WHEN  IS  HISTORY?     Re-­enactment,  Anachronisms,  and  the  (Embodied)  Afterlife  of  Aesthetic  Practices.   Copenhagen/Falsterbo  October  12-­‐14,  2011     Place:  http://www.norregard.com/     Program:     Wednesday  12  October     12.30     Departure  from  Kastrup  Airport  with  taxis  (We  all  meet  at  the  Starbucks  Café  in       the  arrival  hall  of  terminal  3,  on  your  right  hand  before  the  exit  towards  the         taxis)   13.30     Arrival  at  Hotel  Norregård,  Falsterbo  (Sweden)  -­‐  Lunch   14.30     Welcome  by  the  organizers   15.00     Keynote:  Carol  Mavor,  “Duplicitous  Blue”   16.30     Coffee   17.00     Keynote:  Rebecca  Schneider,  “Acting in Ruins: Thoughts on Theatre’s “Adhesive Dead””   19.00     Dinner   20.30     Film:  Derek  Jarman,  Caravaggio  (1986)       Thursday  13  October     7.00  –  9.00     Breakfast   9.00     Two  papers:         Mathias:  Using  History  as  a  Kleenex:  Economies  of  Touch  in  Queer  Art  and  Theory       Mai  Britt:  The  double  identity  of  the  art  reproduction;  visual  imitation  –  and  re-­                    enactment  of  artistic  creation     10.30     Coffee   11.00     Workshop  I  –  details  tba   12.30     Lunch   14.00     Three  papers:         Louise:  History:  language,  knowledge  and  authority.  Or  just  plain  non-­sense.         Sigrid:  Colonial  past  in  the  present:  The  afterlife  of  an  unknown  19th  century           painting       Annika:  Re-­constructing  the  avant-­garde;  images,  paintings,  projections.  Some         remarks  on  the  historisation  of  Swedish  artist  Siri  Derkert  and  the  early         “cubisms”.   16.00     Coffee   16.30     Workshop  II/PhD  workshop  –  details  tba   18.00     Break   19.00     Dinner  

Friday  14  October     7.00  –  9.00   Breakfast   10.00  -­‐  12.00   Concluding  discussion  and  evaluation  of  Visions  of  the  Past.         Short  introductions  by  Renja,  Sigrid  and  Dan.   12.15       Lunch   13.30     Departure  with  taxis  to  Copenhagen  Airport                                                                                

ABSTRACTS  KEYNOTES   Carol  Mavor:  Duplicitous  Blue  

         

     

     Yves  Klein,  Requiem,  1960,  sponges,  pebbles  and  dry  pigment  in  synthetic          resin  on  board,  The  Menil  Collection.          

 

Blue  is  a  particularly  duplicitous  color,  associated  with  opposites  or  near  opposites:  joy  and   depression;  the  sea  and  the  sky;  infinite  life  and  death.  Blue  is  not  only  the  color  of  the  liquid   ocean,  a  liquid  lake;  its  meaning  is  liquid.     “Duplicitous  Blue”  is  chock-­‐full  of  liquid  blue  mythologies  Chantal  Akerman’s  2000  film   La  Captive;  the  Aran  islands  off  the  coast  of  Western  Ireland;  cyanotypes  and  blue  Polaroids;  

the  Australian  Satin  Bowerbird;  Agnés  Varda’s  1965  film  Le  Bonheur;  Krishna’s  blue  skin  in   eighteenth-­‐century  Jodhpur  painting;  the  powder-­‐blue  burqas  in  Samira  Makhmalbaf’s  2003   film  At  Five  in  the  Afternoon;  Roger  Hiorns’s  2006  installation  of  blue  copper-­‐sulfate  crystals   grown  to  cover  an  entire  London  bed-­‐sit  (Seizure);  and  Krzysztof  Kieslowski’s  1993  film  Blue.   The  fluid  feasting  of  “Duplicitous  Blue”  is  semiological,  as  prescribed  by  Roland  Barthes’s   Mythologies  (1953).  “Mythology,”  because  it  is  truth  disguised  as  fiction  and  fiction  disguised   as  truth,  is,  by  definition,  as  duplicitous  as  blue.   To  see  blue  is  to  see  duplicitously  true.    

           Anna  Atkins,  British  Algae,  1843,  Cyanotype  Impression,  New  York  Public  Library.

       

 

Rebecca  Schneider:     Acting  in  Ruins:  Thoughts  on  Theatre’s  ‘Adhesive  Dead’     “I  am  dead,”  says  John  Gabriel  Borkman,  otherwise  known  as  Alan  Rickman,  standing  center   stage  at  the  Brooklyn  Academy  of  Music  on  January  29,  2011.  On  the  stage,  large  mounds  of   snow  and  ice  appear  to  be  melting,  leaving  puddles  of  water  on  the  floor  that  the  elegant   skirts  of  the  ladies  drag  into  long  wet  paths.  But  the  ice  is  not  melting,  nor  wet,  and  the  snow   that  blows  in  billows  onto  the  stage  is  no  snow  at  all.  Rickman  is  not  dead,  and  the  walls  of  the   theatre  that  appear  to  be  crumbling  around  us  in  the  ruin  that  is  the  Brooklyn  Academy  of   Music’s  Harvey  theatre  in  New  York,  are  not  crumbling  at  all.  The  ruin  itself  is  faux  -­‐-­‐  frozen  in   a  state  of  decrepitude  considered  conducive  to  “cutting  edge”  art.      

Theatre  has  long  imagined  itself  to  be  dead.  Cinema  killed  it  again,  after  a  thorough  

slaying  by  photography.  Perhaps  in  relationship  to  its  multiple  deaths  (how  many  times  has   the  Church  declared  it  damned?),  it  has  been  lauded  as  a  primarily  haunted  and  haunting   medium.  Even  its  own  modern  visionaries  of  note  –  think  of  Zola,  think  of  Stanislavski,  think   of  Artaud  –  constantly  descried  the  habit  of  theatre’s  own  conventions  to  strangle  it  from   within.  Theatre,  it  appears,  has  long  been  its  own  voracious  parasite  and  the  source  of  its  own   perpetual  ruin.  Art  history  has  certainly  held  it  to  be  so  –  and  theatre,  dutifully,  has  fit  the  bill   by  appearing  objectless  as  well  as  perpetually  decomposing  and  debauched.  What  and  where,   after  all,  is  the  glorious  history,  the  carefully  written  annals,  of  the  comings  and  goings  of  the   mime?  A  library  search  will  underscore  in  an  instant  the  enormous  silence  on  this  silent   figure,  famous  for  gesturing  the  object  in  the  very  space  of  the  object’s  absence.  The  mime   slips  into  others’  history  (such  as  photography’s)  and,  grinning,  becomes  a  figure  for  the   paradox  of  uncertainty,  the  theatricality  of  any  evidence,  without  an  art  history  of  his  own.   Perhaps  this  lack  of  history  is  because  there  can  be  no  “tone  of  certainty”  (to  quote  Didi-­‐ Huberman)  with  a  mime  in  the  place  of  art?  For  every  mime’s  tone  is  heard  as  a  ghost  note  –   as  ambivalent  as  it  is  clear,  as  uncertain  as  it  is  precise,  as  posed  as  it  is  improvised.    To  write   it  otherwise  would  be  to  miss  it  –  again.    

This  paper  will  think  between  Rickman/Ibsen/Borkman’s  statement  “I  am  dead,”  and  

the  problem/promise  of  the  mime  in  terms  of  Didi-­‐Huberman’s  “tone  of  certainty.”  For  no   matter  how  certain  Rickman  sounds  –  he  is  both  not  dead  and  not  not  dead  at  once.    

Something  leaks  and  slips  in  mimesis,  and  the  question  becomes  –  should  a  history  engaged   with  mimesis  be  leaky  and  slippery  as  well?  Would  such  a  leak  and  slip  extend  to  temporal   registers  when  we  try  to  account  for  when  Ibsen’s  John  Gabriel  Borkman    (for  example)  takes   place?      

As  Herbert  Blau  so  elegantly  put  it  in  Take  Up  The  Bodies:     Whatever  the  style,  hieratic  or  realistic,  texted  or  untexted  –  box  it,  mask  it,   deconstruct  it  as  you  will  –  the  theatre  disappears  under  any  circumstances;   but  with  all  the  ubiquity  of  the  adhesive  dead,  from  Antigone’s  brother  to   Strindberg’s  Mummy  to  the  burgeoning  corpse  of  Ionesco’s  Amedée,  it’s   there  when  we  look  again.  

  That  is,  theatre  dies,  and  gets  up,  to  die  again,  and  get  up  again  –  the  strange  jumpiness  of  the     “adhesive  dead.”  This  paper  proposes  to  think  about  the  “adhesive  dead”  and  “acting  in  ruins”   (such  as  acting  in  BAM’s  Harvey  theatre)  to  ask  after  the  affective  economies  of  theatre’s   always  already  anachronistic  time.  Disappearing  to  reappear  is,  surely,  a  kind  of  circulation   and  one  that  traffics  uncertainty  in  and  through  objects  –  many  of  which  are  both  there  and   not  there  at  once.    What  can  theatre  (which  is  not  to  say  performance)  offer  to  art  history  in   general?  The  fecund  recurrences  of  error?  What  does  error  get  right?    

ABSTRACTS  FOR  MINI-­LECTURES   Mathias  Danbolt   Using  History  as  a  Kleenex:  Economies  of  Touch  in  Queer  Art  and   Theory     In  her  1999  book  Getting  Medieval  Carolyn  Dinshaw  draws  attention  to  the  “queer  historical   impulse  […]  toward  making  connections  across  time.”  Using  the  language  of  touch,  Dinshaw   focuses  on  the  importance  of  affect  in  historical  encounters.  This  paper  attempts  to  respond   to  the  growing  interest  in  “touching  across  time”  and  "transtemporal  communities"  in  recent   queer  theoretical  and  artistic  work  by  scrutinizing  the  complex  temporalities  and   (chrono)politics  of  touching  history.  Through  analyses  of  works  by  Renate  Lorenz/Pauline   Boudry  and  Benny  Nemerofsky  Ramsay,  I  ask  what  we  can  make  of  terms  such  as  "consent"   and  "responsibility"  when  working  with  what  Lorenz  and  Boudry  calls  "friends  from  the   past".  If  these  engagements  function  as  friendships  with  benefits,  who  benefits  the  most?       *****  

  Mai  Britt  Guleng     The  double  identity  of  the  art  reproduction;  visual  imitation  –   and  re-­enactment  of  artistic  creation   The  problematic  role  of  art  reproductions  in  books  and  art  magazines  has  deep  historical   roots  in  the  discipline  of  art  history.  In  the  second  part  of  the  19th  century,  prior  to  the   introduction  of  mechanical  reproduction  methods,  art  historians  and  artists  differentiated   between  a  wide  range  of  reproduction  possibilities.  Diverse  photographic  techniques  and   graphic  methods  were  considered  to  hold  a  variety  of  visual  qualities  which  made  them  suited   for  reproducing  some  categories  of  art  better  than  others  –  e.g.  the  albumen  print  for   drawings,  lithography  for  sculpture  and  etching  for  painting.  “True”  copies  however,  could   only  be  made  in  the  same  media  and  in  the  same  scale  as  the  original.  Copy  and  reproduction   were  not  the  same.  

 

My  paper  will  discuss  the  theories  and  practices  of  art  reproductions  in  the  late  19th  

century  with  special  emphasis  on  the  Nordic  magazine  Tidskrift  för  bildande  konst  och   konstindustri  [Magazine  for  fine  and  applied  arts]  (1875-­‐76).    The  magazine  was  founded  by   Lorentz  Dietrichson  (1834-­‐1917)  who  was  professor  of  art  history  at  the  Academy  of  Fine   Arts  and  teacher  at  the  Technical  School  in  Stockholm,  and  later  the  first  professor  of  art   history  at  the  University  of  Oslo.    

According  to  Dietrichson,  the  act  of  making  a  good  reproduction  –  whether  

photographic  or  graphic  –  was  depending  on  the  ability  of  the  maker  to  understand  the  inner   structure  and  artistic  processes  of  the  original  work  of  art.  The  ideal  reproduction  was  not  so   much  a  documentary  or  mechanical  copy  as  a  result  of  the  maker’s  re-­‐enactment  of  artistic   creation  –  the  artist’s  appropriation  of  the  original  in  the  shape  of  a  new  work  of  art.  I  will   examine  this  relationship  between  original  and  reproduction  and  its  implications  on  the   notion  of  the  connection  between  past  and  present.     *****    

Professor  Sigrid  Lien   Art  History,  LLE,  University  of  Bergen,  Norway                                                                                     Colonial  past  in  the  present:  The  afterlife  of  an  unknown  19th   century  painting     The  starting  point  of  this  talk  will  be  an  unknown19th  century  painting  –  which  so  far  has  been   “untouched”  by  art  historians.  This  painting,  a  family  portrait,  titled  “Hustugten”,  reflects  a   difficult  and  conflicting  history,  which  involves  Norwegian  colonial  engagement,  personal   shame,  bourgeois  pride  and  broken  hearts.    Even  though  it  has  not  yet  become  art  history,  the   image  has  over  and  over  again  and  through  the  centuries,  performed  history  in  very  different   contexts.  It  thus  raises  a  question  as  to  how  a  colonialized  colonial  power  as  Norway   remembers  it  past  –  or  rather  how  stories  about  the  past  have  been  created  and  still  is  created   through  this  image.  Inspired  by  contemporary  anthropological  theory  rather  than  art   historical  writing,  the  presentation  will  reflect  on  the  question  of  the  role  of  memory  in  the   negotiation  of  a  painful  past.  

Annika  Öhrner   Konstvetenskapliga  institutionen,  Uppsala  universitet  -­‐   [email protected]       Re-­constructing  the  avant-­garde;  images,  paintings,  projections.  Some  remarks  on  the   historisation  of  Swedish  artist  Siri  Derkert  and  the  early  “cubisms”.   In  a  recent  work  I  have  discussed  the  diversity  of  the  avant-­‐garde-­‐spaces  available  for  foreign   artists  when  arriving  in  Paris  and  Montparnasse  before  the  WWI,  taking  as  departure  point   the  artist  Siri  Derkert  (1888-­‐1973)  and  her  work.  She  developed  a  modernist  painterly  work   as  well  as  fashion  design  during  the  period  1913-­‐1920.    It  is  proposed  by  Art  History  that  her   encounter  with  the  Montparnasse  bohemia  and  the  Académies  libres  in  Paris  was  the  cause  of   the  interesting  new  traits  in  her  art  that  instantly  affected  the  art  in  Sweden  into  new   directions.      

The  picture  gets  more  complex  however,  when  taking  into  consideration  the  diversity  

of  cubism  produced  in  Paris  by  the  time  as  well  as  the  diversity  of  its  consumption,  i.e.  the   market  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  networks  and  the  working  conditions,  i.e.    the  social  space   that  Derkert  and  her  mates  were  constructing  for  themselves  while  in  Paris  and  while   traveling  around  in  Europe  (and  even  to  North  Africa),  on  the  other.  How  has  Art  History   coped  with  this?  What  is  influence,  and  when  does  it  happen?    

I  try  to  read  this  complex  situation,  from  among  other  perspectives,  through  the  

archival  study  not  only  of  her  left  work,  but  of  photographic  images  from  her  personal  archive   that  recently  have  been  uncovered.  These  small  black-­‐and-­‐white  images  present  the  artist  in   different  social  and  gendered  spaces,  but  also  present  a  lost  (or  at  least  today  unknown)  body   of  work.    

Left  then  with  at  least  three  different  document-­‐types;  original  paintings,  digital  

images  representing  these,  as  well  as  black-­‐and-­‐white  photographs  (and  their  digital   representations)  representing  other  original  work,  now  lost,  from  the  same  time  and  author,  a   reconstruction  of  the  mechanisms  of  the  historisation  of  the  artist  as  part  of  the  early  avant-­‐ garde,  is  revealed.      

This  paper  has  been  written  in  connection  with  the  research  for  two  parallel  projects:  a  retrospective  of  

Siri  Derkert    at  Moderna  Museet,  Stockholm,  May  28th-­‐  September  4th,  2011,  which  I  curated,  and  a  research  

project  at  Kungliga  Biblioteket  /  The  National  Library  of  Sweden,  which  included  seven  scholars  who  worked   with  departure-­‐point  in  the  artists’  archive,  donated  to  the  library  in  2009.  

