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Art and Ambiguity: An Extended Review of Border Zones at the Museum of Anthropology, British Columbia
Author(s) -
Fuglerud Øivind
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
museum anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.197
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1379
pISSN - 0892-8339
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1379.2012.01130.x
Subject(s) - exhibition , museology , ethnography , ambiguity , narrative , anthropology , representation (politics) , colonialism , aesthetics , politics , common ground , history , sociology , visual arts , art history , art , archaeology , literature , philosophy , law , political science , linguistics , communication
In the last decade, an emphasis on aesthetics has become a prominent strategy for ethnographic museums that try to sever their connections to a history of colonialism and to overcome the dilemmas and difficulties involved in representing societies and cultures that are different from their own.[Note 1. The present article is a result of the project ...] Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, aesthetics and art are projected as being intuitively understandable—a common ground where the politics of representation can be avoided. This article reviews the exhibition entitled Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures , which is a temporary exhibition that, following a lengthy rebuilding period, opened at the Museum of Anthropology (MoA) in Vancouver in 2010. In this article, I attempt to situate the exhibition within the MoA's own “exhibitionary narrative” and within a landscape of contemporary art. I argue that Border Zones represents a continuity with the MoA's permanent exhibitions but question the extent to which it lives up to the MoA's own vision of “multiversity” or a critical museology based on the need to deconstruct the pretensions of Western science. [ethnographic museums, aesthetics, primitivism, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia]