Kategoriarkiv: Art history

During and After the Pandemic: Recent activities in Visual Studies

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Åbo Akademi doing some ”visual sociology” in Bogotá, Colombia, September 2023. (Photo L. Conde-Aldana)

Update: In 2024 sixteen years have passed (2008-2024) since Visual Studies started as a minor undergraduate program at the then Department of Art History (Konstvetenskapliga institutionen) at Åbo Akademi. Today both Art History and Visual Studies are part of the section KHF (Culture, History, Philosophy) at the FHPT (Faculty of Humanities, Psychology and Theology). In Visual Studies we are now developing a closer connection to historical and anthropological aspects of the visual: next spring the course Visual Sociology and Anthropology (5 ECTS) will for the first time be given in English for both Åbo Akademi students and exchange students. The associate professor of Visual Studies also supervises Master and Doctoral theses in art history, and participates in the research seminar for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University in Sweden. He is also a member of the editorial board of the online academic journal  ICO: Nordic Iconographic Review, located at Lund University, and participates in an international project for re-launching Visio, the journal for Visual Semiotics (originally published in Canada). Both Visual Semiotics and the study of Iconography have been important parts of Visual Studies ever since the international beginnings of anglophone Visual Culture Studies and German ”image studies” (Bildwissenschaft) ca 40 years ago.

With the aid of guest teachers from Lund University, the University of Turku (UTU), and the Visual Neuroscience group at Helsinki University, we have offered two basic courses in Visual Perception and Behavioural science during 2014-2019: Visual Perception and Cognition (5 ECTS) and Eye-Tracking Methodology in Visual Studies (5 ECTS). Due to a number of factors, some caused by restrictions during the Pandemic 2020-2022, we had to discontinue Eye-Tracking Methodology in 2020 and Visual Perception and Cognition in 2022. During the same period, structural changes of the KHF study program meant that the course Från avantgarde till global konst (”From avant-garde to global art”), on the history of 20th Century visual art, was no longer included in the basic level studies in Art History. It was then decided to continue the course, but to include it as optional in the Visual Studies minor instead. It is given in Swedish as a fully on-line course with pre-recorded lectures.

Our 5 ECTS course in Visual Rhetoric, given in Swedish as Visuell retorik: Propaganda och marknadsföring (”Visual Rhetoric: Propaganda and Marketing”) has met a similar fate — it is now fully online with pre-recorded lectures from the Pandemic period. As the study of Visual Rhetoric is a rapidly expanding field (with a close connection to Cogntive Semiotics), these lectures will soon be outdated and we will have to develop the course further. Participants of the course have contributed to research in Visual studies by collecting and coding a large number of commercial videos from the Internet (mostly Youtube) between 2016 and 2019: the outcomes of this exercise is part of an evaluation of criteria for identifying instances of visual rhetoric in commercial messages, recently published in the academic journal Cognitive Semiotics (Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin).

During the Pandemic, we were recommended to develop the sociological and anthropological aspects of Visual Studies more and to bring the course schedule into closer correspondence with the international Master programs of our Faculty. Consequently, a considerable amount of time was dedicated last Spring to the development of our Visual Sociology and Anthropology course. It was adapted from Swedish to English and given as a first ”test-run” with a small group of Swedish-speaking students. The trend is that more and more of our courses are now given in English for all categories of students. A course in basic semiotics that we gave (with some modifications) in Swedish between 2009 and 2024 has now changed both name and language: starting in January 2025, it will henceforth be given as Visual Semiotics and Storytelling (5 ECTS). Rather than focusing more narrowly on one particular method or theory of Visual Semiotics (for example Structuralist analysis), we will now provide more of an overview of how different theories and approaches have contributed to the study of how images are actually processed and understood by people, and how perceptual and cultural factors interact in this process. Each week, analytic exercises in visual image analysis will support the learning and the application of the theories.

Biovisualization: neural axons of the human brain. Image source: Tamara V. Tulaikova and Svetlana R. Amirova, ResearchGate.

Most of our courses are now concentrated to the Winter and Spring periods, with only two exceptions: the aforementioned online Art History course and our international course on photography and cinema: Photography and the Moving Image (5 ECTS, November to January). These somewhat skewed proportions are again due to structural and organizational changes at our Faculty. One of the optional courses still has a strong connection to the behavioral sciences: it has been offered successfully for ten years and is called Visuality and Visualization of Information. Many participants in the course have been from the Master program of biomedical visualization (BIMA), but  students from the Social Science and Humanities faculties have also participated and have reviewed the course favourably. Unfortunately, we no longer have a basic course in visual perception and neurology that can prepare students for the more scientific aspects of image perception and visualization, but we usually recommend that one should familiarize oneself with some basic literature (such as Basic Vision by Snowden et al.) before joining.

For Swedish-speaking students who want to include Visual Studies as a minor in the Bachelor programs of Culture (KHF) and Language studies, we still offer the course Visuell analys as a course based on hands-on analytical exercises. This has been an effective and popular approch ever since the course started in 2008. For the more historically or aesthetically inclined, we also offer our international Comics course, Comics – Interdisciplinary and Cultural Perspectives, which will henceforth be given in April and May. At the start page Våra kurser / Our courses at this blog, all the course descriptions have been updated this Autumn, and there are links for those students who want to access the Åbo Akademi Moodle and take a more detailed look at the courses right away (no  registration keys are needed). Likewise, the links to various Internet resources and to other universities with programs in Visual Studies, to be found in the right-hand directory of this page, have been updated very recently.

Sixten Ringbom, professor of art history at Åbo Akademi 1971-1992. Photo: Åbo Akademi image archives.

Some research activities of Visual Studies at Åbo Akademi between 2019 and 2024: There has been no time to start bigger joint projects or apply for funding, but invitations to contribute to journals and research anthologies have been answered. We participated on behalf of the section of Art History at Åbo Akademi in the seminar Hundra år av svensk konsthistoria – och sen? (”Hundred years of Swedish Art History – and then?”) at Uppsala University in June 2019: see program in Swedish as pdf. One of our talks at the seminar was then developed into the book chapter ”Is Finland Swedish? The role of the Swedish language, Swedishness, and Swedish history in Finnish art historiography” during 2019 and 2020. After an additional 2-year editing process, the chapter was published in the research anthology Swedish art historiography —institutionalization, identity, and practice from Nordic Academic Press in 2022: The whole anthology is available as pdf here (Lund University Library portal). During collecting and reading a considerable amount of Finnish and Finland-Swedish research in art history from the 100 year period 1920-2020, we also had occasion to look more into the work of our former Åbo Akademi art history professors: Lars Ivar Ringbom (1901-1971) and Sixten Ringbom (1935-1992). Our Archive of Art History (Konstvetenskapliga arkivet, link) is currently in the process of exploring and cataloguing additional documents related to the research of the two Ringboms. On the occasion of the re-publication of Sixten Ringbom’s book The Sounding Cosmos in 2022, an article on Ringbom was published in the Åbo Akademi science journal Meddelanden (in Swedish). Some of Sixten Ringbom’s later studies of pictures and narrative have an obvious interest for Visual Semiotics and narratology.

”Mayday Demonstration”, painting by Johan Ahlbäck (1895-1973) in the collections of the Dalarnas Museum, Sweden.

