Since 1995, Patrick Huse has spent a lot of time in Iceland and has brought five large-scale museums shows here, the last one currently in Hafnarborg, the art museum in Hafnarfjörður. These exhibitions have come here after opening in Norway and have also gone to museums in other countries. Iceland has been the focus of two of the exhibitions but these are part of a much wider artistic exploration of the arctic, its landscapes and cultures, a journey that has also taken him to Greenland, to Nunavut in Northern Canada and to the lands of the Sami.

JP: For more than a decade your art has focused almost exclusively on the high arctic and gradually your exhibitions and publications have become larger and more diverse. You no longer restrict yourself to traditional media like painting but include photographs, texts and videos to document what you find on your travels in the north. What is the source of your fascination with these areas?

PH: Almost every writer and traveller in the arctic talks about the “simplicity” of the land and the clarity they achieve in their minds when they are there. The “simplicity” they talk about is real. It is something you experience in daily life and it gives you time to think and to reorganize your mind. In our carefully planned lives we have difficulties in clarifying our thoughts and feelings because so many things are impinging upon us. Personally, I have pragmatic attitude towards the arctic as a learning process. The scientists today say that the arctic is the place on the planet where you can most easily measure or read the earth condition and that also goes for cultural changes because there is limited diversity in each environment, in contrast to more populated areas where there is now more diversity.

Your interest in the North is obviously not just formal or investigative. It is personal.

As I know you, both as a person and an Icelander, you are aware of your history and we both know that we build our knowledge on our own understanding of our history. My interest in the arctic goes beyond my own environment and I admit that it is strong curiosity that has brought me to those places. I feel comfortable on my own latitude but I am also fascinated to see how different cultures on the same latitude resolve their issues and to learn from that. In my work as an artist in the context of my projects makes me a mediator but at the same time my daily life in a small village high in the mountains of Norway makes me a participant because we in our community deal with many of the same problems of sustainable development in a peripheral area.

I remember talking with an Inuit from Repulse Bay about the value of the land. He said that he often goes out on the land, away from the beaten track, to get in touch with himself, to get away from the stress in the communities which – even in the arctic – are getting more city-like every year. My experience is the same and I feel, like the Inuit, that nature is not something that we need to explain or question. It is a given, a source we can return to if we know what to look for. For the Inuit, so many aspects of life are still directly linked to the landscape and cannot be represented separately. In the same way, the landscape is still a part of the Inuit and cannot be represented separately from all other aspects of their lives; there is no need to represent landscape as a separate idea or concept. It may be possible to look at the growing gap between Inuit and their land (under pressure from Western culture) and the emergence of landscape in art as an indicator of this distancing from the all-encompassing life on the land, where life was the landscape and vice versa.

The cultures of the arctic are under threat from the global commercial culture of the West but this is more than just a question of cultural preference of way of life. What is at stake is survival so raising the issue is in effect a potentially explosive political act.

One thing which is quite clear is that our problems are no longer local problem because so many environments on earth are struggling with the same issues. With better communications we have become aware of how much we share in this regard.

In my work I’m not necessarily searching for diversity, trying to uncover more diversity in culture or in nature. I simply study the northern landscape and its different cultures on the basis of an assumption that nature is a cultural activity that has fundamental importance to economic and political structures. It is not that I think these northern latitudes are something altogether unique or offer something for study that you don’t find on other latitudes. It’s more a question of being informed about conditions on my own latitude and trying to learn different ways of thinking and dealing with daily life. Indigenous people say that white people leave too many tracks. In our Western world, a lot of time is used on preserving memory in a physical way. Among the Inuit the same is achieved through a very strong oral tradition. A visitor from Nunavut asked me curiously why people in Norway live in museums because to him the interior of Norwegian houses looked very much like a small local museum. My impression is that Inuit culture does not make the divisions, distinctions and dichotomies that we make between man and nature, man and animals. Inuit culture exits “in” nature, while our Western culture exists “apart” from nature. This is clearly one of the things that set the northern cultures apart but this approach to things will eventually disappear as Western culture becomes more influential. We also find large diversities between peripheral communities and central areas in other parts of the latitude than Nunavut. The larger the distance from central areas the more people have to rely on the resources that nature provides. The one important thing that distinguishes this latitude from others is, of course, the climate. This inevitably makes for a different and more complicated lifestyle than what we find in the warmer climates to the south.

The peoples of the far north are clearly more in tune with their natural environment than we are. Why is that good?

