Introduction

If industrialisation, enlightenment and what can be summarized as the “modern project” have involved a disenchantment with the world – to cite Max Weber’s famous words – then in this world, we have never been able to experience the victory of rationality. If “the spirit of society” during modernity is presumed to emanate from a fairly commonly shared area of knowledge, world view and morality – cemented together by large collective identities – then these identities in late modernity have multiplied through division into ever smaller groups of special interests and social associations. In a hyper-individualised western world it would seem that every truth is made relative, negotiable and a question of personal taste and opinion.

Yet in such an atomised world, strange global rechanneling occurs between mainstream and subcultures. In this arise new surprising alliances and collective entities that would fill the vacuum after God, the State and lost communalities: conservative enclaves celebrating the past, newly discovered ethnicities and nationalism, fan cultures that form complete and playful social systems based on fiction and popular culture; commonly shared social maladies and interest groups; associations of fundamentalist, secularists, critics of civilisation without ideology; religious sects that erect solid boundaries against the rest of the world; esoteric world views which camouflage their deviations….Some alliances are dynamic, temporary and resemble role plays; others are deadly serious and will colour every single thought held by their members.

Another Order is an exhibition at Konsthall C that gathers together art reflecting these new channels and role-plays, this “tribalisation” and the struggle between rationality and irrationality. The exhibition includes work that concerns and stages an ongoing negotiation about rights, demands for truth and adaptation, a negotiation between the sacred and profane, between special interests and collective responsibility, between the majority (ex-clave) and the deviating (enclave). Not least, the Swedish evangelical movement, at its peak, grew so strong that it could successfully negotiate with – and became part of – efforts to democratise society, the “People’s Home” and the welfare state. But even if most of the evangelical congregations later became socially accepted, their members nevertheless maintained a clearly demarcated mental and social boundary between society within and society without.

Another Order also directs attention to the presence of the Waldorf school in Hökarängen, a school which may be seen as a “heterotopi”, as a bearer of “otherness” within the “ordinary” world – conveying other values and ideas than those of suburban architecture and venues strongly associated with modernity and rationality. However, the presence of a Waldorf school in a suburb does not express a simple and clear deviation; its deviation is mild and sometimes almost undetectable from the outside. The anthroposophical system, which pervades all aspects of life and possesses its own cosmology, forms a world which develops alongside, but in constant interaction with, the welfare state.

In Another Order it is also suggested that it is not always about exchanges between different worlds and systems but about the fact that the repressed – if it has been denied with sufficient persistence – can reappear or materialise in the centre, in one form or another. The British sociologist and political theoretician, Anthony Giddens, has talked about the return of the repressed. The return of that which has been denied takes place in the form of fears and spectres, through strange rites or as sudden passions, and during unrestrained affirmation.

David Helldén’s very matter-of-fact architecture in Hökarängen may be seen in light of the fact that his father was a minister, stringent and austere, with Schartuanic (strict and fundamental evangelical protestants) leanings, a religious standpoint that David Helldén rejected. There are scarcely any what might be called mystical elements in his architecture (it is no coincidence that he never designed a church), but it is possible to understand Helldén’s minimalism through the ascetic ideas he was brought up with, which Martin Rörby notes in his book on Helldén. Rörby also suggests that Helldén could hardly avoid being influenced by Goetheanum, an experimental building in Dornach, designed by Rudof Steiner, founder of the Waldorf movement, when he designed the high rise building on the square as an architectonic sculpture. Already here it is possible to discern the rechannelings and connections between modernity and another system of belief which is not to be perceived as anti-modern but rather as an alternative to modernity. Here also we can detect the return of the denied, the unconscious conversion. Thanks to Uppsala Art Museum and others who have loaned works.

Swedish Arts Grants Committee

Konsthall C is located in a municipal laundry in Högarängen. The gallery is run by a non-profit cultural association with support from Stockholm’s municipal Culture Department, Stockholm County Council and the National Swedish Arts Council.

Konsthall C
Cigarrvägen 16
12357 Farsta
Tel. 604 77 08