The Fireman

I see this more as an intervention than an adornment. An anomaly.

Artist Oscar Guermouche primarily works with text, emphasizing the identity-creating functions of language. With this in mind, he was selected to create a site-specific work for the reference library at Magasin III.

In conjunction with the reopening of Magasin III in 2020 after a three-year Intermission from public activities, the reference library was redesigned and relocated within the museum’s premises. Museum Director Tessa Praun and Curator Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten sought a text-based artistic practice for an inscription in the long wooden table at the library’s center, and Oscar Guermouche’s name promptly emerged in the process.

Communications officer Hedvig Furuhagen and I had the opportunity to meet with Guermouche in November 2023 and hear his thoughts on The Fireman. Three years had passed since Magasin III reopened and the work was completed in the library. Guermouche describes how he usually starts his practice at his bookshelf, which he did this time as well. Wanting to highlight the importance of libraries and literature the artist initially explored ideas about mysteries and secrecy in libraries. It wasn’t until he shifted focus and looked for more political dimensions that Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 came to mind.

In The Fireman, Guermouche employs a phrase from the novel, written in 1953 and depicting a future society where the possession of books, by public initiative, is strictly prohibited. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman whose main task is to burn books at night. Over time, he begins to question his profession and thus the society in which he lives. Oscar Guermouche uses a phrase that illustrates an argument between Guy Montag and his wife Mildred, in which Guy Montag tries to make her understand the new insights he has reached, but fails:

but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Text and words are a constant factor in Guermouche’s life. He talks about how he can specifically remember certain sequences in books but not recall current titles or authors:

Those sentences that float around in the air near the bookshelf, they lead you somewhere.

It was such a sentence that led him to the scene reproduced in the work. It was the desperation and at the same time the deepest alienation of a person who is denied understanding that he reacted to. In the wooden table, Guermouche also saw connotations to the small person’s ability to express resistance. He was immediately taken with the table’s edge upon viewing the blueprints of the table from the side. He argues that a table edge can directly function as a canvas for a unruly schoolchild wanting to express discontent toward an authority, and perhaps also communicate with other students:

It is also a kind of protest against the powers that be by demolishing, destroying, vandalizing, and marking their property. But in reality, you do not communicate towards the powers that be. Because the powers may never see it, and it may not matter. And like Guy Montag’s attempt to convince his wife, the carving is met with dismissal and disdain. The text in The Fireman is not carved, but inscribed. Then again, I am not a student, and neither is the table a school desk.

In the work, aspects such as identity and body are present – Montag in the novel is a fireman through and through. It’s not just a job, Guermouche argues, but also integrated into the protagonist’s physical constitution. The artist describes how the identity crisis that the character goes through also becomes a questioning of the physical body. The desperation and failure to get his wife to join in Montag’s new belief also affect the reader’s image of Montag as a character.

The work at Magasin III is just like Guy Montag’s insight at first glance hidden under the skin. A huge leather table cloth covers the wooden table and leaves the visitor to search for the work themselves. Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten expresses in a conversation that the work demands both visitor and institution to be active for it to come to life, considering its placement. The design means that the work must continue to be awakened to life. The content is there but requires one to first seek out the library, then to the table’s one short side and finally lift the canvas. Likewise, the museum is also required to repeatedly emphasize the existence of the work by highlighting it in tours and conversations with visitors.

Under the canvas, the text runs along the solid table edge from one short side to a bit into the table’s right long side. Guermouche wanted the sentence to arise out of nothing and then end the same way. Rather than a decorative embellishment, he wanted the text to function as an intervention and a deviation from the table and the whole. The typeface leads one to think of book body text, which is what Guermouche aimed for, to emphasize the place’s connection to literature. Just as Ray Bradbury illustrates a society where people have stopped questioning their surroundings, Guermouche’s work encourages the observer to remain curious about it, both in form and content. There is also something certain about the solitude that the artist describes that characterizes the rebellious schoolchild and Guy Montag in his frustration which also seems to be found under the dark leather table cloth. They, in Guermouche’s words, mercilessly deeply engraved letters bide their time under the skin and wait to be discovered and activated by the next person.

Katja Åberg, December 2023