‘Ganymed’
Artistic Intervention in the Collection Displays of Fine Art Museums
Master Thesis Heritage Studies: Museum Studies
UVA Universiteit van Amsterdam 01/2019
By: Christina Panholzer Supervisor: Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes Second Reader: Marga van Mechelen
‘Ganymed’: Artistic Intervention in the Collection Displays of Fine Art Museums
Table of Content:
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: From Presentation to Production ... 1
2. Artists’ interventions in museums: where do their origins lie and how can one conceptualise them? ... 9
2.1 Artists and their relationship to museums - an historical outline ... 9
2.2 Performance as museum intervention ... 16
2.3 Transhistoricity ... 25
3.The Ganymed Series ... 29
3.1 The concept and its developments ... 29
3.2 Art interventions as an educational tool in museums ... 37
4. Conclusion ... 47
5. Bibliography ... 53
6. Figures ... 60
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor Mia Lerm-Hayes for her profound and helpful feedback and her encouragement. Gratitude to my second reader Marga van Mechelen. Furthermore, I would also like to thank the team of Museum Studies program at UvA who allowed me to dive into the field of museology and its theories.
As this thesis entails much information I received through interviews, I would like to express a big thank you to the producers of Ganymed, Jacqueline Kornmüller and Peter Wolf. In this sense, also a great thanks to the director of Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Sabine Haag, for the internal information and the museum’s perspective.
I would like to thank my godmother Ines Mitterer for her help and the insights into her opinions. A further thank you goes to Catherine Buckland, a dear student colleague and English advisor.
Finally, I must express my gratitude to my eternal supporters, my parents, boyfriend and friends without whose constant encouragements this would not have been possible. Thank you!
1. Introduction: From Presentation to Production
Since 2010, several fine art museums across Europe became the stage for collected but diverse performances under the name of Ganymed taking place across specific evenings. For visitors, it appears almost like a trip to the theatre. Only able to enter the museum with a special ticket, queues line up in front of the museums after the advertised opening hours. A museum visit at night? What brings this many visitors to museums that should have long been closed for the night?
Inside the walls of the museum, one witnesses further unusual scenes that does not resemble other fine art museum visits. The entrance halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium in Brussels are crowded with people gazing at the centre of the museums’ entrance halls. There, distinct from the rest of the crowd, we find people dressed up in costumes, tuning instruments, preparing for what is to come.
Suddenly, the preparation appears to be completed and the crowd moves to the museum’s galleries. Instead of finding the paintings brightly lit, the room lights are dimmed, adding to the museum-at-night-experience. Only specific paintings are illuminated. In front of these, interrupting the carefully preserved atmosphere of the galleries of painting, the audience witnesses several performances. Thereby, the performances are as diverse as the topics depicted in the paintings. Actors are telling stories, a dance is performed in the space in front of a painting, a cellist is wildly swinging his bow, and the audience becomes part of the play. While what we perceive does clearly not belong to the museum’s regular mode of display, at the same time, it seems to intimately address meanings connected to the paintings hanging on the walls behind.
The performances are part of the concept called Ganymed. Ganymed is an art or theatre intervention within the museum that actively engages with the museum’s collection display. It interrupts the museological narrative by allowing a new view on the historic paintings, but is not originating from art historical research, rather from artistic considerations. Since 2010, Ganymed has taken place as eight different productions in five fine art museums across European cities, including Vienna, Brussels, and Budapest.
Artists working with museums, in their spaces and with their collections, has become an increasingly common phenomenon. 2012 Simon Stephens in Museums Journal describes museums as being “awash with artists”, listing a slew of projects in which museums large and
small had invited contemporary artists to work with their collections and audiences.1 These
projects are described by Stephens as “fresh” and “innovative” looks at collections and displays.2 In this sense, Christopher Marshall also identifies a general trend in museums
towards “utilizing artist commissions or artistically inspired displays [as] a means of opening up contemporary museums to a more poetic or even mysteriously immersive museum visit.”3
Nicholas Thomas speaks about this mysteriousness as a “return to curiosity”.4
Is the museum succumbing the experience economy? Is it a move away from academic narratives? Can we see this trend as a desire to include audiences with different knowledge backgrounds? Or can artists add something to the existing display that curators cannot? And what could that be? By examining the case study of Ganymed with a focus on the most recent production in Brussels, this thesis examines why European fine art museums support the inclusion of ‘alternative’ narratives around their collections originating beyond their curatorial department which, furthermore, are intervening with academic knowledge and the taxonomic order of the traditional gallery display.
Further questions arise from this trend including how contemporary museum visitors can be expected to negotiate displays of these kinds with their attendant sense to traditional understandings of knowledge and the objectivity of the museum’s institutional voice? And what parameters of these ‘innovative’ approaches contribute to an understanding of the collection by the audience? Lastly, what overarching societal shifts are we witnessing, which frame these projects? And in how far do these events partake of an experience economy, or reveal anti-intellectual trends with regard to art?
Alongside their function to display works of their collections, or temporary exhibitions, which have for long added a non-permanent element to museum programming, museums are with this trend actively commissioning art or collaborating in the realisation of art projects. They are shifting their focus from presentation to production of culture. Artists are receiving access to institutions, in order to act in collaboration. With the decision of the museum to open up their confines to new actors, museums are embracing the plurality of voices, which make up a cultural landscape. As the relationship between museums and contemporary artists is the basis of this thesis, it needs further examination. Yet, whilst there are many different opportunities to give the stage to artists inside a museum (artist as curator, artist in residence)
1 Stephens 2012, p. 22. 2 Stephens 2012, p. 24. 3 Marshall 2012, p.65. 4 Thomas 2016.
this thesis is focusing on ‘interventions’ and, therefore, on an active engagement with the art displayed in the museum.
The first chapter looks at historic developments of artists’ work in and around institutions and highlights that what began as a form of critique in the 1960s can today be understood as a collaboration between artist and institution.5 Starting with Marcel Duchamp,
and finding their most critical potential in art practices of so called ‘institutional critique’, conceptual art practices and their institutionalisation will be examined. The chapter also focuses on the term ‘intervention’ and its definitions.
The literature on artists working with museums is dominated by the major survey of James Putnam, Art and Artefact: The Museum as Medium that looks at a broad selection of artists using different modes of engaging with museums itself and their concepts.6 Kynaston
McShine’s The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect is the catalogue of a major exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1999, and reflects mostly on institutional critical art practices.7 Peter Osborne’s survey on Conceptual Art highlights the development of these
practices and tracks the mode of institutionalisation.8 A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale’s Museums by Artists is an anthology of writings about artists and their concern with the ideology and history of museums.9 While the anthology focuses on museums as artists’ own initiatives,
this research concentrates on established museum in which artists intervene.
