moderna museet was 50 years old in 2008. This noteworthy anniversary was celebrated with exhibitions, festivals and special programmes – and by the publication of The History Book: On Moderna Museet 1958–2008. This volume was the result of a long-term research project into the museum's history; together with the museum's curators, the participating researchers and scholars produced essays and articles on various aspects of the museum's operations and history. The book developed into an exhaustive study of everything from the architectural transformations of Moderna Museet to its reception in the international press and included chapters on the museum's collection, its teaching activities, political history and exhibition programmes.
Since The History Book is a historical study we, the whole research group, thought it important in addition to broaden the perspective by making room for a look into the future. We did this by organizing an international conference: Dåtid, samtid, framtid: Det moderna konstmuseets historia. Ett symposium på Moderna Museet (Past, Present, Future: The History of the Modern Art Museum. A Symposium at Moderna Museet) which was held on 17–18 October 2008. Inviting international speakers to participate allowed us to shift the attention away from Moderna Museet, from Stockholm and from Sweden, in order to listen to other voices on the history of museums and to different visions of a possible future.
The conference opened with a welcome speech by Moderna Museet's director Lars Nittve; this was followed by Anna Tellgren presenting the work of the research project and the ideas behind it. Hans Hayden then spoke about Det moderna konstmuseet som plats för forskning (The Modern Art Museum as a Research Site) on the basis of his own experience as one of the researchers and authors of The History Book. He set out his view of the museum and the academy as research sites in the following concise summary. Research means: knowledge (existing and potential), curiosity (a desire to experiment with different perspectives and solutions) and critical thinking. Research requires: a flexible structure that can take account of individual initiatives, opportunities to generate time through internal and external funding, and specific research tasks. Moderna Museet has both the capacity and the desire to become a place that meets these criteria.
The two conference days were designed so as to bring together primarily Swedish voices on the first day, who would talk about the museum's significance in a more personal way. Monica Nieckels portrayed her role as a curator working mainly in the 1980s under the heading En föränderlig tid i konsten: En intendents erfarenheter (Changing Times in Art: A Curator's View). She was responsible for the film programme and events of various kinds: she was, for example, one of the first curators in Europe to show Bill Viola. The subject of a lecture by Beate Sydhoff, representing the art critics, was Kritik och politik runt Moderna Museet 1966–79 (Criticism and Politics Surrounding Moderna Museet 1966–79). She presented a varied picture of the situation as it obtained in the 1970s primarily, and provided a comprehensive background for the political dimension that is so apparent in the decade of changes the museum went through in the 1960s. In her contribution Tankar om då och nu (Modes of Then and Now), the art historian Margaretha Rossholm-Lagerlöf described her first encounter with American art. Her talk is published in an edited form together with three of the other lectures in this special issue. These three more personal voices were complemented by the concluding session of the first day when the artist Marysia Lewandowska showed the film she had made with Neil Cummings: Museum Futures. Basing their work on an intervention in The History Book – a kind of commentary on the museum from the future – the film made by Lewandowska and Cummings takes the form of an interview with Ayan Lindquist, the director of Moderna Museet in the year 2058. The interview is reproduced in its entirety in The History Book, and the intervention also resulted in the inclusion of brief commentaries on the individual chapters.
Our international speakers were invited to present papers on the second day and three of their contributions are included here. Mary Anne Staniszewski, whose thesis The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (1998) provides an in-depth interpretation of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presented a paper in which Moderna Museet and, in particular, its more overtly political exhibitions at the beginning of the 1970s are linked with contemporary trends on the New York art scene. Her conference paper Looking for Signs of Life is presented in this issue of Konsthistorisk tidskrift, as is Patrik Andersson's article The Art of Re-assemblage. In his dissertation Euro-Pop: The Mechanical Bride Stripped Bare in Stockholm (2001), Andersson has meticulously researched how American art and Marcel Duchamp were received in Europe, with Moderna Museet very much to the fore. In his conference lecture he focused on a particular aspect of Pontus Hultén's activities as museum director: the extent to which Hultén was influenced by the writings of the philosopher Max Stirner. A wide-ranging discussion of the exhibition medium was presented by Maria Hirvi-Ijäs in her lecture The Art Exhibition as a Communicative Medium. Her dissertation Den framställande gesten: Om konstverkets presentation i den moderna konstutställningen (2007) (The Descriptive Gesture: On the Presentation of the Artwork in the Modern Art Exhibition) deals with the exhibition from a theoretical perspective which focuses on its communicative dimension. The architectural aspects of more recent museum buildings were dealt with in various ways in the two concluding conference papers. The architecture critic Mimi Zeiger presented and discussed the spectacular shapes and guises of modern art museums and how they have affected the way we see and experience museums. Her lecture The Exhibitionists: Buildings, Cities, Identity served to complement the discussion on museum spaces since it focused on the exteriors. Taking examples from Europe (with Bilbao's Guggenheim to the fore since it has given rise to describing the phenomenon with the term “the Bilbao effect”) and the US, Zeiger discussed the ways in which cities are attempting to make use of the image of the art museum to assert their particular identities. Kylie Message's lecture Museums in the Twenty-first Century, which is reproduced in this issue, concentrated on a particular museum, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris designed by Jean Nouvel, and discussed the possibilities of the post-colonial museum and the challenge it faces.
