School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMuseums as Assemblage Practice and Potential( 2019)In this dissertation, I explore the emergence of the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). In contrast to the voluminous media reports on its ground-breaking and radical entry into the museum world, I set out to situate this museum within a wider historical and theoretical framework. I introduce the key concept of assemblage systems theory to illustrate contemporary museum practice through a philosophy of openness, rather than fixed-chronological or fixed-institutional approaches. A key aim of this body of work is to provide a new critical framework for understanding contemporary museum practice, using assemblage systems theory, before applying this method to a case study of Mona. This thesis is divided into three sections. Section one (chapters one to three) serves to map out the field and provide a method of reframing. Chapter one maps a genealogy of museums, while chapter two explores key threads of institutional critique. These provide a contextual grounding for my argument that current museum practice is best understood through multiple, non-linear narratives. In the third chapter, I develop my methodological approach and conceptual framework, drawing on Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) extension of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1986) concept of ‘assemblage’, Conal McCarthy’s (2015) outline of ‘museum practice’ and Duncan Grewcock’s (2014) ‘critical reflexive visitation’. I argue that by tracing the interactions occurring between components of a variety of museums understood as ‘assemblages’, we can identify four ‘common notions’, the ‘normative’, ‘responsive’, ‘affective’ and ‘emergent’. In section two (chapters four to seven), I explore each of these common notions in turn, illustrating their processes of territorialisation and de/reterritorialisation. Section three (chapters eight and nine) serves as my primary case study and concluding reflection. In chapter eight, I undertake a sustained engagement with Mona to crosscheck its practices against the assemblage systems theory framework outlined in the preceding chapters. I argue that the interactions at Mona are constituted by an elaborate and dynamic interplay with a larger cultural framework and visitor agencies, problematising the idea that Mona fits within a linear history or a typological set of museum practices. I conclude with a reflection on potentiality, arguing that by releasing the function of theory from its authoritative and structural foundations, we liberate both conceptualisation and practice.