Models for a Qualitative Society
(2016)
Materials: Painted blackwood acacia, steel
Dimensions: variable.
This series of spinning tops address Lina Bo Bardi’s proposal for what a museum should contain, and by implication, what culture should be: a collection, popular culture and a playground. Playgrounds allow an intimacy with form which is usually forbidden from cultural objects. The spinning tops function simultaneously as scale models for possible carousels (and other past and future playgrounds) and as elements allowing an exhibition to become a playground itself, inviting staff and visitors alike to play with them.
“The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society is an artwork by Palle Nielsen (1968) that is concerned with the meaning of the social and subjective change that (the) playing (child) generates within the machinery of society. As such, the event was nothing short of a mass utopia of art activism, aimed at applying an anti-elitist concept of art for the creation of a collectivist human being.”
From The Mass Utopia of Art Activism, Lars Bang Larsen, MACBA, 2010.
