This dissertation traces the history of a diagram. The diagram shows four circles of gradually diminishing sizes, lodged one inside the other, like the layers of a circular or spherical body. For a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists centered around Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the diagram represented a new type of museum: a museological Information Center modeled on the computer, operating as a site for radically democratic social experiments. The four layers stood for different functions: information capture, processing, interface, storage; or, put differently: social spaces and media resources, workshop floors, exhibition facilities, collection. Through close readings of a series of exhibitions and institutional projects in Sweden, the US, and France, this dissertation follows the development of this diagram: its prehistory and formulation, its different implementations, and its direct and indirect effects. It studies Moderna Museet’s original, unrealized project for Kulturhuset in Stockholm, according to which the museum should project its dynamic energies across the city center, serving as a “catalyst for the active forces in society”. It discusses the museum’s confrontation with digital technologies in the late 1960s, through pioneering museological organizations such as the Museum Computer Network in New York. It analyzes the exhibition formats developed in correspondence with the notion of the museum as a “vast experimental laboratory” and a “broadcasting station”: the exhibition as critical information pattern, as tele-commune. And it studies the diagram’s afterlife as one of the models informing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, during that project’s early phases. The Exhibitionary Complex reads these endeavors and visions as attempts to devise a critical understanding of the exhibitionary apparatus in relation to new information environments and media systems. It sheds light on a largely forgotten aspect of the exhibitionary, museological, and cultural history of the late twentieth century, in Sweden and internationally. But it also seeks to establish new models for grasping the exhibition’s singularity and potentials as a cultural and media technological form, in relation to the emergence of new information networks, as they exert increasing control over social, cultural, and political existence. / Space, Power, Ideology

Queer artists have engaged archives throughout modern and contemporary American art, but art historical discourse of their work has centered the writing of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to theorize these spaces without considering archival scholarship. This text takes up Gabriel Martinez’s Archive series as a case study to critique archival selection theory and better understand how prejudice has affected the preservation of queer folx’s collections. Martinez’s series is situated amongst other Western artworks that center archival records and queer themes throughout the last century. This section places his artwork in dialogue with other artists for whom the archive is the subject of their artwork. The artworks detailed exemplify the multiplicity of ways that queer folx critique and interpret the histories preserved in these institutions. Following this survey of art is an analysis of how archival records are selected for preservation and the inherent subjectivity of this task. Pedagogical writing on archival selection by Frank Boles, Richard Cox, and James O’Toole are consulted to better understand how archivists working in the field are taught to handle this type of work. Most of their writing is focused on traditional archives and fails to articulate the challenges facing counterarchives, spaces formed to compensate for the erasure of queer persons in traditional institutions. This review of archival scholarship ends with a critique of how queer counterarchives have fallen short of their inclusive aims. The final section of this text is dedicated to a close study of Martinez’s Archive series. His photographs document the Harry R. Eberlin photograph collection and the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia. The historical context of the Eberlin collection and the founding of its host repository are presented in conjunction with Archive series because Martinez’s compositions are inseparable from these histories. Philadelphia queer culture in the 1970s and 1980s is revealed through the retelling of these histories and by examining who was visualized in the images themselves. These images of bars and events simultaneously reveal the gender and racial disparity of patronage within these spaces and exemplify long-standing tensions in the city’s queer spaces. Lastly, this text posits a practice called “pseudo-processing” where artists document and preserve facsimiles of archival records to question the divisions of archival labor from that of an artist performing comparable tasks. / Art History

