Talking Space And Stuffed Lions With Asbjørn Skou

Around five years ago, Copenhagen’s walls were regularly plastered with all these life-sized, black and white paste ups of hand-drawn humans. Often depicting sad everyday people suffering through their daily chores. Fresh on the wall, they were signs that Asbjørn Armsrock Skou was back in town.

Asbjørn is one of Denmark’s finest when it comes to art. After having spent five years studying at the Bremen Academy of Arts, the man formerly known as Armsrock has settled back down in Copenhagen. Okay, he hasn’t really settled down. He’s busy as fuck.

This Friday, Asbjørn and Third Space are hosting a small exhibition of some of his latest work. The exhibition is called Terminal Infrastructure, and has a completely different visual direction than the hand-drawn characters of his past. 

We met up with Asbjørn for coffee and cigarettes at the gallery and had a chat about stuffed lions and why photocopied prints look so goddamn cool.

VICE: What got you into working with visual art initially? Is it a family thing or were you just influenced by your surroundings?

Asbjørn Skou: I would say that we all start doing art as kids, when we paint and draw and so on. So it’s not as much a matter of when we began doing art, but much more when we stopped.

As a youngster I got involved in the graffiti and D.I.Y punk environment, where I discovered the playfulness of art, but also figured out how to give it a function through flyers, banners and posters for all sorts of concerts and protests.

Later on, I found that visual art had a sort of language that could express what I wanted to say about about issues that I found relevant.

You started working in public spaces with paint and paste-ups. Do you miss that way of working?

I had a long period where I wanted to get away from what you would call street art culture, and began working more with contemporary art. But my primary focus is still mainly on public spaces – I just don’t do my work in them. I work with materials I collect from them and use these in my collages. I work with public space in a para-archaeological way, researching the spaces we are dealing with on a daily basis, but aren’t focused on, like the dead end, the abandoned lot, the ruined structure – spaces where something falls apart and then becomes something else.

Will you ever go back to actually working in the public space?

Yeah, I can feel I have been wanting to go back to that environment, especially after I have been working with these white cubic spaces for such a long time. But I need to find a balance where it wouldn’t be too easy to categorize it as street art or graffiti, but perhaps more as part of the interventionist tradition  within a post-situationist praxis. 

Right. It used to be all paint, coal, projections, linocut but now your work revolves around photocopies and print collages, how did that transition come about?

In a world saturated with perfect image-material and highly glossed photos, I find it interesting to work with images of 3D spaces and turn them into gritty, trashed, black and white flat surfaces. I’ve been working with drawings for many years, but always in connection with other media and photography as reference materiel. Now I primarily do collages, where I sample and re-contextualize information and visual material. 

And you stick to black and white a lot. Is that the old crust punk in you that wont let go?

Ha, yeah, I think there is some of the punk and D.I.Y heritage that carries on in my use of black and white and also with the photocopies, since those aesthetics were a very big part of that scene.

But I also use black and white because they are the two outermost counterpoints that we have – negative and positive – and in between is the gray spectrum, where all the things we live through and think about exist.

So what’s the next step?

I have been working loosely with film, which is very new for me. But since I work with sort of a pseudo fictive documentation of process-based works, film is a very fitting medium. And I try to get the collages out of a small square standard format, and turn them into larger site specific collages about the size of a room. Like for example building reconstructions of spaces in the size of the spaces themselves.

Your exhibition on Friday is inspired by J.G Ballard’s sci-fi novella collection The Terminal Beach. Is literature a reoccurring inspiration in your work ?

Yeah, the other day I was thinking, that there’s always been a lot of literary research connected to my work.

The last couple of years, I’ve used sci-fi literature as a point of reference. Actually this is the first time I’ve built an exhibition where text is used directly as part of an exhibition.

This exhibition is pretty small compared to the 300 square meter Impossible Society you did at the Vejle Art Museum in 2011. That one even had a stuffed lion. What do you like better – big productions or small ones?

I have a thing for projects that are extremely large and impossible to realize. But it depends on the space. I always try to make something that would fit in the particular space I’m given. This exhibition is small, but the amount of theoretical content in here is the same as in the Impossible Society.

What was up with that stuffed lion?

I was covering the subject of museology. So the lion was a metaphor for nature, which we’ve tamed and stuffed. That’s why we had this old, smelly and moth-eaten lion that I had to get from Giveskud Zoo. No one else dared to lend me one.

Thanks sir. See you Friday.

Asbjørn Skou’s exhibition Terminal Infrastructure opens Friday the 7th of march at 17.00 and runs until the 5th of April at Third Space – Skydebanegade 31 – København V