File Note 81: Jockum Nordström

I recognised a grasshopper (or is it a cicada?) on the frontispiece of Jockum Nordström’s monograph published by Hatje Cantz in 2013. Would this strange creature be his alter ego? Would I be right to believe that in Jean de La Fontaine’s parable, La Cigale et la Fourmi [The Grasshopper and the Ant] Nordström sympathises with the singing diva, rather than with the parsimonious ant?

Let us backtrack four centuries and go to France. In La Fontaine’s tale, the scolding hymenopter comes out as the paragon of morality and industriousness, the righteous example to be followed, although by our more liberal standards it is condemned as a stingy creature, unsympathetic to the plight of its fellow insects. 

For one brief moment, let us suppose that the ant enjoyed the music, although—the grouch that it was—it never came to admit it. Most contemporary science and jurisprudence would maintain that the grasshopper’s song improved the ant’s productivity and would commend the happy singer for kindly providing an atmosphere conducive to work…

Aesop’s tale, written more than 2000 years earlier than La Fontaine’s, carried this message (more aptly, in this version the singing wonder is a cicada). Is this the correct moral of the story? Well… maybe for those times, given there wasn’t yet even a vague hint of an impresario, of a concert hall, of a rock star and Phil Spector’s wall of sound (often compared to the obsessive song of many cicadas!) was definitely centuries away in the making.

Today, what draws us to the carefree insects of fairy tales is that, like a true-blooded artist, they generously donate their creation to the world, without measuring the costs of the transaction. They do not contemplate the chilly winds of winter, nor poverty nor hunger.

Nordström must be strongly on their side, the artist and musician that he is.

‘The story [The Grasshopper and the Ant] has been used to teach the virtues of hard work and the perils of improvidence.’ (en.wikipedia.org, June 2013) 

To do so, he employs a technique that perfectly fits in his narrative style—his large collages (such as A Stick in the Wood, 2005 and Äta upp soppan, 2013) have the proportions of a cinemascope movie screen. Created in these dimensions, watercolours are a display of skill, a wonderful artifice, bordering on the sleight of hand. There is an accomplished storyteller in Nordström, a shade of the The Prestige (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006) entrancing the listener (the viewer) with a narrative that is seductive and familiar.

Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” applies to Nordström’s constructed stories, all told in two dimensions (the flat characters are placed like roles being played in shadow theatre), like hand-made stills from a kind of proto-cinema, humble, eloquent and to-the-point.

His vocabulary and syntax are in tune with the content of the work. In it, one finds the formal purity of the Shakers, combined with the “shaking” of rock & roll. Dan Graham made the seminal documentary Rock My Religion in 1983. His truth still holds: that one can draw an uncomfortable parallel between restraint, sanctity and unbridled desire, the same correlation that we find at the heart of Nordström’s oeuvre.

Of course Nordström is a musician and music figures prominently in his work. Like Aesop’s cicada and La Fontaine’s grasshopper, he offers us music (and his art) freely and without guilt, revelling in the pleasures that life has to offer the moment one looks behind the façade of decorum and propriety.