Much research time in Visual Studies during the Pandemic year of 2020 was spent collecting material for two extensive research articles covering the iconography and visual rhetoric of political propaganda: Iconography of the Labour Movement 1 and Iconography of the Labour Movement 2. As it turned out, these two articles appears to have been one of the most read from our Faculty at Research Gate during 2021-2024. The Labour and Worker’s Movement theme has been continued in collaboration with labour movement organizations in Sweden and colleagues at Malmö University. At invitation from the Johan Ahlbäck Association (Ahlbäcksällskapet), research was conducted between 2021 and 2023 for the main chapter of the book Inte vackert men omutligt sant: Johan Ahlbäck, arbetarkonstnären från Smedjebacken (”Not beautiful but immutably true: Johan Ahlbäck, the working class artist from Smedjebacken”), published in 2023. As image editor, our associate professor was also responsible for the documentation of Johan Ahlbäck’s artistic oeuvre and the selection of illustrations for this art book. Following discussions with Magnus Nilsson, professor of comparative literature at Malmö University, and a conference on Nordic Comics in Malmö in October 2021, we have also put together an article on the phenomenon of Working Class Comics for an anthology that will be published in April 2025 by Malmö University and the academic publisher De Gruyter (Berlin / New York).

From the start, the ambition of Visual Studies at Åbo Akademi has been to specialize and focus on Semiotics. There has always been a connection to Lund University and the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS, 2009-2014, now the Section for Cognitive Semiotics) that was established there by the late professor Göran Sonesson (1951-2023). There has therefore been a need to make our small writing- and documentation projects here in Åbo/Turku relevant also for semiotics. In some cases this has not been possible, because the aim has been merely historiographic (see for example the ”Nordic Art Criticism” section of this blog), but both the work on Labour movement iconography and that on Working Class Comics contain some elements of what is often referred to as Socio-Semiotics. With the aim of starting a methodological discussion regarding possible points of correspondence between Iconology/Iconography (as a speciality of Art History) and Semiotics, the one-day doctoral seminar Exploring the Boundaries of Iconography was arranged in November 2021 in collaboration with Art History (konstvetenskap/taidehistoria) at Åbo Akademi and UTU. A speech from  the seminar has been published in English in ICO (Nordic Review of Iconography) no 3-4 2022 (Liepe), and a response is forthcoming in ICO no 1-2 2024 (Andersson).

Typical situation during the Pandemic: academics trying to get Zoom in order. Vilnius November 2021: Paulius Jevsejevas, Karl Joosep Pihel, Fred Andersson.

While Iconology/Iconography is mostly associated with the methodology of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), we wish to also stress the importance of another scholar of Jewish European descent but active in America: Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996). Schapiro was clearly a pioneer of both the Modern study of Medieval Iconology and of Visual Semiotics as applied to various periods in cultural history: thus his research is an obvious point of departure if we want to study connections between the fields. A paper on the topic was presented by Visual Studies at the 12th conference of the Nordic Association of Semiotic Studies (NASS) at Vilnius University, Lithuania, in November 2021. All sessions were recorded by NASS and the session chaired by us can be watched here:

NASS XII Session 5: Karl Joosep Pihel, Fred Andersson, Evripides Zantides (Youtube)

A much expanded version of the paper, comparing different approaches in Visual Semiotics (Structuralist, Cognitive, Social) and relating them to the pioneering work of Schapiro, was published in Volume 18 (2023) of the journal of the A. J. Greimas Centre for Semiotic Research in Vilnius, Semiotika: 

Sensory Qualities as Signs? Meyer Schapiro as a Pioneer of the Semiotics of ‘Visual Form’ (Semiotika 18)

Members of Groupe µ, Liège 1991: Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Philippe Minguet and Francis Edeline.

In connection with our courses in Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric, and exchanging texts and ideas with Semiotic research centers in Belgium and Brazil, we have also made efforts to present francophone research to students and colleagues who do not read French. Especially the work of the Belgian research collective known as Groupe µ has has been a source of productive reflection and methodological application. Articles presenting the theories of Groupe µ have been published as outcomes of our research in Visual Studies in 2010 (Nouveaux Actes Sémiotiques, English), 2015 (Estudos Semióticos , Portuguese) and 2016 (Taidehistoria Tieteenä, Swedish). A further article in English with a presentation of the main elements of Groupe µ’s contributions to literary and visual analysis, and the implications of such analyses for a general ”theory of meaning” in Cognitive Semiotics, was published in 2023 in Volume 3 of the book series Open Semiotics, edited by Amir Biglari (Université de Limoges) for the French publisher L’Harmattan:

The Visual Semiotics and Rhetoric of Groupe μ: Opening a Dialogue Between Linguistics, Aesthetics and Cognitive Science (ResearchGate)

The first issue of Visio, Spring 1996.

The digitalisation of the journal Visio (1996-2005), journal of the International Association of Visual Semiotics (AISV-IASS), is a cooperation between members of AISV-IASS from Åbo Akademi, the University College of Kristianstad (Sweden), the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and the University of Lyon. Visio is a journal that has been difficult to order and access. The digitalisation of all issues will now make avaliable a large corpus of texts, mainly in French but also in English and Spanish, covering a wide variety of topics, methodologies and national cultures during a dynamic and inspiring period of the development of Visual Semiotics as a specialized field of research. It can be assumed that many of these texts, and the topics and projects they describe, are still unknown to the majority of researchers active in the field — especially those of the anglophone world. When published online at the OJS online journal platform of Lund University, the Visio archive will give the academic community and the general public a much improved access to sources that throw light on the history of Visual Semiotics and the relationship between its different ”schools” in France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Canada and Latin America.

The Visio digitalization project, and plans for the future of the journal, were presented in a session of the 13th congress of AISV-IASS in Bogotá (Colombia). The conference was held at the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano from 28 September to 1 October 2023. When we presented the project, we did it more as a discussion with other conference participants than as a conventional presentation, and in addition to representatives from Åbo Akademi (Andersson) and Paris 8 (Reyes) some members of the original editorial board and scientific committee of Visio were also present. Notably, professor Jacques Fontanille from Université de Limoges, member of the editorial board from the start in 1996, gave a well prepared speech on the history and future of the journal. An inspiring congress, the AISV-IASS 13 in Bogotá also gave rich opportunities for exploring the life of the city and its many museums (see picture at the beginning of this post).

”Visual abstract” of the last article published Göran Sonesson, 2023: Humankind from Ape to Archaeologist; a psychological experient with children; the geometry of visual perspective; Sonesson’s signature; the Rabbit Scribe of the Mayans (compare next picture). Source ResearchGate.

To be a semiotician in the Humanities often implies a contradiction of aims and interests. In the Humanities there is a tendency to specialize rather narrowly in the study of specific periods, places, and even single individuals, such as a certain artist or a certain writer. By contrast, semiotics is more general in its aims. As the late Göran Sonesson used to put it, semiotics is ”nomothetic” (about developing and testing models) and not ”idiographic” (which literary means ”recording the individual”). Cognitive Semiotics focuses on larger developmental patterns: both in child development and in the evolution of Humankind at large. This is also true of the  Cognitive Semiotics centre at Lund University. Both linguists, developmental psychologists, primatologists and some art historians have contributed to the projects there. Looking back at the work of art historians who were active at the turn of the century 1900 one will discover, however, that they were often far more ”nomothetic” than people of today may expect. Some of them worked at the level of global world history and constructed general theories about cultural development and human creativity – often in close connection to the Archaelogy and Cultural Anthropology of the time.

