Needling Institutions: Artistic Interventions Exposing Museum Ethics
Hans Haacke’s installations from the 1970s called into question the relationship between museums and corporate sponsorship. From the 1980s onwards the Guerrilla Girls’ collective works raise questions regarding bias in museum representation. In 1992 Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society examined context and curatorial authority. Pippa Skotnes' 1996 curation-installation titled Miscast at the South African Museum in Cape Town, South Africa highlighted conditions under which objects may enter museum collections. More recently, Nan Goldin’s 2018 and ongoing artist-activist “die-ins” at the Met and other museums draw attention to museum acquisition policies and donor affiliations, but also call into question the voice of the artist within larger institutions to critically engage ethical and organizational practice. While curations and exhibitions are often the focus of discussion and research around ongoing discourse on ethics and museums, what of the role of artists? This panel seeks to consider the artist and their artistic interventions – acts or objects that mediate between institution and viewer, past and present - which play with, question, comment on, provoke, subvert and transform museum policy and practice. We invite papers that explore artworks, installations and performances as interventions within museum spaces, that situate them within broader historical contexts, that evaluate different approaches and their success or shortfalls from critical perspectives, and that look to the past, present or future of artistic interventions as shapers of ethical museum practice.
Field of Study:
Africa
Europe
North America
Asia
Modern (1800-present)
Chairs:
Jessica J. Stephenson,Kennesaw State University - jsteph55@kennesaw.edu
and
Amanda H. Hellman,Emory University - ahhellm@emory.edu