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.

In this connection it may be pointed out that ethnological and art historical researchers usually view "folk art" as characterized by stylistically conservative, retarded features. Jorn drew attention to the radical features of "folk art", its special capacity to transform and reshape, for example, symbolic representation of the eternal issues. This influenced me strongly and provided important inspiration for my own research on Annamirl.

But the alleged radical features of "folk art" are not something that can exist only as a quality of the object itself – as such a quality, it must be related to the experience of these qualities. Those artists who took an interest in "folk art" did not consider it as a cultural remnant but precisely as works of art offering creative possibilities and forms which might provide these artists with solutions to their own artistic problems. For Jorn, then, who was endowed with an unusual ability to express himself both pictorially and verbally, "folk art" was a source of inspiration and creativity not only in his artistic work but equally in his intellectual involvement with these questions.

This should be the starting-point of present-day research on "folk art". It would mean that as researchers we take seriously our experiences of the works we study, that we try to approach them from two points of view: on the one hand taking into consideration what can be reconstructed from the historical situation when the work in question was created, on the other what we alone can contribute, given our contemporary and individual experiences.

From the point of view of our experiences it is possible – and valuable - to juxtapose the artist and the viewer/researcher for the viewer/researcher is in a dialogue with tradition in a wide sense just as the artist is. It is through our experiences of a work of art that our cultural tradition is approached as a vitalizing force, irrespective of whether the artist belongs to the same social class as the viewer.

My own view of scholarship as a way of understanding and interpreting symbolical actions and creations is in several ways inspired by the work of hermeneutic scholars such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Robert Jauss, and Paul Ricoeur, who emphasize that the scholar is always characterised by subjectivity and by private associations, and that this does not constitute an obstacle but rather may contribute to our appreciation of a work of art.

Necessity imposes on us a historically limited "horizon of understanding" as we interpret a work of art. It is therefore not possible for us as scholars definitively to determine the meaning of a work of art, exhaust its content, since new vantage-points for an understanding are created all the time, revealing contexts which it was impossible to experience earlier.

It is not a question of adding the scholar's subjectivity to the objectivity of the work of art. What we must do as scholars is not to try to put ourselves in another human being's place nor are we dealing with some sort of expressionism on the part of the researcher. What we should aim at is a dialogue enabling us to approach the object of our study from two directions, from history and from the present moment.

The plan of the thesis

My general thesis is in opposition to the scholarly tradition in "folk art” research which claims that the distinction between "folk art" and the "fine arts" is essential. I do not agree with this. My point is that "folk art" may share essential qualities and effects with the "fine arts". The Annamirl stove has been classified as "folk art", which has determined the approach to it. Consequently, the first chapter of my thesis consists in a critical study of the principles of the history of "folk art" research in Europe with particular reference to questions to do with "folk art" and aesthetics. I concentrate on more or less conscious notions prevailing for nearly a century of empirical research among ethnologists and art historians. My aim in writing this chapter has been to investigate some important cultural attitudes in "folk art" research where the distinction between the "fine arts" and "folk art" has been maintained. I have focussed attention, then, on aspects of research such as the aesthetic ambitions, status, and character of "folk art", trying to determine if and to what extent "folk art" has been looked upon as art, to put it simply.

The development of 2Oth-century art and the theoretical discussions pertaining to it have influenced me and my attitude to art, including the art of the past and research on it. My theoretical starting-point as well as my choice of method when considering the Annamirl stove are of course a result of this. Reflections bearing on the individual's experience of works of art occur in the thought of several 20th-century artists and art theoreticians. How these ideas have been expressed and justified in different schools and traditions remains so far a relatively unexplored subject, but the origins of such considerations seem to lie, among other things, in the artists' discovery of so-called primitive art during the second half of the l9th century. A further development along these lines is the fascination 20th-century artists have felt for the creativity of, for example, children, uneducated people, lunatics, outsiders, and alcoholics.

The change – or changes – in art as a concept which this shift of emphasis has caused has resulted in art historical theorists debating the concept of art from different, new points of view, among other things under titles such as "Art as an Open Concept" and "Art as a Social Institution". In this context the study of the viewer's role and of the experience of art is a natural consequence.

In the second chapter of my thesis - "Annamirl: An Anthropomorphous Stove" – I describe the object of my study while also subjecting its treatment in researches to a critical review.

Initially, an account is given of some special features in traditional Austrian ceramics and tile-stove-making. For these form the historical basis for my hypothesis that the stove was probably made in a simple workshop, in the countryside or in the town, during the latter half of the l8th century. In this chapter I also discuss the anthropomorphous principle of construction characteristic of the stove, and an attempt is made to adduce observations derived both from the fields of ethnology and of art history.

