickel Tailings’ and ‘Oil Refineries’ remind us of the vast distances across which industries in the global economy interconnect.

In a complex, non-linear, counter-intuitive world described by quantum physics and holding super computers (not to mention the global market, of course) is there not, today, a great demand for the story telling artist, for artists that supply linearity, intuitive structures and simplicity (even stupidity)? At the same time, art itself, in all its seemingly random multiplicity, appears to mirror this worldly complexity, certainly, when looked at from a distance. Yet however drifting and unoriented art currently appears to be, however abstract and confusing, there is still an overarching feeling that art is valuable to us as humans. Even if, today, the artwork can merely supply us with non-meaning, non-faces, non-orientation, non-art, we value it in some strange way, perhaps for daring to struggle with the substance that makes up our epoch, or perhaps precisely for not having to struggle with it. Beyond satisfying our individualistic desire for the myth of the one, the genius etc. (a myth which in our time can merely be the veneer of a whole world of hidden collaborations, ideas theft and anonymous production) what does art inspire in us?  What will people be inspired by in future? The stories of an individual’s genius? What myth replaces the “rags to riches” story? What will be the future definition of the imagination? After the myth of complete aimlessness, after post-modernism, will we return, for example, to a sort of middle-age harmony between the crafty individual and the wholesome collective?

In a time of constant revolution, of revolutions against the constant revolution, the artist implements small and carefully orchestrated mutations on the basis of her close studies of what has gone before, small changes that may or may not translate in history into great leaps.

If art is always linked to pleasure and if the artist is always supposed to have fun making stuff, then the question is: what is most pleasurable to us? I find no pleasure in expressionist outbursts of vivid colours onto canvas or the half-pornographic gestures of some performances. There is more pleasure to be had for me while implementing all kinds of laws & rules and all kinds of techniques & methods than in exhibitionism of any kind. Then how about turning the standard artistic formula around: “I make myself useful in art so that I can be useless in life.” Maybe complete freedom in life means to be free even of pleasure.

I’m becoming increasingly fascinated with the field of tension between chance and imagination. Photography, with which you can capture much more than you’d hoped for but much less than you want, could stand for chance in my work. And what if the imagination is nothing but the dialogue between different forms of chance? In my view, that is precisely what the Grogram project is an example of: imagination as chance encounter.