copenhagen2007: April 2007 Archives

Who knew that Kastrup airport had such a beautiful new connection between Terminals 1 and 2? My flight was nowhere near Terminal 1 and I still walked the length of it, just to go through all the arches:

At the end, a lone luggage cart:

Danish performance artist/author Claus Beck-Nielsen, reading from Selvmordsaktionen: beretningen om forsøget på at indføre demokratiet i Irak i året 2004 (The Suicide Action: The Account of the Attempt to Bring Democracy to Iraq, 2004) as part of World Book Day in Copenhagen.

There's a reason he is this thin -- truly ghoulish in person -- but I'll try to do a separate post about that later. I'm presenting on one of Beck-Nielsen's books at the 2007 SASS conference in Iowa later this week.

During a break in the World Book Day events, I grabbed some sushi from Letz Sushi, a small restaurant on Elmegade just off Nørrebrogade:

This afternoon we had a visit from three people involved in Gyldendal's new comprehensive Danish Literary History, a 5-volume work stretching from 1100 to 2000 AD. Critic May Schack and Professor Klaus P. Mortensen represented the editorial side of the effort, while Lasse Horne Kjældgaard was on hand to tell about writing some of the entries themselves.

In the US the issue of Nordic literary history has gotten a breath of fresh air with the effort to write a "History of Nordic Literary Cultures" along the lines of the successful Latin American effort. Steven Sondrup and Mark Sandberg, two American academics, have presented their work on this project at the last few SASS and IASS. The "Literary Cultures" projects are in a way set in opposition to more traditional reference works such as the Gyldendals volumes we heard about today, together with the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Briefly, the project seeks to break with biographical and/or chronological rubric and instead organize knowledge around the intersections instead. In this strategy, Copenhagen becomes a geographic node that contains a history of the importance of Danish theater for Norwegian and Swedish playwrights, just as 1905 becomes a temporal node with a special resonance for Norwegian literary culture. I don't know if there will be "no article on Strindberg" in the final product, but it's safe to say that the project seeks to move past the great man theory of literature

Having said that, the three Danes we met today made a spirited defense of individual authorship as the foundation of their approach, especially given the intended audience of the Gyldendal work. An interesting aspect to their approach lies in the eksemplariske princip (exemplary principle), wherein citations from each authors' works are included in the biographical discussion. In this way the Historie seeks to be "demonstrerende, ikke kun postulerende" (demonstrating, not just postulating.) They assign a high value to usability (anvendelighed) and see the historic progression of authors in each volume as the simplest way to reach readers in an intuitive manner -- and perhaps, through the use of thematic essays and cross-references, lead the reader to connections he or she had not previously considered.

Tonight was the book party for one of the more original volumes published by Museum Tusculanum Press: Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture. Edited by Khaled Ramadan, a KU art historian, the book analyzes the condition of exiled and refugee artists in Scandinavia, especially those from non-Western cultures.

"In Denmark there has been a tendency to view expatriate art not as part of current global developments, but as expressions of ethnic cultures of little importance to contemporary art practice. In contrast Peripheral Insider argues that expatriate art or internationalism in visual art is not only part of the global art discourse. It is a phenomenon with a specific history, closely related to colonial and post-colonial experiences."

The book wins points for the dramatic cover as well -- designed by Pernille, one of my co-workers -- that features the hilarious guerrilla art campaign "FOREIGNERS, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE US ALONE WITH THE DANES!"

(A note on those posters, designed by the Superflex collective in 2003 -- one of the questions they provoke is who, exactly, the 'us' is. From the admonition we can gather that the subject is neither fully Danish, nor a foreigner -- thus my interpretation that the 'us' doing the speaking is a kind of not-wholly-integrated outsider, an ethnic subject with permanent residence in Denmark but a problematic relationship to national belonging.)

Joining Ramadan on the panel discussion tonight was an Englishman, Trevor Davies, who has worked in artistic and cultural circles in Copenhagen since the 1980s, including stints as the director of the Copenhagen International Theatre and leading the Copenhagen European Cultural Capital project in 1996. He's most recently the author of a report on "Cultural Diversity Seen in Connection to Danish Arts Council" [pdf, huge]. Niels, the director of marketing at the press, bravely holds it aloft here:

As an American I can say that it's very interesting to hear Europeans frame debates over cultural relevance and social integration in terms of government funding. It seems that subsidy and support is the (literal) coin of the realm, and that enormous support from central bureaucracies is the starting point of the conversation, rather than a dangerous dead-end, as it often is in the States. However I will grant that Davies gave a spirited and effective defense of Danish cultural subsidies in his talk, which drew upon a discussion of the differences between his native Great Britain, where the millions of Southeast Asians form a critical cultural mass capable of producing and consuming culture in sizable numbers, and Denmark, where the 450,000 'foreigners' do not exist in significant enough clusters to perform the same cultural role. As Davies said, he wrote his new report "primarily for the ten people" who serve on the Kulturråd, so it will be interesting to see if his -- and Ramadan's -- work, in the academic and the political spheres, respectively, bears fruit.

A few pictures from the large cemetery in the middle of Nørrebro.

Søren Kirkegaard's grave:

Click through to Flickr to see a translation of the hymn on his tombstone.

Hans Christian Andersen:

On the way home from Assistens Kirkegård, I walked down Nørrebrogade before turning southwards down towards Frederiksberg. Due the Easter holiday, it was quiet enough for a young boy to ride his tricycle down the street. Behind him, an older cyclist on two wheels to the left, and on the pavement to the right a reminder of turbulent March: "69" represents Jagtvej 69, the former address of the Ungdomshus.