pedestrian survey || thrift shop vernacular

fieldnotes: 001, Stockholm • Sweden

Oct 17, 2021

The Sami camp, a frequent subject-matter in Scandinavian & Nordic art, as a sort of internalized exotic “other,” in much the same fashion as the Indigenous American Indian representations within art of the US.

“I do not seek. I find” —Pablo Picasso
"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents" —Bob Ross
“A picture is worth a thousand words” —anonymous

Reading cultural landscapes • pattern language, material culture, “art” & ethnographic tracking

thrift shop art appreciation || 001

Fieldnotes || Briefing: brief notes from actual fields

What makes for good fieldnotes? And furthermore, why bother taking fieldnotes in the first place? Heck, what constitutes a “field” anyway?

Great start! Because you should always go into the “field” asking questions with a blank slate, although rainproof paper is easier to carry. Now, with our eyes wide-open"- kinda cool-like, so as not to be overly obvious - let’s take in the scene and head out into the nearby “field” with plenty of room in our rucksack for non-predetermined question foraging.

Ready?

But first, let’s look over some legitimate ethnographic advice for taking proper fieldnotes:

Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein (1997) have developed a list of what should be included in all fieldnotes:
1. Date, time, and place of observation
2. Specific facts, numbers, details of what happens at the site
3. Sensory impressions: sights, sounds, textures, smells, taste
4. Personal responses to the fact of recording fieldnotes
5. Specific words, phrases, summaries of conversations, and insider language
6. Questions about people or behaviors at the site for future investigation
7. Page numbers to help keep observations in order
There are 4 major parts of fieldnotes, which should be kept distinct from one another in some way when we are writing them:
1. Jottings are the brief words or phrases written down while at the fieldsite or in a situation about which more complete notes will be written later.
2. Description of everything we can remember about the occasion you are writing about - a meal, a ritual, a meeting, a sequence of events, etc.
3. Analysis of what you learned in the setting regarding your guiding question and other related points.
4. Reflection on what you learned of a personal nature, be especially careful to separate it from analysis.

Now, place all that highfalutin’ learning over to the wayside, because we’ll be focusing here on only two key aspects of the fieldnote-taking process:

The jottings: which, besides being a really cool word, means being curious and aware and taking in what’s “going on” or “going down” around you. Your methods and tools? That’s up to you: pen & paper, notes on your phone, snapshots, beat poetry, what have you. Counting on our memories alone can be a rather interpretive plastic medium. But you know what? Even hard scientific data is an interpretive art, so there you go.
The field: any and every place or opportunity, that’s the field. The closer and more local or micro to you and the place you’ve currently got your boots planted, the better! Trust me - your very own closet, local forest, abandoned lot, drainage ditch, or neighborhood is the best “field” for you.

Swedish vernacular art ||

Thrift shops across Stockholm and greater Sweden are, by my estimation, absolutely chuck full of great works of art. Produced by vernacularists, outsiders, and hobbyists; mass-reproduction; art & folkschool projects from the attics and old stugor; some old, mutilated rare book prints cutout & framed; and yes - even a few professionally rendered artistic gems.

Subject-matter, content, & iconography ||

I hear you asking, Eph, what’s the deeper cultural narrative here? What is it that Swedes of old and present desire from their artistic representations?

Here’s a list of the most commonly represented subject-matter genres that I repeatedly witness:

Nordic environmental landscapes
Cabins, barns, boat houses and saunas
Farms and farm life
Boats, sailboats, and ferries
Birch trees, other birch trees, and a spruce tree
Historical architecture with cultural emotional value
Hunting, waterfowl, moose, and reindeer
Fiddlers, Midsummer “maypoles,” harvest time, and God Jul Christmas/winter scenes

I suppose that when it comes to this sort of subject-matter, I’m rather biased because I’m fascinated by reading the iconography of the material culture, built environments, cultural landscapes, as well as the environmental depictions. And yes, I’m a sucker for a nice birch tree or log cabin every time.

This romanticized past of happy yet tuckered peasant farmers, ships captains, hunters, herdsman, milkmaids, and other worldly fiddlers does come with a dark side, however.

To learn more, as you must, about the deeper and darker sub-currents running through these lovely, happy, nature depicting and seemingly non-confrontational pretty pictures, we hit the research stacks, by following the trail of links below.

A commonplace thrift shop layout: mid-century modern, Danish modern, 18th-19th century, and IKEA furniture juxtaposing a cornucopia of paintings and prints in a variety of style and genre

Share Art of Encampment: the breakdown

Recontextualizing Swedish nationalism for commercial purposes: a multimodal analysis of a milk marketing event

Helen Andersson (2019)

Swedish nationalism and nature

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the idea to associate democracy to Swedish nature and the Swedish landscape has been central to Swedish nation building. Nature was considered to constitute the basis of democratic nationalism (Werner & Björk, 2014) and Swedish nature and Swedish people as a nature-loving people became central discourses in the formation of a modern and democratic nation (Sandell & Sörlin, 1994). Nature became represented through the idea of ‘openness’, ‘cleanliness’, ‘simplicity’, nature as being free of artifice and hence as something fundamentally equalizing (Ehn, 1993; Sandell & Sörlin, 1994; Werner & Björk, 2014). It was the Swedish landscape that had formed the Swedish character and temperament, and notions of Swedishness were produced within prose, poetry, architecture, design, portraits and landscape images (Facos, 1998; Werner & Björk, 2014). The Swedish landscape and scenes from the Swedish folk life represented typical themes: nature, the farmer and farmer culture, the season of summer, traditions, rituals and customs, and wooden panel buildings with the color of ‘falu-red’ or mansion yellow became key signifiers of Swedish national identity (Facos, 1998). Nature became appropriated by the white urban middle class for cultural reasons such as pleasure and leisure, singling out selected parts of Sweden in order to live authentic lives during the summer (Werner & Björk, 2014). Aquarelles such as Carl Larsson’s paintings of family life and rural socializing (see Figure 1) became virtually synonymous with the image of the nation (Carl och Karin Larssons släktförening, 2016).

'NATURE-LOVING' AS NATIONALISM

While the plants which stand as symbols of nature, and of Swedishness, thus often belong to an anthropogenic landscape created by farmers, farming itself is less emphasised in today's rural romanticism. Perhaps this is because there is little similarity between a modern farmer and the fantasised historical peasant. However, just as the English expression 'country' relates both to the territory of a nation and to the rural 'countryside', Swedish 'landet' has double sets of connotation. `I landet' means 'in the country' while 'på landet'means 'in a rural setting' . Further, there are no strong boundaries maintained between going 'Out pa landet' and Out i naturen', although 'på landet' gives more space for associations to rural life, rural economy. Rurality and naturality therefore are conflated, representing a sense of Ethno-Swedish nationalism.

Dig deeper within the resource links below: