Mining the Museum

Watching Fred Wilson speak about Mining the Museum (a work of brilliant Institutional Critique that was on view at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore in 1992-3) in class on Thursday, I was struck by his comments about the community of viewers that entered into dialogue during the time that the exhibition was on view. He mentioned that during the duration of the show, the African-American maintenance staff and the professional curatorial staff witnessed a shift in the dynamic of their relationship that had been oriented around a margin/ center model, with authority mapped on to the (white) valorized "professional" labor of curating as opposed to the (black) maintenance labor of the staff. The long-standing conceptual importance of Ukeles' Maintenance Art project, initiated in 1969, cannot be denied.    Fred Wilson, “Metalwork 1793-1880" from Mining the Museum. And I think that here we come back to those intangible things that are produced by the public work of art that again relate to Hyde's notion of an artistic gift that maintains and sustains community connections rather than producing an artwork as a commodity. This kind of artwork can only be funded through grant money as it does not enter into commercial exchange (and isn't that a good argument for the validity of organizations like the NEA and NEH).  Since we will be looking at Relational Aesthetics this coming week, it makes sense to highlight this important connection between these ideas.  The entry on "Institutional Critique" on Oxford art Online discusses this artistic practice that "questioned the hidden assumptions, ideologies and operation of institutions such as galleries, museums, publications and private collections, their artwork serving to reveal the frameworks of classification and circulation that give art its meaning or value... Wilson’s installation ... demonstrated how Native and African American history was suppressed by the taxonomy and display systems at this and, by extension, other museums. Taking on the role of a curator–scholar Wilson rearranged the collection, manipulated lighting and sound, and rewrote labels, unveiling not only the hidden history but also how institutional policies and practices served to sustain racial discrimination. As it coincided with the annual conference of the American Association of Museums in 1992, this installation was widely influential in the US." As we discussed in class in reference to the Carolyn Dean reading, hierarchical thinking tends to favor those MAKING the hierarchies.  Wilson, working in a historical collection, as a conceptual artist, wonderfully disregards (or complicates) any previous concept  of ‘high’ and ‘low’  culture.  The ways in which this show spoke to the staff, who had never felt addressed or moved by an exhibit before could almost stand as a perfect illustration of Brecht’s definition of “popular” culture: “popular means: intelligible to the broad masses, adopting and enriching their forms of expression / assuming their standpoint, confirming and correcting it / representing the most progressive section of the people so that it can assume leadership, and therefore intelligible to other sections of the people as well / relating to traditions and developing them / communicating to that portion of the people which strives for leadership.”  Furthermore, using this example, we could argue that Institutional Critique strives for a Brechtian sense of realism: “Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up..."

A change of heart - Fred Wilson's impact on museums from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

"Every museum has scores of wounded objects that are subject to the triage of conservation, that languish in storage while awaiting restora­tive treatment. Wilson ferreted out just such a painting, and installed it "as is" in the first green room. A Henry Bebie portrait of an unknown white man, it had a large tear in the area of the head which revealed the wall behind. Visitors entered the dimly lit gallery and were startled to see a blinking eye and a dark-skinned nose projected onto this spot, giving the uncanny sensation that there was someone inside or behind the canvas. A motion-activated audio loop captivated listeners by declaring:

Nobody knows that I'm inside you, except Mamma. She lives far away. I promise that I won't expose myself to your wife. And if you move, your children will never know. But you will have to live with me constantly reminding you of what you've been missing and what you did until the day you die.

With a brilliant economy of means Wilson conveys the complexity of racial identity, suggesting the covert heritage of African-American blood in those persons society perceives as Caucasian." Judith Stein, Sins of Omission

Unrelated: Bill's post on South Park (esp the video at the end) set me off watching old SNL skits with Mike Myers' parody of German Avant-Garde tv, SPROCKETS.