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objective spectacle’s clap: a sonic brainstorm and the atavism of “yes”

The performance by Objective Spectacle is a medley of eclectic parts, almost a sonic brainstorm. Boisterous, “sports crowd” cheering morphs into what sounds like the merciless pelting of a rainstorm, then incrementally decelerates, dilating into what could be the last few drops of the storm. The audience is drawn into a game of suspense, ambivalent expectations, collective dynamics, manipulation and suggestion in a constant loop of different clapping textures. Each clapper holds their body differently: some react spastically when they clap, others draw themselves tightly inwards. Some clap perfunctorily, out of duty; some seem to feel they have clapped enough and look like they are done clapping. The clappers become a micro-polity or temporary constituency, influencing each other’s reactions, from primordial, frenzied, cult-like clap to the reserved, obligatory clap; from the mindless “groupthink” of affirmation culture to the exhaustion of collective patterns of euphoria.

Objective Spectacle. CLAP. Ballhaust Ost, Berlin. 2016. Courtesy of the Artist

From the 1830s when professional clappers—“claqueurs”—were hired by Paris theatre and opera houses to encourage a positive reaction from the audience, applause has been the prima facie ritual of how a spectator receives a performance. What happens when audience reaction—how an audience receives a performance—is elevated to the rank of the performance itself?

Weaving Together a Patchwork Quilt of Different Clapping Textures

At the beginning of CLAP the 24 performers stroll in at the same time as the real audience are seating themselves. They take their places in four rows of bleacher seats with the same off-hand insouciance as the audience. The narrator stands off to the side and queries the audience in a preternaturally calm voice, “I want to ask you to remember the first time you clapped. It’s not easy. Or you could even think of the last time you clapped. That’s easier. We could even try to remind ourselves of the sensation of when you are about to clap. When you are just raising your hand. You are asking yourself if you are allowed to break the silence […] Maybe there is a tension in the air. You can try to remember the sensation of air on the skin, on the finger.”

Objective Spectacle. CLAP. Ballhaust Ost, Berlin. 2016. Courtesy of the Artist

The lights go out, the narration dissolves and is replaced by a single clap, reminiscent of the portentous tick-tock of a giant clock. The theatre is pitch black, and the performers soon erupt in a boisterous clapping spree, complete with occasional cries of “yahoo” and “bravo.” The clapping and cheering continue for another four minutes in pitch darkness, the volume gradually decreasing. Eventually, the clapping turns into a mélange of disparate sighs, whistles, murmurings, occasional whispers and what can only be described as a cross between what a human might sound like if they were imitating a frenetic puppy breathing heavily and what a human might sound like if they were trying to repress their laughter, but unable to prevent deformed, barely recognizable giggles from escaping in sporadic bursts.

After six minutes of darkness the lights return, and the 24 performers begin clapping again, several of them with their eyes closed. The clapping gradually slows down until the performers are completely silent and still, looking directly at the audience, with the faint sound of what seems to be a ticker-tape running in the background. After about a minute has passed in silence, one man starts to clap. Someone else joins him slowly, followed by two more, then three, five, and soon the whole group is clapping again robustly. This round of clapping dwindles over a few minutes, as the clappers drop out one after another, until we are back with absolute silence and stillness. At this point the performers appear to become intent on a comedy program or performance, as they stare straight ahead and burst out laughing. Some almost fall off their chairs from laughter, others slap the back of the person sitting next to them to share the hilarity of the moment, and one man has stand up as his laughter becomes uncontrollable.

In the next episode, as if in a déjà vu or a dream on an endless loop, a lone performer starts to clap slowly and warily. The clap accelerates, goes double-time, and a minute later all the performers erupt in clapping and cheering again. For the first time, all 24 performers have popped out of their chairs to clap and cheer. Different people hold themselves differently. One woman with a long dark braid is stiff and restrained, clapping in a reserved, almost begrudging way. Another woman in a crinoline mini-skirt is much more energetic, bobbing up and down and shifting from left to right foot as she claps, like a boxer getting ready for a fight. A man performs the heteronormative “dude” clap, holding his body straight upright. Another man bobs his head back and forth horizontally when he claps, as if listening to music on (imaginary) headphones. Two women jump up and down in mirthful unison as they clap, like human versions of popping popcorn. Of all the clapping sets thus far, this is the most unreserved, accompanied by the sound of feet stomping monstrously on the bleachers, creating a sense of pandemonium. Then the lights go out and the theatre is once again pitch dark (we are about halfway through the performance).

Objective Spectacle. CLAP. Ballhaust Ost, Berlin. 2016. Courtesy of the Artist

At this point, the narrator returns, spotlighted in the darkness, and says in his faux-soothing voice, “There are so many reasons to clap. Like the rising of the sun in the countryside. Birth, newborns. Important people, superstars like Michael Jackson /Jordan, Trump, Hillary, Barack. But normal people too.” Then he lists the first names of the 24 clappers, who clap each other as they step up one by one into the spotlight. The red hue of the light and a metallic industrial sound in the background lend an eerie feel to this part of the piece, almost like the midnight indoctrination ceremony of a cult. The clapping soon synchronizes into “clapping to a beat” as a pulsating disco beat emerges in the background.

Finally the narrator asks (with the exaggerated gusto of a game-show host), “Are you ready?” He counts down from 10 to zero. At zero the lights go out, and there are nine minutes of clapping in pitch darkness. About two minutes in, the clapping gradually morphs into what sounds like people playing patty cake or perhaps even horse’s hooves on the ground, mixed with what sounds like the light pitter-patter of falling rain.

Still in total darkness, we now hear the boom of fireworks. The clapping begins again, but it is more orchestrated than anything we have heard yet. It comes in triplets or 4/4 time, like morse code or sonic/rhythmic hieroglyphics trying to impart some esoteric message. As an audience member, I felt it was my duty to find a pattern in the clapping, as if it could not be random. The clapping gathered itself together: a few people clapped, then several others joined in and the clap accelerated, then it suddenly stopped and the sequence began again. The effect reminded me of several people sprinting very fast in spurts, then suddenly stopping for a few seconds, waiting for the others to catch up and then starting off again. This was accompanied by background sounds: the occasional stray note played on a cello and an inexplicable sound like the bellowing of a dying cow. After some minutes of fitful stops and starts, the clapping seemed to find itself and decide where it wanted to go, as if obeying some unspoken collective agreement. It consolidated resolutely into a single unison clap, which began slowly and then accelerated. The sound of fireworks grew louder and more intense at the same time. The theatre remained pitch black except for six small backlights, in which the faint outlines of people could be discerned. The 24 performers were now down off the bleacher seats, on the stage, clapping frenetically in the semi-dark, jumping in unison from right to left and left to right as if possessed by a force beyond their control. The scene was reminiscent of mystics or Sufi “twirlers” who spin for hours, oblivious to what is around them or how their movements might be interpreted by an observer.

Doppelgängers, Mirrors, and Empty Museums

For me the piece evoked comparisons with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The Empty Museum—a museum exhibition that consisted of an empty room, putting on display the container or bare physical structure that houses art. Similarly, instead of giving us the conventional content of a theatre performance—dialogue, narrative development, character development, actors, plot, set design—CLAP laid bare the structural convention that defines the performance itself: applause. The audience becomes a doppelgänger or mirror image of the clappers on stage, reminiscent of the double-presence in Foucault’s description of the mirror as a heterotopia in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias: “Between these two, I would then set that sort of mixed experience which partakes of the qualities of both types of location, the mirror. It is, after all, a utopia, in that it is a place without a place. In it, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up potentially beyond its surface; there I am down there where I am not, a sort of shadow that makes my appearance visible to myself, allowing me to look at myself where I do not exist: utopia of the mirror. At the same time, we are dealing with a heterotopia. The mirror really exists and has a kind of comeback effect on the place that I occupy: starting from it, in fact, I find myself absent from the place where I am, in that I see myself in there I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent.” [1]

CLAP (two audiences, live audience vs. performer audience, getting seated at beginning of performance). Ballhaus Ost. 2016. Courtesy of the Artist

This “comeback effect” Foucault refers to of seeing oneself in a place where one is absent, and which he ascribes to the heterotopia-as-mirror, materializes in CLAP. The real audience and the 24 performers arrive and sit down at the same time, followed by a moment of silence when the two audience bodies— “real” and performative—sit in silence staring at each other. This gave me a feeling of discomfort, which I could not explain at the time. As I realized afterwards, I felt uncomfortable because the performers on the stage were not looking at us in the blank way that stage performers are trained to look at the audience, looking “through” us. Instead, they were looking at us as actual people—as if they recognized us—and there was something vaguely or unexpectedly confrontational about this. It was as if we in the “real” audience unexpectedly lost our anonymity. I was not sure how I should feel: should I be pleased/displeased or relieved/annoyed/threatened, or simply neutral, about this loss of my anonymity as audience member?

A question that comes immediately to mind, given the tacit and oblique role of the audience in CLAP, is whether or not this performance was a form of “participatory art”? Participatory art forms require the participation of the audience in order to be “activated” as artwork. The rhetoric of active vs. passive spectator is crucial to the ideology of participatory art. Descended from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which excoriated our society’s subservience to the “spectacle” (“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”), the rhetoric of the “active viewer” is imbued with emancipatory aspirations that militate against an atomized society supposedly numbed by individual consumption. [2] Debord’s almost Manichean dichotomy between the “active” and “passive” spectator is marked by a tacit heroism on the part of the “active spectator” who is able to escape alienation and false consciousness, and to gain autonomy.

However, theories of interpassivity and the interpassive spectator (proposed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Zizek) have exploded Debord’s binarism of “active viewer=good,” “passive viewer=bad”. Interpassive spectatorship is neither passive nor active, but instead denotes situations in which we give away our passivity, in which our passive experience can be delegated, transferred or performed through another. Examples include the Greek chorus, which performs our innermost thoughts, professional mourners hired to do the weeping at a funeral, and the fetish, where we transfer power or agency to an object that serves as a proxy for our desires or wishes. Whereas Debord’s “passive-viewer subject” was mesmerized by spectacle while his “active-viewer subject” was able to launch interventions into the corrupted “society of the spectacle,” interpassivity is a critical negation of the project of subjectivization as such. Interpassivity is a form of spectatorship that creates a proxy or outside agent to experience something in your place—whether that proxy be an object, person, activity, etc. Transference, displacement, proxy, split subjectivities and fetish are central to the theory of interpassive spectatorship. Robert Pfaller’s theory of interpassivity complicates, negates, and renders obsolete the Debordian rhetoric of “active vs. passive” spectatorship that has dominated much participatory and socially engaged (visual) art since 1968.

Pfaller’s theory of interpassivity queers Debord’s over-simplistic rhetoric of the active vs. passive viewer. Debord’s active/passive viewer theory has the orthodoxy of “straightness” (heterosexuality), premised as it is on an over-determined, schematic “good cop/bad cop” binary division between active and passive viewer, analogous to heteronormativity as an epistemological regime predicated on a Manichean dichotomy (man vs. woman) with no subtlety, gradation or overlap between opposing polarities. Pfaller’s theory is queer in that it complicates, blurs or renders obsolete over-simplistic binary divisions and schematic categorizations. The Debordian rhetoric of active/passive viewer is also straight in another way, because it is what everybody takes for granted as the prevailing ideology; it is the entrenched regime currently in power. The notion that an “active viewer” is superior to a “passive viewer” (descended from Debord) is the taken-for-granted assumption embedded in (if not fueling) innumerable subsequent waves of art movements, from the Situationists to Fluxus to relational aesthetics to “social practice” (socially engaged art) to the whole basis of the Whitney ISP (a highly influential Marxist para-academic program in New York City for visual artists/ theorists that has churned out luminaries who comprise the canon of conceptual art and institutional critique of the last 50 years of (largely American) art history, including Jenny Holzer, Andrea Fraser, Mark Dion, Glenn Ligon, Grant Kester, Gregg Bordowitz, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Sharon Hayes, Emily Jacir, Miwon Kwon, Maria Lind, Helen Molesworth, and countless others). [3] This assumption that an “active viewer” is superior to a “passive viewer” is deeply entrenched in a particular corner of the art world. Meanwhile, interpassivity is the marginalized underdog (as a theory, its influence is not as widespread). Another way in which interpassivity is “queer’ is that a gay person understands split subjectivity in way a heterosexual person never can. A heterosexual person cannot imagine what it is like to have a conflict between one’s public image and one’s private persona in the way a gay person can. The entire notion of divided subjectivity—a subjectivity paradoxically split against itself–is something that resonates, represents even, a queer subjectivity in a way that it cannot do for a heterosexual.

I bring up the question of whether CLAP qualifies as participatory art because of the way the piece ended. The piece concluded with each of the 24 clappers taking a bow one-by-one, and then standing on stage clapping together with the real audience. I asked the creator of the piece if he considered the ending—when the real audience and the performers clap together—to be a part of the piece, and he replied in the affirmative. Once could say that the piece ends in an orgy of communal clapping and in this sense the piece verges on having a participatory element. Furthermore, in a subtle way the audience unwittingly participates in the piece simply by sitting where it is sitting: it provides a mirror image in which the 24 clappers on stage are reflected.

Insofar as CLAP had a participatory element, it was clearly not fueled by, nor informed by the prescriptive Debordian rhetoric of active vs. passive viewer. It was not governed by binary divisions or moralizing criteria for hierarchies where one type of viewer is superior to another (as the Debordian rhetoric presumes). The participatory element in CLAP can be better explained by the theory of interpassivity. The performers on stage seemingly usurp the role of the audience by taking on the audience’s task of clapping. By clapping for one hour, it as if the performers obviate the need for the real audience to clap, since that responsibility has been delegated to the clappers on stage. It is interesting to note that CLAP is reliant on the conventions of the stage in order to subvert these conventions. For example, if the exact same performance was put in a white cube gallery, it would lose its pungency. In a white cube gallery, viewers can come and go as they please, they do not have to stay from the beginning to the end of the performance and they can speak to each other during the performance. Also, in an art gallery, viewers are not seated in a pre-arranged format as they are in a theater. In CLAP the “real” audience is governed by the conventions of theater: they must sit in pre-arranged rows of seats, they must all sit facing the stage, they are generally expected to stay from the beginning until the end of the performance, they must be quiet. Without these conventions, CLAP would have nothing off of which to form a mirror image. It is because we in the audience are doing the exact same thing as the performers on stage—that is, sitting in rows of seats staring quietly straight ahead of us, and eventually clapping—that is where the piece gets its power. Without this, CLAP would not be able to create its uncanny mirroring effect, whereby the audience is confronted with the stark simplicity of looking at its exact double on stage. If we come to a performance with a certain mental architecture—we are prepared to sit in our chairs a certain way, to observe quietly what is happening on stage, to applaud as a response to the performance—to have this concatenation of unspoken rituals thrown back at us for us to simply observe on stage causes cognitive dissonance. If the people on stage are now doing what we as spectators usually do, what role is then left for us?

In his 1917 essay “Art as Device” the Russian and Soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky expounded the concept of ostraneniye or “defamiliarization” (literally “making strange”)—a literary device that aimed to slow down and problematize the reader’s perception. [4] By subjecting the reader’s mind to a state of radical un-preparedness, ostraneniye jolts him or her out of the well-trodden paths of habitual perception, rendering something commonplace and ordinary suddenly unfamiliar. Shklovsky begins by describing how, over time, perception devolves into a rote habit, devoid of vitality or verve: “Considering the laws of perception, we see that routine actions become automatic. All our skills retreat into the unconscious-automatic domain; you will agree with this if you remember the feeling you had when holding a quill in your hand for the first time or speaking a foreign language for the first time and compare it to the feeling you have when doing it for the ten thousandth time.” [5]

Shklovsky calls this phenomenon “automatization” and states that the objective of art is to make objects unfamiliar again by the device of ostraneniye (“making strange” or, in the English translation we use, “enstrangement”): “Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been.” And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the “enstrangement” of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art…” [6]

In this passage, Shklovsky bifurcates into a two-tiered epistemology: the realm of “seeing” vs. the realm of “recognizing.” For Shklovsky, these are mutually exclusive categories. We see Shklovsky refer to “recognizing” in terms that are almost pejorative, as a state of being so desensitized that one is “unconscious” to the point where it as if we had never even lived our own lives. One might deduce that Shklovsky sees the realm of “recognizing” as almost tantamount to a type of false consciousness that has to be punctured or woken up by “seeing.” Ostraneniye (“enstrangement”) is the name Shklovsky gives to a technique, by which we “make forms difficult” and “increase the difficulty and length of perception”: “And now, having elucidated the essence of this device, let us try to delineate the limits of its use. I personally believe that enstrangement is present almost wherever there is an image … The image is not a constant subject with changing predicates. The goal of an image is not to bring its meaning nearer to our understanding but to create a special way of experiencing an object, to make one not “recognize” but “see” it.” [7]

For Shklovsky, the purpose of enstrangement is to disrupt automatized perception: “When studying poetic language—be it phonetically or lexically, syntactically or semantically—we always encounter the same characteristic of art: it is created with the explicit purpose of deautomatizing perception. Vision is the artist’s goal; the artistic [object] is “artificially” created in such a way that perception lingers and reaches its greatest strength and length.” [8]

We can understand CLAP as a giant enstrangement (defamiliarization) project. By weaving us in and out and in and out of a giant patchwork-quilt tapestry of different sets and typologies of clapping, CLAP functions like a mental obstacle course we have to “get through”—something like a training. It is not an easy piece to get through, and at times elicited comparisons in my mind with John Cage’s famous “4’33” (1952) where Cage sat at his piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds in silence. Cage’s performance must have tested the audience’s patience and CLAP calls for a certain degree of forbearance from the audience. By repetitively subjecting us to this stark and simple act of people clapping on stage, it tries to jolt us out of automatic perception of something we have done so many times that we don’t perceive it anymore. Using Shklovsky’s terms: we “recognize” how to clap and when to clap, but we don’t “see” it. Following Shklovsky’s exhortation to render something commonplace and ordinary suddenly unfamiliar, the question is: did the performance CLAP make clapping suddenly unfamiliar? Here the answer is more subtle. While there is nothing unfamiliar about people sitting in rows and clapping, what is indeed unfamiliar is to make this the subject of a performance. So in an oblique way, the answer is yes.

I chose to write about CLAP because it transformed (i.e. subverted) my idea of what performance can be. Before seeing CLAP, if somebody had asked me, “Do you think it would be possible to make a compelling or captivating performance consisting of nothing more than people clapping on stage for an hour?” I would have said, “No, that sounds like a recipe for disaster! I cannot imagine that such a performance would be any good!” And yet, by ingeniously presenting the subtleties of different gradations and textures of clapping and bodily affects that go with clapping, a captivating performance was created that consisted of almost nothing but people clapping on stage for one hour. I was struck by the purity of the work: it brought in no extraneous elements, but stripped the performance down to the bare essentials of its concept.

In this sense, I found myself comparing CLAP with the renowned No Manifesto (1965) by Yvonne Rainer. A founding member of Judson Church (an avant-garde dance collective in Greenwich Village, New York City in the 60s), Rainer was a postmodern choreographer who rejected the overwrought angst and theatricality of the modern dance canon that directly preceded her (exemplified by Martha Graham), advocating instead that dance be stripped to its bare essentials and incorporate movements of the every day. She set out her credo in No Manifesto (1965):

“No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.” [9]

While CLAP is not a dance performance, it elicits comparisons with No Manifesto because it also says, ““No to spectacle,” “No to virtuosity,” “No to transformations and magic and make-believe,” “No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image,” “No to the heroic,” “No to the anti-heroic,” “No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.” In her Manifesto, Rainier rejects all the usual trappings or means by which a performance can “seduce” its audience. In similar vein, CLAP did not attempt to show “virtuoso” skill, it did not pound us with spectacle, it did not try to make its clappers into “stars,” it did not launch into make-believe. In fact, at the very beginning of the performance the narrator breaks down the “fourth wall” with his direct address to the audience asking us to remember the first time we clapped. His prologue sets us up to apprehend that the performance will not be premised upon illusion, mimicry, or dramatic verisimilitude, by which actors try to convince an audience that fictional events happening on stage are “real.” Instead, we are to take what is happening on stage for its literal actuality (a person on stage clapping is not “an actor clapping in a fictional story on stage in a fictional narrative,” but is nothing more and nothing less than a “real person clapping on stage”). In this sense, we might construe CLAP as a “performative readymade” (a term coined by Objective Spectacle) in that, just as Duchamp’s readymades were supposed to be indistinguishable from everyday objects, the clapping in CLAP was indistinguishable from everyday people clapping, unembellished by extraneous performative theatricality.

My only misgivings about the performance concern the role of the narrator. At times he felt extraneous, almost as if he was in the wrong piece, his faux-soothing voice reminiscent of a yoga instructor or the contrived earnestness of the “sensitive boyfriend.” He seemed to be “telling us what to think”, providing a road map for the world of clapping, but the road map was contrived and unnecessary. His delivery suggested ironic awareness that what he was saying was pointless, which made me wonder still more about his role. The clapping performance itself told us much more about clapping (without a single word being uttered) than the narrator who was explicitly “telling” us what to think about clapping. I might go so far as to say that the existence of the narrator seemed at times disrespectful to the integrity of the piece. Like a fly buzzing around you that you keeping swatting and you wish would go away, each time he intervened I thought to myself, “I hope he finishes quickly so we can get back to the clapping.” It became apparent to me that this was not a piece about language, as the parts that used language (the narrator’s interventions) were the only parts that were in any way contrived. This was a piece about SOUND and SPACE and BODIES IN SPACE MAKING (non-linguistic) SOUND.

