Liar's Poker: Representations of Politics, Politics of Representation by Brian Holmes

Liar\'s Poker
		Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation
		Brian Holmes
		Basically, what I have to say here is simple: when people talk about politics in an artistic frame, they\'re lying. Indeed, the lies they tell are often painfully obvious, and worse is the moment when you realize that some will go forever unchallenged and take on, not the semblance of truth, but the reliability of convention. In a period like ours when the relationship to politics is one of the legitimating arguments for the very existence of public art, the tissue of lies that surrounds one when entering a museum can become so dense that it\'s like falling into an ancient cellar full of spider webs, and choking on them as you struggle to breathe. Now, the mere mention of this reality will make even my friends and allies in the artistic establishment rather nervous; but it is a reality nonetheless. And like most of the political realities in our democratic age, it has directly to do with the question of representation. Picture Politics Does anyone doubt there exists a politics of representation? Such people have clearly not looked at the television during a political campaign. But worse, they have not looked at social movements. They have not witnessed the endless capacity of people who do not occupy positions of elite power, and who do not enjoy direct access to major media, to project their messages nonetheless, by means of signs, images and gestures. Nor have they realized how effectively artists can work in such »outside« contexts: one need only think of Gran Fury, amidst the New York Aids activism of the eighties; of Ne Pas Plier, with the jobless people\'s movements in Paris in the nineties; or of the many artists who have participated in recent counter-globalization demonstrations and campaigns. Artists can play a vital role in this kind of »picture politics«. At the same time, it is easy for artists to heed the injunction of the museum, the magazines and the market, which say: »Picture politics for me.« Do a picture or a sculpture of politics, carry out the representation of political conflict, as in the installation piece by Thomas Hirschhorn, Wirtschaftslandschaft Davos, shown at Kunsthaus Zürich when Hirschhorn won the prize for »Young Swiss Art« in 2001. This work uses model houses, toy soldiers, real barbed wire and other ready-made materials to represent the besieged Swiss valley where the world\'s most powerful people annually meet. Hirschhorn\'s style can be referenced to »dadaist collage«, observes one critic; but his major source is »the practice of excluded people who know perfectly well how to get their messages across, by using whatever they find.« [1] In this case the excluded people are those who confront the barbed wire at the World Economic Forum. And since counter-globalization has been a hot subject, representing them is a perfect way to become popular in a museum. Hirschhorn goes further, though, because he turns a bit of ordinary life into a representation of politics, with his Bataille Monument in a Turkish quarter of Kassel. This life-sized library, snack bar and makeshift TV studio is a participatory project, whose effects in the neighborhood itself I won\'t presume to judge from a distance. What concerns me is the way he manages its relations to the artistic frame. On the »taxi stand« where visitors awaited to be ferried from the Documenta 11 to the site of the monument, Hirschhorn placed a quotation from the American artist, David Hammonds: »The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It\'s overly educated, it\'s conservative, it\'s out to criticize, not to understand and it never has any fun... So I refuse to deal with that audience, and I\'ll play with the street audience. That audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart. They don\'t have any reason to play games, there\'s nothing gained or lost.« Hirschhorn claims to have abandoned the framing structures of contemporary art, for a more authentically engaged social practice. But if that\'s the case, why the taxi, why the exposure of the site to visitors\' eyes, which turns the social project into a representation? What kind of game is he playing? In his case there are certainly things to be won - like the prize for Young Swiss Art, or the Marcel Duchamp prize for the promotion of French artists, awarded to Hirschhorn by the ADIAF association in the year 2000. The Duchamp prize is sponsored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a transnational consulting company, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Kunsthaus Zürich, where Wirtschaftslandschaft Davos was shown, is regularly funded by the Private Banking subsidiary of Crédit Suisse, which ranks 31st on Fortune\'s Global 500 list. Documenta 11 was sponsored by Volkswagen, Deutsche Telekom and Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. Does all this sound familiar? In the contemporary art game, the picture of excluded people\'s politics is worth a lot to the included - including transnational corporations. Of course I\'m aware that the prize commissions are independent, just like exhibition curators. Their independence supports the notion of an autonomous artistic sphere, separate from the economic nexus that sustains it. These kinds of separations, between abstract financial decisions and their substantive effects, are exactly what the protestors at the Davos meetings refuse. Hirschhorn retains an interest in the artistic frame he claims to leave behind. Yet he seems particularly uncomfortable there; and it\'s intriguing to see how he ups the symbolic stakes in the Davos piece, formulating a direct critique of transnational capitalism even as he is pursued and courted by the corporate-backed prize commissions. How does picture politics work, when it is associated with a proper name and presented within the contemplative frame of the art institution? Invariably it produces statements like these: »I represent the people«, or »I represent a social movement«, or »I represent the excluded« - which are the classic lies of representative democracy, when it serves to conceal private interests. [2] Of course, this root fact makes myself, a self-styled »critic« writing in catalogues and magazines about the relations of art and politics, into one of the baldest liars of them all. And for some perverse reason I want to tell you how it\'s done. Rules of the Game Liar\'s poker is easy to play. The deck is composed of kings and aces. One person draws, and names the card in his hand; the other judges if he\'s telling the truth. If you draw an ace, it\'s easy: you have no choice but to say it\'s an ace. If you draw a king, then the game begins: because you can always bluff. Each time you claim to hold an ace, the other player must look in your eyes and decide if it\'s real. If he thinks it\'s not, he calls your bluff; and if he\'s right he wins a dollar, or ten, or a hundred, depending on how high you\'ve set the stakes. If he\'s wrong, you win the same. And if he doesn\'t do a thing, he loses fifty cents, or five bucks, or fifty dollars, and the card goes back into the pack, so that no one ever knows if you were telling the truth. For our purposes, the artist draws the cards, and the public calls the bluffs. Nowadays, of course, the artist often plays as a team with the curator or the critic; so those relations are never entirely certain. As for the cards, the ace is political reality, and its image in the museum is highly attractive. This gives the artist a great advantage: because to prove an ace is a bluff, you have to go out looking, whereas the public prefers to stay inside the museum. The artist, however, also has a great disadvantage, which is that the house - I mean the people who run the game, the founders, the funders, the boards and directors - actually can\'t stand aces, and if they think the artist really has one, they will never let him or her set foot inside the museum. So in both cases the artist has to bluff his way through, either claiming political engagement to live like a king inside the white cube, or hiding it to siphon off money, resources and publicity for use by a social movement. Occasionally, when the lie is too grotesque, the public will call the bluff; and then the artist has to give up some cultural capital. Even more rarely, it turns out that the artist is really involved in a social movement, in which case he or she is soon fated to disappear from the museum. Now there\'s an obvious question: Why would anyone want to play such a game? In fact the question can be asked about anyone playing by the unbearable rules that hold in almost every social field today. These are the rules of inequality, exploitation, domination - those nasty realities we have to lie about in polite democratic society. # For the entire article please follow the link: Retrieved from: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1276&lang=en on 20th of June 2017

100 of the Most Influential Ethnographies and Anthropology Texts

A selection:

http://architectonictokyo.com/100_of_the_Most_Influential_Ethnographies_and_Anthropology_Texts.html

An obvious reaction to looking at these titles is saying I have read this and that, and I would like to read this and that! But also, and here I feel some butterflies in my tummy - happyness, feeling that people around can start writing better ethnographies in anthropology, books to inspire...

Art from bureaucracy and archives on display

Recently I started to be interested in how archival materials can be displayed in an attractive and intelligent way.
It is the researcher who wants to display artistically, or the artist who is fascinated by the scientificity and bureaucracy of the researcher?
This post will be made out of titles of books/ exhibitions/ artists concerned with these issues:
Start with 1
1. an article about an exhibition of the Bauhaus Archive in Germany http://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/tear-off-type-walls-in-berlin




2. Forging Folklore, Disrupting Archives - an exhibition plus events organised 15 May-15 July 2014 in Goldsmiths College, Constance Howard Gallery with the special contribution of materials from the Special Collections, Goldsmiths.