Carroll La’s chapter Object to Project leaves the frame of institutional critical practices and looks at artist’s interventions in museums collections that came into being through collaborations.10 In the same sense, Christopher Marshall tracks collaborative practices of
artists in museums.11 Danny Birchall in his dissertation focuses on British museums working
with art interventions.12 Furthermore, the first chapter of this thesis introduces the concept
termed ‘new institutionalism’ that centres around collaborative practices of art institutions and artists. Jonas Ekeberg, Simon Sheikh and James Voorhies deliver further examination of the
5 Birchall 2012.
6 Putnam, James (2009) Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium, 2nd edition, London: Thames &
Hudson.
7McShine, Kynaston (1999) The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, New York: Museum of Modern Art. 8 Osborne, Peter (2002) Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon.
9 AA Bronson; Gale, Peggy; eds. (1983) Museums by Artists, Toronto: Art Metropole.
10 Carroll La, Khadija (2011) Object to Project: Artist’s Interventions in museum collections, in:
Sculpture and the Museum (ed. Christopher Marshall), Farnham UK: Ashgate, pp. 217–39.
11 Marshall, Christopher R. (2012) Ghosts in the Machine: The Artistic Intervention as a Site of
Museum Collaboration-accommodation in Recent Curatorial Practice, in: The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, Vol.4 Iss.2, Champaign, Illinois, US: Common Ground Publishing.
12 Birchall, Danny (2012) Institution and Interventions: Artist’s Projects in Object based Museums,
ideas and missions of ‘new institutionalism’ which is commonly regarded as the legacy of institutional critique from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.13 The chapter ends by drawing
attention to the diverse nature of art interventions in museum today and highlights that different institutional needs trigger different collaborations.
Due to the form of Ganymed as a performance, the next chapter, begins by investigating the difficulty to define the term ‘performance’ and investigates art forms that use performance, like dance and theatre. It continues by focusing on the political interests of interdisciplinary performance. Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells and Matthias Warstat and Julius Heinicke’s research project around ‘applied theatre’ highlights the importance of political interest of art which finds further examination in regard to Ganymed. ‘Applied theatre’ also questions the setting of borders between art forms while furthermore taking into account theatrical interventions.14 The keyword ‘participation’ finds further examination, both in terms of
performativity and museological interests. Among others, Irit Rogoff’s inquiries about the exhibition space as trigger for constituting participatory behaviour within political culture are of interest in this regard.15 Diana Taylor’s Archive and Repertoire is important for these
inquiries.16 The chapter furthermore, introduces several historical examples of
performance-based art interventions.
The third chapter relates to art interventions in museums with the working method of ‘transhistoricity’. Putnam describes the nature of interventions in museums as an “opportunity for museums to reanimate sometimes tired-looking displays by adopting a fresher contemporary approach.”17 This, therefore, follows the plea of the editors of The Transhistorical Museum to let artworks communicate beyond historical times.18 Whilst The Transhistorical Museum mainly speaks about curatorial methods of presenting historic alongside contemporary art, this chapter applies transhistorical thinking to art performance as
13 Ekeberg, Jonas ed. (2003) New Institutionalism Verksted #1, Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art
Norway; Sheikh, Simon (2006) The Trouble with Institutions, or, Art and Its Publics, in: Art and its Institutions; (Möntmann, Nina, ed.), London: Black Dog Publishing, p. 142-149; Voorhies, James (2016) What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism?, Massachusetts: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Sternberg Press.
14 Bishop, Claire (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London:
Verso 2012; Warstat, Matthias; Heinicke, Julius (2015) Theater als Intervention: Politiken ästhetischer Praxis, Berlin: Theater der Zeit.
15 Rogoff, Irit (2005) Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture, in: After Criticism: New
Responses to Art and Performance, (Butt, Gavin, ed.), USA/Uk/Australia: Blackwell Publishing, p.117-134.
16Taylor, Diana (2003) From the Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas, Durham/London: Duke University Press.
17 Putnam 2009, p.156.
18 Wittocx, Eva and Demeester, Ann eds. (2018) The Transhistorical Museum: mapping the field,
contemporary intervention in the fine art museum. In this regard, the transhistorical approach allows us to see art interventions as a communication method that delivers new narratives for the art on display in the museum.
Considering the case study, this chapter ends by arguing that contemporary performative art interventions in historical collections can be seen as educational tool that can lead to new understandings of the collection in the light of current socio-political topics and vice-versa by relying on means of bodily and emotional experience, and both participatory and transhistorical approaches. In this sense, commissioned interventions constitute a method to ‘wake up’ historic collections and make fine art museums to active players in the contemporary field. Furthermore, the chapter questions if the dichotomy of artistic freedom and institutional rigidity is maintained through this way of argumentation.
The second part of this thesis, examines the case study Ganymed. The concept, developed by two actors Jacqueline Kornmüller and Peter Wolf, grew over the course of ten years. From theatrical interventions based on the writing of contemporary authors, it became an interdisciplinary concept encompassing many art forms, including dance, theatre, literature, and music. The plea for interdisciplinarity and the nature of Ganymed as enactment/performance leads to a connection to Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the museum building a locus for it.19 As Boris Groys argues in an article
in e-flux, in order for museums to keep up with time, museums need to become the stage to perform the flow of time itself – a total art event, a Gesamtkunstwerk.
The curatorial project [of a temporary, not permanent exhibition], rather than the exhibition [itself], is then the Gesamtkunstwerk because it instrumentalizes all the exhibited artworks and makes them serve a common purpose that is formulated by the curator [...] a curatorial or artistic installation is able to include all kinds of objects: time-based artworks or processes, everyday objects, documents, texts, and so forth. All these elements, as well as the architecture of the space, sound, or light, lose their respective autonomy and begin to serve the creation of a whole in which visitors and spectators are also included [...] every curatorial project necessarily aims to contradict the normative, traditional art-historical narrative embodied by the museum’s permanent collection.20
While Groys speaks about the contemporary museum and its curatorial projects in opposition to the traditional museum collection display, it needs to be examined if his argument of the “temporary Gesamtkunstwerk” can also work for the artistic intervention of Ganymed. In this it is also clear, at least developed by Harald Szeeman in his 1983 exhibition on the inclination
19Wagner 1993. (originally published 1849-50). 20 Groys 2013.
toward the Gesamtkunstwerk that this concept has tendencies to become a total(itarian) work, while the intention of bringing the arts together is also very often a liberating move.21
The first section of this chapter gives an overview of Ganymed’s evolution and highlights how it grew from a poetical manifestation as a one-time event in Vienna, to an international frame for wilfully political statements within multiple fine art museums. Provided by the director Sabine Haag, the perspective of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where the concept both began and was developed, is taken into consideration. Furthermore, a look at the artistic ideas allows a better understanding of their mission and the museum’s. Therefore, the directors of Ganymed were interviewed. Due to the immense diversity of the performances within Ganymed, only a few examples are highlighted. These will provide insight into the content and personal nature of the single enactments.
The second section of the case study closely investigates the argument of this thesis – the educational potential of the Ganymed performances – and thereby reflects on a theoretical basis of museum pedagogy. Olga Hubard’s Art Museum Education: Facilitating Gallery Experiences as well as Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee’s survey of Teaching in the art museum provide information in this regard.22 Questions such as how education in museums
can arrive at an ‘interpretative’ instead of a ‘predetermined’ dialogue are put into focus. Furthermore, this chapter centres around reflections on inclusivity by not presupposing previous art historical knowledge when visiting a fine art museum. In this sense, it is reflected on the inclusive potential of these educational considerations concerning Ganymed as the intervention. Following this, the question of ‘art as art education’ arises and furthermore leads back to transhistorical theorisation.
Two parameters swept along by the nature of Ganymed should prove the educational potential of performance art interventions and, therefore, require further examination. The personal nature of the performance and its content, and the bodily experience in terms of both participation and emotional reaction, arguably lead to an inclusive approach. Studies by a number of scholars are considered, including Roland Barthes, Peter Carpreau, Jasper Sharp and Imanol Aguirre as well as Arthur Efland, amongst others. Susan Sontag, advocates a quest for the felt experience that artworks invoke, that is beyond or before words.23 This, in turn,
21 Harald Szeemann’s exhibition: Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, 1983, Kunsthaus Zürich.
22 Hubard, Olga (2015) Art Museum Education: Facilitating Gallery Experiences, Palgrave Macmillan,
UK: Houndmills; Burnham, Rika; Kai-Kee, Elliott (2011) Teaching in the art museum, Los Angeles: Getty Publications.
leads to a consideration of the status of the body in the construction of knowledge.24 The
chapter closes with the question of what the educational potential of Ganymed is aiming for: which education, and about what?
The conclusion suggests several reasons for the inclusion of art interventions. It points out the ability of fine art museums to be part of the contemporary art world and market. Furthermore, it will treat the question of the difference between curator’s and artist’s abilities in order to convey narratives. It elaborates on the fact that fine art museum’s do not only change their working methods by including interventions but they may as well change their public role in society with it. Lastly, Ganymed is suggested to be understood as means that transfers historic art into the political arena and, furthermore, empowers its audience to take part in it.
The methodological approach of the thesis is based on an analysis of the theoretical tools named. By comparing different theories and approaches and by relating them to each other, I want to investigate different motivations for the case study. To analyse how these concepts affect museology, I have interviewed the museum’s director of Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and have visited the Ganymed production in Brussels. Through close observation, I aim to understand and convey how these interventions were conceived as well as staged. I interviewed the producers and actors of Ganymed, Jacqueline Kornmüller and Peter Wolf, in order to draw conclusions of the artistic motivations and missions for Ganymed. Beyond academic papers and surveys, I have also used press clippings, photographs, publicity, and artists’ statements and their websites to try to describe works of art and situations that existed briefly and were witnessed by few. That each of these forms has its own relationship to the museum only adds complication to describing works whose subject is often precisely this kind of relationship. In evaluating these opinions together with the theoretical framework, I hope to reveal the implications of art interventions in the museum.
Due to its interdisciplinary approach of art forms and the fact that the concept grew from a one-time production, Ganymed appeared to be a particularly interesting case study for me. Furthermore, my own Viennese background allowed me to investigate familiar museum galleries and personalities. The change in the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s program that seemed to be swept along by Ganymed also inspired me. Since around the same time as the first Ganymed production, the Kunsthistorisches Museum has inaugurated a contemporary art department. Its program includes talks by artists, exhibitions about contemporary artists and,
24 Merleau-Ponty 1964; Arnheim 1969; Lakoff, Johnson 1980; Hanna 1985; Lakoff, Johnson 1999;
most of all, their format to let contemporary artists curate their collection in temporary exhibitions. Ganymed and its methods, I would argue, left a lasting impression on the museum. By examining the historical evolution of artists’ practice in and around museums, and highlighting historic and contemporary examples with a focus on the case study of Ganymed, this thesis wants to understand the reasons behind the inclusion of artist’s narratives in museums and the impact this has on audiences. With that in mind, a further step would be to reflect on what happens to the role of a fine art museum when including these artistic interventions. This is not least because of Jasper Sharp, the curator of Kunsthistorisches Museum’s contemporary art department, who points at their ambiguous position:
The educational academic role prescribed to historical museums by their founders, and the nature of the relationship between those museums and living artists, have become increasingly ambiguous over time as the institutions and their collections become ever more gradually removed from the present day. The points in time at which their collections suddenly stop – 1848 in the case of Louvre, for example, or 1900 in the case of The National Gallery, London – drift further away from us with each new year that passes. As a result, museums that no longer collect the work of artists practicing today, or indeed of several generations before them, are having to rethink the way in which they engage with living artists.25
With Ganymed, this thesis is investigating a key case study as a trans-European phenomenon that stands for an important tendency in museum programming. To my knowledge, this research is the first that addresses this topic in the interstices between museum studies, dramatic arts and fine arts, as well as museum pedagogy.
2. Artists’ interventions in museums: where do their origins lie and how can one conceptualise them?
2.1 Artists and their relationship to museums - an historical outline
Museums, in spite of their monumental appearance and high status as architectural entities and guards of national heritage and values, are primarily framing devices.26 As such, much like the
picture frame, they can be used by the contemporary artist not only to clarify, heighten, or counterpoint, but also as the actual content or medium of production. As power symbols, AA Bronson states, museums become potent material for manipulation.27 Thereby the relationship
of artists to museums as reflected and articulated in their art is diverse.28 While many artists
have used the museum and its working methods as inspiration for their artworks, this thesis is concentrating on projects that actively engaged with the institutions and their displays. Furthermore, the focus will be on projects that can be perceived by the museum’s visitor inside the walls of the museum.
