About aspects of artistic presentations.

1. Aspects of Presentation 2
Meaning, context, new museology, critical exhibition-making
Aldo Bakker - ‘Emmy + Gijs + Aldo’ Aldo Bakker - ‘Museum Van Loon’

2. • ‘Presentation’ from the perspectives of material culture studies and linguistics
Aspects of presentation
Material culture studies Linguistics+
context and meaning
New Museology Susan Pearce, 1990
Peter Vergo, 1989
Art History
Visual culture studies

3. A theoretical framework: The New Museology
• New Museology - Recent discipline, in the Anglo-Saxon world
- Keywork : The New Museology,
Peter Vergo, 1989
- Exhibiting = contextual
(cf. linguistics)
- The meaning of an object is inextricably linked to its
context
‘Objects don’t have a single, fixed meaning; meaning is essentially created by
different sorts of contexts’

4. ‘Every presentation of an object, far from being neutral, is in fact part of a dialectical
process’
A complex web of relationships / meanings; the object is itself multi-layered with
different meanings:
• Historical, social, personal context of the object: multi-layered object
• Context curator / museum as an institute (cult. / soc. / pol. context, pers. context)
(subtext implicitly present in the presentation)
‘Curators, whether they think about it or not, really create how you are to view and
think about objects’
• Spatial context (near / far)
• Context viewer (cult. / soc. / pol. context, pers. context)

5. 1. Historical, social, personal context of the object
Vb. Garde-robes, Musée de la mode et du textile, Paris, 2000
Personal, intime history

6. Vb. L’Intime, Le collectionneur derrière la porte, La Maison Rouge, Parijs, 2004

8. 2. Context curator / museum
Vb. ART/artifact, Center for African Art, N.Y., 1988
ART/artifact, Center For African Art, New York, 1988
‘Susan Vogel effectively demonstrated the impact of the style of presentation on the interpretation of the objects’.
‘To question what you are seeing and how the very frame of the exhibition affects
it’.

9. Vb. The White Cube spatial context for presenting contemporary jewellery
cf. Marjan Unger: jewellery in exhibition needs to regain its context, to emphasise its
many intrinsic values

10. Vb. Dinie Besems, Epifyt, Amsterdam, 2002
Epifyt, 2002, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam

11. Epifyt, 2002, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam

12. Fred Wilson, Metalwork 1793-1880, 1992
Vb. Fred Wilson; Mining the Museum, Baltimore, 1992
‘What they put on view says a lot about the museum, but what they don’t put on view says even more’

13. Vb. Barbara Kruger, Picturing Greatness, MOMA, N.Y., 1988

14. 3. Spatial context
Vb. Axel Vervoordt, INFINITUM, Venice, 2009
Axel Vervoordt, Academia Qui est-tu?, Paris, 2008

15. Vb. Aldo Bakker, Villa Noailles, Hyères, 2010

16. 4. Context viewer
Iris Eichenberg, 1997
Jack Cunningham, Memory Kit, 2004
Vb. Maker, Wearer, Viewer, Marzee, 2005

17. Vb. Blog.mode: addressing fashion, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 2008

18. 5. Critical exhibition-making
“The best displays are often those which are most evidently self-conscious, heightening the
spectator’s awareness of the means of representation, involving the spectator in the process of
display” (Peter Vergo)
Vb. Judith Clark, Malign Muses, When Fashion Turns Back, MoMu Antwerp, 2004-2005

20. Vb. Emmy + Gijs + Aldo, Zuiderzeemuseum, Enkhuizen, 2010-2011