The Hollow Woman and a Three Legged Buddha

An open air exhibition of modern sculpture at Pilane on Tjörn

At the risk of being permanently associated with open air sculptures, this blog and accompanying illustrations are all about a visit to the island of Tjörn [sounds like shurn], a drive of about an hour and half north of Gothenburg on the Bohus coast. Tjörn is both an island and its own municipal area (eller kommun på ren svenska). Like Borås – see my previous entry – Tjörn has been trying to promote itself as an attractive place to visit for the culturally minded tourist. In my opinion, they’ve made a better job of it.

Tjörn is the home of the Scandinavian watercolour museum, and has been cleverly building on the success of the museum for a number of years. This summer, for the second year, the island is playing host to an exhibition of modern sculpture at the iron-age grave fields at Pilane [PEE-lan-eh – sort of].

The large-in-a-small-scale landscape of the Swedish west coast is a beautiful setting for the pieces that have been chosen for exhibition, though it probably helped on the day of my visit that the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the clouds were fluffy, white and flying and the breeze was warm. The sculptures are distributed among the low stone circles and grass-overgrown settings of the graves, and there was a peaceful, timeless atmosphere that was only made more apparent by all the enigmatic faces of the black and grey sheep grazing the grass or chewing the cud all about the statues.

You walk and you look and most of all, you touch. The surfaces, especially of the stone sculptures invite your hand. Different stones, different finishes, different textures. The sun warmed slightly irregular flat surface inside the slit of Knut Wold’s “Pilane Sten”, for instance, feels exactly like living skin.

The most extreme example of a sculpture inviting human contact, though, is one I’ve been thinking of as “The Hollow Woman”, though I see from the Pilane Internet site that the sculptor, Marit Lyckander, calls it “Helt i VIII” (= Completely in VIII). Inside a stone boulder is a space. You can enter the boulder through a slit door (if you’re not too fat that is – I couldn’t get in). Inside you find a hollowed out shape into which you can put your arms, legs, breasts (it’s a woman, ok?) and face – there’s a slit to look out of. You become the body that has been freed from the stone.

Scattered around, up on the rocks and variously over the grazing land, these figures contemplate the scenery, one another, the visitors. Neither specifically men or women, rather both genders in one. Androgynous. Human. Thoughtful, bored, meditative, afraid, listening, despairing, amused, questioning. The faces and poses tell different stories depending on how you look at them. I thought of them as Silent Figures, but the sculptor (Hanneke Beaumont from the Netherlands) gives some of the figures names, “Ennui” is one, and others are just “Bronze #7”.

Over the rocks and juniper bushes, out of the corner of your eye, you see glimpses of a massive leg, or two. Or three. The largest of the sculptures at Pilane is the “Three-Legged Buddha” by Zhang Huan. Apparently, this was first exhibited last winter at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. I’ve seen Zhang Huan’s work before. He was included in the exhibition of modern Chinese Art at Louisiana in May 2007. I remember most the video sequence of him standing in a Tibetan river, repeatedly stamping the water with a giant stamp engraved with the Chinese character for “China”. This three-legged Buddha is a similar commentary on Chinese imperialism, cultural and otherwise. Shards of Buddhist statues collected and rearranged in an unnatural form. One foot rests on the Buddha’s head – for a Buddhist from south-east Asia that must be a blasphemy on a par with a drawing of Mohammed for a Moslem (though I can’t imagine any Buddhist trying to murder the artist in retaliation). Religion overthrown. And yet something remains – half buried, still the Buddha’s meditation is undisturbed.

When we got to Pilane on Saturday, (it was an outing for my wife and a friend, too), the car park was filling up, but at no point did the exhibition seem crowded. The sculptures are widely distributed, (though each is in line of sight of at least one other), so there is never a feeling of being crowded. Although I sometimes had to wait for people to get out of shot, if I chose I could easily take pictures that placed the sculptures in a wide, empty landscape.

Inevitably, I find myself drawing comparisons between the efforts to showcase modern sculpture at Tjörn and in Borås. Both are displaying monumental sculpture in open-air settings, one in the countryside, one in a town. Both have abstract and representational sculptures, both have sculptures in stone and bronze. Both have a really big statue as a feature.