3. A very good book on art practices and archives: - Sven Spieker (ed.), 2008. The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge&London: The MIT Press. The articles included were written by: Freud, Ducham, Breton, Corbusier, Lissitzky, Eisenstein, Susan Hiller, Michael Fehr, Andreea Fraser, Sophie Calle. Introduction: Ilya Kabakov - Sixteen Ropes.
4. Archive as Strategy
East Art Map: History is Not Given. Please Help to Construct It
http://calvert22.org/resources/archive-as-strategy-east-art-map-history-is-not-given

Education in the Expanded Field: Critical Pedagogy as Poetics in Contemporary Art

Conference held by Sven SPIEKER
Professor and Chair, Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, at 5 p.m.
at the New Europe CollegeStr. Plantelor 21, Tel: 021 307 99 10, Bucharest

*** I want to devote this lecture to what I am calling “the expanded field of education in contemporary art” in the first two decades of the 21st century. I am guided by the fervor with which the art world has embraced, over the last decade or so, topics such as learning, education, pedagogy, teaching, research, and study as a critical practice, proposing either to work within institutions of education, or making education the focus of their work. These tendencies do not necessarily promote knowledge as a universal end in itself, on the contrary. […] United in their opposition to the political status quo; the failures of public education; and the consequences of neo-liberal capitalist economic policies all over the world, the artists I want to discuss here promote teaching and study as an open-ended and even “poetic” practice that would not be grounded in the manipulative pedagogy of Platonic dialogue with its predictable “learning outcome” (the battle cry of the Bologna process): education, they argue, means unpredictable adventures in the realm of knowledge.

*** Sven SPIEKER teaches in the Comparative Literature Program; the Department of Art and Art History; and the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, contemporary art – with an emphasis on Eastern Europe -, and critical theory. Spieker has published on topics ranging from the Russian avant-garde (Malevich, Rodchenko, Dziga Vertov) to late 20th-century art in Russia and Western Europe (Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Marcel Duchamp, Martin Kippenberger). His essays and articles have appeared in German, Russian, Swedish, Polish and English. Spieker has organized several international conferences (most recently, The Office in the Studio: The Administration of Modernism at the University of Jena, Germany; and in 2011 a roundtable on critical curatorship in Eastern Europe at the College Art Association Meeting, New York City. Participants: EmiliaKabakov; Cosmin Costinas; Piotr Piotrowski; Victor Misiano; Karel Cisar; Lolita Joablonskiene). Spieker's latest book publication focused on the archive as a crucible of European modernism (The Big Archive, MIT Press, 2008). Spieker is the editor of ARTMargins (www.artmargins.com).Current projects include a Critical Anthology of Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe, and a study of Kazimir Malevich in the media age. ***

anthropology in/of museums

8-10th of June, RAI Conference at British Museum.
Two panels dedicated to museums, representation and the relation between anthropology and the museum world.
P02 Exhibiting Anthropology and
P14 Anthropology in/of museums.

I particularly think that discussions which have anthropological background applied to the museum world are very useful. Some of the reasons for this assumption are the following:
a. anthropology is reflexive and critical at its own discourse and making (also as a response to its collonial non-reflexive past) - and museums very often tend not to be reflexive. Why so, it is an interesting topic of discussion.
b. anthropology works with scale - personal stories, options, realities; museums tend to generalise.
c.both anthropology and museums deal with truth.
d.in relation to that, both deal with representation/s of partial truths.
e. it was also discussed the role of art interventions in ethnological or anthropological museums - and its playful, critical point in addressing issues that employeed researchers and currators in museums are not allowed to
f. etc - this was by far the most interesting part!

being said that, I attach two images from a bok with the installation of Fred Wilson, an artist who specifically works and criticises the museum field.

about the future or the past of museums

(I do not like the conclusion of the article. So I invite you to read only the beginning...mostly for the stories included)
Future tense, VII: What's a museum?

by James Panero

On the changing nature of our cultural institutions.


However perplexing the problems of the present and the future, however sobering the obligations laid upon the museums of America through the destruction of war, the past gives confidence for the days to come.

—Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946

What’s a museum? Lately, it seems, the answer is whatever we want. Today’s museums can be tourist attractions, department stores, civic centers, town squares, catalysts of urban renewal, food courts, licensing brands, showcases for contemporary architecture, social clubs, LEED-certified environmentally conscious facilities, and franchise opportunities. A “well-run museum is eerily like an upscale suburban shopping mall,” says an article in The New York Times. A cafe with “art on the side,”?advertises London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “We are in the entertainment business, and competing against other forms of entertainment out there,” says a one-time spokesman for the Guggenheim museum. “Inclusive places that welcome diverse audiences” and “reflect our society’s pluralism in every aspect of their operations and programs,” suggests the American Association of Museums. “We live in a more global, multicultural society that cares about diversity and inclusivity,”?so “service to the community” is now among the museum’s à la carte options, says Kaywin Feldman, the latest head of the Association of Art Museum Directors. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, museums are even about “bringing art to those with Alzheimer’s or post-traumatic stress disorder, and farming crops for donation to local food banks,” initiatives that have been promoted through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

By the numbers, today’s museums are thriving enterprises. Billions of dollars have been spent in recent years on expansion projects. In the United States, there were 46 art museums in 1905, 60 in 1910, and 387 in 1938. Today there are 3,500 art museums, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at American art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000, with 850 million Americans visiting museums of all varieties each year.

Yet if today’s museums are successful cultural caterers with wide-ranging menus, no matter where we find them, their fare manages to taste more and more the same. A handful of the same celebrity architects now designs new wings and even whole museum cities such as Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. Facilities in Spain, Boston, the Middle East, and Los Angeles all look different in the same way. An international class of museum professionals job-hops among Beijing, Paris, New York, and Qatar spreading a common corporate culture, where top directors are expected to command million-dollar salaries, oversee thousands of employees, fund-raise, invest and spend endowments on massive expansions, horse-trade the assets on the walls to create blockbuster shows that can attract headline-making crowds, and spin these activities to the press.

Is all this hyperactivity the glow of health or the flush of fever? Philippe de Montebello, the former director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests the latter. With yesterday’s art traded away for today’s trends, exhibition halls taken over by “social space,” and new buildings expanding around traditional facilities, museums are shedding their old skin and remaking themselves in our image. It is said that museums have gone from “being about something” to “being for somebody.” “The work of art, once sovereign, has ceded primacy of place in many an administration’s attention to the public,” de Montebello lamented in a lecture at Harvard, published in the book Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Museums have traditionally been focused on their permanent collections. By emphasizing the visitor, museums now risk forsaking the visited and their own cultural importance. Museums were once the arks of culture. Now the artifacts at greatest risk may be themselves.

Prosperity is a great teacher,” wrote William Hazlitt, but “adversity is a greater.” The story of London’s National Gallery in wartime offers up a poignant lesson about the historical relationship between museums and their permanent collections, and the lengths that nations will go to save them.

During the Second World War, Kenneth Clark, the National Gallery’s young director, needed to get his institution’s collection of European paintings out from under the Luftwaffe’s bomb sites. As recounted in Suzanne Bosman’s 2008 book The National Gallery in Wartime, Clark was right about the threat to the collection in central London. Between October 1940 and April 1941, Nazi nighttime aerial bombardment struck The National Gallery nine times. On October 12, 1940, a German explosive leveled what had been the Raphael room.

At first Clark removed the Gallery’s holdings from Trafalgar Square to a discrete handful of universities, libraries, and castles scattered across Wales and Gloucestershire. When Germany inaugurated its Liverpool Blitz and Nazi bombers came within striking distance of these temporary homes, Clark prepared an even more drastic contingency. He was aware of the U-Boat menace. Nevertheless, he drew up plans to ship the permanent collection off the British Isles to the safety of Canada.

