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Live Coverage: Avant Museology at the Brooklyn Museum, Day Two

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#21

Cooke discusses the landmark exhibition “Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980” at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1982. Organized by Jane Livingston, assistant director of the Corcoran, and her colleague John Beardsley.

It was a pivotal exhibition that showcased artists rarely seen outside of their close knit Southern and African-American communities, such as Sam Doyle, Steve Ashby, and James Thomas.

First Lady Nancy Reagan visits the groundbreaking 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Photographed with participating artist Mose Tolliver.

#22

In 2016, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980,” the Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art* updated the exhibition and staged “Post Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980-2016.”

*We are excited to learn that Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art has scored the choice domain name http://www.art.org/

#23

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Cooke discusses Judith Scott (1943- 2005), an internationally renowned American sculptor who was born with Down Syndrome and could not speak or read. Cooke asks what happens when Scott’s work is placed “in a wider frame positioned alongside other artists like Rosemarie Trockel?” This was the case when Trockel selected Scott’s work for inclusion in her New Museum retrospective “A Cosmos.”

Does this disavowal of existing power differentials transform typologies of craftwork into artwork? Cooke invokes the term “curatorial fabulation” when discussing other examples such as the exhibition “Deconstruction” at Gladstone Gallery curated by Matthew Higgs, which included Scott’s work.

The New York Times featured the Center for Creative Growth, where Scott created her work, in a feature article published last year: “A Training Ground for Untrained Artists.”

#24

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Kimberly Drew leads off her talk with a quote from Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month: “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

These are the words that direct Drew to “publish or perish.” And much of this publishing work has been aggregated on the Tumblr blog Black Contemporary Art (@blackcontempart) and on other social media @museummammy. More recently she was appointed Social Media Manager at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

#25

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Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980)

Drew introduces herself to the audience as a digital native, born in 1990, she received her first computer in 1996. Her professional narrative begins at the Studio Museum of Harlem where she was an intern for Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden. There she encountered the work of Basquiat and other significant black artists. To expand her knowledge base, Drew turned to Tumblr as the platform for producing a collaborative archive of recent art by people of African descent:

a place for art by and about people of african descent. this tumblelog
does not claim the rights to any of these images. this tumbelog was
initiated by museummammy in 2011 …

Drew acknowledges that Black Contemporary Art and subsequent projects furnished her with a degree of internet fame. Now Drew is the Social Media Manager at the Met, a position recently created at the venerable 19th-century institution. In fact, most appraisals of existing museological structures recognize social media and the internet as a primary driver for institutional restructuring. New audiences can now be reached through optimizing an encyclopedic collection as content. Through tagging and metadata, analytic tools allow the web to come alive as a semblance of populism and engagement.

These are not the rules that structured categories for traditional museum collections. Because of the internet, many hierarchies and identities are in the process of becoming less fixed – and it appears to be this disruptive power (to create change in the world) which motivates Drew in her work. "I think a lot about optimizing. How using the proper hashtag can really help someone else,” she says. Meanwhile this algocracy also impacts museums in ways that are yet unknown. To understand these transformations as a mere expansion of consumer marketing is reductive and outmoded at a time when being outmoded might be the biggest fear for museums.

#26

Irene V. Small takes the stage to talk about artist Hélio Oiticica’s “Inauguration of the Parangolés” outside of the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro in 1965. Denied entry into the museum, the Parangolés represent an opposition to what was considered to be the stagnant culture inside. Latin American artists tended to exit the museum altogether to wage their critiques.

#27

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Oiticica’s geometrical abstract sculptures are meant to be moved and touched and were influenced by the improvisation of Samba. For this reason, the Parangolés hang uneasily on the museum walls. Small says they are a material house that is waiting for the viewer’s participation – to display them deprives them of life.

After a fire at Oiticica’s estate in 2009, many of the original Parangolés were lost. The remaining objects were by-and-large replicas. “They are authentic copies that shore up the auratic quality of the original,” says Small. A replica was made for "Helio Oiticica: The Body of Colour" at Tate Museum in 2007, so the viewer could manipulate the copy and also see the real. The replica has an uncertain status, shifting the terms of work.