One example is the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905) and his studies of stylistic development, which should be familiar to any student of art history. Many of Riegl’s observations are still foundational for how the history of ancient art in Egypt, Greece and the Roman empire is taught in basic courses in art history. Sometimes Riegl’s theories and historical schematizations have been described as a sort of ”proto-semiotics”. But how much validity is there in such claims? Following up on the earlier articles on Iconology, Meyer Schapiro and the Groupe µ, this was one of the questions posed in a speech given through video link from the Visual Studies ”home office” in Sweden for the Spring 2024 seminar series of GES (Grupo de Estudos Semióticos) at the public University of São Paulo (USP), 24 May 2024. We wish to thank our friend professor Elizabeth Harkot de la Taille for the kind invitation and the GES and FAPS (Fórum de Atualização em Pesquisas Semióticas) for the recording of the seminar, which is publicly available here:

The close and problematic relationship between Visual Semiotics and Art History (YouTube)

This post has been an overview of some of the activities in Visual Studies here in Åbo/Turku during 2019-2024, a difficult period in Academia and in the world at large. Much of this work has not taken place in Finland: the notion of the physical working place has started to evaporate here as in many other places of education and administration (at the same time as symbolical investments are made in lavish building projects, often resulting in spaces largely unused). Very often the teacher/coordinator of Visual Studies has only been present through Zoom or some other video connection from his home in Sweden. The topics of courses, articles and talks listed here may seem quite diverse and with little to connect them except a very general notion of ”Visual studies”. However, semiotics is a strong common factor that also has a bearing on more perceptual and psychological aspects, especially if one considers how Cognitive Semiotics connects the behavioural and social sciences to evolutionary theory, linguistics and cultural history.

The rabbit scribe, from the the Mayan drinking cup known as the ”Princeton Vase” in the archaelogical collections of Princeton University. Today’s Guatemala, Late Classic Maya (’Codex’ style), AD 670–750.

”The rabbit scribe”, taken from a 5th or 6th century drinking vessel of the Maya culture in today’s Guatemala, was used by Göran Sonesson as a visual signature in his letters and at his Lund University webpages. It signifies the importance of art history and anthropology for his research — he worked in Mexico as guest researcher in Ethno-linguistics during 1981-1983 and he has sometimes been referred to as both Linguist and Anthropologist. The rabbit also signifies the close connection between writing and pictures in the development of writing systems — Mayan script being a hieroglyphic script, like ancient Egyptian writing. The rabbit paints/writes the hieroglyphs on a piece of prepared animal skin that is placed on a flat writing board on the ground, but the way this writing arrangement has been rendered in the picture also makes it look quite exactly like a modern laptop seen from the side. Today, when historical fake news produce the most outrageous interpretations of details of ancient pictures, sometimes with the aid of visual AI, one should treat such associations with great care. But the possible laptop association was also for Sonesson a humourous reference to how past and present are connected in research that investigates the meaning of signs and symbols. A both Anthropological and Semiotic rule is that human beings tend to perceive meaning everywhere. Mayan script will probably never be completely deciphered and we cannot know exacly what the rabbit meant – but it was most probably not meant as a humorous detail only. The rabbit had an important role in Mayan mythology and scribes were venerated as people with a special connection to the gods.

The rabbit signature reappeared in a ”visual abstract” that accompanied Göran Sonesson’s last research article, published only three months before his untimeley death in March 2023. (See picture above.) An enormously productive author and researcher, Göran contributed decisively to the establishment of Semiotics as a recognized academic discipline in the Nordic countries. Together with such scholars as Thomas C. Daddesio, Per Aage Brandt, and the members of Groupe µ, he took part in transforming semiotics — earlier associated mostly with lingusitic models and methods — into the more open and diverse field that it is today. His contributions to this process will most certainly have a lasting significance. Göran didn’t cease working even during his last year of illness, and after his retirement in 2019 he was still strongly present in academic life and in the activities of semiotic associations. During those final years, he took part in the organization of several academic conferences and coordinated such initiatives as our Visio project.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the work of Göran and its continuation in courses and research projects on Cognitive Semiotics basically aims at clarifying how people think (the cognitive part of semiotics) and how all scientific thinking (also ”pure mathematics”) has an Anthropological aspect. This is not a question of subjective or ”humanistic” experience as opposed to ”objective scientific truth”, but of the relevance of methods and research questions for our self-knowledge and the future of our species. Jordan Zlatev has summarized this nicely in his notion of the conceptual-empirical loop: behavioural science creates hypotheses and models, but these should preferably be based on real experience, ”experience” then being defined as both subjective or introspective experience (first-person perspective, or the researcher’s own self-knowledge) and the observation of the behavour of others (second-person perspective). Philosophically speaking, this means that phenomenology as the very general description of ”what exists in the mind” should be the basis of all science (”science” in a wide sense) that deals with human life.

But often science only follows standard methods and standard protocols. The consequences of this are clearly to the seen in Society. Patients are being diagnosed routinely (and sometimes even without meeting the doctor) according to standard definitions of diagnostic manuals. Organizational reforms are carried out on the basis of general measures of efficiency and time management — but with very little regard of how work actually ”works”. The human mind is more and more seen as merely a machine for information processing and execution of algorithms, easily replaced with robots and generative AI. When academic teachers describe learning and the writing of student assigments as ”handling information” we can see how this thinking affects even those who should be at the forefront of critical opposition.

Welcome again to Visual Studies – its 14th year at Åbo Akademi

Art history, Okategoriserade, Perception, Visual studies, , , , , , , ,
Illustrating a theory about photography

An important statement of Visual Studies: From an exhibition by the artist Alfredo Jaar in 2013. Source: https://alfredojaar.net/projects/2013/

Hello! This is still the blog of the Visual Studies minor at Åbo Akademi University and I am still Fred Andersson, a Swedish art historian who has been running this business since it started in 2008. Recently I discussed the topic of blogs with some of my art history students – ”is there anyone who actually reads them anymore?”. Anyhow, we agreed that if you have a text-based blog, you probably write it mainly for your own sake, for testing ideas, using the blog as a ”sketch-pad” for more finished texts, probably also as a strategy to get rid of writing blocks. There are people who use Facebook and Instagram updates for similar reasons, sometimes posting full essays, but especially in the Smartphone mode the reading experience is not very pleasant. Let’s therefore continue with this Visual Studies blog. I guess I will still be the only one writing for it, and if you happen to be some people out there reading it, don’t hesitate to email me if you have questions or ideas (you’ll find my info in the ”Våra kurser/Our Courses” tab at this page). I had to disable the ”comments” function because of massive amounts of spam. All new entries will from now on be written in English, because over the years we have seen that to an increasing extent, exchange students are in majority among the participants of some of our courses.

A random example in Visual Studies: This image was ”made” a century ago in order to capture both the boys and the now demolished building in the background. The image ”tells us” about the situation of its making. Without text and archival information, it doesn’t tell much else. (Source: private.)

We have now, hopefully, left the COVID pandemic behind, and in the meantime the study structure at our faculty section KHF (Culture, History, Philosophy) at Åbo Akademi University has underwent some structural changes. It is, as yet, not very clear what consequences these may have for the future role of the Visual Studies subject. With continuous information work and ”marketing efforts”, for example the maintenance of this blog and the circulation of course information to mailing lists and in the Visual Studies Facebook group, I have been able to attract a sufficient number of students and to keep most of our courses running every year since 2008. However, due to other demanding tasks and the time-consuming adaptation to online teaching during the Pandemic, I have not been able to maintain these outreaching activities for the past two years, and the effects of this neglect are now clearly noticeable.

A small subject is always in a precarious position, especially at a small university with only one single individual (that is me) employed as full-time teacher and researcher of the subject. This single individual is probably even the only teacher in the whole of Finland: even though Visual Studies now exists at Tampere University also, the people there present the subject as a research network and don’t seem to offer any undergraduate courses (Tampere Visual Studies Lab, https://research.tuni.fi/visualstudieslab). Some other Finnish universities have courses in Visual Culture, which is not necessarily the same – I will soon explain why.