When Clark approached Winston Churchill about the move, the Prime Minister had a better idea. “Hide them in caves and cellars,” Churchill declared by telegram, “but not one picture shall leave this island.” Churchill’s remarks signaled the importance of The National Gallery and, in particular, its permanent collection to the identity of the nation. A work of art may exist in isolation, but a culture of art lives through museums and the collections these museums have maintained for the public. These permanent collections embody a museum’s identity even more than its buildings, its record of traveling shows, or any other aspect of its operations. Clark wanted to save the works of art. Churchill saw that Britain needed to preserve its culture of art as well. Sending away the art might spare the canvases, but it would mean disrupting the permanence of the permanent collection.

In 1941, Clark found a way to honor Churchill’s determination. First he reunited the scattered collection by retrofitting an abandoned slate mine into an air-conditioned storage facility. A year later, he began bringing the collection back to The National Gallery through the “Picture of the Month” initiative.

In January of that year, a letter published in the Times of London signed by a “picture-lover” wondered if there could be a way to bring the treasures of the permanent collection back on public view. “Because London’s face is scarred and bruised these days,” the writer suggested, “we need more than ever to see beautiful things.” Clark devised a way to bring up one masterpiece from the slate mine and exhibit it temporarily on Trafalgar Square. By night, and during daytime air raids, Clark moved the painting to a strong room in the basement. The first masterpiece to see the wartime walls was Margaretha de Geer, a work attributed to Rembrandt purchased by the Gallery in 1941 but, until then, never placed on public view. Even with severe limitations on travel, Clark calculated that as many visitors came to see that one painting each day as would have visited the entire National Gallery on a day in peacetime.

Clark chose the next painting—the first official “Picture of the Month”—by reading the suggestions that poured into his offices at the Gallery. The top request, he discovered, was Titian’s Noli Me Tangere. The painting depicts Mary Magdalene reaching out towards Christ after the resurrection, who tells her, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father.” “Almost certainly it was not the historical or physical truths of the picture that really mattered, but its poetic truth,” notes Neil MacGregor, the director of The National Gallery from 1987 to 2002. These pictures are not solitary objects but the visual bonds of a nation. They “exist to enable the public to explore through them their own personal and shared experience, as generations have done before us and will do in the future.”

The art critic Herbert Read, writing during the war, declared The National Gallery to be “a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis.” At the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, Clark ensured the swift return of the entire collection to Trafalgar Square. The rehanging of the paintings became a cause for national celebration. As a reporter for the Observer concluded at the time, “The National Gallery is far more genuinely a national possession than ever before.”

From its founding, The National Gallery, like all great museums, has meant more than the sum of its parts, however magnificent. Leo von Klenze, who designed several institutions throughout Munich in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the Glyptothek, called the modern museum “one of the truly living ideals of this age.”

The identity of The National Gallery is not found on a balance sheet but through an intangible idea tied to a collection held and displayed in the public trust. Since this museum was created when the House of Commons purchased the picture collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein for the nation in 1824, The National Gallery, which opened on Trafalgar Square in 1838, has from the start represented a British ideal of parliamentary government. Unlike many of the other museums in Europe, with their permanent collections nationalized from other pre-existing institutions, the collection of The National Gallery was purchased on behalf of the British people by their lawful representatives. To have sent away The National Gallery’s collection in wartime would have meant sending away a manifestation of British self-rule. The masterpieces that came on view through Clark’s “Picture of the Month” initiative were not merely Rembrandts and Titians, but the Rembrandts and Titians of The National Gallery, of Parliament, and of the British people.

The great museums of the West, founded mainly between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, have almost all functioned like The National Gallery to represent the characteristic ideals of their nations, almost always through an identity intimately connected to their permanent collections.

The Louvre was founded in 1793 to represent the French Revolution through the nationalized treasures seized from the monarchy, the church, and later colonial conquest, all to be exhibited in a seized Bourbon palace. The Prado Museum, which Ferdinand VII opened to the public in 1819 as the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures, represented the last sparkles of beauty from the fading Spanish Crown. The Hermitage Museum, founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and opened to the public in 1852, represented Russian imperial power through its ability to import great art from the West. After 1917, when many masterpieces of its permanent collection were sent into storage like locked-up dissidents, the Hermitage became a manifestation of totalitarian state control.

The many museums that emerged in Germany in the nineteenth century mainly sought out a spiritual ideal. Friedrich Hölderlin saw museums as “aesthetic churches,” where the artists are the anointed priests. The Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who called museums temples of art, applied neoclassical elements to his designs. Schinkel’s museums served to recast the royal patrimonies of their collections into art in the public trust after the work was, for a time, nationalized by Napoleonic France. The pillared porticos like those on Berlin’s Altes (Old) Museum, known as the Royal Museum when it opened in 1830, also turned his buildings into latter-day Greek temples. The soaring entrances of Schinkel’s museums were meant as places where, as he put it, “the individual could recollect himself and prepare himself for the mysteries that awaited him; it was not to be a social place, but rather a place where the individual divorced himself from society.”

The close association of European museums and their permanent collections with national ideals was underscored by their ownership, which to this day almost always remains some form of government control. Britain’s National Gallery, for example, describes its governing structure as a “non-departmental public body, whose sponsor body is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” with a board of trustees appointed primarily by the Prime Minister.

In the United States, the same cannot be said of comparable institutions. American museums began to propagate a generation later than their European counterparts as an answer to those institutions, yet with a key difference that is so apparent it is often overlooked. American museums vary widely in their missions, but they almost all share a similar story as institutions founded and supported by private individuals. Today, most of them remain not-for-profit institutions largely supported through private donations.

Their private status might seem to preclude the association of American museums with a national identity, but the lack of government ownership in fact goes to the heart of their own ideal. It may seem that the philanthropy supporting American museums is ancillary to the treasures the institutions contain. But those treasures, however singular, are also tokens of the idealism behind the institutions that maintain them.

As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent virtue. The visual education offered to the public by these museums through their permanent collections is not just an education in art history but also a lesson in how individual hard work can become an expression of virtue by giving over objects of beauty to the public trust. No other country has seen such private wealth, accumulated through industry, willingly transferred to the public good. Even as institutions around the world now attempt to supplement their own government funding with private support on the American model, the philanthropic culture of the United States remains a singular phenomenon. The countless “American Friends of . . . ” groups that now exist for cultural institutions around the globe are testament to America’s continued abundance of philanthropic energies.

Virtue in both private and public life was of primary concern to the American Founders, who along with education and the rule of law included virtue among the foundations of freedom. “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” George Washington said in his Farewell Address. Or as John Adams wrote in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.”

The American museum consciously emerged out of this ideal of self-governance, a belief that a virtuous people with a passion for the public good might create institutions in the public interest that could one day rival or even exceed the museums of Europe, all without the compulsion of government. Among the many philanthropic pursuits of the American public, the American art museum has received particular attention because its treasures serve as tangible manifestations of virtue.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first of three great encyclopedic museums to open its doors in the United States within a decade of each other. Founded in 1870 and opened in 1872, it was closely followed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1876 (also founded in 1870) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1877 (founded in 1876)—institutions that were quite different from the ones we know today but nonetheless born out of a similar philanthropic urge. As recounted in Winifred E. Howe’s two-volume History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in 1913 and 1946, the Met’s founding generation emerged out of the destruction of the Civil War to speak in bold terms about the virtues of their creation. They directly connected their new museum with the ideals of a reunited nation. In 1866, John Jay gave a speech at a party of his fellow countrymen at the Pré Catalan in Paris celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of national independence. “It was time for the American people to lay the foundation of a National Institution and Gallery of Art,” he urged. A committee of men formed on the spot to pursue the idea back in New York.

