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This study examines the concepts of art, politics and art institution departing from three cases of exhibition situations at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 1998–2008. The cases are considered in relation to different aspects of the museum’s identity as an art institution. The first case, the Pontus Hultén Study Gallery (2008–), is an interactive exhibition space containing 34 mechanical screens for displaying art. It is understood here as a comment on the museum’s identity as a collecting institution. The author critically analyses a number of common oppositions in avant-garde theory regarding museum culture, such as the museum as a place for passivity rather than activity, preservation rather than initiation, and ultimately death rather than life. The second case, the exhibition series Moderna Museet Projekt (1998–2001), was marked by the ambition to integrate artworks into contexts outside the physical museum building. Here case analyses focus on the distinction that the series established between art and a presumed alternative, such as life, reality, or politics. The third and last case, the sound installation Forty-Part Motet (2001) by Janet Cardiff, was installed in an exhibition space that actualised the ideals of the so-called white cube. In the institutional critique of the 1960s and 1970s, this exhibition space was dismissed as isolated and detached from society, an idea that is critically examined. Throughout the different case studies, spectator positions and potential agency are of particular concern. This thesis concludes that the concepts of art and politics are different permeable forms of experiences, visibilities and practices, that cross and intertwine. This conclusion is informed by Jacques Rancière’s notions of aesthetics and politics. In this reading, the art institution is not a barrier separating art from politics, reality or life, but nor is it a dead or deadening space. Rather, the art institution, as a social space and concept of art, is considered as intertwined with other forms of visibilities and experiences. Thus, regarded as a frame for a certain type of visibility, the art institution is capable of establishing a difference that is both unproblematic and urgent.

Avhandlingen rymmer en ”stor” och en ”liten” berättelse. Den lilla berättelsen börjar omkring 1870 och handlar om Nordiska museet och dess grundläggare Artur Hazelius. Den stora berättelsen tar sin början i 1800-talets första decennier och förankrar det kulturhistoriska museiväsendets framväxt och formering i en mera vidsträckt och kronologiskt utsträckt historie- och museipolitisk kontext. 1800-talet har karaktäriserats som en period av stark statlig mobilisering på det musei- och historiepolitiska fältet. Avhandlingen visar att det var osäkert vilken roll staten skulle spela. Det var osäkert vilket slags offentlighet som museerna tillhörde, vilka syften museer fyllde och hur de skulle utformas. Det var omtvistat vem som ägde fornminnena. Två rörelser kan urskiljas. Den ena rörelsen ville åstadkomma ett långtgående statligt ansvar för historiebevarandet. Den andra rörelsen var framväxten av ett civilsamhälleligt associationsväsende på historiebevarandets område. Historie- och museipolitikens grunddrag kännetecknades av spänningarna mellan dessa rörelser. Den stora berättelsen överlappar den lilla berättelsen om Nordiska museet och Artur Hazelius. Avhandlingen belyser det spelrum som de övergripande osäkerheterna om historiebevarandets mål och organisering lämnade åt Artur Hazelius och hur Nordiska museets utveckling efter hand kom att ge återverkningar på hela det historie- och museipolitiska området. Den belyser också hur Nordiska museets stegvisa etablering som kulturhistoriskt centralmuseum påverkades av det kulturhistoriska museiväsendets professionalisering. I avhandlingen är det historiografiska perspektivet centralt. Ett utmärkande drag för den dubbla historia som avhandlingen berättar är den betydelse som historieskrivningen har haft, både för formeringen av det kulturhistoriska museiväsendet och för efterhandsförståelsen av detsamma. / This thesis traces and analyses important changes in cultural heritage and museum politics during the 19th century. It tells two overlapping narratives. One is about the museum founder Artur Hazelius and the creation and expansion of The Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet). The other concerns the indecisive construction of meaning and organisational forms for state responsibility for the cultural heritage. The latter story begins in 1810 and the former in 1872. The 19th century is commonly described as the breakthrough for a new era, a time when the cultural heritage became a matter of the state and a part of state promoted nationalism. This thesis instead sheds light on the uncertainties, hesitations and conflicts involved in the construction of national cultural heritage politics and practices. It emphasises the alternatives to state administration that were launched and the crucial role played by associations and voluntary organisation in the preservation of the cultural heritage. It observes the significance of histories and of counter-histories in the controversies over the ownership of and responsibility for the cultural heritage. The way different political positions grow out of conflicting stories of institutional origin is considered. The thesis also focuses on the gradual emergence of a museum profession and its implications for the development of the Nordic Museum and for museum politics in general.

