The Porous Museum: The Politics of Art, Rupture and Recycling in Modern Romania

Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Porous Museums
	Museums as expandable
	Museums as repositories of garbage and places of concealment
	Museums as continuities of practice
	Chapter synopses
1 Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness
	Living among stereotypes
	Closed rooms
	‘Socialist’ white and tidy
	‘Anti-communist’ colour and bricolage
	Negotiating a white overall
	In search of creativity: The EMYA
	Conclusion
2 The Staging of History: Ethnography in Museums’ Shifting Archives
	Why silence the socialist past?
	Golden archives: Aristocrats and peasants in the capital city
	Finding inspiration in Stockholm and Oslo
	Partial archives: Partial truths
	Relocations during the 1950s
	The 1957 Bucharest exhibition: The difficulty of inscribing difference
	Where are the peasants? Replies from a photo archive
	Conclusion
3 Socialist Multiplication and the Use of the Future Tense
	Multiplication of employees and the school of seriality
	Work as a gift: The art of bureaucracy and numbers
	The 1960s: A marathon of exhibitions, events and the dispersion of technocrats
	The secret police searches the soul of Tancred Bănățeanu
	Socialism goes global: Travelling folk-art exhibitions to Austria, Belgium, China, Mexico, Switzerland and Vietnam
	Endless multiplication of collections: Storage fever makes the museum grind to a halt
4 A Question of (In)Visibility
	The 1977 earthquake: New visibility and the media
	Socialist artizanat, naïve art and the mix of values
	Back to the stores: What museums do not need
	1980s: Eating at the Museum of the Communist Party
	Hunger and collapse
5 What Is Left After a Revolution . . . Fragments
	Priests in the museum: A story of exorcism and sacralization
	1990s’ Neo-Byzantinism
	Paper clips: Fragmentation and assemblage
	‘Living’ museography: ‘When museums disrupt and heal’
	Conclusion
6 Three Faces of Communism
	Anger: Communism as the Plague
	Practice: The continuity of stores
	Irony and playfulness: The art of bricolage
	Conclusion
Conclusion
	Porous museums: Tales of continuity and rupture in Central and Eastern Europe
	The politics of display and ‘peasants out of history’
	Little space for modernity: The missing metal spoon
Notes
References
Illustrations
Index