Avant-garde museum – virtual presentation

The strategic partner of the project will be e-flux (https://www.e-flux.com/), a prestigious American publishing platform with an international reach, which in a creative way implements and disseminates projects describing the tensions of the critical discourse surrounding contemporary art and culture in the all over the world. Moreover, in the artistic community, e-flux functions as a specialized platform for exchanging information about the most important cultural events, ensuring the greatest visibility for this type of projects.
 

The avant-garde museum is a pioneering project that is the result of many years of research conducted by the team of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź on avant-garde initiatives to build collections of works of art and establish artistic institutions.

Its idea was born from the need to better understand one's own institutional heritage and, above all, from the belief in the need to reevaluate established views on the relationship between the avant-garde and the museum. The dominant narrative presents the avant-garde and the museum as opponents whose meeting cannot lead to anything other than the defeat of one of them: either the destruction of the museum or the disarmament of the avant-garde. Apart from this story, however, there may be another one, one developed around avant-garde artists who make efforts to create their own museum institutions in the belief that they can be tools for achieving avant-garde goals. The project implemented by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź aims to present this lesser-known story.

One of its effects was a Polish- and English-language publication of the same title, published in 2020, which is a collection of critical essays by outstanding researchers from Poland and around the world, including Maria Gough, Rebecca Uchill and Julian Myers and Joanna Szupińska, accompanied by rich source material, iconographic and textual.

The culmination of activities in this area will be an international exhibition that will also place the history of the Museum of Art in Łódź in the discussed narrative framework. Its opening is scheduled for October 15 this year.

Through the research, works and archives related to the activities of the first four museum institutions that were established on the initiative or in close cooperation with avant-garde artists were compiled: the network of Museums of Artistic Culture established in post-revolutionary Russia; Société Anonyme Museum of Modern Art, established in the early 1920s in New York by Katherine S. Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray; the Cabinet of Abstraction designed in 1927 by El Lissitzky for the Provinzialmuseum Hannover and the International Collection of Modern Art of the "a.r." group, which became the cornerstone of today's Muzeum Sztuki.

The creation of the Łódź collection is a global phenomenon. It was collected thanks to the enthusiasm and dedication of a small group of avant-garde artists and poets and consists entirely of gifts donated by the most outstanding artists of Europe at that time.

As a result of combining the effects of many years of research of the Museum team and the multidisciplinary experience of e-flux in the implementation of artistic and cultural projects mediated in various media, a virtual platform will be created presenting a project devoted to the issues described above. This internet project will consist primarily of the following components:

• rich visual materials, including documentary films creating a historical background for the story; 
• critical and dissemination texts;
• source materials (e.g. manifestos), present as reproductions of documents, translated into English, and also read in the original languages ​​by lectors.

The great advantage of such a project is the ability to create a synergistic story in which various content and iconographic materials complement each other. The project does not repeat the format of subsequent virtual exhibitions or websites devoted to archives, but will function autotelically and at the same time in correspondence with the publication and exhibition prepared by Muzeum Sztuki.

The use of online tools for this purpose will enable global reach, reaching a wide range of foreign recipients, and consequently, effective dissemination and promotion of Polish cultural heritage around the world.

Funding under the program: PLN 100,000.00 (net)
 

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage under the "Inspiring Culture" Program.