Broadening museum pedagogy : an art intervention at the Archaeological Museum of Cyprus by Angelos Makrides and Phanos Kyriacou

Abstract

Artists have been increasingly interested in looking at and investigating the museum, influenced by the museum’s changing role as much as the diverse and alternative directions that art has taken over the last century (McShine 1999; Rice 2003; Gibbons 2007). Artists, often “wrestling with the issue of their dependence on the museum to endorse their place in art history” (McShine 1999, p. 11), are also more attuned to the power of the institution to define art, to influence their future career, and to make artworks accessible to wider audiences. Over the past few decades, artists have shown a certain degree of critical awareness regarding the authoritative power of the museum to form, but also to sustain and promote very specific and often stereotypical and limited understandings of world situations. This tendency developed as the result of a more general and increasing mistrust of ‘official History’ and a critique against an ‘accurate’ and singular account of the past. It was also a reaction influenced by many poststructuralist claims that the museum was formed as a technology serving the colonial western gaze that defined the viewed ‘other’ object in relation to the viewing ‘dominant’ subject. These theories proposed that history be rephrased so that it includes the multiple and diverse accounts of the past and takes into consideration of the essentialised notions inscribed in western displays. (Phillips 2007) They also proposed that the classificatory systems used in museums be viewed in a more critical manner as problematic forms of categorisation defined by the colonial gaze. Due to this manifest awareness and eagerness to challenge issues otherwise concealed by museum orthodoxy, artists were in many cases called by museum curators to the task; they were invited to define, redefine, challenge, and criticise museum stories, and the ways in which museums choose to tell them.