In case you haven’t heard it before, art isn’t easy (thank you, Stephen Sondheim); all the meticulous work of getting everything right, only for a moment of appreciation or in the case of Norway’s Edvard Munch, criticism. True art is timeless and exists to not only provoke thought but to also inspire new art. When a masterpiece like The Scream comes along it deserves to be remembered because, after all, it wasn’t easy to create in the first place.
With Norway well into its official celebratory Edvard Munch year, we just got wind of another Norwegian artist who’s taken it upon herself to pay a different kind of tribute to him. Lise Wulff, an environmentalist artist, has planned a project entitled “The Scream from Nature,” which aims to raise consciousness about the relationship between humans and nature. Her inspiration for an outdoor installation was drawn from a Munch quote about the motif for his painting The Scream: “I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red and I felt a huge unending scream course through nature.”
Wulff feels that 100 years later, it’s nature that is screaming louder and in quite another way with rising ocean levels, melting glaciers, forest fires, massive extinctions of plant species and more. Her project is an ambitious interpretation of The Scream, in which the face from the painting will be recreated on Oslo’s Ekegergsletta football field during the Norway Cup. This will take place on July 27th, when several thousand participants in the annual international youth football tournament will be arranged to recreate the famous image from Munch’s masterpiece. And you thought the Super Bowl’s half-time entertainment was good!
Also with this project, Lise is encouraging people to make their own “Scream from Nature.” She wants people to participate by creating the iconic face with their own materials found from nature. Participants can send their scream formations to Wulff through Facebook or Instagram, where they will be displayed in a web gallery for everyone to see. The project will also be screened during the Munch 150 exhibition in Oslo until October 13th, and will be updated continuously with newer submissions. By opening up the project to the public, she hopes to accumulate a massive amount of pictures to show that people truly care for the environment and want their screams to be heard.
According to Lise, in the words of André Bjerke (the Norwegian writer), “an artist represents the eyes and ears of society. This idea is for other people to feel the scream from nature, and act!” How about a Scream made entirely of flowers? We’d love to see that.
