Steilneset Memorial

STEILNESET MEMORIAL Art Architecture History

Reidun Laura Andreassen Liv Helene Willumsen (eds.)

CONTENTS

Foreword ix Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction 1

Reidun Laura Andreassen and Liv Helene Willumsen 2 Steilneset. Memorial to the Victims

of the Witch Trials in Finnmark, Vardø

Peter Zumthor

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3 Louise Bourgeois and the Witches: The Complexity

of the Feminine in the Art of Louise Bourgeois

Meg Harris Williams

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4 The Historical Dimension:

From Court Records to Exhibition Texts

Liv Helene Willumsen

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5 What Architecture Can Do – Peter Zumthor’s Memorial at Steilneset

Beate Hølmebakk 6 The Finnmark Witches in European Context

Julian Goodare

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7 The Finnmark Witches in the Regional Historical Socio-Economic Context

Einar Niemi

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8 Monuments and Painful History: Steilneset Memorial. An International Perspective

Tor Einar Fagerland

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9 Religious Beliefs and Witches in Contemporary Africa 89

Randi Rønning Balsvik 10 From Voyage Pittoresque to Site-Specific

Charis Gullickson

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11 Art and Landscape along the National Tourist Routes 109

Svein Rønning 12 The Role of VARDĂ˜ Museum in Developing Steilneset Memorial 117

Sigrid Skarstein and Morien Rees

CONTRIBUTORS 125 Literature

129

List of illustrations 137 Index of Names 143

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Steilneset. Memorial to the Victims of the Witch Trials in Finnmark, Vardø A lecture by Peter Zumthor reconstructed from the memory of Liv Helene Willumsen and Reidun Laura Andreassen When I first was approached by the Norwegian National Tourist Routes to build a memorial to the ninety-one people executed during the witchcraft trials in Finnmark, I did not know where Vardø was, nor did I know the history. I however agreed to come to Vardø on a dark cold November day in 2007 to take a look at the place and discuss the project.

Figure 1. Vardø, which can be seen in the distance, is located on an island on the border to the Barents Sea. Copyright: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner.

I was introduced to the site which was, at that time, covered with snow. I was fascinated by the treeless landscape with its rocky soil and I was fascinated by this site at the end of the world. On this first visit to Vardø, I heard the story of Steilneset and the fate of the 11

men and women. A dramatic story which is totally unknown to large parts of Europe. I was shocked by the events in Vardø nearly 400 years ago. Steilneset is a promontory at the southeast side of Vardø island. The site’s name is meaningful: I learned that the first part of the name, the Norwegian word steile, means ‘stake’ in English, referring to the method of execution for the supposed witches in the seventeenth century.

And I saw a landscape of horizontal lines and the same lines repeated on the mainland just across the strait. On parts of Steilneset there were long wooden racks for drying fish, a traditional method of preserving fish on the coast of Northern Norway. The town of Vardø seemed, at this time of year, deserted and almost empty. No people could be seen in the streets. The only thing that indicated the presence of people and life, were the lights in the windows of some houses showing me that somebody was living there.

These two elements, the wooden racks and the lights, immediately inspired me.

Before my arrival in Vardø, the working committee had proposed that the Steilneset Memorial should be carried out in cooperation with Louise Bourgeois. Our creative approach is in many ways similar. In an interview with the journal Wallpaper, Louise Bourgeois was asked what drew her to particular artists. She said that beside their work they were, like her, lonely runners and independent thinkers (Wallpaper 2008).

When I was given the job I asked Louise to start with the project so that I would know what to do. Then she told me right away. I am not starting, you go first and then show me what you would like to do. My first idea, drawn on a napkin while staying in Vardø, was a long building for ninety-one windows and ninety-one lights dedicated to the ninety-one murdered women and men. After I got back home, I sent Louise my sketches of the long building. She immediately told me that she likes my idea.

Figure 2. One of Peter Zumthor’s sketches of the memorial. Copyright: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner.

Some time later she sent me her sketch of the chair with the burning flames and the big mirrors around it. I offered her to cancel my idea of the long building and just come with 12

a shelter for her installation. But she told me that we should do both, my line and her dot.

