Urban Studies
Master's (Two-Year) Thesis
NEW URBAN MONUMENTS
Critical Urbanism as Curatorial Practice
Sophia Persson
Sophia Persson
Urban Studies: Master's (Two-Year) Thesis
Supervisor: Karin Grundström
Acknowledgements
Jamila Drott, Veronica Gates Carlsson, Anna Högberg (Public Art Agency Sweden), Karin Grundström (Supervisor), and the teachers and students of Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art at HDK– Valand (2020)––Thank you.
Abstract
New Genre Public Art was originally defined by Suzanne Lacy in 1991 as an activist approach to the public; it was a type of public art that was often created outside the institutional structure which brought the artist into direct engagement with the audience, while addressing social and political issues. In 1993, the public art exhibition ’Culture in Action’, curated by Mary Jane Jacob, marked a conceptual shift from static to dynamic public art. The exhibition is considered a landmark event in the development of public art as it was among the first projects to frame communities as the structure and content of its art.
During the past decade (2010–2020), urban development has become incorporated as an integral part of the work of the Public Art Agency Sweden, and the agency have established their own curatorial department in order to curate and produce their own public art exhibitions. As Public Art Agency Sweden is a State agency, their work is largely determined by official policies formulated by the Swedish government. This thesis analyzes the contemporary policies of urban public art by conducting an interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis that merges art history, curatorial– and urban studies, in order to trace the influence of discourse to how Public Art Agency Sweden has operated within this intersection during the last decade––ultimately to discuss what the Swedish policies on public art strive to achieve and the risks, ethics and responsibilities of the emerging field of urban, context-based curatorship.
Key Words
Critical Urbanism, Cultural Planning, Designed Living Environments, New Genre Public Art, Public Art Agency Sweden, Social Turn, Urban Curatorship
Table of Content
Introduction
7
New Urban Monuments
7
Cultural and Participatory Planning
7
Aim
10
Research Questions
10
Previous Research
10
The Curatorial Potential of the Urban Public
10
The Emergence of a Scandinavian Social Turn
12
Method
13
Critical Discourse Analysis
14
Material
15
Layout
15
Delimitations
15
Public Art and Critical Urbanism
16
Public Art and Spatial Politics
16
Life, Engagement and Activism as Conceptual Aesthetic
19
Culture in Action and New Genre Public Art
20
Social Turn and the Ladder of Participation
23
Social Turn as Urban–Curatorial Practice
23
Policies on Public Art and Urban Development in Sweden
25
Public Art Agency Sweden
25
Policies on Public Art in Sweden
25
Regulatory Letters, Propositions and Decisions 2010–2020
26
Designed Living Environments and Cultural Planning
28
Research Reports
29
Hope, Faith, and Art: Art as Political Tool (2016–2018)
29
Outside the Institutional Walls (2020)
30
Critical Urbanism as Curatorial Practice
32
Public Art as Community Work in Urban Development
35
Urban Development and Democracy as Rethoric
37
Conclusions
38
Art Emerges in the Place of the Encounter
38
References
41
Government Documentation
43
Propositions
43
Assignments
43
Regulatory Letters
43
Figures
44
”Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world:
today it is modelling possible universes.”
Introduction
New Urban Monuments
Monument to Work was produced by Public Art Agency Sweden in 2015 as the first public
performance art piece to be commissioned by the Swedish State (Public Art Agency Sweden, n.d.g). Monument to Work is a living sculpture, a performance and a monument by Romanian artist Alexandra Pirici, which shows movement patterns based on the ones of factory workers from the 1970s to today. The artwork is based on interviews that Pirici conducted with industrial workers from different generations about the movements they have performed in their working lives. The monument commemorates the working human body, rather than the buildings, machines or products of industry. As such, it sets itself apart from many other memorials devoted to the industrial age, reflecting a contemporary shift from physical to immaterial production, staging an abstraction of the function of the working body by displacing its movements from the factory floor to a performative context. (e-flux, 2015).
The transition from industrialism to a post-industrial economy is an important inflection point within urban history. Historically, factory jobs attracted people into the city, whereas today, cities’ attraction lays equally within social factors such as diversity and culture, as wide ranges of job- or study opportunities (Boverket, 2012, p. 21; 23). Aspects such as social values, image and identity seems to have become increasingly important prime movers. Boverket (the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning) has identified a sharp population increase in the cities, which in turn has led to increased housing shortage in many Swedish municipalities. Instead of developing cities outwards (which tend to lead to increased car-dependency and disappearence of natural– and agricultural land), densification, i.e. building the city inwards, is a strategy to regegerate neighborhoods and increase construction of housing, as well as improving and implementing certain aspects of sustainability to the city. A well-worked-out densification process can create new connections in the city, reduce segregation and increase the feeling of safety––but it is also symonymous to economic growth. Boverket emphasizes that a common factor along the many municipalities who have implemented densification strategies, is a wish for attractiveness, as a way to increase population and tourism, which supposedly will form basis for better services and extended cultural activity (Boverket, 2016, p. 6-7).
Cultural and Participatory Planning
As it affects the living environments of many, densification and regeneration processes involve a lot of people. There are many methods and strategies on how to manage and coordinate the impact and influence of the civic, one of which is ’Cultural Planning’. Cultural Planning is a planning method that brings cultural perspectives into the urban planning process, which tries to capture the main, unique characteristics of a site. Central to Cultural Planning is the notion of ’cultural resources’,
which comprises culture in its broader sense. Cultural resources include not solely the cultural sector, but also creative industries such as architecture, design, advertising, fashion, tourism and immaterial cultural heritage such as religion and traditions. Furthermore, through the Cultural Planning process, Boverket recommends the arts as a tool for citizen dialogue, as the professional fluitity of the artist allows them to take a neutral, intermediary role between the authorities and the civic. Boverket argue that these types of dialogues generally favors the voices of those who do not usually come to speak (Boverket, 2020).
