Revista de História da Arte (2019) N.º 14
URI permanente para esta coleção:
Navegar
Entradas recentes
- The past and the future display of the slide-based artwork. Slides de Cavalete (1978-1979) by Ângelo de SousaPublication . Silva, Joana; Ferreira, Joana Lia; Ávila, Maria de Jesus; Ramos, Ana MariaSlides de Cavalete (1978-1979) is a slide-based artwork by the Portuguese artist Ângelo de Sousa (1938-2011). This paper explores issues related to the exhibition of Slides de Cavalete through the view of a conservator. In the absence of the artist, the display history of this work was traced with the aim of providing a base to substantiate the decision-making process of its exhibition and preservation. Published and unpublished documentation related to the exhibitions was consulted and personalities who could have witnessed the presentation of the artwork were interviewed. During this study it was understood that Ângelo de Sousa first presented the work projected on a canvas over an easel, for the exhibition A Fotografia como Arte/A Arte como Fotografia in 1979. In the two exhibitions carried out in 2017, the work was presented as a digital projection without the use of canvas and easel. This detachment from the first presentation, might have led to a misunderstanding of the work. Based on the conducted research and following the current procedures, display options for the exhibition of Slides de Cavalete are discussed.
- “L’Immenso Seicento”. The 1922 Florence exhibition of Italian Seicento art and the politics of Caravaggio studiesPublication . Debono, SandroThe Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Seicento e Settecento held in 1922 at the then Pitti Royal Palace (Florence) was the first in a series of exhibitions defining an art historical chronology, schools and the hierarchies of Baroque art, most of which are still valid to date. This exhibition was also the first to showcase a re-discovered Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) then presented akin to a revelation. The exhibition undoubtedly dealt with new readings of art history at face value but was also motivated by explicitly political overtones informed by the politics and international ambitions of the Kingdom of Italy. This paper explores the duality of the exhibitions’ complex narrative bridging politics and art history. It also reviews the genesis of 20th century Caravaggio studies and the ways and means how this was acknowledged within the Anglo-Saxon world of academia over time.
- Peculiar relationships on display: Belgian art exhibitions in Philadelphia and Buenos Aires in 1882 and 1887Publication . Dhaenens, LaurensThe present paper studies two exhibitions that are virtually unknown in the field: the Belgian art expositions in Philadelphia and Buenos Aires in 1882 and 1887. The exhibitions took place outside the contexts of universal expositions and world fairs but they were not private commercial ventures. They were government projects, driven by consuls and by the King Leopold II. For this reason, I consider these exhibitions as results of economic, political and colonial endeavors rather than artistic products. The focus is not on the artworks, but on the dynamics underlying, and generated by, the exhibitions. As this study demonstrates, these art shows were not just instruments to open new markets for Belgian art abroad, but also constituted a medium to negotiate and shape relationships and narratives with and in foreign countries.
- More for Less: art, language and the corporation in inn7o:Art and Economics exhibition (1971-72) at the Hayward Gallery, LondonPublication . Jackson, KatherineConsidered the most unsuccessful show in the Hayward Gallery’s history, the Artist Placement Group’s exhibition inn7o: Art and Economics (1971-72, London) was advertised as an “exhibition in time.” The exhibition was an opportunity for the Artist Placement Group (APG) to document their progress in negotiating artist placements within industrial corporations, such as British Steel, Esso Petroleum, and ICI Fibres. The exhibition co-opted corporate language and ritual, creating a replica of a typical boardroom where meetings between artists and members of industry took place, live, throughout the entirety of the exhibition. This paper re-considers the inn7o exhibition within the context of a shifting British economy and subsequently a re-defining of Britain’s intellectual left. This paper will argue APG’s radicalism should not be defined by democratic participation, but instead, in terms of how language within an exhibition can be used to redefine discourse, blurring and subverting the boundaries between art and economics.
- The closed exhibition: when form needs a breakPublication . Bilbao, AnaIt has been over 200 years that the term “exhibition” (roughly in the meaning in which we use it today) appeared for the first time, when philosopher Friedrich Schlegel mentioned it in a letter to a friend after visiting the Louvre Museum in 1802. In addition to the concept’s long history, exhibitions are extensive, in the sense that they reach ample geographies, and are often under pressure to reach large numbers of people. They are also exhaustive, in the sense that they entail a wide range of formats and sizes and in that they represent diverse ideologies. I will explore the question of whether the exhibition – in its concept, its form, its life, its omnipresence – is in addition exhausted and whether this potentially hinders its societal impact, assuming this medium is able to offer such possibility. Is it a practice that is potentially consumed, drained, or depleted, and fatigued of being simultaneously so many things, in such a variety of ways, in so many places of the world and for this extended period of time? Or does it simply need a rest to recoup its creative energies? These questions will be analysed through the lens of “closed exhibitions” of art (1960-2017), which arguably counter the logic of overproduction. This essay argues that closed exhibitions could potentially trigger novel reflections on issues of commonality and shared experience.