Only then I realized that she planned from the beginning to have me reacting first and then react on my approach.

Figure 3. Sketch from Louise Bourgeois of the installation at Steilneset. Copyright: Louise Bourgeois Studio.

So I came up with the glass pavilion for her installation following pretty closely the design of her sketch.

Figure 4. Sketch from Peter Zumthor of the elongated memorial building. Copyright: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner.

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One very important issue was how this story could be told by using the written sources and the knowledge around the witchcraft trials. I did not want a lot of explaining text or photos or such things. For this part of the project Liv Helene Willumsen, a Professor of History from the University of Tromsø who had been working for years with these historical documents, was engaged. She joined the group and together with the leader of this group, Reidun Laura Andreassen, she came to Haldenstein to present an idea related to the content of the long building. I proposed that each individual should be mentioned by name, to preserve the dignity and personal portrayal. The references to the historical sources should be correct, but presented in a more condensed and poetic manner than in the original documents. The texts should contain their date of birth, the date of burning, the charges, the victim’s confession, and the verdict. Each of these personified texts should be placed inside the long building next to a light bulb. And each of the light bulbs should be hung in front of a window. Liv Helene Willumsen and Reidun Laura Andreassen understood the idea immediately and helped me to realize it. Liv wrote a touching abstract to life and death of each of the ninety-one victims. Concrete poetry.

As mentioned, the wooden construction of the memorial is inspired by the wooden fish racks found on Steilneset. This idea of construction and structure, which I wanted to use in my building, is several hundred years old.

Figure 5. The ninety-one individuals, each with a silk cloth with texts, a light bulb and a window. Copyright: Jiri Havran.

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Figure 6. A model of the framework of the long building. Copyright: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner.

Figure 7. The fish drying racks at Steilneset.

Copyright: Ellen Ane Krog Eggen.

The inspiration from the fish racks contributed to the skeleton of the long building and this construction provides now a space for the knowledge about the victims conveyed through the texts.

The main idea of the project is a textile space hung inside the wooden scaffolding which moves softly with the wind. Tension and softness. A fabric was manufactured for this purpose. Traditional sailcloth would not have lasted long in the given climatic conditions.

So we worked with a fiberglass canvas coated with Teflon. A model in 1:1 was built by the office in Haldenstein to study the construction and its installation because there were no models we could refer to. We had to pay attention to the development of the technique of how to fasten the ropes which joined the fabric to the framework since the flexible textile would move in the coastal wind.

Figure 8. A model of the framework covered with the fabric in the nearby of Peter Zumthor's office in Haldenstein. Copyright: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner.

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The actual construction work was started on the site at Steilneset in the autumn of 2010 by a German and Norwegian team of specialists. The construction of the building demanded adaptations that were unique for this project. Some of the construction solutions were tried out on a small scale before decisions were made to achieve the highest quality possible.

Several of the elements were prefabricated by carefully selected specialists and transported to Vardø.

Figure 9. Details of construction. Copyright: Jörg Wehner.

Some of the equipment was transported in a rather unconventional way, such as the 135 m long electric cable.

Figure 10. The 135 m long electric cable transported through the streets of Vardø. Copyright: Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner.

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Some final adjustments were made during the building period. But, as a whole, it was prefabricated and assembled on site according to our plans. Looking at the people of Vardø transporting the long cables for the lamps to the building, I had the notion that Joseph Beuys would have liked that engagement of the people with the art. Social sculpture.

The building process was complex and demanding, therefore one of my assistants had to be permanently based in Vardø through the building period, to supervise the work. I followed the development of the project closely from Switzerland. The National Tourist Routes also provided the project with engineering assistants and supervision.

Figure 11. Autumn 2010: The 135 m long memorial building is about to take shape. Copyright: Asbjørn Nilsen.

Figure 12. The elongated memorial building in the midnight sun.

Photo: Jiri Havran.

