Exhibition Experiments

Exhibition Experiments is a lively and imaginative anthology which considers experiments with museological form that challenge our understanding and experience of museums and exhibitions. Exploring examples from around the world, Exhibition Experiments investigates a range of topical issues which chart the frontier of museum studies. These include: the popularity and proliferation of museum experimentation, novel exhibitionary forms and their implications for knowledge and identity, transformations of architecture and design, narrative and navigation, juxtapositions of art with science and ethnography, the fate of conventional notions of “object” and “representation,” and the disorientating yet stimulating consequences of all this for museum–going. This innovative collection brings together a mix of art historians, anthropologists, curators, and sociologists to question traditional disciplinary boundaries. Contributors tackle a range of examples of experimentalism from many different countries and exhibition spaces, and combine them with cutting–edge museum theory. The result is an exciting volume that captures the changes and challenging new possibilities facing museum studies.

Table of Contents. 1. Experiments in Exhibition, Ethnography, Art and Science. Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald. 2. Legibility and Affect: Museums as New Media. Michelle Henning. 3. The Labrynthine Aesthetic in Contemporary Museum Design. Paul Basu. 4. Exhibition as Film. Mieke Bal. 5. Experimenting with Representation: Iconoclash! and Making Things Public. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. 6. Walking on a Story Board, Performing Shared Incompetence. Exhibiting "Science" in the Public Realm. Xperiment! – Bernd Kraeftner, Judith Kroell, and Isabel Warner. 7. From Capital to Enthusiasm: an Exhibitionary Practice. Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. 8. The Politics of Display. Ann–Sofi Sidén’s WARTE MAL!, Art History and Social Documentary. A seminar with Laura Bear, Clare Carolin, Griselda Pollock and Ann–Sofi Sidén. Edited by Clare Carolin and Cathy Haynes. 9. From Exhibiting to Installing Ethnography: Experiments at the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra (Portugal) 1999–2005. Nuno Porto. 10. Raising Specters: Welcoming Hybrid Phantoms at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Anne Lorimer. 11. Exposing Expo: exhibition entrepreneurship and experimental reflexivity in late modernity. Alexa Färber

Sharon Macdonald is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is author of Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (2002), and editor of A Companion to Museum Studies (Blackwell 2006) and Theorizing Museums (with G. Fyfe, Blackwell 1996). Paul Basu is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. An active exhibition experimenter, he is author of Highland Homecomings (2007).

“A challenging and fascinating book that theorizes exhibitions as media for encounter, enactment, experience, and the creation rather than the transmission of knowledge. It opens up a whole new way of thinking about the potential of galleries and museums. Essential reading.” Eilean Hooper–Greenhill, University of Leicester <!––end––> “This scintillating collection offers the most original treatment yet of experiment as an appealing, provoking ideology that has pulled together diverse critical approaches in the study of modern culture. An absorbing read all the way through.” George Marcus, University of California, Irvine “This book combines stimulating essays by established scholars who have pioneered research into exhibitionary practice, with exciting and innovative chapters by younger scholars. It will be of equal relevance to museum professionals and the audiences who participate in the museum experience.” Howard Morphy, Australian National University