MMP: Simon Starling

The very name “Moderna Museet” encompassed a dream of reflecting not only the history of modern art but the idea of “the modern” in general. The name was coined in the 1950s when Sweden was most intensively building up its welfare state, and when there was an active vision of economic, technical and social progress. When functionalist architecture and social engineering were two sides of the same coin. In his new work, “Project for a modern museum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm”, Simon Starling draws on this “modern moment”.

For his Moderna Museet Projekt Simon Starling has divided Prästgården´s symmetrical room in two with a roughly built wall of transparent plastic. One half of the room will be used as a workshop during the time of the exhibition by the model-maker, Kurt Mellander, who will build there a radio controlled model aeroplane specifically adapted to carry a small video camera. On the other side of the wall is an architectonic scale model of Gunnar Asplund´s and Sigurd Lewerentz´s functionalist ensemble Skogskyrkogården, built just south of central Stockholm during the 1930s. A video camera surveys the carefully constructed pattern of buildings, paths and vegetation that make up Asplund´s and Lewerentz´s symbolic landscape, simulating at 1:600 scale the conclusion of Starling´s project. This “aerial” view is transmitted with a similar image from above the model-maker´s table to the entrance of the Moderna Museet. The project will be concluded in the spring of 1999 when, in a contradictory act of both analytical investigation and poetic transcendence, the completed aeroplane will be used to film Skogskyrkogården from the air.

Simon Starling is interested in the relationship of different individuals and the “designed” social reality which surrounds them. Many of his earlier works relate to architecture and design, especially that with connections to the “International Styles”. Geography, the transference of objects between different places and the role of chance or coincidence are other recurring themes. In “Work, made-ready, Kunsthalle Bern”, two aluminium objects of similar economic but different ideological value were literally exchanged: a Charles Eames chair was re-made using the metal from a Marin bicycle and vice versa. The two resulting hand made objects inverted the idea of the “ready made”. “Project for a modern museum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm”, picks up on ideas developed in the “Le Jardin Suspendu” a recent work produced for MOMA at Heide, Melbourne, Australia, which in a convoluted network of references and associations, involved the building of a 1:6,5 scale model of a 1920s french Farman Mosquito aeroplane using the wood from a balsa tree, found on a trip to Ecuador, to fly above the modernist museum buildings.

Curator: Maria Lind