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Louise Bourgeois’ installation was made in her atelier in Tucson, Arizona by her assistants and shipped to Vardø. During production, I was frequently in contact with her regarding details. The glass pavilion was raised at the Steilneset site at the same time as the elongated building and it consists of seventeen glass panels that spiral around the installation. The work was mounted under the supervision of Louise Bourgeois’ assistant Jerry Gorovoy, who came to Vardø on a number of occasions to get an impression of how the work was proceeding. The flame in the chair burns eternally and visitors may enter the buildings day and night. Bourgeois entitled her installation The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved.

The glass pavilion contains Bourgeois’ burning chair surrounded by seven mirrors that reflect and intensify the feeling of being in the middle of the flames. The mirrors are angled in a particular way strengthening the fact that reality is rendered in different ways, dependent upon the point of perception of the receiver. The use of mirrors is a recurrent feature in her artistic approach. The blackened glass that I used in the pavilion takes this up: It mirrors the landscape on the outside and the flames from the inside. And since the pavilion consists of glass panels it is open and permeable to nature: The wind can come in, the surrounding sea and the clouds can be seen from the inside.

Zumthor and I have used earth, water, f ire and air to create views of silence. Memory needs silence for it allows time to spiral back on itself. Our understanding of the events in the past at Vardø is a plea for a second chance in the present. (Louise Bourgeois in Wallpaper 2008).

Figure 13. The glass pavilion containing The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Jiri Havran.

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The completion of Steilneset Memorial took 4 years, from the beginning in 2007 to the opening in 2011. The project has been extensive due to the large number of persons involved as well as the architectural challenges. It has also been a rich experience and pleasure to work with Liv Helene Willumsen and the whole team from the National Tourist Routes. I am thankful that they invited Louise Bourgeois and me for this project.

From the very beginning, my main notions have been connected to the landscape of Steilneset and the cultural expressions of a small community in the far north, a cold place with warm lights in the windows. Then, in a historical perspective, I have asked myself: What kind of society was this that once burned its own women and men? Steilneset Memorial has been an attempt to answer this question and to become a place for memory and shelter. Walking through the long building and standing in the glass pavilion one shall get engaged with the victims’ fates.

Figure 14. The long building and the glass pavilion. Photo: Jiri Havran.

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MEG HARRIS WILLIAMS

Louise Bourgeois and the Witches: The Complexity of the Feminine in the Art of Louise Bourgeois In this paper I would like to try to set Louise Bourgeois’ installation for the Steilneset Memorial in the context of her work as a whole, especially her view of the relation between the artist and society. She said: ‘My work grows from the duel between the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the group’ (Morris 2007, 262). The struggle to observe and recognize disturbing feelings lies at the heart of all her work, and was very much a conscious preoccupation, since she took an active philosophical and psychoanalytical interest in her own vocation as an artist. She saw the making of art as an ongoing reparative activity, on behalf of society as a whole. This underlying concern informs her vision here at Steilneset – the chair with its five-fingered flame which burns where a figure is not; the downfacing mirrors which may mingle our reflection with the flickering light: all are contained in the rounded space which we discover at the end of our linear memory-journey through the lives of individuals whose fire was extinguished here in the name of sanctity and cleanliness.

Peter Zumthor has described the two parts of the Memorial as a combination of line and point; they also constitute a movement from narrative to denouement – through memory towards understanding.

Bourgeois saw art as something which helps us to look inwards to understand our destructive impulses and the roots of suffering – not just that which happens to us, but that which we generate and inflict on others and indeed on ourselves. Her art is very personal and autobiographical, yet it is about the same wider issues as the Memorial – it is about the constructive power of remembering, and about human vulnerabilities, primitive impulses, and the conflicting emotions of love and hate that are suggested by her title: The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved.