The notion of Cultural Planning have found its influence from several currents of socially engaged art practices. Internationally, a network of artists such as Jeanne van Heeswijk, Kathrin Böhm, Suzanne Lacy, Superflex, Wochenklausur––to name a few, have shown how certain types of art practices can infiltrate different layers of public society. In recent years, Sweden too has seen a noteable increase in socially engaged art projects such as the Side-Show project by curators Therese Kellner and Nina Øverli in which art was experimented with as social catalyst in four different locations in Småland, and the participatory art project PARK LEK by artist Kerstin Bergendal in which the artwork contested and ultimately managed to transform the local government processes used to reshape segregated urban areas in Stockholm (Kellner & Øverli, 2017; Wilson et. al., 2018). Correspondingly, as of 2014, urban development has been officially incorporated as an integral part of the work of Public Art Agency Sweden, the dominant commissioner of public art in Sweden, in which the main goal has been to implement the arts earlier in the urban development process (Public Art Agency Sweden, n.d.a). As the interconnection between public art and urban policies has been part of the public art discourse for many years, this implementation abundantly represents a shift in the urban politics and discourse which happens outside of the field of art, regarding the qualities that art has the ability to produce. Up until recently, art had been seen as merely an element of design that came in last in the process, when the development plan was already set.
However, these implementations have been the subject of debate, as they have been driven forward by policies, grants and governmental investment projects in which a large emphasis have been put on citizen dialogue, public participation, and social sustainability––jeopardizing the free role of the arts in society. When curator Claire Bishop wrote Artificial Hells, a theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, she intended for the title to serve as a both positive and negative discriptor of participatory art. The title was taken from André Breton’s Grande Saison Dada in 1921––history’s first ever dada event (Bishop 2012, p. 6–7). Similarly, the title of this thesis, New Urban Monuments, referrs back to curator Mary Jane Jacob, as New Urban Monuments was the working title for what became the ground-breaking exhibition Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago––the first ever exhibition to present and develop artworks within the terminology of New Genre Public Art. Similarly, the title referrs to the idea of socially engaged– and participatory art practices as contemporary monuments. Monuments are however treacherous––they might be as much manifestations of oppression as they are manifestations of memory. As the function of the monument is to represent and assemble a public under a common factor, monuments immediately create dualisms. Many Western monuments have been particularly connected to supremacist, patriarchial and colonialist ideologies. These monuments represent memories, ideologies and problematics of past societies. What monuments do is to fabricate memories and stories of the past and as such, they are capable to perform violence. Likewise, these new urban monuments consisting of predetermined collaborations and social encounters, might end up being just as oppressive as its precursors. The practical field in which methods and processes of public art function as a participatory practice in urban transformation processes, is currently a largely unexplored field (Sand, 2019). As such, further research on how art is employed as a socio–political tool through public art commissions is needed.
FIG. 1–2: Urban growth then and now; documentation from the preparatory work and set
Aim
This thesis aims to analyze the contemporary policies of urban public art practices by conducting an interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis that merges art history, curatorial– and urban studies, in order to trace the influence of discourse to how Public Art Agency Sweden has operated within this intersection during the last decade––ultimately to discuss what the Swedish policies on public art strive to achieve and the ethics and responsibilities of the emerging field of urban, context-based curatorship.
Research Questions
The structure of the thesis will follow the following research questions;
• How has the notion of public art in its relation to urban sites and contexts changed throughout the last decade in Sweden, and how has it affected the way in which public art is commissioned?
• Based on the longstanding, international critiques of participatory art, to what extent does commissioning public art as urban development through strategies such as ’Cultural Planning’ put public art at risk in Sweden?
Previous Research
As one of the most prominent art historians working within the intersection of art and public space, Rosalyn Deutsche (1996, p. xi) refers to the field in which ideas about art, architechture and urban design are combined with theories of the city, social and public space as an ’urban–aesthetic’ or ’spatial–cultural’ discourse, and acknowledges that even though this discourse in itself is not new, there has been an intensity and ubiquity surrounding it since the early 1980s. This section will present a selection of research that primarily motivates the attempt of bringing urban and curatorial studies together. Firstly, I will cover the curatorial interest in the urban public and where it stems from, and secondly, I will present some of the previously conducted research concerning socially engaged urban practices. Lastly, I will briefly introduce some of the research that has been conducted on a local basis in Sweden, which then will be elaborated further on in the thesis.
The Curatorial Potential of the Urban Public
In the publication A Brief History of Curating, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (2014) interviews a few pioneering European and American curators in an attempt to summarize the emergence and initial history of Western curatorial work. In an interview with Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art 1982–2008, the issue of urbanism connected to museums and further expansions of the museum is brought up. Obrist mentions that d’Harnoncourt once stated in an interview that the special thing about museums is that they keep a ’connectedness’ with the whole world that cities strive to have, and that the great challenge for museums is to keep and maintain this connectedness part of the urban renewal (Obrist, 2014, p. 188). d’Harnoncourt further explains her point of view;
”Civilization in general, and cities in particular, are inextrictably, in my opinion, bound up together, because it’s concentrations of people and concentrations of minds and concentrations of thinking about what cities can be and what society can be and what makes life interesting that happens in cities […] If you think of the great cities of the world, they are always places where there are a lot of museums and where there are a lot of cultural things going on all at the same time. I think the challenge is exactly what you say, as the museum expands […] you have to be careful that you don’t lose the creative energy, and that you intensify it rather than diffuse it.” (Obrist, 2014, p. 188-189)
What d’Harnoncourt adresses in her answer is that curators always have shown interest and engagement in urban renewal and development processes, although keeping mainly the museums’ activities and the preservance of its societal status in favor. The comment summarizes both the benefits and the disadvantages of a curatorial approach to the urban public. In d’Harnoncourt’s opinion, ”great cities” are the ones where there is a lot of culture going on and where culture is continously being produced and re–invented, a place where ”creative energy” is emphasized and intensified. In this equation, the site of the museum becomes a node to which the public can turn to connect to the rest of the world, where culture becomes history, and as such, art becomes a language through which the urbanised human can communicate and connect to each other. At the museum galleries, the curator works in favor of the artist (who holds the ”creative energy”) and the audience (the public), and mediates the relationship between the two, although by making the gallery the site in which the two meet and communicate. But what happens when ’the museum’ is re-invented or moved out of this equation?