However, when this same piece was presented in a white-cube gallery context and reformulated as a “durational clap” installation/performance, the use of language took on a completely different coloring. For the durational CLAP performance (taken out of the black-box theater and re-formulated for the white-cube gallery) a sole performer sat in a chair laid with his back to the floor and mimed a clapping movement (without his hands actually touching) while a black and white film was played of various people clapping. This performance was like a conceptual “pedestrian scramble” (a crossroads with several intersections) where we were confronted with several elements simultaneously: the black and white moving image of people clapping, a real live person clapping, a sound score of people clapping and a sound score of a god-like omniscient voice uttering fragments of words (usually related to the history of clapping). In this performance, rather than formulating complete sentences (as in the theater performance), language was cut up into short phrases (some of them non-sequiturs) and spliced into the performance. This use of language was highly effective. Whereas in the black-box theater version of the piece the use of language seemed to work against its general thrust or principles, in the white-cube/gallery version, the use of language worked in concert with and enhanced it. Unlike in the theater/black-box version of the piece, in the white-cube gallery version language was not utilized for its literal meaning, but was hurled at the viewer like sonic readymades, contributing to an almost mystical (or other-worldly), trance-like atmosphere around the durational clapping. The sole real clapper (Christoph Wirth) in the durational performance of CLAP had an intensity, drive, and singleness of purpose in his clapping that was almost intimidating, and quite different from the occasionally jocular or light-hearted tenor of the clapping in the theater performance.

Again, I was struck by the purity of the CLAP durational performance in the gallery. In this age of buzzing, whirring, obnoxiously over-produced “multi-channel sound and video installations,” “movement sensors,” fetishistic infatuation with gadgets and gratuitous-use-of-technology-with-no-idea-behind-the-art (a malady afflicting the U.S. far more than Europe), I felt sheer relief that someone had the audacity still to believe that something as simple and unadorned as a person sitting in a chair clapping was worthy of a performance. The gallery performance confronted us with the stark economy of a single act repeated over and over in a way we haven’t really seen (at least not in this style) since the golden age of durational performance/conceptual art in the 1970s (Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, etc.). (Furthermore, I would like to point out how delightfully unusual it is that a performance would have two separate versions—one version made for the black box theater and another version made for the white cube gallery space. To date, I can’t think of another piece or another artist who has done this).

A Clap in a Room. Walzwerk Null, Düsseldorf. 2016. Courtesy of the Artist

CLAP was performed by Objective Spectacle at Berliner Festspiele, Ballhaus Ost (Berlin), Les Urbaines Festival (Lausanne, Switzerland), Théâtre en Mai Festival (Dijon, France), Carreau du Temple (Paris), Treibstoff Basel Festival, Théâtre les Halles (Sierre, Switzerland), Ringlokschuppen (Ruhr, Germany), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Theater Wrede, Teater Nordkraft (Aalborg, Denmark), Festival New Communities – Nordic Performing Art Days (Aalborg, Denmark) and it won the Premio Award for Theater and Dance in Switzerland.

Objective Spectacle consists of Christoph Wirth, Clementine Pohl, Bryan Eubanks, and many others. Berlin-based German artist Christoph Wirth’s work with Objective Spectacle often lies at the intersection between happening, performance, installation art and sound art, examining dispositives of spectacular sensation in medial settings, political environments, and figurations of society. Christoph is artistic director of Objective Spectacle and currently a fellow at Akademie for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, Germany. He was kind enough to answer my questions about the piece:

Andrea Liu: You mentioned something intriguing in a past conversation—the notion of clapping as a form of archiving. Can you elaborate on that?

Christoph Wirth/Objective Spectacle: Clapping is a form of archiving in the sense that it is a gesture where you are continually rewriting over the same, over the same, over the same (action). But the gesture itself is a materialization of or a result of an immaterial process in the sense that, when you clap, you clap in relation to what you saw in a performance, and what you saw in the performance is related to what you projected in your mind onto the performance. Clapping is materialist in that it is acoustic, it involves skin, bodily movements; but it is immaterial in that clapping is an act of remembering the intensity of what you just experienced. So in a weird way clapping is a materialist form of remembering the performance, but the remembering is an immaterial process.

Andrea: Something else you mentioned in a past conversation is that clapping is monstrous. Can you elaborate on that?

Christoph: In this piece I was interested in clapping as some sort of noise. I notice with clapping that speech gets eradicated, and applause can become monstrous, it can become super-alienating, almost like drone music or trance. When you go through this duration of an action and through repeating it, it turns into a durational mode and it’s this gesture because it’s totally inscribed into a habit. At a certain point, the space of experience becomes liminal, then the gesture itself which is all too familiar suddenly gets strange and uncanny and acquires some sort of monstrousness. In Germany, Wagner forbade applause. He had quite a lot of issues with the fact that people were used to applauding during operas. He even intentionally composed solos or arias in a such a way that people couldn’t applaud afterwards.

A problematic I was also thinking about in CLAP was to make a gesture which is not purely critical but also not purely affirmative. I wanted to see if you could create the classical dramaturgy of a piece without any feeling of catharsis. Can we create a functioning performance without any content? There is something rhetorical about clapping.

Andrea: In this essay, I posed the question whether we should call this performance “participatory” and suggested that Guy’s Debord’s Manichean dichotomy of the “active vs. passive” viewer (from Society of the Spectacle), which governs participatory art discourse, is too schematic, over-determined, or binary. Did you have any thoughts on this?

Christoph: This type of classical Marxist theory (Debord) is very clear about what they consider “non-alienated” labor. However, there are situations where passiveness can be active, passiveness can be performative or, paradoxically, where activity can be passive. Take the case of camouflage. Camouflage is in a sense both active and passive. The experience of an audience is perhaps too ghost-like to be captured by “active vs. passive viewer” categories. This is Kate McIntosh’s idea, the notion of the audience as ghost.

Another concept I have been thinking about a lot lately (which is neither strictly passive or active) is Marcel Duchamp’s notion of inframince (translated as “ultra-thin”).

Andrea: By “inframince” I assume you are referring to ephemeral, indeterminate or ultra-thin phenomena, fleeting moments when different elements meet, merge, or change one another at the borderlines of the perceptible, creating a phenomenology of the imperceptible [10]. Paul Matisse called inframince the “very last lastness of things… [the] frail and final minimum before reality disappears.” [11]

Christoph: Yes, Duchamp gives examples of the heat of a chair when somebody just got up out of it, or the smell of smoke blown in the air. Let’s take remembering. What is remembering in terms of an action? Remembering is neither strictly passive nor strictly active. In the part of CLAP where the performers are closing their eyes, I asked them to remember in different time scales the last time they clapped. Remembering as a gesture is very present in clapping.

There is another way inframince (or a barely perceptible change in a system) is relevant to CLAP. For example, at the point in the performance where there is a long crescendo, you can’t really say when it is that you recognize it as clapping. Before you recognize it as clapping it is rain, it is water, it is people fucking. But it doesn’t jump into the regime of signification because it was something else suddenly becoming something else. It melts from one to the other. Clapping as a collective process is full of these nuances, which you know from all your clapping experience. Also at the end of this performance, where you decide or time at which moment you will start clapping, the scaling of the decision-making is on a micropolitical level; because what brings you to the fact that you clap at that moment is basically a re-shifting or remembering of pure collective engagement, but on an ultra-thin (inframince) level.

Andrea: I first came across CLAP (and your work) when you were one of 5 artists, out of 171 applicants, selected for the “Counterhegemony: Art in Social Context Fellowship” program I curated at Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius. (I was the sole person on the selection committee). Since then we were in dialogue off and on about the evolution of CLAP, and we gave a collaborative talk together about CLAP at Sorbonne Université VALE (Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique) in Paris. I recall when I conducted the one-hour interview with you for the fellowship program, you said something intriguing, which is that you don’t aspire to or seek “stability” within a system (I think you were talking about performance as a “system” and you were saying that you don’t aspire to create “stability” within that system). Can you elaborate on what you meant?

Christoph: What I am interested in as aesthetic research is basically to open up spaces where you can “perceive” perception or how your perception functions, and also maybe to shift the way you are used to experience or see or judge the way you read things. Liminal techniques of expanding perception are often discredited as “not functioning”. I like to throw into question when we judge something as “not functioning.”

I am interested in the processional. For example, within different temporalities of doing or of interaction or embodiment, there is always a past gesture/action which perhaps started as symbolic or “meaningful” but can fade into a meaningful meaninglessness, or something which is not so loaded with meaning, and I am more interested in these processes.

These processes are not in a strict, direct sense “readable” as some form of narration or as some form of aesthetics. But for me in a phenomenological sense they are much more about how our perception functions. Because it is constantly unstable, and it is constantly re-shifting itself. That is a process which, on a micro-level, is highly performative and which I am very interested in. I am not so much interested in signification in terms of specific actions, specific speech acts, specific staging of doings; but more in this way that you have to figure out what you see yourself and why, and how that is then related to what you perceive as “normal” to perceive.

I also find interesting the question “Was it wrongly directed?” (i.e. when you cannot tell if a performance was “wrongly directed” or not).

I was also much inspired by watching Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, where you just see the living temporality of people passing and all the things they do in-between when they seemingly forget they are being recorded, or then they realize they are being recorded so they re-adapt to the image of themselves, or the image they want to project of themselves.

Andrea: What you have just said about how there is an innate instability embedded in the processes of our perception which is highly performative, as well as your comment about how you are not interested in “specific actions, specific speech acts, specific stagings of doings”—I think both these points are quite crucial to your concept of the “performative readymade.” Your concept of the performative readymade is that you don’t need to “fabricate” a performance (with specific stagings, specific acts, etc.)—because there is already a performativity embedded in the instability of the processes of our perception. By far the most ingenious thing I have heard you say about CLAP is that because you view the clapping performers as the readymade, you view the live audience as an installation. I find intriguing that you see the people who have come to see your performance as a (temporary) installation in the theater.  (Of course, Duchamp had different categories for the readymade, including: semi-readymade, aided readymade, assisted readymade, provoked readymade, distanced readymade, reciprocal readymade, sad readymade, sick readymade. [12] But we can construe CLAP as a performative readymade in the sense that it was not about fabricating a performance, but making visible the “readymade” performativity already inherent in our shifting processes of perception.  It also relates to how you didn’t want to use professional actors for the piece, and that it was very important for you that you use non-professional non-actors as the clappers. Just as you said you are not interested in “specific speech acts, specific stagings of doings”—it seems for this piece you were also not interested in trained actors fabricating xyz; you wanted real people to do real clapping just as they would in real life.

Now I would like to address how you mentioned earlier the notion of the audience as a ghost. Can you elaborate on that?

Christoph: CLAP was an exercise to make the audience as a fading dispositif. One tends to become disembodied in the dispositif of the audience. The audience is present as a dead body—it’s a ghost. It’s not incorporated. What comes after the death of the audience is the audience. The notion of audience as a dead body brings us to the question of whether it was alive at any point in its own in history. There was always something about it that was chimeric, almost machinic, beyond-the-living—in some way the bourgeois audience was always a dead body.

Andrea: I also would like to ask you about something you said in a past conversation, which is that “perhaps the audience as a figure was a bad idea.” Can you elaborate on that?

Christoph: In antiquity, the choir is full of violence, it is a sphere of sacrifice, of harsh energy drives, of lethal stonings. Every choir or community has a dangerous tendency towards the excesses of a collective. This notion of a crowd, a choir or an audience as a synchronized mass (which is still the case for theater)—maybe it is a bad idea. Maybe it’s more interesting to think about choirs which are de-synced so that different temporalities can act together, but in a format that is not synchronized.

Andrea: In my essay, I used the phrase “heteronormative dude clap.” I would like to propose that a gay male aesthetic of clapping differs from straight male clapping. Of course this is a generalization and there are always exceptions, but at least in the U.S. there is a way a straight man sits in a chair, a way he holds himself in his body (one could call it “normative” or masculinist) and there is a way a gay man sits in a chair, holds himself in his body (and most importantly, the way he speaks) that is completely different and distinguishable from a straight man—but it is almost impossible to explain in words. One thing—there is perhaps a gruffness, a brusque utilitarian attitude towards one’s appearance amongst straight men; whereas with gay men, there is perhaps a levity, a stylized performativity. Perhaps one could compare it to Baudelaire’s “dandy” in 19th-century Paris, someone placing himself in a separate sphere of personalized aesthetics. The notion that gay men have a different subculture than heterosexuals and that you can tell whether a man is gay based on their bodily affect, their relationship to their appearance, how they carry themselves, etc., is also deeply ingrained in American popular culture. For example, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was a TV show where gay men give a “makeover” to a straight man’s way of dress or decoration of their apartment.

Another example, I was walking down a street in Manhattan once with a friend (my friend was straight, but he had been raised by two gay men married to each other and was attuned to gay male culture). We passed by the window of an athletic gear store which had two (male) plastic mannequins in the window dressed in very stylish athletic gear. My friend stopped me, told me to take a look at these two mannequins and asked me, “Do you notice anything in particular about these mannequins?” He said that the way the mannequins were standing and their posture told him that they were gay men. In San Francisco in the 1970s, in a neighborhood called “the Castro”, there was a “movement” or trend where gay men started to wear black leather and to take on the figure of the hyper-male “rough” man—a sort of camp version of a performative hypermasculinity—which became a gay aesthetic. My friend said that the way these plastic mannequins were standing told him that they were modeled on gay men of this period.

I bring this up because in the Ballhaust Ost version of the CLAP performance in Berlin, there were 2 men who clapped in a more traditionally masculine (macho) way, and one man who clapped in a way that could be construed as more “queer.” Do you think it is absurd to propose that there is a difference between how gay and straight men clap?

Christoph: I think it is a little too easy, since there is a whole cultural history and it is very diverse and there is re-appropriation of gay identity and culture. I don’t know too much about it, but I know it is complex. At the end of 1920s, specifically in the communist state, there was a whole culture of revisiting forms of manhood by non-heterosexuals from a communist perspective, it has a lot of history. What you are talking about is basically a re-appropriation of femininity from gay men—it is re-appropriation of culturally-coded femininity through a male body. And of course with this reappropriation there comes a bigger self-consciousness about your own image because that is traditionally the domain of the female. Even though it has shifted a lot, this was traditionally a blind spot of the heteronormative masculine—he was not thinking that he has to be conscious about his image in a specific sense.

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other viewer: discussion

Arseny Zhilyaev: There’s no point pretending that the topic of our discussion (“Zero Viewer” or “Other Viewer”) wasn’t inspired by Covid and quarantine. The idea of thinking about radically different approaches to exhibitions and art institutions came to me when I was reading news about the problems that London museums are experiencing during lockdown. Closed museums are actually a magnet for crowds, but for non-human crowds. As a British museum worker said: “We used to have to worry about objects being damaged by visitors, now we’re worried because they’re not here to ward off the pests.” Lockdown coupled with climate change is leaving museums unable to cope with insects, for which cultural consumption means actual consumption of exhibits for food. Webbing Clothes Moths and Carpet Beetles are usually the main danger to collections. But a relatively new species – Grey Silverfish – are now the main threat.

The lockdown situation makes us look differently at many seemingly familiar things, and human cultural heritage is no exception. You might even say that the virus has become a kind of avant-garde artist for us. Like the most successful avant-garde artists, the virus has estranged everyday life for millions and even billions of people. But it has also trespassed on cultural heritage by opening access to those who had previously been denied access. Direct parallels with events of the 20th century would probably be too provocative, but we can at least use the Covid situation to rethink the boundaries of the human, as well as the boundaries of what we consider to be part of the culture we cultivate.

I began to reflect with my colleague at CEM, Olga Shpilko, about how viewing of museum expositions has changed due to their forced closure and about the viewers who were often excluded from museums in past centuries. We realized that this problematic leads to the idea of some kind of zero, empty viewer – a spectator who exists when it seems to us that there are no spectators at all. And it turns out that there is almost always a viewer, at least since the appearance of proto-RNA, capable of distinguishing between the presence or absence of light, heat, etc., which the mysterious Belgrade researcher Gregor Moebius tells us about. At the same time, the zero viewer can be understood as a standard – as a certain ideal or most typical spectator. And this leads us to the problems of museums after social revolutions, in particular, to the avant-garde experiments with radical museum openness in Soviet Russia in the 1920s–30s. Or postcolonial problematics, which work directly with the concept of otherness and its direct embodiment in the logic of museum activities, from collecting to display, research, etc., etc.

One of the first things that came to my mind in this context was the story of American minimalists like Robert Riemann, who worked as a security guard at MoMA for 7 years, where he met other technical workers of the museum, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt. Under lockdown, the gaze of the security guard, the gaze of the technical worker, passed through the eyepiece of the security camera, has become the basis of optics in closed expositions. This thread leads to speculations about the museum trade union movement, about criticism of the museum as an enterprise. Critics, so to speak, are an engaged viewer, drawn into the exhibition by virtue of their everyday work, which is often not recognized as equal in value to the work of a professional from art – a curator or an artist. If we go towards the camera eyepiece and media mediation, we come to virtual museums, virtual museum tours, zoom conferences of museum workers, etc. But we also come to data archives and the Internet in general as a special zone of cultural accumulation and display. I know that the Moscow Garage Museum was the most active institution in Russia (and perhaps internationally) in this respect: Garage Digital was a major event in the first quarantine months. There is a trend worth mentioning here whereby curators use social networks to create virtual projects that would be impossible in the physical world.

Coming back to the virus and insects, I was reminded of Soviet museum projects in the permafrost and even the case of a virus museum – something, about which we have been trying to obtain materials for a very long time, but so far to no avail, and which shows how the “museification” of a virus can work differently from what is happening in London museums under lockdown. The human body is also a refuge where a virus can live, although, really, the virus exists between life and death. To paraphrase the British museum worker I began from, the human body (indeed, any body) could be a “museum” for other bodies, other forms of life. Think also of projects such as “new arks”, which aim to preserve biological diversity or, in general, life after a potential disaster – protected “bunkers” with specimens of fauna, etc. Or the diametric opposite: the entombment of nuclear waste that will take thousands and tens of thousands of years to decay and that calls for the creation of a label system, designed to inspire terror in anyone who has the idea of visiting such sites. A whole science of death signs – nuclear semiotics – has arisen out of this.

Obviously, these are only some possible developments of the theme. So we have invited our colleagues to offer their thoughts about zero viewers and other viewers in their practice. Let me introduce our interlocutors: Maria Lind, a curator whose name is associated, in particular, with many years of innovative work at Stockholm Tensta konsthall and currently counsellor for culture at the Swedish Embassy  in Moscow, where the issue of inclusiveness and radical openness is a central methodological tool; Valentin Dyakonov, curator at the Garage Museum, one of the curators of the 2nd Museum Triennial of Russian Art and one of the first people in Russia to start working consistently with postcolonial issues; Katerina Chuchalina, curator at VAC Foundation, co-founder of CEM and a member of the group now officially called “cultural mediators” of the Manifesta 13 Biennale, which opened at the end of summer 2020 despite Covid, raising questions of new forms of solidarity with almost no international or at least professional audience. Colleagues, who would like to be the first to share their thoughts on the topic?

Valentin Dyakonov: I got interested in postcolonial theory because it presented a dynamic that is quite different from the progressivist understanding of art, that was so much the mainstream when I started working as an art critic in the late-1990s in Moscow. The rhetoric of progress and the rhetoric of making something to fit squarely into European Western mainstream looked quite uncanny from the start, because the 1990s was not a great time to even dream of a white cube, let alone to construct it. But as money poured in and as white cubes started springing up it became even more uncanny than it was in the 1990s. And this uncanniness was absolutely inexplicable to me – I felt it but I never could understand why there is such a kind of horror in the striving for a well-worn, clean scenario. Postcolonial theory let me look at this striving for the white cube, striving for normalcy, and striving for cleanness in a new way…

AZ: Sorry, are you talking about the Russian context?

VD: Yes, and specifically the Russian art world. I’m not trying to speak on behalf of other communities and complex objects of the postcolonial inquiry. I’m using this only to understand the context of this misguided progressivism that felt so uncanny to me from the start in the 1990s and which I couldn’t understand. But from there it’s quite understandable that a lot of what’s going on in today’s museums, a lot of what’s going on in today’s art world, in Russia, is also part of the very interesting dynamic that was already underwritten by several generations of postcolonial thinkers from all over the world. Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a distinction in his “Museums in Late Democracies”, between pedagogical and performative forms of cultural knowledge. The idea is that there exists an inclusive pedagogy that is meant to help the viewer to discern between high culture and low culture. And there exists a performative democracy, something that he relates to postcolonial and decolonizing sentiment. Performative democracy means that no museum object – especially no museum object that is stored in a museum, that exists in a metropolitan context – no museum object that once belonged to a different culture can be hidden away from the representatives of this culture. So, for example, if you have the Ethnographic Museum in Belgium you should provide wide-open access to the representatives of the Congolese community, both living in Belgium and elsewhere. In the Russian context there is a very interesting development of this distinction. I once asked an artist, Mikhail Tolmachev, who was influenced by Clémentine Deliss whether the deaccessioning of the monasteries and churches in revolutionary Russia after 1917 constitutes a colonizing effort. Whether it could be described in the same terms as the destruction of certain communities by appropriating art from its original context into the context of the museum. And Mikhail posed quite an interesting setup: some museums that hold specific important collections of Russian icons have to deal with Orthodox believers who come and try to engage in religious ritual there in the museum. So the Tretyakov Gallery has a process whereby it loans very important icons by Andrei Rublev to a church for a certain day, a certain feast. The State Gallery in Perm, a big city in the Urals, also has a special section dedicated to icons where priests, clergy, and believers gather for certain Orthodox rituals. We, with our very modernist, positivist, progressivist backgrounds, fail to see these situations as examples of performative democracy. We see them in the context of a certain conservative state pressure. So what we have here is not a postcolonial situation, nor it is a decolonial situation. But we see that there are some very varied scenarios occurring in Russian museums, which are very close to what decolonial critical theory would like to see happening in museums in Europe – certain principles, performative principles that are sought after by the proponents of this decolonial discourse.

