AMJournal #2: The Polyphonic Object
History
AM Journal
Amsterdam
Every edition of Amsterdam Museum Journal includes ‘The Polyphonic Object’. In this section, five scholars from different perspectives and academic fields analyze an object from the Amsterdam Museum collection. The polyphonic object shows the different ways you can approach one object and the variety of stories it may tell. For this edition’s polyphonic object, five experts analyzed a painting from Albert Blitz called Een Genrestuk (A Genre Piece).
Een Genrestuk, 1975
For this edition of AMJournal, we invited Billie Nuchelmans, Katerina Kalakidi, Menno Reijven, Emma van Bijnen, and Wouter van Gent to analyze and reflect on Een Genrestuk, 1975. This painting represents the upheavals related to the modernization of the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood in Amsterdam in the 1970s.
Multidisciplinarity
Ranging from history to museum studies, and visual rhetoric to geography, the contributions symbolize the polyphony that is needed to better understand museum objects. Especially when approaching societal themes such as gentrification, multidisciplinarity is essential.
