Whatever Happened To Sex In Scandinavia?

Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? is the title of the extended catalogue that follows the exhibition/project Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? held at Office for Contemporary Art Norway in 2008/09. This book constitutes the culmination of this project, reflecting and furthering its multiple areas of research and including the results of the archival and critical investigation, addressing the representation of Scandinavia as a sexually utopic territory constructed primarily during the 1960s and 70s in the rest of Europe and the US. The overall project investigates this representation, and analyses it in relation to the actual socio-political context in Scandinavia and a variety of cultural and artistic representations, both in Scandinavia and internationally. It does so by studying the theoretical underpinnings of this construction, the actual historical events and situation, and the cultural representations and interventions within this context.

Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? consists of an anthology of writings by different authors, including reprints of currently unavailable texts, translations into English of texts from other languages, and new commissions, with contributions by writers and theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Jacqueline Rose, Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, Elise Ottesen-Jensen, Daniel Guerin and Otto Weininger, and artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Stan Brakhage, Lee Lozano, Edvard Munch, Jonas Mekas, Thomas Bayrle, Paul Gernes, Paul Sharits, Carolee Schneemann and others, as well as material from periodicals and underground journals from the 1960s and 70s. The book is published in English, and will be distributed in bookstores internationally.

Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? (Verksted #12) is edited by OCA’s Director Marta Kuzma and OCA’s Associate Curator Pablo Lafuente. It is designed by NODE Berlin Oslo, and published by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Koenig Books, London, with generous support from Fritt Ord.