ABSTRACT
This book examines the relationship between contemporary Australian artists and the museum. It considers the museum as a site for artistic intervention, the impact of artists on the museum and the museum’s expectations in engaging artists to interpret its collections and the ways that working in the museum contributes to artists’ practice. We propose that over the last two decades this relationship has been mutually constitutive, signicant as much to the development of contemporary artistic practice as to that of museums in a variety of elds, including art but extending to natural, social and cultural history. By analysing a wide range of projects from the 1990s to the present, we explore the many manifestations of this relationship and its changes over time, from institutional critique, to post-colonial revisions, to artists working in curatorial capacities, and to the re-embrace of aesthetic e ects largely abandoned in both post-conceptual art and didactic museum display. To tackle the complex ways artists and museums interact in contemporary times, we have adopted a transdisciplinary approach that draws on art history, theory and criticism, cultural and post-colonial studies as well as museum studies. We hope to contribute to understanding the role of Australian artists in the museum and the reciprocal benets of collaboration between the museum and the artist, and to mapping this strain of art and museum practice forged predominantly by established, mid-career artists whose work has signicantly inuenced the development of Australian art. e book, we trust, o ers unique insights into the shared histories and changing cultures of art and museums in the contemporary era – post the new museology, post post-modernism.
