Scandinavia at the Barbican - London Barbican Center's Festival of Scandinavian Arts

Contemporary Review, Feb, 1993 by Louis Muinzer

Clearly, whatever light and dark may embody in individual Northern works of art, an elemental network of mortality has caught them up -- a network that reveals itself in other motifs as well. Thus, in many alcoves of the Barbican programme, Life and Death are in effortless interaction. Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, for instance, is the essentially delightful story of a son and his father both finding fulfillment in love; before they achieve that, however, the son tries to hang himself, and the father seemingly blows his brains out playing Russian Roulette. In Grieg's Haugtussa, however, the pattern is less up-beat, for the great song-cycle's sometimes rollicking, sometimes tender lyricism gives way at last to music sung from the far shores of sadness: to me, at least, a potential prelude to suicide.

So intimate can the tension between the opposing forces of existence become in Scandinavian art that they are inseparably juxtaposed. The Barbican festival provided an admirable example of this in Bellman's Opera, the entertainment fashioned by Martin Best and Clifford Williams from the songs and characters of Sweden's 18th century genius, Carl Michael Bellman. As they sing, Bellman's people sometimes move gracefully through a city set in a refined pastoral landscape that has been prettily planted with classical allusions -- a world of glittering life. Yet, in objective 'sociological' terms, they are derilicts and drunkards, the pitiful pub-dregs of Gustavian Stockholm, denizens of a dark world at the side of the grave. The result of Bellman's art, however, is neither contradiction nor confusion, but a tension of opposites -- the wedding of elegant song and dishevilled tragedy into a unique experience.

A curious revelation of this Nordic tension was to be found -- unexpectedly -- in a Barbican display of contemporary glass by Ulla Forsell, a Swede whose art is almost as irresistible as Bellman's. Of herself and her demanding, exasperating art, Ms. Forsell has said: 'It is paradoxical that the artist, ever eager to create a monument to self-expression, should choose a material as brittle and fragile, as doomed to destruction as glass. But having once looked deep into the furnace of the untouchable molten metal, pipe in hand, I knew that I should devote my life to its mastery'. And so she has created colourful and witty glassware of all sorts: a plate of glass fried eggs, for instance, and marvellous wine glasses that Bellman's characters would have loved. Life and sparkle are everywhere in her work ... but metaphorical darkness is in the inevitable shattering of objects 'doomed to destruction'. Like much else in creative Scandinavia, her art is light waiting for its fall into the dark.

One of Ms. Forsell's most resonant creations is a blue-painted wooden ladder with elegant, curved glass plaques mounted between its rungs, thus reminding us that the Northern creative spirit climbs as well as falls -- even soars, at times, like Widerberg's people when they free themselves from their elemental soil. And in their landscapes of light, dark and twilight, the Scandinavians cross and search, as well as climb and fall: they are Edvard Munch's steaming locomotive and Vikings sailing towards the west. They are far-travelling Peer Gynt, too, who visited the Barbican in a concert performance of Grieg's score, and farther-travelling Thor Heyerdahl, who turned up there in person to talk about faraway Peru. Stop them all and ask them where and why they are going, and they will give you answers before they hurry on, casting shadows as they depart. But will their answers only be questions, after all?