****  

  Louise  Wolthers,  post.doc.  The  National  Gallery  of  Denmark   History:  language,  knowledge  and  authority.  Or  just  plain  non-­ sense.       The  talk  evolves  around  the  painting  “From  Ludvig  Holberg’s  Eramus  Montanus,  Act  III,  Scene   3”  (1844)  by  Wilhelm  Marstrand.  It  is  an  illustration  of  a  scene  from  the  satirical  play  Erasmus   Montanus  or  Rasmus  Berg  (1723)  by  the  Norwegian/Danish  writer/historian/philosopher   Ludvig  Holberg.          

Holberg’s  comedy  is  about  a  young  sophomore  returning  home  to  visit  his  parents  and  

their  small  farming  community  after  his  initial  years  at  university.  His  acquired  knowledge,   latin  language  and  academic  airs  clash  with  the  community  and  he  is  represented  as  a  wise   fool,  misplaced  and  misunderstood  as  in  this  depicted  scene.      

Marstrand  remarkably  chose  a  comedy  scene  to  be  the  motif  for  a  painting  of  ‘Danish  

folk  life’  –  an  assignment  required  for  his  entrance  into  the  art  academy.  Thus  he  refrained   from  creating  a  typical  genre  painting  which  was  his  area  of  expertise  at  the  time.  I  will   discuss  how  the  anachronism  and  theatricality  of  the  picture  breaks  with  the  traditional  aim   for  authenticity  in  historical  genre  paintings,  and  how  it  opens  up  for  an  expanded  history   concept.      

Marstrand  is  depicting  a  satirical  scene  where  a  struggle  over  language,  knowledge  and  

authority  takes  place.  In  my  interpretation  the  work  tells  us  about  rhetoric,  speech  acts  and   historicity;  about  how  historical  ‘truth’  is  enacted,  and  how  the  rights  to  tell  the  past  and  the   future  are  constantly  negotiated.      

Suggesting  what  might  aspire  to  be  a  ‘preposterous’  history  of  this  painting  I  also  draw  

on  the  work  by  contemporary  artist,  Ulla  Hvejsel,  who  deals  with  the  representation  of   historical  events  through  performance  and  the  performative  power  of  language.  In  several   works,  like  Cabaret  of  war  (2007-­‐2009)  and  A  speech  to  the  silent  majority  (2010),  she   performs  as  a  ‘fool’,  satirically  commenting  on  ideas  of  enlightenment,  reason,  realism,   misinterpretation  and  non-­‐sense.          

  Wilhelm  Marstrand:  From  Ludvig  Holberg’s  Eramus  Montanus,  Act  III,  Scene  3  (1844).  The  National  Gallery  of   Denmark.      

 

Ulla  Hvejsel:  Be  quiet  please.  A  speak  to  the  silent  majority  (2010).    See  more  on  http://www.realpolitik.dk/  

STATEMENTS    

Hanne  Hammer  Stien   Reflections  on  desire,  writing  and  museum  photography   [email protected]  

 

  Reflecting  upon  the  theme  of  our  meeting,  reading  these  beautiful  texts,  trying  to  deal  with   questions  related  to  my  own  methodology,  all  I  can  think  of  is  Carol  Mavor´s  embracement  of   desire  in  her  text  on  the  photographs  of  Clementina,  Viscountess  Hawarden.  It  is  something   about  the  way  Mavor  writes  that  make  visible  not  only  the  desires  of  the  photographs   themselves,  but  also  Mavor´s  desire  to  write  about  them  –  to  touch  them  in  an  embodied  way.   It  is  as  if  the  desire  slips  through  the  language  of  the  text,  the  pages  of  the  book  –  and  in  the   end  it  makes  me  yearn  for  a  luscious  language  of  my  own.   In  my  life  I  have  a  lot  of  desires,  I  somehow  see  myself  as  a  person  driven  by  desire,   though  in  relation  to  academic  writing  the  academic  norms  make  me  want  to  strangle  my   appetite.  Writing  then  is  all  about  restrictions;  it  becomes  dry  and  almost  unbearable.   Anyhow,  finding  myself  in  the  position  of  writing,  over  and  over  again,  something  tells  me  my   efforts  to  strangle  my  desires  always  becomes  attempts  –  in  this  case  the  aspiration  to  write   seem  to  win.  May  it  be  a  longing  for  an  embracing  way  of  writing,  where  both  my  desires  and   the  norms  of  the  academic  practices  are  grasped,  that  really  motivates  me?  Is  there  at  all  an   opposition  between  desire  and  academic  practices?       The  questions  raised  somehow  resonate  with  questions  brought  up  earlier  by  Whitney   Davis  in  his  “classical”  article  “Winckelmann  Divided:  Mourning  the  Death  of  Art  History”.   Davis  argues  that  the  separation  between  (subjective)  desire  and  (objective)  science  can  be   traced  back  to  the  establishment  of  the  history  of  art,  in  the  beginning  of  the  18th  century.  By   reflecting,  in  psychoanalytic  terms,  on  the  experience  of  loss  and  mourning  that  is  shining   through  Winckelmann´s  History  of  Ancient  Art  his  argumentation  is  developed.  The  loss   described  by  Davis  takes  face  as  a  double  loss.  It  is  expressed  both  in  the  experience  of  a   restrain  of  once  own  (erotic)  desire,  experienced  in  the  meeting  with  an  artwork,  and  as  a   result  of  the  art  historians  forced  way  of  writing  its  objects  into  history  and  to  create  distance   in  time.  Through  the  writing  of  history,  the  art  historian  makes  its  subject  an  objective,  and  by  

keeping  its  object  at  distance  the  art  historian  let  go  of  the  (deeply  and  subjective)  desired   that  is  included  in  the  aesthetic  experience.  Looking  at  the  work  of  art  through  historical  and   scientific  conceptions  the  art  historian  in  such  a  way  corrupts  the  artwork.  Relating  Davis   conception  with  my  own  experience  I  seem  to  have  grasped  a  fundamental  problem  in  the   writing  of  art  history.  Is  it  the  double  experience  of  loss  and  mourning  described  by  Davis  that   materializes  in  my  search  for  an  embracing  way  of  writing?  Can  I  possibly  hold  my  subjects   close  to  and  at  the  same  time  keep  them  at  a  distance?   Reflecting  upon  the  photographic  images  I  try  to  get  hold  on  in  my  Phd-­‐project,  for  the   time  being  titled  “Materialization  as  image  –  museum  photography  between  people  and   things”,  another  desire  is  located.  In  many  of  these  photographs,  produced  by  museum   photographers,  the  museological  desire  to  capsulate  the  past  has  been  a  fundamental  driving   force.  Writings  on  photography  have  also  given  a  lot  of  attention  to  the  ability  of  photography   to  arrest  time;  on  photography’s  power  to  make  its  motive  historical.  But  related  to  museum   photographs,  photography  in  a  different  way  is  used  to  arrest  what  is  all  ready  understood  as   past.  Though  photographic  practices  in  museums  are  deeply  rooted  in  the  idea  of  time  as   linear  they  unveil  themselves  as  anachronistic  by  trying  to  capture  a  sense  of  the  past  in  the   present.     A  particular  photograph  comes  to  my  mind.  It  shows  two  children  in  a  landscape.  In   the  background  there  are  wooden  houses  and  boats,  in  the  front  the  children  are  seated  in   their  toy  cars  made  of  plastic.  The  older  one,  wearing  a  cowboy  hat,  is  looking  directly  and   flirtatious  at  the  photographer,  leaning  his  arm  at  the  bonnet,  posing  as  a  proud  owner  of  his   new  car.  Absorbed  by  this  child,  the  younger  one  holds  his  hands  tightly  on  the  steering   wheel,  as  if  not  to  let  go  of  the  moment.    

    This  photograph  was  taken  during  the  beginning  of  the  1970s  in  Varanger  in  Northern   Norway  as  part  of  a  larger  project  initiated  by  Tromsø  University  Museum  where   photographic  documentation  was  carried  out  over  a  period  of  time  to  map  traditional   practices  and  material  traces  of  the  past  in  this  multicultural  area.  “Varangerregisteringene”,   as  well  as  similar  projects  initiated  by  Tromsø  University  Museum  at  this  period  of  time,  has   later  been  characterized  as  rescue  operations.  This  comprehension  gives  museum  staff,   setting  out  to  “save”  practices  as  well  as  material  culture  from  the  passage  of  time,  roles  as   rescue  operators.     The  photographer  and  researcher  Asbjørn  Klepp  set  out  to  “fulfill  his  mission”  in  this   specific  context.  An  article  written  by  him  in  1974  creates  an  interesting  opposition  between   the  children  in  the  image  and  (the  lives  of  people  of)  the  past.    In  a  caption  connected  to  the   photograph  Klepp  writes:  “Old  boats  (nordlandsbåter)  in  Kiby  are  never  going  back  at  sea,  the   young  generation  has  new  ideals.”  For  Klepp  it  is  the  wooden  houses  and  boats  in  the   background  that  stand  for  the  past.  The  children  portrayed,  turning  their  backs  against  these   boats  and  houses,  are  somehow  seen  as  traitors,  feeding  the  future  by  embracing  the  material   expression  of  the  present,  articulated  through  plastic  cars  and  cowboy  hats.  Historian  Lena  

Aarekol  has  all  ready  commented  on  the  relationship  between  Klepp´s  photograph  and  the   caption  quoted:  it  is  as  if  the  children  become  agents  of  a  future  oriented  present  that  erodes   traces  of  the  past  by  being  present.  The  children  somehow  seem  to  disturb  the  perfect  picture   of  a  society  untouched  by  the  eruption  of  modernity,  and  instead  of  considering  the  children   as  creating  a  passage  between  times  they  are  understood  as  markers  of  a  borderline   impossible  to  pass.     Going  back  to  Mavor´s  text  on  the  photographs  of  Clementina,  Viscountess  Hawarden,   she  argues  that:  “all  historical  research  (…)  feeds  on  a  desire  to  know,  to  come  closer  to  the   person,  object,  under  study.”  In  relation  to  museum  photography  Mavor´s  portrayal  of  the   motive  of  historical  research  seem  to  fit  well.  Through  production  of  photographic  images   museums  photographers  such  as  Klepp  have  tried  to  capture  past  practices  and  materials  so   that  to  see,  to  smell  and  to  touch  the  past.  As  a  result  of  this  embodied  and  museological   desire  Klepp´s  will  to  clean  up  the  picture,  to  protest  against  the  anachronistic  present  of  the   photograph,  make  it  difficult  to  recognize  the  children  in  the  photograph  as  representing  a   passage  -­‐  a  passage  between  times.     Ending  my  reflections  I  once  more  need  to  quote  Mavor.  Motivated  by  a  desire  to  read   more  of  Mavor´s  texts  I  came  across  her  reflections  on  kissing  and  photographing  while   reading  Reading  Boyishly.  She  writes:       “When  we  kiss  [writes  Phillips]  we  devour  the  object  by  caressing  it;  we  eat  it,  in  a   sense,  but  sustain  its  presence”:  the  kiss  then,  is  like  a  photograph.  Capturing  what  is   fleeting,  the  camera´s  famed  devouring  eye  is  as  much  mouth  as  eye.  (…)  Both  the  kiss   and  the  photograph  are  stories  of  taking  and  preserving  the  object,  especially,  if  the   kiss  on  the  mouth,  which  distinctly  “blurs  the  distinctions  between  giving  and  taking.”    

  In  my  attempt  to  understand  Mavor´s  comparison  between  a  kiss  and  a  photograph  I  take  a   look  at  Klepp´s  photograph  once  more  and  compare  it  with  a  kiss:  through  this  optic  it   suddenly  is  made  visible  that  in  the  picture  of  the  children  Klepp´s  “taking”,  of  what  he   experienced  as  past,  includes  a  “giving”  of  what  was  present.              

 

Annika  Öhrner:    Statement   In  the  conference  I  present  one  of  my  ongoing  projects,  which  is  a  historiographical  analysis   of  the  avant-­‐gardes  in  transmission,  related  to  the  work  and  reception  of  Siri  Derkerts   ”cubisms”.  In  this  I  detect  a  kind  of  looping  between  the  production  in  the  centre  of  her  work,   until  the  actual  reception  of  it  in  the  peripheri,  in  a  moment  of  construction  of  a  ”neo-­‐ avantgarde”.  This  looping,  is  visualized  througt  different  kinds  of  visual  documents,  originals,   copies,  digital  documents.  The  last  couple  of  years,  including  during  my  work  on  the  thesis  on   Barbro  Östlihn,  I  have  continuously  widened  the  document  types  I  se  as  relevant  for  the  body   of  objects  of  research.  This  has  been  in  tandem  with  my  ongoing  attempts  to  improve  the   analytical  tools  with  which  I  analyse  social  spaces  and  discourses.   The  digital  shift  has  influenced  the  way  documents  are  available,  something   which  has  striked  me  particularly  as  I  worked  outside  the  Academy  for  ten  years,  returning  in   2003  to  a  completely  new  situation.  The  change  is  enormous.  I  regard  the  digitalisation  of   archives  and  the  availability  of  documents  through  internet,  as  a  step  towards  a  new  kind  of     competition  among  scholars,  a  better  onve.  It  is  no  longer  enough  to  present  new  documents   or  archival  material  as  such,  instead  it  is  the  analysis  which  has  to  be  improved.  This  has,  as  I   see  it,  been  benign  for  the  art  historical  field  as  such.   I  have  admittedly,  made  very  little  experiments  with  the  form  of  the  academical   text.  The  shift  from  using  slides    to  using  digital  images  and  powerpoints,  makes  the  daily   work  of  any  art  historian  so  much  easier.  To  what  extent,  an  a  more  principal  or  structural   sense  the  slide  show  –  powerpoint  shift  has  changed  the  academical  work,  I  am  not  sure.   Excuse  my  very  scarce  lines  on  these  important  matters,  to  which  I  will  return  to   in  my  paper  during  the  conference.        

Christine  Hansen:  Statement   [Part  of  the  introduction  of  my  dissertation  submitted  august  2011]     The  Author  and  the  Artist(s)   In   my   work   I   have   attempted   to   formulate   a   middle   ground   between   the   analysis   of   the   historical  material  (works  and  textual  sources),  interviews  and  artists  statements.  I  have  not   isolated  the  objects  under  discussions  from  the  context  in  which  they  are  produced.  This  does   not,   however,   imply   that   I   can   account   for   the   full   history   of   the   works   and   the   making   of   them.1   Another   factor   is   the   relationship   between   the   work,   its   context   and   the   artist.   The   question  concerning  the  artist  is  particularly  complex  in  the  case  study  Norsk  Landskap  1987   in   my   dissertation,   since   the   work   was   made   as   a   group   effort   by   four   individuals.   Issues   concerning   collaboration   and   repression   of   the   subject   are   major   topics   in   my   work.   Nevertheless,  I  consider  questions  about  the  artist  to  be  important.  Here  it  should  be  said  that   I  neither  rely  entirely  on  the  author(s)  (the  artists)  as  ‘the  proper  source  of  meaning’,  nor  do  I   entirely  exclude  the  author  recommended  by  Roland  Barthes  in  the  Death  of  the  Author  and   by  subsequent  scholars.  As  a  practitioner  of  photography  I  am  often  troubled  by  the  absence   of   the   perspective   of   the   photographer.   Few   artists   on   the   current   art   scene   like   to   think   of   themselves   as   ‘photographers’,   preferring   to   say   they   are   artists   who   “use   photography”   or   “work   with   camera-­‐based   art”.   The   postmodern   critique   of   the   figure   of   the   artist   made   questions   about   the   photographer   appear   as   old-­‐fashioned.   The   perspective   became   more   about   the   intertextual   properties   of   photography   and   the   image   culture:   rather   than   referring   to  the  author,  pictures  referred  to  other  pictures,  or  so  it  was  argued.  To  be  a  ‘photographer’   has  been  associated  with  camera  club  photography  and  (an  ostensibly  unhealthy)  interest  in   ISOs,   apertures   and   grey-­‐tones.   Moreover   many   critical   theorists   have   considered   the   photographer  as  an  almost  unscrupulous  figure:  a  “developing-­‐country-­‐tourist”,  a  paparazzo   or  biased  documentary  photographer.      

