Online exhibition
Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and e-flux present the digital version of the The Avant-Garde Museum. Inaugurated in 2020, on the 90th anniversary of the founding of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, The Avant-Garde Museum examines the beginnings of modern museology.
The history of avant-garde museology begins after the October Revolution, when the Soviet cultural producers proposed the establishment of a network of Museums of Artistic Culture. Not much later, a group of New York-based modernists and Dada artists started the Société Anonyme, a collective that sought to establish the first American museum of modern art. The successive chapters of this story were written by the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, who designed the Kabinett der Abstrakten at the Hanover Provinzialmuseum, and by the avant-garde “a.r.” group, whose efforts began the International Collection of Modern Art at the Łódź museum now known as the Muzeum Sztuki.
The avant-garde wanted to demolish museums, believing they served to petrify and cultivate the past, which needed to be discarded in the name of a better tomorrow. But the avant-garde also dreamed of its own museums, places governed not by history, but by the future. Museums were imagined as laboratories where the artist would experiment with new forms and means of expression, and the viewer would learn to experience and understand reality in a new way. The museum became a vehicle for fulfilling the avant-garde utopia—the promise of a world where everyone has the right to and conditions for a creative life.
The Avant-Garde Museum is a project consisting of three, interdependent parts: a book published by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and Walther König Verlag, Köln in 2020; an exhibition opened at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in October of 2021, and an online project, produced jointly by Muzeum Sztuki and e-flux. The main subject of all three segments of the project—the book, the exhibition, and the digital platform—are four historical museum models: the Museums of Artistic Culture, Kabinett der Abstrakten, Société Anonyme Inc., and the International Collection of Modern Art of the “a.r.” group. The online project focuses on the connections, both historical and conceptual, between the four museums discussed.
View the The Avant-Garde Museum here.
The Avant-Garde Museum project is co-financed by funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
For more about The Avant-Garde Museum project please see msl.org.pl.
Curatorship: Agnieszka Pindera
Concept by Ewa Borysiewicz, Daniel Muzyczuk, Agnieszka Pindera, Jarosław Suchan
Edited by Ewa Borysiewicz, Martyn Kramek
Platform
Designed by Mengyi Qian
Developed by Jules LaPlace
Produced by Muzeum Sztuki in Łodź and e-flux
Project management: Martyn Kramek, Hallie Ayres
