ABSTRACT
As public institutions, museums hold a central role in mediating artistic practice, creating reflective spaces for imagery and providing alternate experiences and encounters with works of visual art. These encounters and their mediation by national galleries are set in focus in this chapter. More specifically, I analyse four displays constructed from objects belonging to museum collections. Collection displays are often a result of collective efforts; they show works readily available to curatorial staff, on which knowledge has been gathered over longer time periods. For these reasons, collection displays hold a solid position within museum exhibition programmes. Utilising the example of the narration of Beuys in my previous chapter, where I addressed the ways in which knowledge about a single artist was shaped by agents involved in the process, in this chapter I turn my attention to the interests embedded in narratives by focusing on the relationships between local communities, as they are articulated by museums. As the point of departure for my readings, I use the poststructuralist interrogation of the relationship between identity and signifier. According to this premise, understanding identity is filled with meaning every time it is used and contextualised. The acts of attaching and adopting identities are political, since they define relationships between an imaginary ‘us’ and an imaginary Other. An inquiry into the positions of the narrator and displayed artists allows me to elaborate on the operation of art in the production of subjects, and the re-creation of inter-communal relationships in which museums participate through acts of narrating. Articulation of these positions is an instrument for distributing a form of belonging, because by performing identities, museum narratives become instructive for viewers—they create subjects and produce and articulate identities by their consolidation.