                                                                                                                1

This phrase is slightly inspired by Henrik Gustafson’s dissertation Out of Site. Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema 1969-1974, Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007, p. 55. He cites Tom Gunning’s study of Fritz Lang’s films on his approach: Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000, p. 416.

I  propose  that  it  is  timely  to  ask  what  it  means  to  work  photographically  within  the  art-­‐ field  without  losing  oneself  in  the  mythology  of  the  artist  (again)  or  in  condemnation  of  the   photographic   activity   as   unethical.   I   have   included   this   perspective   in   my   work   in   various   ways,   for   example   I   have   included   photographers   own   “hands-­‐on”   reflection   on   their   work.   My   aim   in   using   this   material   is   not   only   to   understand   more   about   their   work,   it   is   also   important   since   it   sheds   light   on   their   self   reflection   in   terms   of   what   it   means   to   be   a   photographer/artist.   It   is   important   to   stress   that   my   interviews   with   the   artists   are   recent.   This   implies   that   their   reflection   on   their   work   also   to   a   large   extent   reflects   the   history   of   their   art   field,   that   is,   the   different   narratives,   revisions   and   counter   narratives   that   have   taken   place   in   the   twenty   three   years   since   Norsk   Landskap   1987   was   made.   This   is   an   important   reminder:   even   the   recent   history   of   which   we   have   been   an   active   part   (and   “witnessed”  with  our  own  eyes),  is  in  constant  motion,  and  up  for  revision.     I   have   also   integrated   discussion   of   many   of   the   photographers-­‐writers   in   the   photographic  modernist  tradition.  I  give  particular  attention  to  the  way  in  which  the  process   of  moving  from  concept  to  work  and  the  process  of  moving  from  reality  to  picture  has  been   described   and   reflected   on.   I   have   also   discussed   what   it   means   to   inhabit   the   role   of   a   photographer.   My   claim   is   that   the   photographer   as   social   person,   as   initiator   of   social   situations  has  been  insufficiently  discussed  in  the  literature.                                  

Dan  Karlholm:  Almost  always  contemporary?1     …the  riddle  that  the  work  of  art  sets  us  is  precisely  that  of  the  contemporaneity  of  past  and   present.    

 

 

Hans-­‐Georg  Gadamer  (The  Relevance  of  the  Beautiful,  1977)  

  No  matter  how  often  we  revise  the  past,  the  revisions  originate  in  our  own  time  and  are  hence   a  part  of  the  simultaneity  that  is  the  structure  of  the  present.    

 

 

Lawrence  Alloway  (“The  Complex  Present”,  1980)  

   

    This  work  by  Maurizio  Nannucci  consists  of  a  proposition  in  capital  neon  letters  mounted  on  a   preexisting  wall,  saying:  “all  art  has  been  contemporary.”  A  much  debated  version  of  this   piece  from  1999  was  installed  on  the  façade  to  the  Altes  Museum  in  Berlin  in  2005,  and  the   title  inspired  a  show  at  the  Hamburger  Kunsthalle  last  fall.2  Nannucci  works  within  a   conceptualist  tradition,  in  obvious  proximity  to  Joseph  Kosuth  and  Jenny  Holzer.  This  

particular  work,  however,  strikes  me  as  interestingly  flawed.  Whatever  wit  or  novelty  it   possesses  departs,  arguably,  from  the  more  conventional  sense  of  “contemporary  art”  that  it   ostentatiously  questions  but  ultimately  reinforces:  only  new  or  recent  art  is  contemporary.   Not  so!  We  are  reminded  that  all  the  old  stuff  has  once  upon  a  time  been  young  and   “contemporary”  too,  which  seems  a  nostalgic  proverb  from  the  seventeenth  century.   Contemporary  becomes  synonymous  with  new  in  this  sentence,  i.e.  literally  devoid  of  content.   Is  this  to  provoke  a  discussion  on  the  temporal  limits  of  contemporary  art,  to  make  old  art   relevant,  or  to  critically  challenge  the  hyped-­‐up  presentism  of  the  contemporary  discourse?  I   think  not.  My  first  reformulation  of  this  sentence  would  simply  be:  some  art  has  been   contemporary.  The  adjective  here  refers  to  a  highly  valued  contemporaneity,  differing  from   the  past  preceding  it  or  from  accumulated  history  turned  relatively  obsolete  by  default.  A   historical  qualifier  of  this  reformulation  would  be:  some  art  has  only  been  contemporary  for   some  time  (i.e.  the  late  eighteenth  century,  since  contemporaneity  emerges  from  the   establishment  of  history  (as  such)  as  a  new  historical  object).  To  proclaim  all  art   contemporary  in  Nannucci’s  sense,  is  to  ignore  the  power  relations  operative  within  any   current  art  field,  where  only  a  minor  part  is  defined  as  “contemporary,”  as  well  as  to  disregard   the  historical  contingency  involved  in  establishing  the  contemporary  in  the  still  current  sense.   My  second  reformulation  seeks  approval  on  different  grounds:  all  art  is  contemporary.  The   adjective  here  refers  not  to  contemporaneity  or  the  contemporary  as  a  distinct  construct  of   interest  and  point  of  identification  within  and  to  a  certain  society,  but  to  mere   contemporaneousness,  a  relative  synchronicity  of  all  the  art  that  still  remains  and,  thus,  share   the  same  time  now.  Shifting  the  tense  from  past  to  present  is  key  here.  What  “has  been”  is   automatically  no  more,  it  is  the  mode  of  history  and  memory,  rooted  in  Hegel-­‐style   historicism.  My  second  reformulation  aims  to  substitute  this  historical  mindset  for  a   phenomenological  procedure,  where  each  encounter  with  the  work  is  not  only  new;  the  work   in  this  encounter  is  ever  new,  no  matter  how  old.  My  final  twist  is  that  this  second  sense  of   contemporary  (relating  to  contemporaneousness)  may  be  coordinated  with  or  superimposed   upon  the  first  sense  (relating  to  contemporaneity)  would  we  accept  as  an  idea  that   contemporary  art  means  actualized  art,  that  is,  any  art,  regardless  of  its  physical  coming  into   being,  that  is  actively  brought  to  “contemporary  play.”3      

Dan  Karlholm    

1  This  is  an  excerpt,  for  this  occasion  representing  a  statement  of  mine  on  issues  related  to  the  seminar,  from  a   text  entitled  “On  the  Historical  Representation  of  Contemporary  Art”  in  Hans  Ruin  &  Andrus  Ers  (eds.),   Rethinking  Time:  Essays  on  History,  Memory,  and  Representation,  Södertörn  Philosophical  Studies  9,  2011.     2  The  exhibition  “All  art  has  been  contemeporary”  attests  to  the  renewed  interest  in  the  last  decade  of  issues   concerning  the  historiography  of  modern  and/or  contemporary  art.  The  curatorial  statements,  however,  attest   to  the  modernist  and  simplistically  formalist  assumptions  behind  it:  ”[The  exhibition]  calls  attention  to  the  often   forgotten  fact  that  every  artwork  has  at  some  point  been  contemporary.  While  ’historical’  and  ’current’  works  of   art  may  be  centuries  apart  in  terms  of  their  date  of  origin  and  their  style,  similarities  often  exist  between  them   on  a  formal  or  thematic  level.  This  serves  to  remind  us  that  every  work  of  art  is  an  expression  of  human   experience  and  an  exploration  of  universal  issues,  and  that  the  artists’  intentions  are  not  as  far  removed  from   each  other  as  is  commonly  assumed.”  In  the  family  of  art,  dogs  can  be  spotted  from  antiquity  till  today,  and  the   color  red,  for  example,  unites  quite  a  few  artworks  throughout  the  universe…   3  These  gadamerian  words  are  borrowed  from  Donald  Kuspit,  “The  Contemporary  and  the  Historical”  (2005):   http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit4-­‐14-­‐05.asp.  The  prospect  of  a  redefined  notion  of   contemporary  art  could  involve  interrogating  the  established  histories  of  art  with  new  attention  to  the  temporal,   temporary,  contemporary,  (un)timely  and  anachronic.  

                             

Louise  Wolthers,  post.doc.  The  National  Gallery  of  Denmark   Beyond  history  painting:  photography,  performance  and  other   ‘un-­original’  events   The  main  field  of  my  research  and  curatorial  work  is  within  photography,  which  over  the   years  has  prompted  me  to  consider  the  medium’s  relation  to  pastness,  archives  and  history   writing  in  multiple  ways.  My  overall  academic  interest  has  been  to  expand  the  ways   ‘historical’  photographs  mean,  point  to  or  do  the  past:  how  they  mediate  history  and  how  they   perform  as  historical  documents.  (As  the  network  members  might  be  aware  of  my  Ph.D.   dissertation  was  on  the  photographic  re-­‐/presentations  of  Danish  national  past  in  relation  to   war,  colonialism  and  commercialism  based  on  the  photographic  collection  at  the  royal   library).  Methodologically  I  have  drawn  on  the  photohistorical  work  of  scholars  like  Elizabeth   Edwards,  who  has  argued  for  the  necessity  of  re-­‐thinking  ‘context’  when  working  with   historical  photographs:  we  need  not  only  the  ‘containing’  or  ‘originating’  context  but  also  the   ‘dense  context’  which  “emerges  through  the  relations  of  the  photograph.”2  I  have  also  looked   to  the  discipline  of  history  theory  ranging  from  poststructuralism  to  theories  of  presence  in   order  to  formulate  how  photographs  might  serve  as  historical  ‘sources’  beyond  the  concept  of   a  linear,  irreversible  time.      

Not  being  limited  to  the  conventional  referentiality  of  a  photograph  opens  up  for  also  

re-­‐thinking  its  indexicality  and  considering  “the  very  act  of  photography  as  a  kind  of   performative  gesture  which  points  to  an  event  in  the  world.”3  Taking  seriously  the  agency  of  a   photograph/picture/object  does  not  only  influence  the  way  we  analyse  the  re-­‐/presentation   of  a  historical  event  or  situation  but  it  also  draws  attention  to  how  the  historian  is  always   situated  and  how  she  is  drawn  to  the  material  by  different  interests  and  desires.  In  much  of   her  work  Carol  Mavor  performs  and  reflects  on  this  –  often  seductive  –  relation:  “All  historical   research  whether  the  objects  of  study  are  from  a  long  time  ago  or  yesterday,  feeds  on  a  desire   to  know,  to  come  closer  to  the  person,  object  under  study.  Though  we  go  under  great  pains  to  

                                                                                                                2

Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories. Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, 2001, p. 109. David Green & Joanna Lowry, ”From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicality” in: Where Is the Photograph, 2003, p. 48. 3

cover  up  our  desire,  to  make  our  voice  objective,  to  see  that  our  findings  are  grounded,  to   dismiss  our  own  bodies,  we  flirt  …  with  the  past.”4        

The  paradigm  of  objective,  disembodied  science  has  been  particularly  challenged  by  

feminist  scholars  –  also  of  course  within  the  disciplines  of  history  and  art  history.  My  most   recent  project  has  dealt  with  strategies  of  how  to  disrupt  the  still  dominating  phallogocentric   narrative  of  Danish  the  National  Gallery’s  ‘(patri-­‐)archive’.  Of  great  theoretical  inspiration  has   been  the  work  of  Griselda  Pollock,  particularly  her  Encounters  in  the  Virtual  Feminist  Museum,   which  calls  for  a  radical  intervention  in  the  histories  of  art,  instead  of  just  inserting  hitherto   overlooked  female  artists  in  the  established  canon.  Her  ‘museum’  –  a  series  of  situated   readings  –  takes  seriously  the  performative  qualities  of  the  works  which  “ask  to  be  allowed  to   change  the  culture  into  which  they  intervene  by  being  considered  as  creative:  poïetic  and   transformative”.  5  The  temporal  aspect  of  the  term  ‘virtual’  is  important  to  note:  ”I  define   feminism  as  virtual  in  the  sense  of  its  potential  for  becoming,  in  other  words  leading  to  what   we  don’t  know  yet,  a  culture  beyond  the  phallocentric,  rather  than  a  reform  within  it”6     Working  with  the  National  Gallery’s  collection  of  pre  19th  century  art  from  a  feminist  and   queer  perspective  means  to  question  the  many  gender-­‐based  mechanisms  of  in-­‐  and  exclusion   that  support  the  conventional  art  historical  narratives.  For  instance  I  analyzed  or  ‘queered’   the  practice  of  and  discourse  around  Kristian  Zahrtmann  who  on  the  one  hand  renewed  the   genre  of  history  painting  by  for  instance  choosing  (masculine)  women  as  heroines  and  on  the   other  embodied  a  misogynist  view  on  women  to  uphold  an  image  of  himself  as  a  great  male,   heterosexual  artist.      

My  interest  in  the  legacies  of  history  painting  in  later  artistic  representations  of  art  has  

been  shaped  by  photography,  picture  archives  and  contemporary  artists  dealing  with  history   writing  and  affiliated  with  the  ‘archival’  turn.  One  example  is  Lindsay  Seers’  performative   multimedia  installations  that  play  on  the  dominant  expectations  of  historical  archives  as   housing  a  fixed,  original  piece  of  historical  truth.  Seers  turns  photography  an-­‐archival  through   its  disturbing  characteristics  of  reproducibility,  re-­‐appearance  and  haunting.  Rebecca   Schneider  has  thoroughly  explored  and  conceptualised  such  performative  or  theatrical                                                                                                                   4

Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, 1999, p. 16. Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time , space and the archive, 2007, p. 10. 6 Griselda Pollock, “Towards the virtual feminist museum” in: Elles[at]centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the musée national d’art moderne centre de creation industrielle, 2009, p. 328. 5

qualities,  generally  overlooked  in  Western  art  history:  “The  threat  of  theatricality  is  still  the   threat  of  the  imposter  status  of  the  copy,  the  double,  the  mimetic,  the  second,  the  surrogate,   the  feminine,  or  the  queer”7      

My  current  project  evolves  around  a  single  1844-­‐painting  by  Wilhelm  Marstrand.  I  

have  yet  to  convince  colleagues  (and  even  sometimes  myself)  about  why  this  genre  painting  –   holding  a  typical  low  position  in  the  art  historical  hierarchy  –  is  interesting  in  relation  to   historical  representation.  But  I  didn’t  have  to  convince  contemporary  performance  artist  Ulla   Hvejsel  how  I  considered  her  work  in  the  same  context  as  Marstrand’s  painting.  I  might  turn   to  Mieke  Bal’s  preposterous  history  or  Didi-­‐Huberman’s  anachronism  to  try  to  find  arguments   for  connecting  Marstrand  and  Hvejsel  in  my  paper...  I  am  looking  forward  to  discussing  this   with  you  at  our  conference!      

                                                                                                                7

Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 2011, p. 30.

Hans  Dam  Christensen  

Embodied  hermeneutics?  On  the  re-­enactment  of  Saussure’s   Geneva  lectures     Recently,  I  completed  an  article  on  the  use  of  images  in  Ferdinand  de  Saussure’s  renowned   book,  Cours  de  linguistique  générale,  published  in  1916.  As  is  well-­‐known,  this  book  became  of   prime  importance  for  the  development  of  general  linguistics,  semiotics  and  structuralism  in   the  20th  century.  In  cultural  studies,  for  example,  Levi-­‐Strauss’  anthropology,  Barthes’   semiotics,  Metz’  film  theory  and  Lacans’  psychoanalysis  wouldn’t  be  possible  without   Saussure  as  a  theoretical  backdrop.  From  the  end-­‐1960s  and  on,  deconstruction  and  post-­‐ structuralism  revealed  new  perspectives  on  the  Saussurean  thinking.    

Concerning  the  afterlife  of  Cours  de  linguistique  générale,  people  outside  linguistic  

circles  probably  know  some  of  the  figures  in  the  1916-­‐version  better  than  the  text  around   them.  Above  all,  the  Saussurean  model  of  the  sign  (with  its  tree,  circle,  line  and  arrows)  is   famous.  However,  the  book  includes  lots  of  images  in  a  broad  W.J.T.  Mitchell-­‐inspired  sense:   Diagrams,  formal  symbols,  visualized  metaphors  by  way  of  “abstract”  and  “realistic”  drawings,   and  last,  but  not  the  least,  several  examples  of  thinking  with  images.    