However, d’Harnoncourt’s comment simultaneously represent what has become the most and major miscommunication in between the practice of the urban planner and the artistic or ’creative’ practitioneer. Much of these miscommunications is due to (what could be referred to as) a Floridian approach to the production, producers and consumers of arts and culture, essentially a courtesy of urban theorist Richard Florida who by coining the term ’the Creative Class’ initiated a way from which land owners and other powerful and resourceful actors in the city could capitalize on this ’creative energy’, by for a period of time allowing and/or funding an intensification of it (Florida, 2004). The thesis of his publication The Rise of the Creative Class (2004)––urban fortunes increasingly turn on the capacity to attract and retain a class of ’creatives’, who become the primary drivers of the area’s further economic development––has been hugely seductive to civic leaders around the world (Peck, 2006, p. 740). Speaking mainly to the ones already holding a position of capital power, The Rise of the Creative Class canonized what became a disastrous relationship between artists and their residential communities, from which problematics such as trust issues connected to the gentrificating mechanisms of renewal practices derived from––essentially summarizing a neoliberal era’s approach to the arts. Following the notion of the Creative Class over the years, from its first establishing in 2002 until today, it has gone from being a public policy phenomenon to being heavily criticized as promoting gentrification––even by Florida himself. There exist however a clear connection between art– and urban history. French curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriauddescribes how the mechanisms of urbanisation issued what became a relational
aesthetic. His publication Relational Aesthetics (1998) defines ’relational art’ as an art taking
departure in the realm of human interactions and its social context, which describes an artistic practice based in the sphere of human relations as site for the art work, whereas interaction is the beginning of the further artistic process, and art becomes the state of the encounter––the art object becomes replaced by the state of the encounter (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14; 18). Curator and art critic Claire Doherty (2004) has however contested the way in which Bourriaud’s terminology has been
used by institutions in order to describe artworks that are situated in galleries, that merely interacts with its audience. According to Doherty (2004), what characterizes the relational aesthetics is that they employ human relations to create meaning, often through the assimilation of existing social systems such as eating, drinking or playing. What distinguishes most of the art history of engaged practice from relational aesthetics is the collaborative nature of the work (ibid., p. 4). When initiating the notion of New Genre Public Art, artist Suzanne Lacy stated that ”what exists in the space between
the words public and art is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a relationship that may in itself be the artwork” (Lacy, 1995, p. 20). Herein lies also Doherty’s critique; is New Genre
Public Art as such relational? The simple answer is no; while the relational artist works as creator of the relational narrative, the New Genre Public Art/ist erradicate themselves in favor of its collaboration.This collaborative aspect of socially engaged art is further emphasized by critic Claire Bishop, who in the text The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontent (2006) and the book
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2011), turned to the artistic
interest in collectivity, collaboration, and direct engagement with specific social constituencies. With the former, Bishop coined the term ’Social Turn’, which in today’s art history and curatorial discourse works as a general description of a socially engaged art that is collaborative, participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work. Social Turn practices are less interested in a relational aestethic than in the creative rewards of collaborative activity, and the authorship of the artist is––similarly to New Genre Public Art––conceived to be neutralized in favour of the collaborative action (Bishop, 2006, p. 179). Most importantly, Social Turn projects emphasizes the artistic process over a potential final product, which concludes these processes and ”the creative energy of participatory practices” to ”rehumanize a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalism” (ibid., p. 180). Bishop further argues that the urgency of this political task has led to a situation in which these collaborative practices are percieved to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance and as such, it is nearly impossible to criticize through the terminology of art criticism, as there can be no failed or unsuccessful works of collaborative art, as all are equally essential to the task of strengthening social bond (ibid., p. 180). Conclusively, the main focus of the art that operates under the umbrella of Social Turn is constructive social change.
The Emergence of a Scandinavian Social Turn
Essentially, the past ten years have seen an increased engagement in questions regarding the civic. As society is experienced as increasingly divided, the notion of pubic space has moved back into focus and aspects of the common and the civic have gained new relevance (Malm, 2017, p. 8-9). Furthermore, there are two recent publications that situate the previous mentioned discourse within the wider discourse on the turn to socially engaged art practices in Scandinavia to be taken into account; Curating Context: Beyond the Gallery and Into Other Fields, edited by Magdalena Malm (former Director General of Public Art Agency Sweden), and Public Enquiries: PARK LEK and the
Scandinavian Social Turn, edited by Mick Wilson, Helena Selder, SOMEWHERE and Giorgiana
Zachia. The latter coins the term Scandinavian Social Turn, as the publication situates the public art project PARK LEK (2010–2014) by artist Kerstin Bergendahl within the wider debates on the turn to socially engaged art practices, critical urbanism and processes of local democracy in an era of neoliberalism (Wilson et. al, 2018). Essentially, Public Enquiries describes how artistic practice has been employed in order to change, inform and shape public policy towards urban landscapes in Scandinavia and particularly in Sweden (ibid.). While Public Enquiries elaborates its discourse through the PARK LEK project, Curating Context puts focus on curatorial methodologies. In the publication, Malm sets out to collect and articulate the curatorial methodologies and considerations in the production of socially engaged public art practices. Malm concludes that in this particular field,
the interaction with the artist is absolutely central (Malm, 2017, p. 8). Artistic and curatorial practices concerned with staging and enacting situations not only offer a variety of formats and settings, but also allow for many different roles for the audience. The audience can be many things; they can be spectators, participants, producers of new narratives, or protagonists. In either way, as projects appear in various locations and media, the issue of the audience is always present: Who are they, how are they to be reached, or would they rather be an inherent part of the project? In many projects, the audience is the main character of the work, without whom the work cannot take place (ibid., p. 10). A big part of Public Art Agency Sweden’s operations is to generate and produce knowledge through and about public art. The agency commissions additional action and/or applied research and reports . 1
The reports––which describe learnings and recommendations for future projects––provide basis for further conversations with the Ministry of Culture, who in turn formulate regulatory letters in which the agency’s future assignments are described. These research reports are in other words essential in relation to the further configuration of Swedish public art policies. In relation to Public Art Agency Sweden’s work with urban development, two reports are of particular relevance to this thesis;
Utanför de Institutionella Väggarna (’Outside the Institutional Walls’) by curator Helene Selder, and Tro, Hopp och Konst: Konsten som Politiskt Verktyg (’Faith, Hope, and Art: Art as Political Tool’)
which is an applied research report on the project Art is Happening by Monica Sand. These will be further elaborated on in Chapter 2.
