Intro
The history and presence of craft practices in public space is long and storied. Textiles, ceramics, wood, and metalwork, and many diverse examples of material integration into architectural situations, have maintained a prominent status for craft within the history of art, buildings, and the public sphere. At the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the organization of the Master’s program in Art in Public Space (MAPS) within the Art and Craft Department seems to argue for a “craft” dimension to all public art. Public art and the priorities of craft have remained closely linked, not least through particular material procedures that occur at the intersection of art and architecture, and for the fact that public art exists within, and is affected by, daily life in a way that art in the white cube is not. What follows are three cases of art projects in public space that, each in their own way help us think through a number of these aspects.

Vessels in the halls of power: Lisbet Dæhlin and Elisabeth von Krogh
There are two groups of vessels — think jug or pitcher — by two artists, Lisbet Dæhlin and Elisabeth von Krogh, in the art collection of the Norwegian government.¹ The works were acquired in relation to the construction of the government building complex known as R4, and displayed within Møllergata 17, both of which opened in 1988.²

A quick search in KORO Public Art Norway’s³ archive turns up little about the acquisition of these works or how they made their way into the government quarter. But it is not terribly surprising that von Krogh and Dæhlin would be collected at the same time. Their vessels have often been identified in the same breath as significant works of Norwegian art and craft. Not long after the completion of the R4 building, the artists exhibited together in the exhibition Seks sider av samme tid at RAM gallery in Oslo in 1990, and today they are displayed next to each other in the permanent collection display of Norway’s new National Museum.

Still, the presence of these jugs in the government quarter is curious. Why are they there? The historic icons of art in the Government Quarter, like Picasso’s Fiskerne/The Fishermen or Hannah Ryggen’s Vi lever på en stjerne, seem to meet a kind of expectation of what art one should find in the buildings of the Norwegian government. But why a jug in the “halls of power”?

One answer is surely Dæhlin and von Krogh’s own stature in the history of Norwegian art and design, of which Dæhlin’s signature matte blue ceramics for example are an iconic part. Another lies perhaps in the nature of a jug, for the way it embodies invitation, hospitality, and exchange. Jugs are instruments of sharing between people, of one person pouring for another, and as such can become a symbol for ideals of the collective work of governance. Even in Dæhlin’s large format and von Krogh’s colorful designs, the mugs appear modest compared to other monumental works in the Government Quarter. But when one reflects on their communal and relational logics, they perhaps make more sense as public art in the halls of power than one might at first think. As Norwegian art historian Gunnar Danbolt wrote of Dæhlin’s vessels, ‘you only use a jug when there are many people present — not when you eat alone. It is a symbol of community.'⁴ The importance of community is in line with recollections of Dæhlin by her contemporaries, as when glass artist Karen Klim for example recollects that Dæhlin was drawn to sociality and diverse impulses after moving her studio to the Frysja and Gabelsgate artist communities, after having earlier worked alone at Bøler and Tøyen in Oslo.

A sense of community was perhaps reinforced by the jugs’ public placement, both that they were shown in a group of three, and also, in Dæhlin’s case, in a place of high traffic and visibility. They clearly form a group, standing together, bodily and observant. The public and rather exposed aspects of their presentation also made them vulnerable, both to the mundane “threats” artworks can face over decades of public display (think dust or someone bumping into it), and also being subjected to extraordinary events to which high-profile places are more exposed, as with Dæhlin’s works being severely damaged after the terrorist attacks of July 22, 2011.⁵ The full condition and treatment report produced by KORO conservator Fredrik Qvale in the wake of the July 22 bombing is a wonderful document for those of us interested in the nuances of crafts materiality.⁶ The report gives a tactile summary of the works’ physical qualities, the implications of Dæhlin’s signature unglazed surfaces in regard to longevity and maintenance, as well as the painstakingly precise procedures of restoring the works after the explosion.

Textiles in the embassy: Elisabeth Haarr in Washington, DC
In a more recent project called The Life Instinct featuring the artists Elisabeth Haarr, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, and Eline Mugaas, material culture and history come together in the public space of diplomacy and international relations. This was a KORO project curated by Marte Danielsen Jølbo for the new chancery at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, DC, completed in 2021.⁷

The long implications of material histories are present in the first sentence of Jølbo’s introduction to the small publication that accompanied the project, in which she states, ‘Leif Erikson would never have made it to America were it not for the sheep at home in Norway.' ^8,9 (We learn in Jølbo’s text, for example, that ‘for a sail of 100 square meters, the Vikings needed 1,500 kilograms of wool’.) The project, in other words, uses 1000-year-old histories of craft and material culture to open up a conversation about international relations with clear reverberations in the context of Norway’s embassy in Washington, DC.

