| 1. |
- Petersson, Sonya, 1977-
(author)
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Konst i omlopp : mening, medier och marknad i Stockholm under 1700-talets senare hälft
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this doctoral thesis is to explore how art was mediated and given meaning in the environment of an urban media culture in Stockholm during the second part of the 18th century. It comprises studies of how art was distributed on the market, how it was discussed in the press and how it was exhibited in public. It also includes an analytical orientation toward mixing of concepts and values, rather than purifying them into categories such as elite and popular. Art is approached as an open concept of investigation.The thesis presents three studies. The first discusses art as concepts and subject matter in papers, pamphlets and encyclopaedias, with a critical stand against the historiography emphasizing the establishment of the 'fine arts'. The second situates art in two parallel practises of showing art in public, exhibitions arranged by the Academy of Arts and the Auction Chamber's public sales. The third deals with prints on the market, a medium equally recognized as one of the fine arts and as a visual mass medium. All studies also consider notions of interaction, public, and social class.Two overarching arguments are developed. The first concerns media cultural functions as mechanisms of cultural transgression. This argument points to the mixing of international and local, regarding both themes in the press and prints on the market. It also stresses the mixing of art, commerce, and entertainment, in the dual character of both the academy's exhibitions and the auction's sales. The second argument consists in pointing to alternative cuts, by which I suggest discursive relations between art, luxury, entertainment, and knowledge. These are areas that, since the 18th century, have often been kept apart, but were nonetheless deeply interwoven. One overarchig pattern studied throughout the thesis is the 18th-century linking of the fine arts as well as luxury, entertainment, and knowledge to a perceptually defined subject.
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| 2. |
- Öhrner, Annika, 1962-
(author)
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Barbro Östlihn och New York : Konstens rum och möjligheter
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 3. |
- Inzaina, Anna Brodow, 1965-
(author)
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Konstnärliga projekt & experiment : Beviljade projektbidrag ur Sveriges bildkonstnärsfond 1976-2007
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is about a state-funded artist subsidy granted to visual artists and intended for costly artwork and projects. The project subsidy with its administrative framework is to be found in the intersection between the artistic and political fields. On the board of Sweden’s Visual Artists’ Fund, which is an independent decision-making organ within the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, there are representatives for the art scene appointed by the government for a limited period.The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship between the two fields in the processes which led to the enactment of the subsidy. But also to highlight the changes over time in such relationships on the art scene which concern the relative strengths between positions in the artistic field and the relationship between the state and the artists. Furthermore, the aim is to answer the question of which types of projects have been granted means in the years 1976-2007 and how these relate to the guidelines for the subsidy.Two major changes in the power structures of the artistic field have been identified during the period. These form the basis of the division of the thesis into two parts which mirror each other in three chapters each. The description of two phases in the granting of the subsidies is the main result of the thesis. In the first part the artistic field is influenced by forces from without which affect the relative strengths within the artistic field, while in the second part it regains its autonomy and closes itself off from outside influences.The empirical investigation through cross-sections and sample studies has shown that the project subsidy was widely issued. However, changes on the art scene after the post-modern shift towards a conceptual and process-oriented art came to be of significant importance for the understanding of what a project is. The thesis has shown how the entire basic understanding of the project subsidy has changed and influenced the distribution in spite of the ordinance not having been changed since it was formulated in 1976.
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| 4. |
- Kollnitz, Andrea, 1970-
(author)
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Konstens nationella identitet. : Om tysk och österrikisk modernism i svensk konstkritik 1908-1934
- 2008
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the reactions to German and Austrian modernism in Swedish art criticism between 1908 and 1934. It analyses the rhetoric of art-critical texts and examines the persuasive strategies and powerful verbal imagery of art criticism as well as its national interests. Earlier perceptions of a generally negative Swedish reaction to German art are revised. The analysis reveals a strong Swedish commitment to German art, which has been neglected or ignored by previous Francophile narratives in the writing on Swedish art history.In interpreting and defining German and Austrian art as both product and evidence of national character and as an antithesis to French art, Swedish art criticism is indirectly defining and manifesting Swedish art identity. Dramatic and metaphorically loaded descriptions of modern German exhibitions in Sweden present Swedish art identity as split between its racial and mental closeness to “Northern” German culture and “brutal” vigorous expressionism on one side, and its longing for the “beauty” and moderate harmony of “Southern” French and classicistic art on the other. The critics’ ambivalent feelings toward German modernism also hide a crucial conflict between modernizing and internationalizing tendencies versus conservative and nationalistic tendencies in the Swedish artworld. The textual analyses thus show a complex interaction between modernistic and nationalistic ideas, not least concerning the artist’s rôle. In case studies on the Swedish reception of German and Austrian expressionists – Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Gabriele Münter, Die Brücke and Wassily Kandinsky amongst others – the avant-garde artist is revealed as not only striving for autonomy and international openness, but also as nationally bound and dependent on a national audience and nationalistic legitimation.
