Community-Based Museum Ecologies: Public Doors and Windows and Les Nouveaux Commanditaires (‘The New Patrons’)

A growing number of artist-led initiatives and para-institutional organizations are creating community-based projects that signal the emergence of alternative museum ecologies. This article will examine two initiatives, Public Doors and Windows (PDW) and Les Nouveaux Commanditaires (NC) (‘The New Patrons’) that reflect a diverse range of practices that contribute to, or create, museum ecologies outside the physical and conceptual spaces of museums. These museum ecologies also contribute to discourses on the participatory museum and intersect with experiments in community engagement and social practice. Although they may have distinct conceptual points of departure, the diverse institutional platforms and initiatives of PDW and NC demonstrate the ways in which emerging museum ecologies are challenging museums to rethink their relations to communities

Artists, debt, and global activism

This article examines how artists, activism, and works of art may contribute to a more textured understanding of debt in contemporary society and culture. The diversity of aesthetic practices and range of strategic interventions in which artists are organizers and activists are manifest in the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), advocacy initiatives by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), and alternative, trans-local projects such as the Arts Collaboratory. These activist interventions provide the context for an examination of how artists have seized upon discourses related to debt and finance to produce works that offer a critical reappraisal of the global economy. Artists’ projects by Martha Rosler, Cassie Thornton, Zachary Formwalt, and Michael Najjar challenge audiences to rethink the invisible networks of debt and exchange by creating new visual vocabularies for ‘seeing’ debt. The emergence of activist groups, such as Liberate Tate, has also signaled renewed interest in the ethics of corporate sponsorships, museums, and environmental issues. A heightened awareness of the ethical dimensions of debt and global support for activist movements may contribute to new notions of citizenship and performative democracy that can incite individual and collective renegotiations of how we might critically rethink debt

GDR Literature in the International Book Market: From Confrontation to Assimilation

In the West, the designations East German author or GDR author have often been misused as labels to accentuate ideological boundaries, but they have also been used quite productively to inform readers on new publishing programs (i.e. authors and their works), which offered different aesthetic and thematic perspectives. And for many readers in the Federal Republic this dialogue with the other Germany has served an important function within the overall context of the question of national identity. Whether German authors in the reunified Germany are perceived as former GDR authors, German authors, or simply as authors, it would appear that this dialogue will continue, in its multifaceted forms of expression, but within a markedly international environment

Transdisciplinary Case Studies as a Framework for Working in Global Project Teams (2013)

This article will examine how transdisciplinary case studies can be used to introduce students to critical skills for global project management and intercultural competency. The combination of case study formats, global project management tools, and intercultural communication activities provides frameworks for developing multiple competencies that span professional disciplines and support global internships, service learning projects, or international research assignments. Case studies that draw upon diverse resources and experiential “reports from the field” enable students to successfully prepare for global internships or study abroad and transition from the world of academic study to the complex challenges of everyday life in a global profession by developing their own personal “case study” as an ongoing process of personal and professional reflection and engagement.This article is published as Rectanus, M.W. Transdisciplinary Case Studies as a Framework for Working in Global Project Teams. Online Journal for Global Engineering Education (OJGEE). 2013, 6(1)a9;https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/ojgee/vol6/iss1/9/. Posted with permission

The Artist’s Museum as Reversed Cultural Space

During 2019-20, visitors to the Haus der Kunst (HDK), a non-collecting museum for contemporary art in Munich, could view Black Chapel, created by the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates. Black Chapel was a platform for Gates’ "museum within a museum", or an artist’s museum, composed of Gates’ sculptures, collections of images, and artefacts, including Jesse Owens’ music album collection. This article examines how Gates’ project deploys the historical signifiers and artefacts of Black urban experience in order to challenge the historical space of the Haus der Kunst. I argue that Black Chapel not only contributes to artistic experiments in museum making, it also creates a reversed cultural space and counternarratives within the architectural space of the HDK - a museum which was originally commissioned by Adolf Hitler as a platform for National Socialist art and cultural politics.This article is published as Rectanus, M. (2025). The Artist’s Museum as Reversed Cultural Space: Theaster Gates’ Black Chapel at the Haus der Kunst (Munich). Museum & Society, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v23i1.4716

Transactivism, the Translocal, Art and Performance

The 2014 exhibition ‘Global aCtIVISm: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century’ at the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) underscored the growing significance of activism, art, performance and notions of the civic (civis). While the exhibition referenced global activism, the ZKM documentation and catalog demonstrate that most activist movements begin locally or regionally. Contemporary activist movements engage performative art (‘artivism’) to move across boundaries, spaces, platforms and media that are increasingly translocal. Translocal collectives and initiators create strategies and practices that are shared and collaborative -- while also adopting flexible and responsive forms of organization, ‘commoning’ and civic engagement that are transactivist. This article examines how projects by the collaborative MAMAZA, the arts project IDENSITAT and co-created projects by the artist-geographer Trevor Paglen contribute to a diverse landscape of emerging interventions that may be less overtly signified as protest, or institutional critique, but provide translocal interrogations that also rethink notions of civic engagement and performance. These projects also challenge audiences to engage in a dialectic of ‘performative seeing’ which asks them to imagine what might become visible by exposing the socio-political and virtual spaces of the invisible, but also to consider who or what remains absent. The article suggests that translocal perspectives not only provide an aperture for developing a fuller understanding of how the relations among activism, art and performance are being renegotiated through forms of transactivism, but also indicate that the terrain of contemporary activist practices has become increasingly complex and textured.This accepted article is published as Rectanus, Mark W., Transactivism, the Translocal, Art and Performance. Performance Research, 2016, 21(5);123-126. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1224343. Posted with permission. this article is under CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Deconstructing the Museum’s White Cube: Gregor Schneider’s Artistic and Discursive Interventions in Urban Space

