Provocative poses

But when the provocative and challenging becomes the norm, a problem naturally occurs: few or none are provoked by the provocations. So what we do have them for?

Middle-class cultural consumers have, for a long time, incorporated the idea of art as transgressing the norm and breaking the convention. It is today simpler to create a scandal in Swedish cultural life by saying that you prefer 19th-century French salon painting to Damien Hirst, or that you prefer Carl Snoilsky’s rhymed sonnets to Åke Hodell’s sound poems.

Reactions to Lars Vilks’ roundabout dog sketches of Mohammed and Maja Lundgren’s novel Myggor och tigrar (”Mosquitoes and Tigers”) show with all desirable clarity how uninterested the cultural establishment is in provocations and challenges which are, for once, actually what they purport to be. The reactions show how breaking conventions and norms is only ascribed significance in contexts where they lack clearly defined targets.

WHEN, ON THE other hand, the provocations have a clearly defined target group of individuals who are actually provoked, then they retreat immediately and use otherwise culturally protected words such as “nasty” or “lacking in aesthetic qualities” to dismiss Lundgren’s and Vilks’ work.

Suppose that a literary critic had dismissed Daniel Sjölin’s novel Personliga pronomen (“Personal Pronouns”) for presenting an “unnecessarily nasty” description of a house owner in Sollentuna, or that an art critic has questioned the aesthetic qualities that might exist in Joanna Rytel’s art. I can guarantee that exactly the same people who are now queuing up to paint Maja Lundgren as paranoid would have turned out to claim that similar criteria are entirely irrelevant within literary and art criticism. Critics would then raise their eyebrows and talk about the importance of art being a thorn in the flesh of those in power, that good art can never be assessed as naively as unambiguously representing the world where we spend our lives, that serious art must never be placed under a guardian, and so on.

But that Lundgren and Vilks—unlike Sjölin and Rytel—take risks in their art does not now mean that either Lundgren’s novel or Vilks’ sketch are good art. I would wish to claim that both works are hoist with their own petard, as their value derives from the fact that they appeal to (and draw their nourishment from) the type of negatively provocative value criteria which they ultimately repudiate.

NOR SHOULD MY argument be misunderstood as attempting to elevate words with negative connotations such as “nasty” and “hurtful” to the same pre-eminent position as those with positive connotations such as “provocative” and “challenging.” What one can, on the other hand, long for is a criticism working in as unprejudiced a manner as possible: approximately what happens in Hans Henrik Brummer’s essay on Böcklin in this issue of Axess. This is a text that, from a historical perspective, shows precisely the necessity of seeing beyond the limited aesthetic criteria of one’s own time.

As to the rest, I would like by way of conclusion to thank all of those who have let us know their views on the paper’s new layout. Bearing in mind how readers generally react when a paper changes its form, the response has been surprisingly positive, even if not everyone has been quite as enthusiastic as reader Peppe Engberg who after the change describes Axess as Sweden’s best magazine.

We are also grateful for the constructive criticism that several readers have communicated to us. Even in this issue we have tried to accommodate those who wished to see more brief items.


By Johan Lundberg
Editor-in-Chief

Translated by Phil Holmes