A summary of Larsen, L. B. (2006). Social Aesthetics. In C. Bishop (Ed.), Participation (p. tbc). Whitechapel ; MIT Press.

1. Group B Reading Analysis
Participation in Social Aesthetics
Charlotte, Tahli, Becca and Jack

2. Introduction Recap
Lars Bang Larsen’s analysis of Social Aesthetics discusses the potential
of artistic practices to question the nature of city environments and the
diverse productions of space, moving beyond the reduction of ‘the urban’
as a set of existing and static structures. Socially engaged arts reflects on
personal experiences as well as exposing the increasingly limiting
constraints placed on public and social art and additionally through
examining the dominance of commercial funding and neoliberal
frameworks. Larsen proposed the viewpoint that visual art and the
institution of art as a resource, frames interactive activities through social
interaction and observation. Socially engaged art practices encompass a
utilitarian approach and gives emphasis on direct involvement. At the
heart of Botanica festival is how the community is engaged with the
installations within the site. Therefore this reading is critical in examining
how socially engaged art is significant for community-based festivals.

3. Playground Action on Narrebro,
Model for a Qualitative Society
In 1968 artist Palle Nielsen created a socially engaged art installation
directed at the political debate of children of Copenhagen. Nielsen
examined the need for better playgrounds and youth centres, and for
greater investment in children’s wellbeing. Nielsen created a social
experiment involving 20,000 children and an indoor playground erected
within a day. The social experiment dubbed as The Model, positioned
children’s play as an instrument for social and political activism. The
most remarkable characteristic of The Model examines that the children
were placed at the centre of the institution’s actions. Larsen proposes that
creativity and experiential contact from the children participating had
assigned new priorities to human needs and acknowledged the qualitative
human being as an individual of society. Palle’s functional and
inhabitable sculptures created an organic process in interactive socially
engaged arts. Palle’s sculptural forms are influential in the analysis of
socially engaged arts within the community. This reiterates the
significance of socially engaged art installations within Botanica’s
communal festival.

4. Palle Nielsen in Festival 200
Nielson addressed the idea of large-scale communication in his work, and
different modes of art distribution. That is the ability for a large group of
people to imbue non-traditionally created work with significance. By
approaching the project from a place of collective discussion and mutual
intention, goals can be created that push communicative boundaries. This
warrants a revision of both aesthetic expressions and traditional forms of
distribution.
Festival 200 was named for the 200-year Jubilee of Charlottenborg
Udstillings bygning, the Royal Danish Art Academy’s exhibition building.
Nielsen had a proclivity for non-violent activism, and so in response to a
minimal budget he offered artists a free train ticket and exhibition space if
they were willing to attend Festival 200 and participate. In the week before
the exhibition opened the invitation was open to anyone.
He included 3 projects, all designed as functioning representations of mass-
communications with popular appeal.
The first was a roulette, placed at the exhibition entrance acting as a
metaphor for the event’s promised anarchistic freedom.
The second was an airgun shooting range, where the targets were the faces
of various politicians and high-profile individuals.
A free to use state-of-the-art offset-printing works, a medium allowing for
wide-spread artistic expression. The festivals flyers, papers etc. were also
created here, some of which were distributed to the city and some were
incorporated into the event itself.

5. Jens Haaning’s Middelberg Summer
In 1995 and 1996, Jens Haaning produced a series of production
lines, where people engaged in symbolically charged activities.
They included Weapon Production (1995), which saw a handful
of young immigrants assist the artist making illegal street
weapons, and Flag Production (1996) where Asian art students
sew the flags of an unknown country.
Middelberg Summer (1996) was Haaning’s piece de resistance.
The artist relocated Maras Confectie, a Turkish-owned clothing
manufacturer to the De Vleeshal Kunsthalle in the Dutch city of
Middelburg. The site transformed into an appropriate
environment for the Turkish, Iranian, and Bosnian employees,
complete with culturally appropriate music, soccer banners and
even a canteen for the workers. Observing it, the viewer becomes
a trespasser in an exhibition space that usually affords you total
and complete visual control. The idea is that you become an
alien, in an alien space.
Nielsen and Haaning’s work point to conflicts in social
processes, and presents solutions that are formally alike.

