At the time, it seemed like a clear enough concept. This is 1993, on the opening night of a brand new Stockholm gallery. In the middle of an exhibition consisting of bleak writings and drawings on the wall - 'like telephone doodles', in the words of the press release - the artist Bjarne Melgaard, outfitted in a brand-new Thierry Mugler jacket, picks up the gallery phone and places a call to his boyfriend in Oslo.¹ The call - which may or may not be experienced as a performance - soon evolves into a full-blown quarrel. The boyfriend does not appreciate Melgaard's antics. He does not like being drawn into an art situation in this way. He finds Melgaard's work, his aesthetic strategies, meaningless and exploitative - and tells him so, loud and clear. Melgaard, not one to mince his words, gives as good as he gets, all the while discreetly popping his habitual pills. But in the heat of the moment they spill out of his pocket and all over the floor, pathetic figures of a situation out of control.

If it was a performance - and the press release had certainly announced it as such - it was a performance gone wrong. Actually, Melgaard had imagined the whole thing in less specific and more cautious terms: not even really a performance, but more of a coolly ephemeral pose: a well-dressed lover's phone exchange set off by an ephemeral wall drawing. Something more in the spirit of the polished melancholy of a George Michael song, where gusts of passion and cruelty are kept in check by of one of the strictest design programmes in the history of pop. And yet the terms of the failure - the all-out pathos, the lack of control - were also to become the terms of Melgaard's success in the late 1990s. Those were the insignia that made it possible to read his work in terms of the then-current discourse of transgression and abjection, a starkly anti-formalist and 'anti-aesthetic' undermining of the values of white heterosexist culture and its privileged symbolic and aesthetic forms. The notion of performance (or a performative accessing of the real) was obviously key to this artistic paradigm; the more outrageous, the better. This was, after all, the time of the positive re-evaluation of the work of the Vienna Actionists, of Carolee Schneemann, of Valie Export. It was also the moment when Detroit depression joined LA slacker culture in the gut-wrenchingly limp offerings of Mike Kelley, where failure took on a distinctly critical edge for the first time. All over the Western art world, male artists were either crying or pissing in their pants, or both.

At first glance, Melgaard's work seemed only too well adapted to this context. In an epoch of chaotic installation work, Melgaard appeared intent on trumping all in terms of pure disorderly mass, in a refusal to provide points of orientation or the possibility of survey. Walls were covered with drawings, handwritten notes, manuscripts for unfinished novels, photographs and cut-outs from fashion or news magazines, which were again covered by paintings, framed watercolours, gouaches and designer shopping bags. Tables heaped with objects of all kinds - books, stacks of drawings, medication, records, clothing, wax figures and bronze sculptures - barred access to the walls. Scribbles and drawings covered the surfaces of the bronze sculptures and wax figures; a dense smattering of written-on yellow Post-it notes covered every possible object. Huge pieces of knitted fabric divided the space or lay heaped in corners: endless strings of crocheted wool criss-crossed the room. Half-opened crates and boxes revealed more objects, more paintings. In the factory buildings that housed parts of Manifesta 2 in 1998, a huge painting floated in an indoor swimming pool constructed for the occasion.² Other paintings were scattered around the water's edge amongst trees decorated with toilet roll and a monitor showing a short film of penguins with comments written directly on the celluloid in black marker pen.

Faced with this chaos, critics tended to focus on what seemed to be the only fixed points. Attention would go towards anything suggestive of a theme or a narrative, instances, apparently, of representation or opinion. In the beginning, most of these seemed laudable enough. Youthful Scandinavian depression - cool! Oedipal aggression against academic Minimalists - right on! Articulations of the reality of gay sexuality - great! As time passed, however, the points of orientation seemed less laudable and increasingly fell outside the canon of transgressive art practice. Extreme drug-driven bodybuilding - anyone? Black metal right-wing church burners? Suicidal addiction? Gay death cult snuff Internet files? The implicit violence of such themes triggered the closure of several exhibitions - including a big museum show at the MARTa Herford - for offending public sensibility.³ With violence, and the lack of any clearly articulated denunciation of violence in the work itself, Melgaard's work was, paradoxically, increasingly conflated with the world of simple representation or information. All of a sudden it was as if it was simply expressive of a social reality in relation to which it seemed to have no critical distance.

Alternatively - thanks to the justifications of curators actually exhibiting this material - a critical position was invented, this time in the name of ethnographic documentation-cum-self-representation. To read, for instance, Beate Ermacora (the curator of a particularly dark and difficult exhibition at Kunsthalle zu Kiel) is to be taught to appreciate the violence of Melgaard's work as a sort of social reportage that sheds critical light on marginal and little-known social phenomena.⁴ Why an essentially ethnographic project should be so chaotic and unwieldy in its use of texts, objects and imagery, so given to self-contradiction and obliqueness, was not really answered. That is, it was implicitly associated with the realm of personal experience, as if this chaos was just the natural discharge of a troubled subcultural self charging through the walls of the art institution. Since, on an explicit level, it was associated with the self-mutilation actions of Abramovic, Brouwn, Brus, Burden, Gerz and Schwarzkogler, this self was ultimately validated in terms of institutional critique: Melgaard was said to be testing 'the conceptual boundaries of art' through the (violent) use of his own person.⁵ As Ann Demeester, curator of the closed MARTa Heford show, glibly asserted, 'it is hard to know where art stops and reality begins'.⁶

