Severe priorities, unique results

Norway’s contribution to the 55th Venice Biennial, Beware of the Holy Whore: Edvard Munch, Lene Berg and the Dilemma of Emancipation, opened May 28. The exhibition marks the end of Marta Kuzma’s eight years as director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)—years in which OCA has become a leading, high-profiled institution on the Norwegian art scene and a strong and visible player internationally. Not least in Venice OCA has attracted unique attention for Norwegian artists, but acquiring such notice has involved that OCA firmly position themselves, sometimes at odds with established assumptions of the Norwegian art scene.      

CENTER OF POWER

This article will analyze the direction OCA has taken with Kuzma as director.  The attempt will be to understand what had to happen for OCA to establish itself as an institution where all its varied projects—offering international studio residencies for emerging artists, overseeing seminars and publications, producing well designed, research-based exhibitions—had the same stamp of seriousness, quality and relevance. During these years how did Kuzma create a center of power that acted as a magnet in the international art field?  

Kuzma’s introduction to the Norwegian art field came when she conducted research as curator for Manifesta 5 in 2004. At that time I was director for Unge Kunstneres Samfund (UKS—Young Artists Society) and I remember meeting with Kuzma and giving her an introduction to the institution. She was particularly interested in the periodical UKS-Forum edited by Matias Faldbakken and Gardar Eide Einarsson. UKS was receiving outraged phone calls from members threatening to exit the organization because of the incomprehensible material in the journal under its new editors. Incomprehensible and in English! Kuzma later decided to work with both artists.

The relationship between UKS and UKS-Forum is symptomatic of the situation in the Norwegian art field when Kuzma came to Norway in 2005. A generation of artists and curators was reinvigorating the art institution, which was still marked at the national level by cooperative interplay between artists’ unions and the public sector. This cultural climate lay far from Kuzma’s experience at the International Center of Photography in New York and the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev. Both places were typified by intense competition for (almost exclusively) private funding. To achieve success in the USA or Ukraine was different from flourishing in Norway’s democratized cultural arena.

PROFESSIONAL AGENDA

In 2002, shortly after it was founded, the institution known as Norwegian Contemporary Art (NOCA) changed its name to Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). The first director of the renamed institution, Ute Meta Bauer, demonstrated the high level of her ambitions for OCA by arguing that a clear choice was to reject the deeply established export mentality. The institution should do more than send Norwegian artists out into the world. Among other things in the first three years a file of curated artists was established that evoked strong reactions in the egalitarian arena of Norwegian art. Much can be said about this file, but it was hardly strategically advisable from the standpoint of securing local support. Kuzma set aside the file shortly after she took the helm as director in 2005.      

But anyone who thought this indicated OCA itself should not set a professional agenda for its work was mistaken. The curated file was not too narrow and elitist, as the critics claimed. It was not narrow enough, or more accurately, it was not suited to the work Kuzma now undertook: to establish OCA as a leading center of contemporary art at an international standard.

A former textile factory on Nedre gate in the Grünerløkka district of Oslo was painstakingly redesigned in terms of this activity. The space was organized around a central tribune which, in addition to functioning as steps up to the offices, was also a clear symbol of the discursive space of contemporary art. That the conversations and discussions occurred in the same space in which art was exhibited was not new, but OCA’s space on Nedre gate integrated these functions in a decisive, organic way.

UTOPIA

OCA opened on Nedre gate in 2008 with the ambitious production Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?, consisting of an exhibition, a two-day conference, two booklets, and a book (2011). This production started from the attempt to shed light on notions of Scandinavia as a sexual utopia in the wake of definitive films like Vilgot Sjöman’s Jag är nyfiken – en film i gult [ I am Curious (Yellow)], and the political and historical backdrop of debates on sexuality in the 1960s and 70s. This multifaceted production created great interest nationally and internationally. And what did happen to sex in Scandinavia? According to Artforum critic Don Kulick Scandinavia ended up with some of the world’s strongest regulations governing sexuality of inhabitants. How and why is documented comprehensively in the book; it gathers among other elements a selection of original documents from periodicals, newspapers and books about this essential aspect of our recent history.    

