On the increasing dominance of the digital platform firm in today’s global economy, see Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Regarding the encroachment of behavioral protocols fostered by contemporary digital media on everyday habits and social relations, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).
This essay draws partly on research conducted for my PhD dissertation, The Exhibitionary Complex: Exhibition, Apparatus, and Media from Kulturhuset to the Centre Pompidou, 1963–1977, Södertörn Academic Studies, 2017.
Vladimir Tatlin, Moderna Museet Exhibition Catalogue no. 75 (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968). Works by Tatlin had been included in several important exhibitions of Russian constructivist art in Europe and the US during the 1960s, but the Stockholm exhibition, curated by Carlo Derkert and Pontus Hultén in collaboration with Troels Andersen, a Danish art historian and specialist in Russian constructivism, was the first monographic exhibition of Tatlin’s work since the artist’s death in Moscow in 1953.
See, e.g., Werner Schmidt, “From Fordism to High-Tech Capitalism: A Political Economy of the Labour Movement in the Baltic Sea Region,” in Norbert Götz, ed., The Sea of Identities: A Century of Baltic and East European Experiences with Nationality, Class, and Gender (Huddinge: Södertörn Academic Studies, 2014), and Helena Mattson, “Where the Motorways Meet: Architecture and Corporatism in Sweden 1968,” in Mark Swanerton, Tom Avermaete, and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Architecture and The Welfare State (London: Routledge, 2014).
Maria Gough, “Model Exhibition,” October 150 (Fall 2014): 13.
Alongside the reconstruction of the tower, the exhibition featured reconstructions of a counter-relief and a chair borrowed from museums in Portmouth and Newcastle. On the history of reconstructions of Tatlin’s tower, of which Moderna Museet’s was the first, see Nathalie Leleu, “‘Mettre le regard sous le contrôle du toucher’: Répliques, copies, et reconstitutions au XXe siècle: les tentations de l’historien de l’art,” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 93 (Fall 2005). Peter Bürger introduced the notion of the “neo-avant-garde” as nostalgic, depoliticized repetition of the heroic historical avant-garde in Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Moderna Museet’s mirroring of the tower in 1968 more justly evokes Hal Foster’s reading of the same concept in “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), according to which it is through the neo-avant-garde repetition of the historical original that the original becomes itself, that its project is first enacted.
Carlo Derkert, Pontus Hultén, Pi Lind, Pär Stolpe, and Anna Lena Thorsell, “Skrivelse från expertgruppen den 5 januari 1969,” in Om kulturhuset: Kulturlokalerna vid Sergels Torg, Kulturhuskommitténs slutrapport, Kommunstyrelsens utlåtanden och memorial 49 (Stockholm: Kommunstyrelsen, 1971), 52.
For example, Carlo Derkert, educator and curator at Moderna Museet and one of the members of the “expert group” working on the program proposal for the new institution, noted that the new center’s vision of a coherent “unitary function” drew on “Tatlin’s tower for the 3rd intnl.” Derkert, “Musei II Moderna idéer,” Carlo Derkert Archives, National Library of Sweden, 2009/94:3:25.
Mark Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 32f.
See Pontus Hultén, “Stockholms kulturella vardagsrum,” Dagens Nyheter, November 29, 1966.
See Peter Celsing, “Förslagsställarens beskrivning,” in Resultat av allmän nordisk idé-tävling om bebyggelse inom kvarteren Fyrmörsaren, Skansen och Frigga söder om Sergels torg i Stockholm (Stockholm: Stadskollegiet, 1966). See also Celsing’s comments in “‘Stadsmur’ skall dela Stockholm: Peter Celsing vann klart tävling om Sergels torg,” unsigned, Dagens Nyheter, July 5, 1966.
See Nikolai Punin, “On the Tower” {1919}, trans. Troels Andersen and Keith Bradfield, in Vladimir Tatlin, 56.
See, e.g., Anders Gullberg, City – drömmen om ett nytt hjärta: Moderniseringen av det centrala Stockholm 1951–1979, vol. 2 (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2002), 134.
Pär Stolpe, “Några ord om Kulturhuset i Stockholm,” undated manuscript, early 1970s, §9. In Pär Stolpe personal archives, folder “Moderna Museet, reconstruction.”
The definite collapse of the negotiations was formally announced in a press release signed by members of both delegations on February 27, 1970. Stockholm City Archives, 0218/B:2.
See, e.g., Yann Pavie, “Vers le musée du futur: entretien avec Pontus Hultén,” Opus International 24–25 (May 1971), which also features a version of the diagram with four circles.