I never understood it as good or bad. People are differently attuned to different environments, which is in turn deeply connected to their local identity. One of the interesting issues about the arctic is that extreme climate conditions and the simplicity of the natural surroundings create a particular intimacy and understanding of nature which is different from what we are brought up with in our Western culture.

For the first the Inuit view of life is different from Western culture because they see themselves as part of nature, while Western culture looks upon nature as something to conquer and exploit. We must understand that the Inuit have lived in these parts for more than 4000 years before Western technology emerged and they developed highly skilled hunting methods and a technology for survival that is perfectly adapted to the surroundings. We must recognize that the arctic is probably one of the most difficult places to survive on this planet.

There is a difference between what we need and what we think we need. To gain detailed knowledge of our local surroundings will always be an advantage and it will also help us to understand or process information from other cultures or perspectives. There is always a question of how much more mobility or how many more choices we really need. Maybe we should slow down. In many ways the “advantages” we have achieved have turned out to be some of our largest disadvantages. We should also consider the loss of knowledge as we turn more and more to a global and mainstream culture. What is needed is a higher tolerance for diversity and less pressure to think in terms of the lowest common denominator. We need to place more value on local traditions, language and identity.

Art seems to be a good way to show and celebrate human diversity and a lot of the art of the last few decades (perhaps especially in photography and video art) has tended to do this, celebrating oddities, eccentricity and stark quotidian reality. This can be seen as a sort of resistance to the standardizing trends of the mass media but it also presents a paradoxical situation when the image and icons of diversity are then appropriated by the global media/businesses, in Benetton ads, oriental take-away snacks, new-age Buddhism. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a compromise where people keep resisting and the mainstream media keep appropriating and diluting bits from all different cultures.

Today there is less to distinguish the art project from a commercial project than ever before. Art at its best is an individual language and in that sense represent diversity and could function as a resistance to standardization, but then again, anything created can be used for other purposes than it was made for in the first place. This is always a question of ethics and if the mainstream becomes more tolerant of diversity it is because this has become more convenient. But the communicative tools we have created today can also be useful for communicating serious social issues that need to be discussed at different levels. Serious activity also has a need for using public space. We need to strengthen our beliefs and also discuss what knowledge and legal rights have to be attended to for future generations. In such context I find it important to adopt a local perspective, act globally and think locally because every local community adds an element of diversity which is a resource to the global community.

It’s interesting how you reverse the slogan: Thinking locally is a way of building one’s character in the context of history and community while acting globally is to take advantage of opportunities for communication and advancement in a wider context.

I believe there is growing interest in these issues and a growing understanding that there exists – despite the centralization and globalisation – local knowledge that needs to be preserved because no one knows what culture has the answers that we might need in the future. Many of the indigenous people of Siberia who in the Soviet era moved to the cities for employment have now abandoned the cities where unemployment and poverty are high. They have moved back out on the land and re-established themselves in smaller groups, turning back to their traditional way of living on the land in order to survive. Due to the communications we have today, people will be more aware of these issues and understand that we are in the same boat and that we ourselves are part of the problem.

If we all go to the north we will spoil it. The preservation of wilderness always limits people’s access to it. If we need a permit in triplicate to go up on the mountain then we might as well put up “do not touch” signs. What use is the wilderness to us if it is protected almost like a museum exhibit?

Everybody cannot have access to everything all the time. Often you need to have local knowledge before you approach a new landscape, especially in the arctic where the weather changes quickly and there are animals that can be a danger to you. Then there is the issue of not disturbing wild life which the local population needs for survival. Still there is ways to approach different areas that can provide you with new knowledge.

The idea of the wilderness as a vast open space for exploration is gone. We have to take responsibility for managing our traffic in precisely the areas where we want to think we should be free of all constraints, from road signs and rules. To me, this seems to require a major change in thinking. It is as if there was nothing outside the fence anymore, that the whole world has been encompassed by our society.

We have all lost and some environments have lost more than others but that does not mean that there can be no change. What you say is true and the market economy has encompassed our lives to a greater degree than we had perhaps expected. Still there is knowledge that can point us in a different direction in thinking and people are certainly more aware of environmental issues today.

In Iceland we are seeing for the first time a widespread concern about ecological issues at a time when we are no longer as dependent as we were on traditional resources and farming. This ecological concern is focused on wilderness rather than on the smaller, more remote communities, who conversely see the development of wilderness areas as a way to create jobs and survive. The only alternative they have is in tourism.

