Permanent Loan
part of the After the Museum: The Home Front 2013 exhibition
Museum of Art and Design, New York
March 12 – June 9, 2013
Designers of the installation: Project Projects
Statement: «Project Projects was invited by guest curator Dan Rubinstein and manager of public programs Jake Yuzna to create an installation at the Museum of Art and Design as part of its annual Home Front series. The 2013 theme, “After the Museum,” encouraged participating designers, thinkers, and writers to speculate upon how the role of arts institutions may expand and evolve in the future. Created in response, Permanent Loan proposed an alternative model for the distribution, curation, and presentation of artworks as a commentary upon the increasingly digital age, and the new collaborative approaches that such technologies may enable.
The installation takes as its main provocation the idea of a “Museum of Reproductions,” which can be traced at least as far back as the writings of Aby Warburg, Otto Neurath, and Andrew [André] Malraux, each of whom conceived of modes of viewing art that would democratize and even revolutionize the experience. The urgency of these ideas has only intensified in recent history with the growth of digital museum collections, the widespread distribution of online images, and the availability of low-cost production technologies such as 3-D printing, all of which allow anyone – inside or outside of a museum – to reproduce and distribute multiple copies of an image or artwork.
Following pre-contemporary ideas of organizing by more metaphorical affinities, Permanent Loan presents an unorthodox selection of works from online museum collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Rijksmuseum, The Tate, Walker Art Center, and Yale University Art Gallery. Reproduced as black-and-white digital outputs and 3D-printed objects, the selections span both historical eras and stylistic genres. The diversity is highlighted by a formal looseness of presentation, and suggestive of a more associative curatorial practice that nonetheless acknowledges the nondigital, 1:1 physical scale of the original works.»
