The space of the museum, rather than being monolithic and heterogeneous, is complex, fluid, and fractured. As an institution, its multiple spaces relate to a variety of activities, motivations, and attitudes towards the objects it collects, conserves, and displays. By using Michel Foucault's 1967 notion of the 'heterotopia' to read the museum as a space of spaces, and focusing on the complex object of the performance document, this article traces the link between the placement of objects in a specific space, and how this can be read as a perspective on their value. In tracing the journey of the Joseph Beuys performance document Four Blackboards 1972 through various spaces at Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and Tate Modern, this article will demonstrate those acts of valuation being undertaken over a fifty-year period in the institution, and explore how changing value perspectives result in a changing space, both physically and conceptually, for the performance document.
Article Museum SpaceThe space of the museum is a complex one, which has been in a constant process of change from its foundation in royal collections to the critical approaches to the white cube, and into notions of postmodernism and the contemporary art museum. The relationship between that space and the objects within it has also been a point of persistent critical analysis, from thinking about the museum as an object itself, situated within a specific geographical location and with certain architectural features, down to the positioning of artefacts and artworks within display cases and cabinets. This article, rather than viewing the museum as a monumental, fixed space, and the object as being subsumed within it, will view the space of the museum as fractious and fluid, both physically and conceptually, and will consider the object not as fixed within a singular space, but on a subtle journey between these through its own redefinition. In doing so, it becomes possible to uncover the implicit reasoning behind the movement of objects within the museum space, and therefore to understand how the museum values the objects it contains.Approaches to the space of the museum have varied, particularly over the past thirty years, as new focuses for analysis have driven theories and case studies. Considerations have been made of the architecture of the museum and its impacts on the narratives and experiences within it (Duncan and