I have noticed that most students taking our courses are no longer aware of the existence of Visual Studies as a ”short minor” (in Swedish kort biämne) at our university, i.e. as a small program that you can choose as a parallel complement to your ”major” (in Swedish huvudämne). Some have found single courses that have been recommended as optional in other subjects or study units (in Swedish kurshelheter), others are probably interested in only certain specific aspects of Visual Studies (such as film studies), and many exchange students have realized that some of our courses are among the few in the humanities that are given in English. All this is well and good, but it is obviously time for a reminder that Visual Studies exists as a separate discipline at universities worldwide, and that there are certain reasons for its existence. These reasons are also the reasons why our courses look they way they do, and why they should preferably be taken in a certain order if you want to choose Visual Studies as your minor subject. (See the ”Våra kurser/Our Courses” tab.)

Visual Studies has an obvious connection to Art History – a much older subject that has been taught at European universities for at least 200 years. Most scholars who regard themselves as belonging to Visual Studies have a formal education as art historians, and most research groups or departments with ”Visual Studies” in their official names have been sub-sections or ”outgrowths” of departments of Art History. Because of its organizational connection to Art History, Visual Studies is typically regarded as the study of human visual culture – or more specifically as Visual Culture Studies. The difference with Art History is simply the word ”art” – Visual Culture is not limited to what we usually refer to as ”art” (for example objects exhibited at ”art galleries” or collected at ”art museums”). The history of visual culture is the history of how humankind has shaped its visual environment and developed means of visual symbolism and communication. When limited to Visual Culture Studies, research in Visual Studies normally focuses on aspects of human behavior that are dependent on culturally determined conventions and codes, the dominant research paradigm being that of cultural constructivism.

Reality: a cake moulded by language? (Source: freepik.com)

When taken to extremes, cultural constructivism tends to result in a rather limited worldview, according to which almost everything in life could be explained as dependent on language, culture and learned behavior. One case in point is the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, which states that our perception and our understanding of the world around us is shaped or ”moulded” by the terms and concepts available in our language, and not the other way around. In its strong version, which is today abandoned by most linguists, this hypothesis would potentially lead to such resasonings as this one: Let’s assume that a language has only three basic color terms, and that these are black, white and red. Then, its speakers would not be able to perceive other colors.

How are we to test if this conclusion is true? Indeed, there are still people who in their childhood only spoke a language with no other basic color terms than those mentioned – for exemple some languages spoken by indigenous groups in Australia. Today, they most probably speak English too. If, in their childhood, they were subjected to various psychological tests designed in order to determine whether they could see or not see what ”we” Westerners see, such tests would still beg the question of what it means to ”see” and to perceive. Do we have, ourselves, names for all chromatic nuances we can distinguish? Hardly so: we would then need thousands and thousands of colour terms, and be able to remember them and distinguish between them. There is no room in our verbal memory for such massive amounts of fine linguistic distinctions that only refer to color. The visual ability of distinguishing colour is evidently not dependent on the number of color terms in language. Paintings and other visual artifacts produced in cultures with limited color terminology is by no means less colorful and nuanced than in other cultures, and most probably a more developed terminology has never been needed for social interaction in the group. Similarly, the term brun in old French covered a range of nuances from brown to dark violet – there was not yet any need to attach those nuances to separate word labels.

Research in perception repeatedly demonstrates that seeing is both a biological mechanism and a social activity. When someone or something draws our attention to a detail in our environment we ”attend” to that detail and tend to neglect the rest. This is shown in a well known experiment, in which people watching a ballgame don’t notice the actor in a gorilla suit entering the scene, because they are busy counting the number of times the ball is passed (Watch here, https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo). Thus, vision partly works in a ”top-down” fashion, as psychologists use to say, because we constantly move our eyes and activeley seach out what we want to see or what we expect to see.

But vision also works in the opposite, ”bottom-up” direction. Raw visual data is received by the photoreceptors in our eyes (or, more correctly, in the retinas of our eyes), and is processed for the extraction of only those features and contrasts that are necessay for perception. Vision is selective and active. The supposition that we would not ”see” things if we cannot ”name” them rests on a limited understanding of the relationship between sensation and meaning, or between raw perception and developed cognition.

Neuro-electrical excitation levels of responsive fields (with ON and OFF regions) when registering different points around a light/dark border. Responsive fields only partly overlapping the borders have the highest response levels (above and below zero level), resulting in the perception of a sharp contour. (Source: Thompson, Trosciano & Snowden, Basic Vision)

Actually, ”meaning”, in a wider sense than only ”verbally expressed meaning”, is generated already at the ”primitive” level of extraction of contours by the photoreceptors. As anyone who has ever tried to draw a picture of an object would know, there are no contours ”on” the object. There are only surfaces. Producing a drawing with contours is a process akin to how the organisation of photoreceptors in networks of ”responsive fields” is optimized for the registration of changes in light intensities in a perceived scene: the borders between lighter and darker regions are decoded as contours, from which higher functions in the brain can ”conclude” what kind of object or shape we are perceiving. After some 100 years of advanced neurological science we still know very little about how this actually works. Scientists surely know how visual features, such as size, placement, orientation, colour and movement are processed by specialized regions in the brain, and that these regions are all interconnected in a neural network of amazing complexity, but there is still no clear answer to how all these features and pieces of information are coordinated and understood as something we can point to and refer to with a term in language, for example ”a ball”, ”a cube” or ”a house”.

It seems that the more we study these matters, the less we know, and the more we will refrain from simplified generalizations such as ”there is nothing outside of language!” or ”everything is biology!” Sometimes, Visual Studies can provide space for sharing and comparing contributions from different disciplines: what do historians, sociologists, linguists, computer scentists, biologists have to say about the use of visual skills in their work, and how can their own research contribute to our knowledge about the visual? To the extent that this sharing and cooperation is not limited to the humanities, Visual Studies could then be defined as a more open and inclusive field than Visual Culture Studies, or as Visual Culture Studies without ”culturalist” bias. The same is true of the developments in interdisciplinary language studies, often involving pictures and ”visual thinking” also, that are known as cognitive linguistics and cognitive semiotics.

Freedom of speech 2: Jan Myrdal and Aron Flam

Art history, books, Cartoons, Censorship, communism, Freedom of speech, Okategoriserade, satire, Visual studies, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

After of our thematic weeks about social and political aspects of comics, the following update by Fred Andersson:

Some weeks ago I promised a Part 2 of my reflections on artists, satire and the freedom of speech (previous post). After Visual studies started as a separate teaching subject at Åbo Akademi in 2008, I have been interviewed in Finland-Swedish media on a number of occasions when these issues have been up for debate, for example after the assassination of the Charle Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, and in connection with attempts to prohibit the display of certain parts of the ”canon” of Finnish art history (the Gallen-Kallela ”Aino and Väinämöinen” case in 2018, link to picture and comment in Finnish by Susanna Pettersson here).

Similarly to a number of colleagues at the different arts and culture departments at Åbo Akademi, I refused to sign the call in October 2018 for the cancellation of an event in which the Swedish ultra-liberal mediastar and ”masculinity-theorist”, Alexander Bard would participate. I cannot speak for others, but in my personal case my refusal was not motivated by any sympathies whatsoever with Bard’s sensationalist political agenda and confused Jordan Peterson-style rhetoric. Instead I acted out of a conviction that at University free debate must not be silenced because of pressure from activist groups within the staff. Probably I acted out of a belief known by some as ”first amendment fundamentalism” (yttrandefrihetsfundamentalism).