Maria Lind: This is extremely interesting. Can you just elaborate on the differences between your case study and other things that are going on? And also, what would you call what is going on in Russia?

VD: That is a question that I have no answer to as yet. And that is why it’s so interesting to see the level of protection of certain works of art – and protection, I think, will be a huge topic for us here today. Because, ultimately, all the other viewers that you, Arseny, so eloquently enumerated in your introduction (most of them, at least) are viewed as threats to the specific condition of the artwork’s existence. In our case we have the communities whose artefacts were museified during the modernist push of revolutionary Russia. And then, while staying museified, they are very antagonistically, very slowly given back to those communities. But these communities, in their turn, become an argument in a culture war of the state with the liberal left, roughly speaking. So I think the most interesting thing here is addressing the question of performativity in museums for the communities that had those objects – that they have the right to engage with these objects – and this enlightenment impulse that makes us think of religion (and especially a religion that was so married to the state as Orthodox Christianity) as an enemy of those models of democracy that we strive to implement. And this is, I think, a paradox that has to have an explanation, has to have a certain name. But it’s very much connected to all those interesting developments in museology that Arseny knows so well. And the class and social developments in museology during the 20th century in revolutionary and avant-garde Russia are also part and parcel of this problem that we face now. Because while we usually think of avant-garde museology as something that is in many ways didactic and pedagogical, it’s also pedagogical in terms of a certain standard of performativity, a certain standard of behaviour that the former “other” viewer is supposed to have in the space of the museum. There was a very thorough exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery on the Museum of Painting Culture, which was conceived as a kind of pedagogical museum for the new hegemon – the worker, – showing the development of European painting in all of its avant-gardes. But there was a beautiful document in this exhibition, a type-written document that laid out the rules of presence of your body, and first of all of your feet, because we have to remember that snow and dirt were the main features of a Soviet road in the 1920s. And so you had to watch your feet, you had to keep them clean in order to enter this pedagogical space. So this is, in a way, the invention of a new audience through transforming the level of threat which this audience posed to the integrity of the artwork and to the integrity of this enlightenment model of pedagogy.

ML: Which led to the use of tapochki in museums, which was a uniquely Soviet experience.

VD: It highlights something about the road that leads to the museum. It’s usually cleaner, it’s more…

Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism housed in Kazan Cathedral. 1932

ML: As well as noting that the behaviour of visitors unused to entering a palace-like setting to experience painting and sculpture is something that has concerned museum managers since the days of the first ever public museum, the Louvre, opened in 1792, I would like to ask something. According to your account, we must then be able then to imagine that a certain group is coming to some museums to venerate particular icons underpinned by a strong conservatism, which happens also to be supported here by the official powers. But we can also imagine groups from, let’s say, Congo or anywhere else in the world with objects in museums elsewhere also being reactionary, conservative, etc. It is not automatically linked to some kind of politically critical approach.

VD: Yes, of course, I’m not taking sides here. It just fascinates me, like a Mandelbrot fractal, the amount of different directions this notion of safety of an object could go in. So, we preserve something, and we preserve it, technically, better than the original location.

ML: You seem to underline that there is a difference between the Belgian Congolese example and the Russian Orthodox example in terms of political grounding and intention. That would be a major difference. You are right about some cases, but surely not for every case.

AZ: Could I add something here because I know some texts from the 1920s and 1930s related to this war against religion and the possible museification of religious objects. For instance, there was an important material by Pavel Florensky, who was a priest and a true believer, but who also worked at Vkhutemas. He was involved in the work of the Commission on Preservation of Art and History Monuments of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius (the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius – one of the most important monasteries of Russian Orthodoxy). Florensky wrote a strongly critical text against such museification. His main argument was that a church provides a very unique aesthetic experience based on a synthesis of the arts. It is kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Religious ritual is not only icons, but a performative action, choreography, it has particular smells (a very unusual medium for high art), it has a special system of ethical, mystical relations with believers, etc. (in contemporary terms we could use word “happening” to describe this aspect). This is a very complex phenomenon and it’s not possible to repeat such complicity in the same way in a white cube or in any secular space, even if we are talking only about artistic features.

But the museologists were ready for this argument. Their answer was to elaborate an even more artistically effective entity, let’s say to make a bigger, more total installation than the church itself. And, within this frame, to provide ground for unification of believers and people who do not believe, and at the same time to provide critical distance. Lenin was not against admitting people of religion into the Party. There was the relatively infamous case of the Godbuilders group, organized by Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky. They used religion as a metaphor for the real thing, where the proletariat became God, etc. There were a lot of problems after the revolution, and religion wasn’t the main one. However, at least in theory, the Bolsheviks wanted to preserve the cultural heritage of religion through critical museification. So, in a church-museum one might compare beautiful icons with the history of their production, sponsored by people involved in corruption or political crimes, or compare beautiful choreography with techniques of torture employed by Christians. It was a very aggressive approach to enlightenment, but very close to what we had in Lenin’s rhetoric and comparable with dada style or the ambitions of avant-garde artists.

And one more thing that I’d like to mention here, speaking about different communities in the 1920s; there was a community, called in Russian “Voinstvenniy bezbozhnik”, which means “the militant atheist” – a militant, anti-religious activist community that was very influential. It had several million members according to some sources. It was very big group of people and, on average, they were much more radical than museum workers. So by preserving icons within a museum museologists prevented their destruction, or their sale on the black market. However, they could also be sold by the state…

VD: Something I would add: this opens up two important questions about the history of veneration of objects. The first important question is a completely forgotten history of grassroots atheism that existed as a sect in the Russian Empire. It was regarded as a sect. There were sects that were militantly anti-God, anti-panpsychism, anti-everything. So there was this small group of people, maybe tens of thousands, who were practicing a sceptical atheism. And these weren’t professors of universities in Saint Petersburg – they were merchants, workers, and peasants, people who did not construct this worldview intellectually, through writing, but who adhered to it. This is one thing. And the second thing is, obviously, that this rescuing of religious objects in the 1920s and 1930s and display of religious objects later, in the 1950s and 1960s, was in many ways an act that was almost religious on the part of the museum worker, particularly for a type of slightly dissident museum worker in the Soviet Union. If you produced a display of icons, you most certainly tried to figure out how to talk about theology and belief systems. And the viewer was often, perhaps not Orthodox, for some political reason, not openly Orthodox at least, but was a pious person in many ways.

Katerina Chuchalina: Hi, I’m sorry, I’m late for this great gathering of people. I’m trying to imagine how you got to the point when I joined the conversation.

VD: Well, Maria asked me to start because I work in the only institution that is currently open. And I just went on a topic that might make our dialogue unpublishable in Russian, the topic of icons and the performative aspect of communities that are taking back religious displays in Russian museums.

KC: Okay. Makes sense.

AZ: So the other viewer as a true believer.

VD: Yes, the other viewer is not the disembodied eye of modernism, but a part of a community that venerates certain objects regardless of their level of safety or use.

ML: I’m thinking about the notion of the museum and the notion of the art institution, which we have already used several times. Let’s make an obvious distinction between museums with collections that display objects that are considered valuable in different ways, and non-collecting art institutions. It can also be useful to distinguish between public and private institutions, and between profit and non-profit. The conditions of each of those differ, sometimes radically, depending on the context and the economic, social and political conditions, and the borders between them are porous and fluctuating. This in turn affects how visitors behave in the space, both in terms of expectations and in terms of real, concrete behaviour.

The notion of the viewer is something I don’t use that often, but rather “visitor”, or “experiencer” to imply a broader experience than just vision. For example, at Tensta konsthall we would talk in terms of “visitors”, “partners” and “collaborators”, in the plural. Not rarely these are mixed. The idea of the disembodied viewer that relies so heavily on vision is quite limiting, similarly to what you described before about the comparison of the Gesamtkunstwerk/total installation/happening with the Orthodox church experience.

Many institutions had to close during the pandemic, both museums in the state-run sector and smaller, less formal ones, leading to a different kind of relationship with the objects and artworks in question. This different kind of relationship is potentially interesting, for example, in relation to the people working there. What does it mean to still be working and taking care of art in a museum that is closed for a longer period of time? What kind of relationship can you create, what kind of alliance can you forge, as an employee, to the art works? We have films like A Night at the Museum, which touch on this fantasy. I lived at the Kunstverein München for a couple of months at the end of my tenure there, when I had to give up my apartment. It was fantastic to be with the art works at off hours, barefoot and wearing pyjamas for example! And I once stayed overnight at Tensta konsthall with my son, which was exciting for both of us.

Maybe this is the beginning of a slightly different kind of relationship with art works. When institutions reopened, you had to book slots to visit an exhibition, making for a more solitary experience than usual, and attending openings with smaller groups – first come first serve – sometimes groups of six to ten people. I hear colleagues speak about a clearly different engagement between people and conversations arising from these smaller groups that they had not been experiencing for quite a while. This seems to be something to do with qualitative exchange that has come in the wake of the limits on access due to the pandemic. But then I was thinking about another thing, in relation to your text, Arseny, and what was said at the very beginning – what you mentioned, Valentin, about icons: that certain icons are lent out for a day, for a certain ritual or procession.

This ties up with cabinets of curiosities and other early examples of how paintings once went public. In Italy, for instance, during certain saints’ days particular paintings would be taken from churches and paraded through the city, and now we’re speaking of the 16th, 17th, and even the early 18th centuries. For me it is interesting to think how paintings get some fresh air by being part of a social context, making new and different acquaintances.

Something similar resonated with me when I saw documentation of Lina Bo Bardi’s presentation of the collection at the MASP museum in Sao Paolo for the first time – the absolutely incredible building that she designed. She was also responsible for how the collection was displayed – the famous concrete cubes, which act as feet in which a sheet of glass is placed, and then the paintings are placed on the glass. The scale of these screens is very human. This is reinforced by the fact that many of the paintings on the photographs I’ve seen are portraits. You have the head at about the height of the human head in that space, the paintings are like individuals spread out in the room. In this way, the artworks kind of “come alive”.

How art goes public is obviously at the core of this, which brings us back to the question of the white cube. But the white cube is only one way amongst so many. It is fascinating that the other ways have been so restrained for such a long time.

KC: Yeah, sure, the distinction between art institutions (which probably perceive their visitors more as collaborators and partners) and museums (which rely on the visibility of their objects) makes sense totally for me. Because I’ve also been thinking that what might happen is that they might swap these particular characteristics, which are part of their identity. Art institutions might swap this collaborative or inviting perception of their audience with museums, which in most cases lack it. And this is kind of the best scenario. But the most realistic scenario for me, at least what I’m seeing, is that the worst things in every institution are aggravated, it’s getting worse and more re-built. So it’s like, when you’re not prepared to look at your objects as part of a conversation, rather than an object in a storage, the pandemic will not make you more prepared to do it. It’s more likely that this characteristic will be even more apparent in what’s happening in your institution. But a distinction should be made. Definitely. It’s a core conversation for me, a kind of an illustration of today and today’s events. Because it’s literally three minutes till the moment when Manifesta is going to end and finish, because it was untimely, due to the second announcement of lockdown in France or Germany. And, I mean, we’ve been going through this period with the invisible, uncertain, very big figure of a viewer or visitor. And it’s also been said between us all the time that it’s going to be a ghost biennial. But a ghost biennial, a ghost phenomenon is something that lacks enough witnesses. Because a ghost is something that someone saw and someone not. And since Manifesta has been opening gradually, by slots, by different venues, one by one, some people saw part of it, some people liked it, some people didn’t see it. So there’s a lack of opinions, of the critical amount of opinion which is needed to prove that something exists. It lacks the figure of the witness, who verifies the existence of an art project and art institution (Manifesta is a project and an institution at the same time). And it’s interesting that this witnessing becomes a proof of the existence or non-existence of something. It’s happening all over the world. And it’s also happening with journalists: some people wrote to me from Oslo that a journalist there wrote a review of Manifesta and a colleague asked how it was possible, since he had never been to the venue. So there’s a kind of falsification. You rely on what you get indirectly. He didn’t mention that he hadn’t seen it, that he wrote the review using online information. He just writes as if has been there. And that’s also interesting. And, yes, a lot of things are ending immediately, because, of course, we saw this coming. I mean, everybody could see this coming, Emmanuel Macron was about to announce the second lockdown. And immediately the communication team approaches you with these 3D virtual tours mediated by the team of mediators. So I immediately jump from my physical experience to understanding what kind of virtuality can be produced at this point from what is still kind of alive. It’s not something which has been conceived initially as virtual, and the question is whether or not it can be transformed into virtual tours, into 3D tours. And apart from the fact that it looks kind of repulsive, I mean, as an instrument, it definitely changes the temporality, and your rhythm, and the perception, and everything. And it’s a question that is even more acute now, because Manifesta has only been open for three weeks instead of two months. So it’s a moment to face the question whether these 3D tours make sense. Or would it make any sense to suggest to people to enter the project, while the physical environment is closed. So, yes, apart from all the sentimental things here, these are things we practice now, I think. It’s not a theoretical conversation, not at all. What we are all exercising with is: what is a gaze now, where does it come from, how can it be transformed? That’s an interesting conversation, I think.

ML: More than anything we are familiar with the phenomenon of digital showrooms, exhibitions online, all of that, which is basically replicating something in physical space digitally. But I felt an urge, when the first wave came in the spring, to actually go out and look at art in the physical public sphere, from statues and monuments to art at the subway station and billboards by artists – whatever the city I happened to be in had on offer. Most cities in the Northern Hemisphere have something like this on offer. This is a good moment to look at these things anew. What does it mean to have access to art like this? Maybe we are spoilt, not caring too much about this, and certainly not all public art is great, but it’s an interesting category and there are definitely good examples to be found.

KC: Yes.

ML: We can think of it as “the witness game”. If one pushes that a little it’s the type of the tourist-visitor who goes to blockbuster shows. They went there to have witnessed the Picasso retrospective or Dali retrospective or whatever it is. Not to mention Mona Lisa. The question is, what kind of encounter is that if we are discussing the qualitative encounter with an artwork.

Francis Alÿs. The Nightwatch. London. 2004 © Francis Alÿs

KC: Yes, definitely. I mean, for a biennial like Manifesta, which positioned itself as very site-specific, city-specific, it was a challenge. Because they were always saying we are for both local and international audiences. But life proves otherwise – you have to learn how to really get engaged with a local audience without an international one. And that was like the change of the whole mechanism. What is also interesting is the representation of the figure of the viewer, because we all know that there is this documentation of the opening, and the vernissage, and everything. And the viewers are supposed to be there in these photographs – engaged, enthusiastic, belonging to this. And Manifesta or any institution is desperately looking for this. I wasn’t at the opening of the Moscow Triennial, I don’t know how it was in Moscow. But in Marseille there was an absence of these faces, by protocol – any protocol said that people should be in masks. And it’s interesting how you’re going to compose and basically make up these photographs of the audience being present and in the same way enthusiastic. Because there is this inertia of representing a visitor, a crowd as happy and enthusiastic, and it’s not the same, it’s different. It’s different, for one thing, because there isn’t the same crowd, the international crowd – the international opening of the Biennial. The second thing – there is social distancing, people are in masks, people are anxious about being in the public space, so the faces are different. They look differently, people position themselves or behave differently. I don’t know how it was in Moscow. Valya?

VD: I’ll return to your question about how it was posing with masks for the press wall. It was quite a fun experience. At last, everybody noticed gloves. Previously nobody noticed how the art world looked, nobody knew the brands – the extremely expensive jackets and pants. But now with facial expression firmly under the mask, the brands can start to speak more voluminously…  I’m joking, of course. But we have quite an experience in providing these 3D tours of our exhibitions. The first one was the 3D tour, this kind of 3D experience for the Atelier E.B: Passer-by show, which was closed during the pandemic because it was supposed to be up until June. We extended it to the end until August. In many ways, the scarcity of visitors makes the conversations in the exhibition space much louder, and probably more interesting. And at the same time, when you provide this super high-tech way of looking at an exhibition – as in the 3D presentation – you provide the existing audience of the show with a tool to make themselves acquainted with the content of the show. You draw a bit of a new audience too, because, if it’s done right, it’s a technical gimmick that shows off the effects of presence in this space. But once this new virtual visitor understands how it’s done – she or he – they just move on. And they’re not interested in the fact that it expands the audience. It’s something that informs the audience that the institution already had, the audience that already had the motivation to come.

ML: It is more about not losing the friends that you already have. You have to keep the plates spinning on top of the sticks, like at a fun fair. It can certainly be exhausting, even if it happens digitally.

VD: Absolutely.

ML: This is definitely fuelled by anxiety.

VD: Absolutely, absolutely. That was our motivation for all of the virtual endeavours we were pursuing in the spring of 2020. We didn’t want to lose the core audience. We didn’t want to lose the general audience, even. We wanted to keep it as it was before March 14, when we closed. And so we had to invent new ways of keeping in their feeds. The feed is what your cultural and even personal make-up looks like now. The feed is how it’s formalized. So we kind of doubled down on the Facebook feed, the Instagram feed. And that was – yeah, absolutely right – that was kind of a tool for preserving the existing audience.

But then again, there’s an interesting thing that I remember now. I’ve been to the museum when it was closed – we had meetings there, we had discussions there outside of the exhibition context – and I’ve noticed something that… I don’t know, maybe it will go, it is slowly going away now, but there was a very interesting development in relation to the migrant community here. And migrant labour in Moscow as a whole. I have a friend, Chinghiz Aidarov, who’s an artist from Kyrgyzstan. He works as a delivery man for a company that delivers food. And he told us that in the city that was empty, he became a romantic symbol of freedom for the passers-by. They were cheering him on, they were looking at him as a citizen of the city, not as a Gastarbeiter, so to speak. And I felt this effect in our staff too. We had the privilege of not laying off any essential workers during the quarantine. And I felt that they finally have this amazing privilege of, you know, having the museum to themselves. Mostly only curators have this privilege, because I can be in my exhibition or any exhibition in Garage at any time I like. I can take off after a round table and just, you know, wait for the night to fall and walk around the Triennial. And they had this feeling of owning the space for this period of time.

ML: It’s important to keep being reminded of the encounter with art and how that happens differently with different groups, and obviously the invigilators, the guards, the hostesses are the main people here. As so often, artists were there long before us! Think, for instance, of the work of Fred Wilson with African-American guards at the Whitney Museum, but also somebody like Mierle Laderman Ukeles who took on a job as cleaner, immediately entering a very different relationship to the institution. And, Arseny, I like how you bring up the virus, and the bugs, and the silverfish, etc. Again, think of artists who have done things like this. I am thinking of art works like Francis Alÿs’ surveillance video with a fox at a closed art museum, and Bojan Sarcevic’s video with dogs in a closed church.

AZ: I want to add something about this virtulality mode. In my opinion, forced virtualization of exhibitions today is mainly fuelled by huge commercial enterprises, like art fairs that organize viewing rooms, etc. Not all museums were prepared, not all museums had good, you know, virtual programs and money for organizing 3D scanning before Covid appeared, etc. But art fairs did have this. And when you talk about this new way of experiencing exhibitions under lockdown, we’re losing locality – along with materiality we’re losing locality. We have only… I wouldn’t say an international audience, but we have an audience without location. And this isn’t necessarily connected with the market-driven impulse. But it’s quite different for, as Valentina said, the core audience. So we are going to a kind of new universalization, which could possibly have good sides. But, on the other hand, this could exclude a lot of things.

KC: I’m more kind of interested in the figure of an angry viewer. Like a viewer in a rage. Also because I’ve seen a lot of different situations, not only physically in Marseille, but virtually heard about different situations which evolved from the pandemic, which were accelerated, were caused and accelerated through the pandemic. And there are the two instances which happened in Marseille. One is what happened with the part of Arseny’s work that was vandalized there due to islamophobia, basically. And it’s not the only work for Manifesta that was vandalized – the wires were cut in a sound installation in the museum, by a museum worker, by an invigilator. That was interesting too. And I also witnessed the acts of political disobedience by museum invigilators to the new Mayor of Marseille – they basically just closed the doors to her when she came to see Manifesta, just closed the doors because they didn’t vote for her and didn’t want her to come. And another thing is that there was one venue in Manifesta which was affected, because the artist who was supposed to take over the whole venue couldn’t travel. That was Marc Camille Chaimowicz. So the venue was almost abandoned, and we didn’t make extra efforts to replace or to fill these gaps and to pretend that everything was going all right. We didn’t make efforts to change that a lot. We’ve added some works, but it basically stayed very empty with the nails on the walls – sad, a bit lonely, unlocked. And we had a huge book of complaints from viewers in rage, saying that they can’t bear the emptiness and that they had been queuing to see emptiness (because people are queuing now because of the limitations and the protocol). They had been waiting, because there was a first lockdown and everything was closed, and they were anticipating coming there, and what they saw was emptiness. Or not complete emptiness – there were just voids and lacunas. And something like emptiness was present as much as the artworks were present. So we had the whole visitors’ book of viewers in rage. I mean, I do realize of course that people, who were not in rage, didn’t leave those remarks or commentaries in the book. Yes, but it’s a very interesting document. I mean, this is anxiety about the museum being full, being packed, being ready, ready for the visitor. This kind of fear interests me. And it’s interesting in a good way – the figure of the angry viewer and how you deal with this and how it has been changed by the pandemic.

