Swedish "retrogarde"

[Jamt]

by Bill Coyle
January 2010

Reporting on a Scandinavian attempt to retrieve techniques and genres that fell into disuse during the modernist period.

You may have read a while back about the misadventures of Anna Odell, a student at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. On January 21, 2009, passersby notified police that they’d seen a woman sitting on the railing of a bridge in the center of Stockholm. When police approached Odell, she refused to speak. Fearing she would jump, they took her into custody. She put up quite a fight, kicking and biting police, and then, when they finally got her to an acute psychiatric ward, kicking and biting the personnel. Eventually the doctors had no choice but to put her in restraints and sedate her.

It turned out that the whole thing was a class project, one approved by Odell’s academic advisor. She initially refused to comment on her rationale, but a number of commentators guessed—correctly, as it later turned out—that it had something to do with questioning the accepted definitions of sanity, and with demonstrating the power of the political and medical establishments over the individual. You’d think that One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest had never been written—or made into a major motion picture starring Jack Nicholson.

What was remarkable about Odell’s stunt from an American point of view—from this American’s point of view, anyway—was that (a) virtually every aspect of this project from Odell’s tuition, to the salaries of her advisor, the police, and the psychiatrists, nurses, and orderlies at St. Göran’s Hospital, to the cost of her overnight stay there, was financed by the Swedish taxpayers, and (b) this didn’t provoke those same taxpayers to revolt. Outrage was expressed in several of the major papers, but by readers and editorial columnists, not by the contributors to the cultural pages. Almost to a person the latter group supported Odell. The point of art, don’t you know, is to transgress.

In some of the countries neighboring Sweden that viewpoint is meeting with a good deal of skepticism, and the institutionalized avant-garde is, if not on the defensive, at least the subject of vigorous debate. In Denmark, Frederik Stjernfelt and Søren Ulrik Thomsen, both members of the Danish Academy, published a book of essays called Kritik af den negative opbyggelighed (Critique of the Negative Edification, not exactly a Robert Ludlum title), in which they argued against the tendency—in art, journalism, politics—to view the questioning of norms as a good in itself. And in Norway, beginning in the 1960s, visual artists, most famously the painter Odd Nerdrum, began to paint figuratively again, and to recover techniques that had been abandoned in the drift toward abstraction and conceptualism.

The most trenchant criticism of cultural radicalism in Sweden itself has come in recent years from the magazine Axess. Founded in 2001, Axess at first concentrated primarily on domestic political issues. Since 2007, however, when the critic and literary scholar Johan Lundberg took over as chief editor, the magazine has put an equal emphasis on the arts. In addition to original articles in Swedish, Axess regularly publishes translations of articles by foreign writers, some of whom, Roger Kimball and Theodore Dalrymple, for example, will be familiar to readers of The New Criterion.

In 2006 the magazine started its own cable channel, “Axess TV.” While the bulk of the fare is purchased from outside sources, “Axess” has produced a number of its own programs, most of which are available (in Swedish) on its website. On one, Lundberg interviewed Johan Scott, a professor at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and Christopher Rådlund, a Swedish painter who has lived in Oslo since the late 1980s. That Sweden’s premier art school no longer teaches traditional drawing and painting techniques is depressing, but not particularly surprising. What was surprising was how unprepared the good professor was for any questioning of the status quo in Swedish art education. By the end of the conversation, he was literally squirming in his seat.

In an effort to gain a broader public for the Oslo school, Lundberg and Rådlund organized its first major group exhibition last summer, “Figurationer: Romantik och realism i norskt samtidsmåleri” (“Figurations: Romanticism and Realism in Contemporary Norwegian Painting”). The two men were anticipating, even courting, controversy. In the early 1990s, when two professorships in figurative painting and figurative sculpture were announced at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, all hell broke loose. Almost all of the faculty opposed the new positions, and it wasn’t long into the debate before those who defended them were characterized as not just reactionaries, but Nazi sympathizers. That’s serious stuff in a country that spent just over five years under German occupation and gave us the term “Quisling.”

The night before the opening, there was a party to welcome the Norwegian artists. Axess has the top two floors of a building in Östermalm, one of the ritzier parts of town, and, since the good weather held, the party was held on the roof. The roofs of many of the older buildings in Stockholm are ornamented with details and structures that the pedestrian looking up may never see. The ornamentation of the Axess building takes the form of the captain’s cabin on a sailing ship, from the center of which rises a flagpole. As a gesture to its guests, and as a guide to those of them making their way from nearby hotels, Axess flew the Norwegian flag.

