Unknown Aspects of the 'Ex-School'
Jørgen Nash: ‘Our Poisoned World’. During his stint as visual editor on ‘Hvedekorn’, a periodical featuring lyric poetry and graphics, from August 1961 to February 1966, Richard Winther came into contact with numerous artists. Some of the periodical’s 1963-covers display his groundbreaking experiments in offset. When Nash decorated the hoarding in Møntergade in December 1962 his notoriety was peaking, and at this point Winther decided to feature him in ‘Hvedekorn’. Winther also effected the periodical’s publication of numerous etchings and linocuts from The Experimental Art School.
Bjørn Nørgaard: ‘Jerichau’s Palm. Tree'. This sculpture is most likely based on J.A. Jerichau’s 1915-painting ‘Den tykke palme’ (‘The Wide Palm Tree’) at Statens Museum. Due to the influence of Troels Andersen, surprisingly, Jerichau would inspire many of the artists with roots in The Experimental Art School. In the first issue of the avant-garde periodical ‘ta’’ Peter Louis-Jensen chose to review a Jerichau-exhibition and in the late 1970s Kirkeby became rapt by Jerichau’s ability to build large figure compositions. Clearly Winther’s fascination with history made him acquire this work by Bjørn Nørgaard.
Per Kirkeby: ‘Fence'. Many of Per Kirkeby’s paintings from the 1960s are intended to poke good-natured fun at Poul Gernes. One of Gernes’ great creative inventions was the striped painting of the 1960s. These works were intentionally clean, i.e. rid of motives and references. Teasingly Kirkeby demonstrated that by turning a striped painting you clearly end up with fence posts or palings. Kirkeby’s fence painting combines on several levels what in those years were known as ‘the pure’ and ‘the impure’, i.e. the abstract and the motivic.
Per Kirkeby: ‘West of the Mississippi. Western comics and the Spaghetti Westerns of European origin were a considerable influence on the art of the 1960s. These films were not realistic but instead represented a kind of artistic game where the features and components of the genre were playfully rearranged. Concurrently, however, the films also communicated mythical and universal accounts of heroic trials and deeds. In quite a few of Kirkeby’s paintings from 1965 to 1969 eroded desert mountains, sunrises, cabins and riders are noticeable. Which are also common motives in the broad history of the painting.
Unknown Aspects of the ’Ex-School’
By Lars Morell, Historian of Ideas
An interest in recent Danish art inevitably entails familiarity with The Experimental Art School and artists such as Poul Gernes, Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard and Egon Fischer, to name a few. Numerous museums feature sections dedicated to the art of the members of the ‘Ex-School’. However, conceptual misunderstandings are widespread and many exhibitions give muddled or erroneous definitions of the school’s actual period of activity and seem confused about the identities of its participants.
Experiment Art School
In October 1961 Poul Gernes and Troels Andersen founded what was provisionally called Experiment Art School (‘Eksperiment Kunst Skolen’). In its first year, the school more or less accepted anyone who applied and naturally attracted a motley crowd. Richard Winther was one of the assigned teachers and the subjects taught ranged from graphic design, drawing, sculpturing and painting to art history and theory as well as introduction to materials. Poul Gernes’ strategy for running an independent art school was highly innovative: unlike regular academies the school was ‘without teachers’, all work was approached collectively, everything was shared and nothing ought to be individual or private. In its infancy, the school was characterised by chaos and conflict. It was a time of restlessness, the young generation still searching for its own style in a new decade.
In the autumn of 1962 the school morphed into what was to become an artistic faction. The collage and its creative employment of rubbish dump scraps, in addition to torn magazines and posters, was a vital and defining preoccupation. After Cubism the collage had in part served the purpose of combining art with a new reality. Around 1963-64 the form further developed into pop art, as unedited source materials were now simply magnified prior to their application. Similar to many American pop artists, a lot of the Danish practitioners, John Davidsen and Ole Knudsen in particular, had backgrounds in window dressing.
Experimental films and happenings
At a very early stage, experimental films became a central interest. Andy Warhol made his first movie in 1963, but The Experimental Art School started working with film as early as 1962. Later Jean-Luc Godard’s new and more subtle style of editing was embraced. Objects were intentionally allowed to speak for themselves. At the ‘Ex-School’ visual effects took precedence over storyline.
Film work bears some relation to happenings. Academics still discuss whether happenings stem from theatre, music or painting. As in experimental film, happenings are devoid of the traditional sense of plot and character portrayal. The ‘Ex-School’ underwent a development that is reflected in the general history of art: in the spring of 1963 a couple of ‘envirionments’ were initially build, after which some related performative actions resulted in the creation of the happening as we know it.
The happening is a hybrid form combining theatre, music and painting, and indeed the Danish equivalent of hybrid, ‘blandform’, became the catchword of the late 1960s and the 1970s. A faction of filmmakers, ABCinema, was established in 1968. The two examples demonstrate how the creative breakthrough from which artistic successors drew inspiration and motivation actually took place in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, very few museums display works from this particular period.
The comic book is another hybrid, combining visual art and literature. The impact of pop art was responsible for the acknowledgement of the values of popular culture. At The Experimental Art School particularly artists such as Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard and Tom Krøjer drew inspiration from comics and even produced comic strips and comic books of their own.
The works displayed in the section at ARoS museum dedicated to the 1960s illustrate how Poul Gernes in this respect stood out from his peers. Gernes did belong to an earlier generation and was motivated by the post-WWII endeavour to recreate the spirit of ‘Linien’ and thereby the legacy of Bauhaus. His morals, vision of colour and idiom grew out of this endeavour.
The periodical ‘Billedkunst’
After 1965 the movement associated with The Experimental Art School grew. Some left the group, among them Egon Fischer and Tom Krøjer, while others, most notably composer Henning Christiansen and writers Hans-Jørgen Nielsen and Erik Thygesen, joined. The new phase saw the documentation and publication of experiences in the form of journals. The periodical ‘Billedkunst’ was published from 1966 through 1968 while ‘ta’’ existed from 1967 to 1968. At the end of 1968, a famously tumultuous year, a sense of closure started to become evident. Articles concerning entropy, emptiness, the desert and the absolute zero abounded and by the end of 1968 all the periodicals had been disbanded.
The ‘Ex-School’
The Experimental Art School now renamed itself the ‘Ex-School’. The aesthetic revolution demanding anonymity, systematic approach, common stylistics and collective experimentation, which Poul Gernes had introduced in 1961, was coming to an end. The goal now became to ‘extend art outside art’.
Peter Louis-Jensen quit the happening and started constructing walkways designed to impart a particular experience to the audience. While many found inspiration in the American art scene, Bjørn Nørgaard was always particularly attached to Germany and Joseph Beuys and after a few years of sculptural experiments Nørgaard turned his back entirely on political activism. In 1968 Poul Gernes was handed the task of decorating the county hospital in Herlev and thus commenced his preoccupation with public spaces. Stig Brøgger and Erik Thygesen travelled the United States and Thygesen introduced several American underground movements, among them Feminism, to the Danish audience. Per Kirkeby was alone in setting up an international career in painting. The ‘Ex-School’ had finally reached a point zero that would last until 1976, when a few former members re-launched the group under the name ‘Arme og ben’.
Lars Morell is the author of a book on The Experimental Art School that will be published by Thaning & Appel later this year.
For further information, please contact:
Department of modern art: +45 8818 1111.