Kuzma’s institutional strategy was founded on an understanding of the operations of the international network in the field. The institution would itself need to be important, attractive and agenda-setting to achieve its goal of contributing to an internationalization of Norwegian art. OCA was not merely to be an office for the distribution of funding without its own prioritizing. Quite the contrary: its prioritizing and publicity were entirely necessary.

The prioritizing came, and it was severe. Cooperation with other Norwegian institutions was deemphasized. Thus OCA closed the door on a form of collaboration Ute Meta Bauer had established. Reactions were swift. Directors of several institutions took this as an obstruction of work and production already occurring at exhibition sites and commercial and artist-run galleries. It was even regarded as direct competition with national institutions. OCA was in conflict, some argued, with the very mission it was to manage. Kuzma never said it openly, but the reply was along the following lines: Of course we seek visibility, the best international artists, and international recognition. If this is taken as competition with other Norwegian players and not mutually strengthening activity, that’s not our problem.   

CRITICISM

Critics claimed that government funding should support many participants in the field. But Kuzma’s method was not to let OCA’s profile rest on interaction with a more or less random collection of Norwegian arts institutions. Instead she drew on her international network and selective recruiting to assemble a team she knew could realize her ambitions. Visual artist Marianne Heske argued that Kuzma did this to further her own curatorial career, but one may also argue that hers was the best—perhaps the only—way open to a director with limited resources and high ambitions. Understood as such, it was not a solo project but an advanced form of institution-building.

A robust institution whose reputation builds on professional artistic substance: that was Kuzma’s formula for OCA. Thus OCA clearly designated itself as in polar opposition to the democratized field of Norwegian art. An anonymous distributor of internal public funding cannot build relations outward across Norway’s borders. Directors of committees can perhaps found but cannot sustain a network of relevant international players and simultaneously make Norway attractive. Marta Kuzma’s strong curatorial productions in her years at OCA procured her among other things the position as a so-called curatorial agent for the most recent Documenta, under Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s artistic leadership: a position of considerable international consequence. A result was that five Norwegian artists—Matias Faldbakken, Toril Johannessen, Arne Nordheim, Hannah Ryggen and Aase Texmon Rygh—were selected for Documenta’s main program in 2012. Previously Norway had only been represented by Anna-Eva Bergman in 1959 and Olav Christopher Jenssen in 1992.  

BRILLIANT

OCA’s limited color palette, its straitened black-and-white enunciative space, was for some too opaque, too impenetrable. But its institutional strategy proved very fortunate, not least because of the great efforts Kuzma and her team made. In relation to its financial resources OCA has produced a considerable number of strong exhibitions, publications and events these past eight years. Perhaps they have not always been ventures that players in the Norwegian art community would have wished OCA to concentrate on, but these ventures have helped to make OCA precisely the center of power and the agent of internationalization that was intended. If Kuzma is judged on the results, the answer is clear. She has done a brilliant job at reaching both artistic and instrumental goals. Never have so many Norwegian artists been shown in key exhibitions and biennials the world over. In an innovative and intelligent way she has also positioned Norwegian artistic achievements at the Venice Biennial. This was true of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset in the unique collaboration between the Nordic and Danish pavilions in 2009 and with Bjarne Melgaard in 2011. It appears to be much the same this year with Edvard Munch and Lene Berg.  

The question is what Norwegian politicians and the Norwegian art community want from a future OCA. There is good reason to believe that the new board will want to see more interaction with national players. Individual changes in the jury for the distribution of travel funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are also quite possible. But if plans are for more of everything the likelihood is great that the work will be watered down and that what Ute Meta Bauer and Marta Kuzma have built will be lost. If the recipe is for reduced artistic production and at worst a move from the current space in Nedre gate, we will lose the OCA that has established itself at the highest level of the international art field. Such is the challenging legacy Marta Kuzma has left the organization’s owners, board and new administration.