| In my case study of the Mattress Factory Art Museum (MF), I describe and conceptualize how the museum staff and its resident artists use its exhibition spaces ("spatial practices"), and their implications for museum education. The study takes into account the historical uses of the MF's buildings and the museum's placement in and relationship to its historic residential neighborhood on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I also consider its deviations from "traditional" museum practices, its heterogeneous community of curators, artists, and visitors who reveal the cultural diversity of this site, and how the MF works with artists from around the world to install their artworks in its galleries.;Installation art, by definition, is a type of art in which the visitor to an exhibition becomes part of it by physically entering the space, and, further, by interacting with the installation, which is usually three-dimensional. Installation art is interactive, and during my 16 visits to the MF to explore and research it as the topic of my study, I interacted with numerous installations, some of which are in the museum's permanent collection. Except for the permanent works, the installations change from time to time as artists live in residence for a period of time and create their artworks in collaboration with the museum staff. I also explored the museum's use of space, applying the theories of philosophers Michel de Certeau ("spaces" versus "places"), Henri Lefebvre ("archi-textures"), and Michel Foucault ("heterotopias") to guide my data collection and theorize the constitution of the spatial practices of the MF as a form of museum pedagogy.;Using a case study, I examined how the MF's places (physical locations) become spaces (people's movements and responses to a place). As I discovered, the MF's spatial practices in which the artists often use room-size installations with unusual forms, sounds, and lighting effects in their works immerse visitors in a multi-sensorial, interactive, often exploratory, experience that evokes their sensory responses and engages their participation. (I primarily use my own sensory responses to the artworks and the museum buildings themselves to convey how the MF uses its spaces and involves its visitors in the artworks.).;Finally, I concluded that the relationship of the installations of the MF to the building's interior and exterior features as a former mattress warehouse and macaroni-producing factory that is more than a century old, and to its neighborhood surroundings, comprises its archi-textures as defined by Lefebvre. Because of the MF's interrelated architectural features, history, and immediate surroundings, its contents can be considered one large art installation itself in my view. In terms of the structure of the MF, it functions in contrast to other conventional contemporary art museums, creating what French theorist Foucault calls a heterotopia (an ensemble of relations placed in a single site). As a heterotopia, the MF houses unusual ways of creating spatial relations with installations and relations of co-operative enterprise not only because invited curators and artists have been reconfiguring the MF's exterior and interior spaces with multiple materials and mediums, but also because the museum itself serves as an adjustable installation artwork in which its gallery spaces can periodically be dismantled and reinstalled with new content.;The uniqueness of the MF and the value it offers museum education is its staff's ability to accommodate multiple spatial practices for a range of installation artists to execute their ideas and for visitors to interact with the diverse explorative spaces they create. The multiple spatial practices of the MF imply that an art museum is not just a container for artworks but may be comprised of several functional spaces such as a research site and a studio where artists investigate ideas and utilize spaces to create multiple kinds of environments for visitors to encounter art. The building that houses an art museum with its architectural design, historical context, and surroundings can be viewed as a part of the artwork that creates unique experiences for visitors, who then transform the museum from a place to distinct spaces. Such was my experience of the Mattress Factory Art Museum. |