But the inclusion of Elisabeth Haarr, a central figure in the history of Norwegian textile art, brings a welcome disturbance to the neat but somewhat nationalistic framing embedded in this Leif Erikson-inflected history of wool and US/Norwegian relations. On the one hand, Haarr has long been preoccupied with the cultural heritage and craft techniques in Norway’s southern coastal areas. On the other hand, Haarr leads the conversation in another direction with her work Færdeminne - OH Gunta!, which is described as a ‘tribute to the Bauhaus master Gunta Stölzl, and is, among other things, about the importance she and the Bauhaus school have had for the development of world art’.⁸

The introduction of Stölzl into a web of Leif Erikson, Norwegian wool, international relations, and public art, among other things, helps to underscore the importance of craft and diverse approaches to materiality within developing attitudes towards public space over the long 20th century. Stölzl, a central figure of the Bauhaus weaving workshops, was integral in deepening the material diversity of the Bauhaus universe, elevating the previously disregarded textile production into a space of rigorous experimentation in Dessau. Stölzl was also an important figure in advocating for an approach to craft that was not dogmatic in its aesthetic, but rather attentive to the needs and specificities of a given space, which for her also somehow included affective considerations, a tendency that did not always translate into the dominant practices of international modernism. ‘The aesthetic qualifications,’ Stölzl wrote in a 1931 reflection of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, ‘the demand for beauty, the effect of woven fabrics in a room and the feel of it, are much more difficult to define objectively. Whether lustrous or flat, whether soft or severe, whether strong or subdued in texture, whether coloured brightly or softly, all this depends on the kind of room, its functions, and not least of all on individual needs.'⁹

Stölzl’s argument for an attention to specific contexts in the 1930s is an early testament to craft’s contribution to modernist attitudes toward art and public space. It also bears witness to the influence of Stölzl’s approach on the work and writing of her students and peers, as we see for example in Anni Albers’ notable text ‘The Pliable Plane; Textiles in Architecture’ written some two decades later.¹⁰

Going back to Haarr’s work in the embassy, it’s worth noting that the Færdaminne (Travelogue) works were not made for the specific context of the embassy. They are part of a series that pays homage to Norwegian cultural history and in particular the traditional Scandinavian boat rugs which, as the project’s art plan describes, were ‘handknottet rugs made by women whose seafaring husbands used for protection against the elements’, but which Haarr then associates with other diverse narratives.¹¹ The connection between traditional material practices with the reference of international modernist craft experimentation from Stölzl and the Bauhaus becomes an illuminated curatorial choice for the cross-cultural context of the embassy’s public space, particularly when we situate it within the priorities for site specificity that Stölzl articulated. In this way, both Haarr’s work, as well as the curatorial framework it exists in at Washington, shows how historical context, internal reference, and material traditions can successfully come together through craft practices in public space.

Aage Gaup at the airport
A third case takes us to Bodø/Bådåddjo airport in Sápmi¹⁴ and Northern Norway and Aage Gaup’s monumental work from 1992. To introduce this work, we can indulge an archival digression, to an earlier 1986 Utsmykkningsseminar (seminar on public art) organized in Karasjok/Kárášjohka by Gaup and Iver Jåks, under the auspices of the newly formed Sámi Artists Association (Sámi Dáiddačehpiid Searvvi – SDS), of which Gaup was then the leader.

Gaup and Jåks are two legendary Sámi artists who have made central contributions to the history of public art in Norway and Sápmi. The seminar in question is transcribed into a publication, an important historical document for exploring Sámi perspectives regarding discourses and problematics of art and public space as it has developed in recent decades.

Gaup opened the two-day séance by reminding the group of the first known public artworks in Sámi areas: petroglyphs and rock paintings dating back 9,000 years. Gaup describes these works as

‘magical images […] images that meant something in everyday life. They were a narrative monumental art, and the social environment was linked to the art. […] The artists who carved or sharpened these images in the mountains were highly aware of their own cultural and social situation. They were participants and showed it by their integrated public art [“integrert utsmykking”]. Economy and culture were closely related. If the economic basis failed or changed, the culture also had to change. This is also valid today. So too does Sámi culture have a basis in its own economy’.¹⁵

Making these the first words of the seminar, Gaup anchored the activities of contemporary Sámi artists working in public space within this thousands-year-old heritage. The thought-provoking joint lecture between Gaup and Jåks that follows signals a desire to problematize the relationship between Sámi making in public space on the one hand, and, on the other, Western understandings of public art and Western distinctions between, for example, art and craft. It is a fascinating discourse in which the two artists pose questions about what makes a milieu Sámi rather than Norwegian, the differences for Sámi artists working in Sámi contexts versus Norwegian contexts, what makes a duojár’s workshop different from “an ordinary carpenter’s workshop”, the use of an “international style” versus Sámi clothing in Sápmi, and more.

