Room 5

Implosion: Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler and others

Narrator: The exhibition “Implosion” at Moderna Museet in 1987 was the first more comprehensive attempt to introduce postmodern art to the Swedish public. As a young curator Lars Nittve wanted to improve the museum’s coverage of contemporary art, with a bias towards young, American artists. Historical links were also highlighted by starting with the dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, moving on to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and ending with Daniel Buren and others. The exhibition was instrumental in launching photography-based art and video art, presenting artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.
 
In this room, the museum’s works by Francis Picabia are hung in the order they were shown in Implosion.
 
One of the young artists invited to participate in Implosion was Louise Lawler. In the 1980s, she began taking photos of works by famous artists in museums and private collections. For “Shadow, Summer” (from 1987) she visited Stockholm to photograph Marcel Duchamp’s “Air de Paris” (from 1919) on site at Moderna Museet. The museum’s official archive has letters from the artist to Lars Nittve, with her instructions on how the work should be installed. Their correspondence is in a display in this room, and the work has been installed according to the artist’s instructions. The four photos in red, blue, yellow and green are shown together with Roy Lichtenstein’s “Entablature No 3” (1971) and Andy Warhol’s “Dance Diagram” (1961) – both from the Moderna Museet collection.
 
In this room, we see a temporary spatial structure for Daniel Buren’s “Cabane éclatée no 9”(Exploded Hut No 9) from 1985. It was featured in Implosion and is documented in photos from the exhibition in the display unit. Daniel Buren has been using the same vertical 8.7 cm wide stripes since the mid-1960s. They have appeared on buildings, sculpture plinths, the sails of a whole fleet of dinghies and countless other contexts. The purpose of the stripes is to make places visible. In other words, we are not just seeing the work by Buren, but everything surrounding it. Buren was a close friend and colleague of Moderna Museet’s former director Pontus Hultén.u.