Depotausstellungen Die Erfindung eines Ausstellungsformats aus dem Geist der Institutionenkritik

The storeroom or depot is the dark side of the museum. It is its unknown, hidden space. The cultural anthropologist Gottfried Korff argued that this relationship between the hidden and the public side, for which he coined the catchy phrase “deponieren – exponieren” (deposit-exhibit), was the essential feature of the modern museum, both as an institution and as a generator of meaning. It is along this boundary that the curator’s task in the storeroom is split apart from the curator’s task in the display room by different spatial and epistemic logics. In the 1970s, curators began to break down this clear divide between storage and display. At this time an exhibition format arose that blurred the boundaries between the display and the storeroom: the depot exhibition. Depot exhibitions are museum presentations that turn the depot into their subject matter (i. e. visible storage). They show a particularly large number of objects, which they do not (initially) explain. Rather, the objects are presented as a panorama within spaces that (are meant to) visually and/or epistemologically resemble a depot. As a result, these exhibition formats became extraordinarily popular and to this day have not lost their fascination. This essay inquires how the idea of the depot exhibition arose out of the museum ideas and the social movements of the 1970s

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Exhibition · Geist · Sociology · Subject matter · Visual arts · German Social Sciences and History · Libraries and Information Services · Memory, History, Trauma, Identity · Philosophy