collecting to exhibit?The narratives of art between collection and exhibitionSeminar, 20 January 2016, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark

Daniel Spoerri: Tableau Piège. 1972. Mixed materials: plywood, porcelain, metal. 70 x 70 x 13 cm. ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. Photo: Ole Hein Pedersen

Today, museums are caught between widely differing ideas and expectations of how to narrate art,how to collect and how to exhibit. Where the task of exhibitions was to perform the stories of art, thecollection has traditionally been seen as the chief resource for present and future activities. Newdemands and new types of exhibitions have – in practice – contributed to a rapid transformation inpriorities. Increasingly, the museum narrative of art is based on temporary structures, sometimesimmaterial objects and various loans that are brought into the institution for shorter periods of time.The continued vitality of the permanent collection feels today uncertain.

The one-day seminar COLLECTING TO EXHIBIT?provides a forum for examining and discussingart collections and their use for museumexhibitions. Of particular concern is the linkbetween current or historical presentations ofart and the acquisition, management andplanning of what goes/does not go intocollections. These complex relationships varyand span from the famous, historical collectionmuseums such as the Frick in New York – where collection, exhibition, buildings and institutionseamlessly merge – all the way to the heterogeneous public gallery of today tasked with showingtemporary and permanent exhibitions on top of building collections with a view to the future.

A chief aim for museums is still to narrate about 'art', and every institution builds its activities on aparticular identity made up of its history, individual expertise and – often enough – a vision andmission statement expressing a unique purpose. But what are the connections between amuseum’s many-facetted identity, its collections and the actual narratives of art formed by itsexhibitions? How does any kind of collection contribute to or delimit institutional identity and thestories of art that are performed? In what differing ways are narratives expressed through the use ofavailable collections, loans and temporary structures? Can we learn about the future of the museumcollection by looking to its uses in the past?

To facilitate extended discussion, these questions are addressed from a historical and contemporaryperspective by four keynote speakers: Chris Whitehead (Newcastle and Oslo University), JeremyBraddock (Cornell University), Hans Hayden (Stockholm University) and Rune Gade (University ofCopenhagen). The seminar concludes with a number of short reflections on the theme of 'collectingto exhibit' by museum and university staff.

All parties with an interest in art, museums, collections and exhibitions are invited to participate inthe seminar and discussion. Register for free at www.kunsthistoriker.dk/collecting before 13January

Generous support has been given by

COLLECTING TO EXHIBIT? has been organised by Rasmus Kjærboe, PhD Fellow at Aarhus Universityand Ordrupgaard in collaboration with ARoS and the Danish Association of Art Historians

... what are the connectionsbetween a museum’s many-

facetted identity, its collectionsand the actual narratives of art

formed by its exhibitions?

10.15 welcome and introduction

10.30 first session: collections and narratives of art in history

Chris Whitehead, professor of museology, Newcastle and Oslo University

Visitor Behaviour and Recollection of Permanent Collection Displays

Jeremy Braddock, associate professor in English, Cornell University

Provisional Institutions: Barnes, Phillips, Broad

discussion

12.30 lunch

13.30 second session: collections and narratives of art, today and in the future

Hans Hayden, professor of art history, Stockholm University

Myth Making Strategies: On the Normalization of the Avant-Garde in Post War

Exhibition Practices

Rune Gade, associate professor in art history, University of Copenhagen

Collecting for Eternity: Uncertainties, Paradoxes and Challenges in Collecting

Contemporary Art

discussion

15.30 coffee break

16.00 third session: working with collections and narratives

cases from museum and university

16.50 closing remarks

Register for free at www.kunsthistoriker.dk/collecting before 13 January

Programme20 January ARoS Aarhus Art Museum

collecting to exhibit?The narratives of art between collection and exhibition

ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, ARoS Allé 2, DK­8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

Chris Whitehead, professor of museology, Newcastle UniversityVisitor Behaviour and Recollection of Permanent Collection DisplaysThis paper presents research undertaken at the Danish National Gallery in Copenhagen and theDiscovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). The research pioneered a new method of first-person digital video capture of people’s experiences of permanent displays. Visitors were equippedwith video-glasses and recorded their perambulations, leading to new insights about the mechanicsof the museum visit and to the role of personal identity in people’s engagement with displays andthe curatorial choices and narratives that they embody. For example, we learned more about theways in which people undertake investigations in response to curiosity prompted by displays, andabout the gulf of difference between curatorial representation and visitor reception. The researchalso provided understandings about people’s (literal) recollection of their visits, adding complexity tothe interlinked notions of the 'collection', 'permanent' and 'memory'.

Jeremy Braddock, associate professor in English, Cornell UniversityProvisional Institutions: Barnes, Phillips, BroadThe years before the founding of the Museum of Modern Art saw a period of institutional growth andexperimentation during which individual collectors of modern art elaborated alternative, sociallyengaged modes of exhibition and display that attempted to change the face of institutional cultureand cultural practice tout court. My talk will examine two contemporary, competing forms of theprivate collection as 'provisional institution' during the 1920s: the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphiaand the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington D.C. Each was responsive to the question of the roleof art in a democratic society, but each understood differently the relation of the permanentcollection to the meaning of its exhibitions. Phillips anticipated the contemporary culture of thetemporary lending exhibition, Barnes insisted more stridently upon the integrity of the permanentcollection, and upon the meaning of its specific arrangement. Surveying this agonistic relationship inthe context of a shared, cooperative advocacy of modernism within public culture will provide asalient context through which to understand the recent, highly publicized opening of the BroadMuseum in Los Angeles this September, based in the challenging late-20th century collection of thephilanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad.

