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Unlike the vast majority of large‐scale showpieces exhibited at nineteenth‐century universal exhibitions, Édouard Verreaux's taxidermy group, Lion Attacking a Dromedary, has defied the odds and has survived well past its initial public display in the Tunisian section of the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the context of its original ethnographic display in a space dedicated to the promotion of French colonialism, Verreaux's ambitious taxidermy tableau would have been understood as a representation of authentic life in Tunisia. This illusion of authenticity issued from the object's expert mimicking of the period's artistic conventions for depicting the relationship between people and animals in North Africa by artists such as Horace Vernet, Eugène Delacroix, Antoine‐Louis Barye, and others. Instead of paint or plaster, Verreaux's composition took the form of an uncanny assemblage of body parts taken from a camel, two lions, and an anonymous human: in so doing, Verreaux used the tragic material of living beings to create a literal interpretation of the aesthetic tropes of French orientalism; with this world's fair showpiece, he thus violently bridged the theoretical and material divide between art and life. In this essay, I take these conjunctions between the "real" and the imaginary as a point of departure for discussing the feigned credulity of Lion Attacking a Dromedary. I contend that Verreaux's Lion Attacking a Dromedary should be considered as an imperial tableau, that is, as a didactic object that participated in training nineteenth‐century viewers to be what the historian Ariella Azoulay has called "imperial citizens" by drawing equivalences between nature and culture, and between representation and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1990s saw art exhibitions and biennials staged in East and Southeast Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks – their symposia on Asian contemporary art from 1994 to 2008. The concern was to increase a regional representational capacity based on sound art-critical and historical approaches and to ascertain the contemporaneity of present artistic practice. An emphasis on present-day art established a relational approach to temporality in which the recognition that contemporary artistic formations occupied a coeval time zone with contemporary western art in turn implied increased equality with the western metropole. However, the capacity to exhibit the regional contemporary of an Asia that has economically arrived did not overcome the apprehension of older modernizing ideologies linked with fraught ideas of Asia that had led to the Pacific War. Nevertheless, a multicultural Asia – the aspirational conjuncture of diverse regional locales with still disparate development levels and temporalities to produce a fictional totalized present – was projected in exhibitions that strove to rise above inter-Asian national clashes. These may have been performative projections of the contemporary, but such possibilities were not available during Asia's colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the twentieth century the International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale was seen as a major event by the art world of Belgrade and, more broadly, of Serbia and Yugoslavia. After the Second World War this biggest and most important international show of contemporary art provided Belgrade’s artists and art critics with an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the latest developments on the international art scene. At the same time, it was used as a platform for the leading figures of Belgrade’s artistic and cultural-policy establishment to create, through the exhibitions mounted in the national pavilion, an image of the country’s artistic contemporaneity aimed at achieving its desired standing in the West. The attitude of Belgrade’s art scene to the Venice Biennale went through a particularly interesting phase in the 1950s. Its transformations offer an opportunity to observe, analyse and expand the knowledge about the changes that marked that turbulent decade in the history of Serbian art, which went a long way from dogmatically exclusive socialist realism to the institutionalization of a high-modernist language as the dominant model. Based on the reconstruction of Yugoslavia’s sustained participation in the Venice Biennale (1950-60), this paper analyses the models of the representation of Serbian art in the international context of the Biennale within a broader context of the intensification of Serbian-Italian artistic contacts during the period under study.