In 1869, with Jay as president of the Union League Club, an institution that had strongly supported the Union cause in the Civil War, the club’s Art Committee issued a report that had widespread implications for the future of art:

It will be said that it would be folly to depend upon our governments, either municipal or national, for judicious support or control in such an institution; for our governments, as a rule, are utterly incompetent for the task. . . . An amply endowed, thoroughly constructed art institution, free alike from bungling government officials and from the control of a single individual, whose mistaken and untrained zeal may lead to superficial attempts and certain failures; an institution which will command the confidence of judicious friends of art, and especially of those who have means to strengthen and increase its value to the city and to the nation, is surely worth consideration in a club like this.

So that this consideration would not be confined to the Union League alone, the club sent invitations to members of the city’s other thriving private clubs and art academies to join the discussion. Three hundred people turned out for a meeting at the Union League, then on Twenty-sixth Street.

Few of them were as central to the culture of nineteenth-century New York as William Cullen Bryant. The editor of the New York Evening Post and a member of the Union League, he became the outspoken leader of the initiative for a new art museum. Bryant Park, in back of the main branch of the New York Public Library, bears his name. Bryant never expected government to fund the Metropolitan. In fact, he expected the private philanthropy behind the institution to repudiate big government. This assurance of purpose was unmistakable when Bryant addressed the conference at the Union League:

Our city is the third great city of the civilized world. Our republic has already taken its place among the great powers of the earth; it is great in extent, great in population, great in the activity and enterprise of her people. It is the richest nation in the world, if paying off an enormous national debt with a rapidity unexampled in history be any proof of riches; the richest in the world, if contented submission to heavy taxation be a sign of wealth; the richest in the world, if quietly to allow itself to be annually plundered of immense sums by men who seek public stations for their individual profit be a token of public prosperity. My friends, if a tenth part of what is every year stolen from us in this way, in the city where we live, under pretense of the public service, and poured profusely into the coffers of political rogues, were expended on a Museum of Art, we might have, reposited in spacious and stately buildings, collections formed of works left by the world’s greatest artists, which would be the pride of our country.

The aim of the Met’s founders was not only to found a museum in New York, but also to inspire like-minded philanthropy across the country. “The other cities will follow rapidly in the wake of New York in this movement,” predicted the art historian George Fisk Comfort, and he was right. Speaking at the Union League, Comfort furthermore advocated an encyclopedic museum “to represent the History of Art in all countries and in all ages of art both pure and applied.”

After the New York State legislature granted the Met its Act of Incorporation in 1870, by the first decade of the twentieth century the institution was already far along building out the massive beaux-arts treasury we now find on Fifth Avenue and enriching it with a singular permanent collection—a private institution on public land. One reason for the Met’s rapid ascent was the financier J. P. Morgan. His virtuous role in the cultural institutions across the city inspired New York society. A member of the Union League, Morgan was an original subscriber to The Metropolitan in 1870, became a trustee in 1888, and assumed the board presidency in 1904. “That a man known universally for his acumen in finance,” writes Winifred Howe, “should devote both time and talent to the active administration of a museum of art placed such institutions on a new footing. Other men of affairs decided that art was worthy of their attention, even their collecting, and the Museum deserving of their support.”

In a memorial tribute after his death in 1913, The Metropolitan issued a resolution that took particular note of Morgan’s virtue and spoke directly to his qualities of patriotic citizenship:

He loved all forms of beauty, and with his largeness of nature and of means he became the greatest art collector of his time, and in the history of art his name must always rank with those great princes of the Old World who in former centuries protected and encouraged genius. He was as unselfish with his treasures of art as he was with his fortune. He believed that the happiness of a whole people can be increased through the cultivation of taste, and he strongly desired to contribute to that end among his own countrymen.

Looking back on the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, its president William Church Osborn noted that “New York owes its museum of art to the public-spirited interest of some of its citizens.” He also urged his generation to “fix with sureness the philosophic and economic principles underlying all such institutions, since rapidly changing social and economic conditions are certain to bring about in the future a great need for understanding and continued study of these principles.”

Osborne’s urging was prescient. The assuredness of American museums through the first decades of the twentieth century, rooted in the virtues of their founders and supporters, gave way to a creeping professionalism that, in the name of good business and “best practices,” sought to strip the institutions of their virtuous past.

A new bottom-line sensibility that aimed to maximize revenues and attendance numbers cut against the founding principles of American museums. “When art museums rush to be commercial or seek to titillate their visitors we see a lamentable failure of nerve,” says de Montebello, who went against the grain of this professionalized museum culture as director of the Metropolitan. “Our institutions—even though often founded by businessmen in league with civic officials—were not created to make money and vaunt civic identity.”

This failure of nerve is especially apparent in cases of deaccession, where institutions have justified turning their permanent collections into chattel that can be sold for profit. Among the earliest uses of the term “deaccession” was in 1972. The New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then under the direction of Thomas Hoving, “recently deaccessioned (the polite term for ‘sold’) one of its only four Redons.”

Hoving was the first museum custodian to conceive of his permanent collection as a ready source of capital. In 1970, he purchased a Velázquez portrait for $5.5 million but lacked the funds to cover it. He began looking for works to sell, and the bequest of the late Adelaide de Groot was his principal target. Against the heiress’s wishes that her collection remain in the institution, Hoving sold off masterpieces from her donation—most notably The Tropics by Henri Rousseau—through Marlborough Gallery. The sale was so controversial that the Met’s curator of European painting refused to sign the deaccession form. Hoving signed it for him.

Even as the Metropolitan under de Montebello, Hoving’s successor, rejected this legacy of affronting virtue, Hoving’s ideas infected museum culture. Granted, by narrowing or “refining” a collection through deaccession, a museum can perform a valuable function. It can free up work from storage that may be second-rate or repetitive. A museum can raise money in a restricted endowment from the sale, to be used for the purchase of art that might better serve its mission. Peer-review organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors issue guidelines that, at least on paper, restrict these practices in line with traditional standards. The aamd forbids museums, for example, from using the sale of art in their permanent collections to pay for general operating expenses or to underwrite loans. Such rules are designed to prevent museums from treating their art collections as ATM machines and sources of fast money.

But museums have been finding ways around AAMD, even as this association finds subtle ways to relax its own rules. Museums have claimed, for example, that the art in their permanent collections suddenly does not fit their mission statements, even if the work has been on display for generations. Museums use deaccession to “trade up” their permanent collections, liquidating the symbols of donor virtue while creating a slush fund for their own acquisitions. Museums have decided that certain works are of secondary importance because they are rarely shown, although this record of exhibition may merely reflect the taste of the curators.

If a museum is defined by its permanent collection, then any exhibiting institution with a permanent collection is a type of museum, even if it calls itself something different. Yet museums now routinely declare themselves to be something else just to get around the rules of AAMD, disregarding the spirit of virtue these rules represent.

One of the worst acts of deaccession occurred against the legacy of none other than William Cullen Bryant, the great advocate of the Metropolitan Museum. At the start of the twentieth century, Bryant’s daughter gave Kindred Spirits, Asher B. Durand’s 1849 Hudson River School masterpiece depicting Bryant and Thomas Cole standing at Kaaterskill Falls, to the permanent collection of the New York Public Library. In 2005, Paul LeClerc, the president of the Library, sold the painting for a $35-million payday. Even after exhibiting Kindred Spirits for decades, the Library claimed it was not a museum and therefore free to sell the painting for cash. The LeClerc sale was a direct affront to the founding generation of New York’s cultural institutions and a demonstration of how his professional class could subvert the ideals of virtue at will.

The sale also inspired others. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, announced plans to sell one of the most recognizable paintings in the United States, Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875), for $68 million unless a local institution could match the price within forty-five days. (The Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy ending up splitting the bill.)

