With the point of departure in superstar Barbra Streisand’s book My Passion for Design, artist Henrik Haukeland has created a series of artworks that touches on issues of how to construct one’s own reality and boundlessness. Two works from the series Interiors of Barbra Streisand’s Home (With or Without Dogs) were acquired for the Corona Collection, an initiative to support the Swedish art scene during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Clone your own dog. Build your own shopping street in your basement. There is no limit to what you can do if you have (almost) infinite amounts of money. Artists have always been attracted to boundlessness, to that which breaks all taboos and transgresses all borders.
Henrik Haukeland’s project They Made a Meme Out of My Legacy sets out from megastar Barbra Streisand’s decision to clone her beloved dog Samantha, not just once but twice. When the project was presented at BildMuseet in Umeå, the focus was on two soft toy copies of Streisand’s pooches.
“You can order a soft toy copy of your pet by sending images to a manufacturer in the United States,” Henrik Haukeland explains. “So I sent them pictures of Barbra Streisand’s dog and had copies made.”
“So I sent them pictures of Barbra Streisand’s dog and had copies made.”
Men projektet har inte stannat vid detta. Henrik Haukeland hade även stött på Barbra Streisands egenhändigt producerade, smått galna coffee-table-bok My Passion for Design, där hon i ord och bild ledsagar läsaren genom sitt eget hem med dess överväldigande mischmasch av olika stilar och smakriktningar. Resultatet av mötet blev en serie collage med den gemensamma titeln Interiors of Barbra Streisand’s Home (With or Without Dogs).
När Streisands bok recenserades av den internationella arkitektur/designtidskriften ICON lydde det sammanfattande omdömet: ”An ode to kitsch recreations and unrestrained antiquing that’s part romcom, part confessional horror movie”. Om man inte kände till hennes genuina lidelse för design skulle man kunna missta det hela för ett konstprojekt. Och det är i gränslandet mellan det fiktiva och det verkliga som Henrik Haukeland låter sina verk uppstå.
– Jag fascineras av människor som väljer att konstruera sin egen verklighet, säger han.
– Även konsten fungerar på detta sätt, som konstnär kan man i stort sett välja att göra vad man vill.
Verken i serien Interiors of Barbra Streisand’s Home (With or Without Dogs) bygger på bilderna i Streisands bok, men Henrik Haukeland har klippt om och redigerat dem på ett sätt som gör de redan från början osannolika miljöerna till något som skulle kunna vara hämtat från drömmarnas (eller mardrömmarnas, välj själv) värld.
– Men det verkligt iögonenfallande, det är att den som har pengar i stort sett kan få vad han eller hon vill.
But the project went further. Henrik Haukeland had also discovered Barbra Streisand’s self-produced, slightly wacky coffee-table book My Passion for Design, where the star, in words and images, guides the reader through her home and its overwhelming mishmash of styles and tastes. The result of the encounter was a series of collages entitled Interiors of Barbra Streisand’s Home (With or Without Dogs).
Streisand’s book was reviewed by the international architecture and design magazine ICON, which stated: “An ode to kitsch recreations and unrestrained antiquing that’s part romcom, part confessional horror movie”. If one was unfamiliar with Streisand’s genuine passion for design, the book could have been mistaken for an art project. It’s in the interface of the fictitious and the real that Henrik Haukeland’s works appear.
“I am fascinated by people who choose to construct their own realities,” he explains. “Art also works like this. As an artist, you can basically choose to do whatever you want.”
The works in the series Interiors of Barbra Streisand’s Home (With or Without Dogs) are based on the pictures in Streisand’s book, but Henrik Haukeland has cut and edited them in such a way that makes settings that were quite improbable to start with into something that could have been brought back from the world of dreams (or nightmares, according to your liking).
“What really stands out is that if you have money you can have almost anything you want,” Henrik Haukeland says.
Artist biography Henrik Haukeland
Henrik Haukeland holds an MFA in Fine Art from Umeå Art Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Västerås.
