Many Ways of Knowing
Playing Politics: The State of the Arts in the Post-museum Context
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristian Richard Pau Gath
During the last decade, the evolved agency of the artist and the efficacy of art interventions within the urban landscape has been significantly debated in response to the fields of cultural policy, artistic practice, and academic discourses, highlighting how those within these fields acknowledge the evolving interactions between practitioners and their publics within the post-museum context. Through the theoretical criticism of empirical case studies, this paper foregrounds the participants within the transmission from art programming to public art in a manner that considers the processes contained within this transmission and their dissemination into production as the continuous loop of a public art intervention that is concerned with the ideals surrounding the post-museum and post-autonomous.
Moral Copyright Law and Museum Exhibitions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melanie Brown
Museums are both the guardians of and communicators of our collective cultural heritage. Increasingly, copyright law (and especially moral copyright law) is shaping what items a museum chooses to include in its public exhibitions and to accept into its permanent collections, as aspects of limiting potential liability. This shaping of the collections affects what we will preserve of our societies; and of what future generations will understand about influential events and people throughout history. Currently, there is a lack of communication between legal scholars and the professionals working within the museum sector about the practical realities of interpreting moral copyright law into everyday working practices in a way that does not unnecessarily restrict the items that can be shared with the public. This presentation hopes to begin this discussion and bring together legal, curatorial, and archival knowledge to find solutions to the problem and allow us to holistically preserve our cultural heritage.
An Example of Revised Space Usage in the Creation of Aesthetic Relations: How the Museum Can be More Inclusive
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ioannis Mouratidis
Despite the evolution in the reconsideration of artistic creation as it has been stating during the last years, the evolution of museums and exhibition spaces does not follow the same path, remaining anchored in early last century’s concepts and practices. It is true that the museum has endowed the art scene with certain stability, but this has been obtained in exchange of a significant lack of ideological flexibility. Contemporary exhibitions such as the Documenta, offer a different approach to the exhibition practice, proposing alternative readings on the current exhibition space and establishing a new way of seeing and understanding the practice of exposing actual art, according to a new society of a new era. The possibility of its application in the construction of a discourse, other than the official one, is investigated in this paper. From spokesman of the power that has generated it, to speaker of ideas of the society it represents, this should be the commitment to be fulfilled by today’s museum. It is a commitment to change the role that it assumed more than two centuries ago but today, more than ever, it is essential to review.
Interpreting and Displaying Asia: A Case Study of Library Park in Asian Culture Center
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Boram Lee
How can a museum represent diverse Asia? How does the museum provide its extensive information more widely and effectively to the users? These are the author's questions about the ‘Library Park’ of the Asian Culture Center in Korea. This study uses the Asian Culture Center as an example to study how its exhibition ‘Library Park’ reproduces Asia. Through organizing official publications, interviewing curatorial teams, and analyzing exhibition content, it explains how the exhibitions reproduce Asia and provide users with information. The Library Park is a new type of knowledge and information space called ‘Larchiveum’ that integrates the functions of libraries, archives and museums. The project space of Library Park had professional researchers from all over Asia presenting thirteen Asian themed topics such as exhibition histories, migration, sound, and music, etc. in different forms. The study found that it uses archives as a display method, displaying a collection of topic-related materials, and setting up a digital archive to integrate scattered data across Asia. In addition, through the juxtaposition of exhibitions and books, Library Park can make it more diverse and complement the various Asian issues that cannot be transmitted in the exhibition. It also allows the user to actively participate in the information acquisition process. These extensive and diverse exhibition characteristics enable users to build understanding of Asia from different perspectives.
