A Linear System of Seeing (Exerpt No. 1)

This is an edited excerpt from a piece written for Valentin Y. Mudimbe on the subject of theories of difference in museums, curation and cultural displays. It was meant to entertain a vein of continental structuralist thinking.

The process of assembling and navigating a book can be experienced as curation, if curation is thought of an act of selecting, ordering, presenting objects from a larger system to demonstrate its functionality as a system of its own.

I recently read Another Way of Telling (Vintage Press: 1995), in which John Berger compiles a series of stories, accounts, photographs by Jean Mohr both captioned and uncaptioned, about a peasant town. The volume typically is read for its contribution to the discourse of photography and memory, it is also useful as an analytic tool to investigate for models in curating. The book serves as both an anthropological account, and a criticism of its own methods: each chapter is an essay that presents the central subject matter in iterative configurations,  remembering while thinking anew through repeated content. [1] Each re-presentation destabilizes the last, and forewarns against the next. The power of the critique is nested in this false linearity, in the arbitrariness of sequence.

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The Beginning of a Thought on Installation Art

In an attempt to re-compress some of the art and literature I’ve gathered in the past few years, I’ve been slowly pinning down corners of a subject I want to pursue in my graduate work. The recurring themes in my undergraduate studies circle around the art institutional space, how it can be transformative and plastic, validating and self-critical. Within the discourses on artistic space, I find myself returning to the idea of Installation Art, which cannot be called a medium by art historical tradition, but has in the past 40 years acquired the valence of a coagulated genre, and thus slipped into art world’s vocabulary. I have noticed a discrepancy in documentation and critical perspectives on installation art relative to its high visibility in contemporary exhibitions. While museum attention implies a certain validation in artistic and cultural currency, installation art has yet to move into the discourse of art history. This might be because the genre is perceived to be relatively young, but I would guess that this is more because installation is part performative, part conceptual, and incredibly fragile.

In the handful of survey books I’ve come in contact with, I frequently return to two prominent volumes: MOCA San Diego’s Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996 (1997), and Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (2009). They offer competing methodologies by way of introduction to their subject. Continue reading…

The Cloisters, between Pilgrimage and Tourism

This was a miniature conference paper I gave this week. I was trying to locate the Cloisters, as both a museum and a medieval (contemporary) construction, relative to traditions of pilgrimage and tourism.

In the modern age of tourism, museums have achieved landmark status. For one who sees “everything as a sign of itself,” [1] museums are convenient concentrations of cultural artifacts employed to typify the conditions under which they were made. Fortunately for New York tourists and tour organizations, the majority of these museums are concentrated in upper-middle Manhattan. City Sites NY, a popular tour bus franchise, advertises that both their “All Around Town” and “Uptown Tour Bus” tours include visits to the Museum Mile [2], and is therefore a must. The visibility of these museums contributes to their high visitor traffic, and perpetuates their canonization in the New York tourist experience.

Excluded from these franchised museum loops is the Cloisters. This is in part due to its distance from central Manhattan: it is 5.6 miles north of its parent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose inclusion on bus tours is almost guaranteed. The Cloisters’ absence from the museum canon may also have to do with its specialization in medieval art: its narrow focus appeals to a necessarily smaller audience. Thus, obscure enough in location and content to have eluded the double-decker’s radius of interest, the Cloisters occupies a different category of destinations working along and at odds with touristic practice. Continue reading…

Tourism, and its Semiotics in Museums

I recently reread “Semiotics of Tourism” by Jonathan Culler and was reminded of its usefulness in examining museums.

In it, Culler makes a nuanced reading of touristic habits and its significance for contemporary semiotics. His Tourist is one who deals in the currency of signs and signifiers, who reads “cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems.” (155) This means also that what registers is only what is apparent; the Tourist’s understanding is apprehended through surfaces. His world is only what the Tourist can Structurally infer. His are [sites/sights].

A topically oriented being, the Tourist is also exempt from the criticism of his counterpart, the so-called Traveler, who seeks the truth via pure essence and the authentic. Culler astutely points out that the notion of authenticity is constructed, recognized as such only when given the markers of its own authentic-ness. (161) In other words, authenticity is conferred when affirmed by an authority figure, a cultural construction. Authenticity as that which opposes superficiality is thus destabilized, if not entirely denied. Semiotic participation vis-à-vis the Tourist is thus inevitable and ubiquitous.