So what’s to choose between them? Borås is free, but you have to make a paid phone call for each statue to get more information; Tjörn’s exhibition costs 40 Swedish crowns a head, but you get a little illustrated booklet (in Swedish), to take with you. Tjörn’s exhibition has a very nicely made Internet site, text in Swedish, with lots of pictures; Borås has an internet site, but it’s not very extensive and a bit boring. On the other hand, the recorded messages on the telephone for the Borås exhibition give some of the artists an opportunity to talk about their work, which is a nice touch.

No, the real difference it seems to me is that the Borås exhibition is just nowhere near as visitor friendly as the exhibition at Tjörn. I paid 40 crowns, but I saw all the sculpture at Pilane. In Borås, I saw less than half of the sculptures, and even though I didn’t have to pay anything, I still felt cheated!

Pinocchio in Borås

[Pronunciation note: Borås. Say ‘bore-awe’ and put an ‘s’ sound on the end.]

Borås is a little town. (The people of Borås would probably want me to call it a city. They insist that the proper name is Borås Stad; they passed a resolution in the council making it so. But calling a place a “city” in the local by-laws doesn’t actually make it one.)

So, Borås is a small place that nowadays is little more than a dormitory town for Gothenburg. Once it was an important textile centre; weaving and spinning cloth for the Swedish market and for export, but that was then. Today, only the shell remains. Some of the local schools offer tailoring and design programmes, some Swedish textile and clothing designers are based here, there are a number of clothing chains and mail-order clothing stores with warehouses and offices in and around Borås. Borås folk, especially women, seem more fashion conscious that the average Swede, and (for Swedes) remarkably well-dressed. And there is a museum reflecting the glories of the past.

Other than that …

During the summer now, Borås is hosting an exhibition of modern sculpture. Exactly why they are doing this is a bit of a mystery, but it seems to have to do with the town’s curious decision to buy a nine metre high painted bronze statue of Pinocchio by the American pop-artist Jim Dine.

Pinocchio, yes. The wooden puppet, who comes alive, whose nose grows longer for every lie he tells, who goes on a journey to find out how to become a real boy. Him. This spring the story has been a gift to Swedish newspaper columnists (and bloggers) with nothing else top write about. Trying to find a connection, I mean. Does the Pinocchio story have a particular appeal to the people of Borås? Are they rather wooden? Thick as two short planks? Are they, like the wooden puppet, searching for a place in the world where they will be taken seriously as real people? Are their noses particularly long? If not, does that mean they tell fewer lies than other Swedes? How likely is that, given that the town’s previous anthropomorphic personification was a knallehandlare, a peddler?

Some Swedish journalists and bloggers have compared the Pinocchio statue to the Eiffel Tower. Nobody knew what good the Tower would do when it was built, but look, more than 100 years on it is a world renowned symbol for Paris! OK. But Paris was still Paris before the Tower (capital of France, major European city, place of trade industry and culture ...) With or without Pinocchio, Borås is still, well, Borås.

There’s a Swedish gesture. If you’ve fooled someone, or witnessed someone fooled, and you want to draw attention to the fact, you can ‘make a long nose’. Put the tips of the fingers and thumb of your right hand together, touch the end of your nose with them and ostentatiously pull your hand out from your face, going “Nä-nä” the while.

I don’t like to think of myself as having a closed mind, and my regional bus pass had 24 hours left to run, so on Tuesday I decided to take myself off to Borås and see for myself the new attraction, and the rest of the sculpture exhibition.

If you are tempted to do the same, here’s a tip: Go on the Internet and print out the map of the town which has the sculptures marked. Go here. (The link should work and map should be available till the 21st September 2008.) Why? Because this is the only place you are going to get any help finding the sculptures. Borås is not a big town, and the sculptures are generally quite monumental (though none come up even to Pinocchio’s hips), but trust me, you can’t find them just by wandering around. That was what I tried to do.

Another interesting fact about Borås. The only tourists they expect are the ones who come to study at the technical college. It must be so: that’s where they have located the tourist information centre. Not at the bus station, not at the rail station, not in the town square, not near the town’s main hotel, not even near the town (“city”) hall, but across the road from the college. I found it, now, on an internet map. On Tuesday when I was in Borås, though, I asked several people, and got some friendly (and contradictory) directions, I never did find it.

(Oh, and a tip for the people in Borås, why not tell Eniro that you have a technical college? They don’t know - see right!)