6. Public Bath and N55 Hygiene System
In November 1969 a group of artists from all over Europe came
together to create a public art exhibition featured in Festival
200. Their work included audience participation with the use of
placing ordinary objects in unusual places. This ensured
participants were thinking outside the box and played into
effect on all senses. The exhibition used various materials in
their work and ensured it was maintaining an aesthetic and
formalistic approach. Some examples of the work include
pinball machines and a shooting range in an anteroom, a ping-
pong table and a functioning sauna and shower in a grand
exhibition hall. Troels Anderson explained that these
“fashioned objects let themselves become easily integrated in
the existing situation without any significant changes in
norms of behaviour”.
The N55 Hygiene System was the production of functional
art. Artists worked with experts to create designs and solve
any technical problems. The idea behind the work was to
combine human activity and object factor into one.
This type of public and functional art relates to the Botanica
project as it affects the audience’s sense and thinking anew.
As well as working in ordinary places with abstract
materials, collaborating with industry professionals to create
functional art would be a great concept to explore for the
project.

7. The Oslo Trip and Travel Agency
Danish artists Finn Thybo and Per Bille were
invited, as artists, to join the Young Nordic Biennial
at The Artists’ Hut in Oslo in May 1970. With a
grant of DKK 8,000 (equivalent to almost $2,000
AUD) they decided to buy 50 return tickets for the
Oslo ferry for artists, musicians and architects. The
group of creative members were involved in the
exhibition as an artwork on the opening night with
fellow musicians from Oslo, to perform a rally
concert. The group moved in one long column up
through the streets of the Norwegian capital
wearing red banners and ribbons, or dressed as
native Americans, whilst holding a banner saying
“people of the world unite”. The work was quick to
cause commotion for management and the artists
board, but in the end was accepted and further
documented on the process of the work as a
showcase at the exhibition.
In 1997, Jen Haaning sold airline tickets at competitive prices, as artworks, at
Galerie Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin. She intended to capitalise on German tax laws
which exempt art from an 8% VAT (Value-added Tax). With her concentration on
the exchange of artistic ideas with real-world economics, she was able to create
a possibility for realising certain financial gain whilst upsetting the market at a
micro-level rate.
Both works challenge the cultural and economic significance and invest in the
processes of ideological and geographic exchange. This idea would be an
interesting pathway to investigate in the Botanica project, although would
produce multiple audience viewpoints.

8. TTA Logstor and Life is Sweet in Sweden
After the Oslo Trip, Dufour and Thybo’s work moved in the activism direction.
Working with squatters in Copenhagen, they experimented with alternative social
structures in small, closed communities in Jutland. The project based in Løgstør,
Northern Jutland 1975, started a ragpicker group for the benefit of the liberation
movements in the third world. During it’s existence of 12 years, they were able to
collect 112 tonnes of clothes and shoes and many more essential items and services for
third world countries. These items were collected through many collections, Løgstør’s
largest market being a flea market in the town. The flea market shut down in 1986 due
to a new tourism campaign.
Gothenburg Sweden was preparing to host the World Championships in athletics, the
country underwent a “beautification” process. In the middle of this turbulence
Aleksandra Mir opened Life is Sweet in Sweden, an alternate tourism office in
downtown Gothenburg. Mir renovated and decorated the space in a half-official, half-
private cosy atmosphere that had the intention of making everyone feel welcome. The
host position was personified by anyone who wore the hostess uniform. During the
project, 46 persons assumed the role, regardless of if they had any connection to
Gothenburg.
Just as Løgstør’s working premise was that the local belongs in a global society and
that identities are created across geography and nationality, Life is Sweet in Sweden,
was concerned with the loss of what might normally be considered solid identities.