Contemporary Art Exhibitions as a Complex Historical Source

In source studies, the problems of visual sources, their classification, systematization, analysis, and interpretation are productively developed. The visual turn in historiography has demonstrated the productivity and heuristic potential of incorporating visual evidence into historical research. In this context, contemporary art exhibitions deserve special attention. They are focused on non-classical aesthetics, non-traditional art materials, social activism, multimedia and mixed media. The article argues the thesis that contemporary art exhibitions represent a complex historical source. Its external and internal criticism is associated with complex heuristics, with identification and communication by a large circle of actors, taking account of the specifics of works and contemporary art exhibitions as boundary objects and semiophores. A contemporary art exhibition could be considered as a complex of visual-documentary, visual-graphic, artistic, technological, and sometimes completely non-visual sources, including scientific and technical documentation, objects of everyday life or olfactory compositions (chemical formulas). An important feature of many contemporary art exhibitions is their site-specificity and ephemerality, as well as social criticism. That contexts determine the inclusion in the complex historical source traditional office documents as well as files of political control and supervision authorities in the field of culture. Contemporary art exhibitions as a historical sources are closely connected with new trends in the interpretation of museum/exhibition object in museology, on the one hand, and with understanding of the changing exposition paradigms by which contemporary art is shown to the public, on the other

Art · Epistemology · Exhibition · Programming language · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Library Science and Information · Philosophy · Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry