Dag Erik Elgin

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MoDERNISM MACHINE
The Museum as Study Object
Henie-Onstad Art Centre August 16-October 21, 2012

Production period:
July 2011-July 2012
One professor and three students from Oslo National Academy of Fine Art.

During the twentieth century, the definition of the art object became increasingly precarious. More and more, the object was viewed as the result of a negotiation within a discursive field, rather than the study of a fixed object, such as the nude. Today, the human body is no longer a self-evident object of study in the art academy. This should not, however, foreclose the possibility of introducing a common study-object into the academic curriculum. The exhibition MoDERNISM MACHINE aims to locate such an object within the framework of the museum.

For the past year, students Mari Opsahl, Bjarne Bare and Henrik Mojord Jahnsen at the Academy of Fine Art Oslo and I have analyzed a vast amount of material: the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter´s (HOK) architecture, its archives, the extensive documentation of HOK activity from administration to exhibition and art production, its storage, its collection of primarily High Modernist art, a sound archive, as well as the considerable number of publications. It became clear that HOK could not be reduced to a single object; it is better described as a collection of practices. The exhibition MoDERNISM MACHINE with the accompanying critical reader Modernism Machine - Entering a Site of Production published by HOK 2013, selects, negotiates, and reflects upon these traces of historical, modern and contemporary art production.

In working with the Museum as an object of study, we accumulated a great deal of material for future research, and in the process of preparing this exhibition and publication, we found ourselves being parts of what we were analyzing. By producing new works of art and generating material for future archives, we have aimed to create a site of production rather than an abstract position of analytical distance.

Dag Erik Elgin