The role and place of contemporary art.

The value of contemporary art is debated and will probably always be. This is partly due to the fact that contemporary art claims the right not to be useful. This basically gives art the same position in society as science has in relation to applied sciences. To question the basic values and rules of society is both a part of the human predicament and arguably the core of contemporary art.

The drive of the organisation.

The critical attitude is the core of Ars & Modus. A well functioning democracy requires informed and engaged citizens. It has been claimed that the arts is a vehicle for this engagement. This has proven to be only partly true since only a small elite-group relate to the contemporary art discourse. The majority of ‘ordinary people’ choose not to engage in the discussion.

Yet, creativity is an integral part in every aspect of life, and has always been. Questioning the way things are being done leads to improvements in the smallest of places. This attitude is not unique to the art world or high art.

What then constitutes the gap between so called ‘ordinary people’ and the art world? Explanations range from the critical analysis of Bourdieu and Žižek to purely typological categorisation á la Jung.

Ars & Modus has had as its aim since 2004, to investigate this gap.

Numerous projects have addressed this issue in the past, trying to reach groups of people that seem to be underrepresented in the contemporary art audience. This benevolent ambition often seems to end up in body-count instrumentalism. What has made Ars & Modus work stand out, is that it seems to have bridged this gap over an extended period of time, namely several years. Working in close contact, and later also in close collaboration, with the neighbours in Hammenhög, discussions about art and the art-world have become a natural part of life.

Somewhere along the line this work caught the attention of the cultural elite. The perseverance of the project and the results it was showing proved to be unique. But in gaining approval, the project was also associated with the instrumentalism it tried to avoid. To put it bluntly; every citizen risks the migration from subject to object when Swedish society implements the governmental cultural policy from 1974.

In the year 2007 the project F.K.I.T. was formed as a creative answer to the situation. F.K.I.T. “For the Arts – With the Times”, alludes to the motto of the Swedish king: “For Sweden – With the Times”, adding a somewhat ironic angel. The project introduces institutional critique and media analysis. It takes the collaboration in the village one step further, making it more proactive. In an effort to widen the circle of people involved, the core group invited their friends, and their friends in return. It turned out that this was not as easy as it seemed. The original group had had time to learn by and cope with the issues that had arisen over the years. New people would enter the work with little or no understanding of what had been done so far. Two groups seemed to emerge, or rather two attitudes: People who have not taken part in the project so far, but have had some curiosity and a positive feeling about the project constitute the first group. People who have a critical and somewhat negative attitude towards the project, whether they have taken part in it or not, constitute the second group.

Noteworthy is that a certain group of people seem to formulate a more articulate, negative criticism, namely the people working in the area of contemporary art themselves.

To avoid the forming of traditional clusters, people working in the field of art had been partly excluded from the project. This might explain the criticism from this group. Another explanation might be the general critical approach of the project as it problematises the foundation of the contemporary art scene, making it less than stable. In this sense, the goal of F.K.I.T. has been to make the situation for people working in high-arts a bit more problematic. Not in a purpose of its own, but to introduce yet another level of self-critique. This relates to what has been said earlier about the role of art in a democratic society. If one claims that the art-scene is a vehicle for an engaged and critical discourse necessary in a democratic society, and at the same time do not reflect over the fact that very few people take part in this discussion, then there are serious validity issues in the first claim.

The aim of F.K.I.T. is to point out this discrepancy, using the art-scene as the contextual framework, thus “throwing a stone while living in a house of glass”.