“Installation Views: A Historical Compendium,” in The Artist’s Museum, ed. Dan Byers. Exh. Cat. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art and Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016. 184-244. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Museums and the Shaping of Contemporary Artworks
Museum Management and Curatorship, 2006
In the museum context, curators and conservators often play a role in shaping the nature of contemporary artworks. Before, during and after the acquisition of an art object, curators and conservators engage in dialogue with the artist about how the object should be exhibited and conserved. As a part of this dialogue, the artist may express specifications for the display and conservation of the object, thereby fixing characteristics of the artwork that were previously left open. This process can make a significant difference to the visual appearance of the work, the nature of the audience's experience, and how the work should be interpreted. I present several case studies in which the nature of the artwork has been shaped by such dialogues, and discuss principles for resolving cases in which there is a conflict between instructions specified by the artist and those adopted by the museum.
RACAR, revue d'art canadienne, Canadian art review, 2008
2011
Working within the framework of the museum rather than attempting to resist it, Karsten Bott, Portia Munson, Kelly Mark and Jac Leirner exemplify the current generation of artists who are critically engaged with the museum. In this thesis I will make the case that by using their own collections, rather than existing ones as previous generations of artists had done, these artists actively enact the traditional museological practices of collecting, classifying, and displaying objects as well as the related archival functions of storage and preservation. The work of these artists is reliant upon the museum as a site and draws attention to the institution's capacity to legitimize art. The result is a diverse set of works that raise questions about what kind of objects, people and experiences are recognized by the museum.
Installation Art and the Museum : Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks
2013
This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe.
Centre for Experimental Museology, 2021
This text reflects on the now ubiquitous strategy of museum reconstruction by way of architectural expansion, and investigates an alternative (hitherto, marginal) development path that can be called ‘off-modern’, a term inspired by Svetlana Boym. It contrasts the tree-like museum structure incarnated perfectly in New York’s Museum of Modern Art with a rhizome-like, anti-hierarchical organization of integrity which, the author argues, originated in the low-profile Société Anonyme museum of Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, of which the post-War Stedelijk Museum, under Willem Sandberg, was the heir.
The Object Matter of Museums: designing otherwise
DESIGN OBJECTS: MUSEALIZATION, DOCUMENTATION AND INTERPRETATION, 2023
The theoretical and ethical debate fostered by the reflexive turn of the last decades is increasingly guided by the concern to recover a sphere of political action of the museum: activist and decolonial in nature, deeply entangled in the world and built from an intraactive engagement with it. As a consequence, the museum tends to address the emergent and the urgent through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to circumstances in the world. In doing so, the contemporary museum seeks to create conditions for visitor engagement by empowering their unmediated voices to be heard. This text aims to explore the critical space between the apparent decolonial vitality of the museum and how diffractive practices may be designed in a postcritical and postrepresentational context, arguing that approaches based on artistic and design processes of speculative fabulation (as Design Culture) are helpful for thinking and acting in these spaces of experience, acting as a tool of philosophical enquiry, which promotes responsiveness to «know» and «do» differently in the present. Pragmatically, it highlights three modes of speculative (moderated) design engagement with the present and the future to help museums to break out of their ontological blindness and fulfil their critical and transformative potential.
in Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel (eds.), Historisierung. Begriff - Methode - Praxis, Stuttgart/Weimar : J.B. Metzler, forthcoming May 2016. This essay examines an important transformation in public history in relation to two institutions, the British Museum in London and the Neue Museum in Berlin and their identity as collections and monuments in their own right . In an analysis of the crisis of the commemorative monument in contemporary Germany James E. Young recognizes the continued desire for a form of monumentality, observing a general move from the heroic to the ironic as “the need for a unified vision of the past, as found in the traditional monument, necessarily collides with the modern conviction that neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one thing.” To what extent can a similar shift be observed as these museums construct institutional memory and how does this contribute to “institutional survival” , to renewing their mandate to preserve and to be themselves preserved and transmitted for the benefit of future generations? When we consider the British Museum and the Neue Museum as representative models of the ‘universal museums’ of the first museum age , it follows that it is significant to see how, in today’s ‘second museum age’, both of these museums have incorporated specific representations of their institutional past into the partial or full renovation of their houses . The Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum reveals how artefacts relating to a former ‘order of things’ have been used to produce an overarching vision of the museum’s initial encyclopaedic project. The case of the Neue Museum, whose newly renovated building can be seen as an exhibit in itself , is considered from the point of view of the remains of the historicist murals created in the 1850s and 1860s and the meaning of their role in a ‘new’ (2009) museum narrative.