Within an art exhibition, the disposition of space is fundamental in experiencing artworks. A study of the exhibition space as discourse enmeshes art within a framework of relationship and processes instead of viewing art as an isolated and autonomous object. This paper features the case study of Art '76, the inaugural exhibition of Singapore's first large-scale institution of art, the National Museum Art Gallery (NMAG). The NMAG's opening in 1976 had been much anticipated by artists and the art audience since the 1960s, it was also an important milestone in the National Museum of Singapore's process of modernisation and revitalisation. During Singapore's post-independent period, the National Museum began to redefine itself as a civic museum focussing on Singapore's history and culture, shifting away from its previous incarnation of a research-focused colonial institution, the Raffles Library and Museum. Singapore was not alone in exploring the role of modern art in nation-building, as neighbouring Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand also began to moot for their own institution of modern art around the same period of time. Art '76 and the NMAG represent a case of distinct spatial typology that arose out of unique institutional and socio-political dynamic in post-independent Singapore. In analysing the legacy as well as the relationships and contentions that shaped the spatial articulation of Art '76, this paper studies existing visual and oral archive, as well as critically evaluating the concepts of space as a subject of historical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi stores a collection of about 17,000 artworks dating back to 1850. After the establishment of the NGMA in 1954 on the behest of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to adequately store his collection of paintings of the Indian modernist and his friend Amrita Shergil, the collection was built up over 60 years by successive directors and their personal likings and peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, left unfinished in 1929, has attracted significant interest in recent decades. This essay offers a new interpretation of Warburg's "picture atlas," not in relation to modernist collage and photomontage, but as an heir to scientific pedagogical exhibitions of the late Wilhelmine period. It deals in particular with two "public enlightenment" shows curated by the Leipzig medical historian Karl Sudhoff, whose work Warburg admired and employed: the first on with the history of hygiene in Dresden in 1911, the second in Leipzig, three years later, on the development of scientific images. Like Warburg, Sudhoff appreciated artworks and artifacts as sources for the history of science and medicine. His exhibitions consisted of assemblages of photographic reproductions-some of which were provided by Warburg himself-and uncannily anticipate Mnemosyne in both form and content. By examining the exchange of materials and display methods between the two scholars, the article explores how their respective visual projects reflected deeper disagreements over the public role of science, the epistemic power of images, and the persistence of the irrational in the human psyche., (© 2024 The Authors. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

In 1992, artist David Lamelas installed Quand le ciel bas et lourd at the temporary exhibition America: Bride of the Sun—500 Years of Latin-America and the Low Countries at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), a show that explored the cultural, economic, and political exploitation of indigenous America by European forces, and its project of colonization and erasure. Lamelas’ work remained a public installation in KMSKA’s garden until March 2021 when it was dismantled as a result of the museum’s years-long renovation. This article examines the work in the context in which it was exhibited and later destroyed as a lens to examine two aspects of contemporary art and history in Flanders. Firstly, it foregrounds the complex, transnational heritage that Lamelas’ work presents and considers its implications upon the local, cultural scene in which it resided from the 1960s to 70s, in the 1990s and in the present. Secondly, the text frames Quand le ciel bas et lourd and America: Bride of the Sun as reverberating with the emergence of nationalism in Flanders and a global, postcolonial discourse in the art world. This article considers how aspects of Lamelas’ work and its elusive meanings over space and time might challenge monolithic understandings of Flemish art.

This article explores the emergence of private art galleries in Moscow in the early 1990s. It argues that instead of being driven by commercial objectives, these institutions took on the functions of the still-absent museums of contemporary art. It was the galleries of the early 1990s that were responsible for commissioning and preserving works, supporting artists and creating public awareness of the latest trends in young Russian art. They were ready to take the risk of showing unorthodox and radical artistic practices which were often not even offered for sale. This article discusses the role of the first private galleries in developing the infrastructure for contemporary Russian art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1964 Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi launched an ambitious retrospective of Michelangelo's oeuvre to commemorate the fourth centenary of his death. Held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the exhibition, titled Mostra Critica delle Opere Michelangiolesche, offered a comprehensive experience of Michelangelo's work entirely through replicas and reproductions. A controversial aspect of Zevi's didactics were the inclusion of student designed critical models that were intended to support a visual criticality alongside Oscar Savio's photographs. The models operated as a touchstone for Zevi's larger investigation into the representational possibilities for architectural history, and student photographs of the critical models appeared in a special editorial that was published in Zevi's periodical, L'architettura: cronache e storia. Using installation photographs, unpublished preparatory photographs, and the final published images, this essay examines the unique indexicality constructed through a remediation of the critical model as it evolves from the exhibition to the pages of Zevi's journal. By working through the photographic archive of the Fondazione Bruno Zevi and the personal archive of Paolo Portoghesi, this essay argues that the lens(es) used to