The first sculpture I came across was near the train station. It was (is I suppose) called “Whirlwind”, and looked as though it had been made from several lengths of different coloured hosepipe. The light was very dull, so I didn’t take a picture, which I regret in retrospect. Nearby I found a metal sign which identified this as sculpture number 16. The metal sign also identified the sculptors (a pair in this case). And then there was a telephone number to call for more information about the sculpture.

A telephone number.

Well, this is the mobile age, and did have my cell-phone with me, but I wasn’t sure how much money was left on the card, and there was no indication how much the phone call would cost me.

Having carried out some investigative journalism (ahem) I can inform you, dear reader, that the price is “the price of a normal local telephone call”. (I got this information by phoning the people who organise the service, a company called "On Spot Story".) It’s a clever idea. Saves the museum, or whoever is organising the exhibition the cost of printing information, but it could so easily cost 10 or 20 crowns a call and be a method for the organisers to help finance their exhibition.

Hi! Borås people! It would intelligent to tell the public how much a call is going to cost. Not doing so sends the usual message when there’s no price tag on something you have in your shop window: If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

So on I walked. This statue of a meditating head and shoulders rising out of the water of the town’s little river (Viskan) was the next sculpture I came across. Actually, this one’s been in Borås for four or five years, so I’m not sure whether it’s part of the exhibition or not. (I couldn’t find any metal signs.) But it’s a nice statue and someone had crowned it with a wreath of flowers (now a bit withered). I sat on the steps down to the river opposite the statue and as the sun obligingly broke through the clouds, I took some pictures.

Walking further along the river, I crossed over to the park on the other side when I saw this monumental stone quadrolith. (Well, it’s not a monolith, is it! There are four blocks of stone. What would you call it?)

It has a name – apparently it’s called “Dogon”. I don’t know why. (OK, now I know. I phoned the number and heard the sculptor explain that he was inspired by the masks of the Dogon people of Mali. I do actually see something of a similarity.) It was dull again, so my photos were dull too, but I’ve tried to brighten them up with some Photoshop tinkering. What do you think?

The next statue was a giant rabbit with blind eyes. Then there was a twisted yellow shape that looked plastic but turned out to be metal lacquered like a car. And then there was a corkscrew of metal tubing, square in cross-section which I found quite fascinating and which I think has the shape of an eye in either end. But maybe I’m just seeing things.

There were several more statues in the park along with the twisted eye, but as they were not monumental, not abstract and not ‘pop’, I assumed they weren’t part of the exhibition. I did like the two life-size children playing on a see-saw, though it crossed my mind to wonder whether such a statue would be acceptable nowadays. The children just pre-teen and are naked (or should that be nude?) Thinking about the recent political censorship of photos of nude (naked?) teenagers in Australia and the general hysteria over child pornography. See my other blog on Ipernity for more on this.

Eventually, I found my way to Pinocchio. He’s on a roundabout on the edge of the town centre, striding in towards the town. A local pizzeria has taken advantage of his presence to become the Pinocchio Pizzeria – complete with some much more cheerful representations of the Disney character. Because, frankly, Jim Dine’s sculpture doesn’t seem very cheerful. He doesn’t seem to have much character at all. Blank expression, little eyes, long nose. Well, more character than the Eiffel Tower, I suppose, but still. This little girl was playing about his feet with her brother, under the watchful eyes of their father. She seemed to be having fun – and to be oblivious to the giant metal monster towering over her.

I ended up seeing eight or nine sculptures in the exhibition, but the Internet (go here) lists 28 or so. So, again, if you are planning to visit the exhibition, print out the map in advance.

Oh, and a footnote to those phone-in recorded messages about the sculptures. They’re only worth calling if you understand spoken Swedish. Yes, there’s a message in English and German as well as Swedish, which tells you when to input the code number for more information about a given statue, but the information itself is only in Swedish. The exhibition organisers obviously don’t expect any visitors who are not Swedes. Way to go, guys. That’ll really put Borås on the international map!

Back … and Crowing

After three years Observing Gothenburg, if at all, from back of beyond (that’s a place called Falköping), I moved home again last week. For a more developed account, see my blog at ipernity.com/supercargo.


Last Saturday, after days of dust and distress and lifting and lugging, my wife and I decided to take a day off just to celebrate my return. We went out into the countryside – for more on that, see below. But first, let me crow a little. This morning I had a picture published in our local paper!

