I have taken the general theoretical approach of constructivist epistemology and more specifically that of social and cultural constructionism.[15] This view emphasizes the collectively constructed nature of knowledge and reality, leading independent cultures to construct different meanings regarding the same subject. I chose to adopt this perspective to examine how each case study institution articulates contemporaneity in the context of their different cultural histories, where the inevitable implication arises that temporality and contemporaneity are themselves socially constructed ideas. Museums are syncretic objects wherein multiple layers create and convey specific meanings that vary based on the choices made during the construction of an exhibition; the objects on display do not hold any objective ontological meaning but rather one that is socially constructed.
Contemporaneity has become a popular topic of academic interest in recent years, as there is a general sense that lived experience and temporality today are entirely distinct from what they were only a few decades ago.[16] The idea that contemporary art can be distinguished based on style, mode, medium, or ideology has been increasingly supplanted by the notion that its uniqueness lies in its relation to the social context of contemporary experience today.[17] This paper is largely indebted to historian François Hartog’s identification of “presentism” in his seminal text Regimes of Historicity. Presentism, as formulated by Hartog, is the distinctly “short-terminist” experience of time in the 21st century in which “only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of the unending now” that “extend[s] both into the future and into the past.”[18] Hartog’s assertion that presentism and temporal acceleration signal “the destruction of the old order of time”—in other words, the futurism of modernity—became a central tenet of my own analysis.[19]
My choice to focus on the MNAC and the Stedelijk as case studies was driven by a desire to present a comparative analysis between two institutions with key similarities. Both institutions are publicly funded contemporary art museums in the capital cities of their respective EU countries, Portugal and the Netherlands. More importantly, both museums are over one hundred years old, a rarity among contemporary art museums globally. The question of contemporaneity within century-old museological institutions has not yet been the focus of an academic study, despite the obvious intrigue posed by such a dual identity. My research seeks to uncover and interpret how the two chosen contemporary art museums communicate certain ideas about time. My methodologies were motivated by my interest in historical context, conceptual theory, and primary analysis. When interrogating the tension between institutional history and titularly contemporary content, my approach was highly historical. The case study museums were examined alongside their respective contemporary societies throughout a period in which the very notion of “contemporary” became increasingly problematized. I also conducted a comparative visual analysis of how contemporaneity manifests in the museums’ physical spaces and included primary source material from interviews. As contemporaneity is an abstract and indeed ongoing concept, the collation and analysis of both primary and secondary data provides a clearer view of how museums can aid the perception of the contemporary and its complex temporality.
Museums are “emblematic of the way visual regimes influence and shape our views on the world,” but this creation of knowledge does not exist in a vacuum; museums have “constantly adapted their presentations in response to changing ideas on the production and dissemination of knowledge, changes in display techniques and changes in visitor demand.”[20] When creating exhibitions, museum professionals are actively aware of the complications that arise when negotiating inherent institutional tensions to articulate contemporaneity in centenarian art museums. Whether intentional or not, museum presentations reveal a great deal about contextual modes of thinking, not only regarding the explicit subject matter of the exhibition but also more abstract concepts such as time and contemporaneity.
This section examines the different roles that contemporaneity has historically played in these centenarian institutions. At MNAC, contemporaneity assumed a more relational political function, while the Stedelijk adopted a more temporal art historical definition of the contemporary. “Relational” denotes the definition of contemporary “with”—in other words, something that reflects and conforms to the sociopolitical times in which it was created. “Temporal” instead indicates the more neoteric form of contemporary as that which is new, up to date, or innovative. Articulations of contemporaneity in my two case study museums not only diverged from each other in the past but are also distinct from their own present formulations. It is thus important to understand the context of the museums’ institutional histories to recognize the altered ways contemporaneity is articulated today.
The MNAC is a modern and contemporary art museum located in Chiado, Lisbon.[21] The very coexistence of the labels of “national” and “contemporary” in the museum’s name reveals the relational function of “contemporary,” because the museum’s operations have mirrored the contextually situated ideologies of its evolving, politically charged time. Thus, the “contemporary” that was constructed within the MNAC during the 20th century was definitively national in nature.