Conclusively, in a context in which the museum has been erradicated in favour of the civic, there seems to be a great potential in adding socially engaged artistic labour to the development, renewal and regeneration of the urban landscape. However, regardless of place, the site where the mediation of art takes place is just as political as the content of the exhibited work itself. This understanding demands a certain amount of responsibility which can not be put on the artist exclusively, but must be managed by a curator (Von Osten, 2005).
Method
If cities are what d’Harnoncourt claims them to be; concentrations of people, minds and ideas about what makes life interesting and what cities and society can or could be––wherein lies the potential to influence its discourse, and what does that mean for the making and renewal of cities? With the process of urbanisation as a founding institution and underlying mechanism of sites for encounter and interactions, the activity and discourse of those integrated within these mechanisms becomes the constructors of publics, or even more generally the public. Much of the methodology that I have chosen for this particular research project relies on how theorist Michael Warner (2015) refers to the public as a self-organized space of discourse (ibid., p. 67). Through Warner’s terminology, the minds and ideas that cities are high concentrations of are producers of discourse, which sometimes further elaborates into the city’s publics and counterpublics (a public that is subordinate to a dominant public) (ibid.). As such, the production of publics––and thus cities––are subordinate to discourse, which ultimately makes the urban public an appreciative site for public art and mediation of ideas. Therefore, as an attempt to frame this discoursive practice and to gain insight in both the historical
There is no proper English term for what is referred to as ’följeforskning’ in Swedish. The term would be 1
directly translated into ’follow research’; and explains the operations of an independent researcher who is commissioned to follow and articulate the impact/s of a project from an institutional point of view. Henceforth, this notion will be referred to as applied research.
and contemporary practices of socially engaged art, and to create a theoretical overview, this thesis has processed its data through conducting a critical discourse analysis.
Critical Discourse Analysis
As the main analysis of this thesis revolves around governmental decision-making which affect the way in which artists and curators work in public, a critical discourse analysis will be performed in order to frame the prospects of these decisions and regulations. Discourse analysis, in general, is strongly connected to Michel Foucault (1972), who uses the term ’discourse’ in order to describe practises that systematically form the objects of which they speak––which connects to Warner’s concept of publics as consequenses of discourse; social spaces which are created by a reflexive circulation of discourse (Warner 2005, p. 90). Furthermore, the theoretical analysis is performed according the guidelines for critical discourse analysis as stated by Norman Fairclough (1992); in which the general aim is to search for specific features, patterns and structures that are characteristic for different types of discourses. As such, Fairclogh divides the critical discourse analysis into three dimensions, or guidelines, which are; (1) Analysis of discourse practises, (2) Analysis of texts, and (3) Analysis of the social practise of which the discourse is part (ibid., p. 231). Fairclough specifies that this approach is mainly to be looked upon as guidelines, as ”there is no set procedure for doing
discourse analysis; people approach it in different ways according to the specific nature of the project” (ibid., p. 225).
This thesis will follow these guidelines by analyzing the emergence of discourse of socially engaged art practiced within the urban public and how it has affected Swedish public art policies and commissions, ultimately to discuss the projects that have been produced as a consequence of this discourse. With Fairclough’s guidelines and the subject taken into consideration, the work and gathered material has been divided into three dimentions, in this thesis structured as chapters, concluding;
(1) Discourse analysis –– This first dimension broadly analyses the history and emergence of the socially engaged public art movements such as New Genre Public Art and Social Turn, and how it enters the practical discourse of both art, urban and curatorial studies.
(2) Analysis of texts –– The second dimension of the analysis aims at the correspondance of policies and policy documentation between the Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish Ministry of Culture. The main material for this part is regulatory letters, propositions and decisions that have been regulating the Swedish public art scene through mainly the past decade (2010–2020). For this part, I have focused on tracking the way in which the previously researched discourse has entered and affected the discourse and policy making of Public Art Agency Sweden and the Ministry of Culture.
(3) Analysis of the social practise of which the discourse is part –– The third and last dimension sees the realities of the policies presented in the previous chapter. It presents the curatorial work, commissions and investments by Public Art Agency Sweden, particularly focusing on the transition from policy to practice, i.e. curatorial frameworks and selection processes.
The theories and practices reviewed has been gathered by snowball sampling, as I have traced a network of influential curators, theorists and art projects connected to the notion of mainly New
Genre Public Art and Social Turn (Bryman 2012, p. 424). This type of sampling and information gathering does not have to be specifically about people, it could also be important to sample in terms of context (ibid., p. 427). Using this method is however not critical to the sampling in itself, and demands awareness of which structures of understanding one might take part in reproducing. In this particular case, partly in regards to the subject being an emerging field, the discourse revolving socially engaged public art practices is shaped by a concentrated network of theory and theorists.A potential consequence to working within such a niched subject could be an uneven representation of practictioneers. Snowball sampling could lead to unreflective and uncritical interpretations on the subject, and must as such be viewed through a critical eye.
Material
The thesis is based on official communication between the Swedish Ministry of Culture and Public Art Agency Sweden from 2010–2020 such as regulatory letters, propositions and documentation of government decisions. As the official documentation is in Swedish, the quotes and references presented in this thesis have been translated by me.
Layout
The material presented in this dissertation is divided in three parts and follows the structure of a critical discourse analysis. The material has been broken down and divided into three chapters, whereas the first chapter presents a discourse analysis, in which the thesis main empirical material in terms of theory is presented. The second chapter presents the work of Public Art Agency Sweden and revolves around their policies and policy documentation, that has been developed in close cooperation with the Swedish Ministry of Culture. The third chapter, i.e. the last part of the critical discourse analysis, discusses the projects that these policies have produced. The critical discourse analysis is followed by a concluding discussion which brings the initial research questions back as a prime focus.
Delimitations
This thesis presents an aspect of contemporary public art commissioning, curating and producing limited to the context of ’the urban’; its planning, renewal and development. As a further limitation, the thesis revolves around the curatorial aspects of socially engaged public art. The main issue at stake here is not particuarly public art, but rather public curatorship and the process of formulating, selecting and communicating public art in urban developments.
