In Blood We Trust!
About Bjørn Nørgaard’s and Svend Wiig Hansen’s Artistic Bloodlust
Keywords:
Blood art, Danish Postwar art, Performance art, Art and politics, Religion and artAbstract
The new and more body-oriented art practice that arose in the western art world in the postwar period resulted not only in the development of new art concepts, such as performance art or land art. It also paved the way for completely new and alternative fields of inquiry into what art can be seen as. With the body in focus, the artists investigated how different types of transformation processes unfold something totally new, the artists did not only investigate the relationship between life and art, but also raised some other, and maybe more complex philosophical, aesthetical, and ethical questions about the relationship between life, art, politics and existence. The transmission from life to death or even from body to art, as well as the relationship between politics and religion was thematised in interrelated ways. In that context, the incorporation of dead animals and blood became an essential concrete, material, and symbolic element for these new artistically based investigations. Furthermore, this resulted in the emergence of blood art as a totally new subgenre in the history of art.
The subject of this article is to show how the two Danish artists Bjørn Nørgaard and Svend Wiig Hansen also dealt with blood art as an integral part of their artistic practices in the 1970s. In this article I show how there are mutual differences and similarities between Nørgaard’s and Wiig Hansen’s blood art practice.
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