Conceptual art projects that arose from the 1960s onwards, later known as institutional critique, can be seen as the roots of artistic interventions inside museums.29 Much of the art of
the late 1960s and 1970s, reductive and often language based, questioned the roles of museum, dealer, collector, and the public, often rejecting the object-centred assumptions of construction and the sale of works, and the attendant requirements of exhibition, collection, power, and hierarchy.30
Danny Birchall argues that the history of artistic interventions inside museums that developed out of institutional critical practices began as an outsider’s perspective that turned
26 AA Bronson 1983, p.7. 27 AA Bronson 1983, p.7.
28 Putnam (2009) as well as Gale (1983) distinguish the diversity under the following headers: first,
“museum as format” (Gale) equals Putnam’s “museum effect” and revolves around the application of museological methods to both the production and presentation of artists’ work [examples: Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valies (1941), Broodthaers’ Départment des Aigles (1972), Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999-2000), Siglinde Kallnbach’s The Museum of Ashes (1995) etc.]; second, collections by artists as the urge to accumulate, hoard and classify, demonstrating the principle of object trouvé [examples: Claudio Costa’s Museum of Man (1974), Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum (1991-1996), Marc Dion’s Cabinet of Curiosities for the Wexner Center of the Arts (1997), etc.], and third, “museum ideology and history” (Gale) equalling Putnam’s category of “public inquiry” and puts the questioning of institution’s role, hierarchical systems, ownership etc. into the focus [Institutional critique with artists like Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser etc]. Putnam identifies three more headers: photography as observation inside museums’ spaces, artists as museum curator, and contemporary artistic interventions in already established displays. The last one building the main interest of this thesis.
29 Birchall 2012. 30 Gale 1983, p.8.
into one of collaboration from the ‘inside’ of the museum.31 In order to understand his
argument and the assumed dichotomy of inside and outside, we need to trace the roots of these art practices, intentions, and developments. This chapter highlights certain historic evolutions and relate them to current museological situations.
As the term ‘institutional critique’ already suggests, institutions were being challenged. This concept probably goes back to the very first institution, yet an important predecessor to the activities in the 1960s would be the Salon des Indépendants in Paris 1884. Here, artists, whose works were refused to be exhibited by authorities of the art world, decided to pave their own ways beyond the official structures. Critique was in this stage not implicitly given in the artworks but more in their attempt to build an alternative circle besides the existing one.
Years later, it was Marcel Duchamp’s earlier ready-mades, such as Fountain (1917) which came to be seen as founding moment of a critical dialogue towards an institution in a conscious way. Where traditionally it had been the museum’s privilege, Duchamp playfully asserted the right of the artist rather than the scholar to define art and thereby challenged the well-known standards of authority. With that move, however, a new era in art was about to begin. “Conceptual art, one might say, is art about the cultural act of definition […, it] is first and foremost an art of questions and it had left in its wake a whole series about itself.”32 Peter
Osborne’s survey about conceptual art makes not only Marcel Duchamp the first conceptual artist and the founder of the avant-garde, but also institutional critique a distinct mode of conceptual practices.33
Joseph Kosuth declared in 1969 that “[a]ll art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.”34 Conceptual art, in this sense, required a new mode of
institutional validation and therefore brought along a heightened awareness of institutional factors. The art practices related to institutional critique are seen in two stages. The first, based on the principles of the establishment of European public institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, was linked to the philosophy of a realisation of the bourgeois identity relying on the public exchange of opinions, including in the public museum.35 Institutional critique is based
on the thinking that the pursuit of publicness was not sufficiently committed upon. Heterogeneous in the forms adopted, the first attempts to engage critically with the institution
31 Birchall 2012, p.9ff. 32 Osborne 2002, p.14.
33 Osborne 2002, p.13 and p.42. 34 Kosuth 1969.
35 Alberro 2009, p.2-4. For theories of publicness and public sphere, see: Habermas, Jürgen (1989)
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society; Mass: MIT Press.
focussed on revealing that the apparently neutral walls of the museum – the white cube – in fact, represented a complex, far-from-innocent socioeconomic system.36
Hans Haacke’s work exposed the web of political and financial relationships in museums between museums and their staff and sponsors to show that what may at first sight appear to be outwardly philanthropic could in fact have deeper and more questionable motives.37 Where Haacke’s explicit critique lead to the cancelation of his own show, Michael
Asher’s The Michael Asher Lobby (1983-1984), acknowledging the dependence of institutions on wealthy individuals, was a more subtle modification to the museum environment and was accepted by the institution.38(Fig.1) Daniel Buren’s striped paintings on Paris billboards
rejected the museum as the only possible location for art, and later even got excluded from an exhibition at the Guggenheim museum for dominating with his installation over the other exhibits and the architectural space.39
By the late 1960 and the 1970s it had become crucial for these artists to expose the institution of art as a deeply problematic field, making apparent the intersection where political, economic, and ideological interests directly intervened in the perception of public culture.40
The museum, just as Duchamp identified the society in 1917, was seen as “an outdated institution to be swept along with orthodoxy of academy and salon.”41 Together with the
practices of the mentioned artists, there were influential new ideas being expressed. In the works of theorists like Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, new writings stimulated these
36 O’Doherty 1976. The list of artists associated with this first wave of institutional critique is
commonly reduced to the quartet formed by Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher and Marcel Broodthaers. (Castellano 2018, Alberro 2009, Osborne 2002, Putnam 2009, among others.)
37 Osborne 2002, p. 154; Putnam 2009, p.93. Due to the inclusion of an artwork that documented the
shady economic dealings of a sponsor real-estate company, Haacke’s solo show at the Guggenheim 1971 was cancelled, for example. Furthermore, his work Chocolate Master (1981) examines Peter Ludwig’s, a wealthy German industrialist and collector, role as a cultural benefactor by exhibiting panels about the successful business enterprise that had facilitated his acquisition of an important collection.
38 Putnam 2009, p.95. The artist secured the aesthetic control of the lobby area of the Museum
(Temporary Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles) via a licensing contract for a specified time of twenty months. In doing so, the artist juxtaposed the institutionally occupied “site” of a "public space" with a privately controlled one. A corporate looking lobby in this case became a context which the artist himself controlled directly. Critiquing the institutional framing of art, Asher expressed by removing the bronze replica of the life size statue of George Washington by Houdon from its permanent site outside the main entrance of the Art Institute of Chicago and had it transferred to an internal museum gallery (1979).