But, given the fact that very little systematic evidence of such personal bodily implication in the space of the work itself actually exists, how hard could it really be? The 1996 telephone event was, after all, a crashing failure, never intended to function on such a level of intimacy at all. In fact, it seemed that critics had a far harder time paying attention to the highly impersonal material force of Melgaard's chaos and contradiction and the exact role of the non-assimilable elements at play within it. What was never really addressed was a peculiar project of abstraction that seemed to inform this work from the beginning: a sort of counterintuitive project of abstraction, an abstraction against all odds and hard to grasp given the insistent use of real objects, readable images and well-known social and cultural phenomena. And yet, the work could be seen to perform a continual muting or obstruction of reference to social reality, a type of operation that returns, incongruently enough, to the questions and problems that had informed early painterly abstraction and that had been left dormant in the wake of the post-1960s polarisation between an increasingly apolitical formalism and a conceptualism that had become the proper name of politically oriented art.

No manifesto or statement on this form of abstraction is to be found anywhere in Melgaard's practice. No consistent theory or method can be extrapolated from the work itself. Whatever exists are suggestions: bits and pieces, titles, headlines, words written on Post-it notes. But the suggestions return with a certain dogged obstinacy, ambivalently willing you to pay attention to them as well as to neglect them. A 1997 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that was filled to the brim with a long series of fictional and semi-fictional personas (from Rudolf Valentino as an Arab sheik to 'Mr. Black Pearl', 'Raoul', 'Rob Bo'bel' and 'Bernard St. Summiere' to mention but a few) was somewhat curiously framed by a placard stating 'Free from content'.⁷ In the fragmentary text passages of the handwritten artist's book Casanova in the South Pacific. A Novel (1995), one could find a title that was a bit more specific: 'Working Class Abstractions'.⁸ The appellation resonated with numerous handwritten notes stuck on objects or paintings or simply spread around, and which would evoke 'blue collar' reality or class issues in one way or other: 'Abuse is the beauty of the working class' would be one example, 'Petit Burgeouise Inntelectual' [sic] another. This last note - just to give the context - was scribbled in blue ballpoint pen on a piece of paper that also contained a collage consisting of two logos for Hotel Sofitel at Maeva Beach Tahiti and a cut-out of a commercial for 'une collection de livres à dévorer', as well as more ball-point scribbling: 'Hi, I'm the Hiva Oa dog named Rondi (who the fuck names a dog that) and I saw what Melgaard doubts he saw.' 'Also remembers my puppy also suddenly disaperd.' [sic] 'My own small library.' None of this makes much sense, of course, except as part of the continuity of a series of exhibitions where dogs, holiday resorts in the South Pacific and heaps of books all had a certain presence.

Whatever Melgaard meant by 'working class abstractions' is, therefore, hardly very clear. It certainly was never simply a reference to the artist's personal background, which is, if anything, mixed: solid middle class on the one side of the family, working class on the other. Neither was it a Scandinavian adaptation of the blue-collar identity that figures so prominently in the work of Mike Kelley, the distinctly un-heroic signifier of social abasement, degradation and waste that serves as the point of departure for Kelley's marked attack on the conventional aesthetic logic of the sublime (here identified as the aristocratic way of handling the overpowering experience of excess). Kelley's work may have courted chaos, but as part of a distinctly analytic and strategic project that unearthed the aesthetic logic of social layering in American culture. The force of Kelley's work lies in its ability to deliver precisely focused cultural critique through sensual performance: in the end a deeply pedagogical project.

Melgaard's project is, I believe, a very different one. To begin with, it is essentially committed to the practice of painting: that is, to the possibilities and impasses, the visual openings and taboos of a practice continually said to have come to an end, to the extent that for decades intelligent artists who felt they had some stake in the matter could only perform this end in one sense or the other. The choices they faced are well known: either to refuse to paint ... or to perform a sort of post-painting that could only reiterate its own distance from a technologically and socially obsolete form of manufacture as well as from the formalism that made modernist painting into the signpost for a dubious bourgeois institution. But this end-story could of course also be seen as a guilt-ridden monumentalisation of a single discourse of painting. What, then, if it was to be replaced by a less unifying account of painting's social history and its various technical and aesthetic correlates? What if the identity of modern Western painting in the end does not hinge on the question of a particular handicraft and its role in the production and self-representation of early modern society? After all, this identity already includes the memory of the drastic social and technological transformation that freed painting from the walls and spaces of ritualistic society, and made them into transportable objects or commodities within a nascent capitalist order.

