In The Making of a Museum Judith Nasby recalls the century-long history of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre/Art Gallery of Guelph, informed by her long career as gallery director and curator. The ...book is beautifully illustrated with eighty images of artworks in the permanent collection, beginning with the gallery's first acquisition, Tom Thomson's 1917 masterpiece The Drive, the last large canvas he painted before his tragic death.
Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia redefines Iberian and curatorial Studies by situating curatorial practice at the centre of the configuration of modern, postcolonial ...societies in the Iberian context.
From the 1990s onwards the 'ethnographic turn in contemporary art' has generated intense dialogues between anthropologists, artists and curators. While ethnography has been both generously and ...problematically re-appropriated by the art world, curation has seldom caught the conceptual attention of anthropologists. Based on two years of participant-observation in Mexico City, Tarek Elhaik addresses this lacuna by examining the concept-work of curatorial platforms and media artists. Taking his cue from ongoing critiques of Mexicanist aesthetics, and what Roger Bartra calls 'the post-Mexican condition', Elhaik conceptualises curation less as an exhibition-oriented practice within a national culture, than as a figure of care and an image of thought animating a complex assemblage of inter-medial practices, from experimental cinema and installations to curatorial collaborations. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Paul Rabinow, the book introduces the concept of the 'Incurable-Image,' an antidote to our curatorial malaise and the ethical substance for a post-social anthropology of images.
During the mid-nineteenth century a debate arose over the form and functions of the public art museum in Britain. Various occurrences caused new debates in Parliament and in the press about the ...purposes of the public museum which checked the relative complacency with which London's national collections had hitherto been run. This book examines these debates and their influence on the development of professionalism within the museum, trends in collecting and tendencies in museum architecture and decoration. In so doing it accounts for the general development of the London museums between 1850 and 1880, with particular reference to the National Gallery. This involves analysis of art display and its relations with art historiography, alongside institutional and architectural developments at the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery. It is argued that the underpinning factor in all of these developments was a reformulation of the public museum's mission, which was in turn related to the electoral reform movement. In a potential situation of mass enfranchisement, the 'masses' should be well educated; the museum was openly identified as a useful institution in this sense. This consideration also influenced approaches to collecting and arranging artworks and to configuring their architectural setting within the museum, allowing for displays to be instructive in specific ways. Dissatisfaction with the British Museum and National Gallery buildings and their locations led to proposals to move the national collections, possibly merging and redefining them. Again the socio-political usefulness of the museum was key in determining where the national collections should be housed and in what form of building. This rich debate is analysed with full references to the various forums in and out of Parliament. Part one covers these issues in a thematic structure, examining all of the national collections, their interrelationships and their gradual development of discrete (yet sometimes arbitrary) museological territories. Part two focuses on the individual case of the National Gallery, observing how museological debate was brought to bear on the development of a specific institution. Every architectural development and redisplay is closely analysed in order to gauge the extent to which the products of debate were carried through into practice, and to comprehend the reasons why no museological grand project emerged in London.
This book would not have been possible were it not for the help and support of Malcolm Baker, Anthony Burton, David Carter, Jonathan Conlin, the late Francis Haskell, Hero Lotti, Donata Levi, Rhiannon Mason, Susan Pearce, Barbara Pezzini, Charles Saumarez Smith, Isobel Siddons, Paul Tucker, Matti Watton, Giles Waterfield and the late Clive Wainwright. Special thanks are due to Paola Barocchi, under whose enlightened tutelage this book began life as a doctoral thesis, to my editors Tom Gray and Sarah Charters, to my friends Martin Barnes and Imke Valentien, to the various branches of my family in the UK and Italy and, last but by no means least, to my wife Erica Bemporad.
Windows on Worlds showcases the unique and hidden collections tucked away across the Bloomington campus. Brimming with beautiful photographs, this book offers readers insight into an extraordinary ...number of cultures and societies through IU's collections.
Post critical museology Dewdney, Andrew; Dibosa, David; Walsh, Victoria
2013., 2013, 20130125, 2012, 2013-01-25
eBook
"Post Critical Museology examines the current status of learning and knowledge practices in the art museum and investigates how to understand the challenges presented by the visual cultures of global ...migration and new media. The book locates the discussion of the future of the art museum in the realm of public participation and engagement with art and the museum. It provides a new analytical synthesis of the art museum through accounting for the agency of different communities of users and using theoretical approaches associated with science and technology studies. In the book's terms the art museum is continually made and remade through related networks and instead of an approach that starts with traditional hierarchies of cultural knowledge and value, it develops an analysis of the art museum in terms of an extended set of objects and performances and examines the points of relationship between them. In this way the book shows how the art museum in the first decade of the twenty-first century is no longer governed by the civic and civilizing mission of the nineteenth century, nor ruled by the logic of Modernist rationalism, but instead, can be seen as an institution seeking a new social role and identity and currently still struggling to understand and negotiate wider cultural signifying systems, government policy and market forces. Locating its critique in a constructive relationship to international progressive museological thinking and practice, the book calls for a new alignment in what it announces as post-critical museology. An alignment that is committed to rethinking what an art museum in the twenty-first century could be, as well as what knowledge and understanding its future practitioners might mobilize in a rapidly changing social and cultural context. The book aims to be essential reading in the growing field of museum studies. It will also be of professional interest to all those working in the cultural sphere, including museum professionals, policy makers and art managers. "--
Curating Live Arts Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels / Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels
2018, 2018-11-01
eBook
Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global ...phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field's characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.
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