39 Putnam 2009, p.26-27; Osborne 2002, p.167. Buren’s work rejected was Visible Recto Verso
Painting (1971), a canvas 1,5 meters high by 10 meters, which was to be part of the exhibition VI Guggenheim International in Guggenheim New York.
40 Alberro 2009, p.3-9. 41 Putnam 2009, p. 25.
critical examinations of authorship and recognized art as being interwoven with a system of socioeconomic exchange and power.42
In the 1980s and 1990s, the work of the members of the so-called second wave of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson among others, marked a move away from limitations of this ‘publicness’ and ‘authority’. Previously, criticism was dependent on the belief that an ‘outsider’ position for the artist was possible – the approach that artist and institution are not necessarily connected. Yet, artists from the second wave no longer believed in this outsider position. Andrea Fraser in particular emphasized that it is not a discourse of artists on one side and institutions on the other, and that it is impossible to act outside this “Institution of Art”. The frame that allows something to be called ‘art’ is broader than ever, Fraser acknowledged. In the efforts to redefine art and reintegrate it into everyday life, artists have not “escaped” the institution of art but, in contrast, have brought more of the world into it. According to Fraser, critique therefore, should always happen from within.43
In this sense, as Osborne and Putnam argue, art institutions were busy transforming themselves in order to include the critique and allow conceptual work to be institutionalized and thus part of their program.44 According to Simon Sheikh, it can be seen as a decision by
institutions to brace themselves – like bacteria that temporarily weakens the patient (the institution) only to strengthen their immune system in the long run.45 A certain sense of
self-reflexivity brought more awareness to the museum and its need to review conventional presentation and interpretation methods. Dion has argued, as museums are by nature a slowly changing commodity, the influences from outside were a ”necessary evil" in order to be able to talk about things they found difficult to say.46 In this process of institutionalising, the new
conceptual works took the post-conceptual form of installations.47 Through the site-specific
nature of such installations in the museum and the active engagement in a dialogue with the institution, the term ‘intervention’, one could argue, displaced ‘institutional critique’.48
The word ‘intervention’ is derived from the Latin ‘intervenire’ and means ‘to go between’. According to Carroll La, when contemporary artists intervene in museum
42 Barthes, Roland (1977) The Death of the Author, in: Image Music Text, New York, p.142-148; and
Foucault, Michel (1966) The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences, London/NY: Routledge.
43 Fraser 2005, p.413.
44 Osborne 2002, p.45 and Putnam 2009, p.28. 45 Sheikh 2006, p.143.
46 Mark Dion, My Taxidermy Taxonomy (Lecture presented at the The Culture of Preservation,
Natural History Museum London, 12 May 2011; cited in Birchall 2012).
47 Osborne 2002, p.45.
exhibitions, they intervene between “past and future ways of seeing and thereby turning objects into projects.”49 In other words, new perspectives are being opened by allowing another
standpoint. Yet, interventions do not necessarily guard the critical potential of art practices of institutional critique; artists’ work with museums has also developed in other contexts than critique. Institutional critique could therefore be seen as the artistic mode that paved the way in order for alternative, non-academic narratives to be included in the museums space.
Where the first wave of conceptual art has rejected the ‘visual’ and replaced it with a political motivation in form of a concept, the second wave however returned to an interest in visual forms and traditional media. Christopher Marshall, following this distinction, sets the earlier “politically loaded” and the later “more poetically framed” practices apart.50 The
realisation of a physical product in a specific context – the relationship between idea and entity – again became a crucial part. Yet, installation was not simply the fixing into position of something previously fabricated, but rather became the in-situ production of the work itself – a project.51 The concept and the context kept the artwork alive.
Buren had recognized this already in 1971, writing that “installation [came] to replace exhibition”.52 Marshall also identifies these practices as tendencies towards curatorial activities
which developed prior to the coining of any theoretical framework of understanding.53 The
blurring of the distinction between artist and curator is far from unique.54 In contrast, artists
such as Fred Wilson in Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society did not only employ curatorial methods in his work – researching, presenting and displaying objects – but his practices also involved both close collaboration with the museum and an adoption of museum display methods.(Fig.2) At the same time, Wilson delivered an intrinsic narrative which is clearly relatable to institutional criticism.
This collaboration between institution and artist and with it the merge of institutional activity and artistic practice found a manifestation in the 1990s and early 2000s as a European phenomenon titled ‘new institutionalism’ or ‘experimental institutionalism’.55 New
49 Carroll La 2011, p.217. 50 Marshall 2012, p.68. 51 Osborne 2002, p.46ff. 52 Buren 1971, p.56. 53 Marshall 2012, p.68.
54 Ground-breaking exhibitions in this sense was for example: Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the
Unmentionable at the Brooklyn Museum (1991). The rise of the curator as an author is reflected in the career or Harald Szeemann (When Attitude becomes Form (1969), documenta V (1972)).
55 The term ‘new institutionalism’ was introduced by Jonas Ekeberg in 2003 to present “a handful of
Norwegian and international art institutions” that were undergoing “radical changes” and could be viewed as attempts to “redefine the contemporary art institution.” See: Ekeberg, Jonas ed. (2003) New Institutionalism Verksted #1, Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
foundations for the arts avoided the label of ‘museum’ in favour of designations such as ‘forum’, ‘centre’, or ‘lab’, and were seeking to redefine the art institution as such. The aim was to reduce emphasis on the presentation of the singular art object, increase situations for audience involvement, and to place greater importance on a more integrated engagement between art, spectator, and institution.56 Artists and curators abandoned the traditional
‘white-cube’ exhibition format in favour of more flexible and collaborative works where exhibitions were no longer necessarily the goal. New institutionalism was never intended as a concept, but was rather bound to specific places and personalities that had similar ideas in mind.57 Putting
their focus on art production rather than presentation, and experimentality instead of authoritative education, it is not surprising that new institutionalism is mostly described as the legacy of institutional critique.58 New institutionalism, in this sense, is crucial for the
understanding of how institutions are not only willing to open up their structures to artists but even to build up their institutional missions on these collaborations and shared projects.
