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!