Sara Arrhenius
The art of making a scene in a room which is no longer there.
The art of making a scene in a room which is no longer there.
Transgression requires, by definition, a law to break or a boundary to transgress. In an interview I did with the Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl (Dagens Nyheter, 16/4/2026), she analyzed the contemporary occupation with corporeality, violence, and taboo sexuality as a symptom of the loss of social authority and as participation in a deeper meaningful symbolic structure, rather than as a revolt or transgression. She saw violence against the body in art, but also in culture at large, as an attempt to mark symbolic power which no longer exists. In art, we see someone who has no power over anything except himself and, above all, his own body. There is a parallel there to the individualization and privatization of morality that we notice in contemporary debates on the relationship between artistic freedom and morality. At the show "Organising Freedom" (2000) at Moderna Museet, the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard showed a complex video installation called All Gym Queens Deserve To Die. A short video sequence where a man is sucking on a little girl's arm caused a scandal and heated discussion on the limits of artistic freedom, pornography and child abuse. Quite a few critics used themselves as a point of reference – "that's where I draw the line" – when claiming that the work had passed an ethical limit, and not to some kind of universal moral principles. Right and wrong have moved inside the individual and come across more like ways of life, or lifestyles, than an abstract law encompassing everyone. The question is how the relationship between artistic freedom, morality, and law is negotiated within such a framework and if a concept such as transgression does not lose its meaning to a certain extent. Bjarne Melgaard is perfect for the image of the artist as a scandalous taboo breaker and transgressor. An image which is a legacy from the modernist avant-gardes. But it is more difficult to answer the question of what this image's function is today. In many ways, the notion of art assumes an avant-garde that positions itself against and outside society – a dominant culture and a radical counterculture, and a belief that transgression fulfills a heroic duty of expanding the boundaries of art and crushing bourgeois morality. These are events and expectations which time has chipped away quite thoroughly, both in theory and in practice. It would be difficult to claim that either art or the artist today represents a kind of counter – or outsider culture. The art market is the perfect little sister of the Market and digests most things quite elegantly. It is perhaps the case that the image of art and the artist as transgressors and scandalmongers fulfills a purely nostalgic function and is as important for the scandalized person as it is for the person scandalizing. Simply put, it makes a scene in a room which is no longer there. The attention, the debates, and the scandals are a guarantee to us that art is still capable of its promise to be something else, able to shake the world, if only in the form of an odd little perversion. It guarantees that it is not just business as usual, and that the subcultures which figure in Melgaard's work are not objects of consumption that can be bought and sold in the intense competition for niche lifestyles. One could say that the image of the artist as an enfant terrible functions as a kind of sophisticated screen memory that obscures our view of a more decisive set of changes in art, in the role of the artist, and in the public sphere we have designated for the exhibition of art. Rather than being a revolutionary turned away from the world, contemporary artists' self-image is modeled on the New Economy project manager, the networker, and the creative, insomniac global entrepreneur. Artists have, in many ways, abandoned the expected role of "outsider" and are skillfully navigating the international market economy like ingenious entrepreneurs. The artists of today move in the field between design, architecture, fashion, new technologies, and art. Rather than trying to achieve the frisson of transgression, they're building a world of streams where ideas and collaboration are in constant flow, where there are no differences, and where everything is in circulation and has the same value. Art is architecture. Fashion is art. Money is ideas. Ideas are art, and so on. This mode of thinking blows apart the boundaries we have marked between art and capital, culture and politics, and freedom and dependency. This is the beginning of a much more decisive shift in art than any number of art scandals in the press. What does this change imply and where do concepts such as artistic freedom, criticism, fiction, non-instrumentality, and resistance fit into our understanding of art today? Is there a risk that we are giving up a special place alongside society, one which gave rise to the possibility of a different way of thinking and are instead transforming the artist into another energetic entrepreneur and event organizer? Or is this the beginning of a more productive change in art and society through a kind of artistic activism which does not only comment on reality but also transforms it by participation? Sara Arrhenius Stockholm |
