The Anti-Museum. An Anthology

The museum is constantly a target for criticism, whether it comes from artists, thinkers, curators, or even the public. From the avant-gardes of the twentieth century up until our contemporary era, the museum’s suspect position has generated countless gestures, iconoclastic actions, scathing attacks, utopias, and alternative exhibition spaces. For the first time, this anthology is devoted to the anti-museum, through anti-art, the anti-artist, anti-exhibition, as well as anti-architecture, anti-philosophy, anti-religion, anti-cinema and anti-music. This notion – unpatented but regularly reappropriated – traces the erratic, fractured, and sometimes paradoxical counter-history of the contestation of artistic institutions. From the first anti-exhibition to the first catalog retracing the history of “Closed Exhibitions,” from Dada to Noise music, from “Everything is Art” to NO! art, the Japanese avant-gardes to Lettrist cinema, and not forgetting such major protest figures as Gustav Metzger, Henry Flynt, Graciela Carnevale, and Lydia Lunch, The Anti-Museum sketches a polyphonic panorama where negation is accompanied by a powerful breath of life. Edited by Mathieu Copeland and Balthazar Lovay. Introduction by: Mathieu Copeland. Texts by: Zach Blas, Johannes Cladders, Beatriz Colomina, Henry Flynt, Kenneth Goldsmith, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Robert Morris, Bob Nickas, Sören Schmeling, Reiko Tomii, Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche. Features interview with John Armleder, Robert Barry, Ben, Genesis P-Orridge