'Definitive true art' by Håkan Sandell ~ CookingFood.Org

Håkan Sandell
Photo credit Dagfinn Hobæk

I have received several questions on the meaning of the coinage ''retrogardism'', after it was mentioned in the foreword by Bill Coyleto the selection of my translated poetry Dog Star Notations published by Carcanet last month. And of course it´s playing with the familiar word avantgarde, but has no literal meaning, similar to how cubism and impressionism had little to say about the actual intents of artists like Braque or Seurat. It was first used by the Slovenian art movement Neue Slowenische Kunst during the 1980s, and simply borrowed by myself and my friend Clemens Altgårdwhen we wrote what has been called a manifesto Om retrogardism (On Retrogadism) in 1994. Though our real intention was more to playfully name what we regarded as an already existing change-of-consciousness in contemporary poetics and poetical sensitivity. Neither did we feel any more closely linked to the Slovenians than the Russian futurists felt to the Italian futurists a hundred years ago. Some years before, we had been pleased to call our more personal enterprises by the name of "Nybarock" (Neo-Baroque).

All this has been explained down to its smallest details many times before (although not to an English audience). Retrogardist poetics is already the subject of academic studies. And what was to follow, the Swedish-Norwegian Retrogardist Group (1997-2011), growing into a movement including dozens of artists, is today slowly stiffening into history. What I would like to share instead is something closer to my senses and my own immediate memories.

I spent my early youth re-discovering the Modernist wave that swept Sweden from 1980, after the (as we perceived it) rather bleak socialist-realist 1970s, which in an almost totalitarian way had come to dominate Swedish cultural politics. But after some five more years, and although fueled with Postmodernism, most of the Modernist steam was gone. In my group of friends it was clear that Modernism, in poetry, had become a kind of international language with some small, local, folkloristic variations (like the variations in folk costumes during a Soviet Friendship-of-the-Peoples-festival). In English translation, a Turkish Modernist poet would sound exactly like a fellow Modernist poet from Ecaudor. That was the first critical observation, and we would repeat the observation over and over again at international poetry festivals. Our own poems started to cough, discretely, hand over mouth.

The second observation concerned what was being left out of Modernist poetics. From a literary perspective it may at first seem petty. But, yes, the oral was lacking, the epic was lacking, the music was gone, and so on. Not true for the Modernist pioneers and masters to be fair, but certainly for what was coming out of the contemporary festival microphones. Beauty and imagery was there, but the "latin" rhetorical and also the ''surprise'' element was missing. Even the vulgar was lacking. The heaven in those poems had no God, the streets in them had no life. It was difficult to word it sharply, but the observation was distinct: it was the end of an era. My old interest in art and painting would help me further. I discovered a contemporary artist that had already long turned his back to Modernism. The Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum (born 1944):

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This painting, the first I saw by Nerdrum, could be found in Göteborg/Gothenburg, where it had been bought and displayed by the daily morning newspaper G-P. And it knocked me out, at first glance. Now, after Nerdrum's prices have gone from the £2,000 of his late youth to the £200,000 of today, this painting seems to be called 'The Rise of the Sun'. In Norway we always called it 'Gry' (Dawn). But here, several years before I was able to discuss the question with Mr. Nerdrum himself, it dawned on me, through his pictures, what had also been left out by Modernism; the pathetic, the heroic, the sentimental, the nostalgic, the decadent, the Luciferian, the declamatory, the dramatic, the Dantean! (Dantesque?), the Gothic, late Manierism, Romanticism, historicism, symbolism, etc. We even started to love everything that had lost its battle to Modernism; the French Symbolist Rose-Croix painters, the Victorian pre-Raphaelites, and you, old rotten Baudelaire, your children - Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons - and you, William Morris the great poet of the western sunset/sunrise. For what use is Eliot, when you can have Browning; what good is Cummings when there is Coleridge, the holy Eucharist? Or so it seemed to us.

It was not the first time though, that a piece of art awakened these sentiments in me. Around the same time I had listened, perplexed, to a new recording from Laibach, the musical partner of Neue Slowenische Kunst, called 'Macbeth', a violent instrumental but opera-minded piece inspired by Shakespeare's play. It was frightening and hysterical, but definitive true art. More importantly, I had recently visited the Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin, in an alley close to the ''shop window of the West", the Kurfürstendamm. We had just started to throw around the word "retrogardism" for our own new ideas (while still clinging to "Neo-Baroque" as a literary term). And walking round the somewhat sparse museum (another "shop window"), I remember mumbling to myself; 'This is it... this is retrogardism... this is what´s possible... yes, Käthe... let´s empower art again....' And she looked back, as in Delphi, as she did in Cumae, here: