| 1. |
- Hodén, Tintin, 1987-
(författare)
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Motsättningarnas museum : Samproduktionen av museiideal i den offentliga debatten om Moderna museet 1972–2013
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines how the art museum’s societal function has been constructed in the Swedish public debate. The dissertation shows that the cultural section of the daily press is, and has been, a forum where actors exchange opinions about art museums, and where notions on the art museums’ functions are co-produced. The specific aim of the dissertation is to examine how museum ideals have been co-produced in the public debate on Moderna Museet (the Swedish Museum of Modern Art). The term museum ideal refers to exemplary notions about the function of the art museum, and also to ideas on how the art museum should fulfil this conceptualised function. The co-production of museum ideals is analysed in four case studies, which span from 1972 to 2013. The case studies sequentially examine the debates regarding Moderna Museet’s acquisition of the artworks in the New York Collection, the debate on the museum’s new building, the debate about the museum’s sponsorship collaboration with the multinational conglomerate corporation Sony, as well as the debates regarding the project The Second Museums of Our Wishes and the exhibition Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction. The dissertation concludes that four reoccurring museum ideals have been co-produced throughout the debates. The first ideal emphasises the importance of equal representation and democratic inclusion. The second ideal stresses Moderna Museet’s educational purpose. The third ideal underlines that the museum should engage in innovative and experimental activities and the fourth ideal accentuates the importance of international prestige and influence. However, the implications of the four museum ideals have not been fixed nor static. Rather, they have been adjusted to match their changing contexts. It appears that there has sometimes been a discrepancy between the museum ideals and Moderna Museet’s mission statements. However, this discrepancy only underlines the museum ideals’ status as ideals. Moderna Museet may not ever fully achieve what the ideals prescribe, but they nonetheless serve as essential objectives for the museum. Furthermore, the conflicts that have provoked the debates have had a significant impact on the ideals. As an example, the format of the debates has sometimes established polemic between the museum ideals. For this reason, some of the ideals have appeared as opposites, even though their implications have been quite similar.
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| 2. |
- Kimvall, Jacob, 1972-
(författare)
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The G-Word : Virtuosity and Violation, Negotiating and Transforming graffiti
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Contemporary public discussions on graffiti are characterized by co-existence of contradictory claims. On the one hand graffiti is described as vandalism, and on the other as an artistic movement. Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, and the concepts of discursive formation and discursive practice are operationalized in order to frame the object of study, and the contradictory claims regarding graffiti are studied as points of diffraction.The aim of the study is to investigate the construction of graffiti as a phenomenon dependent on diametrically opposite but also interdependent claims, as well as how and in which contexts these statements are enounced. Graffiti is thus understood as a transnational phenomenon produced by subcultural as well as and institutional agents, and the thesis analyzes visual and textual material produced within both subcultural and institutional situations. The study is conducted on material concerning three different cultural contexts: different descriptions on the development subcultural graffiti in New York City (circa 1972–1987); the framings of the graffiti on the Berlin Wall in English-language newspapers; and the adaptation of New York’s zero tolerance of graffiti in Stockholm, during the 1990s and early 2000s.The institutions in the studied material represent a wide array of sectors such as the police, art institutions, and public-transit companies, and they interact with graffiti from their own interests and perspectives. The claims of cultural institutions often fall within what in this thesis has been referred to as a consenting discursive practice, built upon the statement ‘graffiti is art’. It is also in relation to this discursive practice that most subcultural descriptions of graffiti are produced. The claims by institutions such as the police and public-transportation companies are almost exclusively found in the interdependent, rejecting discursive practice, built upon the statement ‘graffiti is a crime’.