O museu de arte moderna e contemporânea é uma instituição que possui relações complexas com a arte, com o mercado da arte e, com os públicos. Suas origens remontam ao museu tradicional e, em linhas gerais, mantém suas atribuições básicas e pouco muda ao longo do tempo, mas passa a agregar novas e diferentes funções. Parte-se da hipótese de que, em face às novas manifestações culturais, às práticas das artes, aos hábitos culturais e às novas formas de organização - que se situam num outro registro, em coletivos, trabalhos colaborativos ou agrupamentos assemelhados - o museu necessita rever sua atuação se desejar participar ativamente do processo cultural contemporâneo. Para examinar o problema, partimos da análise do museu desde suas origens, verificando que ele surge na confluência de práticas tradicionais das coleções e gabinetes de curiosidades, e das ideias do Renascimento, que se adensam com o iluminismo buscando autonomia e o exercício da função pedagógica. Em seguida, analisamos o impacto que sofreu com as Exposições Universais e com o modernismo nas artes. Nesse longo percurso, buscamos identificar os diferentes tipos de ações de mediação que o museu realizou com os públicos, desde os catálogos e a expografia, até os seminários, debates e ações educativas. As novas funções que adquire no início do século XX e o processo de revitalização no final desse mesmo século transformam o museu numa das grandes atrações turísticas de nossos tempos. Na contemporaneidade, paralelamente ao museu, e fora dele, surgem propostas em rede de pedagogias coletivas que ampliam e atualizam este campo por meio da construção coletiva de experiências artísticas, de mediação, debates, plataformas de discussão e de documentação, que retiram tais atividades de um certo \'anonimato\' e dispersão, para se tornarem públicas. Sem abandonar tudo o que tem feito e sem, necessariamente, abraçar exclusivamente as práticas mais radicais, o museu pode participar das novas redes que estão se formando e estabelecer relações ricas e produtivas, funcionando simultaneamente como um ponto de emissão e de recepção na qual interagem artistas, instituições e públicos, onde todos são ativos. Dissolve-se, assim, o papel pedagógico nos moldes iluministas que possui o museu. / The museum of modern and contemporary art is an institution that has complex relationships with the art market, the public and the art itself. Its origins date back to the traditional museum and while keeping its basic characteristics with very little change over time it added some new and different functions. The hypothesis is: taking into consideration the contemporary form of cultural manifestations, art practices, cultural habits and organizations such as collectives and collective work, the museum needs to rethink itself if it wants to participate actively in the contemporary cultural process. To examine this problem we analyze the museum history, observing it has originated from the confluence of collections and curiosity cabinets traditional practices and the Renaissance ideas, further emphasized by the Enlightenment concepts, seeking autonomy and the exercise of a pedagogical function. Then we analyze the impact exerted on it by Universal Exhibitions and Modernism in arts. Through this long journey, we try to identify the different types of mediation actions the museum has developed with its audience, from catalogs and expography to seminars, debates and educational actions. The new functions it has acquired in the beginning of the twentieth century and the revitalization process experienced in the late twentieth century transformed the museum into one of the main tourist attractions of our times. In contemporary times, new interrelated, networked pedagogical propositions arise which amplify and update this field through the collective construction of artistic experiences, mediation, debates, discussion platforms and documentation that bring publicity and cohesion to these otherwise unrelated and \'anonymous\' activities. Without necessarily abandoning its legacy and embracing exclusively the more radical alternatives, the museum can participate in the new networks that are forming and establish richer, more productive relationships, acting simultaneously as an emission and reception point where artists, institution and public actively participate, therefore dissolving the Enlightenement-based pedagogical role the museum still holds.

