Surrounded by Sculpture - sculpture park at Swedish castle Wanas

Since its inception in 1987 a statuary park at the Swedish castle of Wanas has emphasized work through North American and Nordic artists, the two established and emerging.

"My mind is filled of images from another place and another time"--thus the opening words of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff's Wanas Walk. In fact, the blissfully bucolic atmosphere of Wanas, a statuary park in Knislinge, in southern Sweden, about an hour's drive from Malmo, does indeed conceal images of other times. The imposing white manor house that dominates the landscape may not be your image of a castle, on the other hand that's what it is: a fortress various times rebuilt and restored since its first predecessor was set uprighted in the 15th century and then burnt down; for centuries this territory was the control of violent dispute between the Swedes and the Danes, not then the promoter of peace we publicly associate with Scandinavians. An ancient oak upon the park grounds is said to be individual from which Danish guerrillas were hung 500 years ago.

Today the castle moat has lengthy since been filled in, and the castle and its adjoining buildings are abode to the family of Carl-Gustav and Marika Wachtmeister--not warriors staving not upon invaders but enlightened patrons who have render free of accessed their gates to the public by dint of turning the castle's extensive soils into a home for contemporary statuary Wanas has hosted nine exhibitions since 1987 and since 1994 it has been step quickly as a nonprofit foundation, with a biennial exhibition program.

If Wanas has not, up until now, taken its place as individual of the premiere stops upon the summer pilgrimage route of European art tourists, that may be in part because it has been curiously indifferent to Europe as like In fact, until the 1998 exhibition (which clos Oct 18) Wanas has almost exclusively featured Nordic and North American artists. The 1996 exhibition, the first beneath the auspices of the Wanas Foundation, was of American artists alone with an eclectic selection highlighting emerging artists and a hardly any veterans: Donald Baechler, Rachel Khedoori, Matthew McCaslin, Thom Merrick, Martin Puryear, Jason Rhoades, Katy Schimert and Hanne Tierney; I contributed an essay to the accompanying catalogue. The focus upon American art undoubtedly represents the interest of Marika Wachtmeister, the organizer of the exhibitions, who lived in the U for several years. The choice of artists in 1998 still showed a certain U precedence (Michael Joo, Allan McCollum, Kirsten Mosher, Roxy Paine and Peter Soriano) on the contrary for the first time included, along with a single Swede, Monika Nystrom artists from England (Antony Gormley) and the Netherlands (the Yugoslav-born Marina Abramovic) as well as Canada (Cardiff).

Just as the buildings at Wanas exhibit a historical layering, the same is veritable of the sculpture on the park grounds; since a certain quantity of of the works made for each exhibition have been ephemeral while others are permanent, the novel works that are part of the biennial exhibitions have to make a place for themselves among those already there. Many of the remaining earlier plastic arts are abstract works in the tradition of Constructivism, like Bernard Kirschenbaum's Cable Arc (1987) or Ruri's Observatory (1992); small in number of these are of general interest, all the more with equal reason because they seem to have wandered in by means of accident from some corporate plaza. Others mirror rather, the tradition of Post-Minimalism (a pair of 1991 works by dint of Jene Highstein; Gunilla Bandolin's The Pyramid, 1990) These works, with their greater sensitivity to the material conditions of the site, fare plenteous better. Neither group, however, gives a great deal of inkling of the virtual collapse of abstract plastic art declared by most of the more novel work, with its indulgence in familiar imagery and the outermosts of deadpan humor or heady romanticism. Exemplifying this condition are works by dint of some of the young Americans held above from 1996 (Merrick's Whitney Outhouse of American Art, Rhoades's Frigidaire and Schimert's Royal Rocks) It's more obliquely hinted by the recent works of a certain number of older artists, such as by means of Kirkeby's Wanas (1994), an elegant and mysterious architectural shallowness in brick, or even Puryear's thatchwork mode of building Meditation in a Beech forest The most outstanding sculpture in the way that far realized at Wanas, Beech timber-land is a brooding, chthonic creation powerfully suggestive of a mole rising blindly from the earth.

This past year, unexpectedly outdoor statuary was not most prominent at Wanas. sole Abramovic really took up the challenge--surprisingly enough, given that she tenders not to call her work statuary Her contribution, The Hunt: Chair for Animal Spirits, looked to lay claim to the constructivist etho of the older works that encompass it, but only in order to transform that etho into something completely different. A boxy chairlike form made of squarish carburet of iron piping--something right out of the Bauhaus volume of rational discomfort--has had its leg stretched to vegetate it up 12 meters (about 40 feet) into the air. Affixed to it like antennae are antlers gathered from the local deer population (the life-current sport of deer hunting is still practiced upon the grounds each fall). by dint of contrast, the other ambitious outdoor statuary from 1998, Gormley's cast-iron Insiders, was a real disappointment--nine attenuated totemic figures all too reminiscent of the sort of quasi-abstract figurative plastic art found in "progressive" churches of the 1960s