The Opera ship

On Monday, one of the paper’s journalists repeated a frequent comment made by the guides on the sightseeing boats here in Gothenburg. The guides love to point out the new waterside opera house and say something like: “The design is supposed to be based on a boat, but I’ve been coming past here for four years and I still can’t see it. Perhaps you have a better imagination?” The journalist added his tupennyworth “Nej, tyvärr” (= no unfortunately).


Well, I see it every time I cross the bridge into town, so I thought I’d respond. I also thought I could point out that the view is from Hisingsbron, as you come from Hisingen. This is important (in a very parochial way) because some mainland Gothenburgers look down their noses at us Hising Island dwellers as not real Gothenburgers. (Hisingen houses about a quarter of the tax-paying population of the city. It also includes most of the Volvo plants – where upwards of 20,000 Gothenburgers work – the major container and oil ports, Gothenburg’s second airport and large areas of countryside. It’s also been lived in and on for several thousand years more than the city of Gothenburg has existed. More about that below.)


But the fight against local prejudice is long, and setbacks are many; Göteborgs-Posten removed my Hisingen references when they published.

Violence and Death on Hisingen

That could be a headline in GP. We Hisingers feel the local press unfairly highlights social problems with a Hisingen connection. If someone is murdered in Askim (posh mainland district), or if there’s a bank robbery in the centre of town, and they can connect at least one of the perpetrators to Hisingen, then that’s what they’ll do. Am I going on too much about this?

OK, what this heading actually refers to is Saturday’s walk and some of the pictures I took. We enjoyed the walk on Saturday so much, that we repeated a part of it yesterday evening, in order to sit on the rocks by the sea and paddle by the light of the setting sun. On the original walk, we’d seen masses of wild honeysuckle and wanted to smell it in all its glory, but even at 8.30 p.m. the sun was still too high and it wasn’t till we were walking back again that we began to notice the scent that would not come into full strength for an hour or more. It was a beautiful evening, even so, and the walk on Saturday also.


Yesterday it was really warm, over 25 degrees, and today as I write it must be about the same, with blue sky and the very occasional fluffy white cloud. But on Saturday the weather was still changeable. The walk was the Bronsålderssund stig (the Bronze Age Sound Path, where sound means a narrow inlet of water).



Bronze Age Settlements

Once upon a time, about 5,000 years ago, the whole of Scandinavia was lower relative to the level of the sea than it is now. Hisingen was not one large island, but many smaller islands. The first permanent inhabitants here were fisher folk and farmers, and they made their homes at the edge of the water. As the land rose, what were shallow bays and straits, drained and ultimately became rich farmland, while the stony meadows of the Neolithic and Bronze Age people were abandoned as too infertile.

The places they lived and worked became overgrown, or were used only to pasture sheep and goats. For centuries, the only signs of the earliest people were the cairns of stones they raised to cover their dead. These were on the higher ground, above the settlements, on land even the Bronze age people thought too infertile to farm. But the cairns stood out and as the land rose, they became even more prominent. Generations of sailors used them as markers to identify the coast and navigate the channels.

Then came the archaeologists, who opened the cairns (those that hadn’t long ago been plundered) and found cremated bones, earthenware pots, bone combs and bronze artefacts. They began to piece the story together.

The Bronsålderssund walk, meanders along the Bronze Age coast, visiting the sites of the settlements that have been discovered. Sometimes it clambers up to the cairns and stone settings on the tops of the hills, and furthest out on the island, it reaches the present sea coast, which is where we went paddling on Thursday. There’s not a lot of history to see. A few signs with brief information in Swedish (and briefer information in English). But the landscape is large on a small scale. Though the hills are not high, there’s a scramble to climb them, though the path itself is only about 4 km (1 mile), it winds about through trees and bushes, rocks and boulders, and gives a sense of great variety, complexity and distance. And it is easy to picture how it might have looked all those years ago, when the settlements were alive and the dead in the cairns were newly mourned.

A good day’s outing, in fine weather any time in the year. If you’re visiting Gothenburg and want to find out more go here! The path (my wife assures me) is clearly marked. Clearly, if you are not red-green colour-blind. If, like me, you have difficulty seeing red spots painted on lichen covered rocks, it’s a good idea to take someone with you who doesn’t have that problem. Or a dog.

The are more photos from the walk at my Ipernity site. Come and visit!

Well, it’s good to be back and I will try to keep up this blog with a new entry every few days from now on. For now, though, Hej då!