The idea of constructing [site/sight] is particularly relevant to the museum. The [site/sight] is denoted with what Culler calls “markers,” which operates triply: representing it, giving information on its significance, and making it recognizable. (159) Markers construct [sites/sights] in reverse; they precede the existence of a significant object.

Is this not what museums do? Perhaps their markers are quadruple: they also collect the [sites/sights] (here, objects) into one space where the importance of one confirms the importance of another and visa versa. Museums are vehicles of semiotic presumptions.

Yet the constructive power of museums thus reveals the shortcomings of Culler’s argument. Like the museum, he is limited because he assumes the tourist’s unconflicted subjectivity, assumes a universality to touristic practice, and in groups signs into distinct cultural systems. The institution, the participants, and their exchange, are more opaque than they are rendered here.*

• Jonathan Culler. “The Semiotics of Tourism.” Framing the Sign. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

* I was told that this criticism was too hasty, please drop me a line if anyone is interested in talking about Culler in greater depth. I would love to keep the conversation going.

Anticipating the Museum (Chris Burden)

Recently, in the context of a class discussion on expectations in museum contexts, I returned to an earlier paper I wrote on alternative spaces for a performance art theory class. The topic of our conversation was what a Museum Goer anticipates of the viewing space, and what alternative iterations of art spaces can do to illuminate the substructure of our expectation.

Performance art is a revealing lens in museology because it constructs a pocket of liminal space around itself, especially when presented in an art institution. It is through physical contact with the work, thus approaching the threshold of liminal/institutional, that we become aware of the responsibilities we take on as Museum Goer and the ones that we defer.

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What “Work of Art” has Done

Abdi Farah

This week, the season finale of Bravo’s art-related reality TV show aired, knighting the 23-year-old Abdi Farah as what the tagline calls “the Next Great Artist,” which comes with the benefits of a solo show in the Brooklyn Museum, and a piece to be auctioned at Philips de Pury. Also, every inch of that sentence has been violently protested by a surprising hoard of passionate dissidents, many of whom preface their comments with “I don’t call myself an art person, but–.” That in itself has proved the show to be successful to me.

I mentioned after the show’s premier that I foresaw this as a valuable experience in showing a larger public more emerging art while demystifying the exclusivity of art insiders. I’d like to add now that the show has done something I didn’t fully expect, and that was only possible through the medium of a tv show: it given people a space and greater comfortability to discuss art.

To understand the magnitude of this, we have to start in the museum and gallery. These two institutions need to have a sheen of completion and some incontestability to survive; their very exhibitions defend that which they are displaying. This defensiveness on behalf of the institution becomes another barrier between the non-frequenters and their ability to feel confident about their individual aesthetic judgement. I do not mean to exaggerate the strength of this barrier or diminish the will of the individual, I simply mean to comment on the feeling of awe and intimidation, however slight, that is built into our museum and gallery spaces.

What this show has done, therefore, is to remove that barrier of intimidation by taking the viewing process out of its usual institutionality (albeit by putting it into another one). It takes works that are decently representative of some emerging art now, and brings them to the viewer in his own space, in which he is comfortable making and defending his judgment. And because thew viewer sees the artists talk, and watch these pieces come into being with no previous scholarship or criticism attached, he participates as an equal in an open forum. Jerry Saltz, famed art critic and regular judge on the show, wrote in his final of many blog posts throughout the season that the show has given birth to a different kind of art criticism. I’ve pulled an excerpt below:

“I wanted to see if art criticism was porous and supple enough to actually exist on a different stage….[and] It happened in the tens of thousands of words that all of you wrote in the comment sections at the bottom of the recaps. An accidental art criticism sprang up, practiced in a new place, in a new way, on a fairly high level. Together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine. The delivery mechanism of art criticism seemed to turn itself inside out; instead of one voice speaking to many, there were many voices speaking to one another. Coherently. All these voices became ghosts in criticism’s machine. It was a criticism of unfolding process, not dictums and law – a criticism of intimacy that pulsed with a kind of phosphorescent grandeur.”

Mr. Saltz has my utmost respect for recognizing the potential of this new kind of viewing process, and honoring the reactions it can elicit. He and his fellow judges, all of whom blog regularly on the show, have called this an experiment, and rightly so. It was an experiment in diffusing artistic knowledge and authority through an atypical medium, and for that it was immensely satisfying to witness. I will be curious to see how an institution like the Brooklyn Museum further engages with this, when Farah’s show goes up.