"Enn velldans svår lammpa att tennda"
Executed in 1994. Mixed media of electrical cord, switch, lamp socket, and 100 switches. Length approximately 1140 cm.
Provenance
From the collection of Björn Springfeldt.
More information
From Björn Springfeldt’s lecture at a cultural breakfast, Värmdö Municipality, 2016:
“As a conclusion to my talk, I would like to offer one more reading recommendation: ‘Kreativitetens filosofi’ by Nils-Eric Sahlin, a wonderful stimulus for thought, where, alongside Epaminondas and Monteverdi, we encounter Dan Wolgers—and what you see here is a work by Danne.
The National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm wanted to create an exhibition about the digital revolution, which is based on zero and one, on empty space and fullness, and they invited Dan Wolgers, who wanted to pay tribute to the Enlightenment by contributing a lamp.
He made this one, complete with plug, light bulb, and switch—but not just one, a hundred.
The King was to inaugurate it, and the artist suggested that the act should consist of the King turning off Dan Wolgers’s lamp.
The artist, of course, could then turn it on again by technical means.
The Royal Court let it be known that His Majesty could consider turning on a lamp—but not turning one off.
[…]
The mathematician Olov Bergvall told me that the King’s chance of turning on the lamp is one in a number with thirty zeros. I am terrible at mathematics and asked for an analogy, and Olov Bergvall said, “OK, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He called and said that the chance was like 1 divided by the weight of the sun in kilograms, or like 1 divided by the number of molecules in the world’s largest elephant, which weighed 11 tons.
When I still didn’t understand despite this pedagogical effort, he said, “OK, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He did, and suggested that I imagine that at the formation of the Earth, one began to grow grass on all available land and continued doing so for about 10 billion years—until the Earth dies.
The hay is piled into an ever larger stack, and somewhere inside it there is a needle.”
More about Dan Wolgers
Dan Wolgers is a Swedish sculptor, born in 1955 in Stockholm and educated at the Royal Institute of Art from 1980 to 1985 (he later became a professor there from 1995 to 1998). Wolgers is full of inspiration and humour, a playful Dadaist who experiments with and questions almost everything, and of course, he provokes and shocks the viewer. He was commissioned to design the cover for the Stockholm telephone directory, but instead of creating an image, he placed the phone number for his studio. The directory is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When he was to participate in a group exhibition at Liljevalchs Art Hall, he requested to borrow two benches, which he immediately sold at auction. He was reported for embezzlement and was conditionally sentenced to daily fines. The verdict arrived in the post in a sealed envelope, which he signed and sold for 20,000 SEK. Wolgers puts everything to the test, even the sign "Here ends the public road." "I try to visualise and manifest different aspects of life in my art," he says. "On a personal level, I use my work to try to understand something of what I and others have to do here on earth."
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