Cultural Considerations
Open-air Exhibitions as a Kind of Ubiquitous Museum: A Case Study from Polish Spisz View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janusz Barański
The paper considers a change in the function and importance of traditional material culture in the post-rural region of Polish Spisz (southern Poland). Older, usually wooden handicrafts related to farming (carts, cart wheels, ploughs, harrows, troughs, benches, etc.) have already lost their original functions in the highly modernized environment and now are used as historical objects exhibited: hung on the walls of new buildings or placed in one’s garden by the house. At the same time, they become part of a wider project of garden aesthetics by being placed alongside popular elements such as flower beds, water features, plastic or plaster garden gnomes and farm animals, which serve as mementos of a bygone culture. The museum-like open-air exhibitions of these material artefacts also suggest that the nature of cultural memory has changed from ‘true memory’ (unreflective, authoritative) into ‘historical memory’ (reflective, discoursive). They become part of displays of memory and cultural heritage that expresses the transvaluation of the obsolete. As unique material mythemes, they form a tale connecting the cultural past with the present, a narration that is understandable for its inheritors, and quality objects that are included in cultural change and thus uphold a feeling of homefulness. This makes the entire process of cultural modernisation, from which the discussed material elements of traditional folk culture have not been totally removed, relatively gentle and gradual.
Featured Towards a Digital Contact Zone: The Institutional Impact of Celf ar y Cyd within Museum Wales
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirstin Mitchell
Operating as a digital contemporary arts resource within both Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales) and National Contemporary Arts Gallery for Wales, Celf ar y Cyd (Art Together) intends to enhance the accessibility of museum collections, through both an extensive programme of digitisation and an accompanying diversification of the voices that contribute to the ways in which collections are interpreted and understood. The potential benefit that this demonstrates is perhaps most obviously outward facing and, indeed, the intention for the initial phase of my data collection was to undertake a programme of qualitative research with those working with the resource within the museum, to evaluate this external benefit from an institutional perspective. During initial thematic evaluation, however, a series of more internal benefits consecutively emerged. Investigation of these forms the basis of this paper, which will consider three interconnected aspects of this institutional impact. Firstly, this paper discusses the practicalities of the variously collaborative method of working which Celf ar y Cyd incorporates, primarily within Amgueddfa Cymru. This is then expanded to consider the different values that this facilitates, discussing the inter-related benefits of process and challenge at both theoretical and practical level. Findings are also positioned within the wider framework of ‘a digital contact zone’, understanding of which my PhD research intends to contribute to, as a space where the varied creative uses and responses that are facilitated by Celf ar y Cyd might develop an understanding of the museum as community, in various ways.
Art Museums as Knowledge Keepers: Questions Concerning Responsible Stewardship
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jodi Kovach, Daisy Desrosiers
Museums are makers of knowledge, but aren’t they also knowledge keepers? What does it mean to introduce a form of traditional knowledge into a public space through an artwork, and how should a museum properly steward it? This is a question that The Gund, the contemporary art museum of Kenyon College, is currently facing in response to the reception of This Land, a long-term, site-specific installation by French-Anishinaabe artist Caroline Monnet that expresses indigenous identity in relation to the land on which the artwork resides. Monnet drew from traditional Algonquin basket designs to create geometric patterns that wrap around the glass enclosure of the museum atrium, encoding a history and ecological sensibility built on principles of continuity, tradition, and harmony. Over the 2023–24 academic year, Kenyon students have engaged with the artwork through formal course sessions in many subject areas, and have expressed deep appreciation for how the artwork is inscribed on both the architecture and the surrounding landscape. As the inaugural commissioned work for the atrium, this project has allowed us to extend the museum beyond the physical structure of the building. It is scheduled to close in 2025 to open the space for future commissions, but concerned students have expressed that its removal will again efface indigenous presence. This study addresses the complexities of stewarding of a work of art not commissioned for permanent display, but which has become vitally important to the community’s relationship with the museum and how we reckon with historical erasure of indigenous presence.
50 Years of the Revolution of April 1974 in Portugal: Women Artists and Feminist Art in the Revolutionary Period (1974-1977)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isabel Nogueira
The relationship of women artists and feminist art in Portugal with the Revolution of April 1974 (how their work engaged with the Revolution and its sociopolitical, cultural and even economic issues), is very strong and defined a powerful artistic, gender and social statement. How does one contribute, from a perspective of recent art history in Portugal, to the analysis and appreciation of the works and acts of women artists, rewriting, if necessary, the history of 20th-century Portuguese art itself? More specifically, how to establish a historical, artistic and conceptual dialogue between the feminist art in Portugal (between the Revolution of 1974 and 1977), the second and third waves of feminism and the neo-avant-garde? In the 1970s, in Portugal, there was an unprecedented group of women artists who occupied a very relevant place in the Portuguese and even international artistic circles (Helena Almaida, Lourdes Castro, Ana Hatherly...), which was a moment with fundamental repercussions for today.