Just as contemporary art spaces related to new institutionalism, so did traditional museums take an active stand in this development. “As collaborations have evolved”, Birchall notes, “the relationship between museums and artists has become as much about process as about the production of art.”59 Looking beyond artistic interventions, other examples in this
regard would be artist in residency programs, or contemporary artists that are being invited to curate exhibition within the walls of fine art museums. Artists' interests in archives and depots, and their selection in ‘Wunderkammer’ principals privileges visual association and personal discovery over academic knowledge and taxonomic order. It, furthermore, foregrounds artistic authorship in the presence of institutional authority and not in the rejection or critique of it.60
Joseph Kosuth’s The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable (1990) brought together contemporary works of art with both historical art and ethnographic objects
56 Voorhies 2016, p.6ff.
57 Examples mentioned in Ekeberg’s introduction (Ekeberg 2003) included Rooseum Malmö, Palais
de Tokyo, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center Istanbul, Bergen Kunsthal, Kunstverein München. Key actors were, among others, Ekeberg himself, Jens Hoffmann, Simon Sheikh, Nina Möntmann, Charles Esche, and Maria Lind. It is also important to note that New Institutionalism is regarded as failed enterprise. (See therefore: Kolb; Flückiger 2013 p.13, Ekeberg in an interview with Kolb/Flückiger 2013 p.20, Charles Esche in an interview with Kolb/Flückiger 2013 p.27, Gielen 2013 p.15, Voorhies 2016.)
58 Kolb/Flückiger 2013 p.13 59 Birchall 2012, p.18.
60 “While we have looked at exhibitions made by artists as instances of critique, form of authoring,
and experiments pushing things beyond conventionality, there is another way of thinking about the impulse to curate, and here it is something close to making art.” by Alison Green (Green 2018, p.149).
from the museum’s collection.61(Fig.3) In 2011, the British Museum hosted Grayson Perry’s
exhibition Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, displaying his own work alongside objects from the British Museum’s collections.(Fig.4) Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman met with critique that the exhibition was an effort to reassert the ‘relevance’ of British Museum’s collections and to spice up their displays with the flamboyant nature of Perry.62 Museums such as the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna have been inviting artists to curate their collections in temporary exhibitions since 2012.63
These trends, rather than supplementing institutional critique, offer alternative approaches not all of which are based on a binary opposition between the ‘static museum’ and the ‘innovative artist’.64 It is important to note that commissioned collaborative practices
express the voices of the museums as much as the voices of artists. The very idea of the artist’s intervention has been turned inside out. “Although the rigid and autonomous nature of the museum was criticized by the early avant-garde movements and their successors, by the 1990s many artists recognized the more positive evolutionary role that some museums can play when their curators are more receptive to new ideas.”65 The institutional power, the very thing to be
criticized in the beginning, was turned around to use it for the recognition that art is a dynamic force able to effect change.66
The following gives some examples of artists’ interventions in museums, in order to set the context for Ganymed. Specific institutional needs trigger different collaborations. Bristol Museum, for example, invited street artist Banksy to create an intervention throughout the whole museum’s space (Banksy vs Bristol Museum, 2009).67 Detoured oil paintings were
hung alongside the existing art collection, and Bansky’s rats were inserted into natural history displays.(Fig.5) Alice Anderson’s Childhood Rituals (2011) also consisted of a number of interventions in the Freud Museum in London. Thick ropes of woven doll’s hair were used to bind the building from roof to ground. This was in reference to Anna Freud’s studies of child
61 Green 2018, p.215.
62 Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Grayson Perry Clashes Cultures at the British Museum, in: The Times,
27 September 2011 [ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grayson-perry-clashes-cultures-at-the-british-museum-852x2gz2nwh , last visited December 17, 2018]; Clair Woodward, Grayson Takes Pot Shots at Ancient Art, in: Scottish Express, 9 October 2011
[https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/276313/Grayson-Perry-takes-pot-shots-at-ancient-art , last visited December 17, 2018].
63 Kunsthistorisches Museum invited Ed Ruscha to curate an exhibition with their collection in 2012,
in 2017 Edmund de Waal, and in 2018 Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf.
64 Birchall 2012, p.13 and Marshall 2012, p.69. 65 Putnam 2009, p.33.
66 Graw 2006, p.137.
67 See museum’s website: https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/stories/banksy-bristol-museums/ [last
psychology that addressed Freud’s assertion that female crafts such as weaving were compensation for the ‘genital deficiency’ of women.68(Fig.6) Intolerance (2011), an
installation by artist Willem de Rooij, confronted a group of Dutch bird paintings by Melchior d’Hondecoeter in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The three-dimensional collage is “a reflection of institutional working methods and exhibition practice, but also as a visual investigation of the triangular relationship between early global trade, intercultural conflicts and mutual attraction.”69(Fig.7) Jeremy Dweller’s intervention (2010), in turn, does not consist
of an art work, at least according to him.70 Baghdad 5th March, 2007 is a wreckage of a car
damaged by a car bomb explosion that happened in Iraq. It was installed in the galleries of the Imperial War Museum in London.71(Fig.8)
While object-based interventions often involve a temporary or permanent change of museum display, it is not necessarily a part of every museum intervention. In the case of the Ganymed series, several museums allowed an intervention that is based on literature and was enacted as a performance in the collection galleries. Yet, it was only to be seen with a valid ticket for the performance and only on designated evenings. Due to this performative nature, which resembles more a theatre visit than a museum visit, the next chapter looks at museum interventions that are based on performance and will find parameters to approach the case study.
2.2 Performance as museum intervention Problems of definition
It is argued that the term performance lacks a specific ontological definition.72 Diana Taylor,
for example, describes how in performance studies notions about the definition, role, and function of performance vary widely.73 Taylor points out how the term ‘performance’ is used
in terms of cultural practices and ontological affirmations, as well as performance as events
68 Hoare, Natasha (2011) Alice Anderson’s Childhood Rituals, in: Dazed Digital (15th April)
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10138/1/alice-andersons-childhood-rituals [last visited Decmeber 18, 2018].
69 Website artwork: http://www.intolerance-berlin.de/de/installation.html [last visited Decmeber 18,
2018].
70 Jeremy Dweller about the artwork: https://vimeo.com/22438693 [last visited Decmeber 18, 2018]. 71 Imperial War Museum Website: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/70000413 [last
visited Decmeber 18, 2018].
72 Madeira/Salazar/Marçal 2018, p.80. 73 Taylor 2003, p.4.
regarding civic obedience, citizenship, and gender in the public sphere.74 Performance can be
art, performance can be theatre, performance can be a review of work achievement; it seems as performance can be anything.
