Art, politics and the museum

The porous museum : the politics of art, rupture and recycling in modern Romania / Gabriela Nicolescu.

London : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023.

x, 207 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015, under the title: Art, politics and the museum : tales of continuity and rupture in modern Romania.

"The Porous Museum examines questions of museum practice, aesthetics and politics through a focused study of The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. The museum has functioned successively as a museum of art, a communist museum, the headquarters of the communist secret police, and a museum of folk art. Gabriela Nicolescu traces the museum's spectacular biography and follows the transformation of its practices and aesthetics through three very different political regimes in the 20th and early 21st century: monarchist, socialist and post-socialist. Nicolescu's fascinating study starts with a focus on a dumped and smashed statue of the revolutionary figureheads Marx, Engels and Lenin in the museum's rear yard as an expression of the complicated journey of modern Romania. She considers questions of recycling and rupture, with some exhibits and practices being carried over from one regime or historical period to another, while others are discarded in favour of the completely new. In this the practices of the museum mimic that of the wider nation state and the ways in which the past is remembered or rejected. The interdependency of politics, ethics and aesthetics that Nicolescu terms 'porosity' is an attribute of museums all over the world. Drawing on original anthropological research in a key ethnographic museum in Romania and in other anthropological museums in eastern and western Europe, the book moves beyond regional and media stereotypes of the folk, of what is an ethnographic/ anthropological museum, and of socialism or eastern Europe. Instead, Nicolescu's study argues for the importance of life histories and critical and creative snippets of institutional biographies to produce the history of a nation in its multiple phases of being"-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Nicolescu, Gabriela. Porous museum London : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023

English

January 03, 2024

Includes bibliographical references and index.