Work 10. Frötuna Kyrka Bell Tower
The Swedish bell tower confused me no end when I first encountered one. A religious structure, clearly old, with no obvious entrance, no windows and shaped like a space rocket? There is a marvellous example of one in the grounds of bla bla1 church that one passes on the way to Arlanda. If a guest is in the car I always challenge them to guess what the bell tower structure is and to date no one has got it. The latest attempt was the Newcastle artist Sally Madge who visited to participate in a experimental drawing exhibition at the old NOA building2 curated by sambo Helen. Sally would not let me tell her the function of the building and it was only a few days later when on a tour of lake views that I designed to appeal to the visiting Brits, that we passed by Frötuna church that she guessed it. She was pleased as punch and we trudged up the hill for a closer look.
It was not my intention to paint it today however as the plan was to take a lake view but as often happens in a good spot, on erecting the easel a alternative view presents itself. Today I was poised brush in hand like Cezanne in the Roussel sequence3 to take the lake view when the view of the bell tower suddenly caught me. I squared it up with my hands to
find the line of the hill then dragged it across with a thin phthalo without delay. Now committed I moved the easel round at attacked it. As I have discovered while painting on the dull winter days, it is important to achieve first and foremost the correct tonal balance between ground and sky but to do so with coloured tones. It is one of my very favourite things, the effect of the snow causing a tonal reverse with the sky which is ordinarily the brighter.
I can see a pair of foxes hunting in the field. Apparently they use the earths magnetic field to target prey that is under the snow?
I patched in the sky in tones moving from a dull sulphur to a bruise of lilac with hints of blue. The inevitable perimeter.4 The hill tone scythed on in thick strokes indicating a movement from the tower to the lower left. The large and distant trees create a nice triangle. The fence lends a diagonal one way and the young pines on the left begin another diagonal back up the hill to the tower. Two figures (perhaps Sally and I) sploshed in at the last and a tit of red in the base brush to echo the tone of the tower.
I suppose you are aware of the debacle surrounding the Norrtälje (NOA) studio group and their eviction from unit 14?5 I had a running commentary from Helen who has become increasingly involved and is in fact now a chair. In a nutshell the Kommune do not care a jot for the arts at least for the artists among those it represents and the benefits of the arts chestnut that works so well in the UK6 and is in fact quite real, (more so for the property developer/speculator than any seller of social returns) does not apply here at all it seems. All is so controlled here, a banquet of the ordinary. On the menu? The same dishes that have been there for decades. One can quite imagine a trail of petty governance going back decades insuring that progress is achieved without any change. No to the arts! But artists can be great for the city? Suckers that we are we can fix buildings put on exhibitions and events, even whole festivals - for free! We can improve the image of the city making it attractive, ah ha! Stop there, that's it. 'The image of the city'. In the quest to control the minds and behaviour of people (a traditional Swedish pastime)7 controlling the image of the city is like controlling what is possible to imagine and of course that may end up not so good for those who have walked the power line to their seat at the table.
Anyway you know more than me about all that and I mean no offence in taking aim at Swedish national characteristics and in fact part of the reason I feel it is fair game is because of the way the Sweden brands itself abroad, the Swedish embassy in London is like a lesson in living. Of course it would be very much at odds with the norm if a nation did not promote itself but as is becoming ever clearer to me, it is only when one settles and experiences that the contrast between the image one has been sold and the reality one sees and feels becomes apparent. Another statement of the obvious but this dynamic is no small potato since in this Ptruth farce we have entered the world is shaped by the latter; by sees and feels,8 by shares and likes. The struggle for power in this context is one of control of the sees and feels and again one will protest "but it has always been so", and that is true but the difference now is that the 'power' is willing to assert 'a' truth, its truth and insist upon it without recourse to...well, anything. And this can be justified as doing ones duty to the party "base". The base? The base? A powerful imaginary collective to be sure; the political "base". Of course one has ones voters but the forming of them into a political "base" is an aesthetic project undertaken by the party itself. It creates precisely a base to justify its actions and this means everything. In this the alt right excel and it is very artistic.
While we have raised the subject let me say to you quite frankly a few thoughts and feelings about this land. I certainly do not want to dwell on it like so many do but lets get it said. It seems to me that here in Sweden everyone lives under a weight. You can call it Jante Law but to me it’s 'the weight'. Those raised in this land are clearly more immune, conditioned from an early age in dagis and school, getting used to the way of the weight, building up resistance to function under the weight. In the world of work in public places through the annual events it seems the people of Sweden create and re create the weight. Those of us who visit Sweden can feel this weight straight away and very strongly. What’s more without the necessary conditioning to cope or understand it. To be clear this weight that exists in Sweden is not pleasant to behold and I just hope the organized calm society that seems to be the pay off is worth it because in other places there is no weight and believe me living without the weight is better. Perhaps societies services do not function so well and people are more touched and vulnerable but they have the pleasure of living their one and only life free of the heavy weight that presses Sweden like burger. No doubt this accounts for the flatline culture.
As an immigrant I have the possibility to see all this from the outside and that’s why I enjoy holidays more than I used to but do not misunderstand me, I enjoy Sweden and its weight in fact suits me because one thing that the weight does allow for is the quiet life and that is exactly what I want to work quietly from nature, but I worry for my children. As a loving father I am pleased that my children are in such a safe and wholesome environment but at the same time it would be tantamount to abuse to let them live under the weight unchecked, growing only into manicured bonzais rather than the rugged, unpredictable majesty of fully growns. The answer: travel.
You know I once spoke to Simon Shiekh -too clever by half- about this when I met him at the Loughborough exchange of 2015 and I knew of his stint at the Malmo Academy so we had Sweden in common. His take?: “There is some strange mind control shit happening over there!”
There I've said it. With a handshake,
John
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1 Possibly refers to the church at Almunge where the bell tower is on prominent view from the road.
2 The Norrtälje artists group known as NOA occupied unit 14 on Campus Roslagen for 15 years between 2003 - 2018. In 2017 Helen Edling curated an exhibition called......
3 Refers to the rare photographs taken by Ker-Xavier Roussel of the notoriously reclusive Paul Cezanne in 1906.
4 John's term for the perimeter of trees that features prominently in the Roslagen landscape.
5 The NOA group were evicted from the building in 2018 and were given no assistance in finding an alternative. It is not clear what John means by 'debacle' but it may refer to the artists protesting the eviction and the wider public outrage that played out in Norrtälje Tidning.
6 The benefit of the arts was was a topic of much debate in the UK during the New Labour era where art was used by government as part of urban regeneration. This subsequently became a common practice used by property developers to prepare run down areas for development. This practice is widely criticised as gentrification. John refers to contemporary art and gentrification in TAS work 23: "Our rationale begins with a desire for breaking away from contemporary art, but why? Firstly because the blatant corporate nature of the whole business is truly beyond the pale and the cosy relationship with high finance which has always lingered but in 2011 this simply cannot be tolerated no longer. No more blind eye! Added to this is the transparent and dismaying farce of not only of the gallery/dealer/curator/bienale/posh idiot system but also the role of contemporary art in gentrification where it really has become just another leaf in the property developers well thumbed playbook."
7 This is a little strong. John is making the common observation among UK and USA immigrants that Swedish authority is created through some kind of psycho-social engineering to which people bow to and recreate in their daily lives through compliance, discipline and pedagogy.
8 Perhaps refers to the established view that in the Post Truth era politics is characterised by appeals to the emotion of voters over fact based arguments.