In my analysis I emphasize that the Annamirl figure does not adorn the stove, she is the stove to the extent that she can also be seen as a figure intimately linked with fire itself. The presence of fire is, by the way, an objective fact, partly because Annamirl is heated by means of fire, partly because she is made of ceramics, which is in itself connected with fire in a fundamental way.

I summarize some aspects of Austrian ceramics relevant to the stove Annamirl while also pointing out some other characteristics which make this stove different from other contemporaneous figure stoves belonging to "fine art". – That part of the country, Oberösterreich, from which the stove is considered to come, has since time immemorial had a highly sophisticated production of pottery in the towns as well as in the country; there were town artisans as well as country artisans capable of producing lead glazes and tin glazes with great skill. Given this particular situation, we cannot eliminate the possibility that this stove was made in the countryside in a simple peasant workshop (so-called "peasant majolica", "peasant faience").

– Austrian style stoves of the 18th century were to a certain extent made in simple workshops as well. Such stoves are also known to have been in use in bourgeois homes in cities. In view of this background it is reasonable to assume that this stove, which displays a number of "archaic" features, is infused with the tradition of a simple countryside workshop.

– Oberösterreich is the place of origin of the so-called figure stoves. A comparison with other stoves preserved demonstrates Annamirl's affinity with "folk art" very clearly.

Annamirl's frontal and statuesque pose, the weight of the body evenly distributed between both legs, which are placed at a distance from each other, is actually unique among those figure stoves which have been preserved. Nor does it occur in "fine art" representations of women. The pose as such can of course be exemplified in older art, particularly in sculptural representations of men, but where it does occur it serves as a kind of symbol of strength and manliness. The pose is common in so-called "primitive" art as well as in "folk art" (see plates 14-15).

Annamirl's "folk art" character is also to be seen in the special proportions chosen. The trunk, in particular, has been heavily overemphasised: the stove does not suggest what a person really looks like but rather represents an idea given sensuous form. However, although Annamirl was made during or soon after a classicising epoch, it does not bear witness to a strong interest in the ideal of beauty of classical sculpture. Nor does Annamirl suggest that the artist or his circle made a study of anatomy. Nor can Annamirl be described as a caricature of classical ideals. My own impression is that she belongs to another, parallel movement, devoted to another aesthetics, which is comparatively independent of the classical scheme on the whole.

– The very anthropomorphization characteristic of Annamirl distinguishes it from all figure stoves preserved. I consider this principle as determining the particular expression of the stove.

In the following chapter - "Annamirl from an Art Historical Point of View" - I try to find and describe those traditions which might have been followed by the potter who made the stove. This chapter is an attempt to describe the original context of the Annamirl stove and to view it in an art historical light with due consideration of the traditions underlying it. It is obvious that Annamirl not only springs from the life of the Austrian people, but from the art historical tradition too. Some of its most important roots are found in the kanephóroi ('basket- bearers"), who have a long art historical tradition in pictorial art and architecture but also in 18th century figure stoves and porcelain figurines and in popular copper engravings of the "Cris de Paris" type (street-criers and hawkers, "le bas peuple", in streets and at markets). At the level of representation of ideas, I find that Annamirl is related to a particular Mannerist kind of imagination which in a broad tradition is expressed, among other things, by allegorical representations of, for example, man – seasons, man – elements. I think it is reasonable to see the Annamirl stove as a late representative of such a tradition; in that light it represents a season – “Autumn" – as well as an element, – "Fire" –, while containing allegorisations of the themes of fire and fertility which reinforce one another. To this one might add some other ideas, that of the transforming power of fire, for her function as stove connects her with rebirth and the contemporary interest in the metamorphic power of fire. Annamirl can he seen as a positive figure which at one and the same time represents a season – that of ripe fruits, grapes – and an element – that of fire: both can be interpreted as images of the good and warm powers of life.

Earlier students of Annamirl (Frank, Schmidt. Franz) have assumed that she once carried a washtub or a trough on her head. The present burden is said to replace an earlier one, now removed and lost. After studying the Annamirl stove in an art historical context, I find it likely that the burden carried by the stove on its head was a basket of grapes and fruit.

