Hidden Prophecies
Marcus Mårtenson, An Artist Who Helps Us Navigate The Space Between The Real And Virtual Worlds
Should you hit the 'like' button or share a post? Should you take a selfie without Instagram filters, exposing the creases and flaws on your face, or are you afraid? Will you suffer from missing out if you go on a screen detox? Welcome to our new world, with new rules for how to behave, socialize, and simply be.
When I met up with artist Marcus Mårtenson in his studio in central Stockholm to interview him for our first print magazine, our chat continued after we concentrated on questions about inspiration and where he finds his Muse. Being something of a modern-age philosopher, Mårtenson clearly does extensive research before each exhibition. And it just so happens that in recent years he has been focused on the new dawn in our civilisation, in which the virtual gradually conquers our lives. He asks numerous questions that he responds to through his art, almost as a warning to his audience to prompt them to question more and not just accept all that is provided in the name of an easier life.
Do you remember the very first piece of artwork that made you stop and think ‘I'll be an artist’?
When I was a child my dad had a book of surrealist painters with Max Ernst and Dali, but also a Belgian artist, Paul Delvaux, who did these very surreal kind of occult paintings. They had something very dreamlike in them that was really fascinating and almost a little frightening. His images were made out of skeletons, women, some were nude, some weren't. The painting contained incredibly haunting, dreamy landscapes. I remember seeing those paintings as a kid and I thought this is something else.
As we speak, you are sitting in front of your own paintings that have many of those images that you just described.
Yeah. But if we're going to be honest, there's not that much nudity in my work, right?
Your nudity is kind of hidden, like in your painting Peeping Tom, you don't see the nudity but there's a nude somewhere on the other side.
My art focuses a lot on questions of transparency versus secrecy in our modern world where we constantly expose ourselves and make ourselves transparent on social media and in virtual worlds. It’s taken for granted that we should be as transparent and in a way as nude as possible.
At the end of the day, that's not always the best thing for us. I really feel that people need secrecy. People need privacy. People need a space that's off stage where they can hear themselves on an inner level where you can reconnect with your own inner guidance system instead of always being bombarded by external stimuli.
I wonder how much do we lose by overexposing ourselves?
If you constantly have all this information about everybody, it becomes almost boring. You lose that moment between people, a seduction of getting to know somebody. You lose the mystery and that mystery is something that is essential.
Each one of your exhibition has a theme: conspiracy theories, surveillance tech, how we are being transformed by social media. So does the idea or an image come before the theme, or a theme comes first?
It could be either way. For example, my last series was called Surveillance Games. That show was a lot about how tech companies use gamification: game psychology. They study slot machines or video games and then they apply that knowledge to all media because those things are incredibly addictive to the human mind, they're like dopamine, They create the same kind of gamified tools on social media platforms or on our workout platforms or on any app we use. So we kind of transcend our reality to start living this kind of a real life game because we're boosted by ‘likes' and by shares and rewards, and while we're collecting and giving each other points, we’re being surveilled. It’s similar to these tinted windows in rooms with cops, we are on the side where we don't see in, but there are other people who are viewing us while we're playing these games.
Can you take me shortly through your artistic process. We know that it ends with a cluster of paintings that create a whole big narrative. But what are the steps to that?
In the show before my last one, I was working a lot with the theme of artificial intelligence. I made a lot of paintings about facial recognition, about how a lot of our jobs were going to be replaced, but also about things that I worked on in my show, Surveillance Games. I felt it was almost part two of what I started in that previous show. And now I'm interested also in how the world is becoming more and more synthetic in terms of how we present ourselves to the world. So it's almost like a trilogy of shows.
Let’s talk about the word ’synthetic.’ It is something that’s not organic. Something fake.
A French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard writes a lot about hyper reality, about how eventually the culture we're producing and the world around us becomes more and more preoccupied with the fake and the fake becomes something we see as more real than the real. We prefer the digitally enhanced person who's been redone either by plastic surgery or through an Instagram filter. We prefer Europe that we find in Las Vegas to actually going to the continent. Many plastic surgeons report that patients are coming in and asking them to make them look like they've applied Instagram filters to their faces.
