Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art Edited by Maia Wellington Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano (original) (raw)
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The roles and influence of monographic exhibitions on art historical scholarship
Maia Wellington Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano’s edited collection, Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art, is the fruit of a remarkable symposium hosted at the Istituto Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence in March/April 2016. The event brought together likeminded scholars of art history and museum studies from around the world to speak about, to discuss, and to reflect upon the impact of monographic exhibitions on the written trajectory of art historical scholarship, and vice versa. The volume’s essays consider monographic exhibitions that occurred from the late-eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, featuring artists ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary periods. In this way, the book is of value and of interest to scholars specializing across these many centuries.
The Significance of Archival Exhibitions and Their Influence on Contemporary Art
This research project intends to compare and contrast two archive exhibitions from the ICA and the Whitechapel Gallery. Each archive exhibition documents an exhibition held previously at its respective gallery. This research project will also investigate the nature of these types of archival exhibitions, and why these two particular shows were significant enough that the ICA and Whitechapel Gallery felt it necessary to present their documentation as exhibitions in their own right.
Modes of Making Art History: Looking back at documenta 5 and documenta 6
As art history further questions its fundamentals, the exhibition format continues to lose its neutrality. In the preface to the second volume of his compendium, Biennials and Beyond -Exhibitions that made art history: 1962-2002, Bruce Altshuler leads the increasing interest by art historians for exhibitions back to the insight that "exhibitions bring together a range of characters, who, exercising varied intentions in diverse circumstances, generate so much of what comes down to us as art history."[1] However, the academic rewriting of selected shows is itself subjected to norms which, given their canonizing e!ects, must be taken into consideration. This article does not intend to question the art historical study of exhibitions tout court. Rather, it criticizes the selection of case studies according to a logic of masterpieces while excluding exhibitions which are regarded as not having made art history. In fact, the di!erent modes by which exhibitions can shape art history require further analysis, eventually casting new light on events which have not hitherto
Exhibiting outside the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775-1999: Alternative Venues for Display
In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so—for example J.L. David's exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874—despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.
Manifesto: Towards a Historical Critique of Exhibitions
2015
Introduction Literary critics write book reviews about new novels. Art critics review works of art and the exhibitions they are presented in. Exhibition critiques, however, seem to be much less developed. 1 In most popular reviews, most attention is usually paid to the shape, architecture and function of the building, rather than to the actual contents of the exhibition (a notable example being the reviews on the new Dutch Military Museum 2 ). In other instances, reviews are echoes of the press releases of the organising institutions, or evaluations of the accompanying marketing message. If they do go beyond that, they tend rely on specific disciplines such as art history. One might expect academic reviews to provide some much needed in-depth criticism. However, museums and exhibitions rarely receive substantial coverage in academic journals. Although we do find theoretical reflection on museum exhibitions, especially in the case of ethnographic museums and exhibitions, it often sto...
Landmark Exhibitions Issue Les Immatériaux or How to Construct the History of Exhibitions
How does one construct the history of exhibitions -forgotten, unwritten, disparate, often lacking in documentation? In what ways might it be a new kind of history, displacing the traditional focus on objects and related critical histories, yet irreducible to the term 'museum studies'? In what ways have exhibitions, more than simple displays and configurations of objects, helped change ideas about art, intersecting at particular junctions with technical innovations, discursive shifts and larger kinds of philosophical investigations, thus forming part of these larger histories? What does it mean to ask such questions in the era of fast-moving celebrity curators, biennials and fairs, digital ways and means, which have taken shape over the last twenty years?
This intensive, one-day workshop is the second in a series of events aiming to advance the emerging scholarship on exhibition reconstructions. Revisiting and restaging past exhibitions is a recent tendency in curatorial practice that has been allocated the status of a new genre, the ‘remembering exhibitions,’ by Reesa Greenberg. Despite the increasing popularity of this phenomenon in curatorial practice, there is currently very limited scholarship that addresses the complexity and motivations behind these reconstructions. The focus of this workshop is to develop the critical terms of the discussions that took place during a panel organised in April 2016 by Michaela Giebelhausen, Natasha Adamou, and Michael Tymkiw, entitled The Return of History: Reconstructing Exhibitions in the Twenty-first Century, at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in Edinburgh http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session34
History of Exhibitions: Curatorial Models, Countermodels, and Altermodels
It has become increasingly common to claim that the history of modern and contemporary art is best grasped as a history of exhibitions. While such an approach has obvious advantages, particularly for curators, its implications are less clear. How might it differ from accounts that privilege artists, movements, mediums, or contexts? What sort of critical, aesthetic, and analytical criteria should structure such an undertaking? How can a history of exhibitions avoid the pitfalls of canonization? And what relevance might pre-existing models of curating retain for contemporary practices? This seminar will investigate such questions by collectively analyzing a selection of test cases drawn from the history of exhibition-making. Our work will be directed by the following objectives: to trace important developments in the evolution of exhibition forms and curatorial practices; to register the ways in which these histories have conditioned recent artistic production and exhibition making; and to critically assess the rhetoric of the art exhibition as a form of public communication. The course is divided into three sections. The first of these, entitled “Models,” surveys important moments in the development of the exhibition in Western modernity, ranging from the private collection, the state museum, and the salon to the modernist musem, the travelling exhibition, and the international biennial; it also attends to avant-garde activities in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The second section, “Countermodels,” seeks to trace some of the many ways in which experimental art and exhibition-making positioned itself against these historical precedents in the decades following 1945. While this section will cover such influential museum exhibitions as “Information” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” it will place equal emphasis on gallery shows, demonstrations, para-museal installations, and work in distributed media. It will further examine developments at the periphery of established North Atlantic centers. The last section, “Altermodels,” engages contemporary developments that mean to further reinvent the exhibition. Here we will look closely at the complex transformations grouped together under the term “globalization,” before examining recent tendencies in durational and social production, closing with an evaluation of the changing status of curatorial labor.