Museum of Installation, London (2001)
“Hard to fathom. Hard to come to grips with. Interesting and annoying,” says co-director Nico de Oliveira of the Museum of Installation’s reputation in London. “We’re not networkers. The key thing for us has always been the art.”
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 30 January 2010
This article first appeared in Sculpture magazine, 20(2), page 10-11 in 2001.
In November 2000, the Museum (otherwise known as MoI)
celebrated its 10th anniversary with over 100 projects to its credit at its
gallery and in Los Angeles, Germany, Belgium, Norway, and Mexico City.
“The way we’ve operated— without structural funding— is that you are
always surprised that you’ll be around for another day,” reflects de Oliveira.
“The project is entirely run on our energy and that of the people who
collaborate with us.”
Opened in 1990 by co-directors Nico de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, and Michael
Petry, the museum has pursued an “absolutely pro-artists” agenda solely
dedicated to installation, and it continues as an important center for discussions,
exhibitions, and archival techniques for the medium. In addition to presenting solo and thematic group shows, the Museum of Installation has organized exhibitions in shop windows, London’s only surviving diorama, a 100,000-square-foot warehouse, and in Portakabins, and created an intervention in the British Museum. First located in a leased warehouse space in London’s Clarkenwell area, the Museum of Installation moved into a permanent five-room row house south of the Thames in January 1997; the building was purchased by the directors as a “cultural investment to guarantee the project’s longevity.” In 1999, MoI opened an adjacent space exclusively devoted to displaying its archives and developing research activities. If this weren’t enough, the curatorial trio also co-authored Installation Art, published by Thames and Hudson, now in its fifth printing, in English and French.
Despite its name, the Museum of Installation is not really a museum— at least not in the traditional
sense. “In 1989, everyone was denying there was such a thing as ‘installation.’
We wanted to legitimize and enshrine that name— and provide a kind of
credibility by coupling it to the word ‘museum.’ At the same time, it was a
dare. With the temporary nature of the medium, is it possible to have a
museum of installation?” Later, confronting the notion of a museum “collection,”
the Museum of Installation requested artist input. In a 1995 show called “Archive,” the
directors asked, “If there was to be an archive of installation, which would
become the museum’s bedrock, what would it be?” The results included a series of artist memories on audiotape created in a special booth. Responses
came in standard art jargon and narratives about relationships that developed
during the curatorial process, as well as traditional slides, video footage
and, in a further development, the box.
The box? At the time of my visit in the summer of 2000, the Museum of Installation had just recently closed its “Box Project” show, which featured over 250 contributions by artists, architects, and curators. Using a specifically commissioned six-by-nine-by-two-inch cardboard box, the empty container became “a space for participants to inhabit with their thoughts of what an archive of an artwork might be.” Contributions have included models, remnants of the installations, as well as, contentiously, the remains of an artist’s dead grandmother. The box— “a metaphor for a space beyond it”— originated from a show in 1997 in which artists were invited to put forth ideas toward Andre Malraux’s imaginary museum.
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