The Memorial, I believe, is not only about remembering but also about reparation for past crimes, and about reflecting in what sense it is indeed possible to reverse or modify the injury dealt to those who were murdered not by crazy individuals but by respectable society hundreds of years ago. The Memorial brings to present-day attention something which might have been buried: the persecution of those who became scapegoats owing to society’s suspicion that they had gained satanic powers or hidden occult knowledge that was liable to destroy some part of the social fabric – some religious, racial, or economic imbalance, or subversion in the relations between the sexes (since witches were mainly 21

women). The dominant social group, driven by fear and intolerance, selected individuals who manifest some kind of weakness, oddness, inferiority, or even talent, and used them to exorcise unwanted feelings. As is well known psychologically, the guilt of the persecutor (if unfelt and unacknowledged) is projected onto the victim, who then becomes an object full of bad or dangerous qualities. The illusion is then that the feelings can be destroyed along with their container. Freud (as Bourgeois will have known) was interested in the phenomenon of witches and in the similarity between confessions made under torture, and the fantasies of some of his ‘hysterical’ patients: and the similarity between the medieval theory of possession and the psychoanalytic theory of ‘a foreign body and a splitting of consciousness’ (Freud 1897, 242). The social disease that creates witches is analogous to the psychological one induced by hysteria and has to do with the human failure to take responsibility for threatening or frightening feelings.

Bourgeois emphasized that the emotions she was dealing with were ‘universal’ ones. Instead of ‘conversation pieces’, she said, her sculptures were ‘confrontation pieces’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 66). They aim to engage the viewer emotionally. Sometimes, especially when they involve the portrayal of dismembered body parts, they have been found disturbing; but she said her intention was to be ‘accurate not shocking’ (Meyer-Thoss 1992, 119). In her art she tries to see ‘what is, not what I would like’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 261).

The subject may be violent or ugly but the art created may still be beautiful; this is not to glamorize the subject, but to endow it with the kind of understanding that is beautiful in itself, founded as it is on not hiding or denying those primitive aspects of ourselves that it is better to acknowledge. She was interested, she said, in the irrational roots of aggression and how ‘we destroy the very thing we most desire’ (Storr et al. 2003, 117). She speaks of the ‘monster’ within or the ‘deadly beast that inhabits me’ (LB-0356), of being in a ‘creativity rage’ and transferring feelings she experienced 40 years ago (LB-0566). Looking in the mirror she sees a ‘Medusa’ (LBD, November 13, 1992), the ugliness of a non-idealized reflection. Contradicting Sartre – and certainly contradicting the ecclesiastical judges who condemned the witches – she insisted that hell is not in other people: ‘hell is inside you’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 269).

The point of unearthing buried feelings, however, is not to repeat but to revise. Unpleasant feelings are not to be remembered passively or with self-pity, but rather should be used as fuel to ‘burn through’ a new work (to borrow a phrase of Keats). This is the healing function of art. Aggression in her view was connected with fear – of the unknown or the alien – such as we find in society’s view of witches. ‘In real life’, she said, ‘I identify with the victim; in my art I am the murderer’ (LBD, April 30, 1992). In this she was referring to the rhythm of destroying-to-recreate that underlies the artist’s use of materials. The very making of art, especially sculpture, involves a rhythm of attack and reparation. It echoes the psychological process of investigating the destructive impulses within oneself, but with a creative purpose.

For to represent murder in art, or to attack a piece of stone with an artistic purpose, is the precise opposite of acting murderously in life: ‘I am free because I use the aggression I am suffering from against the sculpture’ (Morris 2007, 36). The exposure is a kind of catharsis or exorcism (both words she uses) that checks violent action and converts its energies into 22

beauty and harmony. ‘To be an artist is to guarantee to your fellow human that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer’ (LBD, August 27, 1984). Artists – as people – don’t get better and better, she said, but they become ‘able to stand more’ (Kuspit 1988, 23). Owing to a privileged access to the unconscious, they become ‘aware of an anxiety crisis’ that is then solved through the artwork, and can ‘create bridges’ with the unconscious conflicts of others. The type of memory that the artist uses constructively is an active type, that turns the past into the present: ‘if you cannot abandon the past then you become a sculptor’; and ‘I organize a sculpture the way we organize a treatment for the sick’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 226). To remember the past through art-creation, however aggressive, is a healing activity.

