Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.08.2014, Blaðsíða 44

Making The Case For
Art In The Time Of Need
In 1979 it was considered abnormal
behaviour to study art, to become an artist.
Icelandic society was still struggling with
the big swallowing of abstract painting (a
procedure that lasted 30 years), and only
a handful of parents could say they were
happy seeing their children off to the
“Myndlista- og handíðaskólinn.”
We’ve come a long way.
Today Icelandic parents are almost
hoping for their kids to go to art school, to
grow long Mugison beards and become
the hipsters of the future, the leaders
of the next generation. When you look
back, you can see that art has made a
difference here in Iceland.
2. The Björk Effect
I grew up in a very one-sided society: Only
one man could be Prime Minister, and he
was also the richest man in Iceland, only
one man could write in Icelandic, and he
was getting very old, only one man (yes,
they were all men back then, women
were only used for modelling or teaching
French on TV) was a good painter, and he
lived in Paris, and only one man was good
at dancing, and he lived in San Francisco,
and no man at all was good at the theatre
and absolutely no one at doing films. Well,
back then only one film had been made
in Iceland, and it was only shown... well,
uh... once.
Everything was one, once and one-
sided.
Reykjavík only had one restaurant,
one bar, one disco, one radio station,
one TV station, one museum, one gallery
and one tree (down in Suðurgata). And
downtown there was only one man
walking around and that was all the
street life we had. This man is dead now,
bless his soul, but we’ve come a long way
from one to one o one. For now we have
101 of everything. One hundred and one
restaurants, one hundred and one pubs,
one hundred and one writers and one
hundred thousand bands.
And it was all thanks to one little
woman, and her One Little Indian. Yet she
was never elected for any office, she never
even entered politics, she only had this
incredible voice, and a thousand ideas, a
thousand ways to use it, and all of them
were NEW. Yet she did more for Iceland
in thirty years than a hundred politicians
in a hundred years. She transformed our
culture, raised its standards, pushed it to
a higher level, gave it a wider exposure,
branded it as trendy for the next fifty
years, lifted our spirits and gave us self-
esteem. More than anyone it was she who
took us from “One Everything Reykjavík”
to “One O One Reykjavík.”
We should stop talking about before
and after the Crash and start talking about
before and after Björk.
It’s maybe the most radical example
in history of how much art can do for a
society, how much one little woman can
do for her country, how much power
art can have. For proof you only need
to look at the current Icelandic music
scene, from Arnalds to Airwaves, from
Samaris to Anna Þorvaldsdóttir. A radio
station in the States even did a special
best-of list for 2013, with Icelandic bands
only. With its music
scene Reykjavík is
like a small kid with a
balloon the size of the
Zeppelin airship.
The answer to
the eternal question
why there are so
many rock bands in
Iceland is obvious. One star creates a
thousand.
3. The Man Who Saved Iceland
A similar example of the power of the
individual is the curious case of Árni
Magnússon. In the beginning of the
18th century (his 350th birthday was
celebrated last year) he started his
quest for finding the old manuscripts,
second or third hand copies of The
Sagas, first written on calfskin in the
13th century. This, our national treasures,
the foundations of our nation, our
claim to fame, and the most evident
proof of intellectual life in the Northern
Hemisphere before the invention of
books, all this could have been lost, were
it not for the relentless work of this one
stubborn man.
Árni came around when paper
was new in Iceland. People had
started preferring neat looking paper
manuscripts and printed books, and
were fast forgetting about the old and
smelly calfskin things. Hard times had
even forced people to make shoes and
clothes out of the skin pages and, when
the cold and the hunger hurt the most,
some had even taken
to eating The Sagas.
(A fitting end to the
“Oral Tradition” that
created them.)
But Mr.
Magnússon went
all around Iceland,
visited every farm
he could, searching and asking for lost
pages of lost manuscripts. He could see
that some world class literature was
being lost forever, if nothing would be
done about it. Before he died at the age of
66, he managed to collect enough of it to
save a whole “civilization.” He practically
gave us the Iceland we have today.
4. “Cut Taxes, Kill An Artist”
From this we can see how art can
influence society. At first sight it may not
look like the most necessary thing for a
nation, but when you look closer, it might
actually be the most important one.
For some years the artless people
have been telling us: First we need to fix
our health system, before we can allow
us an art school, a museum, a theatre, or
all those artists’ grants. A recent bumper
sticker even reads: “Cut Taxes, Kill an
Artist.”
And sometimes you might actually
admit to yourself that art is not totally
necessary. I mean, the fishing can go on
without it, the taxis will run, the aluminium
factories will be OK. Yeah. Let’s admit it.
We’re not necessary! We’re just
parasites on the back of society! Sucking
out blood and money! For our own
egoistic careers!
And so you lay down in your bed
at night, an unnecessary man falling
to his unnecessary sleep, and in your
unnecessary dream you dream that
people are standing outside your house,
banging their pots and pans, screaming
for their money back, all those grants they
gave you over the years, and you spent
on rented rooms and bread and butter, in
the hope of writing novels and painting
paintings. They don’t care about any of
it, it’s all shit to them, and now they’re
setting fire to your house...
And then you wake up from those
stupid thoughts and you don’t care if
someone says you’re unnecessary, for
you realise that art is necessary for you.
You just have to be an artist, like some
people are farmers and other people
are gay. Yeah. It’s a biological thing. It’s
the same as with the gay 7%. There will
always be that magical 7% of every nation
that wants to make art, to do “needless”
things: Write Sagas, sing about Human
Behaviour or put the sun inside the Tate
Modern. And no matter how many Hitlers
this planet will see, they’ll never be able to
eliminate this 7% need to do unnecessary
things.
5. A Featherless Peacock
For society, art is like what the feathers
are to the peacock. They might not
seem necessary to his survival, but if
you take them away from him, he’s no
longer a peacock. Without his feathers,
44 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 11 — 2014ART
When I was 20 years old I decided to enter the Icelan-
dic School of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavík. My grandfather
voiced some doubts, but my parents were OK with it. But
one day I met a distant cousin of mine on the bus, who said:
“You’re going to the School of Arts and Crafts? Why? You
want to learn how to knit?”
This was back in 1979, way before Björk and Raggi Kjar-
tans. This was the time when you only went to art school
because you had this disease, this art disease, this ongoing
inner desire to express yourself. It had nothing to do with the
hip and the cool. Our art school was lightyears from being
the coolest school on the planet, like it has become today.
Photo
Alisa Kalyanova
Words
Hallgrímur Helgason
The
Magnificent
7%
Hallgrímur Helgason is an Icelandic
writer/artist living in Reykjavík. His
last show of paintings, “The His-
tory of Icelandic Literature Vol. IV,”
at Tveir hrafnar listhús, Reykjavík,
was covered in Art Forum by Doug-
las Coupland. His books are out in
many languages, the best known
being ‘101 Reykjavík’ and ‘The Hit-
man’s Guide to Housecleaning,’
both available in English. A stage
version of his last novel ‘The Woman
at 1000°’ will premiere at The Na-
tional Theatre in September. The
Danish film ‘Comeback,’ based on
his screenplay, will premiere early
2015.
Who is
Hallgrímur
Helgason?
Illustration
Inga María Brynjarsdóttir