Art/Histories

The first thematic exhibition under the aegis of the museum’s new appointed director Sabine Breitwieser, initiated a debate over a central part of the institution’s mission: making history out of artifacts. Looking beyond the narrow confines of art history, it focused on works with a specific frame of reference: art that reflects on history and contemporary events as well as its own involvement.

In Art/Histories, an exhibition that took place at both museum buildings, uptown and downtown, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg presented multiple fresh perspectives on history and historic events. How is history written, who is appointed to write it and which tools do historians apply to the study and evaluation of historical events and the communication of their findings? How about the objectivity of scholarly research and the historic documents on which history is based? What legitimizes visual artists who bring their own resources and unique approaches to the exploration of themes in history and recent historic events in their work?

With more than 330 works by around forty artists, the exhibition spanned the period from the seventeenth century to the present. It engaged both the museum’s own and other local collections as well as a variety of perspectives and artistic practices in a dialogue, including the rules of the art world itself. The exhibition thus presented art with distinctive views on history—and the artists behind it—in a larger historical framework and surveys its origins as well as its contemporary manifestations. As extensive as the theme was also the spatial presentation, which extended to both venues of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg—the Mönchsberg and the Rupertinum.

The scrupulous methodology of historiography has recently found itself confronted with a new emphasis on the immediate experience of events. In the last few years, this shift has led critics to raise numerous questions also concerning the role of the museum: Whose history is to be told, and from whose perspective? Whose task is it to tell it? And what form is the ongoing revision of traditional contents to take? General consensus has emerged that art history should be read less as a linear succession of schools and tendencies spearheaded by individual protagonists than as a living network in which interrelations and meanings are subject to ongoing renegotiation.

In addition, the exhibitions raised questions such as, can artists take the role of (critical) historians? Can they tell us something that we do not already know from the profusion of facts and views with which today’s media flood us? Or do we have reason to hope that they are simply “better” at telling us about “their” view of history and histories?