April 2024
I completed my secondment at the Van Abbemuseum in The Netherlands in 2024. This institution is shifting its focus to become a Constituent Museum where ‘museums put relationships at the centre of their operations.’(1) The museum is also in the process of developing new guidelines for the museum’s archive. The institution is asking ‘What does a constituent archive look like’ in the context of the development of a new curatorial plan for the permanent exhibition in 2025 that will embody the practices of the constituent museum.
My practice sits within the field of socially engaged participatory and collaborative practice and I am concerned with how we might preserve or archive the participatory element of the work as another medium or foundational aspect of the work. For the museum, as a commissioning body and exhibition/social space for the work, it is important to consider what its role is in preserving the relational aspects of the work and how this reflects on the role of the museum in society in the 21st century.
For my research, I chose a participatory work by the Danish group Superflex to consider how I might revisit a work in the archive to flesh out its participatory aspects. Free Sol Lewitt was part of In-between Minimalisms / Free Sol LeWitt curated by Christiane Berndes, Daniel McClean and SUPERFLEX which formed part of a larger programme Play Van Abbe – Part 2: Time Machines at the museum in 2010. Superflex presented a workshop facility within the exhibition space where copies of Untitled (Wall Structure) by Sol Lewitt (1972) were reproduced 23 times during the exhibition. The public signed up for a lottery where they could win one of these replicas. The work considered issues around authorship and usership, and public and private ownership, and the status of the art object within this nexus.
I contacted the participants of the work and received 4 responses. I carried out interviews with the participants at the locations of the work to discuss their motivation for taking part in the project, their relationship to art and art objects before and after their involvement? The information has been collected through audio and visual means and the intention is to create an audio essay that will draw out these themes, alongside a discussion of the critical and practical concerns of the work in relation to the evolution of the museum in the 21st century.