This essay investigates live-streamed guided tours made by Moderna Museet, so called sofa tours, streamed between February 2020­ and April 2021. The aim is to observe, describe and analyze the [Moderna Museet’s] sofa tours using a modality approach as well as relating the sofa tours to physical museum visits, using the concepts of media, mediation, remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy. The research questions concern ways of looking at art when participating in sofa tours and the differences compared to physically viewing art at the museum. In conclusion, the sofa tours made by Moderna Museet offers several alternatives to physical museum visits, not necessarily better or worse. Participants can actually modify their experience of participating in sofa tours and looking at art, for example by choosing to participate live or afterwards, with or without access to other participants comments, questions and reactions as well as choosing between using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or the museum webpage to access the sofa tours. Comparing sofa tours to physical museum visits showed that both their principal function is to provide opportunities for people to view art together with other people, with or without the aid of a guide. However, most of the mediated space in the physical museum is unavailable to sofa tour participants. On the other hand, the sofa tour creates another set of unique mediations which do not exist in the physical museum space.

Denna uppsats har undersökt hur Hilma af Klint har framställts i utställningskataloger och recensioner av Moderna Museet i Stockholms tre utställningar – 1989, 2013 och 2022. Uppsatsen har granskat ordval, fraser och åsikter gällande beskrivningar av henne, hennes konst och hennes plats i konsthistoriens skrivning. Undersökandet har utifrån ett feministiskt synsätt. Genom Linda Nochlins Varför har det inte funnits några stora kvinnliga konstnärer, Whitney Chadwicks Women, Art & Society samt Hélène Cixous dikotomier och text Laugh of the Medusa har uppsatsen kommit fram till att återkommande ordval som hänvisar på af Klint som kvinna har förekommit främst i samband med Moderna Museets första utställningen. Idag vid utställningen 2022 ifrågasätts Moderna Museets roll mer i deras återkommande synlighet av af Klint och hur vidare hon ska förklaras som ett geni som marknadsför museumet, mer än henne som en konstnär. / This essay has examined how Hilma af Klint has been described in exhibition catalogues and reviews of Moderna Museet in Stockholm’s three exhibitions - 1989, 2013 and 2022. The essay has examined word choices, phrases and opinions regarding descriptions of her, her art, and her place in the writing of art history. The examination has used a feminist approach. Through Linda Nochlin’s Varför har det inte funnits några stora kvinnliga konstnärer, Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art & Society, as well as Hélène Cixous’ dichotomies and text Laugh of the Medusa the essay has reached the conclusion that recurring word choices that refer to and highlight to af Klint’s gender as a woman are most visible in the first exhibition from 1989. Today, at 2022’s exhibition, the role of Moderna Museet is challenged more in their repeated visualising of af Klint and also how she is now depicted as a genius to market the museum, more than her as an artist.

The pocket watch, an ingenious invention that over its 500 year-long development, made it possible for time keeping to become portable and reliable. A symbol of culture, station and importance, that changed the way our society interacts with and uses time. Nordiska museet’s collections contain over a thousand pocket watches and pocket watch movements, all available through the aggregator Swedish Open Cultural Heritage API. With a critical eye towards the outdrawn digitisation process of Swedish museums, this paper intends through statistical analysis to find trends, patterns, and problems relating to the representation of this grand collection. The results reveal negligence surrounding technical descriptors by reason of suboptimal knowledge regarding watchmaking, a confusing naming convention, and a great need for deeper research into the collection.

Öyvind Fahlström in translation aims to examine how Moderna Museet interpreted Öyvind Fahlström in Manipulate the World – Connecting Öyvind Fahlström; an exhibition that showcased pieces by the postwar artist Öyvind Fahlström together with works by contemporary artists. I understand the exhibition as a ’game of translation’, in which the artworks and the texts connected to Manipulate the World are put in play with previous interpretations of the artist. ’Game of translation’ is a concept that draws on Fahlström’s concept of game, as well as Mieke Bal’s and Susan Sontag’s different understandings on the power dynamics of interpretation. As in the works by Fahlström, Bal and Sontag, the viewer and her interpretations are placed in center of my analysis.  Manipulate the world aimed to ’activate’ Fahlström. Even though the exhibition presented Fahlström as an artist who tried to actively disrupt established narratives, I concluded that the translation of Fahlström presented in and as the exhibition relied heavily on the established history of that same artist. Within the framework of that history, Manipulate the world presented two relatively new readings of Fahlström’s art: they highlighted the presence of colonial and postcolonial criticism in Fahlström’s production and launched an understanding of the artist’s variable paintings as political models.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the concept of an individual who hangs an exhibition poster from Moderna Museet on their wall and shares it on Instagram. Questions regarding what that individual wants to tell the audience about themselves, their individuality and lifestyle, through sharing it on a public forum have been the main topic. The material was an image of a poster from Moderna Museet in Stockholm (an Andy Warhol exhibition from 1968) hanging inside someone's home. The picture was found amongst Instagram-posts that had been tagged to connect with the account @modernamuseet_butiken. At the basis of the analysis is the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu concerning capital, taste, beauty and museums. The method was a qualitative social semiotic approach that began by looking at the material on a denotative and connotative level, before branching out to the social semiotic level by applying the theoretical framework. The research found that through the content it is possible to make strong connotative readings concerning the person's education, background and awareness of art and art history. A conclusion is made concerning Bourdieus work in a modern day, which says that it is possible to use it to get a fundamental understanding, but it is at the same time important to approach the theories critically, because of the fact that the lines between different social classes are getting more blurred.

