Of all the signs confirming a strange global awareness in the Danish art world.

Of all the signs confirming a strange global awareness in the Danish art world, particularly during Copenhagen's possession as "cultural capital" of the European Union for 1996 none is more striking than "NowHere"--a examine of 127 international contemporary artists lately mounted at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, 22 miles north of the city. The exhibition's title, with its emphasis forward the here and now, had near of the claim-staking defiance of the gay-rights chant "we're here, we're unusual get used to it." at the same time its complementary (and often-joked-about) reading as "nowhere" also appeared at once a sardonic elucidation on Denmark's alleged provincialism, a parodic jibe at passe utopianism and a signal that the curatorial selections would bespeak the one-world, everywhere-and-nowhere nomadism of today's art and artists: rootles ahistorical and increasingly cybernetic.

similar hipness was particularly significant given the show's venue The Louisiana, Denmark's merely major privately funded art museum, is a bastion of classic modernism, renowned the two for its superb holdings of postwar works and for their eminently tasteful installation in galleries and gardens overlooking the uninjured between Denmark and Sweden. Nevertheless, with a actual few exceptions, the entire collection was placed in storage for four month at the height of the tourist season (the Louisiana is Denmark's fifth greatest in number popular tourist draw, attracting throughout 600,000 visitors last year) in order to destine the 107,630 square feet of exhibtion space to this inspect of contemporary works. The temporary usurpation could be seen moreover, as a goodnatured Oedipal gesticulation by its 43-year-old organizer, Lars Nittve. Invested in 1995 as the museum's modern head (ending a four-year interim directorship by dint of Steingrim Laursen, 64, an associate director at the Louisiana for the last 25 years and now administrative representative overseeing large exhibitions and international relations), Nittve in import replaced the 80-year-old founding director, Knud W Jensen who had serv since 1957

Jensen is of the house and lineage of Alfred H Barr. The scion of a manufacturing family, he headed the preeminent Danish publishing firm, Gyldendal, before undertaking, at age 41 to establish the Louisiana as an unprecedent public showcase for novel Danish art and design. His original museological directive, unchanged level after 1966 when the burgeoning of Documenta apted him to expand the institution's purview to modernism tout court, was summarized in the "NowHere" catalogue by means of Vilhelm Wohlert. (Wohlert, with Jorgen Bo was Jensen's architect by the agency of 37 years of expansion.) "Louisiana," they agreed, "should be like a one-family house where a rich uncle receives his guests"

In contrast, Nittve, a Swede, present the appearances a man of the postmodern existing Formerly an art critic and, later, chief curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1986-90) he serv until 1995 as director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden. In 1993 Nittve, who is well known in Scandinavia for theme point out tos like "Implosion" (1987) and "Trans/Mission" (1991) as well as monographic exhibitions of Picasso, Warhol, Allan McCollum Charles Ray and others, was asked to curate a large contemporary overview for the Louisiana. Although plans did not work without at the time, the exhibition he propos was essentially "NowHere." (It has also been reported that the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion was part of his unfortunate bid for directorship of the upcoming Documenta.) Thus the later hiring of Nittve, and his immediate decision to implement the idea that had largely won him the do job-work constituted a dramatic generational shift. Whereas Jensen like Barr, treated modernism (in all its mixed permutations) as the one steady way for 20th-century art, Nittve pointedly first attempted with a show based forward the conviction, as he states in his catalogue introduction, that "we can no longer rely in succession the idea of dominant tendencies or 'isms,' however recent and up-to-date, to help us understand what we descry happening in art."

Pres materials for "NowHere" describe today's cultural milieu as a terrain vague in which the forces of information, media and immigration create an "open field" for artistic efforts. The display itself is designated a "polyphonic" exhibition--i.e., single in kind mixing many artists' voices and several curatorial points of view. Accordingly, Nittve--seeking to create a difference-rich "playground" effect--commissioned four outside curators and sum of two units Louisiana staff members, who worked as a team, to create five distinct sections, each with its confess esthetic rationale.

Speculating that his maiden effort might "shake [the Louisiana] to its core," Nittve at handed viewers with a dual conceptual agon. First, despite their differences of inflection, the five mini-exhibitions (most of whose curators were born about the time the Louisiana first opened) shared an adversarial stance toward high modernism. In the words of single in kind of the guest curators, Iwona Blazwick: "The beauty of the Louisiana Museum can also appear to be a form of stasis. As a repository for a certain shadow and period of art thing it embodies hegemony, authority and closure" Oppos to this mythic monolith were the five insurrectionist sections advocating, in various admixtures, the intensely personal, the political, the psychologically harrowing, the ecstatic and the technologically adventuresome. In other words, the displacement of modernism by the agency of postmodernism was posed as a variant of the perpetual toil between classicism (seen in Jensen's enshrinement of the "good life" in one as well as the other its economic and artistic senses) and romanticism--with all the critical approbation now going to the young Werthers.