Museums Change Lives

A quick note to share the recently published case study reports on how the Museum Association strategy is being applied. There's a news item on the MA website, here, and there you'll find links to lots of interesting material. There's the Tank Museum in Dorset working with young offenders, and the Scottish Football museum dealing with memory and self confidence.
I'm thinking particularly of my Introduction to Museum Studies students who will be doing presentations soon exploring recent museum practice!

You'll find the news item here.

Digitisation in Museums

As a new book surveys landmark shows, museums are only just starting to catch up with the digital revolution of the photographic medium.

Around the turn of the century, books dealing with the relatively new art-historical subgenre of exhibition history were far a few between. Since the late 2000s however, as master's programmes in curatorial practice have proliferated, so too have publications on the subject of exhibition history. A recent addition to this category is Alessandra Mauro's book Photoshow; a historical survey of landmark photography exhibitions, ranging from the "International Exhibition of Artistic Photography" in Vienna in the 19th century, to Erik Kessel's 2011 show "24 hrs in Photos".

Aside from the book's descriptive analyses of the exhibitions and their significance, a number of critical and curatorial challenges presented by the medium are addressed. This included an interesting discussion between Quentin Bajac, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Alessandra Mauro, editorial director of the Forma Foundation for Photography, Milan, on the topic of curating photography in the age of the internet. "I have no doubt that the future lies in the digital museum" Bajac tells Mauro, adding, "by that I don't just mean a website [...] museums have yet to embrace the paperless form of photography, unlike the "public at large" and many artists".

For Bajac, the digital museum of the future will commission work that is meant to be looked at only on screen. (Paradoxically, digitisation allows museums to present the materiality of historic images in a way that is impossible in an exhibition or book). MoMA has started exploring the possibilities presented by digitisation, launching "Object: Photo" in December: an online extension to Bajac's exhibition of the Thomas Walther collection of Modern photography (1909-49). Utilizing technology, "Object: Photo" enables it's visitors to explore - in greater detail - the images by avant-garde photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Berenice Abbott among others. Looking behind the prints, exploring the results of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and gaining access to additional information based on new research.

However, this is by no means a marker for change within the museum sector. Rather, an indication of MoMA's progressive intent. Depending on the art institution - their institutional outlook, type of collection, budget, and limited by architecture (to put it very simply) - museums are embracing technology at different rates and on varying levels. For instance, while the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam launched their interactive Augmented Reality app in 2009, and MoMA allowed an external hacking of their system to create an interactive curation platform, the 'no phone' / 'no photography' in the gallery ban prevailed in the majority of UK art institutions.

It will be interesting to see where Bajac takes digitisation next at MoMA.

Triennale Brugge 2015

Contemporary Art and Architecture Triennial of Bruges 2015
20 May 2015 - 18 October 2015Brugge, BelgiumCurators: Tim Holger-Borchert, Lies Coppens, Michel Dewilde

Since 2007 more than sixty percent of the world population has lived in an expanding network of very large, unfinished cities. Attitudes to this phenomenon of global urbanization differ. On the one hand, a number of experts like Benjamin Barberi regard the city as a solution to a range of global problems. Where the traditional sovereign nation state and large international organisations fail, Barber sees the liberating potential of the city. Eric Corijnii also believes that cities are increasingly junctions for social and political reconstruction. Ruth Eatoniii, on the other hand, refers to the detrimental consequences of global urbanization and to its damaging legacy.

The Triennial sets out to explore this in the unique setting of a historic city that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Brugge.

Central to the Triennial is the question of the future identity of the city and its possible role in the rapidly rising levels of urbanization: What can Bruges distil from the recent evolutions that typify the mega-cities? And conversely: can a small city that is protected by UNESCO contribute to the development of a new form of urbanization? In this connection the curators juxtapose two frictions: the representation of Bruges as a static medieval city versus the dynamic image of the unfinished global city. The curatorial team have linked the two frictions by means of a hypothetical question: "What would happen if the five million people who visit Bruges every year suddenly decided to settle here permanently?". (This reminds me of Ai Weiwei's '1001 Chinese Visitors' project, in which he invited 1001 Chinese citizens to visit Documenta 12 in Kassel, explore the town, the exhibition programme, and most crucially - to interact with other cultures. These interactions formed the content of the artwork, documented and preserved by filmmakers and an accompanying book of interviews. Corresponding to this, Ai Weiwei installed 1001 chairs from the Qing Dynasty throughout the exhibition spaces of Documenta 12, to be exposed to, sat on and studied by the German public and the many other cultures present at the exhibition).

Each of the invited European and Asian artists will interpret this area of tension in their own way, linking the fields of contemp art and architecture against the background of the intact historic city centre. Each of the outdoor works will be specially conceived for the 2015 Triennial. The end result of this process will be on show in the public space from May 20th to October 18th 2015, to then disappear from the cityscape. In addition to the outdoor art trail, there will be indoor exhibitions in various locations: De Bond, Arentshuis, the Town Hall and the Spanish warehouses.