• A KURÁTORI GYAKORLAT ÉS DISZKURZUS SZÓTÁRA
  • Bemutatási mód
  • Diszkurzivitás
  • Együttműködésen alapuló művészeti gyakorlatok
  • Fehér kocka
  • Finanszírozás
  • Interpretáció
  • Kiállított kultúrák
  • Kurátori (szemlélet)
  • Oktatási fordulat
  • Performatív kurátori gyakorlatok
  • Részvételen alapuló művészeti gyakorlatok
  • Szerzőség
  • Új muzeológia

• Esettanulmányok

• Kiállítás (Budapest)

• Megjelenések

• Rólunk

• CURATORIAL DICTIONARY
  • Exhibition display
  • Discursivity
  • Collaboration
  • White cube
  • Funding
  • Interpretation
  • Exhibiting cultures
  • Curatorial
  • Educational turn
  • Performativity
  • Participation
  • Authorship
  • New museology

• Case Studies

• An Exhibition (Budapest)

• Appearances

• About

NEW MUSEOLOGY


Museology is concerned with artworks through institutionalized collections, always in accordance with the concepts and methods of the given field  (art history, history, social sciences, natural sciences, etc.) and its professional criteria (handling sources, preservation, handling the collection, research, making things accessible, interpretation, exhibition). The field of museology includes the collections, research on the collections, and the public presentation of these research studies’ results, the mode of which changes with time and space. In the course of the history of modern, public museums, which were institutionalized in the 19th century, the most prominent turn was spawned when critical reflection was subsumed by the museum itself: when, form the 1960s on, critical reflections gradually have been incorporated into the collection and the representational mechanisms of the museum.

In the theory and practice of cultural representation, a theoretical realignment can be detected from the 1960s on: the series of turns in social sciences and art theory (~interpretation ~discursivity ~curatorial) appeared in scientific and art theoretical texts, as well as in works and visual genres (art works, artefacts, exhibitions). These shifts contributed in museological work to the critical/ self-critical, reflexive/ self-reflexive re-assessment of the authorial discourse of the museum collection that was based on the impermeability of scientific canons. Within exhibition practices, this change was manifested mainly, besides the selection of themes, in the critical approach towards exhibition display (~exhibition display ~white cube ~exhibiting culture) and curatorial praxis (~interpretation ~discursivity ~curatorial). This re-alignment of theory and practice also shaped museum education’s content and function. By the 1970s-1980s, an outer perspective was formed that, compared to earlier approaches, generated a new discourse. The primary streams within this discourse included establishing critique-based relations towards cultural and symbolic representation, to history (the past), and to society, by creating interpretations in the exhibitions and the by the articulation of critical texts on the museum. Museum studies calls these shifts, from the 1980s on, new museology. [1] Thereafter, the museum as a public institution of political ideology started its “own” critical discourse, in which such themes appeared as post-colonialism, the “nation” as a construct, or the interpretation of “race” and “gender” as a social, ideological, and cultural construct. New correlations were constituted between authors, artworks, and meanings in the museum, which also influenced the collection and curatorial practice related to the collection (~interpretation ~exhibiting cultures).      

The adjective “new” also refers to a distinction: against the “old.” [2] In the literature on museology, published in and after the1980s, one regularly finds texts on the critical survey of “traditional” and “old” exhibition practices, [3] as well as reflections on the “new” viewpoint that understands museology as cultural studies or cultural theory—which aims to define new possibilities and methodologies of working with artworks, acquisitions, collections, and exhibitions, along with the past, history, and display. [4] A new era began both in writing texts of anthropology and cultural theory (~interpretation), and in the display of exhibitions and museums (~exhibition display ~exhibiting cultures), as well as in the rearrangement of museological knowledge into educational practice, and also in museum communication. The role of subjectivity and multiple voices strengthened, authorial manifestations occurred more often, and voices that had been previously unknown and unheard of (e.g. aboriginals, women) became visible. These changes opened up a whole new perspective, and allowed for new and different (more democratic) interpretive possibilities for the institutions  [5] (~discursivity ~participation).  However, this discourse was characterized not only by methodological and thematic changes, but also by new practices that developed in relation to it: artists and art groups were given the space and the opportunity to apply their practice in the exhibition space, to present their alternative use of the space in an exhibition or museum setting [6] (~collaboration ~participation ~performativity ~discursivity ~educational turn ~curatorial). This resulted in the transformation of creation and (museological) knowledge, as well as that of the role and the praxis of the curator: instead of the previous “lectures,” dialogues were created in the museum between themes, spaces, objects, and people (~interpretation ~discursivity ~educational turn ~curatorial).