ML: Are you interested in the angry viewer regardless of motivation?

KC: No, motivation is what is most interesting. I mean, there are different motivations, I don’t limit them to one or two, I mean, there might be different motivations and different ways of expressing them. How are you as a viewer allowed to express anger? What is this borderline between vandalism and expressing your attitude? How do you define this edge?

ML: Arseny, let me answer your question about Tensta konsthall. The most important thing was to have a sophisticated program of contemporary art. And then – adjacent to it, close to it, in close proximity to it – activities that most of the time grew out of art projects, in one way or another. This meant that art would sit next to language classes within the framework of Ahmet Ögut’s art project, The Silent University, but also meetings of the local city administration, the annual assembly of a local association, or an activist group protesting against a nearby highway, etc. There would always be space for smaller gatherings within the walls of the institution, and it would be free of charge. This was extremely rewarding.

Ahmet Ögut. The Silent University. Tensta konsthall © Ahmet Ögut

The core of what I do is dealing with “how art goes public” and how individuals and groups can have a qualitative encounter with art. This goes for professionals as well as for others. It’s not outreach in the sense that art is thrown in people’s faces. Art was on display and in other ways available to be experienced and brief introductions were available for those who were interested. But you could also just come to whatever you needed to do at the arts centre and not bother about the art. I find this proximity principle productive, to just get used to hanging around art, in a de-dramatized way, is often the first step towards what I called a qualitative encounter with art. Everything was apparently halted at Tensta konsthall during the pandemic, and then it was slowly picking up before it closed a second time. During the brief reopening the brilliant woman in charge of the language cafe which is part of The Silent University, Fahyma Alnablsi, who is also the receptionist at the konsthall, had initiated walks. Instead of meeting around a table indoors to have language classes, they actually go out and walk together. I’m sure they learned a bit of Swedish while doing that too, possibly even more.

The language café as part of The Silent University, an independent educational platform initiated by the artist Ahmet Ögut and led by Fahyma Alnablsi. In Dave Hullfish Bailey’s exhibition © Ahmet Ögut

VD: It’s interesting how the question of the angry viewer is connected to this zero viewer that Arseny introduced in his intro text. If you juxtapose the angry viewer with the zero viewer, you would almost see that the zero viewer is this cold blooded viewer, a viewer who is dispassionately going through the institution just because they have to be there – it’s a function of the institution, maybe something that we can all project our expectations onto. It’s very instructive to put all our projections into this disembodied figure. I don’t know the exact motivation of the people who vandalized Arseny’s artwork in Marseille. A similar scandal unfolded recently, thankfully without vandalization, in connection with the Tretyakov Gallery, where a label to a work by a Chechen artist Alexey Kallima was blown out of proportion by conservative websites and telegram channels. They said that the Tretyakov Gallery curators who wrote this label were basically Chechen apologists and were promoting terrorism – just by writing what they saw in the painting. The work is basically a variation of a European battle painting where the protagonists are Chechens. So they’re kind of this macho stereotype that he was playing with. These angry viewers were against what they deemed to be political betrayal by a national institution. I think that we either have to be ready for the angry viewer, for the viewer who feels betrayed by what is shown. And there is a plethora of motivations and worldviews to be betrayed in an exhibition space. Or we could just maybe try to kind of “zero” our displays, to achieve chilled-out displays, to get them closer to this zero visitor’s state. We could work around certain political topics or make them more inclusive.

ML: Would it be useful to distinguish among the angry viewers? The discussion around certain artworks in the US over the last couple of years, connected with the Black Lives Matter movement, also involves angry viewers. I was more of an annoyed viewer when I was a young critic, fed up with a certain kind of expressive modernism in various ways connected to masculinity that totally dominated the scene in Scandinavia. Today I am an annoyed viewer in relation to superficial, often commercially viable art, wherever it appears. So there are different motivations, and different expressions of this anger and annoyance. A significant aspect of what you are bringing up with the angry viewer is that we have somehow become accustomed to an affirmative paradigm in art. In general there is an agreement about what we’re showing – we might not love it or we have reservations, – but it’s an essential agreement that this is reasonable and relevant art. However, what we see more and more, also in the rest of society, is that that agreement is broken.

KC: Yes, but I do consider the anger to be an essential part of the visitor’s experience. What I’m saying is that it’s very important to see it as part of the rule. If you’re a visitor or on the curatorial team, you should consider that. I mean, this emotion is very palpable, it’s very physical, sometimes. That’s why I was also thinking a lot about virtual tours. Because if you go 3D, where is your angry viewer? Where is he? He just leaves. He does not exist. These emotions are cut out of the picture.

ML: What about chatrooms and comments? Female politicians and female public figures for instance often experience this in their feeds, directly and disgustingly.

KC: Yes.

VD: Yes, we have Facebook, which will alert us to any anger that is brewing in regards to the 3D display. But I don’t know if it’s really that widespread. Our strategy at the Garage Museum was always to have this safe strategy that sells a certain lifestyle, a certain fashionable presence above a substantial conversation about what the artwork could possibly dig up in the viewer. So that is the second consideration after the first consideration, which is to present it in ways that are not militant. It is something that relates more to the high-end experience of visiting a museum of contemporary art, where you’re supposed to be a little disoriented at times. Because that’s what the artworks are sold to you as being emotionally, that’s what their emotional effect should be. That’s kind of a safe thing to wrap any content in. And that usually works for Garage. But it doesn’t work in big projects and big site-specific projects like Manifesta. Manifesta is always surrounded by different types of angry viewer. And these types are also site-specific to the cities where Manifesta takes place. So you had one type of angry viewer in Saint Petersburg, you had a very different type of angry viewer in Zurich. You, Katya, have a new type of angry viewer who is culturally related to the situation in Marseille. Manifesta basically fishes for angry audience. And it’s like a film, a film that you put in a chemical compound. You see the portrait of a certain angry viewer in a certain European city slowly emerging. And it’s a very interesting work in progress. I don’t know about all Manifestas of the past, but in my experience they all had those political tensions. Saint Petersburg is a great example. It’s obviously a great example because it was an amalgam of angry viewers who were betrayed by the Hermitage showing contemporary art. It was also the angry viewer who was betrayed by Manifesta for showing contemporary art in a country that prohibits LGBTQ propaganda. The list goes on, and on, and on. But in Zurich there were also sections of the population that were betrayed by Manifesta. And so, obviously, when you take on the job of curating Manifesta you have to expect the angry viewer to show up at some point. And as Manifesta is so connected to questions of urbanism, questions of gentrification, questions of the positioning of certain cities – that creates a whole new class of angry viewers who might not even go to the exhibition, who might not be physically there, but who will be angered by Manifesta taking place. This is an interesting project in and of itself, which makes the angry viewer visible.

Arseny Zhilyaev. The Keepers. One-dimensional Sphere Game. Marseille, Manifesta 13. 2020. Photo: Jeanchristophe Lette / Manifesta 13 Marseille © Arseny Zhilyaev

AZ: What is new today is that we have other types of otherness, different from what we usually consider as other. And this new otherness is questioning contemporary art in general. I listened recently an interesting presentation about Oscar Hansen’s heritage, made by Sebastian Cichocki, Tomek Fudala and Łukasz Ronduda from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Oscar Hansen was a quite well-known architect and theoretician from Poland who worked in the 1960s. He elaborated the idea of open form applicable not only to architectural work, but also to museum activity as a public institution. He also proposed a special version of happening or literary public games based on the principles of this openness. For instance, we have two teams with opposite views, they go to a forest (visually, the practising of this game reminds me of performances by Russia’s Collective Actions) and there they represent “steps” towards resolving their antagonism. Each “step” should make their position more and more open. I am sorry for any possible misunderstanding in my retelling of Hanson’s approach. I hope my reconstruction is more or less right in general. The idea of open form influenced Grzegorz Kowalski who was Hanson’s student and an assistant in his studio. As we know, Kowalski later used open-form ideas for creating his didactic methods of common and individual space and “education in partnership”. He created an informal artistic group known as “Kowalski’s Workshop” (or “Kowalnia” / ”The Smithy”), which included many important Polish artists, like Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna, Katarzyna Kozyra, Mariusz Maciejewski, Jacek Markiewicz, Monika Zielińska, and Artur Żmijewski.

We can trace Hanson’s influence among these artists and the ideas of games and work with antagonisms, particularly in Żmijewski’s practices. Although for Żmijewski this work becomes a head-on collision and loses its original nuances. In my opinion already in his works we see the emergence of these “new others” or “angry spectators / participants” of the artistic process, for example, when he confronts supporters of ultra-right political views and left-wing activists, offering to resolve their differences through art. No real resolution happens. But there is a birth of art about this impossibility.

So Polish curators decided to take this approach to the institutional level. In particular, they included works representing nationalist ideology in their exhibition halls by way of an experiment for the purpose of critical discussion. The irony of the situation, which returns us to the topic of this conversation, is that under current political circumstances a thing that started as a radical curatorial experiment tends to become a new norm. At least, the conservatism of cultural policy in Poland pushes art museums in this direction.

VD: Yes, basically, if we agree that the internationalist globalist project of contemporary art is over because it is no longer supported by us – even we, professionals, cannot support this globalism. Or we can say that this project fell victim to different nationalist agendas or separatist agendas, be they islamophobic (in the case of Marseille) or coming from other communities. Then we have to agree that there is no possible artwork to be made that could override this sectarianism. But I think there are artworks that could possibly go beyond that.

ML: Internationalism, collectivity, experiencing art, or having an encounter with art, is all morphing, just as it was always morphing: whether for some time there was a blossoming of apartment exhibitions in a particular context that you are very familiar with, or in other situations art moved outdoors, into forests, for example. The angry viewer is also the official whose job it is to limit you as an artist or curator, or to prevent your activities. But most importantly, things have changed continuously. This is really interesting, in and of itself. Coincidentally, on 1 January 2020, I started a project on Instagram called @52proposalsforthe20s, with fifty-two artists making weekly proposals for the new decade. It is now in its second year. Obviously, I did it not know what was going to happen with the corona virus, but the project turned out to be super timely. As someone who has travelled the world extensively as part of my work, I have rarely felt so intensively connected internationally as when I am working on this project. The artists come from many corners of the world, and people who are experiencing their work on Instagram are also dispersed on the planet. On the screen, on the device, in your pocket. All proposals and all viewers – here the term feels right (!) – are simultaneously particular and general, zero viewers and angry viewers.

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museum perspectives

The reconstruction of museums has long been equated with their expansion. This is partly necessitated by growth in the size of exhibits, as the spatial aspect has been essential to many post-war art forms, such as installation and land art. The dematerialization of art has not been able to stem the tide of demand for physical exhibition space. On the contrary, digital technologies have made it possible to document performances and reproduce ephemeral events in the form of numerous square feet of photographic print and thousands of characters of accompanying text, and to do so easily and almost uncontrollably.

So the drive to expand seems to derive from a transformation in the nature of art and to be inevitable. The trend is not specific to a particular geographic region or phase of development of the culture industry. It is happening in the United States (where a new Whitney Museum building by architect Renzo Piano was opened in 2015, and the renovated and enlarged San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened to visitors in 2016), in Europe (where the long-awaited new wing of Tate Modern opened in 2016) and in Russia (where a new building is being designed for the National Center of Contemporary Art, as well as a whole museum quarter for the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). These are just a few, high-profile examples of a much broader trend: new museums opening today aim to achieve unprecedented capacity from the outset.

But capacity for what? If we are talking about works of art, then, as Hal Foster noted, Richard Serra, for example, undoubtedly produces great work, ‘but that doesn’t mean that its size should be the standard measure of exhibition space’. [1] Moreover, a significant part of the space in museums today is taken up by rest zones, food courts, and retail areas.

Limiting ourselves to museums of modern art, we notice that, despite offering new exhibition strategies and pondering the very phenomenon of museumification, they tend inexorably to expand their floor area. Take the flagship Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums of its kind and the most famous of them all. First opened in 1929 it has moved several times from a smaller to a larger building and is now preparing to expand once again.

But there comes a limit to any expansion. And here we might recall the museum that lent MoMA its name (though Anson Conger Goodyear insisted that the borrowing was inadvertent) [2] and part of its collection, but which—most importantly for our purposes—was based on a model that was diametrically opposed to that of MoMA.

A museum of modern art vs The Museum of Modern Art

In 1920, artist and collector Katherine Sophie Dreier, together with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, founded Société Anonyme, Inc: The Museum of Modern Art: 1920. The first exhibition of this ‘experimental’ museum took place in May 1920 at 19 East 47th Street in New York City, where the heterodoxy of the idea was immediately apparent. The organizers sought to make a space akin to a dwelling, where intimacy and human scale contrasted with the grandeur of national museums. Katherine Dreier was dissatisfied with vast unitary spaces, such as that which hosted the Armory Show. She believed they left the visitor with no emotion except that of being lost and isolated from the artworks. The Société Anonyme wanted to exhibit art in less spacious premises that ‘articulated like small rooms’, [3] but not because it intended to exhibit art to potential buyers as they would see it when they had taken it home. The museum, despite its misleading name (‘société anonyme’ in French means ‘limited company’, suggesting Dadaist wordplay on the part of the founders) [4] emphasized the non-profit nature of its activities. ‘The Museum does not sell any works exhibited under its direction but gladly brings any prospective buyer directly in touch with the artist,’ stated the flyer to the exhibition of 1921. [5]

Dreier’s idea was that people should not come to art in order to worship it. To achieve a full understanding of art, one has to live with it, neither considering it as decoration nor evaluating the interior that results from its presence in terms of good or bad taste. ‘Today our greatest danger is our good taste,’ she stated, worried by how fashionable concerns were displacing the challenges and transformative potential of modern art. [6] So, for the Société Anonyme, the museum should evoke a home rather than a temple. [7]

International Exhibition of Modern Art by the Société Anonyme. 1926–1927, Brooklyn Museum © Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Denying hierarchies was a fundamental principle of the Société Anonyme. The Société collected and exhibited not only the most challenging art of the time (abstract art not yet known to a wider audience), but also artists who would need years of struggle to arrive at the Olympian heights of other museums. The Soviet avant-garde was out of sight for Americans in the 1920s, for political reasons, but there was other art which, for a long period of time, was valued only for its exotic nature, such as the art of Latin America. ‘We have to change our attitude towards Latin races and recognise the great contribution which they have made and continue to make to civilisation,’ Dreier insisted. [8] Finally, thanks to Dreier, who was a suffragette, the Société Anonyme brought to the pubic gaze an unprecedented quantity of works by female artists: Marthe Donas, Suzanne Duchamp, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Lyubov Popova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Milly Steger, and others.

The Museum of Modern Art, with Alfred H. Barr as its director, also began by exploring new and unknown art, addressing itself to the not-yet-established living artists of the current time. But it quickly shook off any reputation for being an innovative and experimental institution, and returned to the stereotype of the temple-like museum. The radical difference between the identity of MoMA compared with the Société Anonyme is apparent from a MoMA eulogy that appeared in the The New York Times of 1932: ‘Novitiate has passed. Still young in years but rich in experience and accomplishment, it [the Museum of Modern Art] has demonstrated ability to play the role of modern chronicler and prophet in New York.’ [9]

The deliberately anti-hierarchical stance behind the Société Anonyme collection came largely from Katherine Dreier’s reflections on the relationship between idea and patent. Dreier articulated the problem of authorship in a new way. A museum had to contain ‘art, not personalities’. ‘The person who gets the recognition isn’t necessarily the only person who conceived the idea,’ Dreier stated. ‘There are all these other people who reinforce the idea and contribute to it who are unknown.’ [10]

Although rejecting hierarchies, the Société Anonyme could not forego making judgments, but it did not assume that any judgment was more correct than any other. Marcel Duchamp, talking to Pierre Cabanne about the Société Anonyme, confessed that he almost never went to museums, including the Louvre: ‘I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there.’ [11] So the anti-hierarchical stance of the Société is essentially a noteworthy extension of Duchamp’s famous question: what makes an object a work of art? ‘Is the museum the final form of comprehension, of judgment?’ he asked Cabanne. A work of art becomes such in the eyes of a spectator: ‘It is the onlooker who makes the museum, who provides the elements of the museum.’ [12]

We can see, in this context, why the Société Anonyme could so nonchalantly relinquish its own exhibition space: the museum only kept its original premises until 1923, after which the collection was kept at Katherine Dreier’s home. [13] Although this deterritorialization was forced, it was in perfect harmony with the museum’s ‘horizontal’ program. Instead of establishing itself on a particular plot of earth, the Société used other institutional venues to acquaint the maximum number of people with the art that it promoted and, thereby, to perform one of its main stated missions, that of education. Indeed, the museum was committed to such a nomadic style of life even when it still had a permanent location. As reported in American Art News on May 21, 1921, the Société’s exhibition of ‘extremist’ art, held in the summer of 1921, was scheduled to arrive in Massachusetts in the autumn, and afterwards to make a tour of other American cities. [14] Subsequent projects, which sometimes included lectures, discussions, and conferences, were held in venues from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Museum, where a significant exhibition opened in 1926, to art galleries in Buffalo and Toronto and in schools and universities. To some of these places the Société Anonyme returned more than once.

Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp in the library at The Haven, her estate in West Redding, CT. Late summer 1936, shortly after Duchamp had repaired his Large Glass © Yale University Art Gallery

The Société Anonyme, in Duchamp’s words ‘contrasting sharply with the commercial trend of our times,’ [15] was finally sunk by the financial crisis of the 1930s. In 1941 it handed over its collection to Yale University Art Gallery and in 1950 the collection was dissolved.

The New York Museum of Modern Art thus obtained a monopoly on contemporary art. Funded by the Rockefeller fortune and moving to larger premises three times in the first 10 years of its existence, its ethos as a museum was the antithesis of the Société Anonyme. MoMA’s aim was to become the only museum of contemporary art, absorbing weaker structures. In an extensive memorandum entitled ‘Theory and Content of an Ideal Permanent Collection,’ which Alfred Barr sent to the Board of Trustees in 1933, he noted the existence of other collections of modern art, including the Société Anonyme, and recommended keeping in touch with their owners in case they could be persuaded to transfer their works to the Museum of Modern Art. [16] The MoMA ethos, rather than that of the Société Anonyme, would be the prime model for other cultural institutions exhibiting modern art, first in the United States and then in Europe.

Refinding the path: The Stedelijk Museum

Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray did not blaze a trail, but they marked a path. In America the path quickly grew over, but not in Europe, where it was kept open after World War II thanks to the directors of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I will discuss the immediate post-war period of the Museum’s
existence under the directorship of Willem Sandberg (1945–1963). Sandberg was an admirer of Alfred Barr, [17] but he was also the person who kept the vision of Dreier’s Société alive and at the forefront of international museum life.

Sandberg began work to reconstruct the Stedelijk immediately after World War II. However the only increase in the museum’s exhibition space between then and 2004 was the addition of a small wing in 1954. [18]

The reason why spatial enlargement was not significant (and even not desirable) for a museum with a collection among the best in the world is clear from something Sandberg said in a lecture at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1973. ‘Today we don’t want to live with what we are expected to venerate. We really don’t know if museums, and specially museums of contemporary art, should exist in eternity. <...> Ideally, art should once again be integrated in daily life, should go out on the streets, enter the buildings, become a necessity.’ [19]

Sandberg put forward the same propositions as Katherine Dreier. Firstly, museums should not be perceived as temples and the hierarchical thinking that goes with such a view is to be rejected. Secondly, and relatedly, art is to be lived with rather than worshipped. And if the Société Anonyme made its exhibition spaces akin to rooms in a home, Sandberg suggested an even more radical path away from aggrandizement of the museum building. He said, bluntly: ‘This should be the major aim of the museum: to make itself redundant.’ [20]

Seen in this light, the strategy shared by the Société Anonyme and the Stedelijk is perfectly consistent: it played down the role of buildings and fostered cooperation with other institutions in order to display exhibits outside the limits of the museum’s own architecture. [21] The Stedelijk’s artworks travelled to meet new viewers instead of becoming entrenched on their own territory. The Museum of Modern Art had, by the 1960s, intermittently raised the question of whether it should lend artworks from its collection to other museums and galleries, [22] but nothing had come of it. The Stedelijk and its collection had been guests elsewhere as often as they had been hosts on their own turf. Without emphasizing this information, and providing it among other statistics on Stedelijk activity in his usual lower case lettering, Sandberg noted in 1961 that 50 exhibitions a year were held in the museum building, while 50 more were hosted by other institutions. [23]

Some of the Stedelijk’s external projects were one-offs, but others led to new things. In 1958, for example, Willem Sandberg found common ground with Paolo Marinotti, head of the International Centre for Art and Costume in Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, and together they immediately conceived the idea of the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte (Vitality in Art). It was presented in 1959–1960 at the Palazzo Grassi and the Stedelijk Museum, before moving to the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. [24] Sandberg pursued the cooperation with Marinotti in a thematically related joint exhibition entitled Natuur en Kunst (Nature and Art). These projects expanded the boundaries of the museum, but the expansion was not in terms of space but in terms of what the museum was capable of doing. Natuur en Kunst, as if saluting Duchamp, displayed natural objets trouvés, such as pieces of wood and stone, handcrafted objects made out of shells and wood, as well as amateur paintings. [25]

Sandberg also cooperated enthusiastically with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement, the cover of the exhibition catalogue featured Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp) curated by Moderna Museet director Pontus Hulten in 1961 spent six weeks in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk before moving to Stockholm, changing its name to Art in Motion, and then arriving on the already familiar territory of the Louisiana Museum. [26]

Bewogen Beweging, exhibition catalogue. 1961

The extent to which the museum wall was for Sandberg a vague and conditional boundary (the wall in Sandberg’s new wing was of glass) is also exemplified by his attempt to work with the Situationist International. [27] In 1959–1960, Sandberg and the Situationists planned a three-day drift (dérive) to be simultaneously effected in two rooms of the Stedelijk, transformed into a labyrinth, and in the streets of Amsterdam (the plan did not come to fruition due to potential dangers of the labyrinth installation). [28]

Evolutionary perspectives

It would be an easy step from the Dadaist background of the Société Anonyme and Sandberg’s utopian remarks about the superfluity of museums as institutions to a nihilist rhetoric, espousing anti-museum concepts. I prefer, though, to use the similarity of structure and operation between the Société and Sandberg’s Stedelijk to help define a particular type of museum, which can be seen, from the perspective proposed by Svetlana Boym, as ‘off modern’. It is something that ‘involves exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity’, [29] revealing potential paths of development that had not been noticed before.