In Chapters II and III I have tried to understand the Annamirl stove on the basis of the historical conditions which I have been able to identify and reconstruct. In that part of my research process I have suppressed my personal experience of the stove while emphasising the historical context. However, as I have pointed out earlier, it is common in some important movements in 2Oth-century art theory to consider that the individual response is of great importance for the existence of a work of art. In my final chapter I employ a more inclusive method. Taking my own response as my starting-point without presupposing specific support in the known original context of the object. I permit the work of art to transcend its genesis and its original limits; it is the artwork's dynamic potential as an object to be experienced at the present moment which is the subject of my study and not the history of the object in a limited sense. The study may be said to be an example of how a historical work of art – as the result of an individual's response to it – is granted a new lease of life, or is reborn.

The basis of my study is the amazement I felt on first encountering the Annamirl stove. Having made an art historical examination, I believe that what originally amused me and made me think of this stove as fantastic in the proper sense of the word must have been a kind of reduplication or reinforcement of the representation of the major themes: fire and fertility. Since Annamirl carried a basket of grapes and fruits on her head when I saw her, my response is obviously based on that fact.

Seen in the light of a historical scrutiny, the Annamirl stove hardly stands out as a so- called spontaneous representation. All things considered, it is a figure which can be determined by several different traditions. Among these there are some which I have not touched upon and which the Annamirl figure is probably related to in one way or another: the opulent, Central European traditions of carnivals and processions in which personifications of the seasons might occur too. But since I am particularly interested in the fact that Annamirl is a stove, an apparatus, and is made of ceramic material, I have made this interest the starting- point of my interpretation and understanding of the Annamirl figure.

This is not to say that my experience of the Annamirl stove is independent of tradition. For it is not possible to place oneself outside history: a spontaneous experience too. is historical, in the profound sense of this word.

The experience which provided the impetus to my research was not given a subordinated role as I continued my work. It was possible to attribute a definite scholarly function to it for I believe that one of the possible meanings of the Annamirl stove now has to be created from the vantage point of an individual response.

If the personal experience of a work of art is made part of the object studied, introspection is the only method which can be used to examine this experience. What one must do is to articulate and try to understand the structure of one's experience; feelings, thoughts, values, and ideas which are not always fully conscious. One's own past and general situation necessarily have a part to play while a reasonable degree of critical evaluation of one's own experiences and the hypotheses they provoke must be observed.

The result of introspection is obviously dependent on who performs it. Similarly, it is probable that different results are obtained if the same researcher uses the method at different stages of his or her life or under different circumstances. But this is not itself a disadvantage if the research problem is explicitly defined as the examination of the interplay of meanings of a historical work of art such as they can be experienced by a present-day researcher/viewer.

Obviously, a critical reader must be able to follow the arguments and the chain of hypothesis in a normal manner, understand and evaluate the methods used when collecting the material studied, when interpreting it and drawing conclusions from it, and finally agree about the results of the study given the starting-point chosen.

The explicit ambition in the presentation of my research has been that any other researcher, using his or her imagination, must be able to understand how I have been able to experience the Annamirl stove precisely in the manner I have described.

My description and my attempt at an interpretation of Annamirl depend on the theoretical assumption that it is impossible to make an aesthetically meaningful analysis aiming at universal validity since this would presuppose that the stove was possessed of unequivocally immanent qualities.

I have chosen to provide a description and an interpretation of my experience of Annamirl such as it appears to me now, at the moment of writing this, when the results of the historical survey inevitably offer a sounding-board.

In "The Experience of Annamirl" I attempt to describe, interpret, and understand my own response in relation to tradition and myth, which made it possible for me to articulate my experiences. Annamirl, that stove in the shape of a woman, stood out, as I saw it, as an elementary image of a woman with a burning heart, with the fire of love burning within her. The chapter may be said to exemplify and describe those processes which occur in the dialectic between tradition and homo sentiens: my experience of the Annamirl stove stands out as conditioned by tradition while at the same time tradition may be said to provide the basis of both my response and my interpretation of it. The possible meanings which the Annamirl stove may possess today can never be anything but creations based on individual experiences; yet they are also in a profound sense historical.

My exploration of the Annamirl stove, then, is consciously based on my own experience of the object. Seeing things from the point of view of this experience, it is also obvious that "folk art" and "fine art" must be juxtaposed; it follows from the logic of viewing that it is equally justified to consider "folk art" and "fine art" either as historical remains or as art. Any ranking of the two art forms is thus pointless. I have derived inspiration for method from Anton Ehrenzweig's concept "diffuse attention" (in The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, 1953), which has provided me with an alternative mode of observation that I have employed as a means of deliberately recognizing my personal version of the meaning of Annamirl such as it could be established and created on the basis of my experience.

