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In November 1980, a curator at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm wrote to Palle Nielsen,
Palle,
It has been difficult to reach you, but I hope that I have sent the letter to
the right place this time. For seven years I have worked with the children's
outreach programme at the Moderna Museet. As you can see from the enclosed
letter, the programme is to be documented in a catalogue for a big exhibition
in Brussels in the autumn of 1981. I hope that you will contribute with an
article to the catalogue since The Model 1968 (which you initiated) is one of
the most important events in the history of the museum - it was so to speak the
starting signal for a whole new form of organisation, not only at the Moderna
Museet but also in most other museums in Sweden.1
Modellen - En model för ett kvalitativt samhälle (The Model - A Model for a Qualitative Society)The Model was an art-activist mass-utopia that superseded the era's concerns with the conquest of space and the open artwork through an incontrollable presence in the white cube. Nielsen didn't write back. He had dropped out of the Danish art scene around 1978, disenchanted with the incipient entrepreneurial spirit amongst Copenhagen artists. The Model may well have been 'one of the most important events' at the Moderna Museet, but it has remained outside of art history, hovering in a limbo between art and anti-art.2 It was in many ways an exceptional project, and it is relevant - from the point of view of both art history and contemporary theoretical debates - to revisit as a different model of politics