Over time, the museum’s collection and practices evolved in tandem with the developments of contemporary Portuguese politics, society, and culture. MNAC was established by government decree in 1911, only one year after the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy and the founding of the first Portuguese Republic.[22] This was part of a broader process of institutional reform by the new Republican government to reinvigorate cultural and educational development across Portugal. The museum is housed in an old monastery, a property that was nationalized following the dissolution of religious orders at the conclusion of the Portuguese Civil War in 1834.[23] The monastery was subsequently converted into a complex that is now shared by a number of public institutions, including the national police and the ministry of internal administration. This complex is thus a potent symbol for how the emergence of the modern nation-state generated the establishment of far-ranging public institutions all working toward the ordering, structuring, and, ultimately, the construction of mass society. The interlinking of these institutions suggests that the MNAC, as a primarily cultural rather than political or civic institution, was nevertheless conceived as contributing to the same goals as the police and government administration bodies.
The founding of a nominally “contemporary” art museum was entirely unprecedented on an international scale.[24] In Portuguese art history today, however, contemporary art is periodized as art produced after April 25, 1974.[25] This date marks the Carnation Revolution, when the Estado Novo, the conservative corporatist state that took power in 1933 under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, came to an end. After decades of operating under this repressive regime, the MNAC benefited greatly from the democratization initiated by the Carnation Revolution. Its building underwent extensive renovations, which concluded in 1994, and the museum reopened with a notably more international dimension to its programming, explicitly situating its Portuguese collection within a broader global context.[26]
Around this time, the museum considered limiting its collection to Portuguese art from the modern period, between 1850 and 1950. While various museums around the world had altered their names to replace the term “modern” with “contemporary,” the MNAC faced an opposite and much rarer predicament: whether to drop the label “contemporary,” a designation it had been using since before any distinction with modern art was made, to better reflect the clearly modern nature of its collection. However, a “contemporary perspective” was ultimately chosen for future collecting and display policies.[27] This decision to reaffirm its contemporary identity while also retaining an aging collection demonstrates a shift in how “contemporary” is conceptualized in the museum today, an understanding of contemporaneity that is no longer solely relational in nature.
According to MNAC director Emília Ferreira, this decision was justified by the museum’s understanding of contemporary as characterized by disjuncture, a core belief from its very founding.[28] Since then, ruptures and “new beginnings” have become an increasingly regular occurrence. For well over a century, “every piece of true contemporary art tries to achieve the very same thing—a caesura, a revelation: a new origin [ . . . ] a new epoch, a new beginning, that sets it apart from all history before.”[29] Although the MNAC had originally intended to gradually deaccession its collection to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (Museum of Ancient Art) as it aged, the century and a half of history held in its collection is characterized by the very disjuncture that the museum perceives as essentially constructive of contemporary art and therefore central to the current conceptualization of its institutional identity.
The Stedelijk is a museum of modern and contemporary art and design located in the Museum Quarter in Amsterdam. Its general reputation within art history is one of innovation and experimentation, with a neoteric approach to contemporary art almost invariably accompanied by controversy. Where MNAC’s long-term relationship to “contemporary” was in the relational sense of occurring simultaneously within its contemporaneous national and political context, the Stedelijk has historically been “contemporary” in the sense of representing and staying up to date with that which is new. This neoteric approach reflects the future-oriented temporality that dominated 20th-century modernity, when the present was merely a hurdle en route to an anticipated future.[30]
Established in 1874, the Stedelijk opened its doors to visitors in 1895. Its establishment was a joint initiative of Amsterdam city authorities and private individuals from the Vereeniging tot het Vormen van eene openbare verzameling van Hedendaagsche Kunst te Amsterdam (Society for the Formation of a Public Collection of Contemporary Art), or the VVHK. Similar to MNAC, the Stedelijk’s early years were characterized by a conservative approach to collecting.[31] The VVHK, which at the time solely determined what was displayed, valued art by established 19th-century Dutch and French Romantic painters and “had no interest in the latest developments” in international art.[32] The Stedelijk’s first director, Cornelis Baard, protested this conservatism and sought to move beyond their narrow framework through donations and loans.
