Ann-Charlotte Weimarck

Annamirl and the Stove of Delight. With reference to "folk art" and "folk art" research in Europe. Åhus: Kalejdoskop 1987 (diss.)

Summary

ln the Museum für Volkskunde in Vienna there is a tile-stove in the form of a life-size peasant woman, naturalistically coloured by means of glazes (plates 7- 11). It was probably sculptured in Austria during the second half of the l8th century and is traditionally referred to as Annamirl.

The stove, which was an adjunct to another stove in an adjacent room, is said once to have been placed in a dance-hall at an inn where its pleasant heat streamed out over the dancing crowd. The impact made by this sculpture in the round representing a flourishing woman with her feet directly on the floor is quite overwhelming. I first saw it during an excursion to Vienna organised by the Department of Art History at Lund. The profound impression made on me in that first encounter with Annamirl has provided the stimulus for this study as a whole.

The aim of my research has been twofold: to interpret and understand the stove Annamirl by examining its historical context, that is to say the cultural and art historical tradition to which the stove belongs with respect to technique, motif, form, and ideational content; and to interpret the stove from the point of view of the present moment. Such an interpretative process involves an attempt to investigate those parts of my own experience of the stove (or, rather, my memories of these parts) which are conscious and can be communicated. My study bears to a very large extent on epistemological issues and problems pertaining to the theory of knowledge. Among other things, I have had occasion to reflect on topics related to the different forms of existence of a historical work of art: as part of a historical context and as the response of a present-day viewer. I have made a study of both forms of existence and the two studies resulting from this approach enrich each other, I believe. In my historical study the place of the object in art history and cultural history is established. This attempt consists on the one hand in trying to describe the technical conditions under which the object was created and the material of which it was made, and on the other in trying to characterise it with regard to style, motif, imagery, and symbolism. Once the place of the object seemed to be sufficiently established and its hypothetical position in a historical and art historical network defined, I discovered that the status and form of existence of the object itself had changed. The comparatively delimited historical object was transformed into an object determined by its relations to a great many other objects and phenomena. At this stage of my investigation I redirected my attention to the individuality of the object, disregarding all the connections traced, all models and predecessors. Having related the object to its historical basis at different levels, I now wished to perceive it as an object in its own right; to do this, I made my responses appear and stand out clearly against the possible models and influences which I had reconstructed.

The kind of tradition which my historical investigation identified and uncovered is different from, or on another level than that with which my experience was concerned. In the historical investigation the external conditions under which the tile-stove was made were suggested and some hypotheses bearing on these were formulated. The other study, concerned with my response, cast a different kind of light on the historical object since the dynamic potential of the work was recognised; to deal with this potential is not something that a historical/critical study can hope to achieve for it can never explain the fascination that an artifact can inspire; it can never explain why a tradition lives on and continues to live on in the individual in history.

"Folk art"

The stove Annamirl has been classified as "folk art", a conventional term implying a number of scholarly difficulties. In this book I have thrown light on these problems in different ways. When I use the word "folk art" I simply mean such objects as European folk art research more or less consistently has classified as folk art, in practice and/or in theory. To keep the necessary distance to my subject I have adopted the somewhat awkward method of putting "folk art" within quotation marks though keeping the word itself to identify the relatively homogeneous group of characteristic artifacts referred to by this term. These objects can be studied. Among other places, in historical museums, museums of folk art, and in books. A not unimportant consequence of this is that the "fine arts" as well must be put within quotation marks.

The "folk art" objects are considered to have been produced before the advent of industrialism by artists/artisans, that is to say, by specialists working outside both the guilds and the academic milieu and who in many cases had customers of two kinds, orders being placed with them both by the bourgeoisie of the towns and the peasantry in the countryside. Similarly, the artist's own social or class background might differ; he might live and work in a town as well as in the countryside.

"Folk art" and its models

"Folk art" is usually thought to be relatively dependent on the "fine arts". It is supposed to require so-called "models" to an even greater extent than the "fine arts". "Folk art" research seems to have forgotten that it is not only in "folk art" but in European culture in general that we find motifs and themes which are constantly being transformed, renewed, varied. And that it is the artists, artists of all kinds, who keep this tradition alive simply by being influenced and inspired by each other's versions - as well as by being capable of communicating with each other across time and space in a very personal and direct way. I would like to say that in this respect the whole of the European art tradition derives its vitality from the fact that artists are intelligent enough to pick what catches their fancy to use it later for their own purposes as they create new works of art. And this is true of artists belonging to the tradition of "folk art" as well as of those who belong to that of "fine art", in my view.

Art historians share the opinion and the conviction that works of art owe their existence to other works of art and to other pictures more than to anything else. That is why, in the literature on the "fine arts', one is apt to come across a great number of studies dealing with artists' influence and dependence on one another. As art historians we assume the existence of models; we take it for granted that traditional elements and stereotypes are a powerful force in art; we know that the artist uses sources of widely different kinds, that he is under the influence of earlier art. This is obvious to anyone engaged in research on works of art. But if the starting-point is combined with reductionism in the practical work the chances are that what is original and unique in a work of art will not receive proper attention.

