All that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous and critical

“The task of articulating cultural value is now urgent in both the museum and the academy, where a tsunami of fiscal imperatives threatens to deluge all that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous, and critical in the public sphere. Significantly, it is a question of temporality around which this struggle now takes place: authentic culture operates within a slower time frame than the accelerated abstractions of finance capital and the annual cycles of accounting (based on positivist data and requiring demonstrable impact). But it is precisely this lack of synchronicity that points to an alternative world of values in which museums – but also culture, education, and democracy – are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet or the statistical mystifications of an opinion poll, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present, and to realize a different future. This future does not yet have a name, but we are standing on its brink. If the last forty years have been marked by ‘posts’ (post-war, post-colonialism, postmodernism, post-communism), then today, at last, we seem to be in a period of anticipation – an era that museums of contemporary art can help us collectively to sense and understand.”

(pages 62)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

A space to reflect and debate our values

“Others will say that the museum itself is a conservative institution and that it is more urgent to focus efforts on social change. But it is not a choice of either/or. Museums are a collective expression of what we consider important in culture, and offer a space to reflect and debate our values; without reflection, there can be no considered movement forwards.

[…]

“Two systems of value hereby come into conflict: the museum as a space of cultural and historical reflection, and the museum as a repository of philanthropic narcissism. In the face of this impasse, the ability of the public museum to adequately represent the interests of the ninety-nine percent might seem ever bleaker. It is therefore crucial to consider the alternatives that do exist, working below the radar to devise energizing new missions for the museum of contemporary art.”

(pages 61)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The contemporary becomes a method or practice

“It is of course banal and predictable to invoke Benjamin at the end of an essay in 2013, but it is striking that his theories have been so influential on visual art yet have had so little impact upon the institutions in which it is shown and the histories they narrate. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin draws a distinction between a history spoken in the name of power, which records the triumphs of the victors, and a history that names and identifies the problems of the present day, by scouring the past for the origins of this present historical moment; this, in turn, is the determining motivation for our interest in the past. Can a museum be anti-hegemonic? The three museums discussed in this book seem to answer the question in the affirmative. They work to connect current artistic practice to a broader field of visual experience, much as Benjamin’s own Arcades Project sought to reflect on Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, by juxtaposing texts, cartoons, prints, photographs, works of art, artifacts, and architecture in poetic constellations. This present-minded approach to history produces an understanding of today which sightlines on the future, and reimagines the museum as an active, historical agent that speaks in the name not of national pride or hegemony but of creative questioning and dissent. It suggests a spectator no longer focused on the auratic contemplation of individual works, but one who is aware of being presented with arguments and positions to read or contest. Finally, it defetishizes objects by continually juxtaposing works of art with documentary materials, copies, and reconstructions. The contemporary becomes less a question of periodization or discourse than a method or practice, potentially applicable to all historical periods.”

(pages 56-57)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

Disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties

“These museums create multi-temporal remappings of history and artistic production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks, rather than opting for a global inclusivity that pulls everything into the same narrative. An apt term to describe the results of these activities is the constellation, a word used by Walter Benjamin to describe a Marxist project of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties. This approach is, I think, highly suggestive for museums, since the constellation as a politicized rewriting of history is fundamentally curatorial. For Benjamin, the collector is a scavenger or bricoleur, quoting out of context in order to break the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing it blazing into the present, and keeping history mobile in order to allow its objects to be historical agents once again. Replace ‘collector’ here with ‘curator’, and the task of the contemporary museum opens up to a dynamic rereading of history that pulls into the foreground that which has been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominant classes. Culture becomes a primary means for visualizing alternatives; rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons.”

(page 56)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The appropriateness of repetition

“The first point [of the Ljubljana Moderna Galerija’s manifesto] states the fiscal reality: due to budget cuts, no new display or catalog are possible, so recycling is necessary. Four further points argue for the appropriateness of repetition: rather than succumbing to the pressure to give consumers the new, the museum advocates the value of rereading; repetition is one of the fundamental features of contemporary art (video loops, re-enactment, etc.), so it is appropriate to repeat an entire collection display; repetition constructs history – through publications, research, the art market – so a repeated display retroactively helps to construct responses that produce history; finally, repetition is driven by trauma, and in Ljubljana this is twofold – the traumatic absence of a contemporary art system and the unrealized emancipatory ideals of communism.”

