In the eponymous scene that gives Thomas Vinterberg's film The Feast its title, the eldest son rises to deliver his speech on the occasion of his father's sixtieth birthday. He has in fact drafted two speeches, one on yellow paper, the other on green, and lets his father choose. He opts for the green. Ah, you chose the Speech of Truth, says the son. And the truth turns out to be very unpleasant indeed, about lies, deception and dissembling. I too have several possible speeches I could make about the applied arts in Norway , and the use of language. Not that my choice is as stark asI between truth and lies. It is more between saying what I want to say in an optimistic, encouraging, affirming and reassuring mode, or a pessimistic, concerned, critical and revelatory one.
The early history of the applied arts as a defined occupational area in Norway is similar to that of many countries, and has recently been addressed in the catalogues for two international arts and crafts exhibitions. 1 Love Jonsson's contribution in these pages offers a close up of terminological usage down the years in the different areas known today as handicrafts (husflid), design and applied art (kunsthandverk). But precisely because Scandinavia is usually dealt with under the auspices of international surveys, exhibitions and texts, I feel it might be useful to rehearse certain historical facts which explain why we should not look at Scandinavia as a unified domain in an arts and crafts sense. Norway often attracts adjectives like “odd man out” or “maverick”, and it can't be denied, the history of Norway's applied arts differs from Sweden's and Denmark's. But before coming to grips with this particular concern, I would like to set the record straight about my own language, the language I use as a writer. Indeed, it is in many ways the Norwegian language situation I can thank for my interest in crafts, and I want to suggest that my own story helps make sense of the status of the applied arts in Norway today. What I want to speak about is language in a wider sense, wider at least than the technospeak generally heard in the field of applied arts.
Between 1380 and 1814, Norway was Danish. In 1814 Denmark was forced to cede sovereignty of the country to Sweden , though the terms of Norway and Sweden 's union, which lasted a hundred years, were relatively flexible. Norway is therefore a relatively young sovereign state, with an even younger infrastructure in the way of higher education and cultural institutions. Indeed, at the end of the 1800s, most would-be artists were still obliged to move abroad to train and find work. Norwegian livelihoods were based on fishing and farming. Although people had little money, by and large they were their own masters, and folk customs – music, dance, storytelling, wood carving and weaving traditions – have retained their vigour to the present day. For several hundred years Danish was Norway 's only written language. Henrik Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish, and had a Danish publisher. But as far as spoken language was concerned, only a handful actually spoke Danish in Norway – they were government officials, business people and immigrant landowning families. Danish was considered civilized, and teachers and pupils were forced to speak Danish at school until 1879.
During the 1800s people in Norway were concerned about Norwegian-ness. What could be done to forge a ‘corporate identity', an image of a civilized nation whose independence was not misplaced? Issues surrounding language gained in symbolic weight. A free nation needs a written language of its own. But which? There were soon two opposing camps, one advocating Danish, punctuated by Norwegian words and phrases of the colloquial speech of the upper classes, the other wanted a completely fresh written language, founded on Norway 's myriad rural dialects. There was a class struggle aspect in this, of course. Ivar Åsen led the rural party, and the language he constructed ( landsmål – literally country speech) was so successful it gained formal recognition in 1885, as an alternative to Danish. Since that time Norway has had two official written languages, Nynorsk (the official name of country speech from 1929) and Bokmål (literally, book speech), Norwegianized Danish. Nynorsk made headway in the early years, not least in schools, but never really left its country origins. And because it was associated with the countryside and farming communities, it lost out as increasing numbers left for expanding rapidly towns and cities as industrialization spread. Only about 10–15 per cent of Norwegians write in Nynorsk today, but everybody is free nowadays to speak in their own dialects whatever their walk of life.
I'm one of the 10–15 per cent that still writes in Nynorsk. It wasn't something I deliberately chose. I was born and bred in a Nynorsk-speaking family, and it is a part of me. The way I write says something about my upbringing whatever I write about. I can not conceal the fact that I grew up in the country, if not exactly on a farm – my father is a first-generation non-farmer, and my mother a second-generation non-farmer. The literature I grew up with – not to mention the songs – is largely unknown to non-Nynorsk speakers. Nevertheless, Nynorsk features widely in the literature of Norway , and a 150 year tradition of written Nynorsk offers a robust platform for my own work as a writer.