The  main  purpose  of  my  article  was  to  question  the  use  of  images  in  a  book  that  is  

hailed  for  privileging  language  as  the  sign  system  in  comparison  with  others.  Saussurean   literature  hardly  ever  discusses  the  use  of  images,  but  does  it  impact  the  understanding  of   language  as  a  sign  system?  At  least,  it  points  to  a  more  complex  usage  of  signs.  The  language   system  is  at  its  best  in  certain  contexts,  whereas  other  sign  systems  are  more  appropriate  in   other  contexts.  Communication,  or  the  negotiating  of  signs,  often  needs  several  types  of  sign   simultaneously,  as  we  see  in  Cours  de  linguistique  générale  with  its  amalgamation  of  figures   and  text.    

A  minor  query  in  my  article  was  to  question  the  authenticity  of  these  figures,  that  is,  

did  Saussure  make  them  himself?  When  Cours  de  linguistique  générale  was  published,  the   person  behind  had  been  dead  for  three  years  and  the  posthumously  book  was  edited  by  two   of  his  colleagues.  Saussure  didn’t  leave  a  manuscript,  and  he  often  destroyed  his  notes  after   the  lectures.  Instead,  the  editors  did  their  work  on  the  basis  of  his  students’  notes  from  three   series  of  lectures  that  Saussure  delivered  at  the  University  of  Geneva  between  1907  and  1911.   Even  though  his  audience  apparently  discussed  and  compared  meticulous  notes  after  each   25

lecture,  only  a  handful  of  students  attended  the  lectures,  and  for  the  two  first  series  the  notes   from  one  student  became  the  primary  source  (his  name,  Albert  Riedlinger,  appears  on  the   front  cover  of  the  book),  while  the  third  series,  which  this  student  didn’t  attend,  is  a   compilation  of  notes  taken  by  three  other  students.  As  the  students’  notes  as  well  as  several  of   Saussure’s  manuscript  fragments  include  simple  drawings  and  figures,  it’s  easy  to  infer  that   Saussure  did  draw  figures  on  the  blackboard,  even  though  not  so  detailed  as  some  of  the   figures    in  the  1916-­‐book.    

The  afterlife  of  the  Cours  de  lingustique  générale  is  complicated  by  further  

circumstances.  The  third  series  of  lectures  became  the  guiding  principle  for  the  structure  of   the  entire  book,  but  a  more  complete  set  of  notes  (with  figures)  for  the  last  series  of  lectures   appeared  in  1958.  The  year  before,  the  students’  source  manuscripts  were  published,  and,  in   addition,  several  critical  editions  of  the  book  have  seen  the  light  of  day  since  its  first  print.  In   1996,  and  perhaps  more  astonishingly,  manuscript  fragments  from  Saussure’s  own  hand  (also   with  figures)  were  found  in  the  orangerie  of  the  family  house  in  Geneva.  It’s  easy  to  imagine   the  excitement  among  Saussure  scholars  when  these  fragments  were  published  as  Écrits  de   linguistique  générale  in  2002,  but  it  also  complicates  the  presence  of  the  past  in  the  present:   Which  “Saussure”  are  we  speaking  of?    

I  shall  not  delve  deeper  into  this  genesis  of  Cours  de  linguistique  générale.  However,  I  

had  to  outline  some  circumstances  above  in  order  to  make  my  current  research  relevant  for   the  theoretical  framework  of  this  seminar.  In  terms  of  this  framework,  we  are,  of  course,  not   speaking  of  the  origin  of  the  Cours  de  linguistique  générale,  but  rather  of  the  quest  for  the  re-­‐ entactment  of  Saussure’s  Geneva  lectures.  Seen  from  this  perspective,  his  (?)  book  is  the  script   for  a  re-­‐performance  of  his  lectures.  It  is,  however,  not  just  a  document  that  represents  the   speaking  Saussure.  His  habit  of  picturing  ideas  on  the  blackboard  adds  a  performative  aspect   that  is  beyond  speaking.  Cours  de  linguistique  générale  also  informs  a  drawing  performer  and   addresses  a  looking  listener.    

Time  has  passed,  the  old-­‐fashoned  linguistics  of  Saussure’s  time,  which  he  opposed  in  

his  lectures,  has  passed,  too,  and  semiotics,  structuralism  etc.  have  effected  our  perception  of   Saussure’s  endeavor.  In  other  words,  the  Geneva  lectures  have  slipped  into  an  anachronic   temporality.  Even  though  future  findings  of  manuscript  fragments  and  the  likes  probably  will   intensify  the  phonocentric  quest  among  Saussure  scholars  for  what  the  Master  really   intended,  the  findings  will,  in  fact,  displace  the  real  events.  They  will  find  their  place  in  the   26

virtual  Saussure  archive  with  his  other  writings  as  well  as  an  abundance  of  interpretations,   critical  comments  and  so  on  which  all  mirror  the  Geneva  lectures  in  a  kaleidoscopic  manner.      

In  this  way,  the  re-­‐enactment  of  the  Geneva  lectures  is,  of  course,  impossible.  In  

addition,  the  afterlife  of  the  book  insinuates  the  common  hermeneutic  paradox  concerning   interpretation  and  truth.  Considered  as  a  script  for  re-­‐entactment,  Cours  de  linguistique   générale  –  with  its  interpretative  presence  until  Saussure’s  dead  in  1913  and  the  following   afterlife  –  perhaps  opens  for  the  suggestion  that  re-­‐enactments  of  all  kinds  suffer  from  the   same  hermeneutic  paradox  as  ever.  In  Gadamer’s  words,  people  have  a   wirkungsgeschichtliches  Bewußtsein,  a  historically  effected  consciousness,  and  their  Vorurteils,   prejudices,  are  shaped  by  a  particular  history  and  culture  as  well.  Whereas  Gadamer  speak   about  texts,  one  can  suggest  that  the  performative  aspects  of  re-­‐enactment  open  for  an   embodied  hermeneutics.  Interpretation  (read:  re-­‐entactment)  involves  a   Horizontverschmelzung,  a  fusion  of  horizons,  where  the  interpreters  –  whether  they  know  it   or  not  –  apparently  find  the  ways  that  the  history  of  their  object,  text,  desire  etc.  articulate   with  their  own  backgrounds,  their  psychological  dispositions,  their  social  and  cultural  beings,   their  bodies  etc.     Following  Derrida  one  can,  however,  indicate  that  this  interpretive  practice  also  involves  the   usual  hermeneutic  troubles,  that  is,  the  guter  Wille  zur  Macht,  the  good  will  to  power,  for   example,  when  the  interpreter  disguises  the  in-­‐  and  exclusions  of  the  interpretative  act,  when   he  or  she  doesn’t  reflect  upon  the  power  of  the  discourse  and  signifying  practices,  or,  not  the   least,  when  he  or  she  is  blind  to  the  uncertainty  of  the  text  (or  the  historical  event,  the  object,   the  image  etc.):  Can  we  presuppose  that  it  is  meaningful?      

If  we  put  the  speculative  question  of  re-­‐enactment  aside,  I  have  to  admit  that  Cours  de  

linguistique  générale  is,  to  put  it  mildly,  on  the  fringe  of  mainstream  art  history.  Saussure’s   drawings  don’t  invite  aesthetic  judgments  and  he  didn’t  lecture  on  art,  so  the  question,  “when   is  art  history”,  seems  beside  the  point.  This  may  be  an  advantage  in  this  case.  The  discourse  of   aesthetical  practices  in  art  history  as  well  as  visual  studies  often  blurs  the  interpretative   troubles,  when  it  ignores  the  use  of  reproductive  images  instead  of  real  art  works.  The   mixture  of  images  and  text  in  Cours  de  linguistique  générale  reminds  us  that  images  are  part  of   the  discourse,  not  just  leftovers  that  words  are  supposed  to  animate  (anew).    

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Ludwig  Qvarnström:  Statement   The  Jewish  Modernist:  anti-­Semitism,  self-­identification  and   the  historiography  of  Swedish  Modernism   In  1930  Bertel  Hintze  (a  Finnish  art  historian  and  gallery  director)  published  a  survey   book  about  modern  art.  In  this  book  he  introduced  the  Swedish  artist  Isaac  Grünewald   (1889–1946)  into  a  narration  of  European  modernism.  Hintze  wrote  that  Grünewald,   “this  incomparable  talent”  occasionally  could  even  surpass  his  teacher  Henri  Matisse.   Grünewald’s  ability  he  explained  by  pointing  at  his  flowing  colours  and  captivating   rhythm  as  a  natural  outcome  of  his  Semitic  origin.  While  this  “oriental”  expression  for   Matisse  was  a  cultivated  skill  it  was  for  Grünewald,  according  to  Hintze,  something   unrestrained  and  primitive.  His  origin  could  also  explain  his  productivity  and  the   variation  of  the  quality  of  his  art.  Even  though  Hintze  here  was  basically  positive  in  his   characterisation  of  Grünewald  he  renounced  him  having  an  individual  creativity,  typical   for  the  anti-­‐Semitic  conception  of  the  “Jewish  artist”.  In  Hintze’s  writing  we  can   consequently  find  some  of  the  well-­‐established  anti-­‐Semitic  tropes  about  the  “Jewish   artist”,  tropes  with  a  long  history,  traceable  back  to  for  example  Franz  Kugler’s   handbook  in  art  history  Handbuch  der  Kunstgeschichte  (1842).  Hintze’s  book,  which  was   written  in  Swedish,  was  published  the  years  before  anti-­‐Semitism  in  Sweden  changed   from  a  “natural”  part  of  the  public  debate  to  an  extreme  right  wing  political  position.   Rhetoric’s  like  what  we  find  in  Hintze’s  book  became  less  obvious  and  later  on  more  or   less  disappeared  from  the  art  history  writing.  At  the  same  time  thought,  the  first  written   narration  of  early  Swedish  modernism  with  its  specific  structure  of  aesthetic  and   ideological  values  was  in  large  part  established  and  published  in  these  years,  a  structure   still  clearly  visible  in  today’s  historiography  of  early  Swedish  modernism.    

There  is  no  doubt  that  Isaac  Grünewald  suffered  of  several  direct  anti-­‐Semitic  

attacks  during  his  lifetime  and  we  can  definitely  talk  about  an  anti-­‐Semitic  influenced   reception  where  his  Jewish  origin  played  an  important  part.  But  I  haven’t  found  any   attempts  to  analyse  his  art  as  part  of  his  Jewish  self-­‐identification.  In  the  historiography   of  Grünewald  his  Jewish  origin  is  both  important  and  unimportant.  The  descriptions  of   his  personality  are  strongly  influenced  by  anti-­‐Semitic  conceptions,  but  his  art  is  never   connected  to  Jewish  culture  or  his  self-­‐identification.  I  am  interested  in  both  the  high   28

voiced  anti-­‐Semitic  rhetoric  and  the  silence  about  his  Jewishness  in  the  interpretations   of  his  art.  This  is  my  starting  point  for  a  planed  research  project  with  the  working  title   The  Jewish  Modernist:  anti-­Semitism,  self-­identification  and  the  historiography  of  Swedish   Modernism.  As  one  of  the  most  popular  Swedish  artist  we  can  find  an  enormous  amount   of  publications  and  exhibitions  about  him.  To  study  his  art  today  without  beeing   influenced  by  all  these  statements  is  almost  impossible.    By  analysing  the  “Jewish   artist’s”  function  and  position  in  the  historical  situation  and  also  the  contemporary  anti-­‐ Semitic  rhetoric  (with  Grünewald  as  example),  I  hope  to  be  able  to  unveil  its  position   and  function  in  the  later  historiography.  Not  to  write  a  history  of  “anti-­‐Semitic  art   history”,  but  to  better  understand  our  contemporary  thinking.  My  purpose  is  to  identify   the  voice  of  anti-­‐Semitism  that  has  been  built  into  the  language  and  structure  of  art   history,  even  where  anti-­‐Semitism  is  not  necessarily  the  object.  This  move  from  the  past   to  the  present  I  hope  to  revers  by  also  introducing  a  voice  in  the  silence  around   Grünewald’s  Jewishness  in  the  interpretation  of  his  art,  a  voice  that  will  activate  his   Jewish  self-­‐identification  in  the  historical  situations  as  a  counterpart  to  the  anti-­‐Semitic   discourse.  In  this  way  I  not  necessarily  have  to  point  at  the  established  history  writing  as   wrong  and  replace  it  with  another  history,  but  instead  I  can  give  room  for  a  complex   situation  where  the  Jewish  experience  can  be  accounted  for  without  excluding  anti-­‐ Semitism  as  an  important  part  of  Swedish  culture.  I  can’t  take  away  the  afterlife  of   Grünewald  and  his  art,  I  can’t  erase  it,  but  I  will  hopefully  be  able  to  explain  parts  of  it   and  introduce  one  more  interpretive  layer.    

In  the  workshop,  I  would  be  interested  in  discussing  the  relationship  between  

concept  as  past  and  history,  in  for  example  the  relationship  between  the  art  critical   reception  of  a  work  of  art  in  the  past  and  its  later  historiography.  In  what  way  can  my   analysis  of  the  historical  situation  unveil  aspects  of  our  contemporary  thinking?  As  I  see   it,  the  anti-­‐Semitic  rhetoric,  easily  traceable  in  early  20th  century  Swedish  art  debate,  has   resulted  in  a  distinct  silence  of  not  only  anti-­‐Semitism  but  also  Jewishness  in  the   Swedish  art  history  writing.  In  what  way  can  I  understand  and  communicate  with  this   historiographic  “silence”?    

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Mai  Britt  Guleng   …  Some  reflections  connected  to  my  paper  The  double  identity   of  the  art  reproduction;  visual  imitation  –  and  re-­enactment  of   artistic  creation     The  topic  of  my  talk  about  the  art  reproductions  in  the  Nordic  art  magazine  from  1875-­‐ 76  (see  abstract)  is  motivated  both  by  curiosity  and  provocation.  Curiosity  and   provocation  meet  in  my  question:  are  we  kicking  in  open  doors?    

 

The  provocation  arises  from  reading  the  introduction  of  Didi-­‐Huberman’s  book  

(reading  paper  for  this  conference).  Here  he  states  that  art  historians  following  in  the   tradition  of  Vasari  and  Panofsky  tend  to  act  as  though  they  know  everything  about  the   works  of  art  and  that  they  are  “able  to  translate  all  concepts  into  images,  all  images  into   concepts”.  This  makes  me  wonder  who  these  art  historians  believing  in  the   “omnitranslatebility  of  images”  really  are.    Does  not  the  study  of  the  discipline  of  art   history  –  its  writing  and  other  discursive  practises  –  show  that  art  historians  have  never   thought  that  neither  the  “works  of  art”  nor  “history”  can  be  transparently  grasped  or   captured  once  and  for  all  in  its  totality  (not  even  Panofsky)?      

My  curiosity  is  of  a  much  older  date  and  more  fundamentally  connected  to  my  

academic  interests.  The  example  with  the  art  reproductions  in  the  Nordic  art  magazine   is  chosen  because  I  want  to  investigate  how  the  art  historians  and  artists  were  reflecting   on  the  activity  of  representing  a  work  of  art  in  another  medium.  What  did  it  mean  to   understand  or  interpret  a  picture  for  the  reproducing  artist  and  for  the  art  historian   writing  about  it?  How  did  they  perceive  the  relationship  between  art  work  of  art  as   something  belonging  to  both  the  present  and  the  past?  And  what  was  the  relationship   between  the  reproducing  artist  and  the  art  historian?  I  want  to  discuss  these  issues  with   the  aid  of  the  notion  of  the  art  representation  as  both  imitation  and  re-­‐enactment  of   artistic  creation.  