The philosophical concepts that Dreier and Sandberg relied on do in fact have a common source. Dreier was fascinated by theosophy and spiritualism, and was influenced by the work of Henri Bergson, and this background helps to explain the selection of artists, whose work was included in the collection of the Société Anonyme: Naum Gabo, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, and Kurt Schwitters. Sandberg’s thinking was also much influenced by Bergson’s biological metaphorics, and not only by the work of Bergson himself (a quotation from whom provides the epigraph to a book, to which Sandberg contributed, on pioneers of modern art in the Stedelijk collection), [30] but also by the writings of his devotee, the poet, critic, and anarchist Herbert Read. In particular, Read’s concept of vitalism was directly related to the themes of the above-mentioned exhibitions by Sandberg and Marinotti. [31]

Stedelijk Museum. 1954 © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam

Two other admirers of Bergson deserve mention here, namely Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose text A Thousand Plateaus expands the horizon of Bergson’s metaphysics. [32] If we look at the rhizome structure they describe, it constitutes just the type of decentralized, comprehensive, anti-hierarchical organization championed by the Société and by Sandberg. And the working principles of the Société Anonyme and of the Stedelijk during the time of Sandberg seem to prefigure the Deleuze-Guattari idea of nomadism.

The type of museum that we have described here is unlikely to, and probably should not, serve as a model at the present time. But, it can become a resource for cultural “exaptation”—a concept, also borrowed by Svetlana Boym from biology, which describes what happens when a particular trait evolves to serve some new function that was not part of its original purpose. [33]

The exaptation from the ‘Société-Sandberg’ museum that could be most relevant today relates to museum governance. The vertical, tree-like structure that defines most institutions today means that, the larger a museum grows, the more rigid its hierarchy must be in order to manage this structure. As a result, what museum directors require above all nowadays is exceptional managerial skills, and other aspects of a museum’s work risk being sacrificed to managerial efficiency. Rejecting such an authoritarian model, where the core objective is to control the dependent units, in favour of a heterogeneous, anti-hierarchical type of organization implies, as a minimum, the opportunity for a museum to reallocate its resources and focus on its original purpose of dealing with artists, art, and exhibitions, and, as a maximum, restitution of the museum to artists and return to the governance model of the artist-driven space, which was used in the first museum of modern art.

Translated from: Shpilko O. Iskusstvo, a ne personalii // Dialog Iskusstv, №4, 2016. P. 70–73.

Categories
Articles

visitors protesting against the ‘museum of others’

1. Visitors protesting against museums

In Paris on 15 June 2020 a group of visitors paid their tickets and entered the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacque Chirac (named after the former French President). Navigating among exquisitely illuminated artefacts from around the world the group started a Facebook live stream. They then transformed from regular visitors who follow the logic of the museum into people who contest the museum. One of them – Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congolese activist committed to the restitution of African heritage (well known, since the event here described, to the artistic world at large and in particular to European museums dealing with non-European artefacts) [1] – dislodges a 19th-century African / Chadian wooden funeral pole from its holder and explains to the camera that there is no need to ask permission to take back a stolen object from a thief. Speaking on camera, grasping the pole and walking towards the exit, Diyabanza makes various statements that he repeats again and again, mantra- or echo-like, regarding European colonization, the looting of objects and the urgent need to return them to the dispossessed communities. His action is a physical protest against the system that allows looted objects to be displayed in national museums, perpetrating colonial violence in its institutionalized form. Diyabanza points out that, by selling expensive entry tickets, museums are making a profit from the display of looted objects. The message is very straightforward: the objects need to be brought back to the communities that lost them. By physically taking the artefact Diyabanza highlights the huge divide between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ museums. Outside the museum colonization has technically ended, but inside the museum objects looted during the colonial era are still there. Diyabanza’s refrain is that this state of things must change, and by constantly repeating the same sentences, he emphasizes that his words fail to reach either the museum staff or the police, who are called by the museum administration to stop him doing what he is doing.

Diyabanza and his fellow activists are stopped at the museum exit. So the action and its message, diffused through Facebook and Youtube, went much further than the actual object, which failed to leave the building. Diyabanza’s words are not lost. They have been recorded and made available to the world. A few months later Diyabanza and other members of the group were fined for attempted theft.

Fig. 1. Mwazulu Diyabanza in the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. 2020. Source: https://youtu.be/uqcD4d-jtc8

The action by Mwazulu Diyabanza and his companions is an invitation to reflect on museums, the connection between institutions and the artefacts stored inside them, and what an anthropological museum could become if re-thought. This visitors’ rebellion can be inscribed within ongoing restitution debates and also within antiracist movements around the globe, such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. It amounts to a wide-ranging critique of white supremacy and the institutionalized racism that dominates all facets of Western knowledge production and institutions. Material and immaterial power structures are attacked in order to interrupt these survivals of violence.

2. The ethnographic museum as graveyard

In his essay ‘Those who are dead are not ever gone’, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung resorts to the metaphor of choking in order to illustrate the present state of the ethnographic museum. In the very first ‘act’ of his essay he writes: ‘The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum seems to be in the midst of a serious crisis of choking.’ [2] Almost every act of the essay starts with the sentence: ‘The very strange thing about choking is that one can choke even while eating the most delicious of foods out there’. This metaphor adds up to a number of current critiques of the museum related to the understanding of museum collections and museum spaces as extensions and continuations of colonial violence.

The ethnological / anthropological museum or museum of world cultures – call it how you prefer – is a disturber. This museum is neither neutral nor unbiased. Museums are ‘sites of forgetfulness and fantasy’. [3] Regardless of the person of the architect and how much glass and sustainable materials are used for the façade, it remains a ‘museum of others’. Even built ex novo, this institution cannot free itself from its legacies and the history of conceptualization of ethnographic museums through the lens of colonial science and exploitation.

The idea of the ethnographic museum as a place of death is not new. It was expressed and visually represented by many authors, including Alain Resnais and Chris Marker in their 1953 documentary, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die). The museum was represented as a place of death for the African artefacts shown in the movie:

“When men die, they enter into history.
When statues die, they enter into art.
This botany of death
is what we call culture.” [4]

Resnais and Marker’s film clearly shows ethnographic museums – specifically the Musée de l’Homme in Paris – as places that display the material effects of colonialism: the military pillage, violence and dispossession of communities around the world. The artefacts stored in the museum are not only the material evidence of colonial actions but also of colonial thinking. But to portray the museum overcome by a fit of choking (the image used by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung) is to represent the situation from a different viewpoint: if the objects are not set free, the West will choke to death on its own violence.

The ethnographic museum is testimony to the production, justification and embodiment of ‘race science’. The vicious circle starts and ends with the European colonial mindset that was invented and kept afloat through the idea of superiority. This overarching idea takes roots in the dichotomy of ‘civilized’ and ‘non-civilized nations’ separated by a temporal gap. ‘Primitive’, i.e., non-Western cultures and their cultural production are placed somewhere ‘behind’, in both a temporal and a developmental sense. Even if Western and non-Western cultures exist simultaneously in time, they are not interpreted as contemporary.

The logic of the ethnographic museum oscillates between national affirmation through the lens of Others and the violent encounter with the rest of the world. ‘The ethnological museum as an institution emerges from ideas of collection, display and learning with deep roots in Europe’s troubled encounters with those societies that were under imperial rule or came under some sort of Western sovereignty.’ [5] The objects brought to Europe and then placed in the museum are physical testimonies of the controlled representation of societies through essentialization and categorization, produced ad-hoc by colonial thought. The analytical categories applied are not those of the societies to which the objects belong, but derive from Western thought and the Western intellectual tradition. Such subjective interpretation producing a narrative on behalf of these objects and origin communities is a crucial feature of ethnographic museums because it mixes up different ontologies and imposes an opportune interpretation of the artefact. As Appadurai states: ‘The misunderstanding of the Savage Sublime is thus a three-way misunderstanding between the disciplines of ethnology, natural history, and art history, each of which is in fact a product of the Age of Empire and has a different stake in the proper understanding of the objects of the Other.’ [6]

Enlightenment ideas of knowledge and violent encounter with the other are closely interlinked in the ethnographic museum. The incongruity between the Enlightenment affirmation of the importance of knowledge and the production of knowledge that serves particular political, economic and personal interests is very striking. What we see is that the idea of Enlightenment and the production of tailor-made knowledge demonstrating the superiority of Europe over the rest of the world are actually not at odds. One is the cause and effect of the other. ‘Not to mention that the very duration, temporality, and meaning of these objects has been under an exclusive control and authority of Western museum institutions that decide how long one can have access to these objects.’ [7] Speaking on behalf of others, ‘learning’ and ‘dialoguing’ with the rest of the world in the context of domination and exploitation, and diffusing this knowledge through institutions as museum, archive and university in fact silences those on behalf of whom the speaking is done and controls the flow of information.

– The museum as a site of temporal and spatial separation

Mwazulu Diyabanza extends his hand in a symbolic gesture and takes the funeral pole from its stand. The object is not physically separated from him, there is no glass or other obstacle between him and it. But the gesture is a symbolic abolishment of the distance that exists between the visitor and the artefacts. In this specific moment Mwazulu Diyabanza is not only a visitor to a museum but a representative of those who were dispossessed, those who no longer accept colonial narratives and colonial spaces. The gesture is a decolonial act against continuous separation and placing at a distance (visual, physical and ideological) within a museum.

The colonial legacies of ethnographic museums, expressed through the politics of separation, echo the seminal lines that Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth on the compartmentalization of the colonial world. The idea of the colonial world and colonial epistemology is based on separation:

‘The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of “native” towns and European towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa.’ [8]

Dan Hicks further develops the idea of compartmentalization through the idea of the museum as a space of containment. This containment is linked both to the idea of dehumanization of Africans and at the same time to the ‘normalization of the display of human cultures in the material form.’ Hicks uses the term ‘chronopolitics’ that describes not only the denial of being part of the ‘contemporary’ world and being given a separate temporality, but also the collapsing of space into time: ‘It appeared that the further from metropolis the European travelled, the further back in time they went, until reaching the Stone Age in Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, etc.’ In museums and archives the conceptualization of time and space becomes very evident and also very significant. Both types of institution emphasize the temporal and spatial situatedness of the Other. In this they echo Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, where the narrator, Charles Marlow, tells the story of a steamboat journey up the Congo river, penetrating ‘the heart of Africa’. On a discursive level Conrad clearly shows how this journey into the continent, further from the coast, brings the European traders to a dark place, where the life of local populations seems to be ages behind Europe. And together with this gesture that Fabian has called ‘denial of coevalness’ – the verbal assertion that two living human groups were living in incommensurable time periods – there was a parallel process of material change, through which whole cultures were physically stripped of their technologies, had their living landscapes transformed into ruins, and had these moments of violence extended across time, memorialized, through the technology of the anthropology museum. [9] ‘Museums are devices for extending events across time: in this case extending, repeating and intensifying the violence […] anthropology has been constructing its object – the Other – by employing various devices of temporal distancing, negating the coeval existence of the object and subject of its discourse.’ [10] The objects brought from Africa, Asia or the Americas are part of the construction of temporal and spatial dimensions that negate coevalness to non-Western cultures. This negation is at the root of the conceptualization of ethnographic museums as places that display so-called ethnographic objects, which are not granted space in museums of fine arts. ‘Since the modern age the museum has been a powerful device of separation. The exhibiting of subjugated or humiliated humanities has always adhered to certain elementary rules of injury and violation. And, for starters, these humanities have never had the right in the museum to the same treatment, status or dignity as the conquering humanities. They have been subjected to other rules of classification and other logics of presentation.’ [11] Following this logic ‘ethnographic objects’ are disconnected from the present and left exclusively in the past.

The makers of the film Statues Also Die deal with the ‘imprisonment’ of African masks behind the glass of Western museums. This spatial separation between the visitor and the artefact, but also between different artefacts, is clearly shown. The spatial appropriation and imprisonment of African objects is musealization. It is made possible by two processes related to the ontological misunderstanding of such artefacts. First, the misunderstanding of the roles and functions of the masks (or other objects) in the societies that produced them. Second, the use of the same explanatory grids for different environments and cultural settings. [12] Transforming socially relevant objects into museum artefacts deprives them of their original meaning, significance and larger context, and thereby silences them. At the same time, it allows the insertion of the artefacts into the Western canon of categorization. ‘Whereas museologization is a western stance that deals with alterity in time as history, ethnologization deals with it in space as distance. The combination of “ethnographic” and “museum” that assimilates African artefacts which are still attached to living people, points at the putting into the past of the distant. The imagery that museologization and ethnologization produces, appropriates the other as something primitive, barbarous or exotic.’ [13]

Fig. 2. A scene from Statues Also Die by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais © Chris Marker, Alain Resnais

The physical divide between the inside and the outside of the museum is another dimension of separation. The action by Mwazulu Diyabanza underlines this dimension because he embodies a visitor who enters from the outside and contests the epistemic logic of the museum. The building is clearly delimited from the outside world by its built structure. The walls of the museum preserve the colonial temporality inside the museum, safeguarding an uninterrupted continuity since its creation. More locally, the separation is operated by the glass boxes or any kind of physical obstacle between the objects and the viewer.

The action at the Quai Branly museum in Paris underlines in a very clear way how different levels of separation can be overcome, how the external and internal dimensions of the museum can start communicating. Mwazulu Diyabanza enters from the outside – an outside, which, in this context, represents a space of protest and contestation of colonial legacies, opposed to the inside of the museum. ‘Outside’ is the space where the Rhodes Must Fall protests took place and it is the social space of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mwazulu Diyabanza symbolically brings the struggle inside the museum. His action can be read through the lens of separation and chronopolitics as contesting spatial and temporal dimensions of separation by actively challenging the structures of the museum. It can also be an invitation to build bridges between the outside and the inside. The attempt to bring the object outside the museum is an attempt to create a different epistemic context for it. The question that simultaneously arises is whether it is possible to keep the objects inside, but to re-create the museum environment around them.

3. Creating a different network of relations between visitors, museum institutions and artefacts.

The realization that something is wrong with the ethnographic museum is not new. Besides clear feelings of ‘malaise dans les musées’ experienced by many visitors and described by scholars, the debate has moved into the political sphere. In the recent past, the speech by Emmanuel Macron at Ouagadougou University in 2017 was an important milestone. Macron affirmed that all looted objects in French museums should be restituted. This speech was followed by the report commissioned by Macron in 2018 from two eminent scholars, Senegalese Felwine Sarr and French Bénédicte Savoy.

Their report ‘Restituer le patrimoine africain’ (‘Restitution of African Heritage’) is a landmark contribution to public discussion on the restitution of African artefacts. It starts by questioning what ‘restitution’ of African objects might mean in the current context before discussing concrete steps on how to proceed. Sarr and Savoy define restitution through the verb ‘to restitute’, that ‘literally means to return an item to its legitimate owner’. [14] The authors point out that ‘this term serves to remind us that the appropriation and enjoyment of an item that one restitutes rest on a morally reprehensible act (rape, pillaging, spoliation, ruse, forced consent, etc.). In this case, to restitute aims to re-institute the cultural item to the legitimate owner for his legal use and enjoyment, as well as all the other prerogatives that the item confers (usus, fructus, and abusus).’ [15] The act of restitution would acknowledge the illegitimate actions of the past but would also contribute to the rupture of colonial survivals in museums today. The Sarr-Savoy report is an important step towards the institutional understanding of the ethnographic museum as a place that must restitute pillaged objects to the communities that were violently deprived of their material heritage. ‘To openly speak of restitutions is to speak of justice, or re-balancing, recognition, of restoration and reparation, but above all: it is a way to open a pathway toward establishing new cultural relations based on a newly reflected-upon ethical relation.’ [16] This report has contributed to the discussion of how to move from the present reality of the ethnographic museum, full of the products of colonial violence, to a new type of museum that would be free from such violence. What will these museums become when the objects finally find their way back?

Although, for the moment, the artefacts remain in the museums and massive restitution has not affected museums in either France or other European countries, critical approaches to ethnographic museums and ways of re-thinking colonial legacies are being experimented with. Radical reassessment of history and social struggles against the persistence of colonial histories and heritage may lead to different solutions or responses.

The options are multiple and the possible remedies are various. First of all, there is the attempt to critically approach the museum and its legacy through decolonial practices. These may consist of rebranding and revisiting the collection and trying to establish a different type of interaction between the viewer, the objects and the institution. The second task is to bring down the statues and monuments of colonialism. The third and most challenging task is to find alternatives to museums or monuments as we know them at present, alternatives based on different epistemologies and different forms of knowledge production, which have been ignored or silenced by Western culture.

– Rebranding ‘world culture’ museums

In recent years a number of institutions have started to engage in decolonial practices that involve a rebranding of ethnographic museums. One example is the work carried out by Clémentine Deliss who was director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt between 2010 and 2015. The challenge of the ethnographic museum, as formulated by Clémentine Deliss is ‘knowing how to come to terms with the hiatus between the narratives of then and now, the different geopolitical and associative identities, and their relation to crises and war, epidemics, and anonymity? Moreover, how to do this with a collection that had been brutally extricated from its original referentiality?’ [17]

Deliss wanted to transform the museum from an end-point, a static frame of the past, and for it to be perceived instead as a process, a living organism. The final step in her re-thinking of the museum would be what she calls the ‘post-ethnographic museum’. ‘If we want to discuss the post-ethnographic museum, however, the necessity for new experimental research into these collections is paramount,’ she says. [18] The post-ethnographic museum is an ethnographic museum that has been profoundly reworked and rethought at all levels, starting from its architectural structures to its modus operandi as an institution in the cultural field. Deliss took steps to overcome the idea of temporal, spatial and epistemic separation in the museum by imbricating interventions from contemporary artists, writers and thinkers with the objects of the museum collection. She criticized the idea that only ‘ethnologists’ or other professionals working in museum depositories can assign and define the meanings of the objects. She invited new people to interact with them. The space of the Weltkulturen Museum organized ‘encounters’ between the objects – often labeled as sacred or ethnographic – and contemporary art. These steps suggested a radical change in the way a European ethnographic museum creates meanings. ‘The Weltkulturen Museum is about people, objects and their trajectories. For objects, too, are migrants, and embody partial or incomplete knowledge. The design for the new building should reflect the inherent tensions of our societies, recognizing that the museum offers less a static endpoint than a dynamic moment of connection in an ever-fluctuating assemblage of identifications between people and things.’ [19]

During her directorship Deliss worked on and elaborated the idea of a museum-university – a hybrid proto-institution that makes formal and informal university-level inquiry flow into former ethnographic museums, basing all new research on the potentiality created by assemblages of artefacts, documents, and photographic archives. [20] So the museum would be perceived as a space of learning, of knowledge production, and not of an imposed and controlled narrative.

– Bringing down the statues

The option of bringing down monuments to coloniality is compared by Achille Mbembe to demythologization of history and putting it to rest. [21] As Preciado writes for Artforum: the statues ‘stand for the values of virility, racial purity, wealth, and power, affirm the victory of the patriarchal-colonial discourse that commissions and installs them and occludes undesirable narratives.’ [22] When protesters tear down the statues, sometimes they are replaced with alternative heroes, as for example a Black woman or Darth Vader. Preciado underlines at the same time that a fallen statue opens up ‘a possible space of resignification in power’s dense and saturated landscape.’ But when the statues fall – and they must fall, as Preciado writes – their pedestals that remain empty continue to bear the symbolic value of a monument. The empty pedestal, according to Preciado, is also a symbol of something. He suggests leaving the pedestals empty as a free space of expression. ‘Let the museums remain empty and the pedestals bare. Let nothing be installed upon them. It is necessary to leave room for utopia regardless of whether it ever arrives,’ Preciado writes. This take on statues and their pedestals echoes with the opinion of Dan Hicks on museums. He underlines the importance of anthropological museums if they can successfully ‘transform themselves by facing up to the enduring presence of empire, including through acts of cultural restitution and reparations, and for the transformation of a central part of the purpose of these spaces into sites of conscience.’ [23]

Fig. 3. Sculpture of a black woman installed in place of the statue of Edward Colston

Dan Hicks suggests re-thinking museums, their anthropological display and what exactly the museum should evoke: pride or shame, etc. The visitors’ rebellion is a clear request for restitution, but, as Dan Hicks suggests, rather than being seen as an attempt to efface the anthropological museum, it is a call to recreate it as a site of consciousness. ‘In case of restitution the space of the museum can be re-worked and re-thought. Restitution is not subtraction; it is refusing any longer to defend the indefensible; it is supporting African institutions, colleagues and communities; addressing western museums’ roles as sites of conscience and remembrance, tackling the ongoing effects of racial violence, paying a debt, rebuilding a relationship. No museum can stop the world from changing around it. Dialogue is giving way to action. We don’t know how this ends for the ten thousand objects looted from Benin.’ [24]

Fig. 4. The statue of Darth Vader that replaced the statue of Vladimir Lenin in Odessa, Ukraine

Bringing down a monument, as in the Rhodes Must Fall protest, is only a first step in the decolonial approach to archives, museums and institutions. The same goes for Mwazulu Diyabanza’s seizure of the funeral pole in the Museum Quai Branly in Paris. The first gesture of active protest needs to be followed by global rethinking of how museums could exist outside the relationship of categorization imposed by the Eurocentric modern vision of the world, ceasing to control the narratives of the objects exhibited there.