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| 3. |
- Öhrner, Annika, 1962-
(författare)
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Barbro Östlihn och New York : Konstens rum och möjligheter
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The study analyses the American neo-avantgarde as well as the narratives of Swedish post World War II art history, through a specific subject position. The Swedish painter Barbro Östlihn (1930-1995) lived in New York from 1961, where her work was exhibited and received on a new art scene. Despite the strong focus within Swedish Art History on the 1960’s and the American art scene, Östlihn seems to be marginalized in its narratives. Studies of selected corpora of American art criticism, and of segments in the Swedish art scene in the 1960’s are maintained. Discursive and field-related mechanisms, which help to explain what positions were available, are revealed. Transnational processes of avant-garde culture between Manhattan and Stockholm are discussed, e.g. through an analysis of the American pop art show at Moderna Museet in 1964. This becomes the backdrop for the final chapter’s discussion of the narratives in post World War II Art History in Sweden. In the interpretation of Östlihn’s work-process, her use of photography is understood as a strategy to connect her painterly work with urban space. The painterly and the photographic are merged, as in other artistic practices in a historical moment of crisis in painting. The studio, the site where modes of art production are constructed, is one point of departure in a spatial analysis of the art field. Another is the ongoing urban renewal on Lower Manhattan and its impact on artistic work and on how artists are positioned. Östlihn’s co-operation in the work of her husband Öyvind Fahlström, is understood as a merging of a traditional division of work between genders, and new co-operative modes of art-production. The study is the first academic work on Barbro Östlihn, and covers the time span 1960-1969. Feminist theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Michel Foucault's discourse theory is used as its main framework.
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| 4. |
- Björk, Christian, 1976-
(författare)
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Den sociala differentieringens retorik och gestaltning : Kritiska perspektiv på funktionalistisk förorts- och bostadsplanering i Stockholm från 1900-talets mitt
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis, I analys suburb- and housing planning and interior decoration carried out primarily in Stockholm between the 1930s and the 1950s. Functionalism, the overall concept of the period, has perhaps been interpreted in terms of ideological concepts, interpreted as "democratic" and as a progressive dividing line between the past and the future. I examine how housing and suburban planning in Sweden in the mid-20th century was affected by how housing and town planning related to that period's clear class boundaries and well-defined gender roles. I analyse both rhetoric and physical planning. Whether the architect had explicit ambitions to achieve spatial differentiation of socio-economic categories, how suburban planners dealt with their historical inheritance and the principles about categorisation and spatial separation. I also analyse how ideas of class, gender and spatial differentiation of family members affected the organisation and design of rooms in the housing planning of the mid-20th century. The general conclusion of the thesis as a whole is that ideas about class, sex and familial hierarchy were reflected in functionalist housing and interior decoration. The planned suburbs in Stockholm involved explicit strategies for differentiating population categories in different suburbs. The planned suburbs, which were regarded as paradigmatic cases for the suburban planning of the period, involved explicit strategies for differentiating population categories in different suburbs, a strategy that was concretised in physical suburban planning. Terraced housing in one area, småstugor in another, blocks of flats in a third, detached houses in a fourth. Sociological arguments justified this type of suburban planning. The emotional affinity between neighbours was considered to be better if the neighbours belong to the same socio economic category. Planned homes, which were regarded as paradigmatic cases for the housing planning of this period, involved explicit strategies for differentiating family members into different rooms, distinguishing between private and public rooms within the sphere of the home, a strategy that was concretised in physical housing planning. I analyse how the magazine's editorial content contributed to producing a middle-class housing ideal. A central aspect of modern housing planning and the debate in around 1930 was the launch of the home as an essentially private sphere. The editorial team behind the magazine Hem i Sverige launched the home as a reaction against the idea of the home as essentially a private sphere, with a clear spatial hierarchy and division between different family members, between private and public spheres. I examined the participation of the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in the 1930 Stockholm exhibition. As an influential commercial actor, the store's management had a strategy of combining consumption with both benefit and enjoyment, dreams, pastimes and goal-oriented purchases. The starting point for Nordiska Kompaniet's interior decoration approach was the organisation and content of the upper middle-class home. The drawing rooms, the dining room, the serving area, the homes with clear dividing lines between private and public sphere. Family structures and familial hierarchy were emphasised on the basis of the upper middle-class family's tradition.
