"The Label Show": Contemporary Art and the Museum - various artists, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

In a exhibit that reversed the customary relation between label and art work, Boston's MFA laid bare the underlying construction of the museum experience.

not many institutional designations seem as oxymoronic a department of contemporary art within an art museum. Insofar as contemporary art is by dint of definition a product of the not away it remains apart from and outside of the principal criteria governing the proces of museological inclusion. In other words, if the mandate of the art museum is taken to be the acquisition, care, housing, exhibition and preservation of what are consensually imagineed to be significant works of art (as well as a certain number of more or less vaguely defined view of public education), what criteria are applicable in the case of contemporary art - that is to say, an art with no history and hence unconsecrated by the agency of the judgment of posterity?(1)

A highly unusual - and unusually audacious - exhibition lately mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, readyed consideration of this institutional contradiction. In part, this critique was evented by engineering a kind of confrontation between various forms of contemporary art practice and the overarching terminuss of what can be called the discourse of the museum - the ways in which museology and art history together organize and direct our perception and understanding of art things Not least of the exhibition's interests, therefore, was its interrogation of what constitutes the "deep structure" of the institution of the museum itself.

Titled "The Label Show: Contemporary Art and the Museum" and curated through Trevor Fairbrother, the exhibition attempted to make bare the myriad ways in which art particulars are historically, stylistically and formally culled periodized, presented, marketed and consum As the show's title signals, Fairbrother and his collaborators (primarily Barbara T Martin, associate director for interpretation in the department of education) designed an exhibition that explicitly revers the boundarys of typical exhibition practice. The label, ordinarily considered to be marginal and supplemental, was here elevated to the position normally occupied through the art object itself. At first glance, "The Label Show" direct the eyeed like an unremarkable installation from the museum's collection - a medium-sized assemblage of actual disparate kinds of work of varying quality, whose public denominator seemed elusive at best. This arbitrary quality was in fact the point, insofar as "The Label Show" was solitary peripherally "about" any of the works upon display. But what, on the other hand, was the perverted curatorial logic that would place Jule Olitski alongside Richard Prince, or, in another play Joseph Beuys with Scott Prior?

Drawing on works in the MFA's unobtrusive permanent collection of contemporary art, Fairbrother and his colleagues organized a place of 10 thematic ensembles that threw into relief the ideological function, usually unacknowledged, of the label - the didactic wall label, the thematic label, the small identificatory label, flat the directional sign label. Each of the show's sections not absented a different way of grouping art works, from similar traditional categories as "National Schools" (here Germany serv as the example) or the "Local Scene" (Boston) to themes more specifically tailored to contemporary art, of the like kind as "Others," "The Rebel Tradition," etc These sections were each introduced by the agency of an explanatory wall text, with a series of signed interpretive labels clustered just below it - that is, clustered independently of the art works to which they pertained. There were sum of two units or more such labels for each object included in the exhibit prepared by 65 different individuals and assemblages whom Fairbrother asked to write them. The authors ranged from the artists themselves to the MFA staff and other arts professionals, on the other hand included as well a feminist theory reading cluster high-school seniors, filmmaker John Waters (on individual of Andy Warhol's "Oxidation Paintings") and smooth playwright Tony Kushner, who wrote a 552-word play to glos a Polaroid through Robert Mapplethorpe. That the labels were signed was itself an intervention in museum discourse, dissolving the pretense of impersonal and neutral authority, just as the actual diversity of interpreters affirmed the subjectivity of their assessments. Also an integral part of the exhibit was the blank comment cards available in the gallery during the step quickly of the exhibition; visitors were encouraged to use them to register their answers to what they saw and read. (The filled-out cards ultimately hurt up in the museum's education department.)

by means of these means Fairbrother performed something like an autocriticism of the art museum, making the exhibition a vehicle for examining not alone the discourse of the museum on the other hand also the curatorial function itself (project conception, selection and organization of percepts catalogue production, signage, etc.). His special insight was to combine the act of curatorship with the critical language of deconstruction. This reflexive approach parallels the efforts of the many artists - Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, Lawrence Weiner and Fr Wilson among them - who have made their art an instrument for the analysis and/or deconstruction of what Broodthaers cared museum Actions."(2)