frame Michelangelo's architectural theory operated through a type of Benjaminian dialectics; one that reveals the "modern key" used by Zevi to approach Renaissance architecture at mid-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne wanted to be more than a British outpost in southern Australia. Before its second decade, in 1854, the city founded an impressive museum-library-gallery complex. As European museums developed cast collections, Redmond Barry – Melbourne's chief patron – filled Melbourne's halls with a considerable selection. With time, these casts were discarded. The now lost collection seldom receives more than a passing remark in scholarship. However, these early displays in (what would become) the National Gallery of Victoria reimagined European Winckelmann-inspired curatorial models. The resulting experience made viewing into a performative action of nascent civic identity. Considered within current practice, Melbourne's casts expose the implications of curatorial ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Art Words / Likovne besede is the property of Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies (ZDSLU) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The most common form of restaging is that of the retrospective exhibition, for it can be used to provide a platform for the museum to reaffirm the original exhibition and in turn reaffirm itself as host. For Harald Szeemann, the role of the curator was that of a mediator who, through the exhibition, should attempt to halt the abovementioned closed-circuit of affirmations by questioning existing boundaries and canons. His own work, however, has been repeatedly restaged in recent years. This article focuses on two restagings: the Prada Foundation's When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (2013) and the Getty Research Institute's Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions (2018). I argue that restaged exhibitions can take two different forms: they can be focused on revising traditional canons and hierarchies, or they can serve to reaffirm the exhibition and the hosting institution. The two forms are interdependent, however, and most restagings contain a mixture of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores five exhibitions created for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Artmobile, the first mobile art museum in the United States. The mission of the Artmobile was to bring works of art directly to citizens throughout the state of Virginia from 1953 to 1994. In analyzing educational and exhibition materials, such as exhibition booklets, audio guide recordings, press releases, and speeches, this research examines the educational philosophies of each exhibition in relation to contemporaneous museum education literature. Applying Tony Bennett's analysis of the impact of culture on the social to the creation of educational philosophies, this essay argues that while the mission of the Artmobile remained constant, there was a shift in the educational objective from the development of cultured citizens through art appreciation and the improvement of public taste to fostering individual visual literacy and encouraging visitors to make art historical and personal connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new historical research on Asian art--particularly Chinese art--in New Zealand through the examination of the content and reception of the Loan Exhibition of Oriental Art, which was held in Christchurch from May to June 1935. It situates the exhibition within the context of Depression-era New Zealand, examines the place of Chinese art, in particular, in the developing cultural nationalism of New Zealand of this period, and highlights the role of one local connoisseur in the making of the exhibition. Moreover, the article's focus on the southern hemisphere fills a gap in global histories of Chinese art exhibition in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sešit Pro Umění, Teorii a Příbuzné Zóny is the property of Vedecko-Vyzkumne Pracoviste Akademie Vytvarnych Umeni v Praze and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Ludmila Vachtová, born in Czechoslovakia in 1933, is an art historian and critic. Since the late 1950s she has been an uncompromising curator and gallerist with precise ideas on the management of the institutions she was in charge of. She also gained international recognition as a specialist on František Kupka. After having emigrated to Zürich in 1972 she published in Neue Züricher Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemenine Zeitung and curated many exhibitions in Switzerland. This interview concentrates on the second half of the 1960s. At first, attention is payed to the joint curatorial activities of Vachtová and Hana Seifertová. The outcome of this collaboration was a series of exhibitions of sculpture by artists from Czechoslovakia and Austria. For the first time, contemporary sculpture was taken out of galleries and shown outdoors, in the urban and natural spaces of the city of Liberec. At the same time Vachtová curated at two Prague galleries. One, which was more experimental, concentrated on contemporary trends and specifically on various forms of abstract art, was Galerie Na Karlově náměstí. At the other, Galerie Platýz, Vachtová tried to develop the concept of a commercial gallery with a rich accompanying programme. Associated with the liberalization tendencies of the 1960s, these activities ended with the dawn of the so called normalization period after 1969. The interview was conducted in the form of written letters during the period of 2015-2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa was formed in 1952 in Johannesburg and was active throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Chinese South Africans were adversely affected by the consolidation of urban racial segregation during apartheid. The Club and its members used the spatial tactic of the photographic outing to disrupt the racialisation of space within Johannesburg, as well as to produce photographs that expressed aspirations that were curtailed by the apartheid system. Photographic outings created temporary zones of autonomy in which photographers could capture subversive and otherwise ephemeral experiences of space. I also examine a photographic exhibition organised by the Chinese Camera Club that formed part of the Johannesburg Festival of 1956. By participating in this celebration of civic pride, the Chinese Camera Club exploited a conspicuous public platform to enhance the visibility and prestige of both themselves and the wider Chinese community within Johannesburg. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, the exhibition contested the relations of difference that were imposed upon club members by racial classification, and replaced exclusionary notions of their difference with relentlessly positive ones. Simultaneously, the exhibition asserted a sense of their belonging to Johannesburg, in spite of their precarious right to reside within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the participation of Czechoslovakia at the large-scale exhibitions held during the latter half of the 1960s. In particular it looks at the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paolo Biennial and the Biennale de Paris, at which Czechoslovakia often featured by means of national pavilions or areas, and compares these shows with the selection of Czechoslovak artists by foreign curators for the fourth documenta in Kassel in 1968. The text focuses on how the exhibits were presented at these exhibitions, the mechanisms for conceiving of these occasions, and the position of the curators or commissioners. The form and content of the Czechoslovak expositions, which were created by a small circle of people, were relatively conservative, both within the framework of the exhibitions as a whole and in relation to the domestic art scene (especially in the case of the Venice and Sao Paolo biennales). Nevertheless, compared with both earlier and later presentations at the same events, Czechoslovak participation during the latter half of the sixties was progressive in character and featured good quality exhibits. At the end of the decade this was manifest in the selection of a smaller number of artists, a greater emphasis placed on the work of younger artists, and a broadening out of the media represented (which now included environments and light-kinetic work). On rare occasions, poorly connected national exhibitions were replaced by an exhibition conceived of as an integrated whole. I argue that the politically and socially turbulent period around 1968 (both in Czechoslovakia and around the world), which was manifest in the organisation and form of the biennales examined, was not reflected in the Czechoslovak presentations. It was biennale-style events that allowed Czechoslovak artists to see how they fared within an international context and mediated information on current trends for both artists and curators. In contrast, the discussions just starting in the West on the very concept of the biennale did not yet feature on the Czechoslovak art scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effects of cultural cross-dressing on the balance between the material object and its representation in the context of exhibitions. It builds on Timothy Mitchell's ideas of the exhibitionary order to demonstrate how early twentieth-century western exhibition practices were not uniform but open to experimentation in order to produce increasingly effective displays. The article focuses on the Sino-African missionary exhibition arranged in Finland in 1911-1912 in which mannequins and dress racks were replaced by living displays. Thus, exhibition visitors encountered the organizer and his assistants dressed in traditional brightly-coloured Chinese costumes. In addition to revealing a variety of motives and purposes behind this unorthodox handling and presentation of clothes, the article draws attention to the intertwinement of bodies and dresses originating from different cultures and to the meanings they bring to each other and to the exhibition as a whole. Cultural cross-dressing served to create a lively, multisensory and spectacular show, and it was an effective tool, in the context of the Sino-African missionary exhibition, for making Chinese material culture intelligible and meaningful to its audience. This particular mode of representation both blurred and heightened the spectator's experience of cultural difference between East and West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harald Szeemann's 1967 exhibition Science Fiction is ripe for re-examination. Insights gained from unpublished handwritten notes reveal Szeemann's endless listmaking as a connective curatorial methodology that sought to re-create an expansive science fiction 'state of mind'. The resulting exhibition of over 3,000 diverse objects stands in contrast to the sterile space-age aesthetics of the white cube that was, at the same moment, becoming the pre-eminent form of contemporary art display. The popular response to Science Fiction stimulated Szeemann to conceptualize a 'Museum of Today' that would dynamically reflect its moment in time - a concept that resonates in Szeemann's subsequent work and in contemporary curatorial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Victory Over Japan exhibition opened during the heady days following the Allied victory in the Second World War. As one of a series of exhibitions organized by the Ministry of Information (MoI), with pioneering designer Misha Black, the Japan show attracted over one and a half million visitors in just four months. The MoI exhibitions were considered a primary means of wartime communication for the government and Black's pre-war ties to continental figures like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius via the MARS Group ensured that the propagandistic successes of the progressive exhibition designs of the 1930s were seized upon for the war effort. Japan combined simulated jungle-like conditions with modernist idioms and used mixed media displays to create an immersive, sensory exhibition that could convince the public of difficult foreign policies through the construction of an 'official' narrative. This paper analyses Japan and other MoI exhibitions as a means of reflecting on the impact and influence of wartime exhibition design techniques. I argue that not only did the field of mixed media exhibitions develop throughout the war, but that it contributed in significant ways to the blossoming of modern forms of design and display in the post-war cultural arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 1935 Science Museum temporary exhibition on Noise Abatement, situating it in the sound historical context of inter-war Britain, and making an argument that the ‘way of hearing’ it advanced was part of an attempt to shape auditory perception in the interests of a class-bound culture of acoustic civilization. Further, the article uses this exhibition to mount an argument that museum scholars should consider sound not simply as a medium of engagement, but also as a politically interested and socially active field.

