Collecting to Exhibit? The Narratives of Art Between Collection and Exhibition

Seminar, 20 January 2016, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark. Registration is free of charge

Today, museums are caught between widely differing ideas and expectations of how to narrate art, how to collect and how to exhibit. Where the task of exhibitions was to perform the stories of art, the collection has traditionally been seen as the chief resource for present and future activities. New demands and new types of exhibitions have – in practice – contributed to a rapid transformation in priorities. Increasingly, the museum narrative of art is based on temporary structures, sometimes immaterial objects and various loans that are brought into the institution for shorter periods of time. The continued vitality of the permanent collection feels today uncertain.

The one-day seminar COLLECTING TO EXHIBIT? provides a forum for examining and discussing art collections and their use for museum exhibitions. Of particular concern is the link between current or historical presentations of art and the acquisition, management and planning of what goes/does not go into collections. These complex relationships vary and span from the famous, historical collection museums such as the Frick in New York – where collection, exhibition, buildings and institution seamlessly merge – all the way to the heterogeneous public gallery of today tasked with showing temporary and permanent exhibitions on top of building collections with a view to the future.

A chief aim for museums is still to narrate about ‘art’, and every institution builds its activities on a particular identity made up of its history, individual expertise and – often enough – a vision and mission statement expressing a unique purpose. But what are the connections between a museum’s many-facetted identity, its collections and the actual narratives of art formed by its exhibitions? How does any kind of collection contribute to or delimit institutional identity and the stories of art that are performed? In what differing ways are narratives expressed through the use of available collections, loans and temporary structures? Can we learn about the future of the museum collection by looking to its uses in the past?

To facilitate extended discussion, these questions are addressed from a historical and contemporary perspective by four keynote speakers: Chris Whitehead (Newcastle and Oslo University), Jeremy Braddock (Cornell University), Hans Hayden (Stockholm University) and Rune Gade (University of Copenhagen). The seminar concludes with a number of short reflections on the theme of ‘collecting to exhibit’ by museum and university staff.

Programme

10.15 welcome and introduction

10.30 first session: collections and narratives of art in history

Chris Whitehead, professor of museology, Newcastle and Oslo University
Visitor Behaviour and Recollection of Permanent Collection Displays

Jeremy Braddock, associate professor in English, Cornell University
Provisional Institutions: Barnes, Phillips, Broad

discussion

12.30 lunch

13.30 second session: collections and narratives of art, today and in the future

Hans Hayden, professor of art history, Stockholm University
Myth Making Strategies: On the Normalization of the Avant-Garde in Post War Exhibition Practices

Rune Gade, associate professor in art history, University of Copenhagen
Collecting for Eternity: Uncertainties, Paradoxes and Challenges in Collecting Contemporary Art

discussion

15.30 coffee break

16.00 third session: working with collections and narratives

cases from museum and university

16.50 closing remarks

All parties with an interest in art, museums, collections and exhibitions are invited to participate in the seminar and discussion.

The seminar will be held in English.

Full programme and registration can be found here: http://www.kunsthistoriker.dk/collecting/