My previous research into artists creating and deconstructing museums (in week 53) has led me to consider the ways in which artists have intervened in museums, either through being commissioned to respond to the collection, creating interpretive works, or sometimes even uninvited.
In the foreword for ‘The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect’, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D Lowry discusses examples of different responses by artists to the museum site: “In 1960 The Museum of Modern Art agreed to show Jean Tinguely’s Hommage a New York, an amazing and elaborate construction designed to self-destruct – as indeed it did, in an event in the sculpture garden that was finally closed down by firemen. By 1969, however, when Yayoi Kusama arranged for six women and two men to shed their clothing and frolic in the pools and among the sculptures on the same site, her intention was subversive rather than collaborative; the event took place without the Museum’s consent, and indeed, Kusama had organised it precisely to protest the institution’s lack of modernity, its function as, in her words, a ‘mausoleum of Modern Art’.” (McShine, 1999, p12)
Museum practices in art
Ever since the modern concept of the museum developed out of the Enlightenment period at the end of the eighteenth century, artists have considered their relationship to this new type of institution. For example, some artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Marcel Duchamp created their own museums (albeit differing dramatically in scale) to utilise and critique systems of collection and display. Other artists, such as Dennis Oppenheim created large-scale ephemeral works so that organisations and galleries would not be able to collect them. However, ironically these works often resulted in the production of documentation including photographs and maps which are now shown in art museums. (McShine, 1999, p13-20)
The collection of the documentation of artworks has also been facilitated by the artists themselves. In particular, the Fluxus movement, who despite the conceptual and performative nature of their practices, collated their documentation together in a cabinet (known as The George Maciunas Fluxus Cabinet) between 1975 and 1977. The production of this ‘museum’ allowed the artists to share their practice with audiences that hadn’t attended the original happenings or events, and created a space to include other ephemera such as artist books, music scores and object multiples. (McShine, 1999, p15)
Artistic interventions
Since the 1990s, explorations of the museum structure within artist practice have developed exponentially, so much so that museums regularly invite artists into their institutions in order to create interventions within the space or with the objects. However, it is not just art museums that are interested in working with contemporary artists. Ethnographic and psychoanalytic museums including the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford or the Freud Museum, London, also commission artists to respond to their collections.
These interventions often take the form of interpretations of the collections, either through a re-curation of the space or the production of documentation which investigates the nature of the collections, in order to reframe the way that audiences see museum objects. As Khadija Carroll writes in‘Object to project: Artists’ interventions in museum collections’, “When contemporary artists intervene in museum collections, they intervene between past and future ways of seeing, thereby turning museum objects into projects… Intervention in the context of artistic practices implies an artist aiming to disrupt power relations in the museum where pre-existing objects are often presented as an authoritative representation of a given culture.” (Marshall (ed), 2011, p217)
These projects are not as much about creating new objects as developing artistic practice around already existing ones, thereby allowing audiences to gain a better understanding of both the nature of contemporary art practice as well as how museum culture affects the way that they interpret the past.
Further reading:
The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect by Kynaston McShine, Museum of Modern Art, New York & Thames and Hudson, London, 1999.
Sculpture and the Museum by Christopher R Marshall (ed), Ashgate, Surrey Uk & Burlington, USA, 2011.
http://www.artangel.org.uk/500s/brian_dillon
http://jessicahemmings.com/index.php/museum-interventions/
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409436171
http://www.kdja.org/web/Meta-museums/index.html
http://museumcultures.wordpress.com/tag/artists-interventions/
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/give_and_take_mixed_messages/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Artists-Work-Museums-Interventions-Subjectivities/dp/095664628X
