What is Nordic? by John Peter Nilsson

Can ' t explain won ' t explain just asking...

In our global village of today, the concept of the Nordic countries, i.e., Nordic countries): "With some effort, one can, however, establish a list of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, may appear to be a common elements and factors in their respective cultures today, most construed geographical entity. It is a concept inherited from the 1 9th of them related to the light, the climate, in some cases a common ethnic century, when national romanticism spread through Europe, wanting origin and older cultural links, going more or less far back into history. a new world order to appear. The idea can be traced back to Johann On the other hand, although Danes and Swedes have not been separated Wolfgang von Goethe and his poetry, in which he, inspired by Greek into two distinct countries for more than about a thousand years, and mythology, started to write about a lost paradise in the far north of Swedes and Norwegians less than one hundred years, there is in many Europe - Thule. After the Napoleonic wars, modern Germany was born, cases no difficulty in distinguishing a Dane, an Icelander, a Norwegian and Goethe's lost paradise became an essential feature of the German and a Swede by facial expressions, movement patterns, and their general identity. It inspired the romanticist movement, for instance, Caspar David behaviour before they have opened their mouths. The Finns often look Friedrich, who travelled on several occasions to the northern countries to very different from, for example, the Swedes, although they can be as capture the desolated countryside in which the sky, the landscape, seem blonde, even blonder, than the Scandinavians of northern European, to be so much grander than us human beings, than culture.Germanic, Indo-European origin"
This relationship between northern Europe and Germany continued in various ways until its final perversion during the Nazi regime, when the Nazi leaders were inclined to associate themselves with the north by using variations on Viking mythology in their war propaganda. After the war, a sudden change took place. For many years, although relations between the Nordic countries and Germany were not completely frozen, most Nordic countries looked more to the US, the UK and France, especially when it came to cultural exchange. And during these post-war years, the internal identity of the Nordic countries also grew stronger, with new financial, political and cultural networks. But is it a happy family? Well, like the so-called Benelux countries, the Nordic region is a construct of differences. Sometimes big differences.
In 1982, Pontus Hulten wrote in his essay "Little History & Explanation", published in the exhibition catalogue "Sleeping Beauty - Art Now, Scandinavia Today" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, about the concept of Scandinavia (another word, at that time, for the Nordic countries): "With some effort, one can, however, establish a list of common elements and factors in their respective cultures today, most of them related to the light, the climate, in some cases a common ethnic origin and older cultural links, going more or less far back into history. On the other hand, although Danes and Swedes have not been separated into two distinct countries for more than about a thousand years, and Swedes and Norwegians less than one hundred years, there is in many cases no difficulty in distinguishing a Dane, an Icelander, a Norwegian and a Swede by facial expressions, movement patterns, and their general behaviour before they have opened their mouths. The Finns often look very different from, for example, the Swedes, although they can be as blonde, even blonder, than the Scandinavians of northern European, Germanic, Indo-European origin"
Well, I have been dealing with the concept of the Nordic for a long time by writing articles, editing magazines and curating exhibitions, and I must say that although I feel Pontus Hulten is being a little bit ironic in his comments, he nevertheless touches on an interesting subject. But perhaps it was not exactly what he intended. Today, the subject has to put itself on the map. We have to learn to understand that we are always global - somewhere. Geography has disintegrated and we have to start navigating according to our own experiences. But the vehicle for such a journey is not "Who am 1?", but rather, "When am 1?"
When am 1? In the global world of today we need to navigate using a global language, otherwise we get lost. But our experiences are not only global, they are to an equal extent my private experiences, rooted in my own private context, as in collective experiences of a world that many of us share and live in together. Therefore, we have to rethink what an experience can be in relation to language, especially to the fact that language is not divided either from our body or the place in which we act. Language is in constant flux and interacts with every context and situation we enter.

The Nordic art scene at the beginning of the21st century is still about melancholy, not of the endlessness of nature but of the shallowness of information technology.

This ongoing friction between experience and language creates untranslatable distances. And since the Self can only have a partial understanding of itself and needs the Other to fill in the gaps, a dialogue between experience and language can never be achieved simply by understanding one another. If I want to map myself, if I want to position myself in the broken geography, I have to tell a story - my story. If this story is true, it is mine and no one else's. Of course, this generates a certain misunderstanding, an untranslatable distance between myself and others. I believe it is important to fight for a space in the world to tell this story. It isn't cyberspace. And it isn't ethnospace. It is a mental space, within myself, within my fellow beings.