This progressive shift was significantly extended by Baard’s three subsequent successors, David Röell, Willem Sandberg, and Edy de Wilde, who oversaw the gradual accessioning of the Stedelijk’s historical collections to the Rijksmuseum and the Amsterdam Historical Museum (now the Amsterdam Museum).[33] Throughout this period, the Stedelijk aimed to create “a larger and more intense interest for the living arts” by showcasing new artists who were “able to introduce us into the present [ . . . ] to prepare us for the future.”[34] Museum operations thus aimed to “continually provide affiliation with the current developments in the field of visual arts and the related arts such as architecture, photography, industrial design, etc.”[35]
The curatorial vision of Sandberg, who was director between 1945 and 1963, is particularly central to the Stedelijk’s institutional narrative and its relationship with contemporary art history. Sandberg, already working at the Stedelijk as a curator and graphic designer, famously joined the Dutch resistance during World War II.[36] As director, Sandberg came to be synonymous with the Stedelijk; so, too, did his rebellious character. This in itself demonstrates that the Stedelijk’s contemporaneity was not relational in conforming to contextual sociopolitical developments. The Stedelijk “acquired its reputation as a radical museum of modern and contemporary art and design” following the proliferation of Sandberg’s mythological status as “the trailblazing museum director who championed the avant-gardes,” although he also collected and exhibited 19th-century art during his time as director.[37] Sandberg’s legacy lies in his experimentation with curatorial techniques and his dissatisfaction with art history’s focus on established canon, advocating instead for “an institution oriented toward the future.”[38]
By the 1970s, the Stedelijk’s social function as a communicator of neoteric contemporaneity to the public was well established and was a key aspect of institutional policy. According to de Wilde, the goal of any Stedelijk exhibition was to be “a decisive pointing out of the changing face of visual art.”[39] Following in the steps of Sandberg, de Wilde acknowledged the museum’s role as a subjective collaborator in the production of new contemporary art. He outlined this process by stating that
the museum has to function as the executor of the artist’s design and thereby implement the realization of what otherwise would never materialize [ . . . ] the museum is co-instrumental in realizing works of art.[40]
As the museum would then effectively write these artworks into art history through exhibition and promotion, the Stedelijk not only reflected global developments in contemporary art but also coauthored the establishment of its canon.
This canon, rather than the highly national focus of MNAC’s dominantly Portuguese collection, was always international in outlook. The museum’s pursuit of art from Europe, Asia, and Africa was, however, “redirected almost obsessively toward the art of the new economic superpower, the United States” in the mid-1960s under de Wilde’s directorship.[41] The Stedelijk’s collecting and exhibiting practices followed Western and US-centric trends regarding what was considered the most contemporary, as in the newest, developments in artistic practice. The Stedelijk, located in the Netherlands, was still international in this regard, and throughout the 20th century it came to be “considered an international museum—a museum that both projects and attracts internationally.”[42] Such a cosmopolitan outlook is widely considered to be characteristic of contemporary times and thus fits the museum’s temporal understanding of contemporaneity in the 20th century.
Art historians’ inability to define the parameters of “contemporary” perpetuates an overwhelming infinite suspension of the “now” within contemporary art museums. The 21st century artistic landscape thus reflects the psychocultural experience of late modernity wherein global networks, exemplified by the internet, have caused “a differentiated perception of time and space [ . . . ] where relationships [personal, cultural or political] lose their territoriality, spatiality and temporality.”[43] As this section demonstrates, the last decade in the histories of the Stedelijk and the MNAC has been particularly reflective of the 21st-century presentist regime of historicity.
The Stedelijk was, in a way, predisposed to the articulation of presentism ever since its conversion to the white cube aesthetic under Sandberg’s direction. Since its rise to dominance in the mid-20th century, this gallery style has come under scrutiny for the subconscious implications it imparts onto the artworks that it frames in the name of aesthetic appreciation. It has been argued that the white cube creates a “condition of appearing out of time, or beyond time” through the artworks’ apparent ability to remain “untouched by time and its vicissitudes.”[44] When the Stedelijk reopened in 2012, complete with its new “bathtub” wing and twice as much physical space, the stage was set for new arrangements of the collection. For the first time in the museum’s history, a full scope of the permanent collection (in rotating installations) was to be displayed on an ongoing basis, where, previously, “energies were clearly consumed by the exhibition machine that was the Stedelijk Museum of the last century.”[45]
Perhaps the most significant and experimental reformulation of the permanent collection was revealed in 2017, entitled Stedelijk BASE. In many ways, this design was the ultimate physical expression of presentism (fig. 1-4). The open-circuit, scenographic presentation of 750 artworks offered a “chronological reading of the collection [ . . . ] juxtaposed with a more associative encounter.”[46] Depending on the visitors’ path, different periods and disciplines would become mixed together, thus disrupting expectations of linear cohesion. Director Beatrix Ruf directly noted that BASE intended to parallel the way “the widespread use of the Internet” has altered the way that “we browse, see masses of images in one go, connect them and make combinations.”[47] The perceived benefit of such labyrinthine exhibition design is that it challenges passive voyeurism by provoking visitors to “find a passage of associations through the multicursal maze,” and by individually reordering the disorder “according to our own interests and sensibilities” we are able to arrive at our own naturally subjective narrative conclusions.[48]
Figure 1. The labyrinthine exhibition design aesthetic of Stedelijk BASE. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti, © OMA
Figure 2. Collection layout and installation plan for Stedelijk BASE. © Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Figure 3. Location(s) of Stedelijk BASE, which was housed in the museum’s new wing. © Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Figure 4. The permanent collection display Stedelijk BASE in action. Photo: ARTtube, “Stedelijk Base,” Youtube, October 30, 2018, (7:48 to 8:11).