– Finding alternatives

So what alternative can be found to the ethnographic museum? How can a part of the building be re-built if the rest remains intact? Can we keep the building but destroy its foundation? How can the foundation of the museum be rebuilt but the rest of the building be kept?

If colonial thought and colonial ideas are at the basis of the museum of Others, how is it possible to get rid of the colonial part but keep the rest?

4. Alternative forms of archiving for sound

‘Each time an individual moves an object from one place to another, they participate in the changing of the world. Who is to tell us that the leaf that falls from the tree is not our sister? An object is charged with history, with the culture that produced it originally and, as such, it is a constructed object […] Objects do speak, but they speak their own language. Like the wind speaks. Like birds speak.’ [25]

The Western materialistic approach to culture and knowledge is based on possession and storage of objects or documents in the museum or in archives as a physical proof of their existence. Such an approach is opposed to that of so-called oral cultures, which do not depend on written matter for transmitting and conserving knowledge. Obviously, the way knowledge is conceptualized is also directly related to the form of its transmission and conservation. ‘African societies have produced original forms of mediation between the spirit, matter, and the living. […] these societies generated open systems of mutual resource-sharing concerning the forms of knowledge at the heart of participative ecosystems, wherein the world is a reservoir of potentials.’ [26] European ethnographers used the Western understanding of knowledge and categorized the world accordingly, without taking account of different epistemic systems.

The only possible direction in thinking about objects coming from the African continent is to turn for knowledge and inspiration to African and diasporic creators. As stated by Chakrabarty, Europe should be provincialized. This approach to re-imagining museums would go further than re-branding: it would involve turning to different epistemic bases. One example is Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s Kiosk Museum, a mobile form of museum that proposes flexibility, inclusivity, participation and consciously goes beyond ‘apartness’. As Ayim says, referring to mainstream contemporary museums: ‘This apartness can create gaps between their representation of the stories they tell and the lived experiences of those stories.’ [27] Her mobile museum contained in a kiosk – a structure known to anyone in Ghana – was presented in several different cities around Ghana and also gained high international visibility at the Festival Chale Wote in Accra in 2015. The mobile museum project represents a critique of the idea of a stable, fixed museum space. It also overcame the controlled narrative proposed by the museum, using more egalitarian interaction between the museum, its visitors and the objects. ‘Visitors spontaneously assumed the role of curator or tour guide with lively accounts of their own experiences in the festivals. These moments helped to invert the typical institutional hierarchies of contemporary museums and contributed to the richness of the information generated in the kiosk.’ [28] The Kiosk Museum became a space generating knowledge through interaction instead of controlling knowledge. The question Nana Oforiatta Ayim asked was: what would be a suitable display of objects in the African contexts? Her practice shows how to draw inspiration from the realities of the continent instead of subjugating them.

Fig. 5. Moving museum by Nana Oforiatta Ayim. Photo: Ofoe Amegavie/ANO

It is crucial, in rethinking museums and archives, to emphasize the epistemic divide between material and immaterial. How can the immaterial and intangible be stored? Should it be stored at all? Are there alternative ways of addressing this problem other than materializing the immaterial?

It is inspiring to look at ways in which immaterial knowledge and oral heritage can be stored and transmitted. The Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye addressed this question brilliantly in her film Fad’jal, in which she shows her native village in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal. The feature-length film reveals the life of the village through its agricultural and spiritual activities. Her decision to represent her own village is quite natural. The village is the archetypical place of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’, a place which ethnographers and anthropologist are particularly interested in. If ethnographic museums want to represent the African environment, the basis of the representation would definitely be a village. It is interesting, therefore, how Faye frames her visual narrative.

Faye manages to mix ethnographic filmmaking with an insider’s meditation on familiar events. She shows how villagers work in the fields, produce salt, give birth and bury their dead – various regular activities that characterize the cycle of the year. At the same time in Fad’jal Faye interrogates and re-creates the history and memory of the village from a very personal point of view. Faye who studied ethnology in Paris and was a long-term collaborator of Jean Rouch, delivers a personal and at the same time distanced take on the reality that she is extremely familiar with. ‘Distance (chosen by Faye) is not detachment. Faye’s ambiguous position which unites alienation and rootedness, employs an aesthetic of distance rather than a Rouchian participatory style, which would have its basis in the desire to bridge the outsider’s position.’ [29] Faye’s ability to mix documentary and fiction is also very suggestive for the discussion of museums and archives. Faye’s gaze goes beyond separation and the politics of ‘putting at a distance’ that is typical of ethnographic cinema. Faye uses her distant mode of representation to show that her characters can only be accessible in their inaccessibility – this is her way of reconciling empathy and inaccessibility. Through long fixed frames she creates a new stance that goes beyond the ‘outside vs. inside’ dichotomy. Faye’s observational mode is a way of bringing opposite poles closer, mediating and finding a new visual discourse.

The film starts with a scene in the French-speaking school. The scene is evocative of the type of education delivered in former French colonies. The school as an architectural unit separates the space of formal learning from the space of living, of daily life, of spoken language, of stories and memories. The scene in the classroom shows children going over their homework – a mechanical repetition of the same sentence dealing with the 17th century King of France, Louis XIV. This scene is the only representation of formal education and its role for the people of the village. The manner of speaking and postures of the children as they repeat the lesson show that there is no way they can relate to this obscure historical figure: ‘Louis XIV était le plus grand roi de France. On l’appelait le roi Soleil. Sous son règne fleuraient les lettres et les arts.’ [30] The scene ends with the end of the lesson. Shot from the inside, we see a fixed image of children flowing from the classroom into the school yard, leaving the space of imposed and constricted knowledge behind them.

Faye never takes us back to the school during the remainder of the film – it does not seem to be a productive place for her narrative. The colonial history is not Faye’s main interest, but it cannot be disregarded if an overall picture of village life is to be attempted. The school and the church are two closed spaces and built environments that can be contrasted with the other, mostly open, locations of the film. Showing the lesson in the formal school at the beginning contrasts with the rest of the film and builds a discursive comparison between different ways of transmitting history.

Faye focuses in the film on oral history and in particular on its transmission and appropriation. The film starts by citing the famous dictum of Amadou Hampate Ba: ‘In Africa when an old man dies, a library burns’. The oral history and its social and cultural form and role is foregrounded by the filmmaker. It is shown as a crucial interaction between different generations and their continuity through time and space. This thematic thread is focused onto a group of young boys – mostly adolescents – who gather around their maam (‘grandparent’ or ‘elder’ in the Wolof language) and ask him to tell the history of Fad’jal, the place they belong to and inhabit. The story is divided into several parts and alternates with the other visual scenes of the film. Finally, in order to close the discursive circle of the film, Faye shows how the children gather around the kapok tree and start re-telling the story (Images 6 and 7).

Fig. 6. Safi Faye. Fad’jal. 1979 © Safi Faye

This polyphonic narration shows how it feels to belong to this history not only as listener, but also as narrator. In the final scene the elder is no longer present. He has accomplished his role. The young boys are now bearers of the village’s history and will take it further with them. We observe how a young generation enters into the possession of knowledge and its embodiment through the voice. There is no longer just one storyteller: each of them takes part in the story, telling it in small parts. This approach to history seems playful, but it is also an overt recognition of simultaneous belonging. The alternation of those who are listeners and those who are storytellers is shown as natural and vital. At the end of the film the boys have been entitled to speak. This does not happen in the classroom but under the tree. The children leave the classroom and step into their cultural and social world. The distance between formal knowledge and the places of their lives and their stories is not overcome.

Fig. 7. Safi Faye. Fad’jal. 1979 © Safi Faye

The way in which Faye presents different modalities of knowledge transmission is highly suggestive for thinking about archives and museums. Her magnificent images establish a poetic connection between oral histories (oral forms of knowledge transmission) and trees. She shows trees and the vicinity of trees as spaces of oral history and knowledge sharing. The storytelling experience takes place under large trees that offer shadow and protection to the elder and the boys. The first scene shows them gathered under a large baobab tree (Image 8 and 9). On other occasions they are under a kapok tree, or in places where several trees stand close by one another. This ‘under-the-tree’ space marks a central point of knowledge transmission.  It is simultaneously protected and open, a place where anyone who is interested can ‘walk in’. This is a place where the sounds and events of village life commingle with the narration of history, in contrast with the closed spaces of containment. For example, in one of the scenes, the elder stops speaking because the sounds of music reach them. He pauses and listens to the sounds coming from the village. Here Faye shows how the present and the past of the village are in communication, they are not separated from one another, but are interwoven.

Fig. 8. Safi Faye. Fad’jal. 1979 © Safi Faye

The image of the tree as a place of knowledge, a place of transmission and protection is epistemologically opposed to the spaces of the school or the museum. The surrounding environment naturally embraces the ‘under-the-tree’ space, which serves as a symbolic and metaphoric archive of immaterial and intangible knowledge production, preserved within village society. The openness of the tree and its ability to embrace everything that is told and shared among listeners is quite different from the world of closed, classified and categorized archives, access to which requires special invitation or authorization. Faye’s image of the tree presents the idea of alternative archives: open, shared, and unrestricted by the walls and constrictions of buildings. The discursive space of the tree is an alternative to the space of containment, which Faye herself depicts in other episodes of the film in order to draw this contrast and defy the politics of separation.

Fig. 9. Safi Faye. Fad’jal. 1979 © Safi Faye

As Western museums are to categorizing and classification, oral cultures are to sound. [31] It might be said that, for Black African and diasporic cultures, the central concept for the understanding of generative forces and their functioning is ‘sound’, as theorized by Louis Chude-Sokei in his seminal essay ‘Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber’. [32] Chude-Sokei starts out from the idea of ‘word-sound’ as it exists in the Rastafari conception. ‘Sound becomes its own realm of meaning, of discourse, of politics where the word is necessarily tied to a cultural specificity that must always contend with its other, its sound.  And a sound must in turn […] struggle with the implications of its echoes and the cultural practices of those far enough away to make their own local meanings out of the echo before it decays and is swallowed by infinity.’ [33] The echo chamber is a metaphor of the movement of sound, of diffusion of knowledge through sound waves that link places and cultures. Chude-Sokei refers in particular to the culture of reggae and dub music as it developed in Jamaica in the 70s. Based on the idea of echo and reverberation, dub music was a way of spreading sound and the information contained in it. This principle is also at the basis of oral cultures, as shown by Safi Faye in her film. The story is told by the maam and is then polyphonically echoed by the young boys. This telling of history and transmission of knowledge is the epistemic contrary to the idea of categorizing and containment of knowledge, which is standard in Western museums and archives.

The dictionary defines sound as ‘vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear’. Turning to sound as a tool for communication and memorialization is particularly relevant in the West African context. Through sound, its echo and reverberation, stories are told and re-told through times and spaces. Oral accounts are not fixed, but change over time and also have a significant relationship with the present. The nature of this knowledge is ‘elliptical and resonant’, [34] non-fixed and variable.

Louis Chude-Sokei’s discussion, in his approach to reggae music, of culture and sound from a materialistic viewpoint also seems very relevant to the analysis of oral culture and knowledge transmission as demonstrated and analyzed in Fad’jal. The circulation of knowledge is a complex intersection of sound and culture and their echo through temporal and spatial distance. For Chude-Sokei, echo is also the sensation of a restless searching for roots and the never-ending tensions of dispersal. In the case of oral history, as shown by Faye in her films, there is no technology involved, but there is a clear centrality of the sound.

While, in Chude-Sokei’s analysis, the technological component is crucial, I look at orality through the pattern of echo and reverb without technological innovation, focusing on the crucial role of ‘sound’ for culture, its transmission, its diffusion and its conceptualization. Sound is linked to orality, to diaspora, to the echoing of knowledge and culture through time and space. ‘Sound in Jamaica means process, community, strategy and product. It functions as an aesthetic space within which the members of the national or transnational Jamaican community imagine themselves. This is an imagined community which, unlike the one mapped out by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, operates not by the technologies of literacy, but through the cultural economy of sound and its technological apparatus which is distinctly oral.’ [35]

Repetition and echoing of sounds and their reverberation in the under-the-tree space allows the diffusion, conservation and transmission of knowledge through sound. While more in-depth research on connections and intersections between orality in West Africa and diasporic sounds remains to be done, the essay by Chude-Sokei has already illuminated the connection between oral history and knowledge transmission in the ‘under-the-tree space’ and its relation to echo and reverb. These practices can all be linked by what Chude-Sokei calls the ‘technology of orality’: ‘For those descended from oral traditions and whose dependence on it is due to the exclusive and racialist structure of Western literacy, a sensitivity to sound must exist in a way that it does not for the children of Prospero.’ [36] Colonial histories and histories told in the classroom do not echo in the children in Fad’jal, as do the stories that the maam tells. The scene in the school is focused on history and its telling, but although the children all repeat the same sentence, it is clearly visible that there is no connection between them and the information they repeat.

Fig. 10. Safi Faye. Fad’jal. 1979 © Safi Faye

Thinking about ‘sound’ and the images of Safi Faye’s film, the question naturally arises: Why can a tree not be considered an archive? Why can an archive not be imagined under the tree? Safi Faye shows us this space of spreading knowledge, echoing through time – from generation to generation – but also through space, overcoming physical distances with sound. Polyphonic voices, elliptical histories, accessible knowledge and travelling sounds are all features that both Faye and Chude-Sokei put forward. So, if knowledge and heritage are sound, if they are shared by people through their voices, why should this knowledge be attached to a physical support? How can such an archive be looted? And how can it be preserved? Only those directly involved in these processes can decide how, what and where they want to preserve.

5. Dissemination, dispersal and giving away…

‘Museums have of course assimilated post-colonial critique, and they are often good at dealing with asymmetries of power; but they are very bad at dealing with asymmetries of epistemology; […] So long as “ethnographic” museums do not deal with cultural difference in a more symmetrical manner, they will remain “colonialist” institutions.’ [37]

Any attempt to decolonize needs to be inspired by non-Western voices and ideas. This means listening to voices like that of Mwazulu Diyabanza. When Diyabanza and his comrades are surrounded by the police and museum staff in the museum hall, it becomes very visible that his voice and his words, repeated an infinite number of times, flow freely, but his ideas are not captured. Through his actions and words Diyabanza highlights that, in the context of Western management of ethnographic and anthropological museums, the ideas of theft, of heritage, of right and wrong, are much more complex than a simple dichotomy of legality and illegality. For so long as Mwazulu Diyananza can be condemned for theft, and for an offense against law and order, the colonial principles of containment and separation will continue to reign. Visitors who protest against museums by physically engaging with the institution are a response to the continued existence of the epistemologies of classification and categorization. Diyabanza really speaks the same language as the creators of the museum. He comes and takes as if asking all those who hear him: is it possible to steal from a thief?

Several conclusions can be drawn from the action in the Quai Branly Museum. First of all, there is an urgent need for restitution of looted artefacts. Second, the action is the physical and visual proof that the ethnographic museum has failed. Recourse must be made to different epistemic systems, new language and new images for critical rethinking of the museum. In this context, the image of tree-as-archive can work as a space of immaterial, oral culture, open and flexible. It is dynamic, it is not static, it does not ‘freeze’ the picture of the past, but reverberates between present and past. It can be a place of engagement, of joint work, it is pluralistic and open-ended. The museum space needs to become ‘museum in reverse’ based on dissemination and dispersal, on giving away rather than accumulating. [38]

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dance with bentham

Nika Ham refers to the book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault who addressed the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and his Panopticon. “I know I am being observed and I want the observer to know that”, she writes. The project deals with the relationship between the artist vs. institution, body vs. space, observing vs. being observed, private vs. public.

Dance with Bentham / Albertina

Albertina Museum, Vienna. 2018. Security cameras. 1280×960. 5′ 50″ © Nika Ham

“In Albertina Museum, I wanted to recreate the characters / symbols used by the artist on display, Keith Haring. His characters are simple child-like figures with no faces. In the first performance, I dressed myself in a white suit and a gas mask and tried to recreate the compositions of the characters in the paintings moving across the exhibition space. In the second performance, I dressed myself in a black coat and a gas mask and moved across the space as a content viewer or a ghost observer”.

Dance with Bentham / OG2

Salzburg Museum, Salzburg. 2019. Security cameras. 646×476. 3′ 38″. Music: Slick Grief. Chapter V Instrumental Extended. 2019 © Nika Ham

OG2 is happening at Salzburg Museum. It is a video consisting of short repetitive dance moves that are performed across the exhibition space. With the pink raincoat (Salzburg = rain) I become an obvious intruder next to the historical artefacts of the city of Salzburg. With the added music track – it is a dance show for the surveillant in an unconventional setting”.

Dance with Bentham / Treature Music Video

Urban Nation Museum, Berlin. 2019. Security cameras. 1920×1080. 4′ 20″ © Nika Ham

“For the project at Urban Nation residency I connected with Berlin based musician and urban explorer junk-E-cat in order to make a music video for his track called Treature. We used the Urban Nation Museum as performance space using just the existing surveillance cameras to capture the action – the same technique I am using in my long-term project Squat. From the raw we footage we will create a selection of moving images and stop-motion sequences. All the actions are funny, weird, whimsical featuring four characters in an unconventional setting.”

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pandemic summer / autumn guide

Meditations in an Emergency / UCCA Center for Contemporary Art / 21.05.2020–30.08.2020

The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing) has inaugurated the exhibition Meditations in an Emergency dedicated to addressing strategies for resisting apathy in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. The title of the show is derived from an anthology of poetry from the late Frank O’Hara. As opposed to gathering a collection of works of the 26 featured artists into one thematic container, the exhibition is divided into sub-categories: “everyday life, the body and biopolitics, the human/animal dichotomy, migration and borders, and the information landscape”. It is of interest to consider that the show is not retrospective regarding the contributors, rather aims to pull works from different points in time which can be relevant to the current moment of perplexity, economic collapse, and metaphysical inversion. Historically, the UCCA has functioned as a nodal intersection between a research center and a museum, and with Meditations in an Emergency launches another massive show.

Meditations in an Emergency © UCCA

Department of Presence 2020 / Museum of Modern Art Warsaw / 18.02.2020–31.12.2020

The annual public program for 2020, Department of Presence, associated with the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, takes a novel approach by designating a specific artwork, the installation Demos from Andreas Angelidakis, as the site for investigating institutional responses to the climate crisis and the ramifications of non-action. Demos consists of 74 foam modules which can be reconfigured in multiple ways for different types of functional seating as well as sculptural impact. The work itself aims to interrogate the expectations surrounding announcement, public address, and assembly which are part and parcel of this history of public practices in negotiating modes of democracy. In utilising this installation in its theatrical implications as well as physical ramifications as a location for debate, The Museum for Modern Art Warsaw asks the visitor to engineer “an institution within an institution”, raising the question: can an artwork as a context operate as an institution rather than an object of institutional critique? In addition, the role of the museum as an agent in shaping “planetary and systemic change” comes to the forefront through the Department of Presence.

Department of Presence © Museum of Modern Art Warsaw

Feelers / Foco Gallery / 10.09.2020–10.10.2020

The photographic and sculptural work of Mia Dudek (Poland) vacillates between the focused and the peripheral. In her most recent series which springs from her time spent in Lisbon she addresses the subtle passions of the rhizomatic kingdom, an indefinite trace of brutalist architecture, and manufactured anatomy by staging images such that one is drawn into simultaneous anthropomorphisation and nullification of a subject. The show Feelers curated by Kasia Sobczak-Wróblewska is slated to open in October at Foco Gallery in Lisbon. It is of particular interest that the nature of this exhibition has been in flux for the past months such that a miniature of the gallery has been built in the artist’s studio, collapsing and inverting the mechanics of spectator-artwork-exhibition space. The curatorial tendency has been to evolve an understanding of Dudek’s work pseudo-chronologically in tandem with the artist’s pregnancy shifting from considering the detailed quotidien to an architectural finality which may be synesthetic. The miniaturised version of the exhibition is being rearranged, de-installed, and re-installed at spontaneous intervals, available to be viewed at the artist, curator, and gallerist Benjamin Gonthier’s approval until the official opening in October.

Mia Dudek. Fruiting Body © Mia Dudek

Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain. Get Well Soon / online / ongoing

Rhizome, the digitally dispersive research environment of the New Museum of New York, has called upon the artists Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain who have initiated a cumulative and generative online archive which is dedicated to cataloging euphemisms extracted from the comments associated with medical fundraisers on gofundme.com. The project directly reflects the current drama and tension of living with deteriorating health on a global scale due to Covid-19. The affected individuals who may be struggling in silence are given voice within this project, whilst being protected in their anonymity. Encountering the archive, one is posed with the questions: where do we draw the line between showing concern and fetishising illness? How can we devise a collective future expressing mutual consideration that acknowledges global infrastructural failure and systemic violence? Lavigne and Brain’s project emphasises the effect of the New Museum utilising its correlative online space as a container for continual ethical investigations. Get Well Soon is commissioned jointly by the Art Center Nabi (Seoul), The New Museum, and Chronus Art Center (Shanghai).

