OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY ANNOUNCES
Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?,
an anthology edited by Marta Kuzma and Pablo Lafuente
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway announces the publication of the book Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? in December 2011, and its presentation at OCA’s space on 14 December. An anthology co-edited by Marta Kuzma and Pablo Lafuente, Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? reflects upon the juncture of the political and erotic in the 1960s and 70s in relation to the image of Scandinavia as a sexually and politically utopic territory during those decades. With a close reading of the cultural and political history of Scandinavia through the writings of Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Daniel Guérin, Jacqueline Rose and others, and through the obscenity bonanza that emerged around Swedish film director Vilgot Sjömanʼs I Am Curious (Yellow), the publication offers a plethora of historical material that presents an investigation of the political motivations behind naming a cultural form obscene or pornographic. The publication also offers material that contributes to the understanding of how the cultural activism and the underground of the 1960s contributed to a development of a pornography industry both in the United States and in Scandinavia.
Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? includes historical writings by Susan Sontag, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich and early feminists Katti Anker Møller and Elise Ottesen-Jensen; new texts by Håvard Friis Nilsen on the sexual politics of Norway in the 1930s as relating to the relationship between Wilhelm Reich and Leon Trotsky and by Knut Ove Arntzen on the legacy of Scandinavian Situationism; and visual contributions and archival material from artists and collectives such as Thomas Bayrle, Marie-Louise Ekman, Öyvind Fahlström, Erkki Kurenniemi, Poul Gernes, Gruppe 66, Gunvor Grundel Nelson, Claes Oldenburg, Stan Brakhage, Lee Lozano, Paul Sharits and Barbara T. Smith. Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? also includes visual material from key publications from the time such as Evergreen Review, Screw, Suck, Puss, Haetsjj, Aamurusko and Gatevisa.
The anthology is designed by NODE Berlin Oslo, and published by
the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Koenig Books, London,
with generous support from Fritt Ord. It will be distributed in
bookstores internationally.
For more information about Whatever Happened to Sex in
Scandinavia?, please contact Tonja Boos or Antonio Cataldo.
About the presentation at OCA
On 14 December 2011 at 19:00, on
the occasion of the presentation of the anthology in Oslo, the
Office for Contemporary Art Norway will screen Stan Brakhageʼs
Dog Star Man: Prelude, from 1961, accompanied by a
performance by Norwegian experimental musician Lasse
Marhaug.
Following the post-war American tradition of redefining the body as a metaphor for landscape, Brakhage’s Dog Star Man: Prelude attempts, through the hyperbolisation of montage, the radical suppression of the still shot, and the systematic use of close-up, to create cosmic extrapolations from the body. Andreas Meland and Lasse Marhaug paid homage to Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man in a live performance in 2003. Their album Brakhage (2005) has been described as ‘cultivated sound-art noise, with blowing whistles and a vibrant presence’.
This presentation is made possible by the generous support of Fritt Ord.