The following article seeks to analyze the biopolitical interconnections between cultural policy and the arts during the Swedish 1900s. Of special relevance is the concept of "aesthetic engineering", denoting the attempt to vitalise and activate the population through manipulation of the sensuous environment. In this context, the significance of the individual artwork can only be understood in relation to the larger media ecology of which it forms a part. The study analyzes three heterogenous examples of aesthetic engineering, juxtaposing a Social-Democratic report on cultural policy, Manniskan och nutiden (1952), with the essays of painter and museum director Richard Bergh (1858-1919), and the utopian visions of neo-avant-gardist oyvind Fahlstrom (1928-1976). The different examples all provide theories on the purported necessity of art's "ecologization": i.e. of the integration of the artwork in the environment. By recognising this shared ground, we suggest that a novel context for the understanding of art and welfare politics in twentieth-century Sweden can be established.

The preservation of artistic freedom is one of the pillar stones of cultural policy in liberal democracies. This concern for artistic freedom is, however, traversed by contradictions. It seems impossible to support without influencing. By analysing documents from the history of Swedish cultural policy and the history of the avant-garde, this paper aims to abstract the logic that makes this paradoxical preservation of artistic freedom reasonable. In doing so, I propose a new historical context for the understanding of cultural policy. While the concern for artistic freedom has often been interpreted as a continuation of modern aesthetic thought, I demonstrate that it reveals an anti-aesthetic feature of cultural policy. This feature can be understood in terms of an identification of art with culture. The new context calls for a reconsideration of the place of the aesthetic judgement in cultural policy and of the relationship between cultu- ral policy and democracy.

1964 besökte den sovjetiske partiordföranden Nikita Chrusjtjov Danmark och Sverige. Med anledning av besöket gav en grupp svenska konstnärer och poeter ut antologin svisch, en samling bilddikter, collage och andra konstföremål. De medverkande ställde redan samma höst ut på Moderna museet och i Nationalmuseums regi på länsmuseer runtom i Sverige. I denna artikel undersöker jag de diskursiva betingelserna för denna integrering av avantgardistisk konst och poesi i den svenska offentliga kulturpolitiska apparaten. Exemplet svisch åskådliggör två för litteraturens funktion i välfärdsstaten Sverige konstitutiva element: upplösningen av hierarkin mellan konstnär/författare och publik genom att betraktaren/läsaren interpelleras som medskapare till verket och förståelsen av konstnärens verksamhet som ett kunnande, en konst att lära sig och att lära ut.

In 1964, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited Denmark and Sweden. For the occasion, a group of Swedish artists and poets published the anthology svisch, a collection of image-poems, collages, and other art works. The contributors were invited to exhibit their work later the same year at Moderna museet in Stockholm and to go on a tour around Sweden, organized by Nationalmuseum, to exhibit at various provincial art museums. In this article, I investigate the discursive conditions for this integration of avant-garde art and poetry in the Swedish cultural policy apparatus. The example svisch highlights two constitutive elements for the function of literature in the Swedish welfare state: the breaking of the hierarchy between artists/writers and the audience through the interpellation of the beholder/reader as a co-creator of art and literature; and the reformulation of artistic practice as a skill, an art to be learnt and taught.