To claim this, and to apply it specifically to the more or less construed entity of the Nordic countries, gives rise to another question. Not a psycho-social question, but a cultural-geographical one. In today's global village, the difference between centre and periphery has very much imploded. Technology has made many of us part of an international society where old national frontiers do not seem to exist. Information and entertainment, commodities and ideologies, are picked up all over the world, independent of national or cultural origin. Today it is access to technology (and information) that draws the dividing line between those who are part of the new society and those who are not.
The Nordic countries have the highest ratio of mobile phones in the world. The explanation behind this trend is not merely economic. It has occasionally been claimed that the key factor is a combination of local geography and the number of inhabitants. Communities are far apart, which puts distance between individuals. People make contact by phone or e-mail just as frequently as they actually meet in cafes or in their own homes.
The spreading of communication technology has dramatically altered the way we view the world (and ourselves). This applies to the Nordic countries as much as to the rest of the world (at least the rich part of it). We live in a global village, in which the world has paradoxically both shrunk and expanded! This has given rise to a new kind of closeness to and curiosity about - previously remote regions and marginalised cultures such as the Nordic zone. What is centre and what is periphery is no longer obvious.
In February 1998, the exhibition Nuit Blanche opened at Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, consisting of about 30 young Nordic artists. In the introduction, the curators Laurence Bosse and Hans-Ulrich Obrist write: "The time when places could claim to be the centre of the art world has come and gone. Such a goal has become obsolete at a time when a multiplicity of dynamic art scenes are growing up around Europe and elsewhere, like so many centres with their own particular realities to explore. The nineties have seen Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Reykjavik and Stockholm, but also Bergen, Malmo and Oulu, make their own distinct contributions to this trend in an explosion of creativity that seems to signal a veritable 'Nordic miracle' As sites of encounter and crossover, traversed and modulated by hosts of events, these towns constitute a system of networks that is both dense and loose and highly fluid"
The view of Obrist and Bosse can be seen against the backdrop of changing realities in the communication potential in the Nordic countries, and in the world in general. In this sense, it is interesting to compare their statement with what Kim Levin, curator of "The Scream", wrote in her introduction to the exhibition of young contemporary art from the Nordic countries shown at the Arken Museum in Copenhagen in November 1996: "In the past few years, the legendary northern communion with nature - cold purity, metaphysical solitude, conceptualised light and space - has ceased to suffice for many artists as a fertile ground for artistic production. It has given way to an art of social and psychological pressures"
What Kim Levin is suggesting is that the artistic perception of the self in the Nordic region has changed. The notion of Nature is no longer a major driving force for artistic production. And what Bosse and Obrist are saying is that the Nordic artists have "come home" in a new sense. In one way or another, they regard their own local context without nostalgia or escapism. But to really understand this shift in accent, I believe it is necessary to investigate the cultural heritage of the North, for example, in Sweden.
In 1649, in the reign of Queen Christina, the French philosopher Rene Descartes was invited to Sweden to teach the Oueen about Catholicism. Within two years of his arrival, he died of pneumonia which he contracted, according to legend, due to the cold weather - and lack of cultural stimulation!
It was not until Gustav 111 became king in the late 1 8th century that cultural life started to flourish. Many prominent cultural institutions, especially for music, opera and drama, were founded during his time. As so often before, most of the influences came from France. Gustav 111 tried to achieve royal splendour and modelled his court on the practices of Versailles. He was a patron to artists and writers, and it could be said that Gustav 111 in effect laid the foundations for Swedish cultural life.
In the 20th century, Sweden (in contrast to Norway, Denmark, and Finland) was neutral in both world wars and the country was ruled by a social democratic government for over 60 consecutive years. In this period, the object of cultural policy was to change the traditional perception of culture as bourgeoisie and elitist. Many attempts, both structural and financial, were made to bring culture to the people. However, without going into specific detail, culture in general was not given high priority during this period. The reasons are probably many and highly complex, but the government gave higher priority to building a modern welfare state than to having a buoyant and vibrant cultural life.
In the anthology "Trans-avant-garde international" from 1982, the art historian Mats B. sums up the effects of modern Swedish cultural policy on the contemporary art scene in his essay "The art of a sleeping beauty. Contemporary Swedish painting": "This isolation of Swedish art during the '70s turned out to be very difficult to break. The cultural life including the fraction of the alternative opposition - became during these years bureaucratic and disarmed by the State support system. The aim of the official cultural policy to broaden amateur culture resulted in a feeling by many artists that they lacked a right to exist; the grants
they got were often just a sorry excuse since what they really wanted was an interested audience"
Although Sweden's experience of the war differs from that of the other Nordic countries, I believe there are similarities in this specific description of the general cultural climate with Europe in general. In the '80s, things changed almost overnight. Post-modernism hit the Nordic countries with full force, especially the theoretic issues (but also questions about amateur culture vs. professional were taken off the agenda, and private funding became acceptable to both left and right, which was not the case in the '70s). There was also massive cultural lobbying from neo-liberal groups during the'80s to establish a "market-oriented" approach to cultural life. This led to a polarised situation, and debate frequently seemed to concern how to organise and structure cultural life, ratherthan culture itself and what it represented.