This dissertation investigates the mediation of art on Swedish television during the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to examine how the new medium of television was put to use in the dissemination and promotion of contemporary and modernist art during this time. The primary research question concerns the significance and consequences of television as a media form for the practices of art popularization and art education. The introduction of the new medium coincided with the post-war emergence of the welfare state and ambitions of governmental and non-governmental organizations and initiatives to make modern art an integral part of modern society. This dissertation investigates the role and significance of television in these endeavours from the point of view of Sveriges Radio/TV, by focusing on the actors involved as well as the form and content of arts programming at the time. The study makes use of mediatization theory and the concept of remediation, in order to capture and analyse the dynamics as well as the conflicts between television and art at the time. The study uses the method of media-specific genre analysis, inspired by cultural theory, asserting that arts programming is a cultural category made up of practices and processes and interwoven with ideological structures and power relationships. The dissertation is divided into three chapters investigating different aspects of the phenomenon of art on TV during the specific historical period.  The dissertation shows how the 1950s and 1960s witnessed great hopes for television as a way of disseminating art and educating the public on matters of art, aspirations closely connected to notions of art distribution as a way to achieve cultural democratization. First and foremost, however, the close study of the practices of arts programming shows how the relationship between television and art at the time was also characterized by problems and conflict. Using the terminology of mediatization theory, it is possible to speak of conflicts between distinct logics. These conflicts can further be understood on several levels, adhering to the twin logics of remediation: transparent immediacy and hypermediacy. The actors involved all shared a view of television as the great medium of the future when it came to disseminating and promoting art to the wider public. However, they also shared notions of television’s limitations when it came to the matter of ”doing justice” to a work of art when broadcast. This was first and foremost considered to be purely a matter of technical limitations, such as the lack of colour and the small screen size. It is however also evident that the actors’ view of their task and that of the medium with regard to arts programming, to represent works of art to the viewers as honestly as possible, delimited the form and content of shows and programming. On another level, the conflict between art and television was a matter of art’s supposedly critical and societal value. According to the actors, art was considered something other than regular programming, in the sense that art constituted different ways of seeing and perceiving the world. The function and importance of arts programming, then, was considered to be in the ways it differed from regular programming, making possible to educate the TV-viewing public in critical thinking towards the manipulation of media as well as providing ways of developing the form and aesthetics of the television medium.

This dissertation traces the history of a diagram. The diagram shows four circles of gradually diminishing sizes, lodged one inside the other, like the layers of a circular or spherical body. For a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists centered around Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the diagram represented a new type of museum: a museological Information Center modeled on the computer, operating as a site for radically democratic social experiments. The four layers stood for different functions: information capture, processing, interface, storage; or, put differently: social spaces and media resources, workshop floors, exhibition facilities, collection. Through close readings of a series of exhibitions and institutional projects in Sweden, the US, and France, this dissertation follows the development of this diagram: its prehistory and formulation, its different implementations, and its direct and indirect effects. It studies Moderna Museet’s original, unrealized project for Kulturhuset in Stockholm, according to which the museum should project its dynamic energies across the city center, serving as a “catalyst for the active forces in society”. It discusses the museum’s confrontation with digital technologies in the late 1960s, through pioneering museological organizations such as the Museum Computer Network in New York. It analyzes the exhibition formats developed in correspondence with the notion of the museum as a “vast experimental laboratory” and a “broadcasting station”: the exhibition as critical information pattern, as tele-commune. And it studies the diagram’s afterlife as one of the models informing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, during that project’s early phases. The Exhibitionary Complex reads these endeavors and visions as attempts to devise a critical understanding of the exhibitionary apparatus in relation to new information environments and media systems. It sheds light on a largely forgotten aspect of the exhibitionary, museological, and cultural history of the late twentieth century, in Sweden and internationally. But it also seeks to establish new models for grasping the exhibition’s singularity and potentials as a cultural and media technological form, in relation to the emergence of new information networks, as they exert increasing control over social, cultural, and political existence. / Space, Power, Ideology