Surrounded by Sculpture - sculpture park at Swedish castle Wanas

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

"My mind is full 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 sculpture 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, but that's what it is: a fortress various times rebuilt and restored since its first predecessor was erected in the 15th century and then burnt down; for centuries this territory was the subject of violent dispute between the Swedes and the Danes, not then the promoters of peace we currently associate with Scandinavians. An ancient oak on the park grounds is said to be one from which Danish guerrillas were hung 500 years ago.

Today the castle moat has long since been filled in, and the castle and its adjoining buildings are home to the family of Carl-Gustav and Marika Wachtmeister--not warriors staving off invaders but enlightened patrons who have opened their gates to the public by turning the castle's extensive grounds into a home for contemporary sculpture. Wanas has hosted nine exhibitions since 1987, and since 1994 it has been run as a nonprofit foundation, with a biennial exhibition program.

If Wanas has not, up until now, taken its place as one of the premiere stops on the summer pilgrimage route of European art tourists, that may be in part because it has been curiously indifferent to Europe as such. In fact, until the 1998 exhibition (which closed Oct. 18), Wanas has almost exclusively featured Nordic and North American artists. The 1996 exhibition, the first under the auspices of the Wanas Foundation, was of American artists only, with an eclectic selection highlighting emerging artists and a few 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 on American art undoubtedly represents the interest of Marika Wachtmeister, the organizer of the exhibitions, who lived in the U.S. for several years. The choice of artists in 1998 still showed a certain U.S. preference (Michael Joo, Allan McCollum, Kirsten Mosher, Roxy Paine and Peter Soriano) but 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 show a historical layering, the same is true of the sculpture on the park grounds; since some of the works made for each exhibition have been ephemeral while others are permanent, the new works that are part of the biennial exhibitions have to make a place for themselves among those already there. Many of the remaining earlier sculptures are abstract works in the tradition of Constructivism, like Bernard Kirschenbaum's Cable Arc (1987) or Ruri's Observatory (1992); few of these are of current interest, all the more so because they seem to have wandered in by accident from some corporate plaza. Others reflect, rather, the tradition of Post-Minimalism (a pair of 1991 works by Jene Highstein; Gunilla Bandolin's The Pyramid, 1990). These works, with their greater sensitivity to the material conditions of the site, fare much better. Neither group, however, gives much inkling of the virtual collapse of abstract sculpture declared by most of the more recent work, with its indulgence in familiar imagery and the extremes of deadpan humor or heady romanticism. Exemplifying this condition are works by some of the young Americans held over from 1996 (Merrick's Whitney Outhouse of American Art, Rhoades's Frigidaire and Schimert's Royal Rocks). It's more obliquely suggested by the recent works of some older artists, such as Per Kirkeby's Wanas (1994), an elegant and mysterious architectural folly in brick, or even Puryear's thatchwork structure Meditation in a Beech Wood. The most outstanding sculpture so far realized at Wanas, Beech Wood is a brooding, chthonic creation strongly suggestive of a mole rising blindly from the earth.

This past year, unexpectedly, outdoor sculpture was not most prominent at Wanas. Only Abramovic really took up the challenge--surprisingly enough, given that she prefers not to call her work sculpture. Her contribution, The Hunt: Chair for Animal Spirits, seemed to lay claim to the constructivist ethos of the older works that surround it, but only in order to transform that ethos into something completely different. A boxy, chairlike form made of squarish steel piping--something right out of the Bauhaus book of rational discomfort--has had its legs stretched to sprout it up 12 meters (about 40 feet) into the air. Affixed to it like antennae are antlers gathered from the local deer population (the blood sport of deer hunting is still practiced on the grounds each fall). By contrast, the other ambitious outdoor sculpture 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 sculpture found in "progressive" churches of the 1960s.