In 2006 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery sold $71 million of its collection of older art in order to buy contemporary work, claiming the older art did not fit its mission statement. In 2008 the National Academy Museum in New York sold two valuable Hudson River School paintings to fill a budget gap, proclaiming its primary status as an art school. In 2009, the trustees of Brandeis University announced plans to shut down the school’s Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise general revenue. All the while, countless other institutions have worked under the radar to liberate their permanent collections from the restrictions imposed (as they see it) by the outdated mores of their donors.

While the profit motive drives the businesses that fund philanthropy, the perceived profiteering of American museums breaks a covenant they have made with the public and damages the culture of virtue that continues to sustain them. Sometimes this is done consciously, as museum professionals attack the past from within. At other times these professionals do damage with the best intentions. Any museum decision that appears to capitalize on the permanent collection—from gift shops to high ticket prices to fancy restaurants to facility rentals—risks diminishing the museum’s virtue in the eyes of the public. What most museum professionals fail to recognize is that the principle of virtue means that good business often becomes bad business once inside the gates of these institutions.

Headline-making cases of deaccession are only the most extreme perversions of America’s museum ideal, because they strike at the very embodiments of virtue. Most of today’s museums therefore acknowledge that their collections maintain some special status, at least in the eyes of a reactionary public. They have learned that deacessioning can invite unwanted publicity. So rather than go after the collections themselves, museums will more often update the facilities that contain them in order to recast or cover over the virtuous meaning of the objects inside.

Today the American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is a rare holdout of traditional museum culture. Its awesome display of cultural confidence begins with James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt riding through a triumphal arch at its front entrance. This foregrounds a soaring lobby designed by John Russell Pope in 1936 after Roman baths—a notably civic model compared with the more religious classicism of Germany’s museums. The same sense of veneration is applied to the facilities within. Bold signs throughout the institution proclaim the donors of specimens, all without a postmodern preamble about the misuse of taxidermy. Artisans are still trained to preserve the animal models and diorama rooms of the biologist Carl Akeley, who died on assignment for the museum at the spot now depicted in the gorilla diorama. The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians has been left primarily as Franz Boas, the great anthropologist, designed it at the turn of the last century. A refurbishment of this hall that could restore its original windows, uncover its columns, and elevate the lighting would easily bring this room back to its inaugural splendor. Ten years ago, the original architecture of the fourth-floor dinosaur rooms was similarly uncovered in a brilliant restoration sponsored by David H. Koch.

There was a time, however, when this museum was far less assured of its past. In the 1940s, the institution’s fanciful Romanesque Seventy-seventh-Street facade, designed by J. C. Cady in pink granite dotted with turrets and globes, was to be wiped out with the application of a monolithic slab that the critic Christopher Gray likened to “some gigantic crematorium.” This new look represented the new faceless sense of what museums suddenly were supposed to be—museums without histories.

What saved this museum? In part the AMNH came to see its own history as an object worthy of protection and study. It also got lucky, undergoing budget cuts right before the wrecking ball arrived. Today the museum seems more dedicated than any other to polishing up its past and celebrating its own history along with the history of its permanent collection.

Many other institutions have been far less fortunate. The Brooklyn Museum, designed by McKim, Mead & White, lost its grand outdoor Met-like staircase to the rhetoric of “public access” in the 1930s, when the entrance was brought down to street level, the stairs ripped out, and a lobby carved out of the original auditorium. This loss created an architectural imbalance that has only been aggravated through the recent addition of a $63-million glass atrium. In the 1950s, the museum’s beaux-arts lobby was similarly stripped of its ornamentation and a drop-ceiling installed. All of these moves were designed to conceal, reinterpret, or destroy the museum’s one-time architectural grandeur and patrimony.

Today’s museum capital projects often follow a similar pattern. With the addition of new materials, new restaurant spaces, new entertainment venues, and new contemporary art galleries designed by celebrity architects, they can be particularly seductive. The new 70,000-square-foot $114-million wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened on January 19, is but the latest. Designed by Renzo Piano, the new facility offers “purpose-built spaces for concerts, exhibitions, and classes, along with enhanced visitor amenities,” according to the museum’s press office, including a “cube-shaped performance hall and an adjustable height special exhibition gallery,” a visitor welcome area called the “Richard E. Floor Living Room,” apartments for artists-in-residence, a store called “Gift at the Gardner,” a greenhouse, and a restaurant called “Café G.”

The building, which required the demolition of Gardner’s historic carriage house, now serves as the only entrance to the institution and connects with the original museum through a glass-enclosed umbilical cord, which penetrates the back of Gardner’s fanciful Venetian building.

Compared to Gardner’s grand pastiche of a museum and the limitations imposed through her trust, the Piano addition is ostentatiously invisible, obsequiously deferential, and more than willing to cater to the creature comforts of the visitor/end-user. The vertiginous theater-in-the-square turns the spectator into a spectacle. The Kunsthalle for new art, the eateries, shops, and apartments are all sumptuously attractive. A “geothermal well system, daylight harvesting, water-efficient landscaping techniques, and the use of local and regional materials” may make the new building eligible for leed gold certification.

But what has been lost in the shuffle? How will this facility affect Gardner’s original vision and the mysteries of her creation? And if the new building is meant merely as an engine to generate new donors, couldn’t the trustees just as easily apply $114 million directly to the preservation of the original facility (where the water stains of a rusted-out skylight continue to streak down the interior walls)?

In countless cases, the concern is that museum professionals have come to regard their founding generations with suspicion rather than reverence. They question the legacy of these industrialists and “robber barons.” They suppress the American idiosyncrasies of their institutions to appeal to international ideals. They undercut the signs of private philanthropy in order to seek out greater state control. They advance a new populist rhetoric that trumpets appeal and “access” over beauty and virtue. They attack their own “imposing” facilities and “elite” permanent collections. They undermine the art and architecture their supporters had given to the public trust. All along they sell their own expanding ranks and bureaucratic sensibilities to a complicit donor base as a way to counter, conceal, update, and “reinterpret” the influence of their museums’ dubious histories.

But what if museums were to see these histories as something worthy of preservation and reverence? Some institutions have already taken such a turn. The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History are three of the institutions that have quietly rejected the spiraling demands of the professionalized museum by cultivating their own founding principles.

What if all American museums were to embrace the virtuous intent of their founders and supporters? The answer is that the American people, once again, could become the connoisseurs of virtue.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Future-tense--VII--What-s-a-museum--7298, retrieved on 20th of March 2012

Gold and My cocaine museum

My Cocaine Museum e o carte care vorbeste despre un gand. despre un : Ce ar fi daca... Daca am putea intelege ca in spatele obiectelor de aur care exista in marile muzee ale lumii este mult pamant si oboseala si apa si truda si iar apa si saracie si alcool si ... frunze de coca. Da, frunze de coca mestecate in coltul gurii, ca sa ma treaca oboseala si tot restul. Cartea asta este un altfel de carte de antropologie. O  etnografie pe care o citesti cu sufletul la gura pentru ca e in primul rand despre oameni, cu nume, cu povesti personale, istorii de viata. In Nordul Columbiei sunt oameni care muncesc cu zilele pentru un gram de aur. Aur pe care il vand imediat la magazinul din colt, pe un cantar in care de cealalta parte a balantei sta un bob - un bob de porumb. Primesc putini bani, sau mai degraba putina mancare.

Cat aur ai gasit azi?
Un gram.
Raspunsul e invariabil.
Chiar daca uneori au gasit mai mult sau mai putin. Superstitii. E multa invidie si ura si vraji de mana…

Soare, caldura, stat degeaba (decat munca ca sa muncesti, mai bine stai), sunet de muzica in surdina undeva la umbra si racoare, gust de fruze de coca mestecate intr-un colt de gura… Asta e! Ploaie...
despre water in water,
Julio arboleda’s stone,
Diging,
Mines,
“Paramilitary lover”,
Bocanegra si povestea teribila cu omul care a stat nu mai stiu cati ani in inchisoarea iaia renumita pentru ca a violat o femeie, apoi pentru ca ea l-a turnat politiei, omul s-a intors si …
im - ha!