Get Well Soon © Rhizome
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Articles

on the museum of non participation

Olga Shpilko: For me the title of your project is ultimately attractive and catchy due to the ambiguity inherent in the urge to participate. On the one hand, participatory practices defeat hierarchies and contribute to horizontal relationships, including the relationship between artist and viewer. Non-participation is a way of distancing from communal values in favour of individual ones. It might be described by a Russian proverb, “Don’t ask me – my hut is on the edge of the village” (my attempt to translate). But, on the other hand, in my view, participatory practices (art practices, in particular) now have an obvious downside: participation seems to have been pushed too hard in the current system of culture, when anyone who does not wish to participate is accused of being an art consumer and not an art producer. So how do you view non-participation? I guess the notion is controversial for you too.

Brad Butler: I like your Russian proverb! And yes, for us, as you say, non-participation has been very generative. It carries with it dynamic tensions. So, we can say that non-participation can be used to describe resistant strategies, but also non-participation can be used to describe conditions that we are struggling against. This made the project very dynamic for us, especially in looking at the different ways that power operates.

Brad Butler & Noor Afshan Mirza. Act 00136. 2009. Courtesy Brad Butler & Noor Afshan Mirza

Noor Afshan Mirza: For example, during a residency at ZKM we worked with 40-70-year-old museum attendants who had been working a long time in the museum. The conditions of their outsourced contracts did not allow them to speak to visitors about the art which they invigilated and which they had grown to know more about maybe than anyone. They had no collective rights to visibility or a voice. Our aim was to work with these guards and invigilators and give them a platform in the exhibition. Projects like that also diagnose non-participation in practice, it is important not to think of it just as a theory.

OS: Could you please expand on your methodology (if the word is relevant) and how the Museum evolved in the course of the project?

BB: We wanted to work over time and go deeper into ideas that would connect over multiple projects. We would try to listen and be open to working with people on the ground in situations that often wouldn’t obviously get called art. We would let the ideas lead and always ask ourselves what the work needs. Of course people often need space and time, so we often held space open for others. We also explored different ways of creating exhibitions, from films to objects, to situations, to circumstances and provocations. Often we were working outside museums, for example through creating language exchanges, newspapers, theatre groups. I mean when I look back at it now, part of me wonders how did we achieve all that? How did my physical body manage to hold all of those people and strategies together and run a space in London at the same time (a film platform called no.w.here). I’m really proud of our way of working. I use the past tense although Noor and I never publicly closed the Museum of Non Participation concept. But we did take a step back to look at it. That happened after we got an invitation to create an embassy of non-participation at the Sydney Biennale in 2016. The invitation came from a curator called Stephanie Rosenthal who wanted to work with a concept of different embassies of thought. When she approached us, she explained that she had originally intended to have an embassy of “resistance”. But on reflection she decided that that’s wasn’t quite right, or enough. So, she offered us a whole space to make an embassy of non-participation. And that trip not only brought together a lot of ways of thinking for us in one exhibition. It was also momentous as it brought a decade working with our concept into alignment with a recent history of colonialism that we found incredibly painful. And so, by the end of the Biennale we were very successfully received, but we also wondered whether non-participation as a concept was agent enough? In a world with huge male, fascist figures in command. So, it wasn’t a closure. It was a real question about where the pressure points are, and where our agency is needed. And is a Museum of Non Participation that can be incorporated into a biennale the right way for us to work anymore? So that’s where you still find us now, organising our thoughts in relationship to where we should place our bodies. So the Museum of Non Participation is a big body of work. It’s not all on our website. It’s multiple strategies and it crossed countries and borders.

NAM: Actually, a lot of the Museum of Non Participation was also about oral culture. The practice of oral culture is also very gendered. So a lot of things weren’t documented for that very reason, you know. So as much as it is visible…

OS: Do you mean the English language classes, which were organised at the Museum, and its visitors?

NAM: No, I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about things like my feminist project, The Gossip. I’m talking about the relationship between our community of organising and activism. There was a whole lot of things, that we were actively involved in, that just didn’t get recorded as contemporary art and didn’t get registered as activism. It’s just part of oral culture of embodied knowing that becomes knowledge, sharing, distribution, you know. So, as much as this was visible, a whole kind of body of practice was actively not recorded. Because its value was being present in the moment in that room. What you took away with you mattered, and how that body then, in a positive way, contaminated another body of thinking, so in a sense it was a very analogue way of open source as a part of deep practice of oral culture.

OS: Yes, sure. I meant that the oral culture needs to be spread out and distributed in order to exist: its mode of existence indeed reminds of the process of contamination. What I wanted to ask is who were these people who made this possible? So, this is a question about your audience, but I also wonder how you perceive and how you assess the level of their participation and non-participation.

BB: I mean I can relate to your question in lots of ways, because I look back on those eight years and there were so many different ways we worked. So, sometimes we would start from the position of thinking about our relationship to how people might find the work who would never be looking for it. For example, in the Museum project, very early on, we were thinking about the relationship of boundary walls and spaces that both protected and excluded people from artwork. My memory is that – Noor, please correct me – we used to think about hijacking different forms of distribution for our ideas. So, that led us to interventions in public spaces, markets, streets or zones where you would not expect to encounter “contemporary art”. And that when it happened, you weren’t even sure if it was a performance or not.

NAM: Just to add some detail. We looked at spaces or we would be drawn to spaces that had a kind of diversity around social classes or economic backgrounds. That’s why we did things with bread or worked in public spaces or market spaces. So you would get into a dialogue with people from different backgrounds. Or audiences not defined by a social economic group. It was really about having a plurality.

BB: Then there were other forms of distribution. One of the largest projects we did in terms of distribution was when we managed to get an entire newspaper to take on a Museum of Non Participation supplement and send out 20,000 copies around the country. And it was just full of our thoughts and processes of all of our collaborators that we had built up over a couple of years. Actually, do you also remember when we went back to negotiate with them for a second project? It was one of the hardest negotiations I ever remember happening. It was very interesting. Part of our process was to try to set the right terms and conditions for a work to happen. And often we would be having that dialogue with people who weren’t in art spaces. So, for example, I remember we went and tried to make a project work with a Pakistani international broadsheet, The Daily Jang. “Jang” means battle, so our proposal was called “The Daily Battle”. And it was a battle. We had already done a supplement with them, and they were really happy to work with us, so we went back in and we said this time we would like to take up some space inside your newspaper which is not announced as an art space. Please just give us a column and don’t tell anyone that it’s “art”. We would then invite writers to participate in the column space who are not normally the writers who have access to your newspaper. And that will be “the art work”… And getting that to happen, a column in a newspaper that didn’t announce that it was an art space, but which had editorial freedom, man, it was so hard.

NAM: Because the battle, the battle was about value wasn’t it?

BB: Yes.

Brad Butler & Noor Afshan Mirza. The Daily Battle. 2010. Courtesy Brad Butler & Noor Afshan Mirza

NAM: It became about value, you know, business, the media group business… What is the value for me and the business to do this? And then we were obviously advocating for cultural value, for value I mean of new voices in this space. I remember one of the writers we invited was a journalist. And the journalist said, “I’ve never been given such an open space from which to write”. Because we just literally gave each person the title: “The Daily Battle”, as an invitation or provocation for a response. It could be poetry, prose, an article on any subject, no censorship. So, we had to negotiate a space of value in order to give this kind of freedom to the writers. And that was really… It was very contested, wasn’t it Brad? It was very, very, very hard to negotiate that. Looking back on this, it was hard because there were two completely different stakeholders’ values (the media group, and us the artists) sharing a common platform. The previous collaboration was so much easier, as they gave us the whole newspaper as a separate editorial supplement.

OS: Am I right that linguistics in all its aspects is important to your work? If I am not mistaken, you even called the Museum of Non Participation a language? You flipped the word “Museum” horizontally in the graphic identity of your project, Museum of Non Participation: the New Deal in the Walker Art Center, where, as Sang Mun noticed, reversed type also connoted the act of resistance and the Urdu alphabet’s right-to-left writing system. [1] You have also complied a guide entitled “Non Participation: Acts of Definition and Redefinition”, referring to the vocabulary that we use or misuse.

Brad Butler & Noor Afshan Mirza. Museum of Non Participation: the New Deal. Installation view of the exhibition at Walker Art Center. 2013. Courtesy Walker Art Center

NAM: The acts of definition and redefinition of text were an invitation. At the time we were thinking about what it means to name and define not only an artistic practice, but a political or philosophical position. We thought about the concept of non-participation as a collective process of inquiry and a malleable and expansive term, as a way of speaking to urgent social conditions and pervasive everyday realities. And rather than asserting that as a position of negation or denial, we wanted it to be a position from which to speak. So, we invited multiple voices to address non-participation within the context of their personal and professional lives. And to think on the convergences of art and political praxis. The published texts were written by international and local collaborators: Nabil Ahmed, Rachel Anderson, Chris Conry, Jeanne Dorado, Keli Garrett, Larne Abse Gogarty, Olga Gonzalez, Rahila Gupta, and Fatos Ustek. And through them we saw non-participation being understood variously in relationship to large-scale global migration and climate change, post-conflict situations, endemics of violence, daily habits, agency and identification as a citizen, social welfare, and resistance and revolution.

OS: Was the supplement to The Daily Jang a one-off action? Or did it turn into a series of publications? What was the ultimate outcome for you?

BB: The MoNP supplement was a one-off edition. Taking up column space within the newspaper itself, well, my memory is that it was a very challenging set of negotiations, but in the end we managed to get six commissions published in the newspaper. Each article was called “The Daily Battle”, with a brief editorial text referring the commissioned artworks back to the site of the actual exhibition space where the daily newspapers were being delivered, displayed and distributed. Visitors to the gallery could take away the daily newspapers. We did consider the project of intervening into The Daily Jang as successful even though it was our biggest struggle. We kept going because we were driven by questions, like, for example, what it means if you go to a piece of work which you know is participatory and isn’t an obligation to participate? We made a whole kind of theatre, language around that. So, for about five years we worked with the Migrants Resource Centre in London with the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed. We created plays and went into social centres and other spaces where people could encounter and work through experiences they were having, that they wanted to change and transform. But then Noor and I took that into the museum space and we started to create performances that lived between Brechtian learning theatre and Boal’s strategies. We put these two things together as a provocation to an audience where you move through a Brecht play which then goes into real experiences. The non-actors we were working with became a theatre group that spilt out into provocations to the audience about justice. It wasn’t advertised as participatory theatre but the provocation of moving out of the play and into real life and the imagination created a whirlwind of ideas which took off in different ways. And so we would also use that as a way to activate our exhibition spaces. And, I don’t know, we would sometimes think about what are the thresholds and barriers that we were facing and how could we use those to our advantage.

NAM: Just to give another example, one that goes back to the roots of the project. We once set up the Museum of Non Participation project space behind a barber’s shop in Bethnal Green Road. It was behind the barber’s shop because our first community of language exchange students were barbers, Pakistani barbers. Then over time we turned the space into the museum exhibition space. And so, many people came from different places, then they had their hair cut. Or they came for a haircut and then noticed there was something going on in the back space. Some people just heard that you can get chai and would come and relax there. Some were using it as a kind of relief from the street activity, every day, and just liked a quiet spot. Some were just turning up and using it for study time or just chill out. There was a little garden area as well. Some came because they actually got our newspaper. Some people came with families from Birmingham because the newspaper was interesting to them. So, many different people started to take up space in the museum behind the barber shop. And what happened was a very classic old-fashioned vibe of being a community centre that was open for everybody. Obviously, there was a threshold of sorts, a traditional male barber shop is not usually a place crossed into by women, but the work was also making evident these different thresholds. The different rights of access and different set of privileges. The barbers also became the trustees, the keepers of the museum. And their body language, their power, their relationship to it also shifted over time. And that’s the part of the oral culture that people started to hear about. That there was this kind of space where some events were going on, but more often not. It wasn’t programmed, it was a free space. That could be activated by people that just walked in off the street.

OS: Yes, I understand. From what you say, I see that you treat a threshold that exists between a museum and real life in a very interesting way. On the one hand, you blur it, which is part of a long-lasting impetus to merge art and life into a whole. But, on the other hand, you settle it. Any museum, yours as well, creates an artificial environment, completely different from the natural one. But this makes it possible to disrupt the orders that rule our society, which many of us want to escape. And this transforms a museum into a place of exile. Because a museum is actually a sort of place of exile for objects, a place of exclusion. And it can equally be a place of exile for people by their own will.

NAM: Yes. It can be a place of refuge as well.

OS: Yes, refuge is maybe a better word than exile, which has a negative sense.

NAM: I think exile is a good word as well. I always had an issue with hierarchy and I always had an issue with formal education. The way that formal education is taught, with a master and a tutor, and you are the student. There is always a power dynamic. And so I’ve always felt closer to the history of community art projects. But art education and community art in relationship to museums, in relationship to display culture, has often been devalued. So, you have the exhibitions happening and the art projects or community projects were always marginalised. And what I’ve found is that some of the more exiting and experimental, radical projects were happening in the side entrance or at the backdoors of the museums, which is where real life, real people, and real community and dialog was happening. So this Museum of Non Participation was trying to undo this inherent hierarchy in relation to display culture, object-oriented culture and community. For education that could actually be intersectional. For embodied knowing, community knowledge and exchange. They were all being interrogated, but they were all given the same value. Experience and knowledge was not given a hierarchical value. Everything was a horizontal structure and therefore treated as equal.

OS: Your answer makes me want to introduce one of the topics of our grant programme, the second edition of which is dedicated to liminal states of museums. The border between the museum and real life, which we were talking about earlier, and the institutional nature of a museum as a treasure custodian are inextricably linked to the figure of a guard. The Museum of Non Participation newspaper features a text signed by Pancho Villa where museums are characterised as “at best a bloody pirate’s treasure trove”. In a different place in the same newspaper you discuss what comprises a boundary, referring to Mel Bochner’s performance in 1967 when he taped up two pieces of paper on the wall of his studio, measured the distance between them and then removed the paper. It would be interesting to learn how these ideas about borders and boundaries affect your art. Maybe you could expand on your film The Exception and the Rule, which is part of the Museum of Non Participation and which dealt with the notion of borders.

NAM: Yes, The Exception and the Rule was filmed over a 2-year period, in India (Mumbai) and Pakistan (Karachi). It is another layered work of ours, where we approach the subject of the border from multiple points of view. The post-Independence split in 1947 of the British Indian continent into new borders of India, East Pakistan and West Pakistan (later, in 1971, Bangladesh) was called “Partition” and it resulted in a mass movement and migration of Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims as well as protests and violence. As British citizens, carrying the passport of the former colonial masters, our privileged bodies could cross the border between these countries. Most Pakistanis don’t get that access and a lot of Indians also don’t get to cross the land border into Pakistan. We wanted to explore this border as both a real and psychological partition, a trauma of colonialism. So this film keeps shifting its position, especially towards the subject of the internalised colonial gaze of object | subject | border and the camera apparatus. The western-centric gaze of the optical colonial unconscious. So we use a layering of fiction, experimentation and documentary to create a plurality of identity, culture and ethnicity.

Brad Butler & Noor Afshan Mirza. The Museum of Non Participation. 2008. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary, London

OS: I’d like to pose maybe a very simple question, which came to me when you were speaking about museum attendants. What struck you most in the operation of your museum and other art institutions, which were involved in your project? Because, despite the Museum of Non Participation being a work in progress, you still might have had some expectations. What happened when they had not been met at all or had been met by some completely different realities? Maybe that resulted in a change of your methodology or made you alter some of your views?

NAM: Great question.

BB: I think one of the things I noticed with us is that when we did something, we never really repeated it. We have quite a long research practice. We would research very heavily before we would do something. So, a lot of thinking would always go into something. But we rarely… If we found something, we rarely repeated it, even knowing it could be really successful. And I think it’s partly what you are saying. The success and the failure of something would always give us the next project, it was generative like that. So, when I look at the whole body of work, maybe a bit towards the end I can see a few things repeating, like we hadn’t quite finished them and we wanted to go deeper. But we always felt like we wanted to then come to it from a different direction and rework it.

NAM: Can I also add to that. Because, parallel to this whole museum project, we were also running a not-for-profit space called no.w.here.

BB: Yes.

NAM: …that was bounded by so much bureaucracy and state-funded loop holes and political policy… that some of our methodology in the museum was actually a reaction to. So, it was less that the works were being methodologically changed in relation to each other; it was a generative learning across two very different types of projects. Also we would look to resolve a question or a process based on its context. You can’t transfer a practice or a method that you’ve done in a project, say, in Cairo directly to a project that you’ll be doing in South-West Germany. So, those sorts of things couldn’t just be applied as tools. It’s like the tool has to be remade and sharpened for each context. And sometimes tools have to be left behind, because they weren’t appropriate for the next. But I really felt that a lot of it was shaped as a kind of… utopian project… but also as a cathartic process for the micro-managed bureaucratic and colonial violence that is embedded in cultural production. I mean, the stuff we had to do for no.w.here, a lot of it was so absurd, so Kafkaesque… I mean the system wants you to value the matrix and analytics, but doesn’t value the embodied experience and process.

OS: Sure.

NAM: …so from the methodology of no.w.here, the Museum of Non Participation was kind of used as a counter-argument, you could say a counter narrative…

BB: That’s so interesting, now reflecting, and even in Olga’s first question about whether our Museum was a fictional space or not. It was a fictional space, and it was about conditions of power. But, it’s so true – we were experiencing two things at the same time. The pressure of holding a physical space, with all the pressure of gentrification and luxury real estate development in London. That it has to make financial sense as well as being creatively at the edge of what we could achieve. And this fictional space where you… you’re really trying to undo all the ways of operating which have been trained into your body. So, we sort of had both.

OS: Nora Sternfeld coined the term “para-museum” to think of documenta as an institution “simultaneously as an inside and an outside, with a parasitic relation to the museum.” In her view, “we might conceive of it as a subversive gesture that steals (the power of definition and the infrastructure) from the museum.” [2] Do you think you can relate your project to this concept?

NAM: What immediately comes to mind is an oblique way to respond to your question – the para-museum we experienced as artists in residence back in 2009, when we were invited as no.w.here to take up residence in the Centre for Possible Studies (the Serpentine Gallery’s off-site project on the Edgware Road). Under the stewardship and curatorial guardianship of Janna Graham and Amal Khalaf their Centre really was a true fit of this parasitic relation to the host institution. We were invited to set up a Free Cinema School and run an 8-week-long community engagement project that interrogated the context of Free(dom), Cinema and the pedagogical approach to School, with local youth residents, neighbours, shopkeepers, and community elders. This project evolved into us being in residence for a total duration of 5 years and together with Amal Khalaf, Frances Rifkin, and Janna Graham setting up what became Implicated Theatre – an incredible experience of Boal’s methods of Theatre of the Oppressed. Brad mentioned this earlier in our conversation and it really deserves a whole big chapter in another discussion. This is the oblique answer to your question, because, yes, it was Brad and I who also shaped that project and simultaneously we ran the Museum of Non Participation, and Implicated Theatre is very much part of the MoNP experience. It’s a curious thought to reflect on, whether no.w.here was the host institution to the para-site of the Museum of Non Participation.

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pandemic summer guide

The Penumbral Age. Art in the Time of Planetary Change / Museum of Modern Art Warsaw / 05.06.2020–13.09.2020
 
The Penumbral Age. Art in the Time of Planetary Change is an exhibition devoted to ecologically conscious art. The title of the exhibition was taken by the curators (Sebastian Cichocki and Jagna Lewandowska) from the book The Fall of Western Civilization. A Look from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, published in 2014. In the book ‘the period of the penumbra’ is contemporaneity seen by a protagonist from the future as an anti-intellectual time when scientific knowledge is increasingly ignored. The exhibition, involving 71 artists and eight collectives, is not based on scientific facts and statistics, but on imagination and emotions. The text accompanying the exhibition includes a saying by Nicholas Mirzoeff, that ‘we must “unsee” how the past has taught us to see the world, and begin to imagine a different way to be with what we used to call nature’. [1] The role of the art museum in this process is as a place where the required mental changes are catalysed.

The Penumbral Age is an exhibition that links land art – the western art movement from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s – with the art and thought of Pakistani artist and activist Rasheed Araeen, who strives for ‘global art of planetary change’. The ambitions of the curators are therefore not limited to local contexts, but cover the whole Earth. The exhibition can be seen as a ‘who is who’ parade of the environmental art scene. We are offered an overview of the classics of the genre from Robert Long to Robert Morris and Agnes Denes, through ‘protest art’ in an institutional package (Suzanne Husky and Akira Tsuboi) to esotericism (Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett, Teresa Murak, Czekalska and Golec).

The introduction of non-western perspectives to the exhibition widens the spectrum of the classics, Such perspectives are brought to bear by Manumie Qavavau, who draws inspiration from the traditional art of the Innuits, Jonathas de Andrade, who parodies western ideas about the inhabitants of Brazil, Ice Stupa Project in Ladakh (India-artificial glaciers created by engineer Sonam Wangchuk), INTERPRT collective and work by Frans Krajcberg, a Polish-born artist who settled in Brazil after World War II to lead a hermit’s life until his death in 2017.

