I currently work at a historical library. It is frigid there year round because the collections, apparently, decompose slower in the cold. It is an environment dictated not by the needs of the people in it, but rather by the "preferences" of the precious objects we "value" enough to preserve. I am fond of exclaiming "I'd rather be dead than preserved.
To continue the thread of thinking about time and space and human efforts towards confusing them, linking them artificially or otherwise insisting on a linear relationship for the two, I offer these two bits of beautiful found writing, both of which crossed by desk today. The first offers a beautifully abstract definition of history, and knowing. It re-mixes temporality and memory into the fold...
The second also argues with its perceived imposed linearity in the act of preservation and history-making.
1.
In a recent review in Powells, Mark Gustafson tells us about a book called Nox, A Box of Greiving, by Ann Carson. The book is a
so-called "poem" (a Greek-derived word meaning "a thing made"). A unique assemblage of bits of conversation, letters, postmarked stamps, memories, cut-up photographs, drawings, paint, staples, etc., Nox is here replicated as one long accordion foldout in a clamshell box.”
Carson connects what she is doing to the Greek word historia, "asking about things," and to Herodotos, the first historian. She says: "Now by far the strangest things that humans do -- he is firm on this -- is history. This asking. For often it produces no clear or helpful account . . . Historian can be a storydog that roams around . . . collecting bits of muteness like burrs in its hide." She adds: "To put this another way, there is something that facts lack."
(more:) I came to think of translating as a room . . . where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. . . . Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
2. the art-agenda elist published my herforeto favorite press release ever, reprinted here:
Extempore Temporary Contemporary Art Museum Amsterdam opens
Since the Fall, October '08, an uncomfortable gap exists in Amsterdam, missing a, or actually, theContemporary Art Museum. In these one and a half years passed, nothing has been done in its absence. Nothing real has been made. Nothing to address this problem. What lies waiting is only an ever more critical responsibility. Until the Stedelijk returns.
We jump into the abyss between the now and future. Not no longer, not not yet—
now now now now you missed it
there's a new now now now now now.
If not us, who? With nobody left to make the selection, we've selected ourselves. We do it because we can—subjectivity as our only strategy.
You can disagree.
ETCAMA.
Problems for a problem.
Contemporary for the Contemporary.
Art for Art.
Museum for Museums.
History exists. The Contemporary exists. Museums are Contemporary Art history making machines.
Our Museum is a Contemporary Art making machine. The only history it writes is its own.
Museums collect linearity. Show linearly. Important artists, important movements, placed on a great timeline in the name of a complete, objective education. Our Museum does not confuse time and space.
Museums suffocate, cryogenically freeze works, techniques and ideologies, they preserve a type of value. They are non-profit, profit making, with democratic illusions of balance, of objectivity. The structure of Museums, the language they use, their goals and premise are not wrong. We do it different.
A Museum is a failed Art project because a Museum can't fail as an Art project.
We are essentially dealing with an economy of means. We have limits, they are subjective.
This is the only way.
We will not, can not operate, in a typically Museum-like manner. We are concerned with presenting Art, the Contemporary and to give Amsterdam a Contemporary Art Museum project when there is none.
Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst / space in collaboration with What Is Happening Here
I am compelled to collect things and moments. Lately I have taken to obsessing over 72 hour time lapse photo projects as a way of capturing a moment in time. It is a curious instinct some of us have. To archive, to map, to record and catalogue, to trap or still or freeze something or some moment in time. In the past I have attributed it to fear, to attachment, to desire, to control. I have thought of it as creative, as damning, as violent, and also as kind. I am interested in the various motives and outcomes of this sort of action on living beings, on moments in time, and on objects. How these actions can change the nature or essence of a being, relationship, moment or thing.
This whole post makes me want to re-read the author's note from My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig, and follow his bushwacked rainforest path to Walter Benjamin's writings on Collecting...
For stilling, de or re contextualizing, and framing is the problem of anthropologists, philosophers, curators, historians and artists alike. Those that try and make sense of things, order of things, meaning of things, must study and define the edges of that thing. They must seek it's isolation even when it is inherently connected. Is this true?
If motion, or change, is our only constant, what does it mean to freeze something? What does the action serve or accomplish? If the goal is to honor something, or to study it (I respect study most when honoring is the initial action of the inquiry. Understanding may be impossible without honor first) how can we accomplish that goal as we allow the subject in question to live, breathe and change? If sight were our only sensation, then video might be an answer... But we have bodies, we are, in fact, part object ourselves...
Related posts on this blog:
http://natashamaria.blogspot.
http://natashamaria.blogspot.
1 comment:
heh?
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