Alexander Bard (left) and Aron Flam, or ”The Aryan of the Jew”, publicity picture from their cooperation in 2018. Image source: https://aronflam.com/blog-aron/2018/9/1/the-aryan-the-jew-2

However, this kind of ”fundamentalism” is not without it problems, and of course it is not my own invention. (It is an important part of intellectual ethics to acknowledge that all that we know and think, we have originally recieved from others. Therefore we write footnotes and references.)

I received my ”first amendment fundamentalism” primarily from the work of an international intellectual who has influenced and also angered generations of younger writers and journalists in Sweden. His name was Jan Myrdal (1927-2020) and on 30 October he passed away at an hospital in Varberg, very close to my usual homestead at the West coast in Sweden. Of special interest in the context of Visual studies and Art history are Myrdal’s books and articles on political satire in Europe, and on ancient and medieval iconography in France, Kampuchea (the Khmer name of the country more known as Cambodia), and Mexico. His wife, the artist Gun Kessle (1926-2007), cooperated with him in all these extensive projects as photograher and critical friend.

The Myrdal-Kessle couple also belonged to the rare group of dedicated and systematic private book collectors in their time; during their many travels, they collected a total of more than 30.000 items, including complete issues of many important journals and book series. After 2013, the collection has been kept and catalogued by the Jan Myrdal society in Varberg, in a house donated by the philantropist Lasse Diding. Items can be searched and ordered though the Swedish bibliographic system Libris (http://libris.kb.se) and the collection is open for scholars and the main public at appointment with the Society. Information in Swedish about the Jan Myrdal library here: Information om Jan Myrdalbiblioteket.

Jan Myrdal (1927-2020). Image source: Wikipedia.

Jan Myrdal was a lifelong communist of Marxist-Leninist orientation, and unusually consistent in his political views. Because of his consistency, he ended up being perceived as rather lonely. Differently from most other leftist public intellectuals in Europe, he refused to denounce the policies of communist leaders later exposed as responsible for economic disasters and mass purges. To the end, he defended his belief that humanitarian reasons for condemning the rules of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot are not valid; he saw their policies as historically necessary. Of course, he also defended his right to speak out this belief in a political climate and at a time in which fewer and fewer shared them. To a very great extent, he used to his own benefit the freedom implied by the first amendment of the American republican constitution. Many commentators remarked that in societies of the type preferred by Myrdal, he would probably have been the first to be shot.

Myrdal had no university education at all, and he was in this respect ”self-taught” as a journalist, writer, social theorist and historian. One could fairly say, however, that he was born into the top intellectual elite of the European labour movement, and that he therefore didn’t need a university. His parents were Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both nobel laureates whose social reseach made them highly influential both in the Swedish social democratic party and in the development of welfare policies in the USA and the UN. The young Jan Myrdal very early felt a need to denounce the ideals of his parents and to identify with the life of common people and more radical politics. He compensated his bad school results with extensive reading habits, and in spite of obvious reading- and writing difficulties he insisted on becoming a freelance journalist and writer (free from the parents, whom he later denounced rather brutally).

In his teens, Myrdal also became a member of the youth organisation of the original Swedish communist party, SKP. However, he distanced himself from the party in the 1960ies, partly because of its new reformist tendencies (known in the Communist movement as ”revisionism”), but also because of its traditional connection to the Soviet Union. In the Sixties, the anticolonial cause grew in importance, and in this context China was increasingly seen as representing the hope of Socialist society against Soviet stagnation. At this time, Myrdal’s books and articles were recognised internationally as part of a wave in which Western writers freed themselves from eurocentrism and dedicated themselves to studies of the ”third world”, as an act of solidarity with its popular movements.

It is significant that one of the books with which Myrdal had his international breakthrough had the English title Confessions of a disloyal European (1968, in Swedish 1983). Disloyalty towards European powers and European educational traditions, especially if associated with conservative politics, was very important for Myrdal and other supporters of anti-colonial struggle at the time. The transformation of rural life in the People’s republic of China was the topic of an earlier book by Myrdal, written in cooperation with Gun Kessle as photographer: Report from a Chinese Village (1963, first Swedish edition the same year). This book was praised as the first in-depth report by a westerner from inside the huge social experiment in China. It focused in an almost ethnographic manner on living conditions and traditions largely unknown outside the country. At the time of Myrdal’s and Kessle’s first visit to the studied Liu Lin area, most peasants there still lived in cave-like dwellings, carved out of the rock and soil with a special technique.

Later, however, when the negative consequences of Mao Zedong’s ”big leap” and cultural revolution had become common knowledge, Myrdal and Kessle were accused of having been pawns in the hands of the regime, totally and naively dependent on government guides and translators. Similar accusations were mounted in connection to the couple’s visits to Kampuchea and their expressions of solidarity with the communist Khmer Rouge movement.

Myrdal and Kessle first visited Kampuchea in order to collect material for their study of the ancient Khmer kingdom and its national sanctuary Angkor Vat: Angkor: An Essay on Art and Imperialism (Vintage books, 1970). They established friendly relationships with prince Norodom Sihanouk, dictator of Kampuchea at the time (also king of Kampuchea 1941-1955 and 1993-2004). Sihanouk’s close diplomatic ties to China and North Korea secured his escape when he was deposed as head of state in 1970; later he could return because of his support for the Khmer Rouge. It is obvious that Myrdal and Kessle were strongly dependent on their contacts in the political establishment of Kampuchea for their access to travel and studies in the country; they developed a strong loyalty with the Khmer Rouge regime of 1976-1979, but they claimed to have witnessed no signs of the atrocities soon reported in Western media.

The cover of Jan Myrdal’s and Gun Kessle’s Angkor Vat. Image source: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/

The Kampuchea case remained the great unresolved paradox of Myrdal’s political legacy and has greatly tainted his and Gun Kessle’s reputation in most quarters. When pressed on the matter, Myrdal’s usual response was that he would surely welcome an investigation of the whole extent of the Kampuchean tragedy, but only on condition that it was carried out in an impartial manner, and that it also would include the effects of American aggression during the so-called ”Operation Freedom Deal” between 1970 and 1973. (This operation was motivated by a wish to target Viet Cong forces hidden in Kampuchea, and it was disastrous for the country.)

However, a very different aspect which complicates the picture further is the substantial material support from both the USA and China to Khmer Rouge after 1979, securing the continued guerilla struggle of the movement. After the Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea, which ended the Khmer Rouge rule, the USA obviously aimed at a continuation of the Vietnamese war through Khmer Rouge. Therefore, a continued sympathy for the Khmer Rouge and their ”farmer’s revolution” meant, in the new geopolitical situation, an obvious contradiction in relation to the anti-American sentiments that had fuelled earlier activism for the Vietnamese cause in the international left. It is no wonder that Myrdal became an increasingly problematic figure not only for his usual opponents but also for former leftist friends.

Later, in the Nineties, it became evident that Myrdal was prepared to follow the logical consequences of an unlimited freedom of speech to its extreme end-point, for example when he defended the initiative to invite Robert Faurisson, the infamous denier of the Holocaust, to speak in Sweden. Many were also chocked by Myrdal’s refusal to condemn the Iranian regime and its fatwa against Salman Rushdie after the publication of the Satanic Verses. As in other similar cases, Myrdal’s standpoint here was essentially strategic: Rushdie’s right to describe the Islamic world and culture in a manner seen as blasphemous should be defended, yes, but strategically an alliance between leftist movements and the Islamic republic against the USA must be prioritised.

As the proverb goes, ”the enemies of my enemies are my friends” (or the friends of my enemies are my enemies), but Myrdal’s actions often gave the impression that all enemies of American or Soviet imperialism were his friends. A couple of years ago, when Myrdal was ninety years old but still very active, he spoke at an anti-imperialist peace conference i Moldova, attended by representatives of a number of far-right organisations. Not long before, he had caused another scandal by publishing, as invited author, a number of articles in a magazine that supports the policies of the rightwing Swedish populist party Sverigedemokraterna. The conclusions were evident for most of us at the time: Myrdal had ended up in the ”brown camp”, he had lost it.

