This thesis examines the first seventeen years of the history of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MOMA), from its founding in 1965 until c. 1982. It is concerned with the changing relationships between the museum and its audience, focusing on those aspects of the museum's programming that shed light on its role as a public mediator of recent art. This provides a means to consider the underlying values and commitments that informed MOMA's emergence as a leading contemporary art institution. Chapter one examines the museum's relationship to utopian countercultures through the metaphor of the museum as 'garden'; chapter two considers the erstwhile 'permanent' collection and its connection to corporate patronage; chapter three investigates the parallel forces of institutional critique and institutionalization; and chapter four addresses didactic strains in the museum's representation of an emergent multiculturalism. Although dedicated to the history of a single regional gallery, the thematic structure of the thesis provides entry points into historical and theoretical issues of broader relevance. It is based on primary research in the previously neglected archive of what is now known as Modern Art Oxford, supplemented by interviews with artists and former staff members, and by close attention to British art periodicals and exhibition catalogues of the period. It is also informed by critical writings on museums and displays, and by artistic, social and museological histories, allowing the museum's activities to be situated within the cultural politics of these turbulent decades. The thesis suggests that institutional identity - as exemplified by the history of MOMA from 1965-1982 - is porous and discontinuous: the development of the museum over this period is animated by multiple and often contradictory ideals, continuously shaped by pragmatic considerations, and subject to a rich variety of subjective responses.

You Had to Have Been There challenges the role of fetishistic materiality throughout Film Studies using the history of New York underground film and video production from 1965 to 1985. It focuses on four situations of underground film and video production and exhibition: the relationship between Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground's Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Film-makers' Cinematheque, the screening of Michael Snow's Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen at Anthology Film Archives, the production of work by Ed Emshwiller, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola, and other artists at WNET's Television Laboratory, and the exhibition of No Wave Cinema by Beth and Scott B, Lizzie Borden, Vivienne Dick, John Lurie, James Nares, and others at Max's Kansas City, the Mudd Club, and the New Cinema. This project uses the above exhibition sites to argue for the importance of liveness and presence in recording media, considering the affect of liveness not only on our definitions of cinema, but also on the relationship between cinema and historiography. While a canon of experimental film has emerged within Film Studies, determined by the alignment of experimental filmmakers and the academy, this dissertation carves out an alternate corpus of works screened in non-traditional environments. It finds an affinity between such spaces and the project of post-classical apparatus theory, both of which challenge the regimented space of traditional film spectatorship. The films and videos of this project are connected by two crucial elements: their location in New York City and their attention to sound. The personnel involved in the creation and reception of these films and videos constitute a network forum, or a group of artists who use the spaces of reception and production to reconfigure assumptions about film and video. Some of these spaces share direct links and touchstones, while others are tied together by shared concerns. One shared concern is a critical approach to the relationship between sound and image within cinema. Michael Snow and the filmmakers of the No Wave use pre-existing ideologies of sound to challenge cinematic presence and absorptive spectatorship while embracing the limits of subcultural spectatorship. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Television Laboratory embrace sound's power as present, reorienting our perspective on the relationship between technology and the body. Taken together, these exhibition sites argue for the importance of sound and liveness in understanding experimental film history. They also suggest alternative modes of spectatorship that might hold productive power in our current media environment of hyper-reproduction and communicative capitalism.

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

Cette thèse pose la question de la place du livre dans l’expérience de la lecture dans le musée quand dans la seconde moitié des années 1960 tout l’art, tel qu’il est redéfini par les artistes conceptuels, est à lire. Dans les années 1960 et 1970, puis de nouveau au tournant des années 1990-2000, les espaces de lecture se multiplientAlors que l’emploi du livre par les artistes conceptuels s’inscrit dans une quête de démocratisation de l’art, qui serait désormais diffusé hors du musée, le livre dans le musée semble poser le problème d’une relation apparemment contradictoire entre la nature reproductible d’un médium et son ancrage in situ. Force est de se demander si cela ne produirait pas une réification du livre et une interdiction de la lecture pour reprendre les mots de Marcel Broodthaers. A moins qu’il ne s’agisse d’interroger les usages du livre et la place de la lecture dans la constitution de communautés éphémères. La première partie est consacrée principalement à la spatialisation de la lecture à l’ère de l’information aux Etats-Unis entre le milieu des années 1960 et le début des années 1980. Les espaces de lecture sont alors aussi des espaces à lire. Dans une seconde partie, nous verrons que l’institutionnalisation de l’installation est contemporaine de celle de la lecture dans le musée. Enfin nous étudierons l’émergence de modèles originaux d’exposition du livre d’artiste et du livre, créés par des artistes et commissaires qui ont participé à la rédéfinition de l’exposition comme médium et/ou en réinterprétant Le Club des Travailleurs de Rodchenko (1925). / This dissertion investigates the position of book in reading experiences which take place in the museum context when in the mid-nineteen sixties, all art, as redifined by conceptual artists, is to be read. In the 1960s and in the 1970s, then again in 1990s and 2000s, reading space have been increasing. Those could be apparatuses produced for exhibition as well as art environments and installations. In contrast with artists books which deal with democratizing art by circulating outside the control of museums, books in museums leds to questions about an apparent opposition between a reproducible medium and its in situ anchorage. It begs the essential question of whether it might end up in the reification of the book as well as in the prohibition of reading, the Marcel Broodthaers’s Interdiction de lire as stated for Pense-Bête (1964). Unless it provides the opportunity to focuse on the uses of books . The installations we are analyzing contribute to the building up of temporary communities. That is to say that we have also to consider the reader position in social sphere. There are three crucial trends, for it is in exploring them that we can begin to explore as the book as a reference for the environment which is itself to be read at the time of Information Turn which influenced theory on architecture. In the mid-1990s, artists produced what we call in situ books that are produced for reading in the museum. This dissertation dealss also with the wide range of interpretations of the same historic source, The Working Club by Alexandre Rodchenko (1925), by curators and artists from the New York art Scene as well as other American and European Artists.

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