The exhibition title Artefact is both descriptive of its subject and a statement of intent.

Artefact is where contemporary art meets historical relic within City Museum’s ever-changing permanent exhibition Making Melbourne. It establishes a dynamic exchange between the work of artisans and artists, proposing a harmony between surface aesthetics, provenance and function.

Making Melbourne is constantly evolving in response to new social, political and curatorial challenges, with its displays slowly germinating, blooming, and eventually expiring over time. The exhibition breathes with life, as though it were the very heart of the Melbourne itself.

If Making Melbourne is the city’s heart, then Artefact is its soul.

Thirteen Melbourne artists have been invited to respond to the Artefact displays in Making Melbourne. The introduction of their small-scale works into this historical menagerie – works that grapple with questions of narrative, traditional forms of display, diorama and the relationship between physical objects and technology – enriches Making Melbourne with the mystery and seduction of craft-based art practice. The relationship between art and Artefact is a dialectical one, with the museological context of Old Treasury’s nineteenth century environs injecting an elegiac disquiet into the contemporary installations, playing off their allusions to grandeur.

The interplay between actual and imagined objects creates a unique dynamic, forging a multidimensional Melbourne story pulsating with the authenticity of yesteryear and the vigour of today. The artworks participate in a dialogue between art and Artefact, where traditions of museum display and white cube polemics are ruptured and melded, where two disparate approaches to object connoisseurship can happily play and commingle together.

Why should they be disparate?

The role of the museum has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Charged with the impossible responsibility of providing a voice for all society, and by burdening exhibits with the unrealistic expectation of defining or symbolising a period or event much larger, museums en masse have taken to hiding their collections ‘out the back’ as though a source of shame.

The museum Artefact has become suffocated by context and the obligations with which it is burdened.

Museum Artefacts must be depersonalised, presented objectively in an attempt to proffer a uniformly unambiguous voice. Art objects, on the other hand, are expected to be personalised; to speak subjectively and with passion. The relationship between art and Artefact is therefore as ripe for subversion as it is for arousing new approaches to object appreciation. Central to the premise of Artefact is an acknowledgement of the different ways we approach, appraise and critique art and historical objects.

Works in an art gallery are typically gauged by their aesthetic values and conceptual principles. Objects in a museum, on the other hand, are judged in terms of their ability to impart knowledge, and to inform by association to a wider event or period. Both objects are, however, invested with a value based on singularity, rarity, craftsmanship and uniqueness.

Artefact seeks to suggest such parallels as well as highlight discrepancies between art object and historical Artefact connoisseurship. It challenges viewer preconception when entering an exhibition space by disrupting that experience with alternate displays of art and Artefact. It emphasises the tendency to engage with artworks in one way and Artefacts in another: by merging the two, both objects can be appreciated on levels beyond those normally prescribed.

The rationale behind presenting art in a sterile, white cube gallery is to facilitate transmission of the perfect, uncontaminated voice of the artist. Like a symphony awaiting a hushed audience, there can be no distractions – art must have no competition.

However, this rationale is increasingly considered to have the opposite effect. To question the inherent institutional structures and politics of the utopian white cube space has almost become a form of sacrilege. The ‘church’ of the gallery, while aspiring to neutrality, has instead become an institutional ‘block’ dictating expression. Artists are seeking to escape this straightjacket and penetrate the sphere of the everyday, in locations such as supermarkets, brothels and bus shelters. In 2003, a group of twelve artists intervened in a purpose-built, mock converted warehouse situated within a city-fringe housing development. Immersed in this everyday environment, the artworks engaged with the public (inspecting the property which was for sale), and their conceptual strategies were enacted within the physical realm to great effect.

Artefact similarly seeks to disrupt and challenge preconceptions and, in many cases, misconceptions about where art belongs and how it can be presented. It seeks to realise the unbounded potential for pushing at the limits of contemporary art and the containers that hold it.

Artefact introduces passion to the museum arena: a unilateral, subjective response. It suffuses the static, sterile displays with creative energy, animating the Artefacts from their taxidermical slumber.

The artworks, in turn, bristle and pulsate within their newfound historiographical context. Immersed in an environment richly endowed with expectation and obligation, characterised by its asphyxiating over-populace of object, text and interpretation, the artworks are abuzz with situational stimulation. Their forms, resonating alongside their utilitarian forebears, reverberate with aesthetic sensation; saturated with ambition they hold the potential to impart a deeper understanding of their sociological roots. Superficial differences melt away, and the art and Artefacts achieve a synthesis of aesthetic harmony.

Why, indeed, should they be disparate…

Text © City Museum 2007
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