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/performance-parangoles
Hélio Oiticica: The Parangolés by Tate Museum

#28

At the current exhibition at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium” visitors are offered a rack of copies to try on in the exhibition space. Earlier in her talk Small noted that Parangolés "intervened in the epistemological framework of the body. The process of wearing is the process of being.”

And if we acknowledge that works of art have a life, must we acknowledge that they can die as well?

Small concluded her talk with objects from the collection of Duda Miranda in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which consists of replicas of artworks by major artists such as Oiticica, who made objects never meant to be fetishized. Since much of Oiticica’s best work has migrated from Brazil to Western museums hubs like the Tate and MoMA, Miranda’s local collection of reproductions serves to fill a gap by questioning “not what is art, but when is art, and what can it do?”

#29

For his talk “Objects of Prohibition,” Fionn Meade begins with a consideration of house museums, to frame what he calls “house museology,” an analysis of famous sites of “meaningful creative production.” These include The Nietzsche-Haus in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, the Leon Trotsky Museum, Coyoacan, D.F. Mexico, and The Avant Garde Institute in Warsaw, the studio of Edward Krasiński’s left unchanged since his death in 2014.

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Edward Krasiński’s Studio, Warsaw

With these examples and others Meade hopes to formulate an “avant-house museology” by disrupting the retrospective gaze of museum-based exhibitions with “the workspace experience of lived life,” he says.

#32

Meade is co-curator for “Question the Wall Itself” set to open November 20 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The second leg of this symposium will be held in conjunction with the exhibition.

The late work of poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers will be included in “Question the Wall Itself.” To advance his notion of “avant-house museology” Meade spends some time unpacking the period rooms in late Decors work of Broodthaers, where the Belgian artist’s “stagecraft becomes a critical tool.”

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Marcel Broodthaers, Décor: A Conquest XIXth and XXth Century (1975)

This work was originally installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London for the exhibition “Esprit Décor.” The installation is a set for a film the viewer never gets to see, The Battle of Waterloo (1975).

#33

Theaster Gates, A Maimed King, 2012

Meade’s thinking about “avant-house museology” culiminates with the recent work of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, and in particular his 2016 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, “How to Build a House Museum.”

In the galleries Gates built several structures and spaces that were museums in themselves, including a dedication to Chicago house music icon DJ Frankie Knuckles and brickmaker George Black. “It is an homage and speculative critique, a portable house museum, and a material transposition,” says Meade.

#34

Martin Luther King, Creative Maladjustment, 1963

Meade concludes by asking, “What are the institutes for creative maladjustment? What do these future institutes look like?”

#35

Bruce Altshuler, Director of the Program in Museum Studies at NYU, begins his talk with the image of a skiascope, a device used in determining whether a person has myopia.

#36

Altshuler sets out to map innovative exhibition strategies, beginning in 19th-century Berlin with the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and Altes Museum – institutional models for delivering a top-down indoctrination in good taste and refinement. By the time we get to the Progressive-era politics of Newark Museum director John Cotton Dana, the museum is seen as an instrument to stage displays that are useful to society. By the turn of millennium, Altshuler recognizes another shift in museological disposition. For this he quoted museum scholar Stephen Weil in 1999. This was around the time the term “experience economy” was gaining traction:

Weil wrote, “what is emerging instead is a more entrepreneurial institution… [that has] shifted from a “selling” mode to a “marketing” one. In the selling mode, museum efforts had been concentrated on convincing the public to “buy” their traditional offerings. In the marketing mode, their starting point instead is the public’s own needs and interests, and their efforts are concentrated on first trying to discover and then attempting to satisfy those public needs and interests.”

#37

Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (2002) at Documenta 11 curated by Okwui Enwezor

Altshuler: “It seems a long way from Moscow in 1932 to Kassel in 2002, but it might not be that far at all.”

#38

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Due to a scheduling conflict Juliana Huxtable is unable to present tonight.

This concludes Avant Museology at the Brooklyn Museum. The conference will continue next week at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with a different roster of speakers. We will be reporting from there. Until then, we will see you at the museum or in the streets.