The Exhibition: A Space of Experience or Interpretation? (original) (raw)
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The exhibition as medium: artist, space, artwork and viewer in dialogue
This paper explores the notion of the exhibition as an opportunity to reveal and enhance meaning thus creating a reflective space where viewer and artwork dialogue and relate with each other. Using as example the practice of Portuguese sculptor Alberto Carneiro (b. 1937), it will analyze key features of his work and suggest ways to expand them into the exhibition space. The work of Alberto Carneiro can be described as highly conceptual while grounded in a strong materiality. Carneiro’s work is often site-related and his installation pieces are usually preceded by what the artist himself designates by project-drawings. The graph paper sheets that Carneiro uses for his project-drawings are filled with records that elucidate about the concepts inherent to the origin of the work as well as about its installation in the exhibition space: drawings of details from the work, references to the materials used, schemes of the spatial distribution of the elements, possible trajectories for the viewer, dimensions of some parts, sentences and thoughts of the artist. All aspects in these complex project-drawings concur to reveal the profound thinking process behind them. The subsequent installation artworks, which typically bring natural elements such as trees, rocks or fruits into the museum, are, then, the materialization of that deep investigation about space and its relations with each element of the artwork and the body and mind of both the artist and the viewer. One of the common aspects between the two devices, project-drawings and installation artworks, is the use of the word as a means to establish a dialogue with the viewer: not only in the titles which directly address him/her, but also annotations in the project-drawings or sentences present in some installation artworks. All call upon the presence of the viewer in the space shared by him/her and the artwork, as well as the viewers’ experiences in nature (walking, lying in grass, picking up fruit). It is this communicability inherent to the genesis of both project-drawings and installations that I believe can be potentiated with the simultaneous exhibition of the two. However, although obviously connected, project-drawings and installations are independent works: they belong to different collections and as a rule are exhibited separately. By taking the exhibition as a reflective space, this paper analyzes how the confrontation between the project-drawings and the installation artworks can potentiate new dialogues and perspectives about them, enhancing that communicability which was one of the artist’s goals in the first place. I will start to present the works which will be used as examples, and then explore the potential new readings that using the exhibition as medium could create. Taking the exhibition as a privileged space where to materialize the concepts explored in the project-drawings, the artist himself renders each re-installation as a new experience. If, as Carneiro states, “The drawing is not made as something which prepares sculpture, but as a means which favors its developments” , then their simultaneous exhibition will always create a new space for reflection and deeper understanding of the artist’s concepts, intentions and artistic processes.
THE ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE IN AN ENGAGING AND MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCE OF THE PHYSICAL EXHIBITION
While recognising the part that digital media play in bringing about greater accessibility to artworks display and ensuring that they are more visible, this paper argues that the physical exhibition continues to be the primary place for the public to encounter the arts, as it can offer an engaging and meaningful aesthetic experience through which people can transcend their own existence. As such, it is essential to rethink now, in the scope of an increasing digital world, the exhibition in conceptual and methodological terms. For this purpose, the exhibition space must be considered as content rather than container and the exhibition as a work, often with the intentionality of a "total work of art", rather than just a vehicle for exhibiting artworks and objects. With this purpose in mind, this paper proposes a re-reading of the exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965), Franco Albini (1905-1977) and Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) in order to evaluate how their theory and practice can provide useful lessons for our contemporary thinking. The three architects, assuming the role of curators, use only the specific language of an exhibition and remix conventional modes of communication and architectural vocabulary, exploring the natural and artificial light, materials, layouts, surfaces and geometries in innovative ways. They considered the exhibition to be a work of art, overcoming the container/content dichotomy and trigging an intersubjective and self-reflective participation. Kiesler, Albini and Bo Bardi may all be considered visionaries of our time, as they offer a landscape that stimulates our curiosity through a multiplicity of information arranged in a multisensory way, allowing each visitor to discover associations between himself and his surroundings. None of them simply created an opportunity for distraction or entertainment. This perspective is all the more pertinent nowadays, as the processes of digitalising information and virtualising the real may well lead to the dematerialization of the physical experience of art. By drawing upon these historical examples, this paper seeks to contribute to current study on how an exhibition can stimulate the cognitive, emotional and spiritual intelligence of each visitor and clarify the importance of this effect in 21st century museums and society at large.
Reformulating the Architecture of Exhibitions
Curatography, 2023
And so, I was trying to ask the question again, ask it anew, as if it had not been asked before, because the language of the historian was not telling me what I needed to know…-HORTENSE SPILLERS The more possibilities are suggested, the more possibilities exist, the more possibilities are taken in by the imagination, the more the imagination's possibilities are defined, the more the possibility of more possibilities can be recognised. The possibilities of more possibilities lead to the imagination itself, immediately and to me.-Madeline Gins If you have curatorial experiences, you might be familiar with the moment when something happens in the realm of an exhibition-the moment the exhibition transcends to become more than just the sum of individual art works in a specific space or site. Exhibiting is alchemy. Alchemy of all sorts of consciousness and entities-invisible histories, memories and projections into the future that curators, artists, technicians, installers and the beholders bring in; matters, objects, both animate and inanimate; knowledge, space and environment etc.-which dissolve their boundaries and synchronise to become inseparable and indistinguishable as individual beings. In this sense, the exhibition itself is not simply exteriorised memory or experience, or a collection of art works and their contextualisation, but also a specific attentional form, into which social, psychic, collective, and technological instances of un/consciousness are capacitated and merged.
