Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum

Jennifer Barrett, Jacqueline Millner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351956680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

This unique book proposes a re-reading of the relationship between artists and the contemporary museum. In Australia in particular, the museum has played a significant role in the colonial project and this has generally been considered as the predominant mode of artists' engagement with such institutions and collections. Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum expands the post-colonial frame of reference used to interpret this work, to demonstrate the broader implications of the relationship between artists and the museum, and thus to offer an alternative way of understanding recent contemporary practices. The authors' central argument is that artists' engagement with the museum has shifted from politically motivated critique taking place in museums of fine art, towards interventions taking place in non-art museums that focus on the creation of knowledge more broadly. Such interventions assume a number of forms, including the artist acting as curator, art works that highlight the use of taxonomic modes of display and categorization, and the re-consideration of the aesthetics of collections to suggest different ways of interpreting objects and their history. Central to these interventions is the challenge to better connect the museum and its public. The book will be essential reading for scholars, professionals and students in the fields of contemporary art and museum studies, art history, and in the museum sector. These include artists, curators, museum and gallery professionals, postgraduate researchers, art historians, designers and design scholars, art and museum educators, and students of visual art, art history, and museum studies. This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

1 Introduction: Situating the artist/museum relationship

THIS BOOK EXAMINES THE RELATIONSHIP between contemporary Australian artists and the museum. It considers the museum as a site for artistic intervention, the impact of artists on the museum and the museums expectations in engaging artists to interpret its collections and the ways that working in the museum contributes to artists' practice. We propose that over the last two decades this relationship has been mutually constitutive, significant as much to the development of contemporary artistic practice as to that of museums in a variety of fields, including art but extending to natural, social and cultural history. By analysing a wide range of projects from the 1990s to the present, we explore the many manifestations of this relationship and its changes over time, from institutional critique, to post-colonial revisions, to artists working in curatorial capacities, and to the re-embrace of aesthetic effects largely abandoned in both post-conceptual art and didactic museum display. To tackle the complex ways artists and museums interact in contemporary times, we have adopted a transdisciplinary approach that draws on art history, theory and criticism, cultural and post-colonial studies as well as museum studies. We hope to contribute to understanding the role of Australian artists in the museum and the reciprocal benefits of collaboration between the museum and the artist, and to mapping this strain of art and museum practice forged predominantly by established, mid-career artists whose work has significantly influenced the development of Australian art. The book, we trust, offers unique insights into the shared histories and changing cultures of art and museums in the contemporary era – post the new museology, post post-modernism.

Focusing on the Australian experience is of course a deliberate choice, in part informed by the principles underpinning our research that emphasise the specific, the materially embodied and the empirically observable. It also springs from the observation that the practice of artists who have worked with museums in Europe, the UK and the US – for example Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Daniel Buren, Mark Dion and Andrea Fraser – has been substantially critically contextualised, in contrast to that of local practitioners. But our focus also reflects some particular aspects of Australian art and museology that emerge from this country's Indigenous and colonial history, its geographic and temporal location (often represented as 'peripheral' and 'lagging' relative to the perceived centres of global cultural and political power) and its singular natural environment distinguished by flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth. Australia's preoccupation with questions of national identity has predisposed many of its artists and cultural institutions to continuously sift through the past to discover what it is that makes Australia unique.¹ This phenomenon intensified significantly in the run up to 1988, the year that marked 200 years of European settlement/occupation, when multiple debates raged about Australia's culture and history. Most importantly, this period saw the emergence and consolidation of wide-ranging Indigenous critiques of the 'official' record's many blind spots, and the uncovering of previously repressed historical narratives. The period that is the focus of our study comes in the wake of these post-colonial debates and critiques, and owes a substantial debt to them. It is also indebted to conceptual and feminist art for their earlier exposure of the ideological pretensions of the fine art museum; these art 'movements' offered a powerful model for understanding how institutions that stake a claim in objectively representing 'culture', 'history' and 'civilisation' are always permeated by (unequal) relationships of power. The artists and museums that feature in this book have in important senses continued this work through nuanced and careful inquiry, driven by a desire to deepen and complicate existing cultural understandings, of Australia in the first instance, but, by extension of broader territory, including: the relations between the past and the present, how best to tell stories that genuinely capture a diverse spectrum of experience while still honouring collective memory, and the role of art in knowledge-creation. In their exploration of these questions that remain pressing to cultural producers as much as to policymakers and the general public around the world, the Australian projects profiled here are of international relevance.