As far as I know, I am the only art historian in Norway writing in Nynorsk today (with the possible exception of a one or two who seem to switch between Bokmål and Nynorsk). It may say something about the recruitment situation in the discipline, or that linguistic identity is now as replaceable as other identity markers nowadays. Or that many find they need to change their language in connection with their work. Because national newspapers don't allow their journalists to write in Nynorsk, and the rest of the private sector is equally sceptical. Nynorsk doesn't sell, they claim. As a language it is hemmed in by prejudice, but it has also created free spaces: publishers, theatres, record companies, newspapers.
That speaking and promoting Nynorsk may be a lost cause is not something I dismiss out of hand, but one positive thing about Norway 's language dilemma is that it makes you think about the linguistic side of life. Language, one realizes, is more than a technical aid. For writer Kjartan Fløgstad, Modernism heralded a new way of understanding language. Modernism turned the instrument into the object. “Modernism comprehends, we might say, the material nature of language. It is no longer an instrument, a means, a utensil, existing outside our bodies. The word is no longer in the service of narrative, vernacular, descriptive device. It has become the privileged aesthetic object. We still use language, of course, but mostly it uses us.”
This conception and dialectical approach to language should be familiar to most writers, but I believe it is also true of most applied artists' relation to the materials of their profession. While writing this piece, I kept them at the back of my mind. The situation of craft makers vis-à-vis the arts in general in Norway is not unlike that of speakers of Nynorsk to the dominant language. Clay, textiles and metals, the materials of the applied artists, are full of cultural capital. However using them means allying oneself with traditions easily overshadowed by more dominant cultural idioms like fine art and design. Although craftspeople share many of the same platforms with fine artists in Norway , the hierarchical pecking order remains. Craftspeople always have to argue their case in the choice of materials and preference for the category applied art. It feels often demeaning, and in that sense it's not surprising that the term applied art (kunsthandverk) – like Nynorsk – is losing out.
The reasons are complex. But some of them are connected with history. As in Denmark and Sweden , applied artists in Norway worked alongside designers, architects and theoreticians in the inter-war period to create things in a Modernist vernacular. The Norwegian Applied Arts Association (Foreningen Brukskunst) was founded for precisely this purpose in 1918. As its name – brukskunst = useable art – indicates, melding artistry and utility was its main objective. By the 1970s, a paradigm shift in Norwegian arts and crafts forced a realignment, expressed symbolically by the association adopting a new name. Applied artists stopped collaborating with designers and shied away from industrial production. They wanted to stop making things for the middle classes and start producing art for public spaces. In 1975 they founded their own organization, the Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts ( Norske Kunsthåndverkere ). Their understanding of craft echoed the definition given in Norwegian dictionaries: “Kunsthandverk, an art form that works with textiles, ceramics, glass, leather, metal and other materials formed and produced in the makers' studios. Craft makers are responsible for the whole process from idea to finished product.” 2 The emphasis on the artistic end product distinguishes craft from handicraft. The emphasis on practical means distinguishes craft from design. Now by defining themselves in contrast to designers, Norwegian applied artists also defined themselves in contrast to their Danish, Swedish and Finnish brethren. Norwegian craftspeople joined forces with practitioners of the fine arts, and since the 1970s the two have remained the staunchest of allies. Craftspeople joined hands with composers, writers and visual artists in 1974 to pressure the government to invest more in art in public places, to impose a fee on the use of art and establish a minimum wage for artists ( Kunstneraksjon '74 ). It was a successful campaign in many ways, and since those heady days, craft people have been treated on a par with fine artists as regards state grants, financial support schemes and public commissions. Although money is not everything, it is the key to almost everything. The financial arrangements for artists in Norway are a very important reason why Norwegian craft makers have been able to resist commercial pressures. 3
Change in the 1970s was not just organisational, it had a strong impact on what was produced. By rejecting the term ‘applied' from their vocabulary, they also severed the association of their artefacts with utility, resulting in solutions which offered everything but practical use. We tend to see this rejection of practicality as a wish for higher status. But speaking with craftspeople, this it is not what they underline. They emphasise freedom. By allying arts and crafts with fine art, they achieved a level of artistic freedom only dreamt of when they were simply “applied artists”. Applied art was circumscribed on all sides by rules, by right ways and wrong ways and other constraints. Being free and having freedom have long been a staple of the Norwegian mentality (soon the only European country not part of EU), frequently conscripted to justify all sorts of things, including the transformation under discussion here. It has even been described as a liberation project. Although “many craft makers have a relationship to forms that are associated with use,” according to the organizers of an exhibition celebrating the 25 th anniversary in 2001 of the Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts, at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo, “craft has long since broken free from its utility aspect”. This much could be seen in the pieces on display, most of which were non-functional – they were representations of utensil. Take, for instance, a painting by former ceramicist, now mostly painter, Tor Hvamen. It was circular, and this formal similarity to a dish made it a painting of a dish. Which explains why it was purchased by the Oslo Museum of Decorative Arts and Design. The problem in this instance is the additional complication represented by the choice of medium. Does a painting that refers to a thing become craft when the museum and exhibition which provides its context is related to craft? Or should we instead see in this “liberation” from utility and traditional materials the object's transformation from craft into fine art?