The problem with tourism is that it creates a copycat culture. Tools that were used in daily life with a purpose are reproduced as tourist items for a low price. This reduces a lot of traditions that generations have built their life on. The culture is reproduced as simulacra just for the purpose of entertaining people. This has very little to do with preserving knowledge and the strategies that help us survive and build communities. To do that we need a more serious engagement with the people we meet and the culture that informs their everyday life.

Perhaps the most effective (and non-prescriptive) aspect of your project is allowing the voice of people from the north to be heard in the art project; to open the possibility of a real dialogue.

In the northern areas there are a lot of similarities in climate and resources but great cultural diversity. In Norway there are large areas of cultivated landscape around the cities. In Iceland, where you come from, the uncultivated landscape is next to the cities. How do you think that affect you as an Icelander? We all have different approach to ourselves and our surroundings. We must communicate these differences in order to understand each other which is why I try to include people from different environments in my projects. This is also an issue of having respect for local knowledge in the different environments.

It is often the case that we don’t recognize the importance of such things ourselves. Only as I myself grew older and saw more of the world did I understand the value of having grown up in Iceland with lava fields as my playground. This sort of thing is not easy to communicate, especially not if you want to explain how the knowledge you gained may translate in different circumstances.

The information one gives is not necessarily understood right away but that should not stop someone from communicating what you experience and find valuable. I heard people on the news the other day saying that they want to build the new Ukraine on European values. What values are those? Are they EU values, are they values from Hitler’s Germany, which some people still believe in, or is it English values? If you do not have any local values I do not see how you can create anything that will have significant global value. Value are difficult to describe because they are so connected to personal experience - like smell, taste, language etc. - and a large part of what we call values will always exist in a subjective universe. At the same time values are connected to unwritten and written rules in the local community. Mainstream culture puts pressure on the individual and thus on the local community, which makes it necessary for the community to formulate local values very clearly.

You pursue a sort of programme of your own but isn’t it most often a struggle against the tendencies of the museums and the art-establishment in general? The museum and the artist will of course have to engage the viewer if there is to be any sort of dialogue and this will have to be, to a large extent, on the viewer’s terms; otherwise he simply will not come to the exhibitions. In the complicated equation of artist-viewer-museum it is the museum that is the most fixed part, resistant, cumbersome. It tends to want to set the agenda because it is complicated – administratively and financially – to have to adopt it to different ways of functioning. Are artists focusing too much on working with the museum rather than forming a direct alliance with the audience?

Even with all the options now open I still think the museum is the best option for communicating the kind of content I am working with. This of course depends on how each museum defines its role in the public forum as a vehicle for pedagogical activity. This boils down to the agenda of each curator in cooperation with the artist and the agenda of the museum administration. Today there is a strong a commercial agenda due to the cost of financing any art project, gallery or museum, and in the present situation anyone who works with art will have to deal with this. Freedom of speech is not least a financial problem and any institution will have to weight the consequences of pursuing a strong political program and this, of course, makes the issue problematic.
I do not see a difficulty in creating a direct alliance with the audience in a museum. The advantage of a museum is that they have pedagogical departments that can function to communicate the content of the exhibition to the audience. The museums most often have a budget to do so but it boils down to the energy and commitment of each individual curator.

Effective art reorients our thinking and provides a new and often unexpected context for information, even political information. There is no doubt the art can reshape the political and thus help to advance and enrich political and even scientific discourse.

This raises questions of what art is and what art is not. This is deeply connected to how the artist chooses to work, how the artist defines his role in public space and to what degree the artist wants to participate in a social and political context. We must describe reality from different angels in order to explain or discuss any situation or environment and point out possible consequences of people’s action. This becomes part of the artist’s agenda.

Geologists, archaeologist, anthropologists, botanists, economists and others are sent out to do research on different issues in an area, so why not an artist? Perhaps cultural issues could be discussed from another angel that can contribute to a better understanding. There is every reason to think that artists can contribute to our understanding of most of the issues that are at stake here but there are territorial rivalries in social research, as in art. One of the basic challenges of modern society is how to cross borders and overcome barriers between the people laying claim to a particular field of research. The lack of communication between different approaches promotes a power structure that is not necessarily conducive to new ways of analysis. Art in itself is a vehicle for interdisciplinary communication. Art and social criticism have moved into an extended cultural field that previously was reserved for the investigations of other professionals. This involves a move from medium-specific to discourse-specific art, from the formal to the real.