O museu de arte moderna e contemporânea é uma instituição que possui relações complexas com a arte, com o mercado da arte e, com os públicos. Suas origens remontam ao museu tradicional e, em linhas gerais, mantém suas atribuições básicas e pouco muda ao longo do tempo, mas passa a agregar novas e diferentes funções. Parte-se da hipótese de que, em face às novas manifestações culturais, às práticas das artes, aos hábitos culturais e às novas formas de organização - que se situam num outro registro, em coletivos, trabalhos colaborativos ou agrupamentos assemelhados - o museu necessita rever sua atuação se desejar participar ativamente do processo cultural contemporâneo. Para examinar o problema, partimos da análise do museu desde suas origens, verificando que ele surge na confluência de práticas tradicionais das coleções e gabinetes de curiosidades, e das ideias do Renascimento, que se adensam com o iluminismo buscando autonomia e o exercício da função pedagógica. Em seguida, analisamos o impacto que sofreu com as Exposições Universais e com o modernismo nas artes. Nesse longo percurso, buscamos identificar os diferentes tipos de ações de mediação que o museu realizou com os públicos, desde os catálogos e a expografia, até os seminários, debates e ações educativas. As novas funções que adquire no início do século XX e o processo de revitalização no final desse mesmo século transformam o museu numa das grandes atrações turísticas de nossos tempos. Na contemporaneidade, paralelamente ao museu, e fora dele, surgem propostas em rede de pedagogias coletivas que ampliam e atualizam este campo por meio da construção coletiva de experiências artísticas, de mediação, debates, plataformas de discussão e de documentação, que retiram tais atividades de um certo \'anonimato\' e dispersão, para se tornarem públicas. Sem abandonar tudo o que tem feito e sem, necessariamente, abraçar exclusivamente as práticas mais radicais, o museu pode participar das novas redes que estão se formando e estabelecer relações ricas e produtivas, funcionando simultaneamente como um ponto de emissão e de recepção na qual interagem artistas, instituições e públicos, onde todos são ativos. Dissolve-se, assim, o papel pedagógico nos moldes iluministas que possui o museu. / The museum of modern and contemporary art is an institution that has complex relationships with the art market, the public and the art itself. Its origins date back to the traditional museum and while keeping its basic characteristics with very little change over time it added some new and different functions. The hypothesis is: taking into consideration the contemporary form of cultural manifestations, art practices, cultural habits and organizations such as collectives and collective work, the museum needs to rethink itself if it wants to participate actively in the contemporary cultural process. To examine this problem we analyze the museum history, observing it has originated from the confluence of collections and curiosity cabinets traditional practices and the Renaissance ideas, further emphasized by the Enlightenment concepts, seeking autonomy and the exercise of a pedagogical function. Then we analyze the impact exerted on it by Universal Exhibitions and Modernism in arts. Through this long journey, we try to identify the different types of mediation actions the museum has developed with its audience, from catalogs and expography to seminars, debates and educational actions. The new functions it has acquired in the beginning of the twentieth century and the revitalization process experienced in the late twentieth century transformed the museum into one of the main tourist attractions of our times. In contemporary times, new interrelated, networked pedagogical propositions arise which amplify and update this field through the collective construction of artistic experiences, mediation, debates, discussion platforms and documentation that bring publicity and cohesion to these otherwise unrelated and \'anonymous\' activities. Without necessarily abandoning its legacy and embracing exclusively the more radical alternatives, the museum can participate in the new networks that are forming and establish richer, more productive relationships, acting simultaneously as an emission and reception point where artists, institution and public actively participate, therefore dissolving the Enlightenement-based pedagogical role the museum still holds.

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This research focuses on agencification and quangocratisation (AQ) through a comparison of the experiences of South Korea and the UK. Although a number of studies of AQ have been produced recently, these reforms remain inadequately understood. Since AQ involves the structural disaggregation of administrative units from existing departments, executive agencies and quangos have distinct characteristics which are quite different from ordinary core departments. There are a number of factors which influence these changes; and this thesis explores nine existing theories which are available to explain these phenomena. Case studies are presented of Tate Modern in the UK and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), which are carefully analysed to examine the validity of those nine arguments. Although cultural agencies, which show some unique features, have become increasingly an essential part of the national economy, they have scarcely been researched from the viewpoint of public policy. This thesis endeavours to explore distinctive characteristics of this policy area; and moreover, it examines the diverse variables which have an impact on policy formation and its results through the process of comparison of arguments. The major tasks of this thesis are to investigate the applicability of the nine arguments and to weigh their merits. As a corollary of this comprehensiveness, it examines the whole public sectors of both countries, in order to show the broader picture and to understand the processes of changes and their backgrounds. More profoundly, similarities and differences between both countries are compared from both macro and micro perspectives. At the same time, the results of AQ are analysed through the comparison of outputs or outcomes before and after these changes, with a view to exploring whether their rationales are appropriate. Furthermore, it also examines the institutional constraints which influence not only the change of agencies but also their performances. Besides which, it seeks to find strategies for overcoming these constraints. This thesis adopts systematic and comprehensive approaches regarding basic concepts and data. It draws on theories of comparative research, the scope of the public sector, the classification and analysis of agencies and quangos, and theories underlying the detailed components of each argument and epistemological assumptions. Therefore, it suggests various aspects which enable us to broaden our understanding of the changes within the public sector; and to generate practical understanding to inform real world reform.