It is nothing new to experience frustration and irritation when something one thought was clear turns out be complex and ill defined. The new craft challenges old categorisations, but perhaps it can itself be accused of maintaining the hierarchy that ranks fine art (free art) above craft (applied art) by employing use and non-use as the fundamental antithesis in its understanding of art? To talk about breaking free from the utility aspect is a very blunt way of putting it. The phrase itself implies that making utility objects entails constraints, which means that it can never elevate itself to the free form of intellectual production which the production of fine art is portrayed as being. Why, I ask myself, did craftspeople in Norway give way to the dominant language in art not only in terms of what they make but their self-image. Or is this jumping on a moralist bandwagon? Should we see instead the appropriation of fine art's idioms and categories as an indication of the fluidity of the term “applied art”, whose meaning is in constant flux?
Whatever the answer, applied art in Norway today is being increasingly assimilated into the wider artistic domain, and the term ‘kunsthandverk' is being used less and less by the people whose profession it once described. The youth-led revolt in Sweden , which led not least to a renewed interest in “useful” art never reached Norway . By returning to terminology like handicraft ( husflid ) and by referring to themselves as decorative artists, the Swedes succeeded in breathing new life into the debate about what applied art is supposed to be in 2005. These practitioners seem to be empowered by craft rather than letting themselves be weighed down by the opinions of others: they allow themselves to be informed instead of limited by history. “Craft needs to be de- and then re -classified. It needs to become internally dynamic once more, rather than allowing itself to be externally constrained,” argues Paul Greenhalgh in the book The Culture of Craft . This is precisely what these Swedish craft makers seem to have succeeded in doing and which I for one would have wished Norwegian applied artists had done as well.
On the other hand, the interdisciplinary nature of Norwegian training and museum curatorship has created a new type of object, able to wander at will across categories and institutions. It is just as likely to find a home at the Museum of Contemporary Art as in one of Norway 's three museums devoted to applied art. 4 This type of restless object is the fecund issue of applied art's mutability. The two works I selected for the exhibition Languages exemplify this condition. At the same time, this restless craft has disrupted the idea of craft held by craftspeople themselves. On the one hand, many of them argue that the term craft has had its day. It is too strongly associated with the counter-cultural movement of the 1970s. It fails to express the diversity of practice prevailing today and for that reason is increasingly ignored. Others see categories as fluid, and therefore of little use. Everyone, they assert, now works irrespective of them. Evidently, terminology is both relevant and irrelevant at one and the same time.
Makers today are obviously more concerned about what the applied arts can become, and less about how they were in the beginning. What concerns me is that we might be risking more than a word calling applied art visual art. At stake may be the way we sense or conceive of the world. It matters whether we use craft as a term, because terms create what they designate. We group and organise things and phenomena according to how we understand them, and then understand them according to the category we assigned them. That people work as craftspeople and fine artists at the same time, or advocate equal status for visual art and craft, does not mean those areas can be reduced to one another or are identical. Despite partly overlapping histories, traditions, values and practices, they remain distinct. This is why I believe it can still be meaningful to retain the word craft and elaborate a separate theoretical position for craft. Not to pigeon hole it, but to give speaking about art space for more than the dominant narrative. It is about letting more voices be heard and linguistic varieties be used.
Notes
1 Karen Livingstone and Linda Perry (ed.), International Arts and Crafts , London : V&A Publications, 2005. Wendy Kaplan (ed.), The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe & America, London : Thames and Hudson , 2005.
2 www.caplex.no .
3 Of a population of about 4.5 million, Norway has today about 800 practising craftspeople and 2,400 fine artists.
4 The three museums being (\the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design ( Kunstindustrimuseet ) in Oslo, founded 1886; Western Norway Museum of Decorative Arts ( Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum ) in Bergen, founded 1889; and National Museum of Decorative Arts ( Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum ) in Trondheim, founded 1893.
This article was originally published in Languages, Think Tank edition 02 Gmunden: Think Tank, 2005
