Negotiating the Icebox: cold collections, dark museums and contemporary art

Conference paper. 'Art Out of Time', Institute of Visual Research, University of Oxford. The exhibition Raid the Icebox (1969) was a pioneering engagement with institutional collection-holding in which Andy Warhol negotiated the conflicting practices and sensibilities that still impact on artists working at the interface of contemporary art and traditional museum display. Framed by the trope of liberating frozen material from the museum store, Warhol’s ‘icebox raid’ now stands as a seminal example of historic art objects serving as installation material in a contemporary art exhibition. In an academic world dominated by theories of embodied meaning and environmental crisis, the significance of Warhol’s title is surely on-going. The aim was to bring stored artworks into the light of day and, within Warhol’s conceit of liberation, the notion of refrigeration operates alongside the metaphor of darkness as a key representation of the non-compliant and non-contemporaneous character of the museum environment.