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| 5. |
- Löwengart, Mia
(author)
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En samhällelig angelägenhet : Framväxten av en symfoniorkester och ett konserthus i Stockholm, cirka 1890–1926
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation studies the processes which lead to the creation of the necessary preconditions for establishing institutions of high culture in Stockholm, between 1890-1926.How and Why these specific processes resulted in Stockholm establishing a permanent symphony orchestra and a purpose-built concert hall are the primary objects of this study.My theoretical framework was shaped by Paul DiMaggio’s model for the creation of high culture. In this model DiMaggio identifies three concurrent but analytically distinct processes, which he argues must act in unison in order for institutions for high culture to be realized. Utilizing this model the main developments in Stockholm are sketched out, by the examination of four fields, the categories for the analysis:1) Music; 2) The performance, external conditions and venues; 3) Audiences; 4) Cultural entrepreneurship and institution-building.The primary sources used are principally concert reviews, concert programmes, and the records of board meetings and other primary materials in the archive of Konsertföreningen i Stockholm.This study shows that, around 1917, a distinction had been made between “art” and “entertainment” in Stockholm’s concert life and a symphony orchestra had been established capable of performing key works from the international standard repertoire. Public attitudes towards music had been ritualized, with musical education and an aesthetic perspective providing the rituals´ ideological basis. Symphony concerts’ audiences, regardless of their social composition, now followed the code of conduct specified in the concert programmes available.In this regard, Stockholm´s development was distinct from many other cities. For Stockholm to finally acquire a permanent symphony orchestra and a purpose-built concert hall, appreciation of serious (or classical) music had to evolve from being a matter of concern only for the bourgeoisie to becoming a matter of social urgency. In addition, a manifested desire to provide musical education to the lower-classes, alongside the on-going process of democratization, led the state to legitimate symphony music. In a spirit of understanding between politicians and the business elite concert institutions were established, and symphony concerts became accessible to a socially broader audience. Crucially, these factors coincided with both prosperous times and a supportive social climate.
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| 6. |
- Strandroth, Cecilia, 1974-
(author)
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In Search of the Pure Photograph : A Historiographic Study of the Farm Security Administration, Walker Evans, and the Survey Histories of Photography
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The photographic archive of the American New Deal agency Farm Security Administration (created 1935-1943) occupies an important place in the history of photography as an exemplar of documentary photography and as symbol of the Great Depression. This dissertation is a historiographic study of this narrative of FSA photography, which investigates the archive's monumental position in the historical narration and demonstrates other possible readings. The first chapter delineates the dominating tropes of the narrative: the importance of the photographers' collective effort, the idea of the photographs as a collective portrait of America, the fear of propaganda, and describes the FSA canon and iconography.The three following chapters construct other potential narratives about the archive. The first shows that while the regular FSA canon is limited to photographs of waywardness and misery in rural America, the archive also contains photographs of modernity and development. The second shows that these photographs of modernity have not been made part of the narrative since they are explicitly motivated by politics and thus could be considered propaganda. The third narrative shows the reception of the most famous FSA photographer, Walker Evans, to have its foundation in the same resistance towards propaganda and politics. The study thus demonstrates that FSA photography was so much more than what is narrated in the history of photography. The survey histories are formulated within a modernist discourse of art, from an ideal of the media specific: each medium should strive towards a purification of its own interior qualities. The history of photography is thus narrated as a history of photographers' exploration of the medium itself. In the case of the FSA, the result is a narrative which considers the photographers' quest for more images the only important thing, which describes their practice as neutral, apolitical and pure.
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| 7. |
- Wadstein MacLeod, Katarina, Professor, 1973-, et al.
(author)
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Exhibiting Art in a European Periphery? : International Art in Sweden during the Cold War
- 2022
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In: Artl@s Bulletin. - : Purdue University Press. - 2264-2668. ; 11:2, s. 127-132
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The project Exhibiting Art in a European Periphery? International Art in Sweden during the Cold War aimed to investigate international exhibitions in Sweden during the postwar period from circa 1945 to the end of the 1980s. The main objective was to find information beyond preconceived ideas of what is important, interesting, or simply good art. In this article, we present our method for searching through the archives and some of the findings and insights generated.
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