The Porous Museum
eBook - ePub

The Porous Museum

The Politics of Art, Rupture and Recycling in Modern Romania

  1. 224 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Porous Museum

The Politics of Art, Rupture and Recycling in Modern Romania

About this book

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 carried over from one regime to another, whilst others have been discarded in favour of the completely new. Through this process, the museum can been seen as a microcosm 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. Applying original anthropological research to key ethnographic museums in Romania and elsewhere in Europe, the book moves beyond regional and media stereotypes by arguing for the influence of local oral histories on national history.

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Yes, you can access The Porous Museum by Gabriela Nicolescu in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art & Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Edition
1
Topic
Art

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Title Page
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Abbreviations
  8. Introduction: Porous Museums
  9. 1 Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness
  10. 2 The Staging of History: Ethnography in Museums’ Shifting Archives
  11. 3 Socialist Multiplication and the Use of the Future Tense
  12. 4 A Question of (In)Visibility
  13. 5 What Is Left After a Revolution . . . Fragments
  14. 6 Three Faces of Communism
  15. Conclusion
  16. Notes
  17. References
  18. List of Illustrations
  19. Index
  20. Copyright