venue
Halls of the 2nd floor of the building MMOMA (Gogolevsky, 10)
project description
“Moscow diaries” is the exhibition project, that arises from collaboration between Museum of American Art, Berlin (MoAA, Berlin) and Center for Experimental Museology (CEM). Each institution will present a quasi-museum installation, based on a critical approach to the main lines of “accepted” history of modern art. MoAA Berlin explores the context in which the inclusion of the historical avant-garde leader Kazimir Malevich in the canon of modernist art took place, and will reconstruct the part of the famous exhibition curated by Alfred Barr, “Cubism and Abstract Art” (MOMA, 1936). The narrative of development of artistic styles proposed by A.Barr to explain the origin of abstraction subsequently became widely accepted and was perceived retrospectively by European museums after the Second World War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union it formed the conceptual basis of institutions of contemporary art in post-Soviet Russia. That explains the reception Malevich primarily as a painter of western art history. CSE will recreate a situation in which there a Alfred Barr and Walter Benjamin faced the art of historical avant-garde, during their visit to the USSR. And will reconstruct an alternative view of the history of art, based on the example of experimental exhibitions by A. Fedorov-Davydov, head of the department of new Russian art of the Tretyakov Gallery.
The tenth episode of the second season of “The X-Files”, America’s iconic television series, is called “Red Museum.” Behind the intriguing title lies a story of mysterious occurrences in the state of Wisconsin, where several people were suddenly recovered drugged and unconscious in the nearby woods with either “He Is One” or “She Is One” scrawled on their bodies. The strange incidents were first blamed on the local cult-like organization, The Church of the Red Museum, although later on these suspicions were not confirmed. As part of their investigation the show’s protagonists, FBI special agents who work on cases linked to the paranormal, attend mass held by the Church and discover cult members wearing plain white robes and red turbans. The local sheriff explains to agent Mulder that The Church of the Red Museum is a response to the bloody butchering of animals by humans. This religious organization runs a farm where cattle are kept as pets, allowed to roam freely and to coexist peacefully with humans.
The color red in the name of the sect most likely evokes the blood of the slaughtered animals. The use of the word “Museum”, in the title of the episode and in the name of the Church, however, is utterly incomprehensible: there is not a single hint or reference to museums in either the structure of the organization, its ideology or modus operandi. It would appear that the word is meant to subconsciously suggest the cult’s solemn, ceremonial and sacrosanct nature as well as its universal mission.
We came across this story (which by and large had nothing to do with either museology or the main thrust of the plot of the abovementioned American series) quite by accident, while browsing the Internet in search of an inspiration for the name of our Center for Experimental Museology. The CEM is a self-organized initiative of ours designed to promote and support specific projects that involve experimentation with the very form of art institutions, and that engage museums and exhibitions as specific forms of media.
But how do randomness and hapchance relate to all of that? On the face of it, randomness seems out of place and incongruent with the museum context for museums are meant to separate the wheat from the chaff, the important and the valuable from the immaterial, to distinguish between what is true and what is false, etc. However, as any expert in the field knows all too well, the sacrosanctity of permanent exhibitions, the inaccessibility of museum holdings and other myths pertaining to this key art institution are, in fact, an illusion largely based on randomness and chance, an illusion that often works to justify social injustice. And if so, why not revisit our attitude to museums’ “grand mission”, while acknowledging their artistic license, their right for creative freedom unbound and unshackled by any restrictions from above?
Our starting point is an accident that has become a law, a church that has become a blog, a search engine that has grown to become the primary standard of truth.
Centre for Experimental Museology is an initiative of V–A–С Foundation and external collaborators aimed at developing and supporting projects that deal with experiments in art institutions’ form as well as with exhibition and museum as specific artistic media.
Centre for Experimental Museology is comprised of Arseny Zhilyaev (artist, editor of the Avant-Garde Museology), Alexey Kritsouk (designer, V-A-C Foundation), Maria Mkrtycheva (educational programme curator, V-A-C Foundation и CEM member from 2015 to 2018), Dmitry Potemkin (translator, editor, V-A-C Foundation), Katerina Chuchalina (curator, V-A-C Foundation), Olga Shpilko (art historian, editor, V-A-C Foundation).