- Biennials, there and here: thinking about the “Venetian formula” and the São Paulo Biennial in the 1960sPublication . MORETHY COUTO, MARIA DE FATIMAIn the past few years, due to the remarkable development of art biennials around the globe and their public popularity, different research projects have drawn attention to their history and how they have impacted on the production and reception of artworks in various local and regional scenes. Focusing on two texts, written within one year of each other, by Mário Pedrosa and Pierre Restany, important cultural agents of the time, I shall address the impact of some of these shows in the 1960s, especially the Venice and the São Paulo Biennials. Moreover, I intend to assess their hierarchical position on the international art scene at the time, asking one main question: since its inception, the São Paulo Biennial has adopted the Venice model, but at what costs?
- Exhibition views: towards a typology of the installation shotPublication . Floyd, Kathryn M.This essay explores the idea of photographs of exhibitions, often used as archival materials for studying the history of exhibitions, as a specific genre of image making. It explores the basic concepts, conventions, and functions of so-called “installation shots” or “exhibition views,” and constructs a basic typology of typical visual elements by studying the approximately 600 photographs reproduced in Mousse Magazine’s 2015-2016 issue #51 entitled “Exhibition Views 1985-1995.” In particular, this essay considers the way exhibition photographs reify images of complex spaces and events while simultaneously suggesting narrative, movement, and complexity in their static imagery.
- The publication as evocation: exhibition histories’ printed matterPublication . Imizcoz, CatalinaThis article looks at three case studies to probe into the fruitful relation between art exhibitions and the publications that follow from them. Phaidon’s Exhibitions That Made Art History are examples of the weightiness of exhibitions’ reception, and useful to analyse the ploys with which exhibition histories impact the construction of art histories. A couple of Mousse magazine issues help to expand the possibilities of documentation, criticise the reliance on images and ponder if rhizomatic histories can be woven from a plurality of voices. The exhibition catalogue of When Attitudes Become Form (2013) serves to unpack exhibitions’ “aura” and the possibility of thinking beyond their (un)repeatability. Following the idea that publications cannot be regarded as neutral evocations of exhibitions, the article traces the ways in which these two platforms of display intertwine to create exhibition histories.
- Resistance to theory: the ideology of “the curatorial” and the history of exhibitionsPublication . Vogel, FelixThe number of books and PhD dissertations dedicated to the history of exhibitions in art history is constantly growing. Most of these publications originate from curatorial studies, a field that is only loosely connected to the discipline of art history. A striking feature of these texts is that “art works” are almost entirely absent, and more or less the same can be said for “the exhibition”. Instead of discussing the exhibition as such, these authors are interested in biographies (most of the time in fact hagiographies) of curators or descriptions of exhibitions, while avoiding theoretical questions about the status of exhibitions. My article deals with what I consider a major problem with these texts, i.e. the absence of a theory of exhibitions and the substitution of such a theory by the vague construct of “the curatorial”. I offer a symptomatic reading that looks at how different actors in the field of exhibition-making establish an understanding and discourse concerning exhibitions. This reading focuses on “the curatorial”, which, even though it does not qualify as a theory in the proper sense, nonetheless performs the function of a theory in curatorial discourse. To be sure, the texts (by authors such as Beatrice von Bismarck, Maria Lind, and Jean-Paul Martinon) that I analyse do not constitute a cohesive notion of “the curatorial”, but they do exhibit some unifying aspects: the distinction between “curating” and “the curatorial”; the expansion of “the curatorial” to fields other than the exhibition; the claim of autonomy; and the understanding of “the curatorial” as an act of institutional critique. In this article I argue that the concept “the curatorial” functions less as an explanation of a certain practice than as the reproduction of a certain consent and, accordingly, serves to regulate discourse. I analyse both the epistemological impact and interest of the construction of “the curatorial” as well as the context in which texts focusing on this concept are produced (which includes asking what consequences they have for art history proper).
- Exhibition view. The primary sources of exhibition history: the example of the Catalogue Raisonné of the Centre Pompidou’s ExhibitionsPublication . Parcollet, RémiMost museums produce, over time, a photographic archive. These visual archives tend to dominate the various documents used to reconstruct past exhibitions, and increasingly supply more and more publications, especially publications on the history of the institution. But, even more than this, they play a central role as essential sources for the history of exhibitions. By putting works in perspective with each other and the venue, and by showing the specific nature of a particular display, an exhibition view photograph is the outcome of a viewpoint (the eye of the photographer) and goes well beyond any form of reproduction. Questioning it as such opens up a particularly fruitful avenue of research, restores to the photographers their fundamental contribution to the history of art, and better reveals a creeping effect involving works being rendered heritage by exhibitions, an effect accentuated by photography and its digitization.