Or were we judging these things in a manner too black and white? Why was it the connections to rightwing extremism which finally made emotions boil over, and not the defence of Mao and Pol Pot? And why have I, by the way,  already dedicated the main part of this post to Myrdal? What is the relationship between him, Charlie Hebdo and the comedian Aron Flam? OK, we will come to that. What I have written about Myrdal this far probably does not inspire much sympathy.

But apart from Myrdal being an outstandingly productive writer whose literary work will survive (especially his self-biographical novels) I also think that we can learn a great deal from his life, and from his research into the political and cultural history of Europe. First of all, of course, we can learn that at the exteme ends, political opposites often meet. The political contradictions in which Myrdal became entangled serve to demonstrate the problems associated with a non-compromising application of ”first amendment fundamentalism”. It also seems that in these matters Myrdal often relied heavily on the French republican tradition of  laïcité (a concept often repeated in the Charlie Hebdo debate), and that this tradition is hard to reconcile with the political logic of Northern Europe, and of Sweden in particular.

What usually happened when Myrdal was attacked publicly for having done or written something outrageous (or against the normalised ”political correctness”) was that he wrote lengthy and learned replies, full of references to historical examples and circumstances with which most of his opponents were not familiar. Of course one cannot risk losing a debate by admitting one’s lack of knowledge. Better then to merely repeat the original accusations. Therefore, because of lack of common ground, the debates mostly confirmed the established view of Myrdal as an ”impossible” individual, or a réfractaire. That was the French term which he often used in reference to himself, i.e. someone who refuses to obey anyone.

Myrdal also felt that he was a follower of August Strindberg in attacking the provinciality and narrowmindedness of Swedish academia and the Swedish literary establishment (especially the Swedish Academy). He associated this narrowmindedness with Strindberg’s notion of ”the public lie”, and gave a speech in French on the topic at the university of Caen (Bretagne) in 2014. He acted offended, but was probably amused, when no magazine in Sweden was willing to print the speech. Instead it was printed in the Finland-Swedish leftist-liberal magazine Nya Argus, link here: Myrdal’s article ”Den intellektuelle och makten: Sverige och den offentliga lögnen” in Swedish.

To my knowledge, there is hardly anyone in academic art history, with the notable exception of Anne Lidén at Stockholm University, who have commented upon or referred to Myrdal’s contributions to art history, and his role as a collector of popular art and prints. The Angkor Vat book has already been mentioned. In Swedish, Myrdal and Gun Kessle also published books on medieval art in France and Norway (När västerlandet trädde fram, 1992), and on art, politics and religion in Mexico (México: Dröm och längtan, 1996). During their stays in Paris and along with their book collecting, Myrdal and Kessle also collected a huge material of political and satirical prints from the first French revolution until the 1940ies. Many of these prints they found in the fleemarkets by the Seine.

Parts of the French print material has been published along with Myrdal’s comments in three books in Swedish: Franska revolutionens bilder (1989), Sälja krig som margarin (2005) and När gatan tog mediemakt (2016). The last one, När gatan tog mediemakt (picture below) deals with the political imagery and satire of the Paris commune in 1871, and was published as the year book of the Worker’s Cultural Association (Arbetarnas kulturhistoriska sällskap) in Sweden. In conjunction with the publication, parts of the material was donated to the Archives of the Swedish Labour Movement (ARAB) in Stockholm. In these books, readers of Swedish can familiarise themselves with the French satirical tradition continued today in magazines such as Charlie Hebdo. A translation into English of the books would be welcome: Myrdal himself often lamented at the end of his life that he had not published more in English.

Jan Myrdal’s book from 2016 in which he writes about the pictures of the Paris commune.

It so happened, that during the last year of Jan Myrdal’s life, questions of freedom of speech and the limits of political satire were on the top news in Swedish media. And this was because of a book by an author who quite clearly belongs to the opposite political camp. (But, again, the opposites sometimes meet.) I am referring to the stand-up comedian and Jewish-born intellectual Aron Flam. Se image at the beginning of this post, in which he is photographed with his friend, the ”aryan” Alexander Bard. Flam had written a book with a basic message easily predictable from a frustrated laissez-faire liberal in a welfare state. It tells (again) the story of the vicious ”indoctrination” of the people in Sweden by the social democratic party (SAP), especially during the Second World War, during which the Party collaborated (or ”upheld friendly diplomatic relations”, according to more official accounts) with Nazi Germany, and commanded public silence with a famous poster by the cartoonist Bertil Almqvist (1902-1972). This poster shows a blue and yellow tiger with the sentence EN SVENSK TIGER (wordpun, ”a Swedish tiger”, ”a Swede keeps silent”). Less has been said and written about Flam’s book than about his debut as a collage artist: for the cover of the book, he took the tiger from Almqvist’s poster and equipped it with a Nazi salute and a swastika. See below.

”This is a Swedish tiger” (detail of cover of Aron Flam, Det här är en svensk tiger, Samizdat publishing 2019.

About half a year after the publication of the book by Flam’s own enterprise Samizdat publishing i August 2019, an objection was filed by representatives of the private ”Military Readiness Museum” (Swedish name Beredskapsmuseet) in southern Sweden. The Museum had earlier purchased the copyright of the original image from Almqvist’s heirs. According to the Museum, Flam was guilty of copyright infringement (not having contacted the Museum) and plagiarianism. This developed into a lawsuit in which Swedish police confiscated the whole remaining edition of the book from Flam’s storage in June 2020. This summer I followed the case rather closely and often listened to Flam’s podcast, entitled Dekonstruktiv kritik (deconstructive criticism, https://m.soundcloud.com/aronflam), which is self-aggrandising and slightly paranoid in Flam’s usual style, but also ambitious in its selection of topics and guests.

Flam received almost unanimous support in the media, it spite of his often controversial ideas (and in spite of the book getting generally bad reviews). The case received international attention, for example here in The Brussels Times: ”A Swedish Tiger Without Protection. In Swedish television (SVT Morgonstudion, aired 24 September 2020), the comedian Sandra Ilar expressed worries, shared by many, at the prospect that Flam could be found guilty: ”It would be a disaster. All the satire one has enjoyed, jokes, drawings that make fun of history, these had not been possible to produce” (Det vore förödande. All satir man har tagit del av, skämt, teckningar som driver med historien, de hade inte gått att göra.) Another segment of the SVT media platform, the satirical show Svenska nyheter (Swedish news) supported Flam’s case with the construction of a ”Tiger Generator” in which anyone can generate a seemingly unlimited number of varieties, and also share them online: The SVT Tiger Generator.

Finally, on October 9th, Flam was freed from all charges by the special court for patents and commercial affairs in Stockholm. Obviously the ”Military Readiness Museum” tried to benefit from a weak point in Swedish copyright legislation. In contradistinction to many other member states in the EU, Sweden has no clear exception for parodies and paraphrases. Now, the Aron Flam case can be used as a precedent, and hopefully the Museum will not contemplate a similar case against another paraphrase of Almqvist’s wartime message. That is a paraphrase which has actually been widely used and circulated for more than 25 years. It is the logo of of the leftist (more precisely Syndicalist) Swedish newspaper Arbetaren (The Worker) which says: THE WORKER DOES NOT KEEP SILENT! Photographed below from my own private T-shirt.

T-shirt of a ”politically correct” Åbo Akademi university teacher.