This emphasis on honoring subjectivity has continued into the current presentation of the permanent collection, which has been on display since 2022. The Stedelijk seems to be keenly aware that multiplicity is a core tenet of contemporaneity, wherein contemporary experience “consists precisely in the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctures of perception, of mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world.”[49] The museum continues to present its collection in a manner that allows visitors to “discern a story—perhaps many stories—within the museum,” yet “the ‘whole story’ is always beyond [ . . . ] there is always an excess of meaning.”[50] The current collection display (fig. 5) is framed by three chronological sections that directly reference the concept of time: Yesterday Today (1850–1950), Everyday, Someday and Other Stories (1950–80), and Tomorrow is a Different Day (1980–). These titles mirror the tripartite of past, present, and future, but they also notably suspend time and fold all three tenses into the present contemporary, reflecting the presentist mindset that dominates contemporaneity. “Yesterday” is at once today, everyday, and someday, while the unknown future of “tomorrow” is nevertheless already on display in this museum of contemporary art and design.
Within each of the three sections, artworks are hung thematically in different rooms. While the presentation is less labyrinthine than BASE, the marked difference in layout between the earliest period and the latter two offers another commentary on the acceleration of time under contemporaneity. Yesterday Today, located on the ground floor, leads visitors along a straightforward linear route from room to room, from early artworks to later ones, and through the unfolding of history throughout the modern period. This future-oriented progression is itself reflective of modernism’s perpetual focus on the future. When visitors have finished this circuit, they arrive at the grand staircase and the collection continues upstairs. The rooms on the upper floor, rather than circuitous, are laid out in a fragmented sequence through which visitors must find their own path: There is no one “correct” way to explore the space. Thus, associations between each of the thematic rooms occur individually and at random. The fact that the modern art from the collection is presented along a more linear circuit of future-oriented progression while the more recent contemporary is arranged as a nonlinear labyrinth physically embodies art historian François Hartog’s notion that our experience of time has become more complex.[51] As you move through space and time toward the more recent present, the narrative and subject matter become more expansive, muddled, bleak, and politically charged.[52] This similarly reflects broader theory that identifies the sense of overwhelm and “future as threat” generated by the acceleration of contemporary time.
The current presentation of the permanent collection intentionally emphasizes pluralism.[53] The polyphonic focus on including Other Stories serves to communicate recent policy changes to the public that started with Stedelijk TURNS, a presentation alongside BASE that was used to “unlock hidden histories” from the collection.[54] Since Rein Wolfs became director in 2019, the museum has become more openly self-critical of its own history and its complicit role in perpetuating a canon that largely excludes women and people of color.[55] The 2023 documentary White Balls on Walls depicted the Stedelijk’s newfound structural responsibility toward diversity and inclusion as well as its ongoing struggle to diversify both its collection and staff. The film reveals the burden posed by the Stedelijk’s dual identity as a centenarian contemporary institution; the museum must overcome a century of history in order to represent a more inclusive era in which diversity has become increasingly prioritized and politicized. One significant scene halfway through the documentary recorded the removal of large text reading “MEET THE ICONS OF MODERN ART” from the building’s facade; the removal of this text was intended as a symbolic public statement acknowledging the power held by major art institutions such as the Stedelijk to decide and perpetuate the selection of artists who are deemed iconic.[56]
The Stedelijk’s self-reflexive turn aligns with shifting practices across the museum world. The rise of critical museology has resulted in greater institutional reflection, which in turn is presented to the public within museums themselves. Techniques that “expose” the museum’s meaning-making process include featuring questions in wall text to encourage audience engagement, documenting historical styles of display to highlight that objects have been shown differently over time, and crediting the curator’s authorial voice to emphasize subjectivity.[57] The Stedelijk uses these techniques both physically within the museum itself and digitally through social media (fig. 6-7).[58] Featuring such reflexivity in the core narrative of the museum space reaffirms the Stedelijk’s belief in the importance of transparency and in grappling with its own exclusionist past.