1
Public Art and Critical Urbanism
Site–specific, or site–responsive, art does not function without its site. Miwon Kwon (1997) defined site–responsive art as deeply implicated in the problem of ”everyday life” as a locus and possible subject for art. The notion of social space stems back to Lefebvre, as a space derived from the human production of relations. These notions initially branched into the art world through the Situationist agenda, and then adapted and further developed into different branches of socially engaged art practices during the 1990s. This chapter analyzes the discoursive practices from which the ’social’ and/or ’relational’ space and aesthetic emerged within the arts, in order to link its relevance to contemporary critical urbanist discourse.
Public Art and Spatial Politics
When Rosalyn Deutsche recalls her initial interest in art and spatial politics, it came from an observation of what first appeared as a coincidence between four phenomenas in New York City during the early 1980s. Deutsche, who is mainly an art historian, observed massive urban development alongside an intensification of the official rethoric about new public spaces, an explosion of interest in the aesthetics of urban planning, and a sharp increase in public art commissions. Deutsche asked herself; What is the relationship among these urban and aesthetic
events? Her initial research begun by searching for the different aspects of art’s social function in
contemporary urbanism and to question the dominant model of urban–aesthetic discourse used to explain this function. Her research found solid ground in critical urbanism and what Henri Lefebvre referred to as ’the production of space’; which she combined with critical ideas of the social construction of ’art’ (Deutsche, 1996, p. xiii).
When Lefebvre approached the notion of space, he begun at the hegelianist thought cycle, where ’production’ is a key notion in the making of the world. In hegelianism, what first created the world was an ’absolute idea’––next, nature produced the human being, who in turn produces history, knowledge and self-consiousness. Hence, the human being produces the mind that reproduces the initial ’absolute idea’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 68). However, from Lefebvre’s point of view, nature has in itself been modified by humans and has in that sense become just as reproduced as the ’absolute idea’. The concept of ’production’ is thus important through this context, as one might ask oneself; who produces what; and what produces who? The notion of production is however welded together with the notion of labour; the main difference between humanity and nature is that nature creates and does not produce––nature does not labour. Humanity however, ’a social practice’ according to Lefebvre, creates works and produces things (ibid., p. 71). So also, humanity produces social space. Lefebvre explains social space as follows;
”(Social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their co-existence and simultaneity––their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder.” (ibid., p. 73)
The city is a place that is crafted––fashioned, shaped and invested in by social activities. For some of us, a part of humanity that is born and bred in the city, the city has become part of the nature that produced and continuosly produces us. Understanding the interplay between the abstract and social, and the physical and material, that co-exists within the urban sphere is perhaps currently more of relevance than ever before. When searching for or constructing a future, or several futures, where–– and when––does the production of space begin? Lefebvre continously compares the city to a work of art and ”the beauty of a flower”. These two are similar in the sense that they are praised as sublime (beauty), yet however, the flower is a work of nature; pleasant in a sense of beauty and fragrance, yet, it does not carry the intention of sublime beauty––”a flower does not know that is is a flower” (ibid., p. 74). Contrary, the work of art is the work of human intention. As such, cities are composed by people, they are composites of human labour; full of political intentions. However, the composite nature of them does not have the intentional character of an art object; marking the split between the micro and macro levels of the city; what is referred to as ’architecture’ and what is referred to as ’urbanism’ (ibid., p. 74–75). According to Lefebvre, cities can not be works of art as they were not planned in advance and not built in an instant. Cities are built over time, out of labour and politics; cities are built partly of practical responses to the city’s geography, partly by collective will; the city favours its inhabitant’s sense of collectiveness. Outmost, cities are places that are laboured on; thus, endlessly produced.
Once a student of Lefebvre, Guy Debord forwarded the concept of the produced space into the art world as one of the founders of ’situationism’ during the late 1950s. In Debord’s view, contemporary life is a consequence of production, as capitalism had completed its total colonization of everyday life by the late 1950s (Swyngedouw, 2002). In situationist art, the point is not to create experimental art, but to produce what could be described as a revolutionary consiousness. Debord argued that capitalism and the bourgeoisie had appropriated avant garde culture, and thus also the arts, and as such, all art had turned into products. The Situationists claimed contemporary life to be stuck within the framework of the decomposition of old cultural superstructures; claiming humanity to be separated in practice from the true control over the material powers accumulated by their time. Debord and the Situationists contested the Lefebvrian understanding of social production. From their point of view, what Lefebvre saw correctly was the contradiction between the progressive individual and the world. However, the following defect to this conception is that Lefebvre remained passive by marking merely the expression of discordance a sufficient criterion for revolutionary action within the culture––seemingly claiming awareness to the impossible-possible as satisfactory enough as a counteract (Debord 1997, p. 91). In Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967, Debord approaches the societal issues connected to modern urbanism through a Situationist perspective. Urban environments are to Debord synonumous to a natural and human environment taken into possession by capitalism (Debord, 2002, p. 122). In modernist urban discourse, architecture––which historically had been a practice reserved to the wealthy––became for the first time concered with the poor. This becomes evident in the construction of modernist housing, whereas authoritarian decision– making becomes the main signifyer of the modernist construction methods. The standardized, massproduced character becomes an indication of misery and injustice (ibid.). Furthermore, Debord recognizes these areas as particularly prominent in Western society where industrialization first begun, whereas this type of standardized, massproduced residential constructions became a method in order to arrange industrialization’s new, social form of existance––whereas growth signifies
material power (ibid., p. 123-124). In Sweden, this type of massproduced housing are generally associated with the Million Programe areas. From a Situationist point of view, the Million Programe areas were build in order to standardize and direct the social existence of its residents into a way of life directed by the ones in power, as such subordinated to the capitalist hierarchies of production and growth generally associated with the modernist era. In the beginning of the 2000s, the notions of what urban critic Erik Swyngedouw (2002) referrs to as ’the Situationist City’, and its related 1960s urban cultural, architectural and political movements received considerable attention. However, as the discourse were brought back into fashion, the once revolutionary, anti-establishment, anarcho-marxist and radically transformative movement were celebrated in an intellectualized, aestheticized and depoliticized version that was particularly oblivious to the political and revolutionary theories and programmatic emancipatory urban agenda that underpinned the Situationist Movement. Swyngedouw argues that the aestheticized reappropriation of merely selected parts of the Situationist legacy reinforces exactly what the Situationists actively criticized and tried to undermine. Through this distortion of discourse, attention is diverted away from the active urban reconstructions that try to confront the totalizing presence of the spectacle and breathe the spirit that Debord pioneered (ibid., p. 153).