Looking at historic examples of performed museum interventions, however, we find pieces that were mostly considered performance art. The origin of performance art, just like art practices of institutional critique, can be traced back to the 1960s. Movements like Dada with Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, or the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer can thereby be seen as early predecessors (followed by happening and fluxus).75 Maiana Brandão points out
that the term performance is used without regard to any distinction: “By means of exclusion, on the one hand, the term performance is used to categorize a work of art that does not fit into any other established artistic genre. On the other hand, generalization allows any kind of performance to be considered performance art.”76
When considering Ganymed, we find a diversity of performances. The question therefore arises as to whether Ganymed, as a museum intervention, can be seen in the tradition of interventionist art performances. Or whether it can be seen to be building a new genre, as theatre that has left (and thus critiqued) its own institution in the wake of such practices as the Rimini Protokoll.77 Without trying to decide upon a conclusive definition of performance, this
chapter wants to highlight some characteristics and differences in order to help the examination of the Ganymed case study in the next chapter.
In order to talk about performance, the use of time and space, and the presence of the body, is fundamental. Performance is based on action. Yet, what criteria distinguishes dance, theatre and performance art? Brandão, for example, argues towards a distinction between dance and performance art through the different use of the body. Her argument is while art performances work with the body and sometimes wants to overcome it, dance is, in contrast, a will towards immersion in bodily movements as a medium.78 Like dance being based on
choreography, performance art pieces and theatrical performances can be set apart through the
74 Taylor 2003, p.3ff.
75 Mechelen 2013, p.255 and Jappe 1993, p.9. 76 Brandão 2017, p.354.
77 The Rimini Protokoll is a format by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel who form a
team of author-directors since 2000.At the focus of their work is the continuous development of the tools of the theatre to allow unusual perspectives on our reality. Their interdisciplinary work lies in the realm of film, theatre and radio play and has long left the black-box of the theatre stage. See:
https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/about [last visited January 10, 2019].
existence of a script in theatre. This furthermore assures a certain preservation of the idea of the theatre performance, whereas art performances rely on the concept of ‘ephemerality’.79
Art performances are regarded to be authentic, “in the sense of what is not simulated but is singular, real, sincere and truthful.”80 In theatre, we assume actors to play a role, whereas
artists of performance pieces present themselves and explore their physical and mental limits.81
In theatre, actors are regarded to execute the concept of someone else, whereas in performance art those two roles lie within the same person.82 Yet, distinction as such are complicated
through projects like the Rimini Protokoll, which has gathered world-wide recognition with their “Theatre of Experts.”83 The group targets public understanding by overlapping real life
and theatre by working with non-professional actors that are regarded as “experts of the everyday” and are supposed to play themselves rather than a role.84 The Theatre of Witness
plays with the same means of reality and authenticity.85
Other criteria that can lead to distinctions between the disciplines would be how the performer deals with criteria as lighting, stage and props. Time and the relationship to the audience would also constitute important distinctive features. Another question would be the location of enactment. Many performance artists, for example, regarded the black-box of the theatre as artificial and consciously reject it.86 Rimini Protokoll can also serve in this regard as
an example.87 Christopher Balme observes that theatre has the potential to take part in
democratic processes, that it can do so even under repressive regimes, and that in democratic societies it has, oddly, lost some of its political engagement by becoming self-absorbed in confined spaces of the private and the unpolitical “black box.”88 Balme draws a comparison
with the ancient Greek agora and its “ultimate publicness” as the other extreme, where theatre public equals public sphere.89 Rimini Protokoll with projects like Situation Rooms (2013)
moves theatre out of this black box and engages with its problem, such as putting the “aesthetical above the political, self-absorption above the interest in social processes, and the 79 Mechelen 2013, p.251ff. 80 Mechelen 2013, p.107. 81 Mechelen 2013, p.108. 82 Jappe 1993, p.53. 83 Carlson 2016, p.55. 84 Carlson 2016, p.55ff.
85 For Theatre of Witness, see: http://www.theaterofwitness.org/about/ . [last visited January 21,
2019].
86 Mechelen 2013, p.256.
87 See for example Rimini Protokoll’s project Call Cutta in a Box (2008-10), directed by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Watzel.
88 Balme 2014, p.IX.
consumption of theatre for a bit of light entertainment above its activist potential.”90 In the
same sense, when regarding performances as museum interventions, this “innocence” of the space (in this case the museum) and the accompanying “presumption of a universal viewing subject” is challenged by the site-specific nature of the intervention (the museum).91
As we see, efforts of setting different forms of performances and their characteristics apart fail when regarding examples as the Rimini Protokoll. Furthermore, these efforts oppose the concept of ‘applied theatre’. Matthias Warstat and Julius Heinicke’s research project about applied theatre centres around the interdisciplinarity of “political art”, hence “performance art and theatre [among others]” that can no longer be strictly seen divergent.92 Following Claire
Bishop’s argument, this development to interdisciplinarity follow a “return to the social.”93
Contextualised by three previous historical moments (the historic avant-garde in Europe circa 1917, the so-called ‘neo Avant-garde’ leading to 1968, and the fall of communism 1989) these lead to a reflection in the arts/performances about “material and institutional conditions” (keywords: institutional critique).94 In this sense, considering the development of avant-garde
theatre, Bleeker spoke of “a shift in focus from semantics (what does it mean?) to pragmatics (what does it do?).”95
The result is a political and social impact that dominates in several artistic manifestations far beyond theatre. Bishop even argues that the history of twentieth-century art should be regarded through the lens of theatre rather than painting, or ready-made (Duchamp). and further includes sub-themes like education, therapy, process-based experiences and intersubjectivity.96 In this sense, it is important to note that both Bishop and Warstat/Heinicke
are focusing on integrative rather than confrontational strategies of the interdisciplinary performance and are therefore setting a focus on participation and people as the central artistic medium. (keyword: experimental institutionalism à la Charles Esche)
While Bishop does not explicitly cover interventionist art, she includes its nature and main idea is the analogy of the genre.97 In research about applied theatre, however,
90 Schwanecke 2017, p.360.
91 Kwon 2004, p.13.
92 Warstat/Heinicke 2015, p.7. 93 Bishop 2012, p.3.
94 About the ‘return of the social’ and its historic moments see: Bishop 2012, p.3. Warstat/Heinicke
2015 reflect about the topical changes in the arts as a result of this (p.7).
95 Bleeker 2000, p.41-56.
96 Bishop 2012, p.3. In this sense, also Gavin Butt argues towards a “turn towards performativity in
the field of artistic practice of the past half-century or so.” (‘theatrical-turn’ by a rise of performance- and installation-oriented practices) Butt, 2005, p.8ff. The theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte terms these considerations the “performative turn.” (for concept of performativity, see: Fischer-Lichte 1998.)
interventions play a fundamental role. Warstat and Heinicke explain the function as a theatrical action that “exceeds an aesthetic experience” but interferes in already existing relations and systems of social, political or cultural nature in order to effect a change.98 Applied theatre
should therefore be perceived in its totality – an aesthetical potential would include not only the performance as such, but the processes of interruption, change and reflection.99 In this
sense, it ties in with the definition of intervention presented in the previous chapter.
