Saunart Museum-Goers Break Sweat Over New Exhibit

The opening night of Peter Johansson’s show at the art museum in Lund, a university town in southern Sweden, had several of the elements that normally accompany such events: people dressed in black, people wearing more rings than they have fingers, people serving those little cheese cubes with toothpicks sticking out of them.

The major difference was that about 20 percent of the gallery goers wore nothing but towels, including me.

Johansson had built a huge sauna right in the middle of the museum, and nobody seemed to mind. In fact, this was why people had come: to see one big-honking sauna - that actually works.

I didn’t know quite what to expect before I went to see The Scandinavian Sauna Project, but certainly not this. I thought it might be a collection of sauna photos. Or there would be some small sauna models made of popsicle sticks. Perhaps the gallery might even turn up the thermostat a few degrees for the occasion. I didn’t envision getting naked and sweaty in a museum … at least not during daytime hours.

A sauna is not the sort of art object you can enjoy from the outside. It requires participation. So I borrowed a towel and went to the changing room, a simple, free-standing wooden structure. Men’s and women’s doors were denoted with non-descript symbols. I chose the door with a sign that looked like two eyeballs on either side of a big nose.

Then, with a towel wrapped firmly around my waist, I followed an elevated wooden path through the museum to the two-story pine sauna. From the outside, if I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have taken it for a sauna. It was big enough to be a guest house, but less complex, architecturally, than a two-car garage.

I entered through the mens’ door, which I recognized immediately, and took a shower in a sculpture. The cylindrical stall was crafted from copper, and some sort of smooth, Japanese garden rocks covered the ground for drainage. Then I went through a door on the other side of the room, which brought me into the sauna at the bottom of a stairway. I walked up the stairs to find a beautifully crafted, elliptical sitting area with 10 sweaty men and women, and room for another 30.

I joined them and began to sweat. It was hard to ignore that more and more of the people coming in were not wearing towels. Or anything else. How ironic, I thought, that the same Swedes who are generally too reserved to say “hi” to each other on the street are perfectly comfortable disrobing in public.

Once the nudists outnumbered the non-nudists, we towel-wearers felt the social pressure and doffed our cover-ups, too. As they say, “When in a Swedish sauna … .”

Perhaps the most impressive engineering marvel of all was the lighting. There was just enough light to see everyone’s body and just enough darkness so no one could tell where you were looking. And the oval-shaped room was designed for viewing. There was a full cross section of Swedish society, from infants to 80-year-olds in every weight division, all naked. I overheard some male college students saying it was fun to be part of the exhibit.

“We’re art!” they exclaimed to the room. Looking around, I’d have to say some of the people were more artistic-looking than others.

One of the most important parts of the Swedish sauna experience is beer. Ordinarily, a beer purchased in a Swedish bar costs around $6, due to extortionate government taxes. But here - the best thing about opening night - the beer was free. Aside from tasting delicious, it certainly improved the artistic value of the exhibit, if you catch my drift.

But we were not just sitting around naked and drinking beer. We were also whipping each other with freshly cut birch branches!

They say branch-whipping is supposed to improve circulation, but I’d sooner believe the propaganda of Priscilla Presley’s hair supplement infomercials. I couldn’t exactly picture a doctor saying, “Poor circulation? Here, have your wife beat you to a pulp with this branch three times a day.”

My girlfriend, Signe, sensing my surprise at the branches, picked one up and offered to whip me with it. Either she wanted to help me enjoy the full sauna experience or punish me for my wandering eyes. It occurred to me as I was sitting there in the buff, sweating, drinking beer and letting my naked girlfriend publicly whip me with a birch branch that this probably wouldn’t go over so well in, say, The Smithsonian Institution.

I have to admit I loved the whole experience. And I wasn’t the only one. Everyone seemed happy. None of those deep, reflective grimaces you see at most museums.

I spoke with the artist, Peter Johansson, who was walking around in a towel. He said it took him two years to get the sauna from the idea stage into the museum, including three months of building in his workshop and two weeks for installation.

“I wanted to make public art that is actually for the public,” he said. In fact, that’s one of the arguments against it. Because the exhibit was so well liked (and free), some locals began to argue that every “Sven Svenson” (Joe Blow) would visit the museum every evening.

Imagine that: an exhibit so popular that museum officials are afraid visitors will come back too often. If only all museums had this problem. And when you consider that the exhibit was paid for with public funds - largely derived from the alcohol tax - why not let the beer drinkers have an exhibit they can enjoy, too?

I take my hat off to curator Cecila Nelson, who had to present the sauna project to the politicians that fund the museum. She had to defend its artistic value, and it was a tough battle. Not nearly as easy as extracting money for abstract or esoteric art, she noted. People expect that at modern art museums. It’s much more risky to display something that appeals to Sven Svenson rather than the usual gaggle of clothed contemporary art aficionados.

MEMO: The Scandinavian Sauna Exhibit will be on tour for the next two years (in Helsinki, Stockholm and Lillehammer, Norway). There are no current plans to visit the U.S.