Henrik Solvang Built a Room Around One Damp Carpet and Nothing Else
In a former rope store in Copenhagen, the installation artist offers one door, four walls and a wet floor. Mirela Sund lasted nine minutes and wants it known that she counted.
By minute four the carpet had found my socks. I was standing in a room in Nordhavn with one door, four white walls and a grey wool carpet damp enough to hold a footprint. Nothing else. I looked for the thing. There was no thing. The thing, apparently, was me, being wet.
The work is called Ankomst, which means arrival. The wall text promises that I will arrive. I did. I wished at once to depart, and that is the whole of the dramatic structure.
At the entrance a young attendant had taken my coat. Part of the work, she said. A coat is a distraction, she said. I have worn that coat to eleven funerals and one opera, and nobody has ever called it a distraction. Her tone suggested the room had been briefed on me.
Nobody will explain the damp. It could be a leak. It could be a decision. A leak is an accident pretending to be an idea. A decision is an idea pretending to be an accident. Either way somebody has been cowardly, and it was not the carpet.
Solvang is known for rooms people regret entering. Fair. His earlier rooms at least gave the regret something to chew on. You could regret a smell, a slope, a ceiling that came down a little further each year. Here the regret has no handle. You stand in it, it soaks upward, and you are invited to call that feeling.
I counted the seams in the carpet to pass the time. Eleven. Eleven is the most interesting number in the building. I considered lying down, to see whether the floor was cold all the way through or only in the spots that had been chosen. I decided I would not give the work a body to be proud of.
At minute nine I opened the one door, which is the only generous gesture in the piece, and asked the attendant for my coat in the voice I usually keep for waiters who have spoken about the specials. She fetched it from a cupboard behind the desk.
It was dry and warm. It had spent nine minutes alone in the dark, undisturbed, with a radiator for company. It was the only thing in the building that had been looked after, and it was mine.
