Anna Dahlgren

Contemporary Art, Criminal Acts and Media Events

Summary Artworks that trespass legal bounds and are judged as illegal acts or objects are illuminating examples of how the notion of art is continuously negotiated by different agents in different contexts. This essay seeks to discuss news media as one such agent or context. The two cases considered are the media coverage of Dan Wolgers’ participation in the exhibition Ecce Homo in Stockholm in 1992 and Anna Odells project “Unknown woman 2009-349701” from 2009. Both acts were simultaneously considered as artistic statements and real illegal deeds. The overall aim is to explore how mass media – that is daily press, professional journals and television – interpreted this duality and how the media discourse intervened and acted in the artistic and legal processes. Thus, this article seeks to analyse the mediatization of art. Accordingly, this study expands its focus beyond the typical agents of the art world such as curators, critics and art historians as it also includes statements and writings from representatives of politics, media, entertainment, law and the general public. Although these artists and artworks differ in many respects, they share a legal postlude as well as extensive media coverage. The media debates that followed the production and display of these two artworks clearly impacted their legal postlude. Moreover, they directly or indirectly constituted parts of the artists’ oeuvres. Being controversial acts, they allowed for multiple interpretations and thereby smoothly fed into the logic of the media system. Furthermore, these examples clearly display how individual artists and artworks may serve as vehicles in larger aesthetic and art political controversies within the logic and system of media.

The Art of Display

TH E B O O K CO N T E M P O R A R Y Art Applied to the Store and its Display was published in New York in 1930 . The author, Frederick Kiesler, an architect and designer originating from Austria, had then been working as a window decorator for the department store SAKS since 1928 . According to Kiesler the department store »was the true introducer of modernism to the public at large. It revealed contemporary art to American commerce.« In the same year that Kiesler pointed out the connection between commercial visual culture and the fine arts, the Stockholm exhibition was held in Sweden. It was immensely influential in the country and marks the breakthrough for functionalistic design and architecture. Like other contemporary exhibitions on functionalism it had a crossboundary approach, mixing architecture, hand-made and mass-produced design. In addition the commercial visual culture played a significant role at the exhibition. This bonding of commerce and functionalism had an immediate effect outside the exhibition area in the city of Stockholm, as will be shown in the following. This essay describes the development of display windows in the subsequent years in Sweden. It is a close-up study of the influences of modernist art on the practices and theory of window display as it appeared in professional journals, in books and in shop windows. As will be shown, the window display was a site where art and vernacular visual culture merged, and the aim of this essay is to analyse how a modernistic aesthetic was interpreted and used within this commercial visual culture. This essay not only points out how certain visual patterns and designs migrated from one arena to another in this period, but will also elaborate on the implications of these transitions. In the vernacular commercial context the features, form and colour inspired by contemporary modernistic painting and sculpture were given different explanations and new functions. The aim is thus to explore how modernism was implemented and used in everyday culture how modernism was literally brought to the man in the street.

Commercial Realism: Concepts on Photography in Advertising in the 1930s

D U R I N G T H E 1 9 3 0 S the photographic image was established as a medium in advertising in the printed press in Sweden. Parallel to this, there was a vivid debate concerning the purpose and function of the photograph in the context of advertising. This article presents the discourse on the photographic medium in the context of advertising as it was produced through words, actions and institutions in the period. Advertising serves here as a case study as presumptions and questions about the photographic medium in general seem to have been accentuated in the context of advertising. The 1930s were an expansive period for the advertising business in Sweden and at the same time great efforts were made to enhance to uses of photographic images in printed ads. Consumption of goods was rising, especially from the mid thirties, and it was good times for advertisers. The photographic medium was promoted in different ways, through business-to-business advertising, exhibitions and competitions. An example of the latter is the annual contest The Photograph in the Ad between 1934 and 1936 held by the daily paper Dagens Nyheter. Within the frames of the contest companies could hire photographers to make images for their ads without cost. In these competitions wellknown photographers such as Anna Riwkin, Arne Wahlberg and Emil Heilborn participated as well as today less known photographers like Herman Bergne, Erik Holmén and Thure Ericson. Altogether there were 60 100 contesting adverts every year. The contributions were exhibited in the city centre of Stockholm and seem to have drawn a lot of attention from the public. In the first competition in 1934 more than 8000 people participated in the voting. Parallel to the establishment of the new image medium in the field there was a great deal of debate in photo journals, advertising journals and other media for professionals in photography and marketing of that time. The writers were photographers, artists and employees at advertising bureaux or people working in marketing. A recurrent feature in Swedish professional journals was analysis of current adverts. In some cases these were comparisons between the effects of photographs and drawings in the same kind of adverts. In extension these texts concerned the advantages and disadvantages of photography and how a good advertising photograph should look. Among the considered advantages of drawings were their clearness, distinct lines and concentration, that is, lack of detail. According to the artist Otto G. Carlsund, the advantages of the drawing were exactly the things that the photograph could not deliver: colouring and sharp contours. The photograph on the other