Un débat entre Bilo Høegh Stigsen, Anja Kervanto Nevanlinna, Morten Birk Jørgensen, Tor Lindstrand et Håkan Nilsson, mené par Nicolas Escach
This text discusses two Swedish art project/art groups: The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, founded in 1992 by artists Leif Elggren (born 1950) and Carl Michael von Hausswolff (born 1956), and Association for Temporary Art [a:t], founded in 1993 by artists Karin Hansson (born 1967) and Åsa Andersson-Broms (then Åsa Andersson, born 1967). The Kingdoms of Elgaland Vargaland (which is a still on-going project) and [a:t] are highly relevant for an understanding of how artists during the 1990’s formed groups and contexts that balanced regular art exhibitions finding other sites for exposing and executing art projects, be it within the framework of corporate business, the Internet or by empowering the “citizens” of a Dual-Kingdom to conduct art works of their own. As this comparison will show, the paths chosen by the younger female artists and the older, more established males both run parallel and divert, and both could be understood as taking on a more vanguard position, deploying traditional avant-garde strategies of existing outside the art world. And yet, forming art groups could also be understood as an attempt to formulate an avantgarde position outside the logic that positions the rule-breaking individual avant-gardist artist and the solo exhibition at the core of an art system that builds careers and keeps the economy running. Indeed, the relationship between the art market and the “new economy” was, as we shall see, one of the things that [a:t] set out to investigate.
This dissertation, using a genealogical perspective, examines American art critic Clement Greenberg and why he has become the foremost representative of modernism in much of contemporary, postmodern art criticism. The minimalist break with Greenbergian modernism (esthetic/formalism) during the Sixties has played, and continues to play, an important role in art theory. The break meant a shift from the esthetic/formalist concept that states that works of art can only be judged a media's specific standards-and that this is what makes it possible to talk about "quality"-to the less static concept of "interest," allowing for a pluralistic art scene. What is most important in this context is that minimalism brought about this change by building on a conflict inherent in the esthetic/formalist conception of art-that conflict being between the avant-garde's dynamic need for development, and the static notion of quality. Minimalism, then, transgressed modernism by embracing avant-garde's need for progress. And it is Greenberg's definition of modernism that eventually made this conflict appear.
Minimalism's break with modernism is still of great importance in two ways. First, it provides arguments in defense of the pluralism of the Sixties against those who have claimed that this pluralism was only a vague copy of the avant-garde during the early twentieth century. It also allows for arguments in favor for certain expressions and against others in the pluralistic art filed-pluralism does not mean that anything goes.
The notion of avant-garde is of great significance in this dissertation. It is the conflict between Greenberg's understanding of avant-garde and its need for development, and the static idea of the media-specific, that in the end allows minimalism to transgress modernism. The way in which minimalism transgresses modernism allows the "neo-avant-garde" of the Sixties to reconnect to the practices of the "historical" avant-garde from the early twentieth century. It remains important, even in the pluralistic art field, to differ between "true" and "false" avant-garde. All these arguments point to the importance of Greenberg, a figure so important that had he not existed, he would have to have been invented.