TRANSPARENZ

Polyphonic Recounting – Opening the institution; the case of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies Barcelona

Laurence Rassel (Barcelona)
All the documents generated by the activities of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona are considered to be a public archive, and they will all be digitized. Indeed, an artwork generates documents by its mere existence. These are collected as “physical traces”, “leftovers”, marks of existence of what is defined by those working at and shaping the Museum as events, events that are happening in time and space in the Fundació. We gave the name Arts Combinatòries to the process of archiving, of digitizing and opening a space, real and virtual, that provides access to the archive in the institution. The article reflects on the notion of open access not only in the digital world but also in the museum.

Staging the documentary. Babette Mangolte and the curatorial ‘dispositif’ of performance’s histories

Barbara Clausen (Montréal)
Barbara Clausen thinks about the relationship between experience and knowledge in curating performance art. She will in particular talk about her curatorial work on Babette Mangolte's first international solo exhibition which took place at the VOX center for contemporary art in Montreal in 2013. This exhibition and film retrospective showcased Mangolte's various practices and modes of production, as one of the key chroniclers of 1970s performance in dance, visual arts and theater, ranging from early archival works to new site specific multi-media installations. Clausen will consider the complexity of Mangolte's practices in light of the current processes of change that are taking hold in the visual politics of performance arts’ past and present. In particular the shift from a body to a hybrid medium and archive based practice that has shed its aura of the ephemeral and has fully embraced its material nature. Clausen looks at Mangolte's capacity to differentiate and articulate various performative practices through their transcription into still and moving images such as photography, film, video, and slide installations. An interest that is echoed in Mangolte's desire to question the unfolding of time and its relationship to space within the mise en scène of the exhibition space. The starting point being the artists' re-reading of her early exhibition format as a dispositive to play out the mise-en-abyme of the correlative relationship of performance art to its archival status. Taking the question, how Mangolte's documentaries of the stagings she chronicled are translated into her stagings of the documentary, as the outset to speak about the very contemporary desire to look back into the present.

Partizipation. Publikumsbewegungen im modernen Museum

Elisabeth Timm (Münster)
Praxis, Performanz, Bewegung, Partizipation sind keine Postulate einer museologisch-theoretischen Diskussion, sondern bereits Leitbilder oder mission statements ganzer Häuser geworden. Der Wandel vom repräsentativen zum relationalen Modus des Zeigens wird in der Diskussion zum Wandel des Ausstellens im modernen Museum meist im Gefüge der new museology verortet. Die Ermächtigung des Publikums in partizipativen Ansätzen erscheint somit als Effekt oder Erfolg einer von außen kommenden Kritik der Institution Museum. Dabei wird ein zentraler Faktor kaum berücksichtigt: die Bildungspolitik.