Interiorist interventions and archival strategies: Contemporary terms for museums and creative practitioners

The contested interior space of the museum and its artifacts are receiving due attention. Museum objectors are altering content, examining unacknowledged assumptions and biases, and developing new ways of seeing and experiencing that will act as new models for critical, creative discourse. Museum objectors range from entire countries (notably Greece, which has been asking the British Museum to return the marble gods of the Parthenon since 1833), to community groups and creative practitioners. A prime example of the latter type of museum objector was Marcel Duchamp. His interiorist interventions of the 1930s and 1940s set the tone for creative practice within the notion of interiority, informed exhibition display and experience, and expanded museum discourse. This paper proposes that Marcel Duchamp extended his creative artistic practice into the field of interior design to subvert critical discourse on authoritarian aesthetics and display. Within this context of critical reflection, the museum as an artistic medium is also fast becoming an accepted methodology of creative practice. To examine this practical, creative work, we first draw on Jacques Derrida’s theoretical discussion about the concept of ‘the archive,’ to acknowledge the language of interiority and to focus on the ‘curated interior’ by juxtaposing the domestic and institutional interior and the notion of topology as a form of creative methodology. As a stepping-off-point, we will explore Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual nuances of the interior, specifically his La Boîte-en-valise, as a masterful blending of the archive (collection), the melding of creative disciplines, and commentary on the museum practices. We will then examine the challenges faced by two American and one Canadian museums’ exhibitions in the 1980s, followed by a review of more recent works highlighting progressive change within these museums. The works by Spring Hurlbut in 2001 and Kent Monkman and Wangechi Mutu in 2019 illustrate evolving discussions about the use of creative practitioners working with museum collections and interiors. As the landscape of the curated interior within the institutional setting (museum) has changed, it is a crucial time to take stock of the different possibilities when addressing the spaces between the memories of the archive: what is remembered, how it was/is remembered? This new methodology of museum as artistic medium is substantially expanding modern critical discourse on the interiority and the archive.