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Mathias  Danbolt,  PhD  student,  University  of  Bergen:     Living  Anachronisms  and  other  Unfinished  Histories     In  2010  the  Norwegian  media  declared  queer  theory  to  be  history.  A  “queer  theoretical   hegemony  is  over,”  the  editor  of  culture  in  the  ‘intellectual’  newspaper  Morgenbladet   wrote  in  an  editorial:  “The  paradigm  shift  is  absolute.  Try  to  say  the  sentence:  The  war   in  Afghanistan  doesn’t  exist.  Or:  Biological  gender  doesn’t  exist.  I  promise  you  won’t   have  any  success.  The  truisms  of  postmodernism  have  gone  from  being  powerful  to   being  slightly  embarrassing”  (02.07.10)  The  editor  of  the  left  wing  newspaper   Klassekampen  formulated  it  in  similar  terms,  explaining  that  he  “shed  no  tears”  for  the   death  of  the  “postmodernist  hegemony”  in  Norway,  “with  its  theoretical  branches  such   as  queer  theory,  where  some  theorists  hubristically  insisted  that  biological  gender  didn’t   exist”.  “Now”,  he  continued,  “the  goal  is  to  get  back  to  a  healthy  and  truth  seeking  culture   in  academia  and  in  the  public  sphere  in  general”.  The  editor  of  culture  in  Aftenposten   explained  that  he  found  queer  theory  to  be  merely  “wishful  thinking,”  remarking  that  he   “couldn’t  think  of  any  queer  theorists  in  Norway  that  writes  engaged  and   understandable.  They  all  use  a  terrible  and  obscure  tribal  language.”          

It  was  the  Norwegian  comedian  Harald  Eia  who  initiated  the  criticism  of  queer  

theory  in  his  popular  TV-­‐show  Hjernevask  (Brainwash)  in  the  spring  of  2010.  Re-­‐ launching  himself  as  an  investigative  journalist,  his  TV-­‐show  used  the  “nature  vs.   nurture”  debate  as  a  starting  point  in  order  to  praise  evolutionary  biology  on  behalf  of   poststructuralist  feminist  and  queer  theory.  In  response  to  queer  theorist  Agnes  Bolsø’s   criticism  that  she  felt  abused  by  the  program,  Eia  commented  in  Dagbladet,  “if  you  are  a   dictator  and  have  run  the  business  for  many  years,  you  might  not  be  very  receptive  to   criticism.”  Finally,  it  seemed,  Norway  had  freed  itself  from  the  grips  of  the  queer   ”dictators”,  with  their  tribal  language  that  nobody  understood  and  far-­‐out  ideas  that   were  nothing  but  “wishful  thinking”.  Truth  would  prevail.        

 

Queer  theory  is,  in  short,  history  in  Norway.  Buried  and  dead.  After  exposing  the  

“tribe”  on  TV,  the  backwardness  of  its  thinking  and  language  was  made  obvious  to  all,   and  the  anachronism  was  finally  cleared  out  of  the  way  by  the  winds  of  progress.  This  is   thus  in  many  ways  an  untimely  moment  for  those  of  us  working  with  queer  theoretical   and  activist  perspectives  in  Norway.  Not  only  have  we  been  told  that  we  have  ruled  the   31

country  and  the  academy  for  decades  (why  didn’t  they  tell  us  before?  We  could  have   done  something!),  but  we  are  also  positioned  as  underdeveloped  species,  speaking  in  a   tribal  language  nobody  understands.  This  is  also  an  untimely  moment  to  be  writing  a   PhD  thesis  influenced  by  queer  theory  –  it  is  obvious  that  I  am  too  late,  and  that  my   theme  is  already  dated  and  already  history  although  my  project  is  not  a  historical  one  as   such.  My  thesis  Touching  History:  The  Affectice  Economies  of  Queer  Archival  Activism   explores  the  ways  in  which  contemporary  queer  political  activists  and  artists  turn   towards  history  in  order  to  rethink  notions  of  politics,  progress,  and  action.  But   suddenly  I  don’t  need  to  turn  towards  history,  I  find  myself  repeatedly  being  positioned   as  history;  in  the  dustbin  of  history.  In  a  sense,  then,  this  is  also  a  timely  moment  to  write   a  PhD  thesis,  for  positioned  as  I  am  as  a  “living  anachronism,”  my  situation  seem  to   symptomize  the  argument  of  my  thesis  on  the  political  nature  of  historizing  and  archival   gestures  –  the  act  of  cutting  something  off  (metaphorically,  practically,  systemically)   from  the  relevance  for  the  present.      

 

The  obituaries  for  queer  theory  in  Norway  made  me  start  pondering  on  the  

question  “when  is  history?”  which  I  proposed  as  the  theme  for  this  conference.  When   projects  you  think  are  in  front  or  in  store  for  you  –  as  something  to  strive  for,  something   that  is  still  to  be  developed  further,  something  that  is  yet  to  really  be  introduced  and  in   your  local  political  context,  finally  reaches  the  mainstream  through  its  obituaries,  it  is   difficult  not  to  be  temporally  disoriented.  This  was  no  mere  “backlash”  against  feminist   and  queer  work.  It  was  more  complex  than  that,  akin  to  the  double  movement  that   Angela  McRobbie  in  The  Aftermath  of  Feminism  (2009)  argues  has  characterized  the   assaults  on  feminism  in  the  UK,  where  neo-­‐liberal  and  conservative  politicians  and   critics  invoke  feminism  only  to  position  it  as  already  achieved  and  no  longer  needed  as  it   “is  a  spent  force”  (12).  The  situation  in  Norway  thus  seemed  to  be  yet  another  example   of  what  McRobbie  calls  a  process  of  “disarticulation,”  that  “functions  to  foreclose  the   possibility  or  likelihood  of  various  expansive  intersections  and  inter-­‐generational   feminist  [and  here  also  queer  feminist]  transmissions.  Articulations  are  therefore   reversed,  broken  off,  and  the  idea  of  a  new  feminist  political  imaginary  increasingly   inconceivable”  (25-­‐26).  The  Brainwash  TV-­‐show  in  Norway  worked  as  a  “dispersal   strategy”,  where  a  “hysterical  and  monstrous  version  of  [queer]  feminism  …  informs  the   political  practice  of  disarticulation  as  that  which  is  somehow  known  about,  and  must  be   efficiently  dealt  with,  before  it  has  the  chance  to  be  rekindled  by  a  younger  generation”   32

(27).  The  effects  of  such  ridiculing  of  political  movements  are  severe,  McRobbie  writes:   “When  important  historical  moments  of  liberation  become  somehow  no  longer   transmissible,  or  when  such  moments  are  caricatured  and  trivialized,  if  not  forgotten,   then  there  is  perhaps  a  crisis  for  the  possibility  of  radical  democratic  politics”  (49).        

My  thesis  Touching  History:  The  Affective  Economies  of  Queer  Archival  Activism  

focus  on  the  temporality  of  political  histories,  and  on  the  political  effects  of  what   McRobbie  terms  “disarticulation”,  and  what  historians  in  general  calls  the  “separation   principle”  between  the  past  and  the  present.  “When  is  history?”  is  thus  not  only  a   question  of  method  or  theory  for  me  –  it  is  a  question  of  political  urgency.  What  are  the   effects  of  positioning  ongoing  and  unfolding  political  cultures  as  history,  as  something   one  can  look  back  on,  retrospectively,  from  the  perspective  of  the  present?        

Touching  History  is  therefore  not  an  art  historical  project  as  such,  but  a  project  of  

cultural  analysis  that  engages  with  a  number  of  recent  queer  art,  performance,  and   activist  practices  that  in  different  ways  disrupt  or  disturb  ideologies  of  progression  in   the  Global  North.  It  focuses  on  practices  that  break  out  of  “straight  time”  frames  by   entering  into  anachronistic,  melancholic,  nostalgic,  and  desirable  relations  with  the  past.   The  focus  is  therefore  on  the  politics  of  historiography  seen  through  works  that  posit   historical  and  archival  practice  as  arenas  of  political  dispute.  The  aesthetic  practices   engaged  with  in  Touching  History  –  by  artists  such  as  Pauline  Boudry/Renate  Lorenz,   Sharon  Hayes,  Nanna  Debois  Buhl,  Ira  Sachs,  Gob  Squad,  Tiller  &  Steinbrenner,  Dunst,   MEN,  and  activists  initiatives  including  Copenhagen  Queer  Festival,  queeruption,  and   Chicago  Feel  Tank  –  highlight  the  relevance  of  paying  attention  to  the  politics  of   temporality,  and  what  Elizabeth  Freeman  calls  the  chrononormativity  of  dominant   political  imaginaries.  The  practices  I  analyze  assert  the  importance  of  focusing  on  so-­‐ called  “long  overdue”  issues  of  injustice  that  risks  being  neglected  or  positioned  as   anachronistic  within  historical  logics  invested  in  chronology  and  ideologies  of   progression.  By  giving  a  space  to  consider  the  duration  of  struggles,  the  stickiness  of   history,  the  fragility  of  progress,  Touching  History  hopes  to  complicate  political   chronicles  and  chronological  narratives  that  moves  forward  by  relegating  certain  fights   to  the  past.          

I  have  tentatively  described  these  historiographical  interventions  that  call  on  us  

to  reopen  or  question  unfinished  political  histories  as  forms  of  “archival  activism”.  This   is  an  attempt  to  highlight  the  ways  in  which  the  aesthetic  practices  take  up  and   33

reactivate  political  cases  and  histories  that  have  been  historicized  and  placed  in  the  area   of  forgotten  or  finished  files  in  the  collective  imaginary.  A  central  feature  in  these   archival  activist  practices  is  that  they  question  what  Rebecca  Schneider  calls  the   centrality  of  “archival  logics”  in  our  understanding  of  history,  using  affective  and   performative  historiographical  methods  to  engage  the  “still  living”  of  the  past  in  the   present.  Centering  on  practices  that  interrupt  the  separation  principle  that  safely   distinguishes  “then”  from  “now”  –  the  past  from  the  present  –  my  project  attempts  to   negotiate  between  feeling  historical  and  being  history;  between  the  desire,  pleasure  (and   frustration)  of  touching  the  “still  living”  history  -­‐  and  the  aspiration  for  avoiding  to   contribute  to  the  violent  historicization  of  ongoing  struggles.          

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Pauline  Ann  Hoath:  Statement     When  is  history?  This  is  a  question  which  I  reflect  on  in  my  research  project  –  together  with   the  question  of  where  is  history.  Based  on  some  500  images  and  250  letters  taken  and  written   respectively  in  the  period  1922-­‐26  by  a  British  soldier  and  amateur  photographer  in  India,   Iraq,  Palestine  and  Egypt  my  aim  is  to  create  a  (hi)story  which  will  give  voice  to  not  only  the   soldier-­‐photographer,  who  was  my  grandfather,  but  also  his  friends  and  fellow  soldiers.  I  am   therefore  speaking  on  behalf  of  soldiers  who,  with  the  exception  of  my  grandfather,  are   unknown  to  me  and  who  were  deployed  to  support  policies  which  I  doubt  they  knew  the   extent  or  significance  of,  in  order  to  make  their  lives  in  this  situation  known.  I  am  speaking   through  an  academic  text  for  my  peers,  but  I  am  also  writing  for  myself  –  to  meet  the   challenge  I  gave  myself  on  first  looking  at  the  photographs.          

The  histories  of  the  British  Mandates  of  Iraq  and  Palestine  are  histories  that  I  feel  in  

general  have  been  sidelined,  overlooked,  perhaps  even  suppressed.  And  when  it  has  been  told   it  is  only  prominent  voices  which  have  been  allowed  to  give  an  account.   Until  it  was  axed  in  May  2011  for  lack  of  government  funding,  The  Empire  and   Commonwealth  Museum  had  hoped  that  their  photographic  exhibition  “Britain  in  Palestine”   would  be  able  to  throw  some  light  on  the  Mandate  years  and  help  today’s  Britons  learn   something  about  the  past  involvement  of  Britain  in  the  Middle  East  –  and  contribute  to  a   better  understanding  of  the  region  today.      

In  order  to  make,  what  I  hope  can  be,  a  contribution  to  collective  history,  I  must  

negotiate  several  –  but  related  -­‐  past  times  from  the  1920s  to  the  present.  I  have  therefore   located  different  points  of  –  and  different  kinds  of  interaction  related  to  photographic  acts  and   viewing.  These  are  as  follows:     The  interaction  between  the  photographed  and  the  photographer.   The  interaction  between  the  photographer  and  the  photographs,  at  the  time  of  their  developing   and  printing,  and  also  later  when  the  albums  were  compiled.   The  interaction  of  the  photographs,  contextualised  in  the  letters,  with  the  recipient  of  the   photographs.   The  interaction  between  the  photographs,  letters,  negatives  and  albums  and  myself.    

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The  interaction  of  my  small  archive  with  other  collections  from  the  same  period  in  the  same   places,  and  my  interaction  with  them.     Thinking  through  the  above  involves  me  in  a  reconstruction  and  analysis  of  the  events   surrounding  the  taking  of  the  photographs,  their  content,  and  of  the  photographs  as  objects,   including  their  affective  power  in  different  times  and  contexts.  This  in  turn  takes  me  to  the   following  points:       The  reconstruction/reliving  of  the  photographic  moment   The  reconstruction/reliving  of  the  making  of  the  negative  catalogue  and  the  albums   The  re-­enactment/reliving  of  the  writing  of  the  letters  and  sending  of  the  photographs,  and  the   reception  of  the  photographs  in  the  letters.       How  then,  to  go  about  reconstructing  or  re-­‐enacting  the  past,  or  on  occasion  thinking  about   how  I  relive  past  events?    

I  have  found  a  conceptual  framework  in  Tim  Ingold’s  study  of  lines,  (Lines:  A  Brief  

History,  2007)  to  account  for  the  possibilities  to  live  life  within  the  restrictions  imposed  by  the   army,  with,  for  example,  no  say  in  one’s  movements.  The  photographs  taken  on  board  the   transport  ship  Varsova  en-­‐route  from  Basra  to  Karachi  document  the  movement  of  the   soldier-­‐photographer  as  similar  to  that  of  a  counter  on  a  game  board  –  moved  from  place  to   place  across  the  surface  of  the  globe  following  connecting  lines  of  navigation  mapped  out   beforehand  by  imperial  policy  makers.  But  other  photographs  show  us  that  occasionally  the   soldier  can  live  life  within  the  imperial  network  as  though  he  were  a  wayfarer,  compared  by   Ingold  to  Paul  Klee’s  line  out  for  a  walk.  The  photographs  which  were  taken  of  the  soldiers  on   a  trip  to  the  ruins  at  Babylon  are  evidence  of  what  I  am  calling  “time  out”  from  the  imperial   plot.  The  different  modes  of  movement  can  I  believe  also  be  related  to  domestic  and  imperial   time.  Although  they  wore  their  uniforms  outside  the  army  camp,  the  soldiers  could  perhaps   on  occasion  have  the  illusion  that  they  were  in  their  own  time  as  opposed  to  the  army’s.  This  I   suggest  is  connected  to  what  I  have  formulated  as  the  working  title  of  my  project  –  When   domestic  meets  imperial  space.  In  addition  to  the  complexities  of  space  which  I  aim  to  explore   within  and  outside  the  frame  of  the  photographs,  I  also  intend  to  take  up  the  matter  of  parallel   time/overlapping  time  then,  and  furthermore  how  I  relate/relate  to  that  now.   36

 

I  have  made  a  start  at  looking  at  the  function  of  the  photographs  in  the  context  of  the  

letters  and  among  the  soldiers;  the  camera  as  a  technical  device  around  which  interactions   between  the  soldiers  –  and  local  populations  are  played  out;  and  with  perspectives  by   Elizabeth  Edwards  have  explored  the  material  practices  of  photography  to  tell  me  something   about  an  historical  imagination.  (“Photography  and  the  Material  Performance  of  the  Past”,  in   History  and  Theory,  2009.)        

Rebecca  Schneider’s  thoughts  on  the  pose  in  photography  as  a  gestic  call  that  is  live/  

re-­‐live  have  directed  my  thoughts  back  to  my  first  encounter  with  the  material  of  my  research,   to  look  again  at  the  photos  of  Dodd  and  his  cat,  mounted  in  one  of  the  albums  alongside  the   soldier  holding  Gladys  the  cat  and  Tiny  the  dog  (fig.1),  to  think  through  my  reaction  then  and   on  all  subsequent  re-­‐viewings;  which  was/is  to  be  moved.      