INTRODUCTION Exhibitions as research
Exhibitions As Research: Experimental Methods in Museums, 2020
This volume argues that museum exhibitions can eff ectively work as a particular way of doing research, a way of exploring the world around us rather than mirroring it. More than that, while this may not at fi rst glance seem to be a particularly revolutionary statement, we contend that, if taken seriously, it does shake a number of the basic pillars of museum practice. If the exhibition is research and not merely a way of communicating research, a number of questions arise: Can we exhibit something, which we do not know the end result of, which is still in the making? Which concepts of "knowledge" apply to such a format? How do we conceive of the roles between the partakers in an exhibition process if this is not a matter of giving shape to a given content? How do we conceive of the role of audiences in exhibitions if research is extended into the exhibition itself? Why, indeed, should we even think of exhibitions as research rather than as a platform to communicate the results of research to a wider audience? These are all questions that we will touch upon in the volume. The idea of exhibitions as research Museums and exhibitions have increasingly been referred to as "laboratories" (MOMA, 2014 ; Heller, Scholz and Wegner, 2015 ; Treimo, this volume; J ø rgensen, this volume) or "experiments", respectively (Healy and Witcomb, 2006 ; Macdonald and Basu, 2007). These terms point to a move away from understanding the museum as a site for representing the world to perceiving the museum, instead, as an agent that produces its own particular eff ects. The museum does not simply mirror the world, but constructs new perspectives and ideas that are generated through the particular mechanisms and qualities of the very institution (Bjerregaard and Willerslev, 2016 , pp. 226-235; Thomas, 2016 , p. 9). One eff ect of this approach to museums has been a focus on the capacity of exhibitions to generate research in and through themselves (Macdonald and Basu, 2007 ; Lehman-Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010 ; Herle, 2013 ; O'Neill and Wilson, 2015). Working intensely with collections, testing ideas out in a physical environment, and relating more or less directly to a lay audience does not only tell us something new about how to make exhibitions, but may also provide us with more insight into the subject matter of the exhibition. That is, the exhibition has the potential to create a research surplus ; through the making of exhibitions we are liable to learn more about the topic of the exhibition. But, as we will explore further 9781138646063_pi-194.indd 1 9781138646063_pi-194.indd 1
MA thesis in Museology and Cultural Heritage Studies, 2020
Environmental challenges with its social and political impact and relevance have increasingly manifested itself in the cultural sphere, including in museums and the study of them. This thesis explores how an art museum presents environmental issues through a contemporary art exhibition. In museological literature focused on issues such as climate change, engaging with art is pointed out to have unexplored potential. However, art museums have their own characteristics rooted in ideals, traditions, and ambitions that affect how they approach presentation of environmental topics. Thus, in my research I have aimed to investigate the possibilities and challenges caused by such characteristics when engaging with environmental issues in an exhibition of contemporary art, as well as how ideas of the communicative capacities of contemporary artworks affect how the topic is presented. These aspects are inspected through an exhibition analysis of the exhibition Tomorrow is the Question shown at ARoS - Aarhus Art Museum, including an interview with a representative from the curatorial team. I have used the concepts of the discursive and the immersive, including notions of atmospheres, to study the exhibition. Further, characteristics of the art museum, presented in a dilemma between social engagement and aesthetic contemplation, are applied to discuss the analytical findings. While this thesis is a museological study, as the art played such a central role for the museum’s presentation of the subject it addressed, I have included some theoretical approaches to analyze a selection of the artworks in environmental perspectives. Based upon the analysis and the discussions of key findings, I suggest that the artworks are proposed to be the main components to communicate about the exhibition theme, and that the other exhibition elements were to facilitate for this. Further, I argue that the use of discursive and immersive approaches to exhibition making show parallels to the dilemma of social engagement and aesthetic contemplation, making it challenging for art museums to provide necessary contextualization of the artworks inside the exhibition, and leads to an aim to add this by the use of textual elements outside the exhibition space.
The Exhibition: Histories, Practices, Policies
Revista de História da Arte, 2019
The Revista de História da Arte n. 14 addresses the “exhibition” not only as an object of study but mainly as a prolific problem. This theme is here covered through various lenses, underlining how the exhibition is a vital topic to many interdisciplinary and interrelated research fields that deal with museums, art, culture and diplomacy.
Contemporary art exhibits are complex operations that offer a considerable wealth of design knowhow. The many fragile, ephemeral forms concerning them, their importance and what they were to become had already encouraged reflections upon critiques and art theory during the final three decades of the 20th century. A number of useful debates were of great use to the rethinking and reassessment of outfitting areas in order to open up essential regions. These regions were to carefully construct the story of art and critiques; a story which is placed at the crossroads of many stories like an exchange and a dialogue or like the privileged junction of a scenario related to art and its context as well as to places and names, facts and dates.