Moderna Museet presents Selections From Its Collection

Written by Lars Nittve Sunday, 18 December 2011 21:17

Stockholm - Moderna Museet has one of the world’s best collections of art, spanning from 1900 to the present day. The photographic collection comprises works from the 1840’s onwards. The art collection includes key works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as new acquisitions by contemporary artists. Swedish art is largely integrated with the international works, presenting Swedish artists such as Vera Nilsson and Siri Derkert parallel with Oskar Kokoschka and Georges Braque. The contemporary section is rehung frequently, and it includes a presentation of contemporary film and video art in The Video Corridor. Selections from the collection on view through 31 January, 2010.

Moderna Museet’s objective is to collect, preserve, exhibit and communicate 20th and 21st century art of all kinds. Visit : www.modernamuseet.se/

Art has experienced yet another expansion over the past few decades, one which in some ways puts issues of techniques and geography in the shade – the broadening of the whole concept of art. This is an expansion that has its roots in the radical works of Marcel Duchamp from the beginning of the last century, with its continuation through dadaism, surrealism and on into the conceptual art of the 1970s. But not until now has the expansion of the concept of art become manifest. Only a few decades ago, it was quite easy to answer the question of “what is art?”, at least purely descriptively: painting, sculpture and works on paper. Perhaps there were one or two video pieces out there. It was primarily down to things you could look at – and the visual and visual intelligence. It was no harder to describe art than to describe music, theatre or literature. If you try the same thing now, you realise that it’s still quite simple to describe literature or music, which are largely unchanged as genres. But when confronted with art, you see that the concept has undergone a radical expansion to the extent that it has actually become a different type of concept from, for example, literature. For one thing, art can easily encompass what we usually refer to as literature, music, theatre or dance.

The exponent or originator has a background as an artist and chooses the arena and context of art for his or her work. This, of course, influences the meaning of the work, both in terms of what we see and how we interpret what we see. Art has progressed from being a cultural category that was largely bound to one particular sense, to becoming a sort of zone in society. This is a zone into which phenomena, actions, design projects and texts can be introduced – perhaps from a life somewhere else in society – onto the art stage, to be examined from new angles and to generate new meanings, while all the time the visual arts, and of course “painting, sculpture and work on paper” still constitute the essential foundation of art. So what we see is not a revolution – that was sparked by Marcel Duchamp in 1914 when he moved an ordinary bottle rack from its workshop setting to an artistic context. But a quantitative leap has given us a far broader notion of art – and thus, of course, new challenges to the modern museum. The modern museum must be agile, it must follow art wherever it goes. Naturally, we will have white cubes and black boxes for the works that require them. Not only have they represented the dominant means of exhibition throughout history, they are still part of the vision of the contemporary artist. But the museum must also be in a position to follow art out of the museum building if it requires other spaces – social, physical or perhaps electronic. The museum is not identical with its building, a lesson learned not least by Moderna Museet during its life in exile between 2002 and 2004, when the nomadic “Moderna Museet c/o” flourished. But, paradoxically, the institution is perhaps more important than ever, simply by maintaining and to some extent defining the zone that is our expanded concept of art, just as the physical museum space was needed in Duchamp’s time to provide relief to his examination of the frontiers between art and non-art. This, perhaps is a comfort, even as the challenges to the modern museum – and thus to Moderna Museet – are greater than ever!

Lars Nittve, Museum Director