Literary scholars have studied how the same matter may be found in fairy tales, epics, novels, poems, and plays, sometimes ending up by being appropriated by fairy tales, the genre from which it originally derives. There are, for example, intimate ties between H.C. Andersen’s tales and the great European tradition of folk tales. H.C. Andersen is not considered a less original writer for having been inspired by fairy-tales and legends and other writers' tales and transformed these to suit his own purposes. Thus, for example, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is not usually looked upon as a misunderstanding of an already existing fairy-tale even though it makes an entirely different point from that of the original version. This attitude must be adopted by "folk art" researchers as well. Our starting-point must be that the European cultural heritage is something that is alive, latent matter, some of whose motifs possess such an inherent force of content or representation that it is capable of firing and nourishing the creative imagination of artists time and again.

That we are dealing with dialectic processes where influences can be seen to work both ways is something we know from traditional art history among other things. It is a well-known fact that not only has "folk art" been inspired by the "fine arts" but inspiration has worked the other way round as well. Consider for example the artists of the late l9th century up to our own time: many of them have been among the most interested and influenced viewers of "folk art", thus showing an influence in the opposite direction: van Gogh, Gauguin, the Pont Aven group, Ensor, Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter group, surrealists, abstract expressionists, and so on.

An important part of the problem raised by "folk art" in research is to do with the supposition that such art is something altogether different from the "fine arts". I maintain that such a division of the artifacts may be interesting from a sociological point of view but is not necessarily important or even reasonable if we wish to cast light on the aesthetic expression of each individual object and the reactions such objects may cause. The potential aesthetic qualities of the objects are not directly related to the social origin of the artists. But the question whether Annamirl may be looked upon as "folk art" or not, in other words the sociological definition of it, is nevertheless important to me in one respect: a classification of the Annamirl stove as "folk art" carries certain implications for the methods which scholars concerned with this object may be expected to use. "Folk art" research, pursued as it is with a marked emphasis on the sociological aspects of the works studied, does not pay sufficient attention to the aesthetic qualities of a work of art and its possible aesthetic effects on the viewer. The important thing as far as I am concerned has more and more been to bring out the power of traditional "folk art" precisely to create sensations in the viewer and to see the "folk art" object as a work of art rather than try to carry on the discussion while using the terms of traditional "folk art" research. It is my contention that earlier scholars, perhaps because of their particular ideological assumptions and preconceived notions about the people, have actually denied "folk art" aesthetic interest and value. They have often treated "folk art" as a country cousin. This is the historically determined, ideological assumption which, as I see it, has caused so many "folk art" researchers to consider the model of a given work more interesting than the work itself, the new work, the new picture.

Modern art historical research treats almost all articulated cultural objects as "art". Interestingly enough, however, this is even more true of non-European material than of European – at any rate if you consider traditional European "folk art", which has been accorded only very rudimentary scholarly treatment. Most scholars have been content to list models and parallels by means of classificatory terms of style and traditional iconologies. Exceedingly few analyses of this material attempt to offer more than a mere survey of sources, or show that the scholar has penetrated the new picture and its dynamics, once the question of provenance and models has been dealt with.

Traditional "folk art" researchers' interest in tracing sources and influences – as one of the methods used in a large survey or as an end in itself – is often based on value premisses of the kind touched on above. If you try to find the models of a work of art, for example those of Annamirl, in art history you are likely to be looking for similar representations of women which may reasonably be assumed to have been known to the potter who made the stove and inspired him. This type of artistic borrowing is a familiar one and goes mainly to prove that artists carry on a dialogue.

Yet within traditional "folk art" research such dialogues have often been considered as less valuable or even ridiculous from the artistic point of view: only second-rate artists make use of models. The Renaissance view of the artistic genius is here given unmodified expression – as though great works of art were created out of nothing although everything we know about arlistic practice suggests the opposite.

Ager Jorn and "folk art"

Traditional "folk art" research is, in other words, largely characterised by a narrow-minded and antiquated view of art, one which actually may be an obstacle to an identification of and interpretation of the new picture and the metamorphoses it has undergone.

I have been inspired in my research by among other things the study of the art of Asger Jorn. His interest in Nordic “folk art” and "folk art research" is the subject of an earlier work of mine, “Nordisk anarkism" Asger Jorn och projektet 10 000 års nordisk folkkonst. ("Nordic Anarchism". Asger Jorn and the project l0 000 years of Nordic Folk Art. With an English Summary. Lund, 1980.)

In the 1960s Asger Jorn (1914-1973) planned to publish a series of books comprising no less than some thirty volumes, in which Nordic "folk art" was for the first time to receive the presentation he felt it deserved. For most of his life Jorn had been deeply involved in this subject and had written extensively about it, books as well as articles. This aroused my curiosity: could it be that the artist Jorn possessed important and useful knowledge about "folk art" which had somehow escaped the academic experts? I discovered that many of Jorn's criticisms of "folk art" research were of great interest, as for example when he claimed that "folk art" scholars were too quick to underestimate the quality in "folk art” artists which they exaggerated in the great artists, namely originality. Characteristically, he thought that it was interesting only from a sociological point of view to distinguish between "primitive” art and "individual, free art". At any rate, this could not be done by comparing the artists' way of dealing with models in a wide sense. Traditional "folk art" researchers my be looking for models of Nordic “folk art” in Europe. This may be meaningful in itself, according to Jorn, but the real analysis can start only when the deviation from the model has been established. For it is in this deviation, in the difference, the transformation, that the aesthetic interest resides Jorn emphasized. To him, the most important question was how the models were used to create new pictures.