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| 5. |
- Hagelqvist, Stina, 1969-
(författare)
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Arkitekttävlingen som föreställning : Den svenska arkitekttävlingens ideologiska, institutionella och professionella villkor under 1900-talets första hälft
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation explores the Swedish architectural competition as defined in the professional discourse of the architectural corps from the first half of the twentieth century. The purpose is to analyze what norms that defined, regulated and supported the use of the competition and the competition practice from ideological, institutional and professional point of view. In using Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, the competition is positioned in the interface between organizer and the architectural corps. This illuminates the competition as both object and instrument of the negotiations of a field of architecture. The competition’s position makes clear the need of a common ideological foundation and the necessity of legitimizing not only the competition instrument but also the architectural corps’ definition of how to implement it. In departing from the concept of discourse, defined by Michel Foucault, I identify principal characteristics of the architectural competition and relate it to notions of freedom and vitality that was thought to be present in the competition. By analyzing the corps’s competition discourse the dissertation makes clear both short-term functions of the competition, such as accumulating esteem, and long lasting effects of the corps’ control of the competition activities by means of guidance, the system of sanctioned competitions and control of the architectural press. This competition system regulated the quality of the competition results and utilized the rivalry between architects by channelling it to the formal legitimate competition. The rivalry between architects, formalised in the competition situation, was thought to bring the competition spirit to the fore and was defined both as the necessary prerequisite of architectural progress and as a constituent property of the normative position of the free practitioner, which was reproduced as architects while competing entered the autonomous time space of the competition.
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| 6. |
- Hayden (Pettersson), Hans, 1965-
(författare)
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Gregor Paulsson och den konsthistoriska tolkningens problem
- 1997
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The core of this thesis is a critical reading of the Swedish art historian Gregor Paulsson's (1889-1977) method of historical interpretation. Initially; Paulsson developed his scholary perspectivefrom the tradition of formalist aesthetics dominating Swedish art history writing in thebeginning of the 20th century. His approach to art history radicaIly changed by the end of the1910's, when he came in touch with experimental psychology. From his own experiments inartistic creativity, he concluded that the governing factor in this process was the ability toapprehend meaning. Paulsson defined the work of art as a homogeneous and ambiguous symbol,which, within its form, combines many different levels of meaning. The task of art historicalinterpretation was to map the meanings carried by the symbol.In his mature works, from the 1930's onward, Paulsson developed these thoughts into a methodof interpretation, dealing both with the psychological and social dimensions of the work of art.Through the concepts of "field" and "function", he tried to reconstruct the original value andmeaning of the work of art and buildings. Thus, he was able to expand the field of research for arthistorians to include all manner of forms and objects of the human environment. In his method,Gregor Paulsson tried to unite the old scholary ideal of a comprehensive system, where all aspectscould be interpreted with reference to each other and to the whole, with the results and theories ofmodern, specialized sciences. His vision was to create a theoretical foundation for a new field ofresearch, which he described as an "aesthetic enviromental morphology".
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| 7. |
- Robach, Cilla
(författare)
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Formens frigörelse : Konsthantverk och design under debatt i 1960-talets Sverige
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores a relatively unknown phenomenon in the design world. Here, the term den fria formen [the free form] is introduced as an analytical tool to narrow down this phenomenon, which was to be found in arts and crafts. The free form emerged in the 1950s, blossomed in the 1960s and lost in importance in the first half of the 1970s. The intention of the study is to analyse and explain the emergence and development of the free form, in the light of contemporary transformations of discourse, both within and without the design world. In the study, the free form is explored from four perspectives: object-oriented, aesthetic, social, and historiographical. The starting point has been a number of objects with an abnormal aesthetic expression. The term free [fri] has been borrowed from their contemporary context. I have defined the core based on three central aspects: an aesthetic dissociation from a normative concept of beauty, a rupture within the technical tradition of craftsmanship, and a subordination of the object’s practical function in favour of its aesthetic expression. However, the most important feature was a critical stance towards prevailing norms and structures. During the period a radical aesthetic transformation took place. This opened for a freer approach to the design world’s objects, which included an acceptance of a wider aesthetic concept. In the 1960s, the Swedish arts and crafts industry was compelled to undertake a major realignment to face an increased international competition. This meant that the platform, which had provided craftspeople with an income as well as a possibility to develop creatively, practically disappeared. Designers now had to refocus: either to become craftspeople or industrial designers. The study discusses arts and crafts’ position in history writing, not least in relation to the international debate pursued in recent years. Here, the area’s marginalisation has been emphasised. An efficient way of deconstructing this marginalisation has been to leave the aesthetic design vocabulary, the mystique of the material, and the object’s practical function – to, just as the free form, approach the visual art.
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