Here and There – Denmark
Louisiana is quintessentially Danish. I know some people go on about the Mermaid on the Rock in Copenhagen Harbour, or the Hans Christian Andersen Museum and his childhood home in Odense, or the original Legoland Resort in Billund, or, for Australians, Mary Donaldson, the one-time Sydney-based account executive, you know, the one who became Crown Princess Mary of Denmark. Some Australians are proud of Denmark’s role in providing a breeding sanctuary for Tasmanian Devils. I have no doubt these are all worthy of attention, but for me they all pale into insignificance compared to Louisiana. To be clear, I am not talking about Louisiana, the 18th state of the United States, created in 1812, following the amazing Louisiana Purchase of 1803. No, I am talking about the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, to be found some 35 kilometres north of Copenhagen, in Humlebæk. This Louisiana is one of those wonderful art galleries to be found in a garden setting, a centre for contemporary art, painting and sculpture. For brevity I’ll continue to call it Louisiana, rather than its formal name, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, or Louisiana MMA.
I don’t want to make extravagant claims. There are other similar outstanding museums of modern art across the globe. In Australia, Melbourne has the Heide Museum of Modern Art, which was established some twenty years earlier than Louisiana in 1934, with the similar concept of creating a museum for modern art in the grounds of a fine old home. England is packed out with stunning museums of modern art, as are the USA, Europe and Asia. What makes Louisiana special for me was the impact of my first visit there in the early 1970s.
Denmark is a delightful country, a small-scale version of Indonesia, with some 1,419 islands (yes, I know Indonesia is vast in comparison, as it has some 17,000 islands!). Denmark is small, some 43,000 sq kms, about one-sixth the size of Australia’s Victoria, with a population just under 5.9 m (Victoria has nearly 6.7 m residents). South of Norway, and south-west of Sweden, it is part of Scandinavia. It is just 4 kms from Helsingør to Helsingborg by boat, the closest point in Sweden. Helsingør is said to have been the inspiration for Elsinore in Macbeth. Denmark and Sweden are now joined by a road bridge-tunnel complex some 15 miles long, which links Copenhagen and Malmo (some 28 miles apart in total). The Jutland peninsula and the islands that make up Denmark are north of Hamburg, and on the map look rather like collection of territory ejected from Germany in an ancient volcanic era
All that geography tells you little about a country that consist of a high-developed advanced economy, a leader in design, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy and high-tech applications, especially telecommunications. With a high standard of living, it is one of the world leaders in education, health care, civil liberties and policies to ensure LGBTQ equality. Much to the surprise (and horror) of US visitors, the Danish economy is characterized by extensive government welfare measures and high taxation, which allows it to ensure an equitable distribution of income. Denmark is a member of the EU but not the Eurozone, and it has opted not to use the Euro. As for climate, and to my surprise the first time I visited, Copenhagen is at a similar latitude to the England-Scotland border. I could add a whole lot of information about the Danish Vikings in the early part of the second millennium, and the Danelaw in England around 1000 AD, but I want to get back to Louisiana.
To visit Louisiana, I drove up to Humlebæk from Copenhagen. This was before the Helsingør Motorway was built, and I chose to take the coast road, the Strandvejen. Much of the journey was close to the beach, water to the right and fields to the left, except for a series of small towns. The journey took us past conventional and modern beachside homes, and every so we would pass through a small urban area. We pulled away from the shoreline as we entered Humlebæk, passed through the town, and entered the grounds of the museum.
I have no idea what I expected to see. What I remember was that it was both stunning, and yet familiar. Stunning. This was a museum of glass, minimalist Danish design, simple, spare and light filled rooms containing beautifully displayed modern art, surrounded by grassy areas within which you could see pieces of sculpture. Nothing was squashed together, both the paintings inside and the constructions outside given room to breathe, to be observed. Familiar? I had just driven up the coast, and had seen, and on at least two occasions stopped to admire, modern Danish beach houses. Those I recall appeared to be huge glass boxes, raised up from the ground, and projecting out towards the sea. Louisiana appeared to share much of the same aesthetic: it wasn’t just a stunning gallery complex, it was also testimony to modern Danish architecture: It was only when I went to the website recently that I realised the old home was still there, around which the museum had grown.