Cica muzeul asta (My cocaine museum) ar avea un prototip - pe faimosul si extraordinarul Gold Museum care chiar exista in centrul Bogotei, cum urci la etajul 2 In Banca Republicii.

Ca sa scrie My Cocaine Museum Michael Taussig a petrecut cativa ani in Columbia si pe valea raului Timbiqui. Cartea a aparut in 2006. El si-a inceput cercetarea in 1969 si spune ca de atunci a mers acolo in fiecare an.

p. X: “To walk through the Gold Museum is to become vaguely conscious of how for millennia the mistery of Gold has through myth and stories sustained the basis of money worldwide. But one story is missing. The museum is silent as to the fact that for more than three centuries of Spanish occupation that the colony stood for and depended upon was the labour of slaves from Africa in the gold mines. Indeed, this gold, along with the silver from Mexico and Peru, was what primed the pump of the capitalist takeoff in Europe, its primitive accumulation. (…) It seems so monstruously unjust, this denial, so limited and mean a vision incapable of imagining what it was like diving for gold in the wild coastal rivers, moving boulders with your bare hands, standing barefoot in mud and rain day after day, so unable to even tip your hat to the brutal labor people still perform today alongside the spirits of their parents and grandparents and of all the generations that before them had dug out the countr’s wealth. (…) The Gold Museum is also silent about the fact that if it was gold that determined the political economy of the colony, it is cocaine – or rather US prohibition of it – that shapes the country today. Not to talk about cocaine, not to display it, is to continue with the same denial of reality that the museum practices in relation to slavery. Like gold, cocaine is imbued with violence and greed, glitter that reeks transgression. What’s more, cocaine has roots in prehistory too.

(((…)))

p. XiX: But I am not that interested in museums. I find them dead and even hostile places, created for a bored bourgeoisie bereft of life and experience. What I am interested in is the life of gold and the life of cocaine where one is dying and the other is taking off (…) What interests me and I hope you too (…) is to combine a history of things with a history of people forced by slavery to find their way through these things. What things? Heat and rain, forests and rivers, stones and swamps, colour and islands – those sort of things – and especially the miasma emanating from the swamp.(…)

si dupa ce a terminat de scris cartea Taussig spune
p. 315. scriind cartea asta am sperat ca voi trezi la viata toti cei 38 de mii 500 de zei si o data cu ei, se vor sparge vitrinele.
“This is my magic and this is why we write and why we write strange apotropaic texts like My Cocaine Museum made of spells, hundreds and thousands of spells, intended to break the catastrophic spell of things, starting with the smashing of vitrines whose sole purpose is to upload the view that you are you and over there is there and here you are – looking at captured objects, from the outside. But now, no more! (…) Ghosts and gods peel back the money, back into mud, then stone – hundreds and thousands and millions of white and orange stones like eggs flowing yolk by the riverbanks all over Columbia where kids tumbling home from school in the midday heat make the stones make their jigger-jigger music, grumbling yet happy like the mad wail of the bells crying out for the dead all day long and longer still ringing in your years.”

CONF: The Museum as laboratory, catalist, forum

International Symposium

The "Principle of the Museum"

The Museum as laboratory, catalyst, forum
University of Bonn

February 11-12, 2011


"The museum might indeed become a place of interdisciplinary activity." -

Joseph Beuys (1980)


In times of changing demands, shifting challenges and high expectations

faced by universities and museums, experts will try to take stock of the

current situation in Bonn on 11–12 February 2011. In a comparative approach

between the concepts of "the museum of art" and / vs. "the museum of

cultures", the different actors and disciplines will question their own ways

to analyse and perform theory and practice of collecting and exhibiting.

As suspected by Joseph Beuys, "the museum" is supposed to become a place for

"a permanent conference". Our purpose is to reflect the museum's roles,

functions and practice in a shared self-questioning of all involved agents

and actors, i.e. scholars, managers and consumers. Beyond discussions about

a "boom", "reform" or "crisis of museums", the focus of our symposium is on

the present situation: in particular the collaboration of the art histories

of the museums and of the universities, the histories of culture,

ethnographies and ethnologies as well as museology and museum practice,

which become increasingly alienated from each other, deserve our interest.

The role and functions of the museum and the university, as well as their

manner of interaction, have to be redefined in the current shift of

challenges and expectations. The scientific cartography and the social

determinations / functions of the museum need to be revised, for example in

terms of education, training and "edutainment". While museum studies

experience a boom, in particular within the field of cultural sciences, and

history of art becomes increasingly involved in the history of museums and

collection - in a kind of trendy "museological turn" - the real museum

scene suffers from drastic watersheds and changes.

Museums, modernity, history of art and ethnology evolved both materially and

epistemologically in simultaneous and complex mutual interdependencies.

Museums are eminent "agencies of modernity" reflecting the social status and

the roles of art and sciences of their time. Within the context of the

present revision of traditional paradigms of western thinking and of the

upcoming reorganisation of our cartographies of knowledge, museum displays

and performances can be regarded as a catalyst for a theory of science and

society – and their practice. Challenges, functions and perspectives of

one’s own thinking and actions have to be reconsidered. This specifically

affects the disciplines of history of art and ethnology, since they are

agents of the indigenisation and commercialisation of their objects and

subjects. In Bonn, both protagonists and representatives of production,

distribution and reception of matters of "art and culture" will work

together to draw a current balance and to develop new perspectives.



The symposium will be held in German and English.

It is free and public.



Organized by Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet, Prof. Dr. Karoline Noack, Prof.

Dr. Paul Geyer



Contact:

Jana Baumann M.A.

Research Project 'Prinzip Museum'

Department of History of Art, University of Bonn

prinzipmuseum@uni-bonn.de

www.khi.uni-bonn.de

Monumentul Marmeladei

Ideea de a scrie un text despre expunerea și cunoașterea prin mâncare în muzeu mi-a venit venit de curând. Am aflat că pe undeva, pe lângă Barcelona există un astfel de muzeu unde poți alege să mănânci ca în secolul 16, 17, 18...  Sună apetisant!

Informația cu pricina s-a suprapus peste un articol despre regimul alimentar stalinist, peste brusca amintire a unor rețete de drob din pate - pe care le făcea mama în anii 80 și uite așa am ajuns la comunismul expus și la mâncare. -de ce? pt că treaba cu mâncarea roade. Si pentru ca si mancarea duce la un anume fel de intelegere - mai din stomac- a subiectului.

În 2004, în expoziția Roșu Domestic (Galeria Hag, București) a fost expusă o savarină și biscuiți la vrac dați vizitatorilor să guste. Un vizitator a criticat în barbă că savarina aduce a nostalgie. Savarina și biscuitele au făcut furori și au creat articol de Dilemă. Bananele, portocalele si ciocolata Milka erau suite undeva sus la etaj - acolo nu oricine putea sa ajunga!

În 2006 la Museum of Young Art in Viena, Ioana Popescu a pus la cale o cameră dedicată alimentației în stalinism - în România. Pe jos sala era acoperită cu pânză de americă - alb crem. Pe ea desenate urme de pași. În mijlocul sălii, de altfel complet goale, pe un soclu (1,5 m aprox) din dotarea muzeului o lădiță cu marmeladă la vrac - cleioasă și tare.
Vizitatorii se apropiau și apoi se retrăgeau curioși. Ce e asta? Monumentul Marmeladei spuneam noi. Doar niște copii, pe jumătate români, s-au apropiat de lădiță și au început să mănânce.

Mai recent la Muzeul Țăranului s-a pus serios problema facerii unei expoziții de proporții mai mari undeva în centrul capitalei despre viața domestică în comunism. S-a ajuns din nou la mâncare, involuntar, de data asta nu expusă, ci consumată - ca la un festival, cu buget. Ce? Păine cu parizer și bere, creveți vietnamezi, conservă de pește, șampanie Zarea...
Puteți adăuga și voi la listă, dacă știți, dacă, mai aveți ce.