Can  we  think  of  the  still  not  as  an  artefact  of  non-­‐returning  time,  but  as  situated  in  a  

live  moment  of  its  encounter  that  it,  through  its  articulation  as  gesture  or  hail,  predicts?  This   is  to  ask:  is  the  stilled  image  a  call  toward  a  future  live  moment  when  the  image  will  be  re-­‐ encountered,  perhaps  as  an  invitation  to  response?  And  if  so,  is  it  not  live  –  taking  place  in   time  in  the  sense  of  its  reception?  Is  it  time  deferred,  finding  its  liveness  in  the  time-­‐lag,  the   temporal  drag,  “in  your  hands”  at  the  moment  of  its  encounter”.  (R.  Schneider:  Performing   Remains:  141)    

I  have,  as  noted,  challenged  myself  to  write  a  history.  This  was  a  response  to  “the  hail”  

within  the  photographs  and  from  the  photographic  material  as  a  whole.  In  Performing   Remains  I  also  find  insights  which  can  help  me  draw  on  and  explore  my  experience  of   becoming  acquainted  with  the  different  parts  of  my  material.    

When  James  Cutler,  aged  19,  left  England  he  and  Lily  had  known  each  other  for  4  

months.  Following  the  army  timetable,  James  sent  a  letter  to  Lily,  with  few  exceptions,  every   Sunday  for  nearly  five  years.  And  after  he  acquired  a  camera  he  regularly  included   photographs  that  he  also  developed  and  printed  himself.  Early  in  2009  I  viewed  for  the  first   time  photographs  taken  by  James  or,  where  he  himself  appears,  by  friends,  in  4  albums,  which   since  1973  had  been  stored  in  a  loft.  Later  some  loose  photographs  were  found  in  the  same   loft,  followed  by  a  wallet  containing  negatives  –  their  discovery  spanned  a  period  of  several   months.  Finally,  the  letters  were  sent  in  batches  in  the  post  from  England  to  Norway  over  a   period  of  4-­‐5  weeks  in  the  period  August-­‐September  2009.  At  a  certain  point  in  my  intensive   reading  I  felt  that  I  became  the  addressee  of  the  letters  and  photographs  and  I  took  the  place   37

of  Lily.  When  one  batch  of  letters  was  read,  I  eagerly  awaited  the  next,  and  was  disappointed   when  there  was  nothing  in  the  post  for  me.  From  the  letters  I  recognized  photographs  that  I   had  seen,  and  learned  of  their  context.  As  well  as  learning  about  the  day  to  day  life  of  the   soldiers,  the  letters  and  photographs  also  revealed  to  me  a  courtship  conducted  in  a  difficult   situation.  Although  I  knew  that  all  would  go  well,  that  James  and  Lily  would  marry,  because  I   knew  them  as  my  grandparents  –  it  was  still  with  relief  that  I  read  the  telegram  informing   Lily/me  that  James  had  finally  been  allowed  to  return  home  and  was  now  in  England.  And   needless  to  say,  I  came  to  know  both  Lily  and  James  in  a  different  way  to  my  memory  of  them.       History  is  continually  made  from  a  performance  with  traces  of  the  past  that  takes  place  in  a   present.          

   

                                                 Fig  1.  

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Renja  Suominen-­Kokkonen:  “STATEMENT”       Writing  and  considering  my  research  project  (Eastern  Churches,  Western  Methods)  my  aims   are  to  situate  myself  and  the  art  historian  whose  work  I  am  studying.  My  objective  is  to   question  the  limits  of  Finnish  art  history,  but  also  the  limits  and  borders  of  other  humanistic   disciplines,  such  as  history  and  ethnology.     This  special  material,  collected  during  the  Finnish  occupation  in  Russian  Karelia  during  World   War  II,  specifically  begs  the  question,  when  is  art  history.      

My  own  tasks  with  this  work  involve  the  problems  of  how  am  I  to  understand  the  

material,  the  interpretations  and  the  art  historian  in  question.  It  is  neither  my  place  nor  role   to  judge,  however  uncomfortable  this  past  may  be  for  me.  In    Finland  there  are  still  problems   regarding  what  to  remember  and  what  to  forget  of  the  past  during  the  last  war.  Though   crossing  these  uncomfortable  borders  of  political  affiliations,  my  aim  is  not  to  reconstruct  the   past  as  it  was  –  that  is  simply  not  possible.    

I  seek  to  record  the  genealogy  of  the  interpretations  of  occupation  and  the  research  

projects  in  this  occupied  area,  and  to  understand  the  trauma  experienced  in  Finland  after  the   lost  war.  The  post-­‐war  staging  of  the  Finnish  role  and  research  archives  from  Karelia  are  the   more  general  context  of  my  own  research  material.    

This  material  poses  many  intriguing  art-­‐historical  questions  –  the  way  its  importance  

was  denied  in  general,  the  fact  that  the  published  results  represented  the  first  academic   research  in  architecture  in  Finnish  art  history,  the  problematic  way  in  which  the  art  historian   concerned  presented  “objective”  results,    and  the  interesting  “something  more”  that  lies   behind  the  results.      

For  me  this  “something  more”  has  been  one  of  the  main  reasons  to  do  this  work.  The  

research  done  during  and  after  the  war  presented  and  re-­‐presented  something  that  was  hard   to  accept  at  the  time.  And  even    today,  art  history  in  Finland  has  not  dealt  with  the  problems   of  this  material.  It  entails  cracks  and  ruptures  that  have  not  been  discussed.  The   interdisciplinary  methods  I  need  here  to  make  these  breaking  points  visible,  to  situate  the   diverse  manifestations  of  space  and  place  and  then  to  re-­‐present  the  narrative  of  these  places,   events  and  objects  –  have  a  lot  to  do  with  critical  cultural  studies.    However,  a  close  reading  of   the  symptoms  also  requires  knowledge  of  art-­‐historical  and  architectural  historical  concepts.  

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Art  history  has  not  entered  into  the  same    kind  of  discussion  on  the  problems  of  

fieldwork  as  done  by  the  disciplines  of    anthropology  and  ethnography.  I  need  to  move  in   these  disciplinary  borderlands  and  also  to  read  the  methodological  norms  of    Western  art   history  against  the  grain.  Thus,  my  final  questions  will  address  who  “we”  are  in  this  story  of   eastern  churches  and  who  “the  others”  are.                                                

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Visa  Immonen:  Statement  for  the  conference  ‘When  is  history?’   PhD,  Adjunct  Professor  of  Archaeology   Helsinki  Collegium  for  Advanced  Studies   University  of  Helsinki   [email protected]  

  In  August  2008,  I  was  sitting  by  a  solitary  office  table  on  a  roof  of  a  large  building.  I  had  white   gloves  on  my  hands,  and  I  was  wearing  a  breathing  mask.  I  leafed  through  the  contents  of   archive  folders  while  trying  to  protect  them  from  the  blowing  wind.  The  papers  were  so   darkened  and  partly  destroyed  by  moist  and  mould  that  the  staff  of  the  People’s  Archives  in   Helsinki  had  considered  them  a  serious  health  risk,  placed  me  to  a  well-­‐ventilated  place,  and   insisted  me  using  protective  gear.  The  roof  was  also  used  by  the  workers  of  a  nearby   construction  site,  and  every  time  when  passing  by,  they  stared  at  me  curiously.  I  felt  like  I  was   doing  a  performance  on  the  use  of  archives.    

I  was  gathering  information  on  the  master  builder  Adolf  Rahola  (1884–1963)  who  was  

a  member  of  the  Finnish  Communist  Party  after  the  Second  World  War,  and  thus  made  his   mark  on  the  documents.  Rahola  interested  me,  because  before  his  political  activities  he  had   worked  under  the  direction  of  the  state  archaeologist  Juhani  Rinne  (1872–1950).  I  was   writing  Rinne’s  biography.  In  the  Finnish  context  of  antiquarian  art  history,  he  remains   famous  for  his  architectural  and  archaeological  studies  of  such  medieval  sites  as  the  Bishop’s   Palace  in  Koroinen,  Turku  Cathedral,  and  Turku  Castle.  He  was  the  leading  protagonist  of  the   protection  and  restoration  of  historic  monuments  by  relying  on  thorough  archaeological   fieldwork  and  documentation.  In  1933,  both  Rinne  and  Rahola  were  arrested  and  charged  of   misappropriating  funds  reserved,  e.g.,  for  the  restoration  of  Turku  Castle,  and  sentenced  to   prison  for  their  crimes.    

The  tradition  of  scholar  biographies  in  Finland,  to  large  extent  based  on  the  idea  of  

coherent  and  linearly  developing  self,  poses  a  range  of  challenges  for  the  present-­‐day  art   history.  If  the  subject  of  biography  should  not  be  the  coherent  self,  as  historian  Jo  Burr   Margadant  has  argued,  but  rather  the  performance  through  which  an  impression  of  individual   coherence  is  created,  such  issues  as  social  context,  gender,  embodiment  and  narrativity  

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become  a  central  concern  for  biographical  writing.8  These  phenomena  are  not  often  discussed   in  the  genre  of  scholar  biographies,  because  the  assumed  individuality  of  a  scholar  secures  the   cohesion  of  the  narrative,  and  gives  a  stable  point  from  which  to  analyse  changes  of  the   respective  disciplinary  field.  Moreover,  the  assumption  of  a  coherent  self  makes  a  biography   more  accessible  to  wider  audiences,  especially  when  writing  of  a  person,  whose  life  and  deeds   are  unknown  to  most  readers  beforehand.    

I  have  divided  my  biographical  work  into  two  parallel  narratives.  The  first  is  more  

traditional,  and  ordered  into  thematic  units  which  form  a  chronological  sequence,  while  the   second  is  based  on  photographic  material  related  to  Rinne.  In  a  form  of  an  unchronological   visual  essay,9  it  comments  his  personal  and  family  life,  the  construction  of  academic   masculinity  at  the  turn  of  the  19th  and  20th  centuries,  and  my  relationship  with  Rinne’s  life.   In  this  way,  I  try  to  acknowledge  the  effects  and  bonds  that  the  past  and  the  present  day  may   forge.  I  would  describe  my  relationship  with  Rinne’s  life  in  terms  of  ‘intimate  distance’,  and   emphasise  the  affectivity  that  it  involves:  the  feelings  of  frustration,  disdain,  and  boredom,  but   importantly  also  moments  of  pleasure,  joy,  and  closeness.    

After  the  biography,  my  project  has  expanded,  and  I  have  been  mulling  over  the  

concept  of  medieval  in  Nordic  archaeology  and  art  history.  What  does  the  concept  actually   denote  in  terms  of  past  material  culture,  and  as  a  scholarly  construction?  My  work   concentrates  on  analysing  the  concept  as  a  material-­‐discursive  process.  It  draws  on  current   discussions  on  modernity  and  archaeological  theory,  but  especially  central  to  it  is  Karen   Barad’s  anti-­‐representationalist  work  on  post-­‐humanistic  performativity.10  Her  insistence  on   the  both  material  and  discursive  nature  of  phenomena  leads  me  to  adopt  a  twofold  approach   with  two  parallel  lines  of  investigation.  The  first  line  of  investigation  covers  the  analysis  of   archaeological  material  from  Finland,  and  other  Nordic  countries.  The  second  line  focuses  on   the  contemporary  and  past  disciplinary  discourses  of  archaeology,  and  their  notions  of  the   medieval.  

                                                                                                                8

Jo Burr Margadant 2000. Introduction: Constructing Selves in Historical Perspective. In Margadant, Jo Burr (ed.), The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1–32.   9 A preliminary version of the narrative is developed in Visa Immonen (forthcoming). Photographic bodies and biographical narratives: The Finnish State Archaeologist Juhani Rinne in pictures. Photography & Culture. 10 Karen Barad 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.  

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Despite  its  actual  and  material  connection  with  the  pre-­‐modern  past,  the  concept  of  

medieval  is  also  deeply  a  modern  phenomenon.  In  some  cases,  the  present-­‐day  modernity   even  emerges  through  the  medieval.  Medieval  buildings  are  case  in  a  point.  While  the  explicit   goals  of  the  restoration  that  Rinne  directed  at  Turku  Cathedral  in  the  1920s  were  defined  in   terms  of  authenticity  and  historical  faithfulness,  the  restoration  actually  constituted  spaces   for  modern  experience.  For  instance,  the  literary  reactions  to  the  results  of  the  restoration   often  take  a  form  of  walking  through  the  cathedral  and  experiencing  it  as  an  affective  and   aesthetic  space  defining  the  modern  and  national  condition.  Similar  observations  are  also   applicable  to  the  second  major  restoration  of  the  cathedral  in  the  1970s.    

I  have  analysed  this  experience  of  modern  along  three  axes:  The  first  is  temporality,  

particularly  the  experience  of  difference  separating  the  present  from  the  past.  This  difference   has  a  concrete  presence  in  the  material  form  of  the  cathedral,  and  its  architectural  features.   The  second  axis  is  embodied  sensory  experience.  It  refers  to  affects  created  by  the  ecclesiastic   space  after  restoration.  Often  they  are  explicitly  connected  with  temporality,  with  the  sense  of   encountering  that  what  is  present  or  past.  The  third  axis  is  authenticity.  It  means  the   differentiation  made  between  important  and  irrelevant,  or  between  true  and  false  in  the   cathedral  space.  As  such,  it  is  particularly  related  with  temporality  and  distinguishing  that   what  is  the  true  trace  of  the  past  from  that  which  is  something  else.11    

As  activities  involving  multiple  temporalities,  and  establishing  particular  bodily  

experiences,  the  restorations  of  the  medieval  monument  share  an  affinity  with  archival  work.   This  affinity  became  very  explicit  when  I  visited  the  roof  of  the  People’s  Archives.  Both  the   restoration  and  the  archival  work  tend  to  emphasize  the  historical  authenticity  of  the  final   outcome,  and  avert  the  attention  from  the  temporal  dimensions  of  present  and  future  which   nevertheless  are  also  implicated.  In  the  same  vein,  the  scholarly  texts  analyzing  the  two   restorations  of  Turku  Cathedral  make  little  of  the  modern  technology  (electricity,  heating   system,  lighting,  audio  system)  used  during  the  work  and  installed  into  the  cathedral,   although  it  is,  in  fact,  the  very  condition  of  the  restorations.  The  texts  instead  focus  on  features   which  are  considered  properly  aesthetic  and  involving  stylistic  choices.  Similarly  archival   work,  the  technologies  and  affects  on  which  is  based,  is  often  removed  from  the  biographical                                                                                                                   11

Visa Immonen 2011. Memoryscape for Modernity: Two 20th-Century Restorations of Turku Cathedral. An unpublished presentation at ‘Imagining Spaces/Places: An international interdisciplinary conference’. University of Helsinki, 24–26 August 2011.

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analysis  of  historical  events.  If  there  is  some  thread  running  through  my  work,  it  might  be  the   attempt  to  bring  out  these  connections  between  the  modern  and  the  medieval  as  well  as   between  the  past  life  and  its  biographer,  and  to  show  the  relevance  of  the  act  of  gathering   information  from  hazardous  documents  on  top  of  a  building  for  how  I  write  about  the  past.  

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Mette  Sandbye:  Statement   Associate  Professor,  Dep.  of  Arts  and  Cultural  Studies,  University  of  Copenhagen     Desire  for  photography   My  main  research  area  is  ”photography”.  I  have  published  three  monographs  on  various   aspects  of  art  photography  from  the  1960s  till  today:  on  American  staged  photography  in  the   1970s  and  80s;  on  contemporary  (often  installation)  art’s  miming  of  or  appropriation  of   family  and  amateur  photography  in  order  to  discuss  the  relationship  between  family,  history   and  memory;  and  finally  on  the  snapshot  aesthetics  of  American  and  Danish  conceptual  avant-­‐ garde  art,  mostly  in  the  1970s.  Apart  from  those  three  books  I  have  edited  the  Danish  History   of  Photography  and  I  have  written  numerous  articles  on  all  kinds  of  photography  from  post   mortem  photography  and  wedding  portraits  to  paparazzi  and  website  family  albums.  But   always  departing  from  photography.      

