Exploring the Future of Museums

Les Joynes, PhD

Current Research on the futures of museums

What is the future of museums and how can we re-conceptualise museums to reflect evolving cultural identities? What will museums look like in 2050 and 2100? What are museums’ roles as monuments in cities? And how do museums as institutions “perform? culture?

As an artist and museums scholar Dr. Les Joynes (US) explores the futures of museums in different cultural and geographical contexts. Founder of FormLAB© at Goldsmiths in 1997, he produces interventions that turn museum inside-out creating new connections for artists, curators, architects and audiences. Joynes is recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award for India and serves as a Senior Scholar in Art at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi. As Fulbright Regional Program Visiting Senior Scholar he presents on “Contemporary Interventions within Traditional Collections” at the National Museum of Colombo (October 2022) and is author of “The Artist-centric model in museums” (Joynes, 2018) in Looking to New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century (Long Museum, Shanghai). He has curated and produced exhibitions and performances in the UK, Japan, France, Brazil, Germany, South Korea, and Singapore and served on the “Sites of Desire” curatorial team that created the first Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum from June 13 to September 6, 1998.

As a Visiting Scholar in Art History at Columbia Joynes was hosted by art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory to explore the visual cultures of museums examining parallel models for re-conceptualizing museums. As University of the Arts London Research Fellow at the UAL Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University Joynes researched museums indexing urban archeologies as well as indigenous cultures and traditions in South Korea, Mongolia and Brazil. Working with museum visionaries and leaders Joynes is founder of www.museum.coach and has coached leaders at Yale Museums, University of Melbourne, Australia, Parsons School of Design, University of London and currently is building a coaching program for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sri Lanka.

Joynes was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1963. In dialogues with Andy Warhol in New York in the 1980s he was inspired by Warhol’s vision and ability to flip inside out the way we perceive art in its relationship with consumerism. Joynes was also inspired by artists Josef Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and philosophers Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham and Julia Kristeva in their exploration of the relationships of power, observer and abject spaces. Born in Santa Barbara, California, Joynes first exhibited at eighteen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Since then he has exhibited at the Barbican, London, the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Paris, Milch Gallery, London, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Mongolia Zanabazar National Museum of Fine Art Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Museum of Brazilian Arts Brazil, Åmotgård Museum, Norway, Norimatsu Museum, Japan, CBGB, New York, Art Fair Tokyo and Fenberger House, Nagano, Japan.

Joynes finished his BA with honors in History at Boston University in and M.Sc. from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. Completing his BA (Hons) Fine Art (1996) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London he studied under minimalist sculptors Stephen Furlonger and David Annesley and was selected to study under French sculptor Jean Cardot at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1995). During his MA Fine Art (1997) at Goldsmiths, he studied under conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin and later under Japanese sculptor Hideyuki Mogami while Japan Monbukakusho Scholar (1997-2001) completing his masters in fine art (in Japanese) at Musashino Art University, Tokyo. Moving to New York in the early 2000s he also studied technique under the American Pop artist James Rosenquist (1933-2017). Examining new forms of experimental and collaborative art practices, Joynes earned his PhD (2012) from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK; and Post-Doctorate (2017) in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil. He created cross-disciplinary collaborative research with Brazilian artists indexing indigenous and syncretic rituals and art-making.

Joynes is recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award (2022), Japan Ministry of Education and Culture (MeXT) Scholarship (1997-2001), University of the Arts London Fellow at the University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (2015), the NKD Fellowship (2008), the Taiwan Huayu Scholarship (2016), Bauhaus Artist Fellow (2008-2009), Edwin Abbey Fellowship, National Design Museum (2009), and the King Sturge Sculpture Prize, London (1995). He was CEC ArtsLink grantee to explore monuments and absence in post-Soviet Russia including abandoned Cold-War era Soviet listening posts outside of Berlin. He is one of the founding editors for ProjectAnywhere, a peer-reviewed journal on artistic research at University of Melbourne Australia and Parsons School of Design in New York and is a Fellow at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.

Work

Since 1979 Joynes has explored found objects as ready-mades and photographed Southern Californian track-home garages as ready-made installations. Later in the early 1990s inspired by Gordon Matta Clark and Jason Rhoades he began excavating structures amid demolition rescuing objects, books, masonry to excavate from the abandoned factories and warehouses in London’s Isle of Dogs, sites that were used as film locations for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In London and Japan he worked with formless materials including pigmented polyurethane creating objects that attempted to defy sculptural norms and sensibilities and created forests of giant globular slip-cast polyurethane flowers for exhibitions in Korea and the UK.

In 2012 he began to turn the museum inside out, re-lensing and shifting the ordered and predicable experiences of museum spectatorship inside-out. At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paolo, Brazil he installed FormLAB as a museum-within-a-museum where within a central studio module he would continuously tamper with and remake the works displayed in FormLAB’s museum exhibition to destabilize the experience of the spectator and question when, if ever, a work of art is really finished.

Also leading projects in artistic research, he explores the tandem processes of experimental art-making and critical interpretation. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist he is examining how Indian contemporary art indexes Indian classical and folk art forms that have reflected facets of South Asian and Himalayan identity.

Indexing dystopian film genres of Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Soylent Green (Richard Fleisher, 1973) Joynes is now exploring the creation of miniature museums that can be spread through a city as an app connected expanded museum - each a “slice” of flora and sonic biodiversity stored in nodes or modules that become living museums that create sites of post-human manufactured memory within mega-urban centers.

Website: www.Lesjoynes.com.