If I don’t want to make extravagant claims about Louisiana, I do want to explain why it had such an impact on me, and how that first experience has reverberated throughout my life. I had been to art galleries before: the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, the Tate Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and much later than my visit to Denmark, the Tate Modern in London. All of these presented art in what I will have to describe as the ‘classical’ style. Most of those London art museums were old, classical stone buildings, the walls covered with hundreds of paintings, the statuary largely inside (too much rain!), and also with each piece close to the others. I had learnt from my early visits that you don’t go ‘to the museum’, but rather to a few rooms, and there you spend time looking at just part of the collection. It was like reading my Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedias: there was too much there, and you had to school yourself to focus on one aspect, one topic, one era.
In a way that is familiar to me now, on first entering Louisiana I saw art in a completely different way. It was almost unsettling. I can still remember going into one room in the museum which had a complete glass wall at one end, large areas of glass on at least one other side, and just one picture in the room. Not just that room, but going from one after another I entered spaces where the design was to ensure you had room to really look at the art. It was close to unsettling, especially for a boy who had been brought up on I Spy books.
Do you know about I Spy Books? It is hard to explain the impact of I Spy books on children like me. I suppose they share some of characteristics with Pokémon Go!! Each book was a list of items that you had to find, and then provide details of information that related to what you had ‘spotted’. A typical example was I Spy London. To complete the book, you would travel all over London (although mainly the central area) looking out for sights like the house Dickens lived in, the Monument (for the Fire of London), etc. As you tracked down each item, there would be a question: in the case of St Martins in the Fields, you had to find the plaque giving the date it was built, and the architect’s surname. It was Nash, and no, I didn’t remember that detail. While writing about I Spy books I found a fascinating if rather brief blog by Jen Pedler from 2014. She decided to follow the I Spy the Sights of London trail and recorded her observations: since she was using the original book, she also commented on things that had changed since the books were written. There were quite a few!
Like Pokémon Go? Not really. The task in each book was to find things in the real world, ranging from the sights of London to birds, wildflowers, aircraft, cars, musical instruments, and more. Each time you completed a book, you sent it in to the ‘Big Chief’ and, if you had the correct information, you were sent a feather (a feather in your cap!!) and a certificate of commendation. Some people saw it as a group exercise, but I was determinedly an individual working away at getting the books completed by myself. The rewards were recognition, getting you out (out of the house, a feature much loved by many parents) and collecting. Collecting is a habit I have never lost, but as I will explain in a moment, I no longer devote my leisure time to past activities like seeking more and more postage stamps, railway engine numbers, or copies of the first editions of every Australian Penguin book ever published.
More subtly, those I Spy books also worked to develop my interests; while spotting train engines and bird watching were activities shared with a primary school friend some of the time, I pursued them by myself, too. When I went out with an I Spy book I often did a bit of engine spotting and kept an eye out for any strange birds! I became a rather obsessive collector (and I probably still am), and kept everything carefully recorded, organised, and in its right place. While my mother had been keen on my various pursuits to begin with, she later came to regret each one, seeing each as yet another activity from which she was excluded, but which seemed to work a kind of magic on me; happy alone, doing my own thing. Louisiana was to throw all this carefully organized life of checklists and organisation up in the air. That approach had worked at school, and it helped at university, but it was of no use in a room with just one painting in front of me.
Perhaps my first reaction in Louisiana might have been a sense of being cheated. Where were the other paintings? No I Spy checklist, I allowed the magic of that gallery work on me. It was the beginning of a process that continued for years. Perhaps two decades later I was looking at art differently. Years later I was taken around the Heide gallery and its storage backrooms by the museum’s director. So many paintings, but I only looked at two, one of which became central to my teaching and thinking about postmodernism, art, and much else. On either side of the world, but Louisiana and Heide are inextricably linked in my mind.