Și pentru a purta discuția cu trei pași mai sus vă invit să citiți următorul articol, și cartea...


http://www.criticatac.ro/1233/bucataria-lui-stalin-a-existat-oare-o-gastronomie-comunsita/


Am senzația că obiectele conduc la o anumită expunere, iar teoria la alta... Până acum am plecat mai mult de la obiecte. Ce-ar fi să plecăm și de la teorie?

Martzy shore!

sau
Arta la colt de strada

Imaginaţi-vă parterul din Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art NY sau Centre Pompidou plin de mărțișoare la vânzare! Parcă și văd sute de vânzători ambulanți, înghesuiți și înfrigurați, cu măsuțe de lemn, geamantane Duchampiene și alte plase și plăsuțe (cafeluțe, de ce nu), șevalete și pancarde pline de (mici) obiecte aducătoare de plăceri, făcute să încânte și în consecință, să se vândă.

Păi dacă asta nu e artă, atunci ce e?
Introducerea asta am scris-o ca sa vă spun mai voalat că umilul mărțișor de la colțul străzii brusc ar putea fi privit altfel. Să aduci mărțișorul în muzeu este, după părerea mea, echivalent cu a coborî conceptul de artă la ceea ce se fabrică în și pentru stradă. Mi s-ar părea un experiment în artă foarte interesant!

Nu voi intra în povestea şi istoria mărţişorului ca obiect şi tradiţie. (Deşi povestea asta a purtării firului răsucit, a celor două principii alb şi negru sau alb şi roşu, care nu pot face să meargă lumea mai departe unul fără de celălalt... e şi ea e tulburătoare, poetică şi de-a dreptul plină de înţelesuri înalte.) Eu nu despre înalt în artă vreau să scriu, ci despre artefact ca obiect de artă considerat de mulți ca fiind jos, mic, al strazii și plebei și în consecință neimportant. Dar din moment ce se află în toate piețele, la colțuri de stradă și în muzeu, se vede treaba că e cât se poate de important – cel puțin pentru lumea orașului.
Aţi cumpărat mărţişoare anul ăsta? Câte şi pentru cine? Diferite unele de altele? De unde? Iată câteva întrebări la care chiar vreau să vă gândiţi şi să răspundeți, pe cât posibil, chiar pe site-ul ziarului. Vă întreb pentru că arta mărţişorului prezent, dacă mi se permite această observaţie, stă nu numai în confecționare, ci și în selecție. Eu una am mers de curiozitate la Muzeul Țăranului Român unde știu că în fiecare an se face târg de mărțișor. Nu avea de gând să cumpăr nimic. Voiam să văd ce mai numește lumea mărțișor, ce se mai întâmplă în urbe, curiozități din astea feminine... Ei, dar din momentul în care am intrat pe poarta muzeului, mi s-a rupt filmul! Adică, bucurie mai mare ca asta de a mă plimba pe la toate măsuțele și a vedea toate mărțișoarele a celor peste o sută de artiști nu am mai avut de mult în niciun muzeu în care am intrat în ultimii ani. Și nu spun să mergeți acolo să vedeți și voi, pentru că poate voi nu veți vedea nimic. Spun doar că eu am rămas suspendată într-o plăcere și bucurie imensă. O fi și creativitatea mai mare, acum pe timpuri de criză!
Îmi imaginez că plăcerea mea se aseamănă întru câtva cu a celor ce vizitau camerele de curiozități de secol 18, 19... Să vă dau niste exemple? Am văzut și pipăit niște cărticele mici mici, cât o ghindă, făcute din hârtie manuală și legate cu șnur alb-roșu din lână, am văzut broșe pe post de nasturi mari cât o palmă, dungați, pistruiați, bulinați... Am văzut ceainice și broșe ca ceainice făcute din lemn și pictate lila și roz cu flori. Și dacă am pomenit de ceinic poate ar trebui să spun și de dulcețuri și gemuri de fructe făcute la mânăstire. Știți, din acelea legate cu material frumos colorat peste capace...Am văzut linguri de lemn cât un deget de copil și simbolul dragostei, al maternității și alte simboluri transpuse tot în lemn de către un meșter popular(habar nu aveam de așa ceva). Am văzut pinguini cu ochi de nasturi, cercei guguloaie,pietricele, mărgeluțe, zgărdane, răvașe, ghicitori, pănuș de răchită facută cerc și prins cu alamă, macrame în cerculețe, piei în floricele, portofele și gentuțe, șnurulețe, șnurulețe, șnurulețe, broderii, petice și iconițe, cruciulițe... Gata m-am oprit! A, ba nu, asta e super tare: niște broșe consistente care conțineau piese de radio, cipuri, un ceas stricat cu Barbie, o foarfecă și chiar un nasture auriu de la un palton militar de pe vremea RPR. Știți de care?
Ei, bănuiesc că dacă mergea altcineva vedea altceva.
Oricum, când vorbesc despre mărțișor ca obiect de artă nu mă refer doar la plăcerea estetică pe care o provoacă sau nu, ci la această acumulare enormă de bizarerii care atrag un public atât de variat și fascinează într-atât de tare încât să se vândă. Arta mărșișorului cred că constă în momentul de încântare pe care îl produce. Încântare și din partea cumpărătorului cțnd cumpără, dar și a producătorului când îl face. Antropologul Alfred Gell, chiar asta și numește arta: o capcană de încântare! (trap of enchantment) De unde vine încântarea? Păi de la procesul de selecție, zic eu. Mărțișoarele se cumpără pentru a fi dăruite – fiecare câte unei persoane (de obicei de sex feminin, la noi). Și sunt relativ ieftine, ca să poți dărui multe. Cumpărătorul se încântă în momentul în care alege: mărțișorul ăsta cutărei persoane, ăsta, alteia cred că i-ar plăcea. Ce fel de asocieri se pot face în mintea umană? De ce mărțișorul ăsta ca un colac de sfoară i se potrivește mai bine mătușii mele decât mamei? Mamei trebuie să-i iau ceva cu roșu, dar nu mare – ei cam asta îi place. Și nepoțelei mele – mâ gândesc la ea, la hainele pe care le poartă, la cum râde și i se luminează toată fața. Are o geacă albă ...pe ea ar sta bine floricica asta de piele... Trifoiul ăsta vernil țipă a o prietenă de-a mea. Are culoarea și forma care mă fac să mă gândesc la ea. Și tot așa... În momentul alegerii se produc niște legături sensibile. Se apelează la memorii, la observații, se fac asocieri. Cineva îmi spunea că vrea să cumpere două mărțișoare pentru două doamne doctor, mai nonconformiste. O iau de braț și o duc la standul cu animăluțe făcute din plante. Îi arăt un porcușor făcut dintr-o floare uscată cu bot de bob de fasole roșie. Foarte fromoase spune doamna, dar nu pot! Dacă doamna doctor e grasă și se interpretează...
Când pleci de la cumpărăturile de mărțișor parcă te întorci cu tolba plină de asociații. Omul și mărțișorul, puși unul lângă altul... și la mijloc,cel ce dăruiește!
Și să mai spună cineva că la noi nu se cumpără artă- chiar și conceptuală! E pe toate străzile (fiecare cu gustul lui) și uite, că și în muzee.

Museological Review, 'Cultural Property: Ownership, Restitution and Retention and its Impact on Museum Collections, their Care, Display and Interpre

tation

Issue 14

The Museological Review, edited by the PhD students of the Department of Museum Studies based at the University of Leicester, has launched an annual online journal. It is a forum for students and practitioners to share and debate innovative perspectives on museums and publishes original research in the field of museum studies and allied subject areas such as cultural studies, archaeology, conservation science, architecture, art history and social sciences, from a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives. We are seeking contributors from the international research community, to share experimental and creative ideas to cultivate debate and enhance museum practice. We actively encourage new thinking with the aim that the Museological Review will share experimental research and creative ideas within a constructive environment.
This issue will focus on the ownership, restitution and retention of cultural property and it's impact on museum collections; which includes related issues of care and conservation, display, exhibition, interpretation and visitor reception, as well as cultural diversity, representation and exclusion.

