A comprehensive archive of Niels Bonde paintings, video and installations with links to texts, exhibitions and free downloads.

Nothing Happened Text by Andreas Schlaegel.

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. Susan Sontag writes in her 1963 review of Simone Weils book of essays. This invention of romanticism suppresses the idea of alienation as a psychological strategy to avoid deep existential questions, freeing the individual to perform in everyday life, without weighing the consequences of every tiny decision against a worst-case scenario. Subjectivity requires alienation, it allows the individual to stay intact as a whole without cracking up, without dissolving into a mere blur of many tiny individual problems and decisions. Another layer is constituted by distractions, consummation or entertainment, alienating the individual from his actual alienation process. Here culture reveals a self-destructive element, since at this point the process of alienation is prone to manipulation. Repetition is attractive - it produces comfort, because the outcome is always the same. For example, by reproducing familiar images that we count on recurring. Psychological conditioning by repetition is a basic element of education, encouraging memorization. The spectacle is not simply visual, it's psychological: it conditions the viewer, and thereby sets limitations to his capability of imagination of possibilities. The almost religious ritual of reading the papers, the internet or watching the evening news on television is an important act of connecting to the nucleus of society, participating in a program of historical conditioning of the human consciousness. The media environment is inseparably connected to our consciousness by doing everything to stage our everyday lives. Media spectacles seep into the private realm when we think about identity or our political self in terms of certain media forms. Technology plays an important role in this, producing a symbiosis of innocence and moral authority, dividing the world into a safe inside and a hostile outside. Niels Bondes art offers the conceptual possibility of a different picture suggesting an alternative reading in a mass-culture context. International economic relations, in terms of resources and power structures have expanded the reach of capital and its image culture on a global scale. Sustainability is a key problem in the way things are going however this only appears to increase a desire to maintain the illusion that things are going on as always. Immersed in media culture, as we are, there is hardly any communication happening that is unmediated. But what does the viewer comply to by communicating these channels of specific media? Commodity culture presents a variety of media forms and formats, primarily as an occasion to satisfy desires, be they individual wishes or political concerns.News images play a significant role in what could be seen as a kind of self-inflicted conspiracy to repress global developments. They can be regarded as representations of a common desire to feel that things are going well, or at least under control. Even when it is increasingly becoming clear they are not, for example in terms of ecological devastation, the big puddle of mud of repressed information, of a common shared bad consciousness. Supporting a culture of complicity and non-intervention the news actually inform and shape the future - by generating images of the present, in the form of images of the past. The audience has been educated to suspend disbelief and play along in a next level of hard core Karaoke. The erasure of the villains can make visible, that the problem is not in the foreground. This painter sure aint stupid.