Many of the artists featured in “Figurationer” were there, as was the composer Marcus Paus, who wrote a cello piece for the opening. Missing from the festivities was Håkan Sandell, a Swedish poet and a long-time Oslo resident. I’ve been translating Sandell’s work for a number of years, and it’s he who introduced me, either virtually or in person, to Lundberg and Rådlund, and a number of the others, including his now former wife, the painter Gøril Fuhr. Sandell moved to Oslo in the late 1990s because of the parallels he saw between the work of Nerdrum and company, and the literary movement that he and fellow poet Clemens Altgård had founded a few years earlier: Retrogardism.

Retrogardism, broadly speaking, is a multidisciplinary attempt to retrieve techniques and genres that fell into disuse during the modernist period. The movement has its own publication, Aorta, which was founded by Carl Forsberg in 1997, and is currently under the editorship of David Almer. Sandell contributes prose, translations, or original poems to nearly every issue, and each cover features an illustration by the preternaturally productive Christopher Rådlund. Articles and poems are in Swedish, or in one of the two official Norwegian languages, Bokmål and Nynorsk.

The following day, the curators, artists, and a few guests piled on to a bus that took us to Edsviks Konsthall, a half hour’s drive outside Stockholm, where the exhibition was being held. “Figurationer” was located on the second floor of a wooden building without air conditioning (understandable, given that it would only be necessary a few days per decade) and the place was, as the Norwegian critic Paul Grøtvedt put it in his remarks, varmt som helvete (hot as hell). Trips outside to look out over Edsvik, a lovely inlet of the Baltic, and to the nearby café to purchase beer were necessary.

There were brief speeches by the Norwegian ambassador to Sweden; by the Swedish painter Peter Dahl, born in Oslo in 1934, who has painted figuratively throughout his long career; and by Grøtvedt, one of the foremost champions of the Oslo school, who has himself been the subject of vicious attacks from its detractors. Finally, there was the premier of Marcus Paus’s “Preludium for en utstilling,” played by the cellist Inga Byrkjeland of the Bergen Philharmonic. It’s a kinetic piece, conscious of tradition without being in the least nostalgic, with brief, faintly reminiscent melodies flying off it like sparks from a fire. Or spray from a torrent, to choose a more cooling metaphor.

While Odd Nerdrum didn’t dominate the exhibition, he was its chief draw, and the first two rooms were largely devoted to his work. Nerdrum is deeply indebted to Rembrandt and Titian, though there’s little danger of mistaking his work for anything other than modern. His figures might be from any era, but they often have implements with them—modern rifles, for example—that make reference to our own time, while the landscapes they inhabit can be so barren and severe that they seem carved out of some ancient substrata.

Given the small size of the Oslo art scene and the long shadow cast by Nerdrum, it was striking how much variety was on dis- play, in terms of technique, motif, and influences. Trine Folmoe and Helene Knoop, former Nerdrum students, specialize in self- portraits that reflect on the nature of the feminine, and on the role of women in the tradition of representative art. Jon Bakken and Marius Moe are both primarily landscape painters, but their preferred locales—in Bakken’s case Telemark, a mountainous area in southeastern Norway, and in Moe’s the softer, more verdant country- side around Oslo—are dramatically different, as are their technical means. Among other highlights were Christer Karlstad’s surreally realistic “forestscapes,” and the pop-influenced, technically brilliant sketches of Sverre Malling.

My favorite piece was in the last room: Flicka vid fönster (Girl at the Window) by Marianne Wiig Storaas is a photorealist triptych, in the central panel of which a young woman stands at a window, face and shoulder nearly lost in shadow, portions of her blonde hair lit, practically ignited, by the light of the setting sun. A gauze curtain billows slightly in a breeze. The landscape beyond the window, though indistinct, is dominated by greenery. It’s summer. In the panel on the left we see the girl, or rather her darkened form, at a greater remove, from another room in the house, and here she has her back to us, her body completing the cross formed by the bars of the window. In the panel to the right, the girl is gone, and we see, though just faintly, that the window is closed, the cross of the window bars complete in itself. It’s a lovely, mysterious piece, one I hope you have a chance to see sometime.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles...trogarde--4361
Link to some paintings on the”figurationer” exhibition, http://images.google.se/images?hl=sv...tart=0&ndsp=18