Besides the adjective “new,” a pivotal part of interiorizing these changes was the “meta” prefix. Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal, with curatorial experiences and an interest in methodology and practice, describes and interprets the “meta-function” of objects: the situation in which an artwork appears not only as an individual object / artwork, but also, through its display, the museum and the gesture of museologizing become visible. This is the self-reflexive response to the historical and ideological role of institutions, as well its integration into the exhibition practices. [7] Through making the meta-function of the artworks visible, the forms and meanings of the objects become perceptible in the exhibition, so does the critique and knowledge of the curator on the (or his/her own) institution (~discursivity ~performativity). A museum in such a scenario is transformed into a dynamic and discursive playground, built on changes. Transparency, critique, and formative practices establish the way of thinking that museum studies denotes as new museology. [8]

New museology, thus, means the historical change of museological knowledge: the concept is to survey in its historicity museological interpretation; the signification praxes of exhibitions based on new knowledges, the museological role of critique, self-reflection, and authorship; as well as the interrelated practices and concepts of the artwork, the collection, and display (~interpretation ~authorship ~performativity ~discursivity ~exhibition display ~exhibiting culture). In this conjunction, the exhibition is not only the site of learning and entertainment, but also of articulating complex political, ideological, and aesthetical nexuses, where curatorial statements play a role as well. At the same time, new museology is also a key concept for the birth of museology as a contemporary critical social, cultural, and art theory and studies.

In the last 20-25 years, in the museums in Hungary with collections and important roles in society, the museological turn, built on self-reflection and interpretive meta-function (as well), has been coming about significantly slower than in the museums of Western Europe that publish the theoretical writings and shape the museological practice. The institutions’ role of forming the society and its socially critical voice is notably weaker, and the theoretical basis of curatorial work is only slowly becoming a part of the institutional strategy. Among the museums with important collections and decisive museological knowledge and practices, it is the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest that represents this approach in its exhibitions the most vigorously.  Primarily with their temporary exhibitions, the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest—the latter also with the research and development of the collection in the last 8-10 years—have been incorporating the experiences of this methodological knowledge. Nonetheless, smaller (typically contemporary art) intuitions, generally without collections, are reacting to international tendencies easier and faster. The lack of a complex critique of the collection’s heritage, and the lack of criticism of ideology and science, as well as the theoretical shortcomings in education, amount to several repercussions.  The museum institutional framework in Hungary is in need of reflexive research and curatorial knowledge that is flexible and up-to-date, alternative critical interpretations beyond grand-narratives, but most of all, new and contemporary (museological) knowledge, created through exhibitions.

 

Zsófia Frazon 

 

References and Further Readings

Bachmann-Medick, Doris
2009 Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Hamburg, Rowohlts

Bal, Mieke
2006 Kulturanalyse. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp

Bennett, Tony
1995 The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics. London, New York, Routledge

Bouquet, Mary
1999a The Didactics of Exhibition Making. Focaal, 34,177-192
1999b Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. An Introduction. Focaal,34,7-20.
2000 Thinking and Doing Otherwise: Anthropological Theory in Exhibitionary Practice. Ethnos, 65.2, 217-236
2001 Streerwise in Museumland. Folk. Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 43, 77-102

Clifford, James
1994 On Ethnographic Surrealism. In The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, London, Harvard University Press, 117-152

Durrans, Brian
2001 Talking im Museums. Folk. Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society, 43, 151-164

Elsner, John – Cardinal, Roger
1994 The Cultures of Collecting. London, Reaktion Books

James, Allison – Hockey, Jenny – Dawson, Andrew ed.
1997 After Writing Culture. Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. London, New York, Routledge

Korff, Gottfried – Roth, Martin Hrsg.
1990 Das historische Museum. Labor, Schaubühne, Identitätsfabrik. Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris, Campus Verlag, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme

Korff, Gottfried
1988 Die Popularisierung des Musealen und Musealisierung des Popularen. Anmerkungen zu den Sammlungs- und Ausstellungstendenzen in den frühen Achtziger. In Fliedl, Gottfried Hrsg.Museum als soziales Gedächtnis? Kritische Beiträge zu Museumswissenschaft und Museumspädagogik. Klagenfurt, Kärntner, 9-23
2002a Museumsdinge: deponieren – exponieren. (Martina Eberspächer – Gudrun Marlene König – Bernhard Tschofen, Hrsg.) Köln, Weimar, Wien, Böhlau Verlag
2002b A néprajzi múzeum: a meghökkentés iskolája? Néprajzi Értesítő LXXXIV, 9-19.

Lumley, Robert ed.
1988 The Museum Time-Machine. Putting Cultures on Display. London, New York, Routledge

Macdonald, Sharon ed.
1999 The Politics of Display. Museums, Science, Culture. London, New York, Routledge

Macdonald, Sharon – Fyfe, Gordon ed.
1996 Theorizing Museums. Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing (The Sociological Review)

Osten, Marion von
2005  A Question of an Attitude—Changing Methods, Shifting Discourses, Producing
Public, Organising Exhibitions. In Simon Sheikh ed. 2005 In the Place of the Public Sphere? Berlin: B_Books:142-166. 

Pollock, Griselda – Zeman, Joyce
2007 Museums After Modernism. Strategies of Engangement. Oxford, Blackwell

Vergo, Peter
1989 The New Museology. London, Reaktion Books