Project Presentation
Museum Collections in the Context of the Event Imperative
Since its founding, the art museum has been organized around both collections and exhibitions. Over the course of the 20th century, exhibitions acquired a decisive stature by virtue of the fact that they drew more visitors and attracted greater media attention. The development of museum studies at the universities over the past twenty years has led to numerous publications, a significant share of which have been devoted to the rhetorical and discursive aspects of exhibitions. But none have studied the current situation of collections and their relative marginalization, which varies according to institution. Yet, despite this discursive, media-driven inflation of the exhibition, more and more museums are openly expressing a desire to develop and promote their collections. With this in mind, they have set out to change the ways in which collections are presented, bringing them up to date through new exhibition formats and novel uses that break certain taboos. Their strategies include, for example, circulating part of a collection, extending carte blanche invitations to artists and guest curators, installing contemporary artworks or even entire exhibitions in galleries normally devoted to permanent collections, twinning historical and contemporary works, and featuring a specifically targeted work or an exceptional acquisition. These ways of doing things introduce new forms and methods into the design and treatment of collections, significantly reshaping three parameters: (1) their relationship to time, which has shifted from the vast expanse of the longue durée to a more convulsive event-driven time; (2) their relationship to space, which argues for the exhibition of individual works hors série and outside the settings in which they could predictably be seen; (3) their relationship to usage, insofar as certain strategies are intended to inscribe collections within an event- and media-driven register, rather than in the framework of their encyclopaedic paradigm. How will this new inflation of the event affect the inscription within a narrative structure of art that is henceforth displayed in museums, and what consequences will it have for the habit of viewing works from a heritage perspective?
The research and inquiry group CIÉCO intends to take stock of these strategies and to reflect their practices and consequences in partnerships with three museums: the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée d’art de Joliette. Seventy to seventy-five per cent of the visitors to Québec museums are local, which is very unlike the situation in Paris and New York, where most museum visitors are tourists. How is it possible, then, to attract visitors to permanent collections—apart, that is, from those necessarily rare times when a museum acquires an exceptional work, or opens a new wing and reorganizes its collections accordingly? Our research project benefits from an unhoped-for momentum, since these three museums have all recently embarked on major architectural overhauls that are required to integrate massive donations to collections and to reorganize the works that are part and parcel of them. But our researchers and partners have also come together around four common and fundamental objectives: (1) to gain exposure for collections in the current context of an almost exclusive enthusiasm for exhibitions; (2) to reflect on the consequences, for the heritage dimension of collections, of these new event-driven usages; (3) to generate new knowledge of this unprecedented development through the identification, classification and analysis of these new museum practices; (4) to foster institutional de-compartmentalization between the two poles that support the discipline of art history (the museum and the university) and, in doing so, to train researchers who are more attuned to the twofold reality of the professional environment in which they will most likely work.
CIÉCO is also engaged in creating more effective mechanisms of knowledge transfer and exchange by means of a Web platform and a work plan that appeal equally to universities and museum professionals. This plan provides for thematic workshops in which researchers and museum curators can discuss the theoretical and practical aspects of the project; targeted activities organized and presented by the partners; activities designed to publicize our research findings (e.g. study sessions, lectures, symposia); and finally, training activities for young researchers and future professionals in art history and museum studies.
The CIÉCO Web site is a tool for organizing, mobilizing and transferring knowledge in ways that will make it possible to follow the development of event-oriented uses of collections. It is used to gather data; to identify the aforementioned new museum practices from their origins through to their current exponents; and to document, classify and analyze these practices. At the initial stage of its conception, the site comprises introductions to the project, the research team and its collaborators, as well as to the partner museums and professionals. There is also a description of past and upcoming activities and our initial research findings.
CIÉCO enjoys financial support in the form of a Partnership Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It is also supported by the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Université du Québec en Outaouais, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
