This is a documentation of an art installation made Max Book and
Anders Ljungman at a place called Vy, in Stockholm SWE, 1991.
It was a temporary place for art, run by C.Fredrik Hårleman.
A shop had moved out and a few big windows towards the street were empty.
Nice and neat to show some exprimental art installations through.
And for ordinary people too…
The installation was made like a mirror. A bit like changing the situation of
outside looking in, to inside looking out.
The people outside on the street were looking out when they peeped through
the letters on the window. On the other side they saw this clumsy bright-lights/
big-city landscape, made out of white cell-plastic blocks that you can find in
consumer-electronic packaging. Complicated forms made just to fill out space
between the coveted valuables and the cardboard box, considered to be pure trash.
If you were looking too close to the window, there was a risk to be exposed to
a retinal shock. There were two very bright strobe lights, that went on at random.
The situation in Sweden at the start of the 1990´s, was quite turbulent.
Both car tanks and people´s heads were filled to the rim with gas.
What they didn´t know, was that just around the corner some bombs were
going to detonate. The Persian Gulf war, and then the world economics got
to know bungy jump for the first time, with blindfolds on.
There is a cultural identity crisis going on in Sweden, that started in the 1980´s.
It can be seen as an omnipotent confusion, where the mid-upper classes and
the cultural elite in society, project themselves as cosmopolitans and (western-)
world-citizens, whereas low-class people and workers, yes even foreign
immigrants, tend to identify themselves with nationalistic romanticism from
the beginning of the last century.
It doesn´t seem to matter, that these were ideals invented and appropriated by
the cultural and economic elite in society, at that time.
What is even more confusing, is that these ideals, if you see them as pure ideas
and movements, originated from cultural movements and intellectuals that
were world-citizens at that time (i.e. Europeans).
What then was left for the Swedes to do, was to invent and refurbish
some folklore aesthetics.
We tried to create some folkwar aesthetics.
