La period room come strumento di espressione artistica e di critica al museo

“The period room as a tool of artistic expression and museum criticism” intends to argue that recently some artists, in different ways, use the exhibition, and particularly the period room, like a sort of new form/format of artistic technique. In particular the essay is focused on Mark Dion’s work The Curator’s Office done for the show More Real?: Art in the Age of Truthiness, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and two Jimmie Durham’s installation: On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian and, the more recent, The Museum of European Normality (conceived in collaboration with Maria Thereza Alves and Michael Taussig). Coming from Duchamp’s works and reconsidered through the Institutional Critique, this kind of artistic practice reflects on its own staging in galleries and museums exploring the concept and the social function of art itself.