The primary inspiration for Bourgeois’ art was her own childhood, a period which for her never lost its ‘magic and mystery’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 277). Family relations were complex owing to the ménage a trois comprised by her mother, father and his mistress who was employed to teach the children English. There was also a certain amount of disability within the family, despite their prosperous tapestry-repairing business: a brother who was mentally fragile, a sister with a lame leg (which often appears in Bourgeois’ sculptures), a mother in poor health, and a father in some ways childish. The young Louise’s jealous resentment of the English governess was complemented by a love-hate relationship with her father, whom she criticized for his ‘cutting’ attitude to women (LB-0410), and a certain ambivalence towards her mother, who was the dominant force in the household, yet who tolerated the mistress. Mme Bourgeois was a meticulous organizer and needlewoman, and Louise admired her, yet also felt her at times to be ‘the poisoning mother, the witch that wants to kill you’; in the guise of offering protection, ‘the shelter becomes a trap, she deceived me’ (LB-0235). The tools of her craft were ambivalent: needles (said Bourgeois) were used for assemblage and reparation; whereas pins – very similar in shape – were incisive, hurtful and destructive (Meyer-Thoss 1992, 178). We might remember the association of both pins and needles with witches – as mentioned by Freud, and as in the old superstitious belief that people could be injured by having pins stuck in a doll supposed to represent them. ‘I’ve spent my life making holes everywhere, either with a needle or with a chisel’, said Bourgeois (LBD, January 11, 2001). One of Bourgeois’ sculptures tells the story of Oedipus, whose own parents drove a pin through his ankles, symbolizing the emotional hindrance that is everyone’s natural inheritance in terms of the Oedipus complex. To walk independently is an ongoing struggle; and life is indeed a Passage Dangereux – the title of another of her installations.

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Figure 1. Passage Dangereux. Photo: A. Burger.

Because of the focus on family life, the Table and the Bed figure prominently in her work as a kind of stage for fantasy. One such work was The Destruction of the Father, a large sculptural tableau representing the fantasy that one day the family, fed up with the father’s boasting, dismembered and devoured him for dinner. She called it a ‘murderous piece’ which ‘dealt with ordinary, garden-variety fear… what interests me is the conquering of the fear, the hiding, the running away from it, facing it, exorcising it, being ashamed of it, and finally, being afraid of being afraid’ (Kuspit 1988, 21). Or in another variation, the child’s fantasy is to ‘kill and devour father and mother and get killed as a punishment’ (LB0230). Table and Bed are in a way interchangeable: being the concrete foundation for acts of destruction and creativity. ‘The fear of sex and death is the same’ she said; ‘my sculpture allows me to re-experience the fear, to give it physicality so I am able to hack away at it’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 227). Devouring and copulation are both ‘a killing scene’ (LBD, June 27, 1991). The circular pit housing The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved is a variant on such a scene and setting – suggesting the confusion associated with attempting to control the body and its insides, a fantasy acted out by society in its superstition and ignorance.

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Figure 2. The Destruction of the Father. Photo: Rafael Lobato.

These kinds of primitive superstitious values were associated by Bourgeois with the narcissistic patriarchal system subscribed to by both her father and by the male-dominated art world of her youth. It oppressed the unvalued artist-children, especially women.

Although she denied being a feminist in the conventional sense, she continually reviewed her position as a woman, in relation to both family and the art world, concluding: ‘To be a woman is a defenseless thing’ (LB-0250). She related an episode in which her father, as a party trick, peeled a tangerine into the shape of male doll with a pith-stalk penis, and teased his daughter publicly for not having one herself. ‘The beast in me wakes up, it’s hate – being a woman, to have lost at the big game’ – the game of the art world (LB0188). Her Surrealist father-figures were the prevailing powers; artists like herself were at best neglected, at worst witches – a focus of both suspicion and humiliation. ‘There is no feminist aesthetic’ she said ‘but there is a psychological content’ and it is ‘the story of all minorities’ (Storr et al. 2003, 142). An early series of drawings was on the semi-humorous but also slightly witch-like theme of Femme Maison. The long hair, streaming in long skeins out of the box-body, reappears in many later works and is associated with ‘beauty’ and also with binding (capturing, linking) – perhaps as in spellbinding (Meyer-Thoss 1992, 178).

