My interest in the work of museums, and the ways in which contemporary art can interact with and signify museum practice, has led me to investigate the use of the vitrine as a mode of exhibiting artworks. The term vitrine refers to a glass case made for housing a collection of selected objects to create a visual display. Although I am primarily interested in the tactile and relational aspects of artworks, the exploration of the vitrine as a vehicle for the organisation of related objects is an area which I feel could intersect with my practice.
Sculpture and the Vitrine
As John Welchman describes in the introduction to Sculpture and the Vitrine, “The vitrine serves (with increasing critical reflexivity) as a general term governing the re-zoning of such objects as they enter into collections, whether private or public, and are readied for display. In this condition the vitrine is, first and foremost, a marker of difference. It separates the objects and things it contains from their contexts, puts them into relation with other objects, alike and dissimilar, and, above all, perhaps, serves to reinforce both the intrinsic and aesthetic values of what it displays”. (Welchman, 2013, p.2)
He goes on to suggest four potential areas for consideration between sculpture and the vitrine, and the ways in which these instances have influenced art practice since the beginning of the twentieth century. The four examples include the pre-modern reliquary, the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosity, the shop front or window display, and finally the fourth thematic area which is “marked by a loose genealogy of work that questions the very nature of the transparency, commodification, entrapment, and speciminization underwriting the viewing model of the vitrine” (Welchman, 2013, p.10).
Institutional Critique
These examples include a mixture of theoretical and physical works critiquing the nature of collecting and viewing artworks within the frame of the vitrine, and by extension, the museum. Such concerns led to the development, in the 1960s and 70s, of an exploration of the nature of the museum, its connections, and politics, known as Institutional Critique. (Welchman, 2013, pp. 3-4)
Institutional critique aimed to revisit the claims of Enlightenment philosophy which promised “the production of public exchange, of a public sphere, of a public subject”. As such, artists who felt that museums were not fulfilling these commitments aimed to disrupt relations within the museum structure through acts of negation, disruption, parody and written manifestos. Artists whose work coincided with these ways of working included Daniel Buren, Eduardo Favrio, Julio Le Parc, Enzo Mari, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Smithson, and others, and incorporated practices spanning the globe in cities including Buenos Aires, Rosario, Paris, Warsaw and New York. (Alberro and Stimson, 2009, pp. 3-5)
The politics of representation, collection and display continued to feature within the art practices of 1980s postmodernism in the works of Barbara Kruger, Mark Dion and Orshi Drozdik, and again in the 1990s with works such as Cornelia Parker’s ‘The Maybe’, at the Serpentine Gallery, which displayed 36 cabinets of historical memorabilia, including a sleeping Tilda Swinton. (Welchman, 2013, pp. 4,16)
Making vitrines
This array of historical practice relating to the use of the vitrine enables me to contextualise my work within a fine art tradition. However, this also creates further questions about how I might attempt to address these issues differently. Furthermore, the use of the vitrine, established as it is within an Enlightenment tradition of separating and recontextualising items according to museum classification schemas, also disrupts previous ideas of incorporating non-modern and networked ways of thinking into my project.
Despite this, I feel that these questions can be addressed through a new investigation of the vitrine through integrating it into the the format of the work, as opposed to creating the work and its display case separately. This practice can also be equated with a ‘whole book philosophy’ in artists’ book practice, where the format and the content of the work are developed simultaneously, both complimenting and reinforcing the message of the work.
Further reading:
http://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades_Project.pdf
Institutional Critique: An anthology of Artists’ Writings
The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968
