By Paul Leavoy
Any O-Train wayfarer will have caught sight of the image. One in 10 bystanders stop and seem to contemplate its design and meaning. Two posters, each depicting silhouetted human forms, one emblazoned with the word “transport,” the other “education.” The meaning of either is unclear, but, as the posters indicate, they are both a part of The People’s Plan, a concept that remains just as unclear.
The casing suggests the images are part of an advertising campaign and on the platforms flanking the O-Train tracks at Carleton University, they seem hardly out of place. But the images are part of a series of ambiguous artwork that leave the viewer questioning whether they are an advertising campaign or government program.
“It’s not evident that it’s art,” says their creator, Adrian Göllner, “and I like that.”
“I like the resonance that can be created, I like the sense of doubt,” he says of his O-Train duo. The People’s Plan, as the series is titled, was a part of the 2001 inauguration of the O-Train.
Uncertainty and “randomness” are both central to this dedicated and clever Centretown artist’s often satirical work that ranges in subject matter from Goethe to the Cold War and the flag of Ireland.
“He has a very clear vision of what he wants and knows how to get it,” says Melanie Scott, editor of Where, a literary and arts magazine.
Scott, a former arts consultant and curator, has followed Göllner’s work for the past decade and notes that he never limits himself to one specific medium of expression.
A self-described “base brat,” Göllner was born in 1964 to Canadian parents stationed on a Canadian Forces Base in Iserlohn, Germany. After eight years, he moved to Canada where an omnipresent Cold War and thoughts of a looming conflict still lurked in many minds.
“My dad was in Germany waiting for World War III,” he says. “In a child’s mind, the year 2000, then so far away in the future, was simply one big mushroom cloud.”
Göllner’s Cold War impressions culminated in his clever, if somewhat peculiar, 1998 project involving the production of Cold War trading cards.
Each card presents a Cold War image on one side and a brief explanation on the other. For example, one card has images of the first four nuclear bomb test explosions to follow the U.S. in the international arms race. The other side of the card has facts and figures about the explosions. Another card shows famed Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko “skating to freedom” along the Rideau Canal.
The cards inspire mixed sentiment. They are humourous and grave, but surprisingly informative. And like the O-Train posters, they use advertising as a vehicle to relay their message.
As Göllner points out, the cards are satirical, “but the shot they take is not at the [Cold] War. It’s at CNN and people who tend to treat serious subject matter like a football game.”
In Göllner’s view, people have a tendency to sensationalize subject matter through the medium in which it is presented. He also feels that humans have a similar tendency to reduce subject matter to numbers.
This notion is best illustrated in Göllner’s 2001 project, Goethe, Graphed. The piece is a series of three colour graphs. All of the graphs represent the number of times certain colour words were used in the Theory of Colours, an 1810 treatise by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
For example, the first graph is a pie chart where each slice of the pie is devoted to a different colour, and the size of each pie piece is dependant on how often the word was used in the text. All that can be gleaned from this graph is that the colours blue, yellow and red were mentioned significantly more often than any other colour in the text. The third graph is a complicated quarterly analysis representing colour word usage in each quarter of the text.
The series takes a jab at what Göllner feels is a contemporary obsession with numbers as an end in themselves. The irony lies in the fact that the graphs are useless — they yield no greater an understanding of Goethe’s actual Theory of Colours.
“Its not the subject, its really the message that’s being treated,” Göllner says. “We like our information easy, condensed, flashy, and that’s what I’ve delivered.”
For an artistic career that began simply with painting, its obvious that Göllner rarely limits himself to one specific medium of expression.
“He’s very broad, he’s very unlimited,” says Scott.
Certainly for some of his projects it is difficult to define the artistic medium at hand. Consider his 2001 exhibit in Dublin, entitled The Flag of Ireland, as Rearranged by the Mail.
For this project, Göllner decided that each morning, at a predetermined time, he would mail one of 192 coloured postcards to a studio in Ireland. When laid in sequence, the postcards would form the colours and shape of the flag of Ireland.
The exhibit featured an image of the flag before the postal diffusion, and the result is a distorted, though remarkably intact, representation of the Irish flag. The occasional offset block of green, white or orange, and the lack of a few cards all together, is an effective reflection of the random fluctuations in the postal system.
“Randomness is something I invite in my art,” he says. Göllner’s approach seems to throw an organic touch on art that is often systematic and abstract, if highly satirical.
Göllner lives and remains in Centretown with his family, primarily to keep a closer pulse on the local visual arts community.
“I know people who get married and they get kids and they go out to the suburbs,” he says, “and they’re artists who just stop being part of the community.”
For Scott, Göllner is less a part of the arts community at large than he is a necessary binding factor within it.
“He’s extremely loyal,” she says, “he’s loyal to the arts community, he’s loyal to his friends.”
“To me, he’s one of the members of the arts community who holds it together, he’s like part of the glue,” Scott says, noting that he devotes a significant amount of time looking at other people’s work.
For the next few months, Göllner will be active with exhibitions abroad in the Netherlands and in the U.S.
Although Göllner relentlessly pursues new ideas, it seems the Cold War continues to haunt him. A forthcoming exhibition in Mobile, Alabama presents a Morse code translation of the Kennedy-Khrushchev correspondence during the Cuban missile crisis.