Hans Hayden, professor of art history, Stockholm UniversityMyth Making Strategies: On the Normalization of the Avant-Garde in Post War Exhibition PracticeThis paper will examine the normalization of the Avant-Garde the West after Second World Warthrough the case of an interplay between exhibition practices and textbooks. During this period adecisive change in the understanding and formulation of modern art entailed: that this was theperiod in which modernism was institutionalised in earnest in the dominating culture system ofnorms. As implied already by the terms 'normalisation' and 'institutionalisation', the post-war periodentailed a social, discursive, intellectual and historiographic shift in the conditions of modern art.The institutionalisation involved not only a few aesthetic criteria and stylistic idioms but asignificantly broader and more guiding, ruling interpretation of art in the modern era – in thecontemporary period and historically. Moreover, this normalisation involved not only the laying downof a particular approach in the normative system of the dominating culture, but also that a certainrepresentation/narrative has eventually come to be taken for granted as a premise whoseideological criteria and historically specific conditions are obscured by the assumption that it isuniversally valid.

Rune Gade, associate professor in art history, University of CopenhagenCollecting for Eternity: Uncertainties, Paradoxes and Challenges in Collecting Contemporary ArtFocusing on contemporary art this paper discusses the function and rationale of acquisitionstrategies in Danish art museums. How are curators connecting acquisition strategies to the past,the present and the future? Are acquisitions determined by the existing collections and therebyinformed by anachronistic notions of art? Or, are acquisitions instead based on ideas about anunknown future and its emerging ideas about art? What are the responsibilities of museumstowards the contemporary art world as it unfolds in the present? What are the obligations ofmuseums towards a public that expects still more influence and interaction?

Chris Whitehead is Professor of Museology at Newcastle and Oslo University. He has trained andworked as an art historian and art curator, but his broad research activities today encompassesmuseums of different types – especially history museums – and heritage, with particular emphaseson the cultural politics of memory, display, knowledge construction and interpretation. Whitehead iscurrently working on political uses of the past, time and place and contested histories and heritageswhere these relate to contemporary social tensions and conflict. Whitehead has special interests insocial constructionism, theories of representation, cultural cartography, art theory, epistemology andTurkish, Italian and Scandinavian museum and heritage politics. He has also been involved in aseries of projects relating to European identities. Alongside these activities, he maintains researchinterests in the general areas covered in the monographs on the 19th Century Art Museum (Ashgate2005), Museums and the Construction of Disciplines (Bloomsbury 2009) and Interpreting Art inMuseums and Galleries (Routledge 2012). His most recent book is the edited volume Museums,Migration and Identity in Europe (Ashgate 2015).

Jeremy Braddock is Associate Professor and director of Graduate Studies in English at CornellUniversity, specializing in modernist art and literature. He has worked extensively with black andAfrican American, modernist culture, the literary anthology and the collecting of modern art, and hisstudies on the Barnes Foundation are the first to successfully interpret the famously idiosyncraticstructure of the museum. All his prime research subjects meet in his book Collecting as ModernistPractice (Johns Hopkins UP 2012) for which he received the Modernist Studies Association BookPrize and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2012. Other books include the editedvolumes Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora (Johns Hopkins UP2013) and Directed by Alan Smithee (U Minnesota P 2001).

Hans Hayden is J.A. Berg Professor in Art History at Stockholm University. As a scholar, he hasspecialized in the historiography of art history, the history and theory of interpretation, and thehistory and theory of 20th century art. Hayden has worked on reformulating the historiographicperspective as an active dialectical and intertextual relationship to scholarly traditions in order tosituate and to achieve a critical reflection upon one’s own position and its intellectual conditions.These efforts can be noticed in the book Modernismen som institution. Om etableringen av ettestetiskt och historiografiskt paradigm (Modernism as Institution: On the Establishment of anAesthetic and Historiographic Paradigm, Symposion 2006), currently being translated to English.This theoretical framework will be further elaborated in his forthcoming book The Politics ofInterpretation. Other books include the edited volume 8 kapitel om konsthistoriens historia i Sverige(Raster 2000) and Perspektiv på samtiden/samtida perspektiv: Forskning om det sena 1900-taletsoch det nya millenniets konst och visuella kultur (Eidos 2002).

Rune Gade is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Copenhagen, specializing incontemporary art. His research areas include theory of photography, museum studies, visual cultureand gender theory. He has published and edited several books, mostly in Danish but some inEnglish: Symbolic Imprints: Essays on Photography and Visual Culture (Aarhus University Press1999), Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media (Museum TusculanumPress 2005), Performing Archives/Archives of Performance (Museum Tusculanum Press 2013).Gade’s latest Danish publication was the edited volume Cybermuseologi – kunst, museer ogformidling i et digitalt perspektiv (Aarhus University Press 2015) on museology and digital media,which came out in February 2015. Gade was a member of the board of PSi (Performance Studiesinternational) from 2006-2010 and is series editor (together with Professor Edward Scheer) of InBetween States, which is being published in collaboration between PSi and Museum TusculanumPress. Beside his academic practice Gade has also for more than twenty years worked as afreelance art critic for the Danish national newspaper Information.

ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, ARoS Allé 2, DK­8000 Aarhus C, Denmark