The neo-expressionism of the 1 980s - with its post modern-influences - which focused on the historical and the psychological, produced numerous offspring in the North. The metaphysical landscape was reshaped, but often with a sideward glance at the melancholy Nordic tradition. Artists discussed the Nordic heritage in ambiguous terms, with a mixture of irony and the profoundest solemnity. But after focusing on neo-expressionism in the early'80s, with both apocalyptic and regional undertones, the Nordic art scene was drawn to more conceptual matters - with a touch of neo-pop. We saw artists paraphrasing trashy art and kitsch, especially landscapes, animals, and interiors. Some artists also made an issue of the avant-garde claims of modern art, combined with post-war social development and optimism. Were we living in the paradise that was promised to us then? Or are all visions of paradise founded on lies?
In the early'90s, we discerned the origination of an art that investigates more directly the interaction between private and public, between fiction and reality. This approach of investigating one's own person, or of working with fictions as though they were real and vice versa, was, and to some extent still is, an aesthetic method designed to give shape to the borderland between real and invented fact. How can we separate the opposites? Is it at all possible to discern how one affects the other?
And, yet, it is not a case of self-glorifying narcissism when Nordic artists mix private and public in their works. On the contrary, they are articulating complex relationships. The everyday becomes alien, almost shocking, when it is elevated to the art context. It is as though the artist is saying, "I am also a stranger to myself. There are uncomfortable rifts in my own idea of myself" and this phenomenon is critically investigated and put on display.
In his little pamphlet "Oublier Foucault" from 1977, Jean Baudrillard comments on this conflict between being inside and outside: "As medieval society found its own balance between God and the Devil, so our society is finding its own balance between consumption and defiance of it. It was also possible, however, to organise heretics and black magic sects around the Devil. In contrast, our magic is white. The heretic is no longer possible in the affluent society. We are faced with a prophylactic whiteness in a saturated society, a society with no myths other than itself"
It is a fateful description of society that Baudrillard presents us with. A claustrophobic description, in which every action becomes an action referring to itself, every thought becomes a thought about itself, every meaning becomes a meaning about itself, something that Andy Warhol, for instance, comments on in his diary as early as in June1983: "But then, since the sixties, after years and years and more 'people' in the news, you still don't know anything more about people. Maybe you know more, but you don't know better. Like you live with someone and not have any idea, either. So what good does all this information do you?"
Well, according to the democratic principals of society, information should make us better citizens. But in today's cyber-neurotic and satellite-stressed everyday life, there is an information overload that makes many of us feel detached and cynical towards the world. Rafael Argullol and Eugenio Trias discuss this idea in their "El cansancio de Occidente" from 1992: "Passivity is the hallmark of humans today. And it is obvious that if people are turned into spectators and robbed of any possibility of influence they become passive beings. But all this, of course, takes place in the guise of its opposite. All manner of pseudo-events go on amid a stream of constant activity; activity that reinforces the passive, an uninterrupted motion that fades into immobility. We speak of all the stress and hurry in our society, but the final impression is of a pursuit of emptiness"
So, are we back to where we started? The Nordic art scene at the beginning of the 21 st century is still about melancholy, not of the endlessness of nature but of the shallowness of information technology. The downfall of Ericsson and Nokia mobile phones? Just joking... The fact is that the region has become aware of its peripheral status while liberating itself from its Nordic heritage. As in many other parts of the world today, the Nordic region is two-tiered, local and global at the same time.
But there is also another side to this development. In his novel "Generation X", Douglas Coupland writes: "You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-today comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile: all sadnesses go unpitied"
I believe that Nordic contemporary art is also rooted in such a paradox. The further the 20th century advanced, the more people grew suspicious of the capacity of large collective movements to satisfy specific individual needs. At the same time, we are controlled as never before by international economic networks and global media. Therefore, it is possible to detect a new brand of tacit individualism in the Nordic context. Modern social welfare policy has created a secure, democratic cultural climate. On the other hand, it has resulted in a desire to transgress accepted norms. A desire to make us feel.