1.1 Jayne Dyer, The Reading Room (2007) (Spare Room), Elizabeth Bay House, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney

In Australia, as in many former colonies and indeed colonising empires, the museum as an institution has been from the beginning inextricable from the colonial project. Imperial museums (often through their keen amateur agents) collected 'exotic' natural and cultural specimens that quickly became enmeshed in narratives of power and their active contributions to the development of Western systems of classification and taxonomy. The extent to which early collectors (and their houses) in Australia contributed to these classification systems embeds museums in a distinct way. These soon-to-be universal classification systems, and the colonial Australian contributions to their development, unwittingly shaped the nation's knowledge of itself. This is particularly evident in ongoing contestations about the framework for understanding Australia's past, exemplified by the debates about the National Museum of Australia and its contextualisation of Australian history.² This history, along with the emergence of powerful new material that gave voice to Indigenous cultural and historical perspectives, made the museum an obvious site for post-colonial critique from the 1990s onwards. Practitioners already schooled in the institutional critique pioneered by conceptual and minimalist artists who demystified the neutrality of 'the white cube' of the modern art museum – including the internationally renowned Australian conceptualist Ian Burn – redirected their attention to colonial collections and artefacts, further underlining the ambivalent relationship between the contemporary artist and the museum. Some of the artwork created in this context – such as that by Narelle Jubelin and Gordon Bennett – was singled out for its groundbreaking critical strategies and consequently was widely documented, such that the post-colonial became understood generally as the predominant mode of artists' engagement with museums in Australian contemporary art.

While the tendentious construction of history by some museums has remained in artists' sights, our book expands the post-colonial frame of reference used to interpret this work, to demonstrate the broader implications of the relationship between artists and the museum, and to thus offer an alternative way of understanding recent contemporary practices. We propose that artists have diversified their engagement with the museum beyond institutional critique in ways that complement and extend, as well as complicate, the role of the museum, the practice of art and the viewers experience. That diversification has included a shift from politically driven interventions taking place primarily in museums of fine art, towards an engagement with the creation of knowledge that straddles the divide between art and non-art museums, specifically historical, ethnographic and natural science museums. Visual artists, of course, have had a long association with non-art museums, including as exhibition preparators, performers, illustrators, web designers and creators of visual representations such as dioramas that bring to life social history or scientific concepts. While acknowledging these forms of contribution, this book is concerned with those artists who bring their standing in their field, or are approached by museum professionals, to realise a creative project in dialogue with a museum. Such artists may instigate and manage the project as an extension of their own practice – as was certainly more often the case before this way of working became well established – or they may be invited by the museum or even be employed specifically as 'creative producers' to bring all the insights of a visual artist to in-house museum display and communication.