To conclude, the cooperation of several performing art forms with its political potential managed to overcome its boundaries and thereby build an interdisciplinary art form.100 It needs
to be noted that this anticipated merge of different disciplines in both, visual art and the latter theoretical, academic examination, leads to a connection to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Maybe we could see the interdisciplinarity of the applied theatre, with its social and political motivations, and its reach beyond the actual product, as the conceptual Gesamtkunstwerk of Postmodernism. Considering these unclear works as performed museums interventions, which automatically guard potential to include the institutional circumstances, architectural disposition and diverse museal collections, would support this quest to a Gesamtkunstwerk. The aim here is not to define performance intervention as Gesamtkunstwerk, rather the comparison should serve a better understanding of their potentials. In this sense, several divers performance interventions that happened in the past are described in the following.
Historic performance interventions – institutionally critiqual theatre
The following highlights certain historic examples of performances that were staged as museum intervention and are seen as institutional critique. Patricia Falguières’ suggests, for example, that institutional critique practices partook of a fundamental “theatricality”.101 Mierle
Laderman Ukeles’s ‘Maintenance Art’ performance in 1973 was an early example of a museum intervention as performance in the discourse of institutional critique. Her series of ‘Maintenance Art’ performances took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. In two of the performances, Ukeles, literally on her hands and knees, washed the entry plaza and steps of the museum for four hours.(Fig.9) In doing so:
98 Warstat/Heinicke 2015, p.11, 30ff. They note that only few applied-theater-projects aim at
fundamental critique of the system or radical social change, rather they focus on institutions that arrange themselves with existing social order and target change which is inherent in the system. (p.13)
99 Warstat/Heinicke 2015, p.23.
100 Jappe identified this development in1993, see: Jappe 1993, p.53. Warstat/Heinicke (2015) makes
‘applied theatre’ to a research topic and with it the argument that political and social art is no longer to be separated by art forms (p.7; 30). See also: Jackson 2011; and Bishop 2012.
she forced the menial domestic tasks usually associated with women [...] to the level of aesthetic contemplation, and revealed the extent to which the museum’s pristine self-representation, its perfectly immaculate white spaces as emblematic of its ‘neutrality’, in structurally dependent on the hidden and devalued labour of daily maintenance and upkeep.102
Ukeles showed the museum as a hierarchical system of labour relations and complicated discriminatory gender biases.
In 1977 the French artist and philosopher Robert Filliou made a series of playful, unauthorised performances in major museum galleries. He illicitly collected dust from famous paintings (Max Ernst to Magritte and Correggio), later storing the dust in a cardboard archive box with a polaroid snapshot recording his action – the work titled ‘Poussière de Poussière’ [dust to dust].(Fig.10) According to Nieuwenhuis and Nassar, this intervention challenges the authority of art and questions the value of stability.103
Andrea Fraser’s ‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk’ (1989) was a performance authorized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.104 The performance involved her masquerading
as an official tour guide, (thereby representing the museum), offering tours in the museum’s galleries.(Fig.11) In these, she investigated and questioned the educational practices of the museum. Fraser took her tour not only to the museum’s gallery, where she criticized the museum’s interpretations of their collection, but also made visitor facilities like the cloakroom, shop and cafeteria equal important parts of the museum. Fraser created the persona of Jane Castleton, the tour guide, “as a docent, she is the museum’s representative, and her function is, quite simply, to tell visitors what the museum wants – that is, to tell them what they can give to satisfy the museum.”105Fraser is not only questioning the conventional role of the museum,
and the assumptions that have been historically placed on the value and interpretations of art, but also its visitors as being merely a passive spectator.
Other interventions addressed global politics. For example, artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan initiated his First Russian Propaganda Art Performance at Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978). He engaged with Russian avant-garde art in the Museum’s permanent collection from the perspective of an immigrant. According to fellow artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, in his performance Bakhchanyan walked around the museum dressed as a
102 Kwon 204, p.19.
103 Niewenhuis/Nassar 2018, p.504.
104 Transcript of the performance in October 1991, See: Fraser 1991. 105 Fraser 2007, p.242.
“walking propaganda center,” covered from head to toe with slogans like “Stalin is Lenin today,” “Beware, savage dog,” and “Why is there no vodka on the moon?”.106
In 2004 the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London became the witness of another performance. While Lucy and Jorge Orta usually choose public places in urban contexts, they staged a performance in the Cast Court of the V&A. The performance was a protest against the allied invasion of Iraq and involved around fifty participants wearing ‘futuristic’ costumes designed by the artist.107(Fig.12) In an interview, Lucy Orta stated:
Where art has an interesting role to play is in location, artworks can be situated in many contexts, look at the V&A for example: the setting is a mausoleum for tombs, and sepulchres; mythical, historical and regal figures; passionate, religious or ethnic combats. We are not necessarily reminded of the current political climate as a visitor to the museum, but the battles were as equally bloody!108
Commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘Casey's Pawns’, a passive peace performance, was held on the symbolic date of 25th June 2004, five days before the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi government and the start of the withdrawal of US and allied forces.109 The material heritage of the galleries and especially their location in the V&A and
with it their history of provenance is seen as one of the driving forces in the conveyance of meaning.
In the Netherlands, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam became the scene of several uncommissioned performances that plead for a fossil free cultural environment in terms of sponsorships in museums.(Fig.13) The collective Fossil Free Culture stated: “Through unsolicited art performances in institutions that accept such sponsorship, we expose the ecological and social devastation that the fossil fuel industry inflicts on the planet.”110
Participation
Due to the public nature of performances in museums, and the absence of a demarcated stage (as such in terms of performer-audience-separation), there is usually a certain degree of audience participation included in the performance. Participation in the museum is a broad concept where the boundaries between participating and experiencing are hard to draw. While
106Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin in Rosenfeld/Dodge 2004, p.146. 107 Putnam 2009, p. 192.
108 Lucy Orta in an interview about the performance. See:
http://showstudio.com/project/transgressing_fashion/interview [last visited December 17, 2018].
109 See the artist’s website: https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artwork/302/Caseys-Pawns-250604 [last
visited December 17, 2018].
110 Fossil Free Culture collective website and manifesto: https://www.fossilfreeculture.nl/about/ [last