Ever  since  my  childhood  I  think  I  have  always  been  driven  by  a  desire  for  the  world  as  

it  is  presented  to  me  in  a  photograph  –  a  desire  “to  touch  time”  via  photography,  quoting   Rebecca  Schneider,  or  to  “be  in  time”,  quoting  Carol  Mavor,  and  secondly  –  in  my  academic  life   -­‐  by  an  ontological  desire  to  understand  the  medium  of  photography  and  its  relation  to  the   world,  the  everyday,  to  the  difficult  question  of  authenticity,  to  emotions  -­‐  from  a  warm   touching  of  something  present  to  a  sad  nostalgic  loss  of  something  in  the  past.  As  Mavor   writes:  “All  historical  research,  whether  the  objects  of  study  are  from  a  long  time  ago  or   yesterday,  feeds  on  a  desire  to  know,  to  come  closer  to  the  person,  the  objects,  under  study”   (Becoming,  p.  16).     Saving  the  past  from  the  ruins  of  history   “Indeed,  the  sense  that  the  past  is  a  future  direction  in  which  one  can  travel  –  that  it  can   stretch  out  before  us  like  an  unfamiliar  landscape  waiting  to  be  (re)discovered  is  familiar”,   Rebecca  Schneider  says  (p.  22),  indirectly  quoting  David  Lowenthal.  Another  urge  for  me  has   been  to  discover,  see,  write  about  and  thereby  saving  bits  and  pieces  from  the  past,   immortalized  in  the  photograph,  for  the  future  –  for  instance  Jewish  daily  life  in  Berlin  in  the   early  1920s  or  contemporary  Japanese  teenage  girls’  self-­‐staging  in  public  photo  booths.  In   that  sense  I  have  been  much  inspired  by  Walter  Benjamin;  his  history  of  philosophy,  his  idea   on  the  dialectical  image  pregnant  with  possible  stories  form  the  past  that  can  be  enlighted  by  

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later  generations.  This  is  why  I  fancy  (and  have  written  about)  artists  such  as  Ilya  Kabakov,   Boris  Mihailov,  Shimon  Attie,  Christian  Boltanski  and  Pia  Arke,  who  almost  literally  make   pictures  talk  by  finding  them,  bringing  them  into  light,  projecting  them  into  the  present  in   order  to  point  to  the  future.    

 

Making  the  image  talk   I  have  sometimes  dreamt  of  imitating  what  the  literary  scholar  Erich  Auerbach  did,  when  he   sat  in  isolation  and  far  away  from  his  library,  his  colleagues,  his  books  in  Istanbul,  whereto  he   had  fled  from  the  Nazis,  and  wrote  his  famous  book  Mimesis  (1946),  a  book  that  is  still  a  part   of  the  curriculum  on  the  BA  program  in  literature.  Not  that  I  dream  of  writing  an  academic   bestseller  (well,  why  not  and  who  doesn’t?),  but  I  really  like  the  idea  of  sitting  in  isolation  with   a  work  of  art  or  a  plain  photograph  or  an  album  and  just  let  it  do,  perform,  talk  and  write   history  in  creative  conversation  with  myself.  I  tried  to  do  it  this  summer,  when  I  sat  on  a  rainy   day  in  the  annex  shed  of  my  summer  cottage  to  write  an  article  on  a  photo-­‐/video  work  by   Belgian  artist  David  Claerbout,  without  any  access  to  books  and  article  bases.    

One  could  claim  that  the  dominant  focus  on  context  in  recent  decades’  cultural  studies  

has  been  replaced  by  what  one  could  call  a  phenomenological  yearning  for  the  feeling  of  the   past  in  itself  (contextualism  having  been  criticized  for  not  giving  the  actual  image  attention).   This  approach  (the  phenomenological  meeting  with  the  object  as  a  moment  of  presence)  of   course  also  implies  some  dangers  that  it  could  be  interesting  to  discuss  at  the  seminar.  Has   contextualism  been  replaced  by  presentism,  and  have  we  lost  something  on  the  way?       Questions  and  answers   So  we  are  facing  the  challenge,  as  articulated  by  Didi-­‐Huberman  (in  the  preface  to  Confronting   Images),  of  defining  the  right  space  between  a  totally  open  approach  to  “the  voice  of”  the   material,  where  you  risk  not  finding  or  hearing  anything  at  all  because  you  have  no  questions,   and  –  opposite  -­‐  the  predetermined,  “closing”  approach,  where  you  find  what  you’re  looking   for,  or  get  the  answers  that  are  already  given  by  a  specific  discursive  problematic  that  you   pose  on  to  the  material.  The  past  as  “an  emptiness  we  fill  in”,  as  Mavor  quotes  James  Kincaid   (p.  30),  might  be  something  in  between?    

 My  most  recent  project  also  makes  me  articulate  such  questions.  Having  written  about  

artists  who  appropriate  or  imitate  amateur  or  family  photography  I  have  lately  turned  to  “the   46

real  thing”  with  a  project  on  the  production  and  use  of  the  family  photo  album  from  the  1960s   till  today.  In  many  ways  I  consider  the  private  family  photo  album  as  a  kind  of  out-­‐of-­‐place   object  that  has  not  yet  taken  a  seat  within  any  discourse  (as  opposed  to  many  art  objects)  –   and  it  is  therefore  a  challenge  to  write  about  in  itself.    

 As  a  part  of  this  project  I  went  three  months  to  Japan  last  fall.  Armed  with  a  scanner,  a  

camera  and  a  notebook  I  visited  13  families  and  a  group  of  15  teenagers  to  see  their  private   albums,  hear  them  tell  about  them  (content,  emotional  value,  how  they  treat  them  as  material   objects  etc.),  and  to  collect  visual  material.  I  also  visited  numerous  flea  markets  to  buy  old   Japanese  albums  and  family  portraits,  now  facing  the  challenge  of  muteness  in  this  specific   material.  These  albums  tell  stories  to  the  future  that  needs  a  listener  (me  –  who  does  not   speak  Japanese!)  to  be  transformed  from  mute  to  something  we  can  actually  hear12  -­‐  hence   the  anachronicity  of  the  material.     The  ‘voice’  of  the  Japanese  family  album   I  am  looking  at  the  family  album  as  a  complex  (and  material)  narrative  of  both  personal  and   collective  patterns,  ideas  and  thoughts  about  subjects  such  as  family,  gender,  emotions  and   affects,  material  culture,  and  visual  culture  at  a  specific  time.  I  am  looking  at  ‘sameness’  and   ‘otherness’  as  compared  to  my  own  culture  (and  some  American  material  as  well)  in  the   version  of  “remembered  past”  that  the  albums  represent.  For  instance  there  are  many   institutional  group  portraits  in  the  Japanese  material,  many  pre-­‐defined  poses,  many  absent   fathers,  few  interior  photos,  but  as  much  social  and  emotions  value  added  to  the  album  as   “elsewhere”.  We  might  understand  Japanese  culture  better  or  in  another  way  by  studying  the   private  family  photo  album  and  the  practice  around  it  –  and  we  might  understand  more  of   photography  as  a  practice  on  a  global  scale.      

Not  being  trained  as  an  anthropologist  I  thus  did  fieldwork  in  Japan.  I  have  become  

Facebook  friends  with  some  of  my  Japanese  students  and  through  this  I  have  access  to  a  lot  of   their  ‘private’  photographs.  But  the  experience  of  visiting  the  13  people/families  (or  many  of   them)  in  their  private  homes  and  going  through  the  albums  while  they  told  me  –  a  complete   stranger  –  the  stories  of  the  albums,  that  sometimes  –  although  not  always  –  revealed  rather                                                                                                                   12

Here I have been inspired by scholar such as Martha Langford, Elisabeth Edwards, Geoffrey Batchen, Sigrid Lien, Christopher Pinney and Sarah Pink.

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traumatic  event  or  emotions,  was  of  a  great  value  that  I  am  now  trying  to  figure  out  how  to   structure  and  transfer  in  my  analytical  text  about  these  albums.                                                                                           48

Kristian Handberg, Ph.d. student, University of Copenhagen Studying retro: the reaesthetization of the near past The  object  of  study  for  my  project  is  itself  a  practiced  anachronicity  with  the  hip  historicism  of   the  current  retro  culture.  My  aim  is  to  map  this  widespread  phenomenon  across  cultural   forms  as  subculture,  popular  culture,  fashion  and  the  traditional  aesthetic  disciplines  and  read   it  as  a  cultural  memory  and  part  of  the  current  history  culture.  This  will  both  be  a  historical   study  establishing  the  chronological  frames  of  a  cultural  phenomenon  and  a  study  of  the  use   of  historical  material  in  the  retro  practices.  That  is  writing  the  history  of  retro  and  addressing   the  history  approach  in  retro.      

For  the  first  of  this  history  perspectives,  I  define  retro  as  a  historically  specific  term  for  

the  last  decades,  first  being  registered  in  1974  (English  language)  and  1979  (Danish  context)   and  finding  its  common  recognition  around  1990.  I  set  my  field  of  study  to  the  time  span  1945   to  present  day  to  study  a  tightening  row  of  revivals  of  the  near  past  since  the  1960s  in  various   forms  of  the  media  and  popular  culture  as  the  Art  Nouveau  revival  of  the  psychedelic  counter   culture  or  the  framing  of  the  1950s  in  1970s  popular  culture,  leading  to  retro  as  a  goal  in   itself.  Behind  this  lies  an  understanding  of  retro  having  the  modern  cultural  ecology  of  sub-­‐   and  popular  culture  as  premise  and  the  same  epoch’s  media  and  material  culture  as  objects.  I   thereby  configure  my  project  as  a  study  of  a  specific  period  rather  than  as  a  trans-­‐historical   investigation  of  a  concept  or  reading  older  material  into  a  newer  trope.    At  the  same  time,  it  is   a  contemporary  and  recent  phenomenon  where  the  historical  meets  the  present  and   challenges  the  limits  of  the  historical.  And  retro  itself  adds  to  this  by  performing  its  revivalism   upon  a  challengingly  close  past  –  it  was  not  many  years  into  the  new  Millennium  before  the   1990’s  were  subject  to  retro  cultivation.  Thus,  both  retro’s  historization  of  the  near  past  as   distinctive  styles  that  can  be  aesthetically  used  and  the  study  of  such  a  recent  phenomenon  as   retro  raise  the  question:  “When  is  history?”    

To  characterize  retro  and  its  use  of  the  past  further,  I  define  it  as  ”a  cultural  revival  of  

material  dating  from  after  1945”  –  happening  after  1980  having  the  modern  past  as  a  subject   for  its  revival  and  so  having  modern  culture  as  context.  Retro  does  not  happen  as  a  total  recall.   It  is  always  about  using  few  or  many  elements  that  contrast  to  the  contemporary   surroundings.  An  actual  restoration  of  the  context  referred  to  is  not  the  goal.    Anyway,  there  is   always  a  presence  of  authentic  material  and  retro  does  not  perform  an  obvious  

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fictionalization  of  the  past  like  Steampunk  science  fiction  (creating  a  futuristic  universe  of   anachronistic  technology)  or  Goth  revivals  (also  focusing  on  consciously  distorted  past).    This   happens  in  a  combination  of  irony  and  nostalgia,  marking  both  distance  and  affection  to  its   objects.    This  special  and  paradoxical  feeling  is  translatable  to  Svetlana  Boym’s  concept   reflexive  nostalgia:  a  collective  and  cultural  nostalgia  that  has  change  and  time  itself  as  its  true   object.  It  is  often  ironic  and  does  not  go  for  total  recreation,  but  is  instead  obsessed  with   relics,  ruins  and  contrast  between  past  and  present.  The  goal  is  reflection  over  time  and   change  and  the  longing  itself,  hence  it  is  attached  to  the  algia  (longing).  This  nostalgic   archetype  and  its  conservative  counter  form  restorative  nostalgia  that  brutally  honestly  will   recreate  a  historical  truth,  typically  the  natural  condition  of  a  culture  or  nation  before  the   changes  of  modernity  focused  on  home:  nostos,  will  generally  be  interesting  to  bring  into   consideration  talking  about  how  the  past  is  dealt  with  in  art  historical  scholarship.      

Concerning  retro’s  approach  to  the  past  and  what  it  does  to  it,  it  is  my  thesis  that  is  

performs  a  synchronic  musealization  and  aesthetization.  Retro  is  developed  both  through   aesthetic  practices  as  art,  fashion  and  identity  performance  and  through  studies,  books,   collecting  and  connoisseurship:  practices  of  curation  and  collection  and  an  example  of   Herman  Lübbe’s  term  musealization,  museal  practices  reaching  beyond  the  museal   institutions.  These  are  intertwined  in  the  aesthetic,  entertaining,  commercial  and   countercultural  investments  in  the  past,  that  retro  performs.  This  is  generally  recognized  as   characteristic  for  the  current  extended  uses  of  history  in  the  ‘memory  boom’  (Winter,   Huyssen),  where  the  past  is  made  present  in  a  wide  number  of  ways  from  official  heritage   culture  to  the  entertainment  industry.  It  is  my  thesis  that  retro  is  both  an  obvious  and  active   part  of  this  and  a  conscious,  even  critical  reaction  towards  the  history  boom  in  its  irony  and   dedication  to  often  unrecognized  sides  of  the  past.  Therefore  retro  is  an  interesting   perspective  to  study  the  contemporary  memory  and  history  culture  from.      

Concerning  the  field  of  cultural  memory  studies,  the  situation  is  similar.  Retro  can  

obviously  be  studied  as  a  practice  of  cultural  memory,  but  makes  as  obviously  a  contrast  to   the  more  grave  memory  cultures  of  trauma  and  war  in  the  collective  memory  predominant  in   the  field.  I  think  the  study  of  retro  as  cultural  memory  can  offer  a  welcome  addition  to  this,   being  a  memory  culture  closer  to  the  life  world  of  the  present  and  the  experiences  of  its  near   past.  Here,  retro  can  be  seen  as  a  formation  of  a  cultural  memory  of  the  change  from  industrial   society  to  information  society,  from  analogue  technology  to  digital  technology  and  from   50

international  modernism  to  the  ‘multiple  modernities’  perspective.  Paraphrasing  Jan   Assmann’s  model  of  individual,  communicative  and  cultural  memory,  the  aesthetization  and   musealization  in  retro  are  the  formational  and  ceremonial  processes  that  creates  a  common   past  in  the  cultural  memory  of  these  events.                          

Describing  retro  as  a  contemporary  memory  culture  will  be  of  relevance  to  the  many  

uses  of  the  past  in  contemporary  art  and  also  to  the  exchanges  between  art  and  popular-­‐  and   subculture,  characteristic  for  the  last  decades.  It  will  confirm  retro  as  term  and  reference   point  and  thereby  setting  up  an  important  touchstone  in  the  aesthetic  meetings  between  past   and  present.                                                                      

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Marja-Terttu Kivirinta: Writing history with past in the future’s past: Foreign cultures, unknown landscapes, (trans)national traumas

Last  weekend  I  was  in  two  performances  of  music  presenting  to  the  Helsinki  concert  audience   the  cultural  historical  project  of  the  Spanish/Catalonian  musician  and  viola  da  gamba  player   Jordi  Savall.  In  concerts  he  and  his  multicultural  group  of  musicians  performed  two  huge   orchestral  pieces  “Istanbul”  and  “Jerusalem”  constituting  of  ancient  music  from  the   Mediterranean  area.  The  former  presents  old  Ottoman  court  music  of  the  16th  and  17the   centuries,  the  latter  of  the  music  of  more  than  two  millenniums  time  representing  the  several   periods  of  the  history  of  Jerusalem,  the  city  as  an  old  meeting  point  of  different  cultures  and   religions.    The  project  of  Savall  is  interesting  idealistic  art  work  to  reconstruct  by  means  of   music  a  link,  a  transcultural  bridge  (timescape)  in  between  the  past  and  the  present.  Savall,   the  leader  of  the  orchestra,  is  a  musician  working  like  a  cultural  historian.  Besides  his  studio   he  works  with  his  collaborators  in  the  archives,  searching  the  documents  of  ancient  music  and  

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instruments,  manuscripts  and  notes.  The  challenge  is  to  perform  ancient  music  to  the   contemporary  audiences  with  ancient  instruments,  or  ancient  like  instruments.    

