Still Life Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition des...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Chicago and London
University of Chicago Press
2020, ©2020
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| Collection: | DeGruyter MPG Collection - Collection details see MPG.ReNa |
| Summary: | How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. -- Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. -- As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion. “Theoretically sophisticated, politically astute, and historically informed, this is a brilliant work, one that will be a productive model for the future study of Italian cinema as well as the investigation of national cinema in general. There is no doubt that this is one of the best books ever written in English on Italian cinema, and by far the most theoretically advanced. Restivo’s fascinating exploration of questions of subjectivity, space, and nation will be of great interest to scholars in fields beyond Italian cinema as well.”—Peter Brunette, author of Roberto Rossellini -- “This book is far above the usual histories of national cinema. It combines political analysis, psychoanalytic reading, and close cinematic explication with Restivo’s breathtaking first-hand knowledge of Italian socio-political history, enabling him to locate each author in a specific context and to discern connotations that are out of reach for most Anglo-Saxon cinema historians.”—Slavoj Zizek, author of Gaze and Voice as Love Objects |
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| Physical Description: | 424 Seiten |
| ISBN: | 978-0-226-71411-0 |