Text, Sculpture Architecture, Skissernas Museum

With Time as Surface

Something about Sivert Lindblom's Sculptures

In Sivert Lindblom's sculptures, time is two-dimensional. I don't immediately know what I mean by that, but it seems to me that time, to the extent that it can be said to exist in sculptures at all, in Sivert's case at least does not appear as the forward-pointing arrow we often envision when time is discussed. No, it appears as two-dimensional, as a surface.

When I sat down to write something about my experiences of the sculptural world of forms that Sivert presents, this formulation came first. In its ambiguity, it could be something to follow up on or investigate. Thus, in Sivert Lindblom's sculptures, time is two-dimensional.

It is a formal language that seeks the timeless. Such a formulation has something apt about it, but it is not entirely correct. Indeed, the strict spatial geometry that seems to inhabit all these urns, pillars, friezes, pyramids, and whatever else the objects may be, could have thrived equally well in objects and buildings from Egyptian, Greek, or Roman antiquity. But it would be wrong to say that anything is directly derived from there. Nothing in the finished forms and surfaces or in the figures themselves is borrowed from these or any of the other classical periods in art history. However, the objects seem familiar with art from these times. There are ingredients that can lead our thoughts to times long past.

To the extent that we can imagine a corresponding way of looking at the time ahead of us, it seems to me that Sivert's sculptures behave in the same way. It is quite obvious that we are facing a new form. Bronze, tiles, cast iron, brick, plastic, and wood fill disciplined spatial-geometric frameworks in such a way that these "designed" objects feel new. Regardless of the actual timeline of when one thing or another came into being, one wants to say that these things do not look like what we made just recently. Nor do they look like what others are making right now. Rather, Sivert Lindblom's sculptures seem to seek connections with, or perhaps establish relationships with, a time that lies ahead of us.

Thus, these objects indicate a time both ahead of and behind us. At the same time, they are made now, and it is we who live now who can conceive of the urn object, the brick pillar spiral, or the profile body in this way.

So, in the end, time spreads out two-dimensionally beneath the objects. You want to place the forms somewhere on the time surface, but like magnetically repelling objects, they want to float away to another spot on the game board. Ahead, behind, in the middle, or perhaps to the side.

Well, but what does this mean now? How does such unease or indecision arise in the viewer of these sculptures?

Let me begin with another reflection. As I have hinted, Sivert's sculptures are often, and especially in his later production, characterized by a striking rigor in spatial geometry. In the drawings that accompany the creation of several of these objects, the formal language appears as circles, squares, and rectangles, or as combinations and assemblies of such units or parts thereof.

Often we find crystal-clear cut surfaces that have arisen from the dissection of the original simple or simply constructed forms. Add the sculpture's three dimensions here, and the formal language gains the same rigor in space.

In this, Sivert reminds one of Brâncuși. Or for that matter, Peter Celsing. Architecture is never far away in Sivert Lindblom's works, so why not think of Ragnar Östberg's world of forms? Let this, in its elegance, be subjected to Brâncuși's saw or Celsing's drafting pen, and we have yet another analogy!

The comparison with architectural language is not foolish. Often, Sivert first draws with engineering precision. Following the drawings, a model maker produces a casting model with the utmost precision, and on that, foundries in turn create their molds. Thereafter, the original can be cast.

Thus, in Sivert's case, it is rare for the artist's own hand to leave an imprint on the works. The times it does occur — as in the early bronze-cast clays — it is not primarily the effort of the hand or the craftsmanship that we perceive. Instead, it is the fractured surface of the clay, the casting seam, polishing, or oxide luster that we notice, as these material qualities play against the representational association, the balancing act of construction, or the progression of form.

In precisely this way — in the absence of thumbprints, the bite of the chisel, or the pull of the saw — Sivert is suddenly Brâncuși's opposite. It is as if he did not want the temporary presence of his own body to disturb the universally conceptual aspect of the representation. The objects stand free from human touch. Objects have form.

In all of this lies a self-imposed rigor. A rigor that thus manifests itself in the form of selection principles but also in rules for how the overall figures may be constructed. Which basic forms are allowed? How may the parts of the basic forms be assembled into a new composite form? How may a part be repeatedly added to itself to complete the expression of the overall figure, for example through construction or elevation?

In Sivert's early works, one can sense that this strict restraint is precisely self-imposed. Consciously adopted as a disciplinary working method. The strong will to form shown by the early bronzes, which even there is tempered by the abruptly interrupted, seeks for its continued production an even clearer counterweight in restrictive rules, a framework of mathematizing coolness or calculated geometric precision. Compare any of the early bronzes with the brick spirals in Frescati, and you will find the same unyielding core of formal desire behind the mathematically ordered brick spiral, with its cast-iron crest of carved cylindrical addition, as behind casting seams, bronze oxide, and clay fractures.