Would you consider NFTs also part of this synthetic world? I question why would I buy a piece of artwork that hangs on some kind of virtual wall.
I've been pretty interested in this expression, you’ve heard of the word ‘metaverse’?
Yes.
Facebook changed their name to meta. There's a lot of new companies that are working trying to create the metaverse, which is a sort of a virtual world where you're going to live and work. It’s similar to what we're doing now on social media or on the internet in general - we’re looking at a screen and we're interacting with people through the screen. The end game of this is they're trying to create a virtual space that you are immersed in through VR. For example, there's a kids' game called Roblox in which they're selling Gucci virtual bags for $4,000 to kids. A lot of these companies who are working with the metaverse are not thinking about older people because we don't get it. They're thinking about the children who will eventually grow up. And if you pay attention to our kids, you will see that they are spending most of their time in synthetic worlds or fake worlds like Roblox or Fortnite or other virtual platforms. And in 10, 15, 20 years, these games are going to be a lot more immersive. We’re going to have an identity in the virtual world, an avatar. When talking with his friends, my son is already saying things like ‘oh, my character in that game has this skin color, and these clothes and he got this new bag and he has this gun and he has …' The end result is that people crave status objects in the virtual world as well. And that's how NFTs come in play. You want to have them “in your digital home” because this is where you meet a lot of your friends.
If you're going to hang out in these virtual living rooms, I think it'll be nice to have some art. That never occurred to me before. But let us return to your art. I'm in your studio right now, looking at all of your paintings, and the words you wrote seem to jump out at me. And it reminds me a little of a monkey brain, you know? So many ideas, so many words. Is it almost a relief to write all these words on your boards? Is it healing for you?
Yeah, I mean, I am so intensely thinking of the world all the time, so there's an aspect to it that's cathartic. One of my previous shows was called Total Noise. We live in this state where we're still kind of bombarded by external stimuli and it becomes difficult to differentiate what's what? And there’s so much synthetic or fake information, people creating disinformation. So I think it's also about systemizing something and creating order out of chaos, like making lists or making charts.
I'm explaining it to myself and trying to understand something that's very abstract or very chaotic. And then I put it down on a blank canvas and to me it's like I see it, but then I give that away to the collective and people think that's pretty deep.
And tell me about the crayons.
I think I was 20, I was in an art school and there was a crayon laying around or a friend had some crayon on the floor or I had some … but what I do remember is that I had also a piece of wood. And then I started drawing on that wood and I thought that it actually looked pretty cool. At that point I was also making sculptures with objects I found like pieces of junk. I realized that there's a lot of wood floating around, so I started collecting and drawing on the planks in a sequence. So it almost became like a story.
And then I started finding other wood: old doors, pieces of scrap wood out in my country house, in old barns, warehouses where carpenters go, Home Depot stores where they have huge pieces of wood and guys who work in the saw department of the stores. I would just give them tons of different measurements ’I want 30 pieces that are 10 by 15, I want 40 that are 20 by 20.’ They would just cut them up and I would take all the wood to my studio and start painting.
Soon after, I took it to the next level and began working with a man who not only creates furniture and more professional woodwork, but also has a laser print cutter. As a result, I would create an outline for him. He'd scan it and import the drawing into the sawing software. And it would cut out wonderfully. It's quite delicate. The snake I created is a fantastic example of this. You want the 'S' to cut through the centre, which I could probably do, but it wouldn't be as nice.
I was browsing through your website for ideas for our interview when I realized you seem to be chronicling civilisation. The Early Man was one of your initial artworks on the site. Then comes The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and Vengeance, then the forbidden, Peeping Tom, and omens and prophecies are added to the timeline. We talked a lot about surveillance, which is a very current problem, but you started from the beginning of time.
I'm interested in these older ways of seeing the world. I'm fascinated by tarot and old symbolic systems that people have developed since the dawn of time to try to map out reality. Tarot is basically a map of elements. It's a map of the inner and outer world, but it's still very interesting from a symbolic perspective. A lot of the old religions and traditions follow cycles of nature and they follow how the world is changing constantly and how you can be in some kind of accordance with that, and change with the world instead of resisting it. I think it's important to be like those old Romans sculptures, with one face that's looking back and one face that's looking forward at the same time.