The "diffuse attention" of which I made Annamirl the object generated a great many images and memories, the aim being partly to try to identify my own associations and responses, in particular those which did not possess the structure of verbal language, partly to locate some of the combinations, connections, and structural elements which were fundamental to the specific nature of my experience. The purpose of my method was simply to uncover some of the genuinely individual aspects of my experience at this stage, by entering fully into the experience of the moment. One effect of using such a method was to evoke works of arts and other images. These originated in earlier experiences, not only to do with art and science but with life in general. The pictorial associations, resulting from my visual activity, were thus indirectly also to some extent dependent on the research I did on the art historical and cultural background of the Annamirl stove.

Out of the flood of images, which was the result of my associations, appeared eventually a suite consisting of images and visual fragments which seemed to be connected structurally with one another. There were, for example, stoves in the form of big pots, and stoves variously adorned with women; anthropomorphous pots borrowing their shape from the female form in different ways, pots suggestive of a womb, stoves and ovens derived from the world of art and craftsmanship, from cartoons and advertising. There were also elemental fantasies, for example mountain landscapes with cave formations beside roaring seas, Mother Earth rediscovered as Land Art; it was a symbolic world of universal significance that opened up. This suite of images was made up of different kinds of symbolic and associative similarities and connections with Annamirl as she appeared to me. Finally, I brought together these associations involving images and motifs into three main groups, which all seemed to be connected. Firstly, these associations concerned the notion of the stove in different ways; Annamirl is a stove, and, secondly, it is made of clay; it is in other words a kind of pot. Thirdly, the Annamirl stove is shaped as a woman. The stove, the pot and woman – these were the three basic components of my associations.

These partially connected fields were next given poetic headings so that their creative power might be retained and the associative and "diffuse" attention which had caused the entire material to come into existence might continue to do so. These poetical sentences were important because the unity and the decisive connections between the parts were made precisely here, and permitted me to articulate experiences inspired by the suite of images. These headings constituted an attempt to suggest, by means of words, the main features of the cumulative suite of images which, formed by each other, created a possibility to understand the connections at a deeper level between Annamirl and fire and the stove and the pot and woman. To me Annamirl represented:

– stove pot – the heat of warming, miraculous or destructive fire

– female pot – the cavity with an unknown inside

– female pot – female stove – the landscape of passion, the stove of delight. In these sentences a number of connections are to be found which are of great importance to my experience. In the three lines above a nexus between Annamirl and a mythical universe of clay, fire, and pots is established (in other words, a tradition of a different order from that represented in earlier chapters by, for example, the porcelain figurines). The stove is linked with the pot as regards both inner volume and material, and both are linked with fire, which transforms clay into ceramics. Woman is linked with the pot, both have an unknown and hidden inside (the pot-shaped uterus). Both these poetic objects, the stove pot and the female pot created in their turn the female stove (remember that our object is a stove in the shape of a woman), a symbolic landscape which opened up, the site of fire and passion – rebirth in the stove of delight.

My associations during this process had involved stoves and fire-places of different kinds, operating at various levels of symbolism. Gradually these impressions and ideas merged, fusing into an image of the experience of Annamirl, the figure stove in the shape of a woman; it looks like a woman and, increasingly, it became a metaphor for woman: the female pot harbouring passion and fire. It was a poetic artifact, the centre of a tangle of ideas, an image of attraction for imagination, dreams and emotions and thoughts to do with wonderful things, delightful experiences, the very fire of love: Annamirl simply became and represented a stove of delight as she and her imaginary flames merged into an image of love.

The source of my experience was of course within me but it is equally obvious that it is not possible to place oneself outside history: our notions and spontaneous reactions are rooted in history, even under circumstances in which coincidences seem to play a certain role. In this case, for example, my experience of the object Annamirl must be linked with the experience I had while reading Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire just as with an innumerable number of other individual "coincidences". Works of art can actually never be experienced in isolation from practice of some kind.

In trying to render clear my experience and giving it a form, I have not been looking for support and references in the historical context which I established in previous chapters. This context could not throw light on the connections which were the most important components of my experience. Instead, I tried to find a way back to the tradition of myths, using Bachelard's text as a sort of divining-rod. I have brought together the results of these explorations under four headings, each representing a kind of field of force which crystallised against the background of the fields formed by the pictorial associations. Fire, The Stove, The Pot/Clay, The Female.

