Art and National Identity – Sweden and Lithuania

Paper for the conference "Mutations" at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Kaunas, Lithuania, 16-18:th of November 2001 

Author: Fred Andersson, art historian and curator

Fred Andersson’s participation in this conference is financed by the Swedish Institute. 

In this paper I shall summarize, very briefly, some of my thoughts about the relation between art and national identity in Sweden and in Lithuania. I have to confess, from the very beginning, that Lithuanian art is a rather unknown territory for me. For this very reason, I won’t get into any depth about historical or biographical matters, but rather focus more theoretically on the general issue of national identity in relation to art. 

To talk about “Swedish art” or “Lithuanian art” does, in itself, imply a relation between art and national identity. The meaning of such a statement depends on the attitude of the persons who speaks, or on the cultural environment of which he or she is a part. On the one hand, it could be a purely geographical and social definition, meaning that Lithuanian art is made by people who either live in or are born in the geographical and administrative entity which is called Lithuania. On the other hand, it could also imply that Lithuanian art is essentially characterized by a particular kind of Lithuanianess. And here, the issue starts to get interesting… It’s very hard to imagine a National identity which is not, in some way or another, linked to a certain geographical Place or area. In every nationalist ideology, the Nation is an inseparable unity of the People, the Language and the Place. Or, to put it in very familiar terms, the unity of “Blut und Boden”. 

I’m very interested in the ways in which national and artistic values converge. And I think that national identity could be expressed both explicitly and implicitly in pictures. On the one hand, the motive of a figurative picture could be a highly explicit depiction of historical events, traditions and cultural stereotypes that are of importance for the mythology and consciousness of a certain nation. On the other hand, an image which only depicts a landscape and it’s trees, meadows and hills could in some contexts function as a more implicit symbol for the Home, the Origin and the Nation. The romantic idea of Blut and Boden involves a lot of vegetative mysticism in which both the Individual and the Collective is seen as a plant or a tree which grows out of the very soil of one’s birthplace. The Tree as a powerful symbol of growth and creation in general of course goes back to ancient creation myths. But in the romantic European landscape painting of the 19th century, the Tree became an important implicit symbol of the love for one’s birthplace and one’s Nation. Romantic vegetative symbolism went hand in hand with national consciousness and awakening. 

This thinking was inherited by the more straightforward Symbolist movements in art around 1900. At this time in Sweden, influences from continental symbolism and syntetism sometimes became merged with a more traditional attitude by some of the artists commonly referred to as “The Swedish National Romantics”. The Swedish painter Carl Larsson (1853-1919) is very interesting in this context. He was no typical practitioner of national romanticism, but still his images counts among those that have in a significant way formed Swedish national identity and awareness. In Carl Larsson’s paintings from his native milieu in the region of Dalarna, Sweden, everything is always neat, clean and well ordered. There is no poverty, no dirty hard work and no evil to be seen. These images show an utopian and ultimately false ideal of a perfect rural society. In contemporary Sweden, in which the rural past is still rather close for many people, Carl Larsson’s paintings have come to represent a widespread nostalgia. The most common image of Sweden and Swedishness is, however, the red farmhouse in the green forest. This simple mental image contains two powerful symbols of Home and Origin, namely the House and the Tree. 

In Carl Larsson’s painting Open-Air Breakfast in the collection of Norrköping Museum of Art, the scene is dominated by the trunks of birch trees. Some red farmhouses are barely visible in the background. But at least we can see the houses, and by that we know that the well dressed people in the painting are not far away from home, and that everything in this idyll is safe. The Birch, with its white bark that makes it unlike all other trees in the Nordic woods, also symbolize youth, innocence and rejuvenation. The season is not spring, however, but rather late summer, if we judge from the sunflowers that are placed on the table. By a device of both likeness and closeness, the young girl to the left is rhetorically compared to the young birch tree against which she leans, and which almost becomes a part of her white dress. In this rhetorical visual language, the awakening reproductive energy of the girl, as a representative of the Family and the People, is compared to the cyclical decay and rejuvenation of Nature. This youthful figure is rhetorically opposed to the old man with the fiddle, who is apparently a representative of the Swedish national minority of the North, the Sami nomads. In this way, the vegetative rhetoric of the image is completed by an image of age and decay, and at the same time the presence of the Sami man is an early acknowledgement of the fundamental cultural diversity of the Swedish nation. 