1.2 Judy Watson, wurreka (1999) Bunjilaka, Melbourne Museum, Museum Victoria

This diversification of engagement, we argue, has resulted in many projects being distinguished by their immersive and affective dimensions that aim to engage audiences sensually. This is in part a response to the limitations of the dialectical, even confrontational, approach inherited from the institutional critique of early conceptual art. At times, such an approach proved counterproductive, increasing tensions between museums and artists rather than facilitating dialogue and alienating audiences which benefitted neither the artist nor the museum. From the artists' perspective, this aesthetic turn can be seen in the context of changing art historical and theoretical approaches to aesthetics that recognise the complexity of the aesthetic experience and its capacity to induce critical self-reflexivity and new conceptual engagement in the viewer – beyond 'pure visual pleasure' and the short-lived impact of the wow' factor.³ Post-conceptual art gradually began to re-engage with the term once banished from the vocabulary of the avant-garde: beauty. From the museum perspective, the interest in developing the aesthetic dimension of collections follows from museological approaches to the object that overlooked its material properties and instead overlaid it with text and contextual data. Museums began to explore affective and performative modes of display out of the perceived need to revitalise the audience experience and to promote a form of reflexivity within the institution. Indeed, an interrogation of the role of the viewer of artworks and museum exhibitions underpins many of the projects we discuss, with the aesthetic experience as the lynchpin.⁴ Museum interest in the audience experience can also be seen as a response to the development of 'experience design' in other cultural sectors such as retail. An exhibition designed with a shop display in mind may be a means of popularising the museum, a way to redistribute some of the museum's cultural authority and render museum display more accessible. But, ultimately, aesthetic –emotional, immersive, bodily – engagement targets directly one of the museum's core concerns: how to connect contemporary audiences to the past and its implications for the present and the future. This reorientation of museum thinking coincided with the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of memory studies where many contemporary artists have situated their practice.⁵

1.3 Anne Ferran, Baby's Dress (1998) Rouse Hill, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales

Capturing the Museum/Artist Relationship

The picture we have built up of the relationship between artists and museums in contemporary Australia is a complex and intriguing one that attests to its mutually constitutive nature. It reveals the different rationales for engaging in collaborative projects, the potential pitfalls and the opportunities for both sides to develop the relationship in innovative and productive ways. Accounts of these projects have not yet been comprehensively considered within an art historical context in Australia, nor within museums studies except in the form of isolated catalogue and journal essays. Our approach integrates the divergent strands of this practice from when it began to gather momentum, garnering increasing support from government, and piquing the interest of many mid-career artists. We argue that this was a significant period for both Australian art practice and museology, when the interests of each began to converge, for example through a type of post-colonial critique that directly engaged the (museum's) techniques of imperialism. To understand the nature of artist/museum collaborations, we interviewed over 30 Australian artists, curators and museum professionals, including those practising in international contexts. Such a systematic, comprehensive and integrated analysis has not been undertaken previously in Australia, nor in other parts of the world where such collaborations exist.

1.4 Anne Ferran, Red Night Dress (1998) Rouse Hill, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales

Given that critiques of the art museum and the administration of aesthetics were central to conceptual and minimal art, it is not surprising that the generation of post-conceptual, or 'contemporary', artists should maintain an interest in the museum as an institution. For many contemporary artists, there remains a (perhaps) perverse interest in their paradoxical relationship with the art museum: they may object to the museums cultural power and elitism on the one hand, but acknowledge their own indebtedness to, and desire for, the museum on the other. This has expressed itself as an interest in the history of the institution and its politics; in the political and cultural power of representation; in the museum's relationship with audiences; and in the aesthetic power of collections. Such sustained interest suggests that there is an established critical strain, a self-reflexive impulse, in contemporary practice in which the museum plays a central role. But what can we make of the museum sector's interest in the artist? Of what use is the artist and his/her way of working to the museum in the current political and funding climate, when the pressure is on to be educational and entertaining, to produce a unified history of a nation, to be inclusive and guard against so-called elitism, a pejorative often attached to art? Our research reveals that for several museums, artists have played a key role in undertaking the self-critique that the new museology demanded, namely questioning the often outdated cultural assumptions on which collections and displays were based,⁶ as well as 'demystifying' the museum⁷ to broaden and increase their publics⁸ and enliven visitors' experience of neglected objects. As cultural theorist Ross Gibson notes, since the 1990s, it's become clear to people who work in museums that any object is a contentious thing, and there are any number of different constituencies, value-systems, faiths and preferences pulling on every single object in a collection'.⁹ It is precisely unpicking this net of contested meanings that is at the heart of much postconceptual practice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Situating the artist/museum relationship
• 2 Institutional practices and artists’ critiques
• 3 Post-colonial engagements: Playing with history
• 4 The artist as curator
• 5 Beautifying the museum: The aesthetics of collections
• 6 Conclusion: Artists and museums now
• Bibliography
• Index