There is a precursor here of the flame-shapes in the Steilneset installation, suggesting links with the wild and untamed that must have been part of the fantasy of the public spectators at the burnings. At Steilneset we see both the fiery feeling, fluidity and turbulence that she associated with the colour red, as in Altered States; and the geometrical containment that she associated with the sky and the colour blue. (She described the New York sky as a blue aluminium sheet holding towering skyscrapers in place – buildings she associated with people, ‘lost presences’.)

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Bourgeois said she felt drawn to art as a means of psychological ‘survival’ rather than a free career choice – there was ‘no escape’ from it (Kuspit 1988, 68). Her identification and empathy with ‘minorities’ has its roots in a perpetual feeling that (despite her privileged upbringing) she was an abandoned child, driven by ‘a rage to understand’ the tragic elements in life (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 207). This was associated with feeling small, a child, female, a ‘little orphan Annie’. ‘If I am abandoned again I am going to set the house on fire’ she wrote in a diary, ‘rocking to infinity the red skein’ (LBD, February 5, 1960). Or again, ‘I am abandoned. Put a match to the whole thing. Red, red, red, red’ (LBD, May 27, 1994). In order to understand, rather than just wallow in uncontained emotion, she needed to distance herself from her French emotional roots and review them from an artist’s perspective. When at the outset of the Second World War she married and went to live in New York she saw herself as a ‘Runaway Girl’; driven by the ‘search for truth’ and the ‘secret of my anxiety’. She was an American artist, she said, and could never have become an artist in France, where the old society with its hypocritical notions of respectability induced in her a kind of emotional paralysis and claustrophobia.

Figure 3. Femme Maison. Photo: Christopher Both art and psychoanalysis enabled a Burke. more constructive and less indulgent type of remembering. She found useful the Kleinian psychoanalytical theory of creativity as a type of mourning for the past or lost: ‘I work in the unknown, the lost’, she said (LBD, 21 June 1994).

In America, Bourgeois had moved from painting to sculpture, realizing she needed threedimensional expression and – even more – a space in which there was physically room for herself, with a ‘centre of gravity’ in which objects could turn around her ‘like planets’ (LB0140). She began to arrange and rearrange individual sculptures in a semi-theatrical way.

Her theatrical spaces contain dramas of the inner world, either liberating or imprisoning and claustrophobic. They are intended to be viewed from different angles, and to stimulate communication between the mind of the artist and viewer through a spatial interchange.

Often there is a chair, which seems to be awaiting its occupant, possibly a child, or the viewer who has stumbled across it. Many of her installation pieces, especially the long 26

series of room-sized Cells, contain mirrors that invite the viewer to partake in the scene, or catch them unawares so that they are caught up in it. The more the sculpture is about the artist and her personal struggle, the more it is about us, the viewers. Eyes also, like mirrors, became a regular feature of her work. She knew the stressful nature of observation for both artist and viewer, and warned against the kind of voyeuristic desire for pornographic spectacle, as must have been the case with the witch-burnings. The only guard against this destructive looking is introspection – looking that does not ‘cancel out’ the responsibility of the viewer (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 210).

One of her early exhibits in America was a series of Personnages, abstract wooden figures like skyscrapers which she said represented ‘missed presences’ whose spirit came to her while working the sculptures (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 106). Sculpting was itself a form of remembering, even of calling up spirits, of possession in the old sense of prophesy which was considered both mad and true – and not so distant from the activity of witches.

Indeed she described herself as working ‘under a spell’; also saying that art is intended not to seduce but to make the spell ‘manageable’ (Kuspit 1988, 23). For the aim of her art is to ‘save a soul from suffering’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 343).

In Ste Sebastienne, a drawing in several versions, she presents herself as under siege and as two-faced – smiling and agonized. Indeed many of her sculptures are a type of self-portrait (even when not designated as such) and prefigure the flaming witch: as for example Spiral woman.

Spirals, she said, ‘turn in a void of anxiety’, but they have ‘possibilities’ for reaching outward (LB-0028), even when they appear to bind or cocoon the figure within. By presenting her own anxiety in aesthetic form she makes a link with the unconscious of others. Art, she said, is a ‘guarantee of sanity’ (LB0688), collecting in vials the ‘precious liquids’ of human emotions and giving them (as Shakespeare put it) a ‘local habitation and a name’.