The conference concluded with a discussion moderated by the museum's curator John Peter Nilsson in which all the conference speakers took part. The subject for debate was »Will the modern museums be historic soon?« and covered the fundamental issues of what museums have been, what they are today and what we would want a museum of the future to be. It was observed that the ideal has long been based on the vision of Alfred H. Barr, but that MoMA has become set in a hierarchical and obsolete form. Pontus Hultén's anarchic regime also figured as a prototype, while also providing a nostalgic glimpse of the liberties enjoyed during the first years of Moderna Museet. Sooner or later, however, museum work has to confront the usual problems: lack of space and insufficient funds. The discussion ultimately revolved around how a living site could be both made out of a museum and created within it.
There was, however, a difference of views: the museum was seen as a historical paradox, as having outlived its purpose, on the one hand, while on the other it was considered to provide a vital resource for the creation of different kinds of meaning. The museum can serve as a discursive forum, which is obviously its natural state. In particular, the museum provides scope for the writing, reformulating and presenting of various histories of art. However, while the museum is seen as a facilitating space, the issue then becomes which possibilities are given priority. Artistic freedom has to be safeguarded while also making room for the theoretical formulations of art historians. And, by extension, this also involves education and the relationship between museum and students and art schools. Fundamentally the museum should serve both as a public space and as an open political and democratic forum. This emphasis on the museum as a dynamic venue should not simply be taken for granted but needs to be actively supported, particularly in terms of the kinds of visitor it attracts who should come from a variety of different backgrounds. In order to make this work, the museum should seek out partners with which to collaborate in its various activities. This also applies to research and the importance of the museum's openness to critical discussion, which needs to come from within as well if it is to be effective.
It is here that one of the dangers highlighted lurks: that of a broader range of visitors staying away and the museum remaining elitist. Hoping to create urban renewal simply by placing an original and unusual museum building in a city remains a pious utopia. The museum (and the museum building) are not by themselves a force of any great weight in the development of a society, but rather something that has to be developed in the enabling space. In terms of the collections, a recurrent theme – with both positive and negative aspects – involved the need for caution in relation to the influence of private collections. While these are often housed in buildings of their own, they can nevertheless be said to exert an influence over public museums; they are not simply alternatives but competitors as well. Furthermore, it is the collections that make the museum historical and which may, at worst, make it feel ponderous, a view expressed by speakers who were in favour of some form of winnowing as an alternative. But who, if not museums themselves, should preserve, care for and display the artistic cultural heritage and how would an appropriate selection process be devised, were objections raised against this model. Everyone did, however, agree that museums still have a vital function in social debate – that they are needed as a forum for discussion and as a meeting-place – as a zone of freedom – and in order to keep alive the debate on art. The museum needs to be a place for collaborative activities. But it is also important to be aware of how museums affect us and how they contribute to shaping and forming us as individuals. Imagining the museum as a living organism – and almost a flesh-and-blood one at that – helped to clarify what an active force the museum is and how it needs to be maintained and supported in order to function.
In conclusion we would like to thank all the lecturers and the audience who took part in the symposium and the writers of the articles in this issue for their interesting and involving contributions to the ongoing discussion of the modern museum of art and its history, present and future.
Martin Sundberg and Anna Tellgren
The research project into the history of Moderna Museet, together with its concluding conference, were made possible thanks to the generous support of the Gertrude and Ivar Philipson Foundation. Additional funding also made it possible to digitise photographic documentation of the museum's history – which will hopefully provide source material for future research into Moderna Museet and art in Sweden.
Translation from Swedish by Frank Perry