In this tension between the expansive will to form and the simultaneously legible restraint lies part of the explanation for the unease we can experience in these sculptures. The mood is not unlike what we associate with the so-called Mannerist art of 16th-century Italy, but here, of course, the means and the time are different.

But there is more to say about the cause of the feeling of uncertainty or unease that we can experience in encountering Sivert Lindblom's sculptures. I believe it concerns the unease that arises from the simultaneity of the inviting and the unresolved. And then we are back where we started, with two-dimensional time and the search for a new form.

During modernism, art was created that ventured into the completely abstract. It became its own language and its own self-contained entity. Things like rhythms and color harmonies became the only anchor points in reality, and all other normal representation was gone. The representational in an everyday linguistic sense did not occur.

Sivert comes from this art tradition, but as I perceive it, he takes a drastic step back, or forward, into the representational from the very beginning. He seems to snatch a piece of representational moment in everything he does. A shard at most, but sometimes more. This shard remains in the kneading of the abstract's dominance, so that it persists even in the finished form. And during the formal desire's journey of discovery, with all the self-imposed rules and creative inhibitions, a new form has emerged!

Thus, here we stand before something we have not seen before, yet which contains a representational shard.

I recognize Nike in some way! Surely this is a wing, a leg, someone running? Later we ask: Isn't this some kind of guillotine setup, and surely this is a tree or a tree graft anyway? And even later: I see exactly how the bricks are laid in spirals in the pillars, and surely they together form something reminiscent of a Stonehenge?

Precisely. But what does this new thing actually represent? Enticed by the representational shard, we are, by the entirety of the unresolved, invited to take a stance on the new form. To give meaning to the new formal language, or to place the object on the flatness of the time surface where it belongs.

What I have discussed so far concerns the formal language itself in Sivert Lindblom's sculptures. I have tried to pinpoint what I perceive as the unifying core for the entire production. The objects certainly look different in different periods, but they all share the same formal problem.

But to venture into articulating this formal problem with words is actually to simultaneously begin to state the sculptures' subject matter. As in all good art, the formal language cannot this time either be separated from the subject matter. Nike is, of course, Nike in some way. And if the title of another sculpture is stated to be Adam or perhaps Eve, then that sculpture naturally deals with precisely that subject matter in some way.

But, to say it again, the treatment of the subject matter is never carried out with representational means beyond the enticing shard. Even in the large plaster cast, where Sivert himself sits in an Egyptian classical, geometrizing posture, the massively representational is merely a starting point for addressing such formal problems.

And the problematics concern the very nature of sculpture! What is sculpture capable of? How does sculptural form come into being? The formal will's joy of discovery begins its journey through the work anew.

I believe I will now be understood if I say that even the titles, or let us say the representational parts of the works, are self-imposed and thus disciplinary boundaries within which the testing of sculpture's distinctiveness and capability takes place.

Sivert repeatedly seeks a new sculptural form by attacking a self-drawn thematic boundary with his abstracting formal desire. Perhaps that can be said as a summary.

With such an attitude, the sculptures will become the result of investigations into the "abstract" linguistic capacity of sculpture. Qualities such as weight, elevation, repose, balance, direction, or construction are what are examined again and again.

In balanced encounters between such qualities, still within the abstract's register, such characters and temperaments can emerge. A building can be said to have acquired a character of rigor, weight, resilience, or something similar. Or perhaps even something more complex like "wishing itself up" or "longing for". But these characters have been produced solely with architectural language — through architecture. In the same way that architecture is architecture and nothing else, sculpture is sculpture and is only about the means of sculpture. But these means can be handled in a similar way, so that the same kind of general or "abstract" qualities or characters arise.

As mentioned, architecture is never far away in Sivert Lindblom's sculptures. It is therefore not surprising that he has come to dedicate such a large part of his work to what is called public art.

I imagine that the idea of two-dimensional time is applicable in this regard as well. Sivert Lindblom seems to me to have an attitude drawn from a time behind us. A time when architecture was the mother of the arts, and when all art forms were integrated with this mother in a common narrative.

However, he carries out his commissions with a clear focus on new form in such a way that the results seem to suggest that the future can recreate such an interplay between the arts.

In Frescati's two brick pillar sites, this balancing act is materialized. The elusive magnetic light is present there, alongside a subdued coordination with the landscape, the houses, the meadows, and the somewhat gnarled trees.

Stefan Alenius Photo: Sveriges Arkitekter