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Post-critical museology : theory and practice in the art museum
\"Post Critical Museology examines the current status of learning and knowledge practices in the art museum and investigates how to understand the challenges presented by the visual cultures of global migration and new media. The book locates the discussion of the future of the art museum in the realm of public participation and engagement with art and the museum. It provides a new analytical synthesis of the art museum through accounting for the agency of different communities of users and using theoretical approaches associated with science and technology studies. In the book's terms the art museum is continually made and remade through related networks and instead of an approach that starts with traditional hierarchies of cultural knowledge and value, it develops an analysis of the art museum in terms of an extended set of objects and performances and examines the points of relationship between them. In this way the book shows how the art museum in the first decade of the twenty-first century is no longer governed by the civic and civilizing mission of the nineteenth century, nor ruled by the logic of Modernist rationalism, but instead, can be seen as an institution seeking a new social role and identity and currently still struggling to understand and negotiate wider cultural signifying systems, government policy and market forces. Locating its critique in a constructive relationship to international progressive museological thinking and practice, the book calls for a new alignment in what it announces as post-critical museology. An alignment that is committed to rethinking what an art museum in the twenty-first century could be, as well as what knowledge and understanding its future practitioners might mobilize in a rapidly changing social and cultural context. The book aims to be essential reading in the growing field of museum studies. It will also be of professional interest to all those working in the cultural sphere, including museum professionals, policy makers and art managers. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Post-Critical Museology
Post-Critical Museology considers what the role of the public and the experience of audiences means to the everyday work of the art museum. It does this from the perspectives of the art museum itself as well as from the visitors it seeks. Through the analysis of material gathered from a major collaborative research project carried out at Tate Britain in London the book develops a conceptual reconfiguration of the relationship between art, culture and society in which questions about the art museum's relationship to global migration and the new media ecologies are examined. It suggests that whilst European museums have previously been studied as institutions of collection, heritage and tradition, however 'modern' their focus, it is now better to consider them as distributive networks in which value travels along transmedial and transcultural lines.
Post-Critical Museology is intended as a contribution to progressive museological thinking and practice and calls for a new alignment of academics and professionals in what it announces as post-critical museology. An alignment that is committed to rethinking what an art museum in the twenty-first century could be, as well as what knowledge and understanding its future practitioners might draw upon in a rapidly changing social and cultural context. The book aims to be essential reading in the growing field of museum studies. It will also be of professional interest to all those working in the cultural sphere, including museum professionals, policy makers and art managers.
eBook
Cultural diversity: politics, policy and practices. The case of Tate Encounters
Prologue
What happens when politics become policies, which, in turn, become practices in a museum?
Such a question was posed at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in November 2010, in a debate
organised by Third Text and Arts Council England, one of a number that have taken place in
the aftermath of the defeat of the New Labour government in Britain. Indeed, over the past
two years, issues surrounding cultural politics and their relationship to institutional practices
have been articulated as a contestation of the effectiveness of cultural diversity policy in the
arts. In such a contest, one can point to the gains that have been accrued through the translation of progressivist thinking into cultural equity programmes and social justice agendas.
Legitimate claims, for example, can be made that advances in employment and programming
have taken place. On the other hand, one can point to institutional manoeuvres – containment strategies – that have ensured that demands for change are neutralised in order to protect
the integrity of long-held views around ‘core mission’ and objects bearing ‘real cultural value’.
Such a framing of the ongoing argument may be a little stark for everyday tastes but politics,
after all, is a messy business. The following account hopes to make some sense of the entangled positions, the disrupted careers, the frustrated hopes and broken visions of professional
stakeholders seeking change by highlighting what has been lost as well as gained in the slippage
from politics to policy and practice.
Book Chapter
The Post-Traditional Art Museum in the Public Realm
The year 1981 marked a historical watershed in British culture and society. In January of that year, a devastating fire took hold of a private party in New Cross, South London, claiming the lives of 14 black teenagers. As angry protests followed the tragedy, frustrated by the lack of police interest in claims of arson, the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, declared on 28 March that England was on the verge of 'racial civil war'. In April, the two-year-old Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, announced major cuts and reforms to the public sector and official figures recorded the highest unemployment in 50 years at 2.5 million. On 10 and 12 April, major riots broke out in Brixton, South London, home to a predominantly African-Caribbean community, and an area defined by poor housing, high unemployment and high levels of street crime which police were tackling through an undercover street campaign named Operation Swamp 81.
Book Chapter
Tracing the Practices of Audience and the Claims of Expertise
At an operational level, the knowledge-base and expertise from which organizational change has been generated within Tate over the last 20 years has primarily been developed through the purchase of commissioned research from external consultancies, and indeed this knowledge-base has dramatically diversified and extended during the last 20 years in response to the changing cultural, social and economic conditions to include economics, business and finance; architecture, urbanism and engineering; design, media and communications; retail, publishing and catering; and information technology. More often than not though, such consultancy research was invisible at the level of the delivery workforce having been mediated through organizational change or project initiatives at director level of strategy and implementation. But despite Tate's entry centre-stage into the cultural and social politics of the public domain, comparatively little independent research has been commissioned towards the creation of change within the practices of the museum in relation to the cultural or social, despite the epistemological shifts in the gallery's activities towards these domains. Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture was the first sustained piece of internally authorized research in this area.
Book Chapter
Reconceptualizing the Subject After Post-Colonialism and Post-Structuralism
Seeing the human subject as a figure drawn to move between different national and cultural settings remains critical for understanding the implications that contemporary global conditions have for museums. The centrality of a global context to a reconceptualization of the human subject was made evident in the last decades of the twentieth century through the conjuncture between post-structuralist thinking and post-colonial conditions. An intense dialogue with the post-structural thought of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze could be seen in key works by post-colonial thinkers, such as Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Homi K. Bhabha (1990). Equally, post-colonial conditions can be seen to have influenced the thinking in post-structuralist texts, such as those composed by Derrida and Cixous, who were themselves born in the colonial setting of French-dominated Algeria. Indeed, in a piece discussing the ways in which Jews living in Algeria under French rule negotiated their relation to French, Maghreb and Jewish culture, Cixous wrote of 'a belonging constituted of exclusion and non-belonging' (Cixous 2004). Such comments emphasize the relation between concerns centred on experiences of non-belonging and questions articulated in the body of post-colonial thought. As such, the relation between post-colonial and post-structural critique provides clues to the ways in which notions of the human subject were reformulated. The particularity of the relation should be regarded as a 'sword that cuts both ways'.
Book Chapter