The  two  concerts  I  heard  conform  on  the  theme  and  the  title  of  our  Nordforsk  network  

conference  “When  is  history?  Re-­‐enactment,  Anachronisms,  and  the  (Embodied)  Afterlife  of   Aesthetic  Practice”.  They  also  challenge  me  to  consider  this  recent  (even  strongly  emotional)   experience  through  my  statement  and  ponder  the  “re-­‐enactment”  and  “anachronisms”  within   it.  Trying  to  link  the  Savall  project  in  concern  into  my  research  I  emphasize  that  the  historical   authenticity  of  the  music  is  not  the  main  issue.  As  it  concerns  this  kind  of  project,  there  is   always  lots  of  discussion  of  the  originality  and  authenticity  of  the  music  and  the  instruments   and  so  on.  The  strictest  critics  claim  the  projects  of  Savall  to  be  commercial,  and  somehow   they  certainly  are.  Savall  is  the  owner  of  the  record  label  and  the  record  company.  In  his  music   projects  the  focus  is  always  on  re-­‐enactment,  on  reproductions  and  reconstructions  and  re-­‐ readings.  But  it  is  also  an  aesthetic  practice.  In  the  concerts  I  noticed  that  the  idea  is  to  turn   the  eyes,  ears  and  mind  of  the  audience  by  means  of  art  and  music  to  the  other(s),  to  the   foreign,  and  reproduce  in  the  scene  the  old  (unknown)  cultures  of  the  past,  now  so  called   margins  of  western  classical  centres,  in  contemporary  every  day  mainly  known  about  the   world  news  of  racism,  conflicts  and  political  problems.    In  the  project  ancient  music  is  now  a   signal,  a  message  for  the  peace.  As  several  psychoanalysts  after  Freud  have  written  the   other(s)  can  situate  also  in  our  minds,  in  our  subconscious.  Although  someone  may  think  that   this  kind  of  huge  music  project  has  something  to  do  with  the  contemporary  commercialism,   maybe.        

As  an  Art  Historian  I  am  not  the  specialist  of  music  and  instruments  (of  ancient  

Mediterranean  cultures).  So  I  cannot  straight  put  the  project  of  Savall  into  the  discussion  by   Georges  Didi-­‐Hubermann  as  questioning  the  ends  of  certain  Art  History  (the  title  of  his  article,   pp  7-­‐8.).  The  focus  of  my  research  is  in  the  History  of  Art  History,  in  the  past  and  in  the  still   present  performative  of  discourses  and  representations  constructing  the  artists  to  be   genius(es),  in  this  case  two  artists  of  the  1910’s  and  1920’s  in  Finland,  Helene  Schjerfbeck  and   Juho  Rissanen.  The  important  concepts  of  my  research  are  gender  and  class,  the  function  of   them  in  the  re-­‐construction  processes.  So  the  project  of  Savall  may  be  quite  far  from  the   questions  of  my  PhD  thesis  in  progress  but  it  is  not.  The  practice  of  my  research  is  somehow   anachronistic  because  my  basis  is  to  move  in  time,  place  and  space,  to  travel  from  present  to   past,  to  the  “foreign  country  left  behind”,  “unfamiliar  landscape”,    and  to  the  basis  of   53

psychoanalytic  trauma  theory  and  to  the  past  of  the  future  (Schneider,  22).  My  project  is  not   to  keep  the  (re)founders  alive  through  ritualized  forgetting  and  remembering,  as  Rebecca   Schneider  determines  “the  foundational  patricidic  impulse  to  modern  nationhood”  (Schneider   23),  but  to  question  it  and    the  way  of  representing  some  artists  still  as  national  heroes,  like   Schjerfbeck  in  Finland.  That  is  why  the  reason  is  to  turn  the  gaze  into  certain  period,  into  the   structure  of  the  (inter)national  art  field  and  art  market  of  the  past  that  has  constructed  the   modernist  myth  of  genius  of  certain  artists.  That  was  the  period  of  the  world  war  one  and  the   period  of  early  Finnish  independence.  So  according  to  the  ideas  of  Homi  Bhabha  I  argue  that   the  framing  is  a  kind  of  imagined  nation-­‐space  in  process,  the  performativity  of  the  discourses   in  the  narratives  of  the  nation.  (Bhabha  1990.)  Therefore  the  basis  of  my  research  is  the   reconstruction  of  the  art  scene  of  the  past,  in  this  case  the  1910’s  and  1920’s,  to  better  re-­‐read   many  voices  and  rhetoric  of  the  discourses  in  the  national  narration,  and  maybe,  to  better   understand  the  past  foreign  country  and  its  national  traumas.  I  see  the  research  as  a  present   dialog  with  the  “past  of  future”  (Schneider),  and  as  Irit  Rogoff  has  written,  it  is  a   contemporary  history  writing  with  the  past.  (Rogoff  2005,  14.)    So  the  very  interesting  issue  is   to  ponder  the  presence  of  the  historical  documents  here  and  now.      

In  the  case  of  Jordi  Savall  the  performance  of  (ancient)  music  is  a  kind  of  discursive  

construction  which  he  accentuates  himself.  He  and  his  orchestra  are  representing  in   contemporary  performances  at  the  present  time,  some  of  the  many  reconstructed  voices  of   the  past,  also  the  voices  of  the  past  trauma.  The  construction  of  the  orchestral  works  of   “Istanbul”  and  “Jerusalem”  are  the  results  of  the  research  and  also  the  dialog  with  the  past   foreign  cultures.  Savall  transmits  his  understanding  of  them  for  us,  in  the  role  of  the  audience   of  the  concerts,  for  us,  for  whom  it  is  now  easier  to  identify  ourselves  with  the  musical   material,  not  so  much  as  historical  sources  as  a  contemporary  understanding,  also  a   representation  of  the  past  full  of  traumas,  anxiety,  violence  and  death.  So  it  is  important  for  us   to  know  the  context  of  Savall.  This  originally  Catalonian  musician  had  a  traditional  education   of  classical  European  music  in  Spain  and  was  interested  in  the  court  music  of  the  16th  and   17the  centuries  that  lead  him  far  from  the  western  music  centres,  from  Barcelona  to  the  other   old  cultural  centres  of  Mediterranean,  like  Venice,  Istanbul  and  Jerusalem.            

In  the  meantime  there  is  still  one  tangent  with  the  Savall  project  in  the  air.  Talking  

about  gender  issues  it  is  easy  to  notice  that  in  the  members  of  the  big  orchestra  there  is  just  a   woman,  the  one  playing  the  wind  instruments.    Since  the  second  woman,  the  singer  and  the   54

wife  of  Jordi  Savall,  Montserrat  Figueras  was  ill  the  night  of  the  Helsinki  performance,  all  the   singers  were  male.  I  don’t  know,  but  maybe  it  is  according  to  the  tradition  that  most  of  the   musicians  in  the  orchestras  were  men,  the  flautists,  the  players  of  lutes,  lyras,  violins,  drums,   and  so  on.  I  assume  that  in  the  performances  in  concern  one  of  the  male  singers,  the  counter   tenor,  might  have  performed  the  role  of  Figueras,  the  role  of  a  woman.  So  this  kind  of  male   orchestra  has  been  quite  homosocial.  But  for  a  listener  the  ideas  of  gender  and  sexuality  were   far  away,  because  the  atmosphere  of  the  performance  is  asexual,  sublime,  mental  and   spiritual.  The  experience  of  sitting  and  of  hearing  the  music  in  the  present  context  as  sitting  in   a  huge  contemporary  Concert  hall,  in  this  case  in  the  new  Music  Hall  of  Helsinki,  is  not  bodily   experience  although  it  is.  The  listener  can  also  observe  the  work  of  the  musicians,  the  players   of  all  kinds  of  instruments,  as  bodily  work.  But  in  the  concert  during  the  performance  as   examining  the  music  in  the  process  I  noticed  myself  uncomfortable.  It  was  not  because  the   performance,  and  not  because  of  the  national  and  even  somehow  nationalistic  rituals  framing   the  new  Music  Hall  in  Helsinki.  That  evening  was  my  first  visit  there,  in  the  new  “cathedral”   for  music,  where  we  had  got  places  quite  high  on  in  the  2nd  floor  balcony  and  sat  behind  a  see-­‐ through  iron  balustrade.  I  was  anxious  mostly  because  of  my  acrophobia.    

Since  the  structure  of  the  art  field  in  Finland  of  1910’s  and  1920’s  was  male,  Helene  

Schjerfbeck  as  a  female  genius  artist  was  one  of  the  rare  exceptions.  I  argue  that  in  re-­‐reading   the  material  of  the  period  about  her  art  and  herself  in  her  fifties  it  is  possible  to  analyze  the   constructed  representation  of  a  mental,  bodily  ill  and  suffering  (old)  woman  whose  paintings   were  regarded  spiritual,  sublime  and  sophisticated.  The  representation  of  the  past  lives  still  in   the  present  (maybe  in  the  future’s  past,  maybe  in  the  future)  representations  and  discourses.   Using  Rebecca  Schneider’s  metaphor  of  Hamlet  as  well  as  of  the  phantom  his  father  in  scene  I   pose  a  question.  Is  there  in  this  reconstruction  of  the  art  field  /  art  scene  still  a  possibility  to   see  the  paintings  of  Helene  Schjerfbeck  also  rough,  unattractive  and  banal?      

References Bourdieu, Pierre 2005. The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Polity Press. Cambridge, UK. Bhabha, Homi 1990. Introduction: narrating the nation. Nation and narration. Routledge. London. New York. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Question posed. In Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art.

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Istanbul. Jerusalem. Leaflets of concerts of Jordi Savall orchestra in Espoo and Helsinki, Finland 2.9.2011 and 3.9.2011. Helsinki Festival. Mayor, Carol 1999. Becoming. Duke University Press. Durham. London. Rogoff, Irit 2005. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing remains. Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge. Marja-Terttu Kivirinta [email protected] PhD student, researcher University of Helsinki / Faculty of Arts /

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Ann-­‐Sofie  N.  Gremaud.  PhD  student.  Department  of  Arts  and  Cultural  Studies,   University  of  Copenhagen.  

Statement  about  issues  of  time  and  history  in  modern  images  of   Icelandic  landscape  (19th-­21st  century).     Conceptualisations  of  time  and  history  are  central  elements  in  the  perspectives  I  apply  on   depictions  of  Icelandic  landscapes.  I  primarily  address  issues  of  chronology  and  the   anachronic  movements  of  images  in  my  analysis  with  focus  on  changing  uses  of  and  attitudes   to  certain  motifs.  I  view  representations  of  time  and  use  of  history  in  the  political  and   ideological  framework  of  Icelandic  separation  from  the  Danish  Kingdom  –  a  movement  of  the   19th  and  20th  centuries.  My  focus  is  presently  not  as  much  on  problematics  of  the  scholarly   treatment  of  the  images  as  on  the  way  ideas  about  past,  present  and  future  are  related  to  the   concept  of  linear  time  within  the  images.  Anachronic  movements  and  other  breaks  in  linear   time  are  constantly  at  stake  in  the  landscape  images.      

Although  I  do  not  aim  for  a  reconstruction  of  the  past,  there  is  a  danger  of  ”inventing  

artificial  boundaries”  –  as  Didi-­‐Huberman  expresses  it  ([1990]  2005)  -­‐  inherent  in  my   framework,  which  I  try  to  address  explicitly  and  critically.  I  try  to  contribute  to  an   interdisciplinary  field  (human  geography,  art  history,  post-­‐colonialism)  of  current  discussions   about  present  day  Icelandic  society  through  analysis  of  past/long  term  developments  as  well   as  analysis  of  current  views  on  the  past.     By  viewing  landscape  depiction  as  Cassirean  symbolic  forms  –  a  means  or  instrument   of  expressing  issues  of  the  relation  between  human  and  nature/environment  –  one  is  directed   towards  a  sensitivity  to  their  individual  directedness  or  activities.  Since  a  symbolic  form  is   constantly  at  work,  coproducing  meaning  with  other  symbolic  forms  on  various  cultural   levels,  meaning  is  never  static.  My  main  goal,  to  investigate  the  landscape  images  as   processings  of  the  relation  between  human  and  nature/environment,  is  then  combined  with   more  concrete  perspectives  linked  to  political  circumstances  of  the  period  in  question:  the   struggle  for  independence,  cryptocolonial  features,  questions  of  territorial  dominance,  and  a   changing  attitude  to  natural  resources.    

My  empirical  material  is  a  range  of  images  of  site  specific  Iclandic  landscape  –  a  motif  

that  seems  to  enjoy  a  constant  actuality  in  Iceland.  I  include  art  as  well  as  images  from   broader  visual  culture,  that  have  been  widely  circulated  and  known  in  Iceland,  and  propose  

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answers  to  why  these  site  specific  motifs  are  so  popular.  Inspired  by  W.J.T.  Mitchell  and   imagological  methodology,  I  point  to  parallels  between  visual  and  literary  imagery  through   reoccuring  motifs.  In  this  way  seeking  to  open  up  such  overlapping  or  mutually  influenced   spaces.      

As  suggested  the  images  are  analysed  with  a  focus  on  their  relations  to/roles  in  

formulation  of  collective  identity  (sometimes  a  close  kinship  appears  while  others  present  an   opposition  to  such  common  ideas)  in  a  national  framework  in  this  period  of  industrialisation,   avant-­‐garde  art,  changes  in  the  economical  power  relations  and  exotification  of  Europe’s   peripheries.  A  period  where  an  Icelandic  visual  art  scene  is  created  with  creative  use  and   reuse  of  the  traditions  of  other  media.   One  of  my  main  focuses  is  that  of  issues  of  progress  and  power:  The  chronological   framework  of  progress  and  modernity  in  general  has  had  substantial  influence  on  many   aspects  of  the  Icelandic  independence  movement.  Both  formulations  of  a  collective  Icelandic   identity  in  history  books,  political  manifests  and  in  visual  culture  as  well  as  external   statements  about  Iceland  are  primarily  centred  around  ideas  of  progress  (or  lack  of  such)  [Fig   1  +2].  In  some  recent  works  visual  artists  have  begun  treating  this  issue  with  a  sharp  irony   pointing  to  the  possibility  of  a  different  modernity  –  perhaps  an  answering  back  to   Eurocentric  modernity?  

  1. Image from Ísland farsælda frón, 1953 by Hjálmar Bárðarson. (Progress has come to the ancient Thingvellir.)

  2. Current commercial for the fashion brand Farmers Marked. (Urban folklore in rural setting.)

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Another  important  focus  is  accumulation  of  time.  This  perspective  is  discussed  is  connection   with  depictions  of  Iceland  as  heterotopia,  as  the  country  is  often  described  in  tourist   brouchures  as  being  ”unspoilt”  or  ”an  unearthly  paradise”  and  in  connection  with  anachronic   depictions,  such  as  e.g.  Raadsig’s  painting  from  1850  of  Ingolfur  Arnarson  colonising  Iceland   in  874  AD  in  clothes  of  Biedermeier  fashion.      

3. J.P. Raadsig: Ingolf tager Island

  i besiddelse, 1850.  

Raadsig’s  image  is  an  example  of  the  anachronic  stretching  of  the  mythical  moment  of  the   nation’s  foundation,  connecting  ideals  of  the  present  with  the  potent  mythical  past.  In  such   images  history  becomes  myth,  that  can  be  reactivated,  where  by  ideals  can  be  projected   through  time.  This  can  still  be  observed  -­‐  as  in  the  past  decade,  where  myths  surrounding  the   Viking  figure  were  reactualised  and  reframed  to  benefit  business  adventures.  Another   example  of  how  national  time  works  anachronically  through  images  is  Morgunblaðið13  from   June  17  1944  –  the  day  Iceland  was  declared  autonomous.  On  this  day  a  photograph  from   1874  was  used  as  news  illustration  creating  a  temporal  wormhole  to  a  previous  ceremony,   and  thus  accumulating  national  symbolism,  which  trumps  the  need  for  temporal  simultaneity   between  event  and  image.    

My  crypto-­‐colonial  perspective  and  focus  on  ”national  time”  is  creating  a  framework,  

that  can  have  reminiscence  of  linear  historicism  based  on  teleological  developmental  model.   However,  I  try  to  navigate  the  pitfalls  through  a  critical  attention  to  this  risk.                                                                                                                     13

A dominant newspaper in Iceland.

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