ART

Arnolfini’s 50th year celebrations come to a head this month with an extraordinary exhibition documenting the weird and wonderful collections and obsessions of a raft of global modern artists. Steve Wright’s our museums man.

Visitors to Arnolfini should always be prepared for the unusual, the indefinable – art to intrigue, amuse and at times bemuse. That’ll never be truer than over the next few months, though, as the ’fini continues the celebrations of its first half-century (it was founded in March 1961 above a bookshop in The Triangle) with a pair of rather unique shows.

‘Museum Show: Part One’ (24 Sept-19 Nov) and, indeed, ‘Museum Show: Part Two’ (9 Dec-5 Feb) will shine a light on one of the most curious and fascinating tendencies in modern and contemporary art: the artist-created museum.

The two-part ‘museum of museums’ will be a selection of idiosyncratic personal collections by some of the world’s more leftfield and explorative artists since the Second World War. Some of the, shall we say, niche artists’ museums of which you’ll find excerpts include the Museum of Soy Sauce Art, based in Kagawa, Japan: a repository of artwork created in this unusual medium, whose first examples appeared, we learn, in 16th-century Japan.

You also won’t want to miss the Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals by Canadian artist Bill Burns, whose centrepiece is 19 pieces of scale-model safety and rescue gear for reptiles, birds, mammals, insects, and fish – and whose agenda, though it may seem frivolous, is in fact at least partly serious (“we offer equal opportunities for all species”). The Voting Booth Museum does what it says on the tin: the Museum of Incest (Simon Fujiwara’s fictional architectural complex, pieced together almost entirely from structures built by his architect father, and billed as “a wildly personal portrait of a father-son relationship”), thankfully, doesn’t. Closer to home, Peter Blake’s Museum for Myself, recently exhibited at Bath’s Holburne Museum, makes an appearance. A tour around the sprawlingly eclectic personal collection of the renowned pop artist (and fanatical collector), it’s an illuminating insight into the collector’s mentality, the butterfly mind of the artist as social recorder, and the bewildering array of cultural highways and byways of the last 50 years. Elsewhere, you’ll travel from the abject, courtesy of Stuart Brisley’s Museum of Ordure, to the sublime –Tomas Saraceno’s Museo Aero Solar, a floating museum made of thousands of recycled carrier bags (pictured above).

“It’s the first exhibition to chart this particular tendency in contemporary art,” explains Arnolfini’s exhibitions curator Nav Haq. “Since the mid-20th century, artists have continued consistently to invent their own institutions. The reasons for working in this way have varied greatly between artists – from critiques directed specifically towards institutions of art to more contemporary examples that focus their attention towards wider social and political realms of cultural hegemony.” Quite so. See you by the soy sauce paintings…

MUSEUM SHOW: PART TWO SHOWS FROM 9 DEC-5 FEB. FFI: WWW.ARNOLFINI.ORG.UK

Copyright Steve Wright 2011