Gaup’s appeal to the rock paintings of Alta also tells us something about his own personal interests as an artist, and we can draw connections between that reference, this seminar on Sámi public art, and his monumental work at the Bodø airport. For example, Gaup drew the cover image of the seminar report publication, two flocks of birds with opposite blue and white coloration that fly in opposite directions, conjuring a kind of mirror effect. The style of the bird figures is rudimentary and repetitive while also full of opposing direction and motion.¹⁶

Three years later, Gaup received a commission for a large-scale public artwork in the main hall of what was then the new Bodø airport. Gaup submitted his competition proposal in December 1989, only three years after he and Jåks organized their seminar on Sámi art in public space. The contract was signed February 1990, and the work was completed in 1992 on a budget of 460,000 Norwegian kroner. Titled Fuglekvinnen og hennes hjelpere (“The bird woman and her helpers”), Gaup’s work is a monumental integrated sculpture in wood, concrete, and metal that soars overhead as travelers enter the airport’s main hall. In it, Gaup reprises a bird reference that echoes his cover drawing for the seminar report, and which was also present in his smaller but highly significant public sculpture Flyversjamanens fugl / Girdinoaiddi loddi from 1988,¹⁷ which has now been relocated within the new Sámi High School and Reindeer Husbandry School and the Sámi National Theatre Beaivváš in Kautokeino/ Guovdageaidnu.

With site specificity in mind, the bird is of course a fitting figure for the airport context, where people come to fly away and land again, much like the birds in Gaup’s drawing. With his appeal to ‘balance’ and ‘the earthly and the spiritual’ in his seminar introduction three years before, it is not surprising that Gaup would be drawn to the site of an airport and identify spiritual or metaphysical qualities there. Indeed, in his competition proposal for Bodø, he writes:

‘Fuglekvinnen og hennes hjelpere is a mythological representation of the female shaman traveling between different worlds. An airport is one such point where different worlds and ideas meet. The Sámi flight shamans [de samiske flyversjamanene] have been flying for centuries and I found it natural to link one of these to the environment of a busy modern airport … my intention is to give the audience an experience of movement in space, as a continuation of travel and for those who need it, an opportunity to get their "soul" back after the trip in space.'¹⁸

Gaup’s appeals to materiality, process, Sámi duodji practices, and ancient forms of image production allow discussions of his work to traverse the categorical terrains mapped by “art” and “craft”. His fluidity between the old and the new and his modes of translating multiple layers of historical knowledge into new works in public space is compelling. The lyricism and “drawn” quality of his sculptural lines at Bodø, together with the appeal to the anthropomorphic animal-human figure, ties his public artwork to the anthropomorphic figures at Alta by which Gaup was so taken. Connecting Fuglekvinnen to SDS’s 1986 Utsmykkingsseminar, the Alta rock paintings, and his work in Kautokeino/ Guovdageaidnu provides a context for us to look at Gaup’s approach to public art at the end of the 1980s. It deepens our understanding of how Gaup carried his Sámi worldviews into what he himself described as a ‘modern context’, and how he wove his conceptual priorities together with a distinct material approach to create a monumental integrated artwork bearing the structure of Bodø’s airport.¹⁹ While the small scale and hand-made characteristics of duodji had to, to some extent, give way to the demands of a structural integrated project, Gaup still manages to negotiate both the material and conceptual priorities of his practice within the complex and high-security environment of the airport.

Three years before submitting his proposal for Bodø, Gaup asked his fellow Sámi artists:

'Do we need a physical Sámi environment when we work? Or is the psychological more important or sufficient? What kind of interiors do we make public art in, Sámi — inter-Nordic — American? Are we just tinkerers or patchers who make interiors seem more reconciled? When we for example place duodji into an environment — is it to mark a kind of territory, even if the works are locked away in a display case?'²⁰

These questions provide fertile ground for reflecting on Gaup’s work at Bodø airport, presumably an “inter-Nordic” space in Gaup’s formulation that is nevertheless situated in Sápmi and where Gaup found a way to work with both the physical environment, as well as the not often discussed but ever-present psychosomatic conjectures that airports produce.

While there is plenty to differentiate them, there are relevant connections between Gaup’s negotiations in Bodø, Elisabeth Haarr’s work at the embassy, and Lisbeth Dæhlin and Elisabeth von Krogh’s jugs in the halls of the Norwegian Government. These connections are first and foremost rooted in their material practices, out of which comes a shared awareness of the relationship between their works’ internal procedures and meaning on the one hand, and how this meaning expands through the public context of their display on the other. Finally, the projects all in their own ways show a sensitivity to their positions within longer material histories, pointing to ongoing negotiations between older traditions, legacies of 20th century modernism, and an expanded matrix of contemporary references. Today more than ever, these negotiations, unfolding through the material conditions that public space so often demands, lay a contested but productive ground for public art’s material and conceptual horizons.