CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Collecting and Modes of Display
Art about how things are gathered, classified and shown, from cabinets of curiosities to artists who invent museums and rearrange archives.
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About
Some artworks take collecting and display as their subject: the shelf, the vitrine, the label and the logic by which things are sorted. Their ancestors are the cabinets of curiosities of 16th- and 17th-century Europe, where shells, coins, instruments and paintings shared crowded rooms. Charles Willson Peale showed himself lifting a curtain on his natural history displays in The Artist in His Museum (1822).
Modern artists turned display into critique. Marcel Duchamp packed miniature replicas of his work into a portable case, the Boîte-en-valise (1935–41). Marcel Broodthaers opened a fictional museum with a department of eagles in 1968, and Fred Wilson rearranged a historical collection in 1992 to expose the stories it had left out. Mark Dion stages scientific-looking excavations and specimen cabinets; Haim Steinbach lines up everyday products on wedge-shaped shelves. Such work asks who chooses, how things are classified and what an arrangement does to meaning.
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