From such a perspective one could suggest that what late industrial media society gives us is not exactly the end of painting but a painting that is less related to craft and representational practice (outmoded or not) than to a singular devotion to a sort of subterranean mobilisation of visuality. Painting (which from 1850 onwards presses against numerous other media formats) could be seen equally as a practice particularly and emphatically given to the articulation of whatever is unseeable and unspeakable in the increasingly controlled (and controlling) visual frameworks of a technocratic society. From this perspective the privileging of the modernist discourse that links painting to form could be seen as part of a drive to pacify or discipline this mobility, to capture it within the domain of the officially visible. In contrast, as Eric Alliez and Jean-Clet Martin suggest in a recent book, painting could just as well be understood as a mode of thinking that is diagrammatic in structure, less a set of forms than an activation of forces whose constructive capacities remain open to inspection.⁹

In early modernity, colour, paint and spatial relations were among the key materials of this mode of thinking. Today we could say that no pre-established material, technique or procedure defines a form of painting whose operations could rather be said to resemble the convergence of technologies and materialities in the realm of information machineries. Within the peculiar form of painting practised by Bjarne Melgaard, the forces at work seem to bring out articulations of highly ambivalent social material, and in a way that obstructs any idea one might have of the communication of social relations in works of art. To say that Melgaard's work is essentially painterly, to move from his informal canvases to the multifarious installation materials that draw these canvases into an idiosyncratic media ecology, is also to say that this social material is itself informed by a distinct project of abstraction. As in the early modernism liberally quoted in Melgaard's work (this is, after all, an artist who paid intensive homage to the deeply unfashionable Paul Gauguin), one is induced to rethink the notion of new painterly realities, of painting as a plane of emergence for things as yet unknown. For what you get in Melgaard's work are not representations, more or less truthful, more or less 'total' in their scope, of some definite social reality - and whether this is lived social reality is a question that becomes moot - but the suggestive surging forth of new social surfaces or new lines of conflict, partly communicated through oblique visual and tactile material and partly through more or less coherent wording.

In this particular context, the concept of 'working class abstractions' can stand as a figure for the way in which half-digested or overdetermined memories, ideas, identities, subjectivities and points of view come together into social figures or constellations that are ill-defined and highly debatable, but which still have a bearing on our attempts to get to grips with a social everyday. There will be no coherent and well-defined blue-collar figures, then. You may, however, find an evocation of the intricate intertwining of gender and class, along lines that evoke the suggestion (made by art-porn filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, among others) that gay issues actually open onto new class issues, that class issues are actively suppressed in the celebration of gay 'lifestyle', and that no sexual politics can exist without some idea of the effect of social difference on the sexual margins. As Nicola Field bluntly puts it, so-called gay lifestyle is a specialised form of a middleclass consumer lifestyle that may be second nature to some but alienating to others, all the while flattering the gay 'community' with a positive notion of its difference.¹⁰

But in between torn-out pages from fashion magazines, Hermès shopping bags, bronze figurines of African couples conservatively dressed in fine wool and cashmere doll's clothes with their mouths sewn shut, wax figures of (and monuments to) deceased gay porn star Joey Stefano, oil paintings that seem to indicate the beginnings of some exceptionally delicate abstract/gestural landscape formation that has been left limp and as if unfinished, and hosts of hastily scribbled quips and denunciations to left and right, you will find no figure, either, of that elusive character, 'the working class gay man'. Nor, incidentally, of the bohemian/creative consumer bad-boy gay artist. All you find is the oblique testimony to the painful construction of relations, in the form of a sad crumpled pillow with the following words written in ballpoint pen: 'Joey's attempt to be creative.' On the plane of emergence created by Melgaard - a distinctly depressive plane where desire is always countered by addiction and laced with doctor's prescriptions - gay sexuality above all figures as an aesthetic/erotic continuum on which the potential for social conflict in general is projected, and where antagonisms are produced.

Here Melgaard's work seems to take a clue from the point made by Leo Bersani in the heat of the homophobic 1980s AIDS debates: the momentary 'loss of self' that, according to Freud, characterises sexual experience in general, and which becomes a potential source of conflict once sexual experience is projected onto social relations of submission and dominance, takes on its most dramatic aspect in the typical identification of the gay male with the idea of 'female submission'. Upturning hierarchies, male self-loss evokes everything that is intolerable and unspeakable, but only because of a culture that overvalues the notion of the self in the first place.¹¹ The common association of gay sexuality with loss is aggressively and absurdly repeated in the work of Melgaard, reiterated to the point of senselessness, through figures too numerous to describe in this short text. But what counts is not this phobic determination of gayness in itself or the abject positions it evokes. What counts is the way in which it serves to constitute a sort of strange painterly 'non-ground' or 'un-ground' in Melgaard's work - a highly strategic lack of grounding in the figure of the self or the subject around whom either representations or forms would gather. And what counts above all is the inherently conflictual nature of this painterly 'un-ground', the way in which its activation of forces makes it possible to imagine contemporary painting wrought free from the deadlock of eternal self-reflexivity, to think painting very precisely as a practice of hallucinating social relations in the making. Maybe this does not make for the very nicest art around. But it may go some way towards explaining the enduring fascination of an artistic project more difficult than most.

— Ina Blom