[gothic-l] Vandal exhibition gives new explanations.

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

    Vandals Exhibit Sacks Some Cultural Myths.
    Mary Blume, International Herald Tribune.
                    Saturday, August 25, 2001.

PARIS The clichéd phrase "shrouded in the mists
of time" might have been invented for the Vandals
who rampaged through Europe's Dark Ages and
whose only immortality lies in the words vandal
and vandalism.

But an exhibition in Sweden, where some of them
were born and others returned some centuries later
after being chased by the Romans from Carthage,
is dedicated to proving that the Vandals weren't
vandals at all.

Where one might expect to see on display hanks of
hair, bloodied axes, broken teeth and captions
about booty and rapine, there is an exquisite
golden fibula with cloisonné decoration and the
Tassilo chalice from Salzburg inlaid with
precious stone. According to the show's organizer,
Pontus Hulten, the Vandals were friendly family
men fond of a joke. If they seized so much of
Europe and North Africa, it was not with a view
to conquest but because they were basically
seafarers who didn't know a land mass until they
hit one.

Hulten, born in Sweden in 1924, is probably the
most admired international museum director in
recent memory. ("He has an appallingly shiny
reputation," a member of Britain's backbiting art
establishment once said.) He has popped up from
Houston to Taejon, Korea, and has created four
museums in four countries, most notably the
Pompidou in Paris. His first museum was the
Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where he installed
an antic sculpture by his good friend Jean Tinguely
at the entrance. It went into motion when fed a
coin and soon had its own bank account, which
helped pay the museum's expenses.

In the sobersided and silkily brutal art world,
Hulten has been a genial free spirit. His Vandal
show is, he agrees, based largely on conjecture,
but he thinks honest inquiry is as worthy as fact
and a lot more fun. "I couldn't have done this if I
had been employed because it might have
damaged my institution, but as I am not, as I am
soon to be 80, what can I lose?"

Nothing, as it turns out, since "The True Story of
the Vandals," on exhibit at the temporary
headquarters of the planned Museum Vandalorum
in Varnamo through this weekend, has had a public
success and has even bent some historians and
curators to his view. The turning point for Hulten
came when his wife, the historian Marie-Louise
von Plessen, fed up after three years of Hulten's
nattering about the Vandals, came aboard. "It's
less eccentric since Marie-Louise joined, because
she's a professional, which means you are allowed
no fancy," Hulten said in Paris.

The project began with the decision to create an
arts and design museum at Varnamo, about an hour
from Stockholm. Renzo Piano is the architect, and
building will start in a year. Rather than a name
like The Arts and Design Museum, Hulten
suggested Museum Vandalorum (there had been
Vandal settlements nearby). "When they first
thought of the museum they had an administrative
name and that's no fun. So I proposed a Latin name
because in this part of the world there are nine
nations with nine languages, so you cannot easily
use one of these languages to appeal to the whole
Baltic region."

It's a bit of a stretch to connect the Vandals with
sleek Scandinavian design, and so Hulten invented
his Vandals show, which opened this spring. "It
started with the name, which I had to justify, so I
started looking up the Vandals and fairly soon
discovered that the history was incoherent."

The first use of the word vandalism in its current
meaning, Hulten found, was by the French
Academy in 1739; in 1794 l'Abbé Gregoire used it
to describe the destruction during the French
Revolution. The Oxford English Dictionary traces
vandal in its modern sense to 1663. In a way,
vandal and vandalism were terms waiting to be
invented, but according to Hulten the Vandals got
a bum rap.

The cause, he concludes, is the Roman Catholic
Church. The Vandals were Christians of the Arian
branch, named after Arius, a fourth century
theologian who rejected the traditional Catholic
view of the Trinity, and so they earned Rome's
enduring enmity.

Procopius wrote amicably about them, if you
know to read between the lines, Hulten says, but
around 485 Victor of Vita wrote a book published
circa 1500 about the atrocities committed by the
Vandals. It had great influence, although there is
no historical proof of its contents.

"Few people are known from a history written
only by their enemies," Hulten writes in the
catalogue. "The Vandals' history is one of them."

The Vandals did sack Rome in 455, or as the
catalogue puts it, they occupied Rome for two
weeks and distributed its treasures among their
troops. Hulten thinks this should not be held
against them. "Sacking Rome was a hobby for
many people," he explains.

His studies took him into many areas, from origins
(did the Vandals come from Ultima Thule and
where is it?) to descendants (blue-eyed
Venetians? The English, since there was a Vandal
tribe called Hasting?) by way of proper names that
can be pronounced only through split teeth with a
swollen tongue.

He found a German linguist who in a paper on the
origins of the Slavic languages makes a connection
between the words Vandal and Slav, and another
German academic who says that instead of Vandal
Arianism we should refer to homoiousian
Trinitarian theology. "I frankly don't understand all
this but he's a very nice man," Hulten says.

In collecting objects, he even got the British
Museum to send pieces from the Sutton Hoo burial
ships uncovered in 1939 at the behest of Edith
Pretty, in whose land they lay.

Although Sutton Hoo is considered an Anglo-Saxon treasure, Hulten 
argues for a Vandal influence in some of the objects. "The British 
Museum was very good, they didn't laugh at me," he says.

The catalogue is full of "maybes" and "might haves" and Vandal 
attributions of some of the more refined objects are questioned even 
in its pages.

None of this matters. It's an engaging inquiry in
which Hulten combined his scholarly imagination,
sense of fun and exuberant curiosity. Questions
have always interested him more than answers.

As he paraphrases Voltaire in his epigraph: "I
accept an idea today, doubt it tomorrow and live
with it the day after tomorrow, and I can always
be wrong." 



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