The myths about the origin of fire which interested me present fire as being owned and preserved by woman inside her body. This is not the only type of myth about the origin of fire but it is one of the most common. It is important to me because it confirms the connection between woman and fire which I experienced in front of Annamirl. For the fire burning in an adjacent room but operating through Annamirl is concealed just as fire is in most mythical women. The relationship of fire to man is usually seen in terms of male possession but in point of fact there is also reason to speak of female fire, the flame inside her.

In my historical survey (chapters II-III) the idea of female fire mainly played a more indirect part. Thus, for example, woman occurs as a motif on figure stoves, but these figure stoves suggest cold porcelain figurines rather than living women. I also related fertility to rebirth in Mannerist and Baroque allegories of the seasons and the elements. And in C.A. Ehrensvärd's( 1745-1800) little drawing the fire of transformation, rebirth was directly identified with the fire of the female womb. Woman may also be linked with the stove and its metamorphic power. She may for example, be associated with the ovens of a bakery. In the hot, fragrant heat of a bakery where the dough rises and is baked, it seemed to me, sensuous and erotic fantasies come easily to mind; it occurred to me that analogous things might happen in a bakery and in the female body; the thought of the metamorphosis flour-bread together with the heat emanating from the ovens triggered off erotic/sexual associations which made rising dough and fragrant fire- places quickly merge with ideas of woman, who also has a metamorphic power. The female uterus is linked with the pot and clay, and can be the place of great, magic transformations; sperms and ova turn into human beings, and to me the analogy with fire and the stove where dough becomes bread and clay pottery was an obvious one.

The earth, itself an element just like fire, stands out as a primeval image of fertility and also as a symbol of the female. Earth – there is a hidden fire burning in the interior of the earth too – is a female element activated and determined at the time of sowing, an ancient and quite obvious image also to the sexual imagination. From earth my associations led me on to the clay pot, of earth, of clay, and its hidden inside, and to woman, possessing a tempting, mysterious fire deep inside. The study of myths explained the force of my own ideas about the links between fire, the stove, the pot/clay and the female: these fields were related to each other in a fundamental way in my experience of them.

Their union was embodied by the Annamirl stove. I had seen her as the stove of delight.

The two surveys are by definition concerned with different levels of human consciousness, their frames of reference extend along different strata; it is quite simply different strata of human reality that form the subject of our interest.

The results of the historical survey are not primarily determined by the criterion that an object must have what might be called a living unity. That is to say, such work is primarily analytical. The historical survey is chiefly concerned with the relations which the object examined might hypothetically have formed part of and to a lesser extent with the object itself; it looks away from this towards the network of conditions which may be said to determine the object. This network should be envisaged as a kind of spectrum of possibilities of different kinds dealing with technological history, specialist knowledge, marketing conditions, class, movements in style and so on, which the Annamirl stove might be related to as a historical object. The survey will indicate possibilities, alternatives.

The exposition of the content of the experience of Annamirl has an entirely different aim, though. It resembles artistic creativity in that it attempts to give form to something that everyday language cannot shape either verbally or in terms of images: the purpose here is to create an object – in this case the suite of images collected under four headings which can be used to gain an insight into the experience.

In the course of my survey I came across a variety of elements in which, in my capacity as viewer, I expanded my own horizon by means of a self-comprehension of sorts. If I were to try to enumerate a number of fruitful possibilities which my emphasis on the experience suggests, I would mention the following. It is the experience and the response that can direct attention to what is unique and new in a certain image. Model-hunting in a limited sense tends to efface the image by relating its different parts to other images if the study is not rendered complete by approaches of other kinds. The response joins these fragments together, emphasising the concrete wholeness which is its most salient feature; that part of the research process is, to my mind, as important as the investigation of the relationships of the image.

Connected with this are the possibilities of art reception studies to account for the evocative life of a work of art, its living, creative matter, because it is able to examine why a certain work of art has succeeded in surviving the time and milieu of its origin. Or has not succeeded in doing so. It is only the response which can make a historical work of art continue to be alive as a work of art.

When the creative element in the experience of a historical work of art is emphasised, semantic energies are released, showing meanings which may not always have been obvious to contemporary viewers who saw the work of art when it was new. The "models" which a modern viewer, in responding to a work of art, relates to a historical work of art may be of a later date than the work studied, a phenomenon which a historical survey cannot describe or explain.

It is possible that all historico-critical research emanates from one's experience of a work of art; it is often the subjective experience of an object or a phenomenon that provides the impetus to carry out a particular survey. My study shows how important it is, at least in a case such as this one, to go back to the object and – not least – if it is possible, to the original experience of it.

Translation: Lars-Håkan Svensson and Muriel Larsson