I know that you were considering to make your own tarot cards. Are you still thinking of that?
I've done a few of the major Arcana cards and paintings. I’ve done the high priestess and justice. That would be a long-term goal though because it's a very time-consuming process. However, so many cool artists have done the tarot. For example, Dali has done tarot, Niki de Saint Phalle has done a huge tarot garden in Italy. It would probably take one or two years to create a whole deck.
How many tarot cards are there?
22 cards in the higher arcana. the main archetypes, and then the rest is like a regular card game. I think there's 78 cards in total, so it's maybe 56 regular cards.
How often do you pull cards?
Not that often. In the nineties, I actually worked one summer on a Tarot reader phone line. It was a very interesting experience in many different ways. But after that I haven't really done tarot for other people that much. And then sometimes when I reflect, it’s interesting to me that my main focus are images and symbols, which talk about our psyche and our connection to the world.
And archetypes are kind of timeless and they can be transformed into a modern context easily, and you can see them play out again and again in our modern culture, pop culture or movies. Once you know these symbols you see very much that they're used, in many different ways in modern art or film consciously or unconsciously.
This made me think of the film where the main character discovers that the ruling class (aliens in the film) were controlling people through advertisements, subliminally influencing them to consume, breed, and confirm to the status quo, but when he put these glasses on, he realized that they were bombarded with messages.
Yes, it’s “They Live” from the eighties.
Can one say that this film influenced some of your work?
I like John Carpenter who made that movie. That movie is pretty profound and it was also prophetic - he was ahead of his time.
Although in the movie it’s in a sci-fi context.
Everything’s in a sci-fi context and then it happens.
You seem to be influenced by movies quite a lot?
In Sweden, when I was a kid, we had two stations on TV and they started broadcasting at five and they would maybe end at like 11 or something. Then when I moved to America at the age of 6, we suddenly had 30 or 40 stations and we got HBO, the movie channel,. All of a sudden, I was exposed to a whole world of fun and excitement and cartoons and commercials, and HBO and other movie channels, broadcasted movies 24 hours a day. So there was a lot of eighties movies that were great like action movies with Schwarzenegger, Stallone, tough guys, the cold war, Reagan, very macho-like.
And they were broadcasting all these horror movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, Spielberg movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or ET and Star Wars, so it was this very rich fertile ground for a young mind to be impressionable, but also to set my own imagination going. I would often write long stories in school. Writing was a very early outlet for my creativity.
Do you have any favorites among your paintings?
There are some that I feel are special. Some artists are very attached to their work and can't sell certain works. But to me, I feel very much that an artwork starts living once it's been placed in someone's home, somebody bought it and they have it and they like it. You become an artist when you become someone else's artist. When you become important to somebody and they feel a deep connection with you and they want to share your art with their friends and talk about it at dinner. You can be an incredible artist and sit in your studio and nobody has seen your work and you'll still be a great artist, but I think your art becomes alive once it is released.
It’s what you were saying before, you want to have a dialogue with your audience.
Yes, I think so because I'm definitely trying to say something that would make them aware. You have to be awake. You can't be just going through life sleeping.
You’re some kind of an artistic guru, Marcus?
No, not a guru.
Maybe that’s not the right word, but maybe somewhat of an art soldier.
A lot of artists are pretty sensitive, right? And, in a flock of animals, let's say like a flock of horses, there’s always one or two that are the sensitive ones, and they will be the ones who run first when a threat comes around the corner and the rest of the pack will follow and often that can lead that the whole pack survives.
Maybe artists are alarmists.
It could be that artists sort of have that function.
Somebody told me that in South Africa they usually have two dogs: a big dog and a small dog. Apparently big dogs do not bark if a thief comes into one’s house, but the small dog will bark and make everybody aware that there is an intruder. And then the big dog will come and bite them. So everyone has a different jobs. Small dogs are artists!
That's really cool.
So what's coming up for you?
This year, I’m going to work on producing a new show that will open in the spring of 2024.
So, come see my show 2024!
Exciting news! We will definitely let our readers know when you invite us to the opening. Thank you for this lovely interview and we wish you good luck with preparing for your new show! You can follow Marcus Mårtenson on Instagram @dreamsandomens