Abstract
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has an extensive collection of time-based media art from the 1960s onwards, which has been expanded into the digital field in recent decades. The Stedelijk makes an interesting case study for this special issue on “Art Curation: Challenges in the Digital Age,” because it has had a reputable history of dealing with time-based art since the mid-1970s but presently faces the same challenges with regard to curating and collecting digital art as other museums of modern art. The Stedelijk’s history began in 1974, when the first curator for time-based art was hired, Dorine Mignot, a pioneer in this field. After Mignot’s retirement in 2006, the museum was closed for almost a decade, but under the leadership of Beatrix Ruf (2014–2017), an innovative agenda was set again for new media and digital art. In this paper, Sjoukje van der Meulen mobilizes the museum’s rich and varied history of new media and digital art to think through some of the issues, challenges and concerns raised by guest editor Francesca Franco for this special issue such as “What are the issues involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting artworks made in the 1960s and the 1970s?” and “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?”
Highlights
I address the way in which one art institution—the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—has dealt with time-based media, from early video art to the newest forms of digital art
Introducing the Stedelijk as a case study, in this essay, I aim to explore some of the questions raised in this Special Issue on “Art Curation: Challenges in the Digital Age”, such as the following: “Are ‘conventional’ or ‘old media’ curatorial approaches still relevant or necessary when curating digital art?”; “What are the issues involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting pioneering artworks made in the 1960s and 1970s?”; and the umbrella question “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?”4 I will begin by sketching an outline of the Stedelijk’s history of timed-based media from the basic premise that the museum’s exhibition program and collection are interrelated and that curatorial strategies and collection policy are shaped in tandem
MOTI, the Museum of the Image,New fused Media with the and Museum to form the Stedelijk Museum Breda in 2017. This short tour through the history of new media and digital art at the Stedelijk brings me back to my question as to how to curate and collect digital art, considering that the collection and the exhibition program are in an ongoing dialogue with one another. Ruf acknowledged this universal trait of museums of modern and contemporary art when she redesigned the museum according to MOTI, the Museum of the Image, fused with the Breda’s Museum to form the Stedelijk Museum Breda in
Summary
I address the way in which one art institution—the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—has dealt with time-based media, from early video art to the newest forms of digital art. Focusing on ‘new media and digital art’ (the more contemporary terms for ‘time-based media’) in a museum such as the Stedelijk, with its renowned collection and distinct exhibition history, allows us to discuss the task of curating and collecting these new forms of artistic expression in the digital era more concretely. Mignot’s long-term position as curator of time-based media at the Stedelijk, from to. Mignot began curating and collecting performance and video art inart theinmidmid-1970s but quickly expanded her area of interest to multi-media installations in the. Ruf appointed a new curator for time-based media, Karen Archey—a prolific critic and curator affiliated post-internet art.
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