OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY ANNOUNCES
Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?
an anthology edited by
Marta Kuzma and Pablo Lafuente
www.oca.no
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway announces the publication of the book Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?, with a presentation at Artists Space, New York, USA on 2 December at 19:00. Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? is an anthology edited by Marta Kuzma and Pablo Lafuente that reflects upon the juncture of the political and the erotic in the 1960s and 70s, in special relation to the image of Scandinavia as a sexually and politically utopic territory during those decades. Through a close reading of the cultural and socio-political history of Scandinavia, through the writings of Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Daniel Guérin, Jacqueline Rose and others, and through an examination of the obscenity bonanza that emerged around Swedish film-maker Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow), the publication offers a plethora of historical material and an investigation of the political motivations behind naming a cultural form obscene and pornographic. The publication also offers material that contributes to the understanding of how the underground and cultural activism of the 1960s contributed to development of a pornography industry both in the United States and in Scandinavia.
Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? is introduced by a thesis essay by Marta Kuzma, and includes writings by Susan Sontag, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Jacqueline Rose, Henry Miller, Elise Ottesen-Jensen and Otto Weininger among others; visual contributions by Stan Brakhage, Marie-Louise Ekman, Dan Graham, Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, Jonas Mekas, Barbara Rubin, Barbara T. Smith, Paul Sharits and Carolee Schneemann among others; fragments from periodicals such as Evergreen Review, Screw or Suck and underground journals such as Puss, Hætsjj, Aamurusko and Gateavisa, many of which are reproduced for the first time in an English-language context.
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 Artists Space
As the first public presentation of the anthology, the Office for
Contemporary Art Norway, in collaboration with Artists Space, will
screen Barbara Rubin’s double-projection film Christmas on
Earth, from 1963. The film will be introduced by MM Serra,
Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, and
screened from two overlapping projectors following the artist’s
original instructions. Christmas on Earth is the filmic
record of an orgy that took place in a New York apartment in 1963.
One of the first sexually explicit film works produced by the
postwar avant-garde in the US, Christmas on Earth
premiered at the Factory under the title Cocks and Cunts,
accompanied by a live performance by the Velvet Underground. Rubin,
19 when she shot the film, was described by Andy Warhol as ‘one of
the first people to get multimedia interest going around New York
City’.
Artists Space
38 Greene St, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013, USA
The presentation in New York has been generously supported by the Norwegian Consulate General in New York and by Fritt Ord.