While the museum world trends of pluralism and self-reflection are generally thought of as positive and long overdue changes, they are also distinctly indicative of 21st-century contemporaneity. An infinite proliferation of historical narratives and the constant challenging of objectivity results in a contemporaneity in which action is supplanted by paralyzing and perpetual reflection, leaving us “stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future.”[59] The Stedelijk’s 21st-century policies and spatial design choices articulate a “contemporary” that is distinctly reflective of presentist contemporaneity and thus entirely different from its neoteric understanding of “contemporary” throughout the 20th century.
Figure 5. The ground and upper floors of the Stedelijk’s old building, which houses the current formulation of the permanent collection display. The routing of Yesterday Today on the ground floor (0.27 – 0.17) is much more linear and straightforward than the spatial layout of Everyday, Someday and Other Stories and Tomorrow is a Different Day on the upper floor. © Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Figure 6. One example of the Stedelijk’s recurring digital segment Staff Picks on social media. Source: @stedelijkmuseum on Instagram.
Figure 7. Photographic documentation of the Stedelijk’s institutional history via social media. Source: @stedelijkmuseum on Instagram.
The equal standing of “national” and “contemporary” in MNAC’s name continues to shape its practices. The ever-expanding category of what is considered contemporary at MNAC could be seen as a consequence of Portugal’s traumatic relationship with time. Indeed, theorists often note that trauma forms a unique type of “time which lasts”[60] and which “floats in atemporal stagnation.”[61] While the Carnation Revolution provided a “year zero” for contemporaneity in Portuguese art, MNAC “failed to keep pace with the cultural dynamics unleashed by the 1974 Revolution.”[62] The museum “continues to struggle with the main constraints identified when it was founded in 1911: the lack of space and material resources.”[63] It has, however, expanded sporadically over time, an ad hoc addition of rooms creating an asymmetrical, labyrinthine physical space (fig. 8-9). Unlike the Stedelijk, which intentionally incorporated labyrinthine aesthetics into its exhibition design in the 21st century, MNAC’s convoluted layout is more borne of circumstances and necessity.
MNAC’s lack of space has naturally led to a preference for temporary exhibitions over permanent displays.[64] Several theorists have noted that the triumph of temporary exhibitions over museum collections indicates the dominance of presentism and a resulting inability to accumulate time in a meaningful way.[65] A constant overhaul of temporary exhibitions is indeed representative of short-term thinking and the “right here, right now” sentiment of presentist contemporaneity. While the 21st-century Stedelijk has slowed its “exhibition machine” in favor of permanent collection displays, the MNAC engages in a constantly renewed programmatic cycle, and these temporary exhibitions (often presenting the permanent collection in smaller portions) occupy the entirety of its current capacity.
Figures 8 and 9. New spaces have been sporadically added to the MNAC’s overall capacity, generating an unintentionally labyrinthine layout, October 2023. Photo: India Jeffes.
Through two exemplary case studies, I have demonstrated how museological understandings of contemporaneity have shifted over a century of linguistic usage in which the term has been fundamentally complicated by broader theoretical debates. The initial impetus for this research was based on a simple question: How can a museum call itself “contemporary” when it is over a century old?
The MNAC and the Stedelijk are two art institutions that have been collecting and exhibiting contemporaneity for over a century. Throughout the 20th century, they did not have to defend their use of “contemporary” because the term was taken for granted as denoting relationality or temporality. However, the implications of the word have become irreversibly problematized by theoretical analyses of how temporality is experienced differently in the 21st century (from the futurism of modernity to the ongoing presentist regime of contemporaneity). The meaning and experience of contemporaneity have fundamentally changed and contemporary art museums such as the Stedelijk and the MNAC have had to continually adapt to this dynamism. Thus, the ways these museums articulate contemporaneity today is distinct from their own divergent 20th-century articulations. The shift toward a presentist historicity can be identified in the Stedelijk’s physical layout and self-reflexive rhetoric as well as the MNAC’s preoccupation with temporary exhibitions.