(pages 50-51)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The Time of the Absent Museum

“In Ljubljana, the first display encountered by the viewer is titled “War Time”: it includes a small anonymous documentary photograph of the occupation of Metelkova in 1993, alongside Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (1993-1994), a photo series of text on skin, alluding to the rape of Bosnian women. Thereafter, the museum’s entire display is organized around thematic categories relating to overlapping temporalities: “Ideological Time” (the socialist past), “Future Time” (unrealized modernist utopias), “The Time of the Absent Museum” (approximately the 1980s-1990s, when artists compensated for the absence of a developed art system by self-organizing and self-criticizing), “Retro Time” (the late 1990s, when artists began to self-historicize), “Lived Time” (body and performance art), “Time of Transition” (from socialism into capitalism) and “Dominant Time” (present-day global neoliberalism). Contemporary art is therefore staked as a question of timeliness, rather than as a stage on the conveyor belt of history; the necessary condition of relevance is the presentation of multiple, overlapping temporalities, geared towards the imagination of a future in which social equality prevails.”

(pages 48-49)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

Viewing the Viewers

“Finally, education brings these activities together. The museum believes that representation of the other is not enough (for example, by collecting works from far-flung cultures) and that it needs to find new forms of mediation and solidarity between the intellectual culture of the Reina Sofia and social movements. The museum’s education program, therefore, is not limited to the usual art-appreciation classes for children, young adults, and students – these all continue to exist, although their content has somewhat shifted (such as the workshop “Viewing the Viewers,” in which teenagers are made aware of the museum as a discursive apparatus). The museum’s education budget has been directed toward the maintenance of long-term programs, such as the “Programa de Prácticas Críticas” (Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices), a free six-month seminar for young artists, researchers and activists who, due to the recession and high unemployment, constitute one of the most disaffected groups in the city.”

(pages 44-45)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The line between work of art and documentation is negligible

“For example, the Chilean group CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte, 1979-1985) recently offered their achive to the Reina Sofia, lacking confidence that a Chilean institution could preserve it. The Reina Sofia paid two researchers to catalog the archive and worked to ensure that an institution in Chile would house it; in return, the museum received an exhibition copy of this archive. In the case of CADA, whose work consisted primarily of performances, actions, and interventions, the line between work of art and documentation is negligible. However, this documentary status increasingly defines the most politically engaged art of the late twentieth century. In order to redefine the Reina Sofia as an ‘archive of the commons’, the museum is therefore attempting to legally recategorize works or art as ‘documentation’. This recategorization increases accessibility to works of art – for example, the public can go to the library and handle them, alongside publications, ephemera, photographs of works of art, correspondence, prints, and other textual materials.”

(page 44)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

We identify emotionally, subjectively; we evaluate politically, objectively

“We identify emotionally, subjectively – and yet at one and the same time we evaluate politically, objectively in relation to society. Because the profound reaches past the everyday, a heightened language and a ritualistic use of rhythm brings us to those very aspects of life which the surface hides; and yet because the poet and the visionary do not seem like everyday people, because the epic state is not one on which we normally dwell, it is equally possible for Shakespeare, with a break in his rhythm, a twist into prose, a shift into slangy conversation or else a direct word from the audience to remind us – in plain common sense – of where we are, and to return us to the familiar rough world of spades as spades.”

(page 98)

Peter Brook, The Empty Space. London: Penguin, 1968.

From my own library, bought from the Emily Carr University Library booksale, used, for 50 cents.

Art as a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world, needing continually to be performed and tested in every specific context

“Rather than addressing this by collapsing art and ethics together, the task today is to produce a viable international alignment of leftist political movements and a reassertion of art’s inventive forms of negation as valuable in their own right. We need to recognise art as a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world, whose negativity may lend support towards a political project (without bearing the sole responsibility for devising and implementing it), and – more radically – we need to support the progressive transformation of existing institutions through the transversal encroachment of ideas whose boldness is related to (and at times greater than) that of artistic imagination.

In using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it. As such, it has the capacity to communicate on two levels – to participants and to spectators – the paradoxes that are repressed in everyday discourse, and to elicit perverse, disturbing and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew. But to reach the second level requires a mediating third term – an object, image, story, film, even a spectacle – that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imaginary. Participatory art is not a privileged political medium, nor a ready-made solution to a society of the spectacle, but is as uncertain and precarious as democracy itself; neither are legitimated in advance but need continually to be performed and tested in every specific context.”

(page 284)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.