Jasper Sebastian Stürup

Take off 20:01. Cataloue text. Aarhus Kunstmuseum (AROS). 2001

In his graphic works, Jasper Sebastian Stürup uses the computer as his artistic implement, in addition to his drawings made by hand. Instead of a studio full of etching needles, copperplates and press-blocks, he avails himself of the wonder of the technological age. Nonetheless, Stürup is using one of the simplest drawing programs. As a matter of fact, he prefers to make explicitly visible just which program he is using. It is supposed to look like what it is. With the computer graphics, the drawing come to be very direct in their formal idiom, inasmuch as with Stürup, it is the first attempt that counts. This renders the drawings immediate and insistent in a different way than they would be if they were very nuanced and richly detailed pencil drawings. The drawings come be stalagmites and industrial design: juxtapositions that fool the eye as well as the mind.

In his work, Stürup presented a number of clay sculptures with toy ambulances placed inside them, together with a series of sound pictures. Togethere with the toy cars, the untreated clay evoked the images of a somewhat weird universe, witch is naïve and high-tech at one and the same time. The sound picture series of the computer drawings have to do with an artist who is dreaming about being one of the great abstract macho painters. "The artist" thus create a number of primitive imitations of the great men of abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnet newman and Sam francis. It goes without saying that there is a wide gulf between the Americans' huge and powerful and passionate paintings and stürup's small, simple, delicate and fragile drawings. The viewer comes up against a slightly cool irony.

Fluens Forlag (the Fly's Publications) is Stürup's own. Through this setup, it has been possible to publish the drawings without any necessity to exhibit them. What this means is that if one wants to buy the artist's works, there is no need to pay the exorbitant prices to a gallery. One can make do by buying the book. In this case, the artwork has been created for the book and, in this respect, the book is the artwork. In this way, the artwork can be distributed under entirely different circumstances than if it were at a museum or in the gallery. Printing your own art in the form of a book or putting most of it out on the internet fosters certain completely different possibilities for reaching the public than what is provided by the normal exhibition space. This is not merely an artistic, but also a political grip, which has it origins all the way back in the poster art of the 1910-20s. but there are also origins in Warhol and pop art, whose conceptual treatment of art plays against mass production. In Stürup's work, the pop culture of everyday life is sliced together with the new media. And in the meeting with art, this affords new possibilities.

In a motific sense, the Spider Hi-Fi drawings are anchored in sound in sound, in record players and loudspeakers, which are spread around the room with diamonds, spider webs and mountains, which rotate on the record player to the music's energetic repetition. these very fragile drawings mixed (as if Stürup were somekind of DJ) with hi-fi and computer graphics and what he leave behind is a cool but also a somewhat melancholy sensation.

?: A strange centrifugal universe - both formally and thematically - binds the fragments of everyday life and stylized pictures in your works together into a space with physical presence. Is this a "near" space that we are standing in front of?

!: If you're thinking about a near space as an everyday space and a personal space, then the answer is absolutely 'yes'. And in what i have drawn, there is also something very private and something intimate, and present, in contradistinction to a photograph, which is printed or copied from something else.
The thing in my work are founded to a great extend upon a layer of fascination, a fascination with space for example, where customary and even standardized space-types in my reworking come to function as mental spaces while at the same time, they also are, for instance, a living room set.

?: In connection with assembly of an exhibition of political art, you recently stated that on this occasion you realized that your own art sometimes also touched upon the political. Is this because everything is political, or what?

!: there are many things going on in all this. On one level, what it concerns is being an artist. Among other things, being an artist ia a political action, because you make your own rules and you weed out certain other matters. But in a more specific sense, it revolves around certain works that i have made where i could see that some of the written commentaries which i insert into the works can also be read as a societal reflection, but still in the personal 1:1 perspective - from one person to another. There is, for instance, the drawing with the caption, "architects, i don't care anymore".