Ultimately, the museums’ ties to history do not hinder their ability to adapt to the complexities of the 21st century; they have indeed always evolved and adapted concurrently with contemporaneous changes and shifting conceptions of what it means to be contemporary.
Disclaimer
This text is an abridged and edited version of the author’s master’s thesis. The full-length original document can be shared by the author upon request.
India Jeffes studied Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam, as well as History and Political Science. As an intern at the Curatorial and Research department at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, she worked on various ongoing projects including the presentation of Keith Haring’s Amsterdam Notes.
[1] Quoted in Malene Vest Hansen and Kristian Handberg, “Politics of Curating the Contemporary-Modern in the Art Museum,” in Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum (London: Routledge, 2023), 77.
[2] Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity & Contemporary Art (London: Sternberg, 2016), 11; Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: or, What’s “Contemporary” in Museums of Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2013), 12.
[3] Claire Grace, “1936–2011,” in ICA75 (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2011), 18.
[4] John Rajchman, “Thinking in Contemporary Art,” lecture as part of FORART series, Institute for Research within Contemporary Art, 2006, transcript, 3.
[5] Dan Karlholm, “Surveying Contemporary Art: Post-War, Postmodern, and Then What?” Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method 32, no. 4 (2009): 713; Bishop, Radical Museology, 16.
[6] Karlholm, “Surveying Contemporary Art,” 713.
[7] Knut Ebeling, There Is No Now: An Archaeology of Contemporaneity (London: Sternberg, 2017), 67.
[8] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “contemporary (adj.), sense 1–4,” September 2023.
[9] On this note, the example I always point to is that the Soviet Union is contemporary with my parents and my parents are contemporary with me; however, as we never existed at the same time, the Soviet Union and I are not contemporaries. Thus, my parents’ contemporary is very different from my own even if we live in the same shared present today.
[10] Amelia Jones, “Introduction: Writing Contemporary Art into History, a Paradox?,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 3–4.
[11] Jones, “Introduction,” v–viii.
[12] Throughout this paper I refer to museums that are over one hundred years old as “centenarian” museums; a centenarian is a person who has lived past one hundred years of age. This is not a museological term but rather my own shorthand for referring to century-old contemporary art museums.
[13] The original definition, inscribed in 1946, was replaced in 1974 and again in 2007 (with only slight alterations in between) before being overhauled again in 2022. Bruno Brulon Soares, “Defining the Museum: Challenges and Compromises of the 21st Century,” ICOFOM Study Series 48, no. 2 (2020): 16–32. ICOM currently defines a museum as “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.” International Council of Museums, “ICOM approves a new museum definition,” ICOM, August 24, 2022.
[14] Hansen and Handberg, “Politics of Curating the Contemporary-Modern,” 2.
[15] In this paper, I adopt the theoretical approach of constructionism as intended in sociology and subsequently adopted by many other fields in the social sciences. The theory of social constructionism has roots in Nietzschean philosophy and was developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their seminal 1966 text The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. It posits that individuals and groups who regularly interact in the same sociocultural context will develop collective meanings that become institutionalized over time. Thus, collectively internalized and widely embedded perceptions of reality appear to be objective.
[16] Pedro Erber, “Contemporaneity and Its Discontents,” Diacritics 41, no. 1 (2013): 29.
[17] This notion became especially popular in art historical discourse following Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1998 text Relational Aesthetics.
[18] François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, translated by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), xv, 201.
[19] Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 123.
[20] Julia Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2012), 11–12.
[21] Helena Barranha, “Cien años, un mismo lugar: Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo en el barrio histórico de Chiado (1911–2011),” Arte y Ciudad. Revista De Investigación 3, no. 1 (2013): 291. Translated with Google Translate.
[22] Barranha, “Cien años, un mismo lugar,” 293.
[23] Barranha, “Cien años, un mismo lugar,” 292.
[24] Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, “History,” Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, accessed December 2, 2024.
[25] Vitor Constâncio, “Forward,” Contemporary Art from Portugal (Art Committee of the European Central Bank & Banco de Portugal, 2002–2003), 8.
[26] Barranha, “Cien años, un mismo lugar,” 302.
[27] Barranha, “Cien años, un mismo lugar,” 302; MNAC director Emília Ferreira, semistructured interview with the author, October 23, 2023.
[28] Ferreira, interview, October 23, 2023.