Öyvind Fahlström, “Moderna Museet – Från pompa och ståt, till informationscentrum,” in Olle Granath and Monica Nieckels, eds., Moderna Museet 1958–1983, (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1983), 171.
Pierre Gaudibert, Pontus Hultén, Michael Kustow, Jean Leymarie, François Mathey, Georges Henri Rivière, Harald Szeemann, and Eduard de Wilde, “Exchange of Views of a Group of Experts,” Museum XXIV, no. 1 (1972): 14. The Information Center model went on to exert an important influence over the early conception of the Centre Pompidou. These developments are described in detail in my dissertation, referenced above, note 2.
See, e.g., the texts about the renovation collected in Arkitektur, vol. 77, no. 3, April 1977. See also Eva Eriksson, “Förvandlingar och lokalbyten: Moderna Museets byggnader,” in Anna Tellgren, ed., Historieboken: Om Moderna Museet 1958–2008 (Stockholm/Göttingen: Moderna Museet/Steidl, 2008).
On For a Technology in the Service of the People, see Felicity Scott, “Woodstockholm” and “Battle for the Earth,” in Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016).
Peter Osborne, “Theorem 4. Autonomy: Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?” in The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays (London: Verso, 2018), 68ff, emphasis original.
“Automation House: A Philosophy for Living in a World of Change,” in Frank Saunders, ed., Automation House, advertising supplement to the New York Times, February 1, 1970: 2.
“Experiments in Art and Technology,” in Automation House: 8.
Jack Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed,” in Kathleen Woodward, ed., The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Madison: Coda Press, 1980). Burnham here relates the judgment of the critic Clive Barnes, noting that it “was more or less typical of the general audience response.” See also Calvin Tomkins, “Outside Art,” in Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose, eds., Pavilion (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), originally published in The New Yorker in 1970.
“American Foundation on Automation and Employment,” in Automation House: 5.
The Changing Nature of Work: 2019 World Development Report (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank, 2019), 2.
Quoted in David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 230.
“American Foundation on Automation and Employment,” in Automation House: 5.
“E.A.T. Aims” {October 1967}, reprinted in Anna Lundh and Julie Cirelli, eds., Visions of the Now: Catalogue (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 18.
Julie Martin, ed., E.A.T. News 1, no. 3 (November 1, 1967): 9.
“Automation House: A Philosophy for Living in a World of Change,” in Automation House: 2.
See Constant, “Une autre ville pour une autre vie,” in Internationale situationniste 3 (December 1959), and Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal,” in Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (New York: Semiotexte, 2007).
See SOU 1972:67, Ny kulturpolitik: sammanfattning, Stockholm, 1972. It is also worth noting that Sven Nilsson’s Debatten om den nya kulturpolitiken, Stockholm: Allmänna förlaget, 1973, an official report on the debates around the proposal for a new Swedish cultural policy, commissioned by the Swedish Arts Council, features on its cover an image of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. It would be interesting to read the cultural policy experiments of this moment in Sweden in the context of what Mark Fisher called “acid communism.” See “Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction),” in k-punk: The Collected and Unfinished Writings of Mark Fisher, Darren Ambrose ed. (London: Repeater Books, 2018).
Some details about the programming can be found in Michelle Kuo’s podcast at the blog of the Silicon Valley “seed accelerator” Y Combinator, ➝. See also Gene Youngblood’s interview with Steina Vasulka, “Orbits of Fortune with Steina and Gene Youngblood,” Steina: 1970–2000 (Santa Fe: SITE, 2008), 4–5. Thank you to Adeena Mey for giving me access to this text. There is also a discussion about Automation House in Fred Turner, “Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 5 (2008), but he appears to draw his information almost exclusively from the Automation House folder. In 1971, Automation House was one of the nodes in the global telex network developed by E.A.T. for the exhibition Utopias and Visions: 1871–1981 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. See Billy Klüver, “Projects Outside Art II,” in Barbro Schultz Lundestam, ed., Teknologi för livet: Om Experiments in Art and Technology (Paris: Schultz förlag, 2004), 180, and “Description,” in Utopia: Question and Answer: A Project for the Exhibition: “Utopia and Visions: 1871–1981” at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, unsigned compendium, dated May 30, 1971. Moderna Museet Archives, F2oc:3.
See Noble, Forces of Production, 353.
Evgeny Morozov, “Digital Socialism? The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data,” New Left Review 116/117 (March–June, 2019), and “Socialize the Data Centers!” New Left Review 91 (January–February 2015); Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015); Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (London: Verso, 2019).
One interesting document in this context is the “Exchange of Views of a Group of Experts,” based on discussions between a group of European museum directors, curators, and museologists in Paris in 1969 and 1970, quoted above, note 18.
See Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005), 28f.
See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).