Abstract

Thinking of the museum as a public space where collective knowledge and consciousness are produced implies, first and foremost, to keep it alive as a site of both contestation and care. From Institutional Critique to Socially Engaged Art, contemporary artists have been prescient in unveiling the museum as an institution entangled in power relations and in fostering the deconstruction of Western-centric cultural heritage. By staging display practices and logics as a work of art, in the 1960s and 1970s Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke brought to the fore the relationship between art and politics in the context of the museum. They both developed a personal critical method – apparently démodé in Broodthaers’s case, plainly dissenting in Haacke’s – reshaping the artist role in society and showing the way for generations to come.