[29] Ebeling, There Is No Now, 69.
[30] Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” e-flux Journal 11 (2009).
[31] Yvette Mutumba and Maurice Rummens, “Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at 125 Years – Editorial,” Stedelijk Studies Journal 11 (2022); Rixt Hulshoff Pol and Marie Baarspul, Stedelijk in the Pocket (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2012), 20.
[32] Mutumba and Rummens, “Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at 125 Years.”
[33] Pol and Baarspul, Stedelijk in the Pocket, 20.
[34] Willem Sandberg quoted in Mary Anna Leigh, “Building the Image of Modern Art: The Rhetoric of Two Museums and the Representation and Canonization of Modern Art (1935–1975); the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2008), 32.
[35] Edy de Wilde quoted in Leigh, “Building the Image of Modern Art,” 33.
[36] Mafalda Spencer, “Willem Sandberg: Warm printing,” Eye 25, no. 7 (1997).
[37] Mutumba and Rummens, “Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at 125 Years.”
[38] Stefano Collicelli Cagol, “Exhibition History and the Institution as a Medium,” Stedelijk Studies 2 (2015).
[39] Leigh, “Building the Image of Modern Art,” 34.
[40] Leigh, “Building the Image of Modern Art,” 34.
[41] Jelle Bouwhuis, “The Global Turn and the Stedelijk Museum,” in Changing Perspectives: Dealing with Globalisation in the Presentation and Collection of Contemporary Art, ed. Mariska ter Horst (Amsterdam: Kit Publishers, 2012), 157.
[42] Beatrix Ruf et al., “Curating the Stedelijk Collection: A Roundtable Discussion,” Stedelijk Studies 5 (2017).
[43] Susana Simplício, Públicos do Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea—Museu do Chiado (master’s thesis, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, 2010), 12. Translated with Google Translate.
[44] Thomas McEvilley, “Introduction,” in Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 7.
[45] Jan van Adrichem, Adi Martis, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Stedelijk Collection Reflections: reflections on the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Amsterdam: NAi010 Publishers, 2012), 11–14.
[46] Ruf et al., “Curating the Stedelijk Collection.”
[47] Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, “Stedelijk Base Opens 16 December 2017,” Stedelijk, September 13, 2017.
[48] Paul Basu, “The Labyrinthine Aesthetic in Contemporary Museum Design,” in Exhibition Experiments, ed. Sharon MacDonald and Paul Basu (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), 68.
[49] Terry Smith, Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 4.
[50] Basu, “Labyrinthine Aesthetic in Contemporary Museum Design,” 68.
[51] François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
[52] This commentary arose from a conversation I had following a visit to the Stedelijk in January 2023 and is supported by Dorothea von Hantelmann, “THE AGENDA OF ART: Politics in Art Today,” in Stedelijk Collection Reflections: Reflections on the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ed. Jan van Adrichem, Adi Martis, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Amsterdam: Nai010, 2012).
[53] Mutumba and Rummens, “Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at 125 Years.”
[54] Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, “Stedelijk Base Opens 16 December 2017.”
[55] Gwen Parry, “Staff Shares #1,” interview by Valeria Mari, Stedelijk Studies, October 6, 2022.
[56] White Balls on Walls, directed by Sarah Vos (NTR, 2022); see especially 30:12–30:41. Available online: https://www.npodoc.nl/documentaires/2023/06/white-balls.html, accessed December 8, 2024.
[57] Jesús P. Lorente, “From the White Cube to a Critical Museography: The Development of Interrogative, Plural and Subjective Museum Discourses,” in From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum, ed. Piotr Piotrowski and Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 120–22.
[58] For instance, the audio guide features the voices of curators who provide commentary on the rooms for which they were responsible, while the recurring Instagram segment Staff Picks strives to demystify the faces that work behind the scenes at the museum. Wall text around the museum also frequently contextualizes artistic developments and artworks alongside the Stedelijk’s own institutional history, often accompanied by photographic documentation both in the exhibitions and via social media posts.
[59] Groys, “Comrades of Time.”
[60] Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 202.
[61] Mieke Bal, Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness (London: Sternberg Press, 2020), 51.
[62] Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, “ARTE PORTUGUESA DO SÉCULO XX (1960–2010),” Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, 2012.
[63] Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, “ARTE PORTUGUESA DO SÉCULO XX (1960–2010).”
[64] Simplício, Públicos do Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, 25.
[65] Groys, “Comrades of Time.”
