Rates of Exchange
Reframing contextual Museum elements in order to reveal and re-contextualize institutional exchanges between bodies, art, graphics, and architecture.
Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebaek, Denmark
1996
This installation developed as architectural, graphic, and video networks that worked its way through the Museum by taking on and transforming the form of various Museum spatial types: counters, cases, seating, and signage. This network intervened at eight locations (Ticket Booth, Museum Gift Shop Counter, Museum Gift Shop Case, Exhibition Corridor, Exhibition Case, Outdoor Case, Outdoor Sign, Dining Wall). These networks was designed from a variety of contextual Museum elements — architectural frames and picture frames, window glass and picture glass, present signage and historical images from the Museum's catalog, active surveillance video — in order to reveal, re-configure, and re-contextualize institutional exchanges between bodies, art, graphics, and architecture, past and present.
At five of these locations the intervention included a real-time video link, showing the exchanges taking place between staff and visitors at the Ticket Booth, the Museum Gift Shop, and the Cafe, and between the visitors and the art at the Exhibition Case, and between visitor and visitor at the Corridor piece. At various locations, a type-network consisting of the three different type-faces of the three “subsidiary” areas of the museum (ticket booth, gift shop, cafe) examines some equivalences of exchange in the museum experience. For example: for 16 Danish Kroner you can purchase entrance for your child (at the ticket booth) or a large postcard (at the gift shop) or a Danish pastry deluxe (at the cafe).
Thus the installation attempts to address the various social, psychological, and physical exchanges:
- between the exhibition areas and the "subsidiary" areas of the museum,
- between museum visitors and museum staff,
- between individuals as they engage with the art and each other throughout the Museum.
- between the events of the museum and their representations,
- between the institution's past and its present,
- between the exhibition labels and signage and the labels and signage of the “subsidiary” areas of the museum.
