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PERFORMING THE MUSEUM The Reader Editors: Aleksandra Sekulić and Dušan Grlja Contents Dušan Grlja, Aleksandra Sekulić: Introduction .............................................................7 From Dissolution of the Past to Meta-Future in the Meta-Museum Boris Buden: In the Museum of Museums ..................................................................... 17 Jelena Vesić, Vladimir Jerić Vlidi: Museum – Art – Education: Ways of Doing, Ways of Seeing, Ways of Thinking ................................................23 Institutional Self-Reflection Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín: Imagining the Relational Museum: Institutional Destabilization, Pedagogies and Archives ..............45 Barbara Steiner and Anna Lena von Helldorff: Collection Reversed — Transfer, Transformation and Ruptures ..................52 Interface of Disruption Oriol Fondevila: Performativity as a Modus Operandi .......................................... 61 Gordana Nikolić, Sanja Kojić Mladenov: Archive + Power. Performing the Archive in Art. ..................................................72 Performing the Museum - Interpreters Performing the Museum Project ........................................................................................... 81 Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad ...................................................82 Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona ...................................................................................94 Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb ............................................................................108 Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, Slovenj Gradec .............122 Appendix I: Performing the Exhibition ...........................................................................132 Appendix II: Interventionist Wager ..................................................................................137 Appendix III .................................................................................................................................144 Challenging Museums: Case studies Jasna Jakšić: Didactic Exhibition .....................................................................................147 Mirta Pavić: The Didactic Exhibition: The Unexpected Challenges of Conservation, Restoration and Presentation ..........................151 Ana Kutleša: Culture on The Market - The Gallery of Contemporary Art in the Early 1960s .........................................154 Branka Benčić: Motovun Video Meetings 1976 - 151 The First Video Art Workshop in Croatia ..................................................................168 The Space of Antagonism Andreja Hribernik: Utopian Moments ...........................................................................177 Gal Kirn and Niloufar Tajeri: Notes on the Archive of Dissent: Monument to Sub/Urban Riots ........................................................................................185 Dušan Grlja, Aleksandra Sekulić Introduction Aleksandra Sekulić and Dušan Grlja Performing the Museum – Introduction to a Reader The projectPerforming the Museum was devised by the main project partners – the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, Croatia), the Museum of Contem- porary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad, Serbia), the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelo- na, Spain) and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška (Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia) – in order to re-evaluate and rethink their resources with the aim “to generate new thinking and open new practical possibilities on the future of such institutions.”1 This would be achieved by establishing “an active dialogue with the audience through a series of presentations, productions and educational workshops, and through the presentation of artistic research to the public.”2 This publication presents an overview of those activities and the reflections of its actors, as well as presentations of similar undertakings and some general reflections “outside” the common, narrowly conceived museum context. The project hinged on the museums involved actually opening up the- ir resources – material resources, like collections, archives and other museum resources, as well as their working methods and other forms of cultural capital – to “outside” actors to help them create different museum projects that would “raise awareness of institutional resources that fall outside the usual frame- work of museum collections, permanent collections and museum exhibitions, and draw attention to museum documentation, architecture and exhibition Aleksandra Sekulić and Dušan Grlja _ conditions, to the context of procurement of art and of its creation, to insti- tutional written and unwritten history…”3 Those “outsiders” – mainly invited artists but also curators, educators and theorists – we called “interpreters” re- 1 The “About” section at the project’s website (http://performingthemuseum.net/site/spip. php?rubrique1) 2 Ibid. 7 3 Ibid. presenting “different kinds of agents associated with cultural production and museum thinking.”4 In this specific case the widely used term “performance” develops two distinct meanings of the word that serve to illustrate the challenges contemporary mu- seums are faced with today: performance as restored behaviour, and perfor- mance as a level of efficiency. In general, to perform is to execute an activity in a pre-defined way – to play a certain role in an expected or prescribed manner. In his definition of performance Richard Schechner emphasizes repetition as its key feature: “Performances… are ‘restored behaviours,’ ‘twice-behaved be- haviours,’ performed actions that people train for and rehearse.”5 Neverthe- less, the meaning of performance in this project most certainly does not aim at being a mere simplistic repetition of traditional activities connected to the role(s) of museum. Although performance is an act of reiteration, of re-enact- ment, it can never be the same, since every repetition, whether voluntarily or not, introduces differences that produce changes in the structure and meanin- g(s) of the very activity that is being performed.6 This interplay of repetition and difference is precisely what this project seeks to enact in order to restore centuries-old museum practices in the very different context of contemporary society. The challenge is to rethink, examine and experiment with different performances of museum in order to acquire knowledge that is much needed to (re)position such seemingly dated institutions in new social circumstances. Starting from the largely obvious premise that museums are and have long been in crisis, the main challenge is to provide a set of possible answers to the question what is to be abolished and what is to be preserved in the structure and workings of the institution of museum. Another meaning of the term “performance” has an explicitly economic di- mension and carries some important and unavoidable connotations for muse- ums. Nowadays it is widely used in the context of the global economic crisis and refers to the measuring the success of an enterprise in terms of efficien- cy vis-à-vis its organization, resources, costs, expediency and profitability. 4 The “Interpreters” section at the project’s website (http://performingthemuseum.net/site/spip. php?rubrique4) 5 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd edition), Routledge, London and New York, 2013, p. 28 6 “Performances are made from bits of restored behavior, but every performance is different from every other. First, fixed bits of behavior can be recombined in endless variations. Second, no event can exactly copy another event. Not only the behavior itself – nuances of mood, tone of voice, body language, and so on, but also the specific occasion and context make each instance _ Performing the Museum – Introduction to a Reader 8 unique.” Ibid., p. 29 “Performance management includes activities which ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner.”7 Thus, better per- formance means the job is done in shorter time using fewer resources. Such connotations point to a new social and economic structure, wherein the previ- ously extensive state-funded public sector is radically cut back, driving public institutions towards financial self-sustainability and so-called resource opti- mization. While traditionally, under welfare-state capitalism, public instituti- ons such as museums depended predominantly on the nation-state for both socio-political agendas as well as support, today they depend increasingly on their audiences to help sustain themselves. Museums are challenged to prove their very existence in the current political context of Europe, whose main in- strument of cultural policy – the Creative Europe program – supports projects like this one. EU cultural policy is designed around self-sustainable models of cultural tourism and cultural industries. Museums surely take this challenge as a threat to their traditional institutional position; but it also represents a chance consciously treat their publics as clients in a way that would be part of a wider cultural democratization process – a chance to reshape “objectives and indicators” by opening up their mechanisms of knowledge production in order to involve the communities around them. The projectPerforming the Museum is based on an acute awareness of present day material and ideological circumstances, and of a possible direction in the museum’s future development: “The traditional roles of the contemporary mu- seum are changing. Its most important activities are

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