{"id":400021,"date":"2001-02-09T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-02-09T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400021"},"modified":"2001-02-09T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-02-09T23:00:00","slug":"absolut-stockholm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/absolut-stockholm\/","title":{"rendered":"Absolut Stockholm"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What\r\nis common in Absolut Vodka and IKEA? Both are global acting Swedish companies.\r\nAbsolut often works together with artists in its advertisements -who deal\r\nwith the characteristic bottle-shape in different ways-, this time chose\r\nIkea as a partner, to switch together the “Swedish” of the two firms in\r\npeople’s minds. The result, an Absolut Vodka bottle form furnished with\r\nreal Ikea furnitures appeared as a billboard in a New York street. Liesbeth\r\nBik and Jos van der Pol, Dutch artists, spending a year at the PS1 in\r\nNew York City saw the billboard there, and took up this “Sweden-switch”\r\nin their show in Stockholm at the Moderna Museet Projekt. They re-imported\r\nthe advertisement and reconstructed it at the Prastgarden, the exhibition\r\nplace of the MM Projects. The life-size copy of the billboard filled a\r\nwhole wall from bottom to top, giving a monumental impression to the viewer.\r\nThe artists spraypainted “Stockholm” over the initial text “Absolut New\r\nYork”. <\/p>\r\n

The\r\n“home brought” ad was a starting point for events the artists organized\r\nin Stockholm through the two months of the exhibition. As suggested in\r\nthe title of the show, the city was the subject of observation and functioned\r\nas a platform to open discussions. Lectures and guided tours intented\r\nto put forgotten, or disregarded places and buildings into the centrum\r\nof attention and as they formulated it, \u201clighten up them for a certain\r\nmoment”. The events considered a wider public, specialists of various\r\nfields, but also not-specialised visitors. Inhabiting existing structures,\r\nthe artists create the possibility for new relations in culture, as Nicoals\r\nBourriaud, French art critic pointed out in his lecture “Relational aesthetics”\r\nin connection with the exhibition. <\/p>\r\n

As\r\nreference points Bik Van der Pol selected places which are today representative\r\nfor the modernistic idea of urban planning and architecture in Stockholm.\r\nTo relate to modernistic ideology which was so omnipotent and the only\r\ntruth for a long time, to see how the theories and ideas have been realized\r\nand how they function today is especially interesting in Sweden, where\r\nthe social welfare state was based on these. The idea of the Kollektivhuset\r\n(1935) was to create a “service-house”, supporting the modern working\r\nwoman. There was a child care in the ground-floor, personal working in\r\nthe house taking care of the laundry, and the families could order dinner\r\nfrom the restaurant – based in the building – and get it through a food-elevator\r\ninto their homes. As the flats were very small, most of the families with\r\nchildren moved out already in the 40’s, the services were closed down\r\nand the house became to decay. The building was restored for 10 years\r\nago, but the original idea did not return, people moving into the house\r\ntoday have to pay high price to live in one of the modernistic monuments\r\nof Sweden. One of the “venues”, Arsta for example was one of the first\r\nbuilt modern suburb centers in Stockholm (1953), where people could shop,\r\ngo to the theatre or to the public library in a concentrated area. Today\r\nArsta Centrum feels very small, the whole piazza could fit in a bigger\r\nshopping center. The public was invited to come to the seldom used nice\r\ncinema \/theatre hall to see masterpieces of 20th century film. Some places\r\nwere revealed for actual cultural debates. In the Sweden-House, which\r\nis the official Sweden information center since the 60’s, architects discussed\r\nthe possibility of re-using modernistic architecture. The ABF-House, a\r\nbuilding with several lecture halls and an exhibition space built in the\r\nlate 50’s, gave place for the presentation of the young cooperative Uglycute,\r\nworking between art, design and architecture. <\/p>\r\n

In\r\nearlier projects Bik and van Pol presented subjectively selected cultural\r\nconnections, for example in Norwich they rebuilt the space of the Konrad\r\nFischer Gallery from D\u00fcsseldorf at a house entrance and it was open to\r\nuse it by everybody. In the Museum Boymans von Beuningen in Rotterdam\r\nthey reconstructed the bookshop of the ICA in London, and made possible\r\nfor the visitors to buy from the exemplary accumulation of books. In other\r\ncases the public was invited to join offered “cultural passions”, so the\r\npublic could watch or sleep under the film “Sleep” by Andy Warhol; in\r\nthe show ‘On the sublime’ in the Rooseum in Malm\u00f6, people could borrow\r\nbooks on the sublime and read them in capsule hotel-like sleeping boxes.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

With\r\n‘Absolut Stockholm, Label or Life – City on a platform’ the artists opened\r\nthe possibility for meetings which observed and used the local cultural\r\nbackground and activated people to relate to it. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  What is common in Absolut Vodka and IKEA? Both are global acting Swedish companies. Absolut often works together with artists in its advertisements -who deal with the characteristic bottle-shape in different ways-, this time chose Ikea as a partner, to switch together the “Swedish” of the two firms in people’s minds. The result, an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630021,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}