The 1947 Vincent Van Gogh retrospective held at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, may seem to be a relatively obscure moment in the history of exhibitions. Yet some artistic and cultural ventures coming out of the show have had interesting afterlives. This article looks at how three productions - a Pathé newsreel story, Van Gogh Exhibition, 1947 (1947); Alain Resnais's short film Van Gogh (1948); and Antonin Artaud's pamphlet Van Gogh, Le Suicidé de la société (1947) - supplement and mediate the Paris exhibition. The exhibition appears, in turn, as a spectacle and social phenomenon (Pathé), a material basis for a narrative about the power of the imaginary in art and life (Resnais), and a dramatization of the impasse between the aesthetic and the social (Artaud). The article highlights the disparity between the logic of supplementarity that unfolds in the vicinity of the 1947 exhibition, where irreducibly elusive or mythic visions of aesthetic exposition predominate, and the double-edged models of supplementarity that circulate in present-day curatorial frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 1935 Science Museum temporary exhibition on Noise Abatement, situating it in the sound historical context of inter-war Britain, and making an argument that the 'way of hearing' it advanced was part of an attempt to shape auditory perception in the interests of a class-bound culture of acoustic civilization. Further, the article uses this exhibition to mount an argument that museum scholars should consider sound not simply as a medium of engagement, but also as a politically interested and socially active field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visits to museums have been studied as hedonic and utilitarian forms of cultural consumption, though limited attention has been given to the access of museum collections online. We perform a unique historic analysis of the visibility of collections in a museum of ethnographic collections and compare 100 years of onsite visits to 5 years online visits. We find two main results: first, access to collections increased substantially online. From a selection of objects available both onsite and online, access grew from an average of 156,000 onsite visits per year to over 1.5 million views online per year. Onsite, the museum received 15.5 million visits in a span of a century while online, collections were viewed 7.9 million times in only the last 5 years. Second, we find a difference in consumer preference for type of object, favouring 3D onsite and 2D online (photographs of objects, particularly when showing them being used). Results support understanding of online heritage consumption and emerging dynamics, particularly outside of an institutional environment, such as Wikipedia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Before the 2000s design occupied a peripheral position in Dutch international cultural policy (ICP). In the first decade of the twenty-first century 'Dutch Design' rose as a key player in the Dutch creative industries, which were assigned a central role in ICP. The formulation of Dutch Design as a creative industry and the embeddedness of the creative industries in identity politics and in geopolitical, economic and diplomatic interests raise urgent questions regarding the essentialist articulation of Dutchness that Dutch Design proposes. Can Dutch Design, formulated as a creative industry enshrined in ICP, represent a conceptualization of Dutchness that corresponds with the empirical heterogeneity and transnationality of the practice of Dutch Design? Or would this entail the dissolution of the very notion of Dutch Design? As a case study, this article traces the negotiations between the Vitra Design Museum and the Dutch national design institutions in charge of implementing ICP in the execution of the exhibition 'Confrontations: Contemporary Dutch Design', held at the Vitra Design Museum Gallery in 2012. It examines how the dynamics of the practical implementation of ICP may accommodate--as well as limit--the construction of the Dutchness of Dutch Design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a contextual analysis of Andy Warhol's landmark exhibition Raid the Icebox 1 (1969) at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Unconventional in both content and installation, it is one of the earliest exhibitions organized by an artist from a museum's permanent collection. Unlike previous studies, which analyse the exhibition through Warhol's biography or artistic practice, this article focuses on the institution and the artist-curator. While the museum sought to render its historical treasures relevant to a younger generation, I argue that Warhol enacted a form of institutional critique that undermined hierarchies of display, value and authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writing of the history of exhibition curating in contemporary art has been largely based on the study of a few pioneer curators, such as Harald Szeemann, Lucy Lippard or Seth Siegelaub, who have been lent the status of authors, occasionally comparable to the artist as author. Nonetheless, if one studies systematically innovations and transformations in exhibition-making since the 1960s, which have given to curating the status of distinct profession and its current high prestige, one may find that the image of a charismatic single-author is, to some degree, a construction. Several crucial historical moments in curating, even when labeled by an individual’s name, were nonetheless connected to collective or collaborative endeavors.