The transient museum: Or a vision of the not-yet-here

Abstract

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.