For Debord, the pivot of a capitalist economy and culture is the commodity (Swyngedouw, 2002, p. 159). Situationist art emphasized the performative action, as to them, art is a matter of producing oneself, rather than things and products that enslave us. The Situationist goal was immediate participation through arranging fleeting moments, of which success could only be judged based on their their passing effect (Debord 1997, p. 90). The very essence of the Situationist activities was the eradication of the museum, of art-for-art’s sake and the separation of art from life, and of redressing the alienating conditions that pervaded everyday life. The Situationist were hostile towards modernism, yet they fully embraced the emancipatory potential of modernity, including the celebration of the power of utopia, the possibility of technologies and of social struggle as a means to achieve a progressive, free and enabling existence (Swyngedouw, 2002, p. 154).
According to French curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriaud, there are several versions of modernity that should be taken into account. In his view, the 20th century was an arena for struggle between two visions of the world; whereas one was a modest, rationalist conception, and the other a philosophy of spontaneity and liberation through the irrational, which can be traced back to movements such as the Situationists. Both visions were opposed to authoritarian and utilitarian forces eager to gauge human relations and subjugate people. However, instead of culminating in the hoped– for enmancipation; the advances of technology and the logic of ’reason’ made it much easier to both (1) exploit and colonize the south part of the globe, which today is often referred to as the ”Global South” and (2) blindly replace human labour by machines––all through a general rationalisation of the production process (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 12). Replacing human labour with machines thus became very much part of the initial process of urbanisation.
Urbanisation is however a cultural phenomena; the general growth of cities and the general crampedness of the urban world gave rise to a much greater individual mobility, connected to a scaling down of furniture and objects (Bourriaud, 2002). The urban setting influenced the development of artworks and the way they were shown––which attests a growing urbanisation of the artistic experiment. The term ’relational art’ introduced an art taking departure in the realm of human interactions and its social context (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14). Bourriaud’s philosophy somewhat connects to Debord’s as it actively opposes the capitalist chain of production––capitalism has locked all lived environments into relations of production that contradict the necessary development of the
productive forces, in the sphere of arts and culture as well (Debord, 1997). Debord craves an art in which the bare essence of the object is erradicated, as he writes;
”We must breach these traditional relations, the arguments and fashions they support. We must direct ourselves beyond present-day culture, by a clear-eyed critique of existing spheres and their integration into a single space-time construction (the situation: a dynamic system in an environment and playful behavior) that will bring about a higher harmony of form and content.” (ibid, p. 88)
Conclusively, the initial relationship between urbanisation and the arts was much attached to modernist ideals. Bourriaud argued that the possibility of a relational art points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals that were introduced and set by modern art, and that the origins of relational aesthetics stems from the birth of urban culture (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14). In other words, the relational aesthetic could be viewed as an urbanized art practice, in which the subjects emphasized by the artist are the interacting––urbanised––human beings, and the new ways in which they relate to each other, as an urbanized collective.
Lefebvre wrote that ”social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information. Such ’objects’ are thus not only things but also relations” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 77). The main argument presented in The Production of Space, is that space is a social product and a social construct, that affects its spatial practices. The influence of the research conducted by Lefebvre in relation to subjects such as city planning, critical urbanism and aspects of ’space’ and its connection to the social, becomes an invitation to the first interrelations between art history, curatorial and critical urbanist practice. Lefebvre emphasized the distinction between micro- and macro-levels of the city; while cities are produced by human forces and as such full of political intentions, the entity and the nature of the city does not carry that same intentional character, as the nature of the city favours its inhabitant’s sense of collectiveness.
There seems to be no coincidence in the fact that the Swedish public art policies have come to concern mainly the Million Programe areas. Many aspects of contemporary urban society still struggles within the aftermaths of modernist ideals. In Sweden in particular, we can trace much of the current social art practices that has been or are being conducted to the Million Programe areas and residents.
Life, Engagement and Activism as Conceptual Aesthetic
The notion of anti-marketization derived into a refusal of the art object and a network of ideas that today has been labeled ’conceptual art’. Conceptualism was initially a contestation to the art market, and curator Lucy Lippard wrote, that during the 1990s it seemed to the ones practicing it as if no one would ever actually pay money for ”a xerox sheet referring to a past event” or ”words that had been spoken but not recorded” (Lippard, 2001, p. 236). But so the art world did––and so Lippard conclude that whatever the minor revolution in communication that was achieved by the process of dematerializing the object, art and the artist remain luxuries in a capitalist society. Conceptualism opened up a space for an art which paralells the decorative object and sets up a new critical criteria by which to view and vitalize itself. Lippard identifies these practices as similar to strategy, and argues that if it were to develop, it might have a salutary effect on the way all art is examined and developed (ibid., p. 263). When eliminating the art object as the final product of an artistic process,
the artistic process can itself instead become a strategy for activism. For example, in 2001, the activist/art organization Women on Waves, formed by artist and physician Rebecca Gomperts, sailed from coasts of countries where abortion was illegal, to anchor in international waters in order to provide safe abortion services for women. Since the boat was registered in the Netherlands, they operated under Dutch law, which made the abortions legal (Thompson, 2012, p. 18). Kathrin Böhm’s since 2014 and on-going artwork Company Drinks is an art in the shape of a drinks company, examplifying of how art can interfere with the notion of economy. Company Drinks emphasizes the historical notion of its site by linking the history of East Londoners ”going hop picking” in Kent (UK) to the formation of a new community enterprise which brings people together to pick, process and produce drinks in east London (Company Drinks, n.d.). Socially engaged art is however, unlike situationism, not an art movement. In Living as Form (2012), curator Nato Thompson writes that socially engaged art should rather be looked upon as an indication of a new social order––ways of life that emphasize participation, challenge power, and span disciplines ranging from urban planning and community work to theatre and visual arts. These practices have been called ’Relational Aesthetics’, ’Social Aesthetics’, ’Social Sculptures’, ’New Genre Public Art’––the list of names goes on, depending on intentions and where in the world this type of art have been practiced (Thompson, 2012, p. 19). When conducted in public, we usually refer to socially engaged artwork as a work within the ’New Genre Public Art’––a term coined by Suzanne Lacy which refers to a public art dealing with profound societal issues structured as collaborations between the artist and their audience (Lacy, 1995). Today, canon refers to New Genre Public Art as one of the catalysts for the arts’ ’Social Turn’––a comprehensive term that gathers art in which the concept of participation is prominent. Social Turn art is not necessarily performed or placed in public space, however its methodology comprises the notion of the social public. As Lippard identified, over time, these types of conceptual, socially engaged art practices developed new strategies on how to deal with profound social issues––however, its strategies seemed to emphasize its salutrary effects on society, the city and the social.
