Editorial

It gives us great pleasure to publish these papers presented at the 2012 NORDIK Conference for Art History, in the stream titled Cultural Heritage: Making History for the Future. The conference provided an opportunity to investigate the complex relationship between real people, art history practice and the abstract concept of national value in cultural heritage. Four years later this issue seems just as pertinent, not least due to the current increase of ideological nationalism in societies across the world.¹ The concept of national heritage, inscribed in the legislation of most European countries, reflects the tension between minority and majority in any given society: it is not given who passes as a member of majority society, in person, language and visual culture.

To live, Walter Benjamin said, is to leave traces.² The question is which traces are worthwhile preserving for the future, for whom, and according to what expertise. Or, whose objects and implied presence are allowed to leave traces in the cultural heritage canon. The papers address that which slips through the fingers of cultural heritage making in art history, a research field that is central to cultural heritage, yet whose objects are at times in its margins: design, painting, contemporary art and modern architecture.³

The conference stream Cultural Heritage: Making History for the Future was part of our research project with the same title funded by the KK Foundation in which Charlotte Bydler and Katarina Wadstein MacLeod from Södertörn University collaborated with Lena Rydén and Ulla-Karin Warberg, then curators at Stockholms Auktionsverk.⁴ The project investigated how the consequences of current Swedish legislation⁵ have some undesirable side-effects on what can be called unspectacular heritage, such as the above-mentioned categories of fine art and design. It also focused on the cultural heritage of the indigenous Sami that claim a territory – Sápmi – that crosses four current nation states and thus questions the definition of “national heritage”. The legislation protecting art and antiquities of national cultural heritage value is only applicable at the moment an object is about to cross Swedish borders. Its cultural value depends on a price estimate, typically given when sold in an auction. The research revealed a set of problems of how heritage is defined in this context, the parameters for determining cultural heritage value (a complex set of categories including criteria such as market price, age and material) but also how anti-Semitism and nationalism underpinned the reasoning behind the creation of the current legislation back in 1927. The relevant agents of state need objective criteria to be able to enforce the law, otherwise it would be useless. But the current state of affairs has the unfortunate effect of discriminating against the artefacts of those groups who are already victims of discrimination by the majority society’s norms such as women and national minorities.⁶

In the conference stream the scope was widened to include the processes, definitions and discourses regarding art objects and cultural heritage selection – typically visible through art history narratives, museum collections and exhibitions. A central argument to the papers is how methods and terminology that are taken for granted define cultural value and heritage. When challenged, the notion of the “national” in heritage becomes destabilized and its canonization processes are revealed.

As art history has transformed into a globalized professional field, diverse values coexist in art history textbooks, museum practices as well as in the auction house market. In his article “The Visibility of Divergence: Vicke Lindstrand – Swedishness, Scandinavianness and the Other”, Mark Ian Jones shows how important nation-branding practices were – and still are – for associating desirable modern qualities with “Sweden”. Practical ways to create value include setting up a context of stories around artefacts such as “national style”. The example of Vicke Lindstrand’s glass design shows how stylistic stereotypes, combined with a certain naivety, turned homogenous and resilient to divergent, non-Scandinavian influences.

In “Negative Heritage in the History Culture of Finnish Art History”, Renja Suominen-Kokkonen shows the need for saving complex memorial sites when power structures change in the aftermath of traumatic repression. In her article she reveals the tensions between state identity and multiculturalism and its effect on memory sites. The case in point is the material culture of the Russian Orthodox Church in Finland that has been, and still is, systematically excluded from the national Finnish narrative.

Meanwhile, in “Constructing Sami national heritage: Encounters between tradition and modernity in Sami art”, Hanna Horsberg Hansen argues that the seemingly conflicting notions of heritage and contemporary art should be irrelevant in the Sami distinct categories of duodji (functional crafts objects) and dáidda (Capitalism-derived art forms, such as Modernist easel painting). Tradition and contemporary art practices are central to heritage making, defying art history and cultural heritage’s typical dependence on distance over time. The example of Sami art shows how cultural heritage always, even at its most “authentic”, play a game of mutual exchange and appropriation with Modernist visual art history’s institutions of display and education.

Finally, Katarina Wadstein MacLeod compares the artist Fanny Brate’s paintings with those of her contemporary Carl Larsson in “The painted home as heritage”. Paintings are arguably the most marginalized of cultural heritage, rarely debated and seldom threatened. Yet, paintings are on the threshold of a number of heritage discourses that relate to taste and canon formation. Whose culture is actually given representation? The key argument in this article is how domestic scenes as an artistic motif have a markedly different reception depending on the gender of its artist. The home in art points to a range of pre-conceived ideas of what represents uniquely Swedish culture, modern art and good quality.

The editors believe that these articles will evolve the discussion on not-so-innocent canon formations in art history and in cultural heritage production in Scandinavia. This reveals a connection between values and power that is as sinister as it is obvious.

Notes

1. Just to take a few signs on the surface, all around Europe, nationalist parties enjoy a frightening surge in numbers of supporters. Relevant to the articles in this issue are the political parties Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) in Sverige, Perussuomalaiset/Sannfinländarna (True Finns/Finns) in Finland and Fremskrittspartiet (Progressive Party) in Norway. Sverigedemokraterna was supported by 12.9% of the Swedish voters in the 2014 elections (http://electionresources.org/se/riksdag.php?election=2014, accessed 13 June 2016), while the True Finns got 17.7% of the votes in the 2015 elections (http://www.electionresources.org/fi/eduskunta.php?election=2015, accessed 13 June 2016) and Fremskrittspartiet got 16.3% in the 2013 elections (https://snl.no/Stortingsvalget_2013, accessed 13 June 2016). All of these advocate a conservative cultural politics, with restrictive and authoritarian nationalist traits.

2. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, Reflections, translation Edmund Jephcott, New York, 1986, pp. 155–156.

3. Personal jewelry is customarily left out of legislation – supposedly it is considered as too cumbersome to control the law obedience. But this has the effect that important parts of the cultural heritage of the Roma minority is left without legal protection.

4. KK-stiftelsen, HÖG10, dnr 20100209, “Kulturarv: Att skapa historia för framtiden”.

5. Lag (1988:950) om skydd för kulturmiljöer and kulturmiljöförordning (1988:1188).

6. Charlotte Bydler and Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, Kulturarv: Att skapa historia för framtiden, Stockholm: Axelius förlag, 2015.