SPACE February 2025 (No. 687)
The scene of the symposium, ‘What Do Museums Pursue?: Art, Museums, and Publicness’ ©Lee Sowoon
Installation view of ‘Shibboleth’ (2007) at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall ©Doris Salcedo
On Dec. 18, an international symposium titled ‘What do Museums Pursue?: Art, Museums, and Publicness’ was held in the multiproject hall of MMCA Seoul. As the fifth academic event that has taken place as a part of MMCA’s research project ‘What Do Museums Do?’, the symposium invited six professionals to discuss the meaning of ‘publicness’ as the goal and raison d’être of art and art museums. The symposium was divided into several parts: ‘Part 1, The Concept of Publicness’; ‘Part 2, Publicness as the Principle of Practice’; and ‘Part 3, The Site of Museums’ Publicness’, and presentations and discussions were given in respect to each theme. The first part, which discussed the concept of publicness, reflected on the political implications and potential of art museums. After criticising the contemporary Korean political scene as one that focuses more on self-promotional ‘representative publicness’ than the realisation of ‘rational publicness’, Kim Youngmin (professor of political science & international relations, Seoul National University) introduced the potential of promoting ‘artistic publicness’ via art. Kim argued that it is not rational topic for debate but an aesthetic experience at the level of latent consciousness that can bring us to self-reflection and effective action regarding public issues such as social justice. Continuing this line of argumentation regarding the public role of the art museum, Shim Bo-Seon (professor of graduate school of communication and arts, Yonsei University) questioned whether the inclusive art policy that is currently posing as a propublicness policy is truly capable of catering to the profound challenges faced by the disabled throughout the contemporary art scene and criticised art museums of today for their separation into a parallel two-value system that is composed of a ‘contentious public sphere’ that promotes contemplation of culture and history and a ‘cordial public sphere’ that seeks to raise cultural accessibility. Shim added that it is only when the challenges raised by radical art are confronted head on that public art museums can evolve from a conciliatory public sphere to a disruptive public sphere. The second and third parts of the day considered the areas in which the museum’s realm of activities and publicness mutually engage with one another and studied specific case examples. By showing varied practical examples, such as the creative youth camp Ipoh organised by the urban-based Malaysian art group PORT, the Ipoh International Art Festival, and resident artist management, Nur Hanim Khairuddin (general manager, PORT) highlighted the potential of collaborations between the art scene and regional society as vehicles for urban space revitalisation. This was then followed by Cho Seonryeong (professor of art culture and image, Pusan National University) who, by drawing attention to the aesthetic form of exhibitions, discussed an example of how an art museum exhibition space had been transformed into a ‘platform for temporary communities’. According to Cho, when the existence of ‘the other’ (visitors) becomes an important part of the exhibition’s significance, the ‘platform for temporary communities’ is created and turns the art museum into a public space. In this context, Cho presented post-industrial art museum spaces such as the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, which had created social spaces similar to that of ‘assemblies’. While explaining how postcolonialist activists had sought over the past decade to promote the concept of publicness to the international scene, Rodney Harrison (professor of heritage studies, University College London) implored art museums to participate in a supranational project of overcoming the ‘poisonous heritage’ left by humanity such as the slave trade and climate change. Lastly, by summarising the discussions from the first and second parts of the symposium, Choi Choon (professor, Seoul National University) argued that since the role of contemporary art is to prompt political discourse via audience participation, future works of architecture that house contemporary art should also evolve from the monumental storage unit to a more temporary building that could be open to infinite expansion and change. MMCA Seoul is planning to gather the materials that were brought up in this international symposium and publish them as a monograph series next year.