The magic from that visit worked its way through me in many different ways. At the time I was in Humlebæk, I was an academic. Looking back, I can see part of the change that visit wrought was in relation to me as a university teacher and as a researcher. Stamp collector Sheldrake was being shifted out of the limelight. In part, that transition had begun before my visit to Denmark. I was already losing interest in traditional academic research, spending years pursuing data on some specific topic, exploring the minutiae of a theory and its consequences. In part that was because I was more interested in the application of ideas than I was in developing theory. But it was also because I began to see my ability to collect and recall hundred, even thousands of facts in order to regurgitate them didn’t suit how I wanted to be in the world. What’s that conventional saying? ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ True, but in order to achieve what the picture can, we need a thousand words or more to explore how it speaks to us.
Louisiana inveigled its way into my teaching. I had never enjoyed lecturing, collecting material from dozens of books and articles, putting them into some kind of order, and then presenting the collage of ‘facts’ to students. I could do it, as it drew on stamp collector Sheldrake, but I soon realised, when I did it the result was boring!
How can I explain this? Perhaps by admitting I once earned the disdain of a colleague for my way of teaching business strategy, no lectures, but lots of challenges for them to address. I believed my students learnt more my way. The difference between the two of us was simple. I would shape a semester long course around one book (not a textbook), or perhaps a collection of just a handful of articles. I assumed the students would read the material. My task was not to tell them what was there; after all, they could read! No, what I wanted to do was to have a discussion on the points I saw were at issue, to work together to explore the questions and problems they raised, and to learn from each other’s perspectives. We had material to work on, but it was a starting point, and it would be developed as the group worked together. Did those students read other books and articles? Of course, they did, but their reading was driven by enquiry, an interest in what we were examining, and I expected them to do that for themselves, to follow their own noses! My rather supercilious colleague would comment that my students lacked a textbook and worried they hadn’t read X’s work. No, I thought, perhaps they hadn’t, but they had absorbed the principles and practices of strategic thinking and knew how to use them in their careers.
In another sense, the magic of Louisiana changed my approach to reading. I was a stamp collecting reader, working my way through everything written by each author in turn. I still do that, in the sense that when I find an author I like I will look out for other books she or he has written. Voracious reading is a continuing and highly enjoyable addiction. However, I have a much greater appreciation of the depth and richness of some books, those that I go back to and reread and continue to reread. That is because they speak to me in a way that the stamp collecting side of my character misses.
Like many other people, I read several books for relaxation, enjoyable time spent in an author’s world, trying to work our who killed whom, or when and where the various ‘silk roads’ appeared and prospered, or the latest mindboggling explanations of physics and cosmology. But those I return to are neither non-fiction nor just simple stories: they are explorations of human nature, how we live with one another, what we seek to do in life and how to make sense of the world we’re in. These aren’t books that do this through a non-fiction approach, telling what is or might be the case, but rather less directly, encouraging the reader to think, reflect, and explore the complexities of people, relationships, and how we make sense of one another, doing so through the author’s characters.
What does that mean in practice? To the despair of some who know me, I reread books like Pride and Prejudice, each time seeing something more to be understood about the foibles of relationships, the consequences of fads and misunderstandings, luxuriating for a few hours inside a small yet fascinating world. I reread Adam Dalgleish’s cases, no longer exercised by whodunnit, but rather trying to grasp the person in the stories, although the twists and turns of each case still do intrigue me. Looking ahead, once the last book in this series appears, I’ll reread all six volumes of Philip Pullman’s account of Lyra, Oxford, and its journey through a series of imagined worlds, noting what I missed before and wondering about human motivations, actions and their outcomes.
Did that visit to Louisiana result in a moment of sudden insight and change? Of course not. As I have already admitted, in some ways it was rather unsettling, even sightly disconcerting, even if in most ways it was very enjoyable. However, like many really major influences in life, its impact was slow, subtle, initiating incremental and important shifts in my perspective on myself and on my life. I have never had the opportunity to go back to Humlebæk. I would like to, but it is not an item on one of those strange ‘bucket lists’ that some like to draw up. Excellent contemporary art can be seen in many places. While I’d like to see the art that is there today, Louisiana’s place in my life is a result of how it entered and shifted my thinking. That visit is one among those those few key moments which I know have made a major contribution to the person I am today.
