The Snow Falls and We With It - Confessions of a Heideggerian

Material. No. 39/2000  

When I was 10 years old our teacher gave us the assignment of writing an essay about what we would be doing in the year 2000. It was a little difficult to imagine. I liked Svenska MAD (Swedish Mad Magazine), so in my essay I made myself the editor of the magazine. I knew that the editors were in Sundbyberg, so I wrote that I lived there with a cat. Even then I must have been attracted to minor fiascos and the more bohemian side of life. I soon stopped writing about my future and instead made a chart — using the same layout as the one my school classes followed — of how I survived the first week of the new millennium by eating my pet.

    When I got to the university in Stockholm there was something of a silent revolution going on — even though it didn’t lead to much. Lars O. Eriksson had changed some of the usual set texts in applied philosophy. We had to read Nietzsche and Sartre instead of Kant and Hume. The future editors of Material and Kris had begun to lecture about Heidegger, and we budding intellectuals felt that we were part of something big, in the same way that the United NLF Groups* once felt like co-participants in the Cold War.

    I read Hegel and Madonna with the same seriousness. Postmodernism caused a feeling of giddiness which I loved. You couldn’t believe in anything, there was no reality — wonderful.

    In Dagens Nyheter, Horace Engdahl wrote that criticism was similar to snowflakes that fell on the written text and made it sparkle like snow crystals. After having read that, there wasn’t much else to do but become a critic. My friends became critics. I started to write catalogue texts for exhibitions. After ridding myself of my inheritance, stipends, and student loan at an ever-increasing pace somewhere between Prinsen and Riche**, I moved to Copenhagen. There I ended up on the sofa of a Dane and read Heidegger without knowing what it was supposed to lead to.

    This was still long before the millennium, and I had already grown as poor as I had dreamed of in my early essay. The Dane’s fridge took on the role I had given my cat in the essay, and soon I was on the street. The easiest way to find company and warmth was by going to exhibition openings. There I realised that I still enjoyed a certain standing — in Stockholm I had both shaken hands with Stig Larsson and had a scuffle with Jean-Claude Arnault. One day I arrived at an opening where you had to put on Pinocchio costumes and masks in order to enter a room and watch a video in which people wore similar Pinocchio masks***. After a while we figured out that you could drink beer through the long nose and the Danes smoked their specially purchased cigarettes, and for the first time I felt as one with the people in my new foster country. That day I felt “Horace’s snow fall” for the first time. I took courage and sent my first review to Material. And since that day I have managed to maintain the mean level of misery that I dreamed of when I was just 10 years old.

Note: When the final issue of the Swedish art periodical Material was published in 2000, the editors asked the critics who had contributed texts to the periodical to write a text about themselves and their work with and relationship to it.    

Staffan Boije af Gennäs’s text in this issue of Material also has the role, in this anthology of his texts, of presenting his writings.

The review of the Paul McCarthy exhibition Pinocchio Pinhouse Experience to which the text refers is also to be found among the first five texts which will be published in the near future.

* In Sweden there was a national organisation, founded in 1967, both to promote the opinion that the US should leave Vietnam, and to support the organisation Front National de Liberation in South Vietnam. 

** A restaurant and a bar frequented by the cultural scene in Stockholm during the late 80s and early 90s.

*** An exhibition by the American artist Paul McCarthy.