Culture in Action and New Genre Public Art
In 1993, curator Mary Jane Jacob was commissioned as curator by the non–profit public art organization Sculpture Chicago. Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago was a public art exhibition that formulated and introduced New Genre Public Art to the art world agenda and canon–– a landmark event in the development of public art. The exhibition first arose as a critique towards the current standards and norms that seemed to be reproduced both broadly by the field of public art, but also more specifically by Sculpture Chicago themselves. Like most art organizations, one of Sculpture Chicago’s stated goals was to work towards a greater public understanding of art, by making the creative process accessible to a greater public (Kwon, 1997, p. 102). In an interview with Miwon Kwon, Jacob stated that in one of her conversations with Sculpture Chicago, she had expressed her criticisms to them––”You’re fooling yourself if you think that by seeing a sculptor weld
two pieces together, somebody has a sense of what art-making is” (ibid., p. 103). Jacob referred to
how Sculpture Chicago had approached this problematic of ”people not understanding art” by putting up tents in public in which the public could have access to the artist’s ”creative process”. The core problematic, according to Jacob, was that the separation between the artist and the audience remained the same (ibid.). Jacob saw the same problematic at the museums and how the audience for art were viewed as the ones that which comes to the museums, so the issues related to audience revolved primarily around the question of attendance. Parallell to an increased ”multicultural awareness” at the museums, Jacob also noticed a shift in focus towards in-house education and outreach programs, as if the aim of these activities were rather to colonize persons and communities and turn them into
museum–goers than to establish new relationships and continuing, permanent vehicles of exchange and mutual respect. Art existed centuries before museums, Jacob argues, and for institutions within the art world to define what art is––or, important art is––is a relatively new phenomenon within Western culture. What the museum does to art is that it creates a distinction between high art and low art, and as such, it indicates that which is significant in the history of contemporary culture as opposed to popular culture (Jacob, 1995, p. 51).
One on the central roles of Culture in Action became involving its audience by inviting them to shift from passive spectator to active art–maker (Kwon, 1997, p. 102). Out of Culture in Action came New Genre Public Art; coined by Suzanne Lacy, who participated in the exhibition as an artist. Similarly to the Situationists and in line with the conceptualist art agenda, in New Genre Public Art, strategies of engagement is essential to its aesthetic language. The source of the New Genre Public Art structure is not exclusively visual or political information, but rather an internal necessity percieved by the artist in collaboration with their audience. As such, the ’new genre’ came from this particular distinction whereas its form and intention distiguishes itself from sculpture and installations sited in public places, which at the time was normatively referred to as ”public art”. Similarly to how Bourriaud describes that the art within the relational aesthetics exists within the state of encounter, New Genre Public Art is unlike other public art in a sense that it is a visual art that uses both traditional and nontraditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues directly relevant to their lives––as such, New Genre Public Art is based on engagement (Bourriaud, 2002; Lacy, 1995, p. 19).
Many of the artworks that were produced during Culture in Action associate with a terminology that puts distinct emphasis on aspects that within urban discourse are connected to social sustainability; such as collaboration, public participation, invitation, dialogue, community work, but also to some extent societal problem–solving. New Genre Public Art is a social practice, as it puts main emphasis on the public rather than art. As an art, it distinguishes itself from the universalizing tendencies of modernist abstraction, to celebrate instead the particular realities of ”ordinary” people and their ”everyday” experiences (Kwon, 1997, p. 107). New Genre Public Art tried to eliminate the institutional pedestal by instead turning to social communities, telling them they are artists.
Culture in Action was however criticized for expoitation of communities and reduction of art to a kind of inadequate and ineffectual social work (Kwon, 1997, p. 103). For instance, Deutsche was particularly critical towards New Genre Public Art, and based her critique on the widespead tendency in art and urban discourse to celebrate these projects as ”socially responsible”, ”site-specific”, and ”functional”––because it helped design and so also contribute to the beauty and utility of its newly redeveloped urban sites (Deutsche, 1996, p. xv). Her argument is developed in the essay Uneven
Development: Public Art in New York City, in which she questioned the overall functionalist rhetoric
of redevelopment and criticized the merger between urban development and ”socially responsible” public art. Deutsche furtheron employs Lefebvre’s analysis of spatial contradictions, from which she argues that a genuinely responsible public art must ’appropriate’ space from its domination by capitalist and state power. Deutsche argues that public space is not a preconstituted entity created for its users; it can only arise from the practice or counterpractice of use by those groups excluded from dominated space. Radical, site–specific public art must disrupt, rather than secure, the coherence of its urban sites (ibid., p. xvi). In Deutsches view, New Genre Public Art does not manage to do so, as tentatively it is too easily appropriated by dominating public actors.
FIG. 3–4: Haha Collective, Flood (1993), produced within Culture in Action (Haha, 1992-95a; 1992-95b). Flood was a storefront hydroponic garden in which the surrounding community grew vegetables and therapeutic herbs for patients in local HIV/AIDS clinics (Haha, n.d.a). The project juxtaposed teaching life cycles in nature with societal issues, such as HIV/AIDS.
