Glitching the Museum: Disruptive Media Art in a Permanent Collection

Abstract

In late 2016, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam acquired seventeen works by leading artists working with digital technologies and cultures. Selected for inclusion into the permanent collection were for instance works by glitch art pioneers JODI and their younger heiress Rosa Menkman. Exhibiting digital art since the mid-2000s, Stedelijk’s acquisition follows a curatorial logic to expand their holdings into a national permanent collection of digital art – to preserve and present it to the general audience. This initiative acknowledges a branch of art that is often absent in offline settings. However, given that glitch art provokes and harnesses the contingent instability of systems, its existence within a permanent museum collection raises some interesting questions:

What happens to disruptive media practices when it becomes integrated, structured, archived and displayed within the contemporary museum – and vice versa?

What happens to the tactical potential of glitch art as institutional critique within a permanent institutional collection?

What are the similarities and differences between institutionalizing the digital avant-garde, and the modernist avant-garde – its canonization and neutralization?

How can glitch art keep its tactical of generating friction from inside this system – and what are the risks of mainstreaming it counter-protocological qualities?

What are the possibilities of glitch art actually glitching the contemporary art museum?

This paper explores these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective joining art history, media studies, and systems theory. Choosing glitch art at Stedelijk as an intensive case, it thus addresses several conference topics – from institutional histories of media art to practices of collecting and representing.