Week 53: 16th – 22nd September
While I was down in London I had the chance to visit The Museum of Contemporary African Art. However, despite its grandiose title, The Museum of Contemporary African Art is not a museum by traditional standards at all, but is in fact a 12 room installation by a single artist, Benin-born Meschac Gaba. Now installed at its current home at the Tate Modern, Gaba’s work represents the largest single artwork purchased by the Tate.
The Museum of Contemporary African Art
The idea of the museum first developed when Gaba visited the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam for a residency in 1996. Through exploring European art museums he realised that not only were contemporary African artists not represented within the artistic canon, but contemporary artworks that had been brought from Africa were being sold and marketed as traditional crafts. It was this experience that inspired him to create a museum as a space to exhibit his own work.
‘Gaba has claimed that the Museum of Contemporary African Art is ‘not a model… it’s only a question.’ It is temporary and mutable, a conceptual space more than a physical one, a provocation to the Western art establishment not only to attend to contemporary African art, but to question why the boundaries existed in the first place.’ Kerryn Greenberg, Curator (International Art), Tate
The structure and function of the museum
The museum is separated into themed rooms which suggest both both typical curatorial concerns, as well as alluding to the architecture of the museum. The rooms, which include a museum shop, restaurant and library, explore the familiar subsidiary elements of Western art museums as art spaces in their own right, where participants are invited to consider the boundaries of institutional participation.
In other spaces such as the marriage room, Gaba showcases his own marriage to Alexandra van Dongen that took place on 6th October 2000 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Presents, wedding attire, a guest book and marriage certificate from the ceremony, come together to make up the museum display, and to break down the barriers of art and life. In the game room and the architecture room, visitors are actively encouraged to physically engage with the objects on display to create new objects through the use of wooden puzzles and building blocks.
Through subverting the function of the museum to a space of ‘sociability, study and play in which the boundaries between everyday life and art, observation and participation are blurred’, Gaba also questions historical narratives of collecting by institutions. This makes the acquisition and inclusion of The Museum of Contemporary African Art as part of Tate’s programme to develop their Contemporary African Art collection even more interesting.
Museums by artists
This exhibition however, also raises questions about the role of the artist-curator and how art practice has extended into the critique of the museum, as well as the ways in which artists have become curators of their own collections. Another example of this is Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Mouse Museum’, a building created in the shape of the mickey mouse logo, housing a series of found objects from his practice. Now housed at MOMA, ‘Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Mouse Museum’ appropriates methods of museum display, and with wry humor typical of his work, comments on the obsessiveness of collecting and the pervasiveness of consumer culture.’
Given my interests in art as artefact and interpretation, I’m drawn to artists using methods of museum display in their own work, as well as incorporating it into my installations. Therefore, I’ve decided to contact and interview artists who create museums as part of my research and present these on my blog. I’m hoping that this will give me more insight into why artists are drawn to the museum format and how this can be used to better understand existing museum and gallery collections.
Further information:
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/meschac-gaba-museum-contemporary-african-art
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/jul/01/meschac-gaba-museum-african-art
http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/blog/13624/
http://www.tate.org.uk/about/press-office/press-releases/tate-and-africa
