[artinfo] The Avant-Garde Museum

[e-flux]

The Avant-Garde Museum
Online exhibition

<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/rc520xvv253de/track-url/rl482sqxhp5a5/0068c528d04e7223a28b9c8c77c0bd6ecc9116d6>theavantgardemuseum.e-flux.com
<>

Muzeum Sztuki in ¸ódê and e-flux present the 
digital version of the 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/rc520xvv253de/track-url/rl482sqxhp5a5/be602c37d5623b0adc1d701849057658b3ff5329>The 
Avant-Garde Museum. Inaugurated in 2020, on the 
90th anniversary of the founding of Muzeum Sztuki 
in ¸ódê, The Avant-Garde Museum examines the 
beginnings of modern museology.

The history of avant-garde museology begins after 
the October Revolution, when the Soviet cultural 
producers proposed the establishment of a network 
of Museums of Artistic Culture. Not much later, a 
group of New York-based modernists and Dada 
artists started the Société Anonyme, a collective 
that sought to establish the first American 
museum of modern art. The successive chapters of 
this story were written by the Russian 
Constructivist El Lissitzky, who designed the 
Kabinett der Abstrakten at the Hanover 
Provinzialmuseum, and by the avant-garde "a.r." 
group, whose efforts began the International 
Collection of Modern Art at the ¸ódê museum now 
known as the Muzeum Sztuki.

The avant-garde wanted to demolish museums, 
believing they served to petrify and cultivate 
the past, which needed to be discarded in the 
name of a better tomorrow. But the avant-garde 
also dreamed of its own museums, places governed 
not by history, but by the future. Museums were 
imagined as laboratories where the artist would 
experiment with new forms and means of 
expression, and the viewer would learn to 
experience and understand reality in a new way. 
The museum became a vehicle for fulfilling the 
avant-garde utopia-the promise of a world where 
everyone has the right to and conditions for a 
creative life.

The Avant-Garde Museum is a project consisting of 
three, interdependent parts: a book published by 
Muzeum Sztuki in ¸ódê and Walther König Verlag, 
Köln in 2020; an exhibition opened at Muzeum 
Sztuki in ¸ódê in October of 2021, and an online 
project, produced jointly by Muzeum Sztuki and 
e-flux. The main subject of all three segments of 
the project-the book, the exhibition, and the 
digital platform-are four historical museum 
models: the Museums of Artistic Culture, Kabinett 
der Abstrakten, Société Anonyme Inc., and the 
International Collection of Modern Art of the 
"a.r." group. The online project focuses on the 
connections, both historical and conceptual, 
between the four museums discussed.

View the The Avant-Garde Museum 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/rc520xvv253de/track-url/rl482sqxhp5a5/be602c37d5623b0adc1d701849057658b3ff5329>here.

The Avant-Garde Museum project is co-financed by 
funds from the Ministry of Culture and National 
Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

For more about The Avant-Garde Museum project 
please see 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/rc520xvv253de/track-url/rl482sqxhp5a5/b252738bbc81e9320b38bb483af591834d9b5964>msl.org.pl.

Curatorship: Agnieszka Pindera

Concept by Ewa Borysiewicz, Daniel Muzyczuk, Agnieszka Pindera, Jaros½aw Suchan

Edited by Ewa Borysiewicz, Martyn Kramek

Platform
Designed by Mengyi Qian
Developed by Jules LaPlace

Produced by Muzeum Sztuki in ¸odê and e-flux

Project management: Martyn Kramek, Hallie Ayres