In the impressionist but yet highly expressive landscape paintings of the Lithuanian painter Petras Kalpokas (1880-1945), the human beings and their dwellings are often subordinate to Nature and Vegetation. One instance of this is his Grey day in Palanga from 1933. One year before, a Lithuanian painter of a younger generation had painted a similar motive in a radically different fashion. This painter was the great Antanas Samuolis (1899-1942) to whom this conference is dedicated, and the painting that I have in mind is his White Apple Tree from 1932. Antanas Samuolis belonged to the same generation as a number of Swedish artists who, in the heydays of modernism and avant-gardism, claimed their wish to return to the simple motives of the Swedish countryside and the naïve technique of provincial amateurs. Depending upon the periods and artists in question, this tendency is referred to as either naïve painting, colour expressionist painting, or primitivism. One important influence for some of these Swedish painters was another major artist of Lithuanian origin, namely Chaim Soutine. And I think that the following quote from a speech by the Swedish artist Bror Hjorth was relevant not only in a Swedish but also in a Lithuanian context of the 1920ies and 30ies:  

“Swedish art must be firmly rooted in Swedishness. It must be poor, barren, simple. It’s to easy for us to cross the river for water, and not to search amongst ourselves, within ourselves. We are too afraid of being primitive, of showing ourselves such as we are, a people which has recently begun its cultural development… From Swedish soil our art must grow.” (Hjorth 1935)

In a similar manner, I think that Antanas Samuolis’s image of the white apple tree is also representative of much that was made in Sweden at this time, by artists like Sven Erixon, Eric Hallström and Albin Amelin. In this image, the thing that is firmly rooted in Lithuanianess, or in other words in Lithuanian soil, is the white tree. The tree becomes the main figure and the dominant symbol of the image, by means of its strange colours and its central position. The houses and the woman are merely subordinate. The woman is either harvesting, or getting some water from a barrel. She receives the goods of Nature, but only as a subordinate servant. The imagery taken as a whole is not explicitly nationalist or Lithuanian-like, but implies in a very sophisticated way the idea of a unity between the House, the Soil and the Human Being, or between Blut and Boden. 

A rather recent work in which the symbol of the House plays a major role is the Swedish artist Peter Johansson’s action Scream and Shout!, which took place at the Skulpturprojekte in Münster last year. Just like his historical colleague Carl Larsson, Peter Johansson is born in the region of Dalarna. His fascination with the mythology and stereotype imagery of this region in a way makes him the Carl Larsson of our time, but in a critical and post-modernist way which no doubt would have been most foreign to his predecessor. In his art, Peter Johansson uses the handcraft, patterns and traditions that could maybe be of any origin, but that nevertheless are considered as essentially typical for Sweden or for the region of Dalarna. In the action at the Skulpturprojekte in Münster, the National Swedish symbol of the red cottage was placed on a raft that was floating in the middle of an harbour. The work also included two actors who played the roles of nationalist Swedish skinheads. They simply lived in the cottage, drank a lot of beer, screamed and waved Swedish flags. 

This is, of course, a stereotype of how young skinheads are supposed to behave. Nevertheless, some critics and journalists mistook the actors for being real skinheads, and an emotional debate started. As a caricature of some basic concepts and symbols of national identity (the Place, the House, the People), the comical effect of this installation/action could be explained as primarily an effect of distance - one could safely laugh at the small "Nation" on the raft because one didn't experience oneself as being a part of it. As a highly explicit expression of the idea of national identity, this was a work that was easy to understand and to condemn. It’s very hard, however, to tell the difference between such explicit symbolism and the more implicit mysticism of Blut and Boden – a mysticism which is a part of the very fabric of our European cultural history. The man or woman who condemns the skinheads might well share some of their ideals – more or less consciously. 

In the Lithuanian contemporary artist Arturas Railas video-work "Under the Flag", this fascism of everyday life is investigated in a most uncanny way. The work was shown at the OK Center in Austria in 2000 and at the Berlin Biennale in 2001. In the Berlin version, the work was shown as two video projections which appeared on the opposing walls in a dark room. In this way, a seemingly simple but yet very complicated narrative structure was acted out in the gallery room. The story of the work reads as follows: Arturas Raila travels to Linz, Austria, in October 1999. This is in conjunction with the parliamentary elections in which the right-wing leader Jorg Haider wins a major victory. Raila documents much of what he sees during his visit, such as street-life, museums, some of the election propaganda, and some of the people’s reactions after the results become known. Later, he edits the material down to a number of chosen scenes and goes to the town Siauliai in Lithuania. In Siauliai, he meets with a certain Mindaugas Murza and some of his colleagues in the leadership of the Lithuanian National Worker’s Union, which is a Lithuanian Neo-Nazi group. 