Pinged at https://www.bloggportalen.se/

A New Swedish Book About Swedish Comics

Alternative comics, Art history, Comics, Okategoriserade, Sverige, Tecknade serier, Ungdomskultur, Visuella studier, , , , , , , , ,

Hello!

This is Fred Andersson, writer of this blog, beginning this evening’s update on comics and comics research in a more personal vein. The reason for this sudden sentimentality is that the topic makes me strongly recall certain picture stories that were probably the main influence behind my choice, as a teenager, to disregard all good advise and plunge into the totally irrational and insecure waters known as ”studies in the humanities”.

These picture stories were not Rembrandt, Shakespeare or even Bob Kane’s Batman. They were ”alternative” and experimental comics by such cartoonists as Martina Edoh, Joakim Pirinen, Ulf Lundkvist, Lena Ackebo and Max Andersson… (the list can go on and on…) The magazine was Galago, the main venue of young Swedish comics artists in the Eighties. The editor of Galago, Rolf Classon, was keen to foster an image of himself and his friends as a totally crazy pack at the far edge of the ”mad left” (in Swedish tokvänstern). These gags and surrealist inventions perfectly captured the spirit that reigned between Punk and 1989.

How we waited for every new issue! How we absorbed it all, and how we recognized our own fears and dreams! And then there were also Pox and Epix, bringing a constant flow of newly translated American, French and Spanish undergound COMIX into Sweden, thanks to the brilliant editor Horst Schröder.

Självsyn och världsbild i tecknade serier (Self-Image and Word-View in Comics) by Kristina Arnerud-Mejhammar, book series Seriehistoriskt bibliotek 1, Köping: Sanatorium 2020.

Well, it is very different days now. Trends in artistic or ”alternative” comics have changed several times. First there was a major economic crisis for comics and comics magazines at large in the Nineties, following 1989 and the recession, almost killing Galago. The market recovered but the carefree attitude of the Eighties did not return. With identity politics and new generation feminism, autobiographical storytelling became a strong current in European comics. During the last ten years, many young comics artists have started to identify more strongly with specific political issues and movements. The manner in which some express their dedication would be familiar to many artists older than the Galago generation. Politics in comics is no longer a joke, and sex and violence are no longer the only reasons why cartoonists are forced to repent.

Last Friday at Uppsala University, Kristina Arnerud Mejhammar defended her doctoral thesis Självsyn och världsbild i tecknade serier (Self-Image and Word-View in Comics) in which she analyses the work of four Swedish comics artists: Cecilia Torudd, Ulf Lundkvist, Gunna Grähs and Joakim Pirinen. All of these had their real public breakthrough in the Eighties with guest comics for the comics section of the main Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. Ulf Lundkvist and (especially) Jokim Pirinen were also very active in Galago. Cecilia Torudd, the oldest of the four (b. 1942) has a large audience among readers of books and publications for children and teenagers. Her most well known story, about the everyday life of a single mother and her two teenage children, was running as a daily strip in Dagens Nyheter for many years. Joakim Pirinen, who is the youngest (b. 1961), is also most likely the one whose work is least read and appreciated outside the circles of comics fans. Aestetically, he is an highly experimental and innovative artist, and has even made completely ”abstract” comics (see e.g. the album Döda paret och deras ”vänner”, The Dead Couple and Their ”Friends”, 2008).

In addition to being an academic thesis, digitally available (link to the DIVA portal page) and publically defended in Zoom, Arnerud Mejhammar’s work has also been printed as a readable and nicely designed printed volume, no 1 in the new series Seriehistoriskt bibliotek (library of comics history) from the Swedish comics publisher Sanotorium. See image above. The book is rather evenly divided between theoretical and historical introduction (Chapters 1 and 2) and individual case studies about the artists (Chapter 3). Even though the case studies contain much useful information and pertinent observations, the greatest merit of the book is probably the overview it provides of comics culture in Sweden and of important debates in comics research.

In a gentle and pedagogical manner, Arnerud Mejhammar introduces readers new to the research field into the main competing theories about comics as a medium, and clarifies how the politics of the 20th century Swedish welfare state provides much of the explanation for the ideological and aesthetic choices exemplified by Torudd, Lundkvist, Grähs and Pirinen. She prefers the term alternative comics instead of for example ”adult comics” (which can give wrong associations) or ”experiental comics”, because the term ”alternative” stresses the strong connection between these comics artists and alternative lifestyles and political movements. This is especially evident in the cases of Torudd, Lundkvist (who has cooperated with the socialist-autonomous Swedish newspaper ETC. since its start in the late Seventies) and Grähs.

Due to her training as an art historian, Arnerud Mejhammar is capable of providing perceptive and detailed descriptions of certain image sequences and image frames which she has selected as particularly worthy of scrutiny. With this approach, she somewhat disregards the sequential and relational properties often stressed by more semiotically inclined theorists (such as Thierry Groensteen) and instead puts the old cartoon master Will Eisner’s motto ”what goes on inside the panel is primary” into good use.

Arnerud Mejhammar can describe a single panel in a comic almost as if it were a painting. This is probably not a very good narratological approach (narratology stresses the relationships within a text), but it makes her able to analyse an a very precise manner the psychological space created by the comics artist by means of stylistic choices.

See for example the panel by Joakim Pirinen shown below. It is the opening panel of an autobiographical story in which the basic theme is ”follow me into the house where I grew up”. In the opening panel things still seem rather normal, and the setting even looks rather idyllic, but already here the picture space has a somewhat dense and claustrophobic character. It will get worse as soon as we enter the house: the walls will close in, past and present will mix in an uncanny fashion and the limits between person and environment will become virtually erased. Arnerud Mejhammar rightly characterises this particular story as one of the most original and innovative works in alternative Swedish comics.

In her analyses of the other three artists, Arnerud Mejhammar similarly pays close attention to the setting and space inside comics panels, and to houses and interiors as important  elements in the stories. Her observations will stimulate the reader to think more about the manner in which the house in which we live, or in which we once lived, often has a shaping influence on our self-image and world-view.

Joakim Pirinen, opening panel of the story ”Följ med mig till huset där jag växte upp” (Follow me to the house where I grew up) from the album Den universella bristen på respekt (The universal lack of respect), Stockholm: Ordfront/Galago 1999. Image source: Arnerud 2020, p. 215.

Konsten den första ideologin för Emil Nolde?

art criticism, Art history, Finland, Konst, Konstkritik, Okategoriserade, Rasism, , , , , , ,

Emil Nolde. Åbo konstmuseum / Turun Taidemuseo, 10 oktober 2019 – 5 januari 2020.
(Texten ingår i serien recensioner skrivna av deltagarna i kursen Kultur- och vetenskapsjournalistikens genrer).

Under hösten pågår vid Åbo Konstmuseum en utställning av den internationellt erkände expressionisten Emil Nolde (1867-1956). Utställningen finns för påseende i konstmuseets nedre våning fram till 5.1.2020 och är utspridd över åtta salar. Expositionen består av ungefär ett hundratal verk, där två tredjedelar utgörs av akvareller medan den resterande delen är oljemålningar. Samtliga verk ägs av Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. Senast Nolde visades i denna utsträckning i Finland var år 1958 och 1972.

