The 1st at Moderna: Ann Böttcher

This story is one of many in Ann Böttcher’s ongoing project The Sweden Series [a selection] which is being shown as part of The 1st at Moderna sequence. The project deals with the way the idea of the spruce has developed and changed in Swedish cultural history over a period of nearly 400 years. With great care and precision Böttcher mixes photocopies, print-outs, post-it notes and postcards with her own expressive graphite portraits of spruces, and arranges them along a black line on which the highly detailed spruce portraits form exclamation marks, marking important events in history of the spruce. For the exhibition at Moderna Museet Böttcher has chosen several works from the museum’s archives to be included in The Sweden Series, and she has chosen to put her historical timeline parallel to the hanging of museum’s collection – the two chronologies are linked.

In a densely forested nation like Sweden, trees have always been of great importance. For a long time, the spruce has had ritual value. Only a century ago, the old tradition disappeared of lining the path of the coffin to the churchyard with spruces, whose tops were broken to point in the direction of the church, so that the spirit of the dead would not turn back. Spruce branches were placed outside the house to keep away evil spirits.

In peasant society the forest was important, and dangerous. People lived off it and close to it – the forest played a major role in their lives. Much of what they needed could be found there, but also all that was unknown, all the things that people could not control. That is why they frightened each other with folk-tales about the forest being alive, about sirens of the woods who seduced grown men, about trolls and about inexplicable beings. The two girls under the spruce in Ydre kept quiet when they saw the first search parties with their swinging lanterns. They had heard tell of the lysegubben (Jack o’ Lantern), and they took great care to stay out of his way.

But The Sweden Series deals with more than just folk-tales. The main theme is the way people have viewed the spruce tree in the history of Swedish art and literature. Having been abominated in artistic and cultural circles during the rococo period (it did not fit in at all with the leafy French ideal landscapes of the time), during the Romantic period of the 19th century, the spruce was transformed into a national symbol. Tall and straight, strong and indomitable, it became an emblem for the Swede and for Swedishness. The tree even managed to become highly fashionable in circles where it had previously been unmentionable. The explorer and author Llewellyn Lloyd, who himself moved to live in the great forests of Värmland, introduced expressions like “The Granris” (spruce twig) and “The Granruska” (spruce branch) into literary salons in England.

The spruce even played a significant role during the great T.B. epidemic at the turn of the 20th century. A sanatorium should preferably be located near a pine forest, where the air was thought to be especially clean. Sanatorium culture gradually developed its own style of architecture, of which Alvar Aalto’s sanatorium at Paimio in Finland is a splendid example.

As Ann Böttcher’s chronology approaches the modern age, the spruce periodically recurs in darker contexts. The Nazis turned it into a symbol of Aryanness. “Hitler did not miss any opportunity to be photographed in front of a tree or a forest,” Böttcher says. Swedish Nazis, too, wanted to be associated with this tree that symbolised Swedish nature. Through Internet auctions Böttcher has picked up postcards published by the NSAP (Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet – the National Socialist Labour Party) showing rune stones and swastikas flanked by spruces.

But the spruce and the forest also had a lighter image during the 20th century, one that still lives on. Elsa Beskow’s stories, which often take place in the forest, are still among the favourite reading of today’s children. The Mulleskolan (an outdoor school for young children), which emerged during the 1970s under the auspices of the Friluftsfrämjandet, is still a way for children to develop an interest in nature. And that is not to mention Allemansrätten (‘everyman’s right’, or legal right of access to private land), which can almost be seen as a national treasure. Maybe the next chapter in The Sweden Series will be about Swedes not being so very concerned about what is happening to their forests. There is not much left of Sweden’s primeval forests, and modern forestry is constantly wiping out ever more Swedish forest-dwelling species.

So, is Ann Böttcher a political artist then? No, she herself does not think so, more a teller of tales. In her carefully formulated chronology she situates herself and her art in a broader context. This makes her works utterly contemporary, however much history they contain. One of the distinctive features of Böttcher’s work and of The Sweden Series is that she mixes her own art with that of others. Her drawings are one ingredient, standing side by side with works by visual artists, writers, poets, and illustrators. No one thing counts for more than another, rather, together they create the story that she wants to tell. She brings Sweden’s cultural heritage up to date, and makes it a topical concern. Every detail in her presentation is carefully judged, every piece of paper is chosen with care, every stroke of the pencil is in the right place. Yet, at the same time, she allows herself the liberty of underlining things with a coloured pencil, of making notes in the margins and of sticking post-it notes on particularly interesting documents. Here is the everyday in the same place as the aesthetically perfect. This must be what history looks like.

Camilla Carlberg