Morten Traavik and the “Waste Commission” – Hellish chaos

Morten Traavik and the “Waste Commission” – Hellish chaos
Morten Traavik and the “Waste Commission” – Hellish chaos
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Hellish chaos. A level of conflict unparalleled in recent Norwegian cultural history. A high-profile artist who claims to have been “cancelled” by the Cultural Council because he makes art about the Cultural Council’s grants. Burning fury in the comments section from both sides of what appears to outsiders to be an absurd conflict. To explain how on earth the Norwegian performing arts scene became as explosive as Norwegian gas in cables down through Europe, we almost have to resort to one of the most famous works in theater history, “Romeo and Juliet”.

Picture the opening scene of Baz Luhrman’s garish 1996 film adaptation. The Montague and Capulet families begin to argue at a gas station. They throw shit. It escalates. Eventually they start shooting with sharp.

Raw violence

On the one since: Actors in the Norwegian performing arts field. Some are exhausted, others are furious. For several years, they have felt ostracized by the Facebook page “Sløseriombudsmannen”. The website, whose aim is to “examine how bureaucrats and politicians waste your tax dollars”, posts detached clips from art projects. “Ragebait”, some call it. “Bullying”, say others. This, the artists believe, makes them easy targets for harassment and harassment, something they say they have experienced for a long, long time. Add the pressure around and the aftermath of “Ways of seeing” and two years of pandemic in an economically hard-pressed art field, and you have very combustible material.

on the other since: Morten Traavik. The artist and stager of discomfort. A kind of Puck, if we stick to Shakespearean metaphors. To ordinary people, he is perhaps best known as “the man who collaborated with North Korea” and his so-called “hypertheatre” explores the gray areas between staging and reality. Morten Traavik is a provocateur who pokes where it hurts, who tears off the plaster with skin, hair and the shame that follows. And – and this is important – because Traavik’s hypertheatre blurs the boundaries between stage and reality, it can be very difficult to know what is “real” and what is an “art project”. Of course, the rest of the performing arts field knows this.

At the same time: It is this unpredictability that makes it so interesting.

Winter 2020 is included Traavik a collaboration with the man behind the “Sløseriombudsmannen”, Are Søberg, on the play “Sløseribaissonen”. The goal of the project is, according to a Morgenbladet interview with Traavik, “to create the theater version of the Waste Ombudsman’s Facebook page, to give flesh and blood to all these virtual arguments that are going on, because I believe that in our time it is far too easy to shoot at point-blank range behind a keyboard and remain in trenches and echo chambers – regardless of one’s convictions”.

But the result is that the trenches only get deeper. Parts of the performing arts community feel stabbed in the back when one of their own collaborates with the enemy, and the heated argument that follows has consequences all the way to the Freedom of Expression Commission. At the same time, Traavik’s period of so-called “Artist support” is about to expire. He applies again. Gets a refusal, and now claims that this is “payback” for the “Waste Commission”.

– I just wanted to disappear

Why does he mean this? Yes, because the Cultural Council peer-reviews the applications in order to maintain arm’s length distance from the state. This means that the committee that assesses the applications, that approves and rejects them, belongs to the same little performing arts duck lady as Traavik and all his critics.

Oh, he didn’t get support? Bu-fuckings-hu, has been the prevailing reaction from the cultural field to the rejection of Morten Traavik. And then they list everyone else who didn’t get support either, such as Pia Maria Roll and Tori Wrånes. Out of 39 applications, only six were approved.

I can’t say anything about the quality of the applications. What I can say, however, is that Morten Traavik has a point. Whether it was his original intention or not: Morten Traavik puts his finger on the discomfort in Norwegian cultural policy.

Because it IS problematic when an entire art field is dependent on a single actor for funding. It IS problematic that this one actor has tremendous power when it comes to which art projects are realised. And it IS problematic that this row shows how incredibly vulnerable this system is to accusations of cronyism and incompetence. The Cultural Council’s problem is that they are simply too powerful.

Misunderstand me correctly. I want a strong Cultural Council. But I also believe that Norwegian culture must have more legs to stand on. In contrast to normal project support, the “Kunstnerskapsstøtten” gives performing arts companies support over several years. It provides artistic and financial stability in these years – but what happens when they are rejected? What then happens to build-up over time, long-term plans and employees in permanent jobs? Where should the artists turn to realize their artistry? “Apply for project support”, says the Cultural Council. In other words: Go back to living from hand to mouth. For performing arts companies, this is an unsustainable situation. Because there is hardly anywhere else to go. Yes, there are some local schemes here, and some foundations there, but we are talking about buttons and glossy images.

This is a well-known problem. The government announced in 2021 that a subsidy scheme for established performing arts companies will come into force in 2022. The purpose of the scheme is to give established performing arts companies increased financial stability and the possibility of predictability. That is good, although here too you will encounter challenges with juggling issues around incapacity and arm’s length. But now things have been strangely quiet in recent months. The question is whether this will also dissolve in the gas pipelines down Europe.

A third solution is, of course, private money. Although it is not unproblematic either, there should have been far more of it in the performing arts field.

So what happens now? Traavik cannot complain about the committee’s assessment, but he can complain about procedural errors. The Council itself, the Council of Culture’s highest body, can also on its own initiative choose to revoke the refusal, but then they have to find the money elsewhere. This is unlikely.

At the same time, Traavik’s project continues to spin. Because, as he says in the NRK documentary “Prosjekt Sløseri”: “It’s not finished after all.” This project is still ongoing. What happens on stage, what we record with a camera, what we show to the audience in a theatre, it is only the earth. But the project itself is the sun. As the show revolves around. The sun is everything that happens in people’s heads, what happens to people’s behavior and reaction patterns when they are confronted with the idea of ​​the “Waste Commission”.

Notorious in Oslo’s underworld

The article is in Norwegian

Tags: Morten Traavik Waste Commission Hellish chaos

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