“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)

If the museum, for Paul Valéry, was where "we put the art of the past to death," artists throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have undertaken projects of revival and renewal, assuming the roles of collector, archivist, and curator with subversive, political, or playful intent. They have reconfigured display mechanisms, reimagined taxonomies, and introduced into museums formerly banished objects and images. Artists have approached the museum gallery as a rich site of freighted yet pliable conventions and structures, a creative space of possibility.