Social Turn and the Ladder of Participation
The initial problematics brought up by Deutsche are similarly addressed by Claire Bishop, as she describes the emergence and public employment of Social Turn art practices. As previously mentioned, Social Turn is an umbrella term which emphasizes participation between an artist and their audience as a socially engaged art practice, and gathers several post-studio art practices; such as community-based art, experimental communities, interventionist art, collaborative art, or participatory art, to name a few. Bishop coined the term as, simply put;
”[…] the artist is concieved less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconcieved as an on-going or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously concieved as ’viewer’ or ’beholder’ is now repositioned as co-producer or participant.” (Bishop, 2012, p. 2)
Since the 1990s, participatory art has often asserted a connection between user-generated content and democracy. As such, Bishop notices a distinct connection between participatory art and The Ladder
of Participation, a classic diagram which was developed in 1969 in an architectural journal. The
ladder has eight rungs in which the bottom two represents the least participatory forms of citizen engagement, followed by three degrees of tokenism which gradually increase the attention payed by power to everyday voices. At the top of the ladder, three rungs represent the ultimate goals of participation; ’partnership’, ’delegated power’, and ultimately; ’citizen control’ (ibid., p. 279). The diagram is frequently cited by architects and planners, often so in relation to practices such as Cultural Planning, in which it sets an equation between the value of a work of art and the level of participation it involves. This becomes an indirect problematic, as by doing so, one turns the Ladder of Participation into a measurement for the efficiency of artistic practice. Such an equation becomes misleading as it does not recognize art’s ability to generate more paradoxical criteria and in addition––art rarely offers anything like citizens control (ibid.).
Social Turn as Urban–Curatorial Practice
The beginning of this chapter saw Rosalyn Deutsche question the supposed coincidence that urban developments often happened alongside an intensification of official rethoric about new public spaces, an explosion of interest in the aesthetics of urban planning, and a sharp increase in public art commissions (Deutsche, 1996, p. xiii). While her reality was New York City in the 1980s, her observation still makes a strong case when deconstructing massive urban and societal developments in neo–liberal Western societies. In order to explore the processes of urban development, Deutsche realized that she had to understand the significance of urban re–development and its residential component––gentrification. Aided by critical urban theory, she saw these mechanisms of urban redevelopment as late-capitalist urbanism, in which new relations of domination, oppression and transformation of cities for private profit and state control hid behind ”revitalizing” and ”beautifying” processes (ibid., p. xiv).
Against the background of increased urban injustice, art institutions have worked in similar ways to uphold domination of the art world. Lately, as a response to the new working methods of artistic practice and artist-run initiatives, a new field of curatorial practice in which institutional reform and critical debate concerned with the transformation of art institutions from within have emerged. Doherty refers to this type of discourse as ’New Institutionalism’, a term borrowed from social
science, as a rhetoric in which the institution, by directing its critique inwards, simultaneously maintains a belief in the gallery, museum and art centre by associating these types of platforms as necessary for art (Doherty, 2004, p. 1). In the text The Institution is Dead! Long Live the Institution! she urges if this type of discourse is to survive, the resultant programmes, events and exhibitions need to move beyond rhetoric to provide intriguing and meaningful encounters for their visitors and participants, and expresses a need for art professionals to rethink the ways in which institutions concieve, support and promote engagement (ibid., p. 7). ”Rather”, she writes, ”the legacy of this
discourse may be a series of art institutions which are able to morph around artists’ work, providing spaces for active participation, collaboration and contemplation, but most importantly a space for the visual imagination” (ibid.).
An era of extensive urban development, the past decade have seen an increased engagement in questions regarding new public spaces and its aethetics, but also combined with questions regarding the civic (Malm, 2017). The term ’curating context’, coined by Malm, describes a field where the curatorial practice is extended beyond the gallery into working outside of institutional structures and into other fields such as urban development, law, and constructions of the civic (ibid.). As such, one might speak of a curatorial social turn as well, as contemporary curatorial work are seeing an increased engagement in the audience and their many participating roles. Malm urges us not to think of Curating Context as a field of only political engagement, as the field also explore and embody our pleasures and desires and leave room for the imagination. The audience is always central to these works, as they rely on intimacy and trust, and place participants in the center of the artwork rather than casting them as ”marginal observers” (ibid., p. 9). The audience have become a curatorial issue whom need to be carefully considered in the conceptual framework of these projects, and produced accordingly. Within current curatorial discourse, the audience is not considered an object of outreach at the end of the production, but inserted from the very start (ibid., p. 10).
2
Policies on Public Art and Urban
Development in Sweden
In Sweden, the State agency Public Art Agency Sweden, hold a dominant position in comissioning public art and public art projects in relation to larger infrastructural urban developments in Sweden. During the 2010s, the agency begun adapting to a broader understanding of public art, in which the influences of New Genre Public Art and Social Turn practices are undoubtedly present. In 2013, the agency announced its own curatorial department, followed by the agency officially incorporating urban development to its mission in 2014 (Lydén, 2013; Public Art Agency Sweden, n.d.a). This chapter will look at how the policies affecting Public Art Agency Sweden have been formulated, in an attempt to identify which governing policies that has been most prominent to the development of public art commissioning in Sweden.
Public Art Agency Sweden
Public Art Agency Sweden was founded in 1937. It is a governmental public art agency working on behalf of the Swedish Government’s Ministry of Culture. The agency’s responsibilities include coordination, consultation and commissioning of exhibitions and contemporary artworks connected to the buildings and environments of governmental operations. In the beginning of the 2010s, Public Art Agency Sweden reinvented themselves and extended their mission regarding contemporary art in public space in order to set up its own curatorial division. Through the Curatorial Department, Public Art Agency Sweden conducts temporary projects in which they exhibit and produce contemporary art in public space. This meant a great deal to the agency, as they traditionally had been a commissioning organization with external producers and projects based on open call:s and applications (Lydén, 2013). This new arrangement also meant an adjustment towards the evolving public art discourse, as the agency then on could initiate their own curatorial projects. As such, Public Art Agency Sweden describes themselves as public actors who explore and develop the interaction between contemporary art and public spaces through site-specific art, temporary interventions, urban development projects as well as discussions and publications. The agency strive to contribute to the development of both contemporary art and public spaces (Public Art Agency Sweden, n.d.a). In 2014, the agency officially incorporated urban development to its mission, in order to strengthen the design of public environments through collaborations between professional groups and citizens (ibid.).
Policies on Public Art in Sweden
The work of Public Art Agency Sweden is organized through regulatory letters that they recieve once a year from the Ministry of Culture, in which a budget and the basis of the governmental assignments that Public Art Agency Sweden are being comissioned is presented. The agency is continously
