Completing discourses
Special Editions from the Documentation Center
20 May - 03 Sep 2017
COMPLETING DISCOURSES
Special Editions from the Documentation Center
20 May – 3 September 2017
Coordination: Araceli Corbo y Ana Madrid
Web development: Antonio Buil
Completing discourses. Special Editions from the Documentation Center is a project that aims to turn a spotlight on and boost the work of the museum’s Documentation Centre.
The different directions followed by contemporary art are not only diverse, and materialise and formalised in varied and complex ways, but also tend to be deployed beyond the configurations that we commonly know as a "work of art". "Works of art" are the objects par excellence in exhibitions, programmes and collections; many of the nuances, processes, situations and interactions of contemporary creation are outside the field of the arts and of the discourses that are derived from it. This is the reason why more and more frequently we are seeing an increased reliance on documentary compilations, archives, artist"s books and special publications to complete the data and approaches to the complexity of the art of our days.
This various set of materials is a tool to know both art and the discussions and formal or discursive genealogies around it, and it is precisely what gives meaning to the Documentation Centre of the MUSAC, which now receives a new and powerful impetus. This information unit produces plentiful specialized resources — both in paper and digital support —, answers specific bibliographic queries, selects reference material, prepares dossiers about artists and collects and maintains special editions and sets of documents (group or personal files, documentary archives, the common’s archives, etc.) related to the whole of the art system.
The Showcase Project’s show consists of two parts: on the one hand, a physical space where a selection of special editions of the Documentation Centre will be shown, and on the other, a purposebuilt web site (www.musac.es/centrodocumentacion) where all the materials that make up the Centre’s catalogue or holdings will be available for public use.
The purpose of this selection is to showcase the variety of materials and formats used by artists or other agents of the art world for creative and discursive speculation. These materials, which were conceived with the idea of democratizing art by facilitating their acquisition and dissemination — mostly from the 60"s —, raise many questions as for their documentary approach. In this case it is the Library-Documentation Centre of the MUSAC that assumes the challenge of selecting, classificating, cataloguing, and preserving the items, as well as the implementation of this underway project that every year will increase its holdings with acquisitions and donations. After being shown, these materials will be accessible to the public by requesting them a day in advance, thus complying with the Centre’s mission of allowing the access to documents and information.
The Centre’s collection is made up of artists’ publications (book/ magazine format), artist’s books, photobooks, digital books, art catalogues, mail art, newspapers, brochures, works in diverse media, posters/placards, electronic resources (CD, disks), performative books, graphic novels, fanzines, pamphlets, flyers, etc., as well as complete collections and loose numbers of periodicals, books from the 1960s to the present, assembled magazines and a great many other items. In the catalogue of the Documentation Centre the catalographic index card of all elements, with their description, both physical and analytical, will be available for public reference.
The web will have a search engine focused on six of the fields that make up the description of every element: author, country, year, publisher, subject and category. This search system will also allow the establishment of different relationships among records and the visualization of the links between the different documents and the works in the MUSAC Collection.
The Documentation Centre includes the essential documentary compilations and various collections of holdings, among which: the A UA CRAG documentary collection, ADACYL (Documentary Archive of Artists from Castilla y León), as well as the following archives: FeminismosLeón, La Voz de mi Madre, Agencia de desmontaje, Colonia Apócrifa, Joan Brossa and David Iturregui.
This presentation of the Documentation Centre as a project in progress covers one of MUSAC’s objectives, that of giving visibility to the importance of documentary sources as a useful legacy for research on contemporary art and culture.
Special Editions from the Documentation Center
20 May – 3 September 2017
Coordination: Araceli Corbo y Ana Madrid
Web development: Antonio Buil
Completing discourses. Special Editions from the Documentation Center is a project that aims to turn a spotlight on and boost the work of the museum’s Documentation Centre.
The different directions followed by contemporary art are not only diverse, and materialise and formalised in varied and complex ways, but also tend to be deployed beyond the configurations that we commonly know as a "work of art". "Works of art" are the objects par excellence in exhibitions, programmes and collections; many of the nuances, processes, situations and interactions of contemporary creation are outside the field of the arts and of the discourses that are derived from it. This is the reason why more and more frequently we are seeing an increased reliance on documentary compilations, archives, artist"s books and special publications to complete the data and approaches to the complexity of the art of our days.
This various set of materials is a tool to know both art and the discussions and formal or discursive genealogies around it, and it is precisely what gives meaning to the Documentation Centre of the MUSAC, which now receives a new and powerful impetus. This information unit produces plentiful specialized resources — both in paper and digital support —, answers specific bibliographic queries, selects reference material, prepares dossiers about artists and collects and maintains special editions and sets of documents (group or personal files, documentary archives, the common’s archives, etc.) related to the whole of the art system.
The Showcase Project’s show consists of two parts: on the one hand, a physical space where a selection of special editions of the Documentation Centre will be shown, and on the other, a purposebuilt web site (www.musac.es/centrodocumentacion) where all the materials that make up the Centre’s catalogue or holdings will be available for public use.
The purpose of this selection is to showcase the variety of materials and formats used by artists or other agents of the art world for creative and discursive speculation. These materials, which were conceived with the idea of democratizing art by facilitating their acquisition and dissemination — mostly from the 60"s —, raise many questions as for their documentary approach. In this case it is the Library-Documentation Centre of the MUSAC that assumes the challenge of selecting, classificating, cataloguing, and preserving the items, as well as the implementation of this underway project that every year will increase its holdings with acquisitions and donations. After being shown, these materials will be accessible to the public by requesting them a day in advance, thus complying with the Centre’s mission of allowing the access to documents and information.
The Centre’s collection is made up of artists’ publications (book/ magazine format), artist’s books, photobooks, digital books, art catalogues, mail art, newspapers, brochures, works in diverse media, posters/placards, electronic resources (CD, disks), performative books, graphic novels, fanzines, pamphlets, flyers, etc., as well as complete collections and loose numbers of periodicals, books from the 1960s to the present, assembled magazines and a great many other items. In the catalogue of the Documentation Centre the catalographic index card of all elements, with their description, both physical and analytical, will be available for public reference.
The web will have a search engine focused on six of the fields that make up the description of every element: author, country, year, publisher, subject and category. This search system will also allow the establishment of different relationships among records and the visualization of the links between the different documents and the works in the MUSAC Collection.
The Documentation Centre includes the essential documentary compilations and various collections of holdings, among which: the A UA CRAG documentary collection, ADACYL (Documentary Archive of Artists from Castilla y León), as well as the following archives: FeminismosLeón, La Voz de mi Madre, Agencia de desmontaje, Colonia Apócrifa, Joan Brossa and David Iturregui.
This presentation of the Documentation Centre as a project in progress covers one of MUSAC’s objectives, that of giving visibility to the importance of documentary sources as a useful legacy for research on contemporary art and culture.