Museums and artists increasingly play a pivotal role in shaping the experiential landscapes of urban culture. While museums (and iconic museum architecture) have not only become “anchors” for cultural tourism, real estate development, and the expansion of the creative economy (Lord & Blankenberg, 2015), artists have created interventions in urban space and museum space that problematize distinctions or boundaries between studio space, museum space, exhibition space, and public space. This chapter will examine projects by artist Gregor Schneider that simultaneously interrogate these discursive, spatial, and institutional boundaries, while also challenging visitors’ museum experience by deconstructing and circumventing the gallery spaces for exhibiting and viewing art in what is frequently referred to as the museum’s “white cube.” While the white cube is literally a gallery or exhibition space composed of white walls (and ceilings), and is often associated with the museum’s aims of aesthetic education and reflection, art historians and artists have engaged the uses of the white cube as a signifier for the art museum as a contested cultural institution. Schneider deconstructs the physical and conceptual space of the white cube in order to expose the ruptures between the cultural remit of the museum and its conflicted relations to the social fabric of the global city. Schneider’s projects not only investigate the links between the museum and the city, including the museum’s implication in the forces of urban cultural politics, his installations also aim to disrupt the ways in which urban visitors experience the museum as a privileged locus of cultural engagement within the city.This accepted book chapter is published as Rectanus, M.W., Deconstructing the Museum’s White Cube: Gregor Schneider’s Artistic.. IN Art and the Global City: Public Space, Transformative Meia, and the Politics. 4(2022);65-84; https://doi.org/10.3726/b17225. Posted with permission

Architectures of Memory: Ulf Erdmann Ziegler’s Hamburger Hochbahn

As Hamburger Hochbahn begins, the architect Thomas Schwarz (also known as Tom Schwarz when he is in the USA)1 observes the lights of Manhattan through binoculars as the airplane makes its final descent on the first leg of his trip to the U.S. with his partner, artist Elise Katz, who has been invited as a guest professor at Washington University in St. Louis. As the next leg of their flight continues over New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio or “Oh-hai-oh” – as Tom remembers it being pronounced when he first visited Chillicothe, Ohio as an exchange student 25 years ago (in the 1970s) – he views the landscape through the binoculars while remembering fragments of his year in Ohio. After arriving in St. Louis at the Dorchester Apartments, his binoculars, a Rand-McNally map of the U.S., and a compass lie on a glass-topped table in the apartment. All three objects reference notions of simultaneous distancing and localization, of observation, self-reflection and memory, and (self-)discovery or orientation which construct narrative discourses in Ziegler’s work.This book chapter is published as Rectanus, M.W., “Architectures of Memory: Ulf Erdmann Ziegler’s Hamburger Hochbahn”. In Die Ethik der Literatur, edited by Paul Michael Lützeler and Jennifer Kapczynski. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2011. ISBN: 9783835308657

Globalization: Voluspa Jarpa’s Altered Views and The Hegemonic Museum

The spatial politics of museums and art biennials are often invoked in discourses and debates regarding the cultural and geopolitical forces of globalization. For example, Paul O’Neill observed that, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, biennials became a transformative force of international curatorial practice and ‘a contemporary global phenomenon’ that ‘succeeded in providing models of resistance to the hegemonic powers of Western art history, museums, and established art institutions’ (2012: 51, 85). The historical legacies of one of the most well-established biennials, the Venice Biennale, exemplify the ongoing contestations and conflicts of global-local discourses, which are manifest in the Biennale’s national pavilions but also in its status as a high-profile platform for ‘world art’ and for the art world. As will be discussed below, contemporary interventions by the Biennale’s artistic directors such as Okwui Enwezor have introduced art from diverse geographies and cultural contexts beyond their traditional European remit. In doing so, they also aimed to complicate global-local binaries that positioned the Biennale either as a global exhibition or as a vestige of national representation. Enwezor’s theme for the 2015 Biennale, All the World’s Futures, not only embraced a more complex spatio-temporal terrain of contemporary art, it also intersected with art discourses and museum debates regarding decolonization and social justice. For the Chile Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa seized upon the frictions of the Biennale as both a global platform for ‘world art’ and as a site for national representation by interrogating the epistemologies and legacies of European hegemonic museums and simultaneously asserting the emancipatory voices of art from Chile. Jarpa’s Altered Views unfolds in a series of three installations: The Hegemonic Museum, The Subaltern Portraits Gallery, and The Emancipating Opera. Rather than offering an overview of the contested art histories of globalization, this chapter argues that Jarpa’s project provides an ‘altered view’ that refracts various constellations of globalized, hegemonic discourse, which emerged in Europe, through an analytical lens and ‘reversed cultural space’ that is created within the context of the Venice Biennale and its contested politics of national representation (Pavilion of Chile 2019)This accepted book chapter is published as Rectanus, M.W., Globalization: Voluspa Jarpa’s Aletred Views and The Hegemonic Museum. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music and Art (2024) Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, section IV (Chptr 14);215-230. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501377747.ch-014. Posted with permission