In my last post I spoke of the MAM's new logo and my first visit to its permanent exhibitions. What I failed to mention, however, is that I also had a unique opportunity to go behind the scenes of the museum. It was fascinating to see the invisible hands and the hard work that gets put into even the "simplest" of exhibits. We had the chance to meet the curators behind the upcoming exhibitions and listen as they spoke about the artist and their work. Amazing, right?
It was. Modern and contemporary art museums like this one are exceptionally mobile and the ideology and intention behind each work and each exhibit can easily be lost in that movement. Although I believe they are still more visible than those at other art museums, they're difficult to grasp for the untrained eye and uninformed mind. Discovering Bertille Bak's inspiration for her work (marginal communities) and the role these people play in creating her exhibits was incredible. She literally spent months living amongst nomadic Romanians. Then, to learn the great historical influences in Slovakian artist, Roman Ondák's works! My gosh. I would have no idea otherwise, let alone such a thorough understanding. As I recently read in Museum Materialities:
"...most often it [the object-information package] does so almost entirely through textually-provided meaning, and threatens to foreclose a more basic, but no less potent, bodily and emotional response to the material itself (c.f. Greenblatt's view of what museums have lost in evolving from temples of wonder to temples of resonance, 1991).
Next week, when I go to the opening, a night when the museum will surely be all decked out in their entertaining best, I'll have that privileged background to lead me through the halls of the MAM. What an honor.
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