These Fascist or Neo-Nazi men are told to watch the video clips, and to make whatever comments they would like to make. In the meantime, they are being filmed by Arturas Raila. This Siauliai session is shown in real time on one of the walls in the gallery. On the opposite wall is shown the footage from Austria. Thus, the men on the one screen are making comments on what is simultaneously shown on the other screen. The spectator stands in the space between the screens, and is forced to turn from side to side in order to figure out what is happening on each side. In this way, the work in itself becomes the total opposite of the notion of unity and essential indivisibility which is crucial to the nationalist experience. 

Moreover, the effect of the work is very different from the related ideal of unity and disinterested contemplation which is commonly associated with the Romantic and Modernist idea of visual art. This is really a work of fragments. It contains a fragmented selection of video clips. It produces a fragmented gaze. But it also shows and documents the efforts of the Neo-Nazis to adapt the images to their own world-view. It is funny and at the same time frightening to observe how they interpret the Austrian scenes and Austrian objects as being Lithuanian scenes and Lithuanian objects. There is a high frequency of comments like “but this must be in Lithuania” and “this is real Lithuanian handicraft” and “remember that the Preussians were actually Lithuanians”. They are, almost desperately, trying to make the disassociated fragments of contemporary, late capitalist life into an image of their beloved Lithuania. In some instances the handicraft shown in the video clips is very similar to that which is used by Peter Johansson, and which in a Swedish context is similarly considered as typically Swedish. 

My final example is The Artist’s Portrait, a project by the Lithuanian artcritic and curator Raimundas Malašauskas. The Artist’s Portrait is not explicitly about national identity, but rather about identity in general. The project started in 1997, when Malašauskas decided to borrow second-hand clothes from a number of artists. Some of the clothes were exhibited and sold at an exhibition in the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. Together with the photographic studio Marijos Nostalgia, he later presented the artist’s clothes in fashion photographs with himself acting as a model. Later, he also appeared in advertisements for the chain store Eko. By appearing in the clothes and the roles of an artist or a model, Malašauskas consciously plays on the fluctuation of Identities in contemporary Western and Post-communist Societies, and also in contemporary art. Being a theorist, Malašauskas creates a project which is a theoretical statement but which could also be seen as an artwork – even if he himself denies this. What I find particularly interesting is the way in which Malašauskas describes contemporary Lithuanian Society in a text that was written after the project. Using some popular references, he describes Lithuanian bourgeoisie as follows: 

“Beavis and Butthead are mature enough to criticize the electronic media. They represent late capitalism. Lithuanian bourgeoisie, older by several decades, represents early capitalism under the conditions of post-communism. Unlike Westerners, it is not familiar with hyperreality (a media product). But they are familiar with censored reality (also a media product). Therefore it finds direct (not virtual) experience very important.” (Malašauskas 1998)

In this remark, Malašauskas makes a sharp distinction between East and West, and between virtual and direct experience. In our time, when the national revival of countries like Lithuania is strangely mixed with the growth of virtual networks and internationalism, it seems that the values of the native, material Place is actually very important. At the same time, the aim of much contemporary art is to criticise such values, which are also very much associated with the tradition of painting. Another quote from Malašauska’s text highlights his view on the connection between the tradition of painting and the notion of a direct and material experience:  

“(W)hen Lithuanian born NBA star Arvydas Sabonis bought a bottle of Issey Myiake men’s cologne in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, it instantly sold out in every store. In these cases the aspect of touching is very important. Touching is directly related with the hand. There are different methods to establish a person’s identity from his hand-prints. For instance, fingerprints can identify the author of a crime, and the quality of a brush stroke – the author of a painting. An empirical touch with a hand is bound to symbolize direct, i.e. authentic experience: ‘That what you cannot touch does not exist’. To touch means direct cognition, when ideological, ethical and racial conventions have been transgressed and a zone of unmediated experience begins.” (Malašauskas 1998)

The historical examples referred to in this paper show that a painting could symbolically express national identity in a more or less implicit way. But what Malašauskas describes here is rather the purely metonymic relation between the painting and the person that paints, or between the matter of a painting and the soil from which pigments are made. In connection to this, I would like to end this paper with two questions. Firstly: what is the relation between Art, National identity, and the material and expressive qualities of Painting? Secondly: how important is the abandonment of such qualities in Art that investigates and criticises national identity?