We invite abstracts, of no more than 300 words in length, for papers in English that explore these issues. The Museological Review is targeted towards PhD students from all over the world, but we would also welcome contributions from other researchers and professionals.

Please send an abstract of your proposed paper – along with a 100-word biography describing your current area of research or position of employment - by email to the Editors (cj36@leicester.ac.uk), or by post to the address given below, by February 1st, 2009. Please remember to include your email address and/or contact details as well as details of your institutional affiliation, if applicable. Successful contributors will be notified by email before March 1st, 2009 and final papers are due September 30th, 2009. All abstracts submitted will be subject to a rigorous selection process to maintain academic quality. We regret that we will be unable to accept all abstracts submitted.
The Editors, Museological ReviewDepartment of Museum StudiesUniversity of Leicester105, Princess Road EastLEICESTER, UKLE1 7LGE-mail:

La ce bun o expozitie?

De pe H-Museum... o conferinta la care mi-ar fi placut sa pot merge. E organizata de Max Planck Research Network History of Scientific Objects si Deutsches Museum. Are loc la Munchen, 27/28 November, 2008
Organizatorii sunt Helmuth Trischler, Christian Sichau, Susanne
Pickert; Deutsches Museum.

Sa vedem ce spun ei:  No exhibition without scholarship: Object based studies and the exploration of the cultural context of the object are prerequisites for the intelligible
showing. However, exhibitions do more than merely visualize the results of
research. They have the potential of stimulating scholarship and generating
knowledge by posing new research questions.
How can researchers take advantage of this opportunity? In which way can
scholarly arguments be translated into spatial arrangement and at the same
time kept serviceable for reading and citing by later recipients? What might
the results of the scholarly examination of an exhibition look like?
Unlike for printed texts, the traditional publication media of scholarship,
common standards of terminology and argumentation for exhibitions have yet
to emerge. What exactly is the role of the objects on display? Recent
history of science and technology has intensively interrogated the epistemic
quality of these material sources of research.
Yet how do the objects unfold their properties in being staged for
exhibition purposes?The conference will bring together exhibition makers, museum experts, designers, artists, experts in cultural studies and historians of science and technology to engage in a discussion about their experiences and expectations regarding the exhibition as product and generator of scholarship.

Conference talks will be given in English. If you would like to attend,

please send a short e-mail to Susanne Pickert,  s.pickert@deutsches-museum.de

(Selectez cateva titluri de prezentari din program):

I: What is this thing called exhibition? Reflections on object, text and space:Helmuth Trischler, Christian Sichau, Susanne Pickert(Munich) 

Ulrich Raulff (Marbach)

Old answers, new questions: What do exhibitions really produce?

Jochen Brüning (Berlin)

Exhibitions vs. publications. On scientific achievements and their

evaluation

Martha Fleming (Copenhagen/London)

Thinking through objects

II: Stories on display. What and how do we see in exhibitions?

Uwe W. Brückner (Stuttgart): Scenography – opera as model for integrative design

Stefan Iglhaut (Berlin):Story telling and scenography: Strategies of science communication in

exhibitions

III: History of science, objects, exhibitions: Interrelations, transitions,

transformations

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin)

Making visible. Visualization in the sciences – and in exhibitions?

Ulrich Großmann (Nuremberg)

The Challenge of Objects - CIHA Congress 2012. The object in the focus of

arthistorical studies

Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen)

Do things talk?

IV: More than history of science?! Exhibitions, research, and the public

Volker Mosbrugger (Frankfurt/M.)

Natural history research and exhibitions – a hermeneutical cycle

Robert Bud (London)

Power, belief and trust: a context for scholarly priorities in the history

of science

Ad Maas (Leiden)

Tearing down the altar. A new view of displaying scientific instruments in

Museum Boerhaave

V: Making exhibitions: Concepts, constraints, critiques

Jürgen Renn (Berlin)

Exhibitions as history of science in action

Walter Hauser (Munich)

Artefacts, visuals and topography as evidence: Working on an exhibition on

nano- and biotechnology

Thomas Schnalke (Berlin)

Arguing with objects. The exhibition as a scientific format of publication

Despre spatiul potential si joc

In psihanaliza exista o teorie despre spatiul potential (a lui Winnicott), care mie mi s-a parut ca se poate aplica acelor muzee speciale (care ne plac), pe care le-am vazut sau doar imaginat...muzeelor antidot la muzeul clasic.

Spatiul potential e un spatiu liminal intre lumea interioara (a fanteziei) si realitate. Un spatiu care este vizibil in special la copii in faza in cere "incep sa fie", adica sa se joace cu obiectele din jurul lor, sa se inventeze, cunoasca pe ei insine. In acel moment, spune Winnicott, ei nu mai traiesc nici in lumea lor interioara (a fanteziei), dar nici in cea pe care noi o numim reala (a obiectelor si oamenilor din jur).  Fantezie, spune Winnicott, nu e sinonima cu imaginatia sau creativitatea, ci este: the biologically determined psychological representation of instinct.

Ce intra in acest spatiu potential?

Pai jocul.

Experimantarea. Si ceea ce Winnicott mai numeste "area of transitional phenomena", "area of creativity", "the dream space", "tehnic analytic space", "area of cultural experience".

Tot ce este intre externul -real si internul-fanteziei, tot ceea ce cream cu totii atunci cand ne experimentam prin joc visele cu ochii deschisi.  

Eu una m-am jucat de multe ori de-a cantareata. Stateam cu orele in fata oglinzii si vorbeam ca in fata unei mari audiente, sau cantam pe o scena fiind. Cantecele, erau de cele mai multe ori, productie proprie.  Vise cu ochii deschisi cred ca avem cu totii si azi...sau poate am avut pana de curand. Ce n-as vrea sa fiu acum nu stiu unde, sa pot primi slujba aia... si sa fac asta si asta... . Casa in care ma voi muta va arata asa... Si bucuria cea mai mare vine nu atunci cand realitatea chiar devine ce-ai visat, dar cand incepi sa iti urmaresti visele cu ochii deschisi, jocurile de-a... si vezi ca se poate, ca da, si tu poti cu puterea dorintelor si jocurilor izvorate din tine, da o anumita consistenta realitatatii. 

Bun,

acum ce are asta cu muzeele?

Pai mare parte din muzeele pe care le stim cu totii sunt spatii deosebit de serioase si atoase, cum spuneam in proclamatie. Spatii ale unor discursuri ale unei realitati brute, dure, serioase. De parca n-ar lucra cu obiecte frumoase sau interesante?!

Doar cateva reusesc sa se scuture de ... seriozitate si sa fie "vii" (spun MTR-istii) adica sa experimenteze, sa se joace serios, creativ (asa cum fac si copiii, si noi in fata oglinzii): cu ideea de muzeu, cu noi vizitatorii, cu ele insele.

Exista cateva care, dupa parerea mea, sunt muzee ale spatiului potential: Museum of Jourassic Technology si ultimele doua camere din stanga de la parterul MTR. Intra, dincolo de usa incepe timpul!

Ele sunt mai mult decat spatii interactive in care vizitatorul se poate juca de-a x sau y. Sunt muzee dialogice, liminale, care leaga lumea noastra interioara a fanteziei de cea a realitatii, sunt locuri care ne tin suspendati intre acestea doua. 

Intrebarea si provocarea e: simtiti si voi ca muzeele astea sunt antidot la muzeul serios?

Le simtiti potentialitatea destabilizatoare, jucausa?

Si daca da, ce e de facut cu asta?