Figure 4. Spiral Woman. Photo: Alan Finkelman.

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For Bourgeois, art had a religious aspect which has nothing to do with the hierarchical practices of any established religion, but is rather the opposite: it is connected with discovering the truth about oneself, as in the classical dictum ‘Know thyself ’ which she quotes from Montaigne. ‘Art is my religion’, she said (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 215).

This kind of religion subverts conventional divisions between godly and satanic. In the service of art, the artist is a kind of mediator who is used by their own inspiration on behalf of society.

The chair for the burning witch is not so different from the tapestry-covered confessional chair she made for a chapel in France, with an inscription above reading ‘Resurrection, reparation, redemption, restoration, reconciliation’. In the witch’s confessional, five flames replace the five words – like the fingers of a hand (another of Bourgeois’ favourite symbols for healing and linking). It is interesting that in contrast to her usual representations of bodies and body parts, here there is no body, only a spirit. Constructive memory entails a constant revisiting and reworking of the original emotional conflict. We can see how this is embodied in the symbolic flame whose flickering light recalls continuously the spirit of those from the past and catches the attention of the present.

Figure 5. The installation by Louise Bourgeois in the glass pavilion, Steilneset Memorial. Photo: Bjarne Riesto.

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Bourgeois thought that Freud, despite his irreligiosity, believed in ‘resurrection’ (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, 187). Nothing can be done about the past, but it is up to the viewer to make changes in the present. The flame is both the spirit of the dead and the life of the future, which is full of potentiality if it can be ‘remembered’ constructively by visitors, as indicated by the mirrors which are a constant feature of her work. ‘I have faith in the symbolic action’ she said. The symbolic action is the opposite of the literal action. It is a form of contemplation – a spiritual not a physical reality. The mirrors looking down on the conflagration are the eyes of the voyeurs – but if we catch our own reflection we can see the Medusa within.

The artist is in one sense always a witch, not only in working under a spell, but in perennially subverting whatever is the established order of things, on the fringes of society.

The artist is there to remind us that in order to make reparation for the crimes of the past, we have both to understand the witch-elements in ourselves (in the sense of violence and aggression), and also to acknowledge their place in our psyche, as the ancient Greeks gave a place to the primitive Furies within their civilized city-state. Otherwise the burning of witches will simply continue in other forms, for human nature does not change. As Emily Bronte wrote: Men knelt to God and worshipped crime, And crushed the helpless, even as we.

References All citations marked ‘LB’ or ‘LBD’ reference unpublished material (documents and diaries) by Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois Archive, New York.

Literature M-L. Bernadac and H-U. Obrist, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews (Cambridge, Mass., 1998) Freud, S., Letter 56 from the Fliess papers, Standard Edition I (London, 1897) Kuspit, D., Bourgeois (New York, 1988) Meyer-Thoss, C., Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall (Zurich, 1992) Morris, F., Louise Bourgeois (London, 2007) R. Storr, P. Herkenhoff and A. Schwarzman (eds.), Louise Bourgeois (London, 2003)

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STEILNESET MEMORIAL Art Architecture History

This book deals with Steilneset Memorial, dedicated to the victims of the Finnmark witchcraft trials in Northern Norway. The memorial is located in Vardø, on the border to the Barents Sea, where brutal witchcraft persecution took place in the seventeenth century. It is part of the National Tourist Routes in Norway. Steilneset Memorial was opened in June 2011 and is based on the three components of art, architecture and history.

The articles in this book are from lectures given at a conference held in Vardø just after Steilneset Memorial was opened. Professionals of various disciplines – architects, artists, art historians, historians, literary scholars and social scientists – give their views on the memorial. This marked interdisciplinary approach yields a variety of perspectives, resulting in a rich and exciting reading experience.

REIDUN LAURA ANDREASSEN is special advisor at Finnmark County Council, Norway, with responsibility for museums and cultural heritage. She has together with other resource persons been a driving force through all stages of the realization of Steilneset Memorial.

LIV HELENE WILLUMSEN is Professor of History at the Department of History and Religious Studies, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø.

She is an expert on the Finnmark witchcraft trials.

www.orkana.no