Emil Nolde, målningen ”Upprörda människor” (Aufgeregte Menschen), ca 1910. Bildkälla Åbo Konstmuseum, http://www.turuntaidemuseo.fi/se/emil_nolde/

 

Varje rum i utställningen utgörs av ett eget tema, vilket tydligt knyter ihop verken samtidigt som man som betraktare lotsas genom Noldes livshistoria kronologiskt. Inledningsvis möts man av lättsmälta trädgårdsmotiv, i vilka den senare grova expressionistiska stilen inte ännu syns. De tidiga verken av den konstnärliga bondpojken har nyromantiska spår och inspirationen av Van Gogh är genomgående för hela utställningen. Vidare i utställningen får vi följa Noldes sökande efter erkännande som tog honom över Tyskland och övriga mellaneuropa. Likväl tycktes Nolde, och i förlängningen även hans verk, alltid ha en stark lokal identitet i det norra Tyskland som avgränsar till Danmark. Majoriteten av landskapsmålningarna föreställer det platta, rurala området där den färgstarka himlen mäktigt tornar fram mellan de grova penseldragen.

Likt många andra konstnärer vid det tidiga 1900-talet var Nolde intresserad av det exotiska och det ”primitiva”. I denna utställning ser vi fyra verk målade under en expedition till Tyska Nya Guinea vid första världskrigets början. Det är i Noldes reseavskildringar samt i hans religiösa motiv som den expressionistiska stilen syns tydligast: stiliserade masklikande ansikten i bjärta färger med lysande färgkraft och utmanande figurer, allt utfört i tjocka lager av olja.

Dock är det i hans mindre färgmättade akvareller Nolde verkligen briljerar. Men det är även i dessa som utställningen tar en tvär vändning och lämnar betraktaren ambivalent inför konstnären. I en hel sal mot utställningens slut nystas en legend Nolde själv skapat upp. I salen hänger små tekniskt förträffliga akvareller som Nolde kallade ”omålade bilder”. Dessa bilder har sedan krigets slut setts som Noldes sätt att göra motstånd mot makten i Tyskland, efter att 1000 av hans verk beslagtogs av nazisterna till den ökända utställningen Entartete Kunst som vandrade genom landet för att göra modernistiska konstnärer till åtlöje. Emellertid har det visat sig, sedan Nolde Stiftung Seebüll år 2013 öppnat sina arkiv för forskare, att Nolde själv var både nazist och antisemit och av en sorts självbevarelsedrift skapat myten. Noldes nazistiska hängivenhet sträckte sig så pass långt att han drömde om att bli partiets egen målare.

Utställningen lämnar en som betraktare med intressanta etiska frågeställningar. Kan man skilja på verk och konstnär? Detta är givetvis upp till var och en. Angela Merkel avlägsnade i våras två verk av Nolde från sitt kontor i samband med att konstnärens politiska hängivenhet uppdagades. Utställningens och stiftelsens transparens kring frågan är ett måste. Frågan om vem som har företräde – konstnären eller partimedlemmen – kanske skaver hos någon besökare, men faktum återstår att Emil Nolde är en av de största expressionisterna, och kanske framförallt akvarellmålarna genom tiderna. Just akvarellerna känns exceptionellt moderna och är de verk som verkligen stannar hos en. Som betraktare kan man ta med sig att Nolde trots sina tveksamma sympatier aldrig ändrade sitt konstnärliga uttryck för att tillfredsställa det parti han tillhörde. Kanske konsten ändå var den första ideologin för Nolde?

Emilia Augustsson

Tema konstkritik (”Art Criticism”)

art criticism, Art history, Finland, Humaniora, Konst, Konstkritik, Pedagogik, Utställningar, , , , ,

Bloggen återupplivas på svenska nu de sista veckorna i november med några texter på temat Konstkritik. De är skrivna av några av mina studenter. Uppgiften har varit att skriva en recension i dagspressformat av valfri pågående konstutställning, här i Åbo eller någon annanstans i Finland. Om de har fått högsta vitsord har jag frågat om de vill att jag publicerar texten här som en liten uppmuntran.

Svårigheten var att skriva en text som inte bara beskriver verken eller berättar om bakgrunden till utställningen, utan som också är tolkande och värderande/kritisk.

Det visade sig att väldigt många av deltagarna klarade uppgiften briljant och att vi tycks ha många blivande svenskspråkiga kulturjournalister och kritiker bland våra studenter här. Frågan är bara var de ska publicera sig i framtiden och var kanalerna och finansieringen för kulturkritik kommer att finnas. Även detta diskuteras förstås på kursen.

Kursen heter ”Kultur- och vetenskapsjournalistikens genrer” och presenteras så här:

”Kursen syftar till att ge en överblick av området vetenskaps- och kulturjournalistik samt att genom praktiska övningar utveckla förmågan till eget skrivande i några av de viktigaste genrerna. Genom att ett flertal ämnen tillsammans är ansvariga för kurserna anläggs och utvecklas genomgående tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv.”

 

Första recensionen kommer upp här på måndag.

 

Karikatyr av Grandville ur ”Un autre monde” (En annan värld”), Paris 1844.

Visual studies and Art history

Art history, Iconography, James Elikns, Norway, Visual studies, Visuella studier, , , , ,

A typical picture for Visual studies? One can say a lot in sociological terms about this. This is the type of pictures people usually ask us about.

Art history is an important part of Visual studies, and most of us who work in the field are art historians by profession. The somewhat problematic relationship between Art history and Visual studies is discussed in an open and inspiring manner in the collective volume Farewell to visual studies (2015), edited by James Elkins and composed of transcripts and responses from the 2011 Stone Art Theory seminar. The seminar brought together over 30 distinguished scholars who have made substantial contributions to Visual studies and related fields in different countries.

Some conclusions are quite clear from the discussions in the book: Visual studies is primarily a British and Anglo-American phenomenon, it has been dominated by social/sociological issues in connection to the Cultural Studies tradition, with much focus on content (or what an Art historian would call ”iconology”) and less on form and aesthetic/psychological aspects. The provocative title ”Farewell to visual studies” is probably intended by the organizer and editor James Elkins as a farewell to Visual studies as it has been, in its more limited aspects. Elkins would like Visual studies to become more ”difficult” (or complex, or interdisciplinary), less focused on contemporary Popular culture, and more open towards other types of images and longer historical perspectives. He asks why for example the scientific image has been largely neglected within Visual studies, and agrees with such scholars as Michael Ann Holly that Visual studies has increasingly lost contact with History prior to the age of Photography, Television and Internet.

Few ask us about such pictures as this. This is also a political picture and very interesting for Visual studies. (”Holy Olav, eternal King of Norway”, newly painted Icon for the Orthodox chapel in Stiklestad).

Few of the contributors to Farewell to visual studies disagree with Elkins on these points. Some suggest explanations to why we have this situation. One quite natural explanation has to do with competition and the need in a new field to distance oneself from ”tradition”. Clearly Art history and History at large represents ”tradition” in this academic game. Still, practitioners of Visual studies are often Art historians or at least Arts people by training, and there is a reluctance towards studying pictures for which the usual methods and analytical tools in the Humanities are insufficient. Somewhat paradoxically, Visual studies seems to have become too unhistorical in terms of the choice of topics, yet too dependent on existing methods and theories in Art history. I think we’ve been trying to avoid these traps here in Åbo. It can be done by focusing more on methods and the development of alternative metods, rather than certain topics and periods. It is good to visit seminars at other departments and facultites (Philosophy, Psychology, History, Sociology, Biology…), and it is good to contribute to both Art history and Visual studies and teach both subjects in order to avoid narrow specialization. One excellent option to learn more about medieval culture and iconography (i.e., ”the study of pictorial content”) was the 2018 Iconographic Symposium in Trondheim/Stiklestad, Norway. There I found the newly painted icon of the Norwegian national saint Olav in the local orthodox chapel. In this picture the ancient rules and symbols of Icon painting are adapted to a contemporary national context in which the Orthodox communities only represent a tiny minory. More about the Iconographic symposium soon, I hope.