Ines Doujak. Ghostpopulations. 2016­–2019. Courtesy Ines Doujak

The global ambitions of the exhibition at the Museum on the Vistula may seem exaggerated, but it is interesting to observe the search for the identity and the role of the institution in times of crisis, not only as a temple where the silhouettes of engaged artists are admired, but, more importantly, as a place whose everyday functioning is based on the principles of social and climate justice.
 
Magical Engagement / Arsenal Municipal Gallery Poznan / 18.09.2020–01.11.2020
 
Magical Engagement is another exhibition, the opening of which has been postponed due to the health crisis (the opening is now scheduled for September 18). Its theme, comparable to The Penumbral Age, is the climate crisis or, more precisely, the way in which art and the municipal institution, filled with the voices of human and non-human actors, resonate with that crisis. The exhibition is divided into three routes (artistic, activist and educational) and it is committed to movement and experience as opposed to static contemplation. It includes guided tours (they will probably be online, at least in part, due to pandemic regulations) with representatives of climate movements such as Extinction Rebellion, or more local initiatives such as the Kąpielisko Collective or Poznan Against Hunters. In the description of the project we read that the events that are included in the exhibition are intended to remove the ‘spells of everyday capitalism’, to show the broken bonds between the social world and what is commonly regarded as ‘natural’. The title of the exhibition refers to that which has been displaced from the world by the logic of capitalist anthropocene, i.e. magic, ritual, memory of human and non-human ancestors, compassion and relationality.

Joanna Draszawka. Odłam Źdźbło. 2019. Courtesy Joanna Draszawka

The exhibition participants include professional artists (Ewa Ciepielewska, Małgorzata Gurowska, Cecylia Malik, Daniel Rycharski), the folk artist Jadwida Aniola, who presents her handmade ornamental decoration, and artist and activist Michal Chomiuk, who has gathered stories of evil spirits, rusalkas, nightmares and women herbalists in the Polish regions of Podlasie and Lublin. The guides (not the curators) of Magical Engagement declare that they practice art in action and activism in magic. The social is not enough for them, so they define engagement broadly, co-creating hybrids and collectives, recycling and upcycling rituals, coming closer to the earthly humus and moving away from humanus. One of the collectives invited to the exhibition, the Inter-species Community, encourages active unlearning of harmful human habits, overcoming speciesism through care, e.g. by spreading and supporting the growth of plants in homes, institutions and between pavement slabs.
 
HKW New Alphabet School #Caring / Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin / Workshops: June 12,13,14.2020 and the ongoing online programme
 
The New Alphabet School is a collaborative self-organised entity within the institution (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) that aims to explore critical and affirmative research practices. It enables research outside academic, disciplinary or genre constraints, where learning and unlearning methods can be practised and where care and shared responsibility are more valued than criticism. Its three-year programme, started in 2019, divides into a number of topics: unlearning, translating, situating, coding, transmitting, caring, instituting, community, healing, weaving, survivance and communing. Each of them is shaped by a different group of art practitioners and researchers: https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/.

Maternal Fantasies. Wattenmeer. 2019. Courtesy Maternal Fantasies

The #Caring part of the three-year program, which would have involved intimate encounters, workshops, shared cooking and joint travel, cannot now go ahead as planned. Instead, there will be three-day online event starting on Friday, June 12, live-streaming a journey that explores the various notions of care, followed by a conversation on the historical aspects of care and reproductive work between two feminist authors: Elke Krasny and Helena Reckitt. Multi-vocal, intersectional queer and black feminist perspectives will be developed in series of workshops, including one with Edna Bonhomme, who poses the highly topical question: When does a person consider themselves sick and how do (post)colonial and (post)migration residues shape the way people archive, narrate and navigate care? There was and is an ongoing radicalisation of epidemics, which results in very disparate outcomes, leaving some to fall ill and others not. The practice of community building based on care is informed by the perspectives of feminism, and (post)colonial and disability studies. It is an activity directed at shaping more tender futures.

#Caring is understood here as ‘diverse ways of relating and living, of perceiving and making, both as a society and as individuals engaged in mutual responsibility, attentiveness and responsiveness’. The practice of care means an ethical as well as a political choice. It situates the human being as a caretaker, a custodial figure, who cares for, repairs and maintains the broken planet.

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performing archives

“If a government has, and had, an agenda of changing everything, always, and as a long-term plan, to erase everything, then you need to archive. Urgently,” claims one of the voices in the mediation text of Far Too Many Stories to Fit into so Small a Box, designed as a visitors’ companion in a mobile speaker. The exhibition is not the first to show the CCA’s collection, but is arguably the only one to date that looks at the collection from different angles and provokes questions about its status, revealing the context of the institution’s early years and what it took to start a collection that is far from formalised. The show brings together not only the CCA’s collection and archival pieces, but also stories gathered in the course of preparations for the show. It uncovers selected pieces to show the multiplicity of solo and group shows by mid-career or lesser-known artists who have passed through the institution’s doors in the last three decades, leaving their traces and understatements. Indeed, the informal stories behind the objects and their often vague status play a key role in the exhibition narrative, which can be read as a fragmented, unfinished history of the institution as told by these objects and their voices. “We were interested in gossip and half-truths from our interlocutors, who speak of the same exhibitions, but whose memories of them are different,” curator Joanna Zielińska explains. [1] She had the idea of inviting the Rotterdam-based Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol back in 2015 and the CCA’s history and its collection was a crucial reference point, but it took much longer to pinpoint the most telling features of the collection. The methodology of the duo, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, who spent three months as the CCA’s residents from March to May 2019, is to create, as they put it, “site-sensitive works”. What they have done, as we read in the press release, is to “critically examine the history of the CCA from the vantage point of outsiders”. The artists have previously worked in a similar vein with the collections of other art centres. They were behind Were It As If (2016) at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, marking the 25th anniversary of the Center’s operation, as well as Fly Me to The Moon (2006) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where the artists worked on the museum’s oldest object, a moon rock, and they also organised Married by Powers (2002), an exhibition encompassing works from FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkerque that was presented at Tent, Rotterdam. According to Zielińska, their method of the Dutch duo, called “dynamic script”, is based on interviews, with subsequent modification of the gathered narratives. The final script is composed from more than 20 interviews transcribed 1:1.

Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka

Far Too Many Stories… speaks subjectively of the institution, to some extent constituted by a white square on the floor — a stage — in the central part of the exhibition, referring directly to Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement), an experimental theatre company set up in 1973 and run by Wojciech Krukowski, [2] the second director of the CCA. Artists were always present at the CCA, some working there and others temporarily residing. “Yes, of course, I was living in the Castle. Once on a Sunday morning, very early, I heard strange voices. I went to the window, and there was the Dalai Lama, standing in the yard”, Zbigniew Libera recalls. The time when Krukowski took up his post at the Ujazdowski Castle at the beginning of the 1990s coincided with the period of political transformation in Poland. One part of the show exposes the original red brick wall — a more authentic backdrop to events that occurred in the early years of the CCA, now hidden under the white wall of more recent times. Next to the red brick, windows have been covered with blue translucent foil as a reminder of David Hammons’ show Real Time from almost two decades ago — an empty space with a thin film of water on the floor, addressing references that include Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Blue. “Everything was under construction, always in between. Always in movement, never stopping,” the first speaker’s voice continues.

The exhibition is being held at a special time, as a new director, appointed without a contest by the Polish Minister of Culture, takes up his duties at the CCA in early 2020. So the show captures the moment of another transition, attempting to document and speak of the institution’s fragile history, its missing parts, while what is yet to come is even more vague. One of the performers leading a performative guided tour quotes from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (some of her best-known works, presented here in 1993): “The future is stupid,” “Men don’t protect you anymore”.

The central element in Radziszewski’s queer-archival exhibition, The Power of Secrets, is an open-space installation standing for the Queer Archives Institute, an autonomous nomadic para-institution, a show within a show that reflects Radziszewski’s distinctive methodology and a long-term project that collects objects and knowledge on queer narratives of Central and Eastern Europe.

Karol Radziszewski: This is a case study of the method. For example, this work, which is called Invisible [3] is of key importance for me, it is the quintessence of how I work. There is the oral history, the basis of the entire exhibition, the works, my interviews. It is an attempt to talk with the oldest people, who remember something, and at the same time a chance to find something that cannot be found in any other way, because it is not in books, it is not in any other materials. […]

 

Zofia Reznik: When did you consciously become an archivist?

 

KR: I think, fully consciously in 2009.

 

ZR: What happened then?

 

KR: Before, I was mainly interested in contemporaneity and facing up to what had been happening. I had been archiving everything, but I didn’t think about it in a systematic way. And in 2009 I started working on the “Before ’89” [4]http://redmuseum.church/demidenko-reznik-performing-archives#rec165323650 issue of DIK [DIK Fagazine], where I said that I would be collecting all these stories from the past of Eastern and Central Europe and somehow I started doing it, and I also went to talk with [Ryszard] Kisiel, [5] whose archive I saw for the first time. It was my first interview and the first view of his archive — it all gives the feeling that it just started then. The work on that issue of DIK lasted for more than two years, there was a lot of travelling. And in 2011, when it came out, I started working on Kisieland — a film about Kisiel, where we reenacted this [archivistic] part of his actions. [6] In the last decade the archive was always there in the background — closer or further, but always a basis for work. And this exhibition is built so that it is not a retrospective, but a selection of works. The archives are the main axis of it all. [7]

The exhibition includes a vast compilation of different artifacts, photographs and oral histories such as those focused on and collected around Ryszard Kisiel, a pioneer of gay culture based in Tricity (the three coastal cities of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot), active from the late 1980s who created Filo, one of the first communist-era gay zines. [8]

KR: …this art and those objects, the visual aspect of it, is not insignificant — reading a book about it is not the same as seeing the scale of it, the physicality of those objects.

 

ZR: And in this sense, this materiality is an amazing carrier of the physical stimuli, that also effect the release of something from our bodies.

 

KR: You know … I know that people are aware that these clothes that lie here under the glass are theatrical costumes or museum objects, but when Ryszard [Kisiel] brought them to me from Gdańsk in a plastic bag… and they had never been washed, and you smell the smell, and touch those laces, and we laugh, and he crams it in that plastic bag… You know, it is very physical, also the smell, some of these people are dead or it was a model… I have never thought before that the smell of the 80s is preserved in it. It is strange, the sweat, but it is just so physical.

 

ZR: It’s a shame one can’t feel it here…

 

KR: You know, there are the bras that Kisiel’s boyfriend was wearing and they just, well, they stink… but this is just the magic of the body.

 

ZR: And you took it away from the viewers! And you could have given [laughs].

 

KR: Well, but I let them peep under the glass…

Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Pat Mic

Next to Kisiel’s showcases with playful lingerie and accessories used in his photoshoots, there is a red cubicle with a micro exhibition Hommage à WS dedicated to Wojciech Skrodzki (1935−2016), art critic, writer and queer activist, co-curated with Wojciech Szymański, an art historian and curator who Radziszewski works with. [9] The environment-like section (and in fact reenactment of a show from the past) brings together works by artists who were part of an undocumented show that Skrodzki put together and that included autobiographical and erotic threads.

KR: … the idea is to show it as part of the method of work with archives, so you can only enter through the Queer Archive Institute. [10] The idea is also to show how you can queer the past without necessarily saying: he was a fagot, she was a dyke, but instead by looking at the existing things in a queer way. That applies to Wojtek Skrodzki, a well-known critic from the times of the Polish People’s Republic, a zealous Catholic who outed himself at the age of 80 and became an activist of sorts. We met at that time, but he died when I was in Brazil, so didn’t have enough time to develop it. But he left me the typescript of his biography, a childhood photo and various premises, that… I treat it as a sort of a fulfilment of his will [sighs embarrassedly] — in 1978 he made an exhibition that was supposed to be his coming out, which he called an erotic exhibition. [11] And from those texts and letters to friends, from his biographical notes, it is clear that he wanted to make an exhibition that in a way would reveal that he was gay, but at the same time would hide it, so that one wouldn’t guess. That’s why he openly writes… that’s why the undressed Natalia [LL], so that there was this feminine sexuality… [12] But there were also some minor clues that he planned on showing, photos documenting The Dead Class of Tadeusz Kantor. [13] So I was reading it and thinking “Fuck, Kantor. What is this about?”. But then I started to look for photos and it turned out that there was this one photo that was removed by the censorship — there in the catalogue, where there is an empty place. So we got to the photographer who made it and he gave us those photos for the exhibition. And suddenly it turns out that you can even show Kantor in such a way… that when you are gay in the 70s and trying to queer your reality, you can sample it from anywhere…

 

ZR: Even Kantor…

 

KR: …even Kantor.

The carmine room with a few circular holes in its temporary walls is designed as a reference to intimate club rooms that provide safe anonymity for sexual intercourse, but it might as well resemble a womb or a photographic darkroom used by professional and amateur photographers in the 70s and 80s. The room was an extension of the exhibition site, a reaching-out architectural hub, enabling the two shows (Far Too Many Stories… and The Power of Secrets) to symbolically meet via the glory holes carved out from the institution’s walls, as one of Radziszewski’s friends brilliantly pointed out during an informal guided tour. [14]

 KR: There is a focus here on appropriation art, also as a method of producing, expanding the materiality of art history and history in general. So this picture is called Hyacinth and it is apparently the first-ever visual representation of Operation Hyacinth. [15] And it is my typical method… let me decode it: I wonder about the most easy-going, best artist of the time, who might try to portray it […]. So, it’s Operation Hyacinth and it’s 1985 and what are the hottest aesthetics of the time? The new expressionism, Neue Wilde — the expression of German painters. [16] So from those painters I choose A. R. Penck, who is a bit less known than [Georg] Baselitz and [Jörg] Immendorf, [17] but his style is more brutal, it evokes cave drawings, very primitivistic — it reminds me of Keith Haring. [18] But he is American, so we need to postpone that tradition, because I’m looking more locally. And it turns out that there are drawings of Ryszard Kisiel from the Filo zine, that are simply about HIV and AIDS, showing various safe and dangerous sexual positions, and that these drawing schemes are totally part of this aesthetics. So I take West — the first painting that A. R. Penck made after escaping from East to West Berlin, which is in the Tate collection, so it is well-known and can be referred to. [19] The characters on the left and right are partly copied […] So this is where “AIDS” appears, he also codes letters — “A. R. Penck”, and here I put “UB” [Urząd Bezpieczeństwa — Department of Security], [20] at two characters holding each other’s hands, I create a policeman wearing a hat, I insert the drawings of Kisiel and I imitate the whole in scale. […] The result has to be such that, when an art historian enters, they say: “Oh, this is A. R. Penck!'”. I had some French curators here three days ago and they said: “Oh, A. R. Penck!”. […]

 

And this Operation Hyacinth, that everyone speaks about so mythologically, no one really knows what… but then — OK, now we have the images that show how it was. So now we can start the conversation: if it was like that or not, or some other way. But it is a starting point for an average person who might have heard of Operation Hyacinth for the first time in their life — they will see this picture and will wonder: here’s a policeman, there is sex — what was going on? — pink folders, something here…

 

ZR: So again, materiality as a place of entry.

 

KR: Yes, because it is crucial for this exhibition to create a kind of material culture based on stories and archives, so the archives are performed by giving them a body or the bodies of those who speak, or bodies in the form of works of art that are physical and material. They are sculptures, images that one is not only projecting or inducing, but you face them. You have to go around this sculpture [Mushroom], for example, and you already know the scale of this toilet [21] and it starts working, stimulating your imagination.

Bik Van der Pol. Far Too Many Stories to Fit into so Small a Box. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Pat Mic

“Archives must be reenacted, especially as QAI always works on different terms, depending on where it is being shown,” Michał Grzegorzek, the curator of Karol Radziszewski’s show, explains. In that sense, the artist brings back and reenacts different, and very often personal narratives, to build up the image of a collective queer body. Its history — rather like the history of an institution — is fragmented and hard to describe or show, and always subjective. One of the show’s protagonists is Ryszard Kisiel, who is the protagonist of an ongoing project started by the artist in 2009, with the 2012 documentary Kisieland — overlooked in the collective memory.

KR: This, for example, is a sculpture that pretends to be a work by Monika Sosnowska. But it is about the Mushroom, that picket [slang for a gay meeting place], and poses common questions about what is possible. What queer form of commemoration can function and what is worthy of being a sculpture — could the most famous gay toilet be worthy?

The queer body is under threat from resurgent homophobia in today’s Poland (one of the biggest countries in the EU). To mention one emblematic manifestation of homophobia, in July 2019 participants of the first rainbow march in the city of Białystok (Radziszewski’s hometown) were met with rage and violence (the words of The New York Times) as homophobic insults were hurled at them by right-wing advocates. [22]

Both exhibitions continue the archival line practiced by different art institutions reflecting on their past recent years, such as Working Title: Archive at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź presented in 2009, which revived the memory of the museum’s most remarkable shows and marked the launch of its second site. As the written guide to the Łódź show stated: “Today’s culture is constantly in archive mode — documenting and attempting to preserve every aspect of the reality that surrounds us”. [23] On a wall at Too Many Stories… we see a poster of the exhibition by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Enthusiasts (2004), the first iteration of their long-run “extensive research amongst the remnants of amateur film clubs in Poland under socialism”, recently acquired and featured online by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. [24] In that sense, art institutions become libraries, gathering and preserving various traces of the past, and activating them whenever needed. Missing links in the CCA’s timeline can serve as fertile ground for its future programming — disseminating knowledge and using mediation tools to highlight what has been overlooked and sometimes to repeat what is already known. In the final room we see eight TV screens collecting documentations from the backstage of exhibitions, revealing how quickly they were assembled. “The Centre is a field of action, it attracts attention” the subtitles read. The opening of Marina Abramović’s show is blended with a press conference with Annie Leibovitz, interviews or artist talks, excerpts from workshops, documentations of performances and the Animal Pyramid by Katarzyna Kozyra from 1993, which is one of the most emblematic works of Polish critical art. Publications by CCA are laid out on tables with posters from shows above them: Tony Oursler (1999), Jenny Holzer’s Street Art (1993), Nedko Solakov (2000), Devil’s Playground by Nan Goldin (2003). Curators reveal that Devil’s Playground “is a show that Karol Radziszewski mentions as having helped him to come out”.

queer archives in “the power of secrets” and the cca’s collection, with its backroom micro histories, complement each other, in the sense that informal narratives often push the boundaries of what is called official.

 

ZR: I would like to ask more about the archival impulse. What’s behind this need to deal with archives, what motivated you to start doing it?

 

KR: I have said it many times — it is important for me that it is about identity, or at least the first impulse was about identity. When I did the first openly homosexual exhibition in Polish history it was 2005 [25] and I had seen things by Paweł Leszkowicz’s, [26] some faint traces of the past. And when I officially came out and saw people’s reaction — that of my mother and of my environment — I realised that there are zero reference points. And there’s nothing in history or in Polish art to lean on as an artist, to refer to, even to see yourself in. So then I understood that the lack of voices and the absence of these themes in the public sphere is a form of repression. […] And this exhibition is the quintessence of it — it is a political work intended to build the visibility of this history that existed, but that had to be discovered and conveyed in a form that made it readable for people. Because all these things existed, functioned somewhere — these historical figures, figures from Poczet [27] or archival figures, — so what I’ve started to do is meant to enable others to find out, like I have found out.

Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka

Considering the two exhibitions only through the archivalist point of view would not do full justice to the curators’ interest and the dimension of the exhibitions. “The CCA’s tradition of exhibition-making in an almost spontaneous manner derives from theatre rather than from the visual arts”. Bik Van der Pol’s curator and writer Joanna Zielińska is known for her cutting-edge curatorial proposals, often connected with time-based arts, such as her recent projects at the CCA: Performance TV co-curated with Michał Grzegorzek and Agnieszka Sosnowska (2017−2020), Objects Do Things (2016) or Nothing Twice at Cricoteka in Kraków (2014), and The Book Lovers, exploring written work by visual artists alongside David Maroto (ongoing from 2011). [28] Zielińska previously worked as artistic director at Znaki Czasu Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Toruń, Poland, where she curated the inaugural exhibition and the institution’s programme (2008−2010). Reenactments as part of Far Too Many Stories… are by a group of artists and amateurs from different backgrounds and origins, including storyteller Agnieszka Ayen Kaim, singer Mamadou Góo Bâ and choreographer Ania Nowak helped by Jagoda Szymkiewicz. All of them were given the final script to interpret so that they could choose parts of it and select objects to focus on. Billy Morgan leads an intriguing tour around selected works in the exhibition, asking the audience to repeat gestures or sentences after him while confessing personal stories: “Yesterday I presented my performance in the sculpture park at Królikarnia and a man I don’t know yelled ‘pedał’ [eng. faggot]. It was a reminder that public space is not a utopian free-for-all, it is a deeply insecure, heterosexist topography governed by its own set of norms”. The touching works tackling body issues are particularly noteworthy and resonate with performances complementing the exhibition such as Family of the Future by Oleg Kulik (1999), “a visualisation of all living creatures living happily together”, as the wall-text tells us, Barbara Kruger’s Your Body Is a Battleground (1989) originally created for the 1989 women’s rights demonstrations in Washington DC and shown in Warsaw in 1995 (resonating with passage in the Polish Parliament of legislation allowing abortion in certain instances), or Nan One Month after Being Battered by Nan Goldin (1984), “I took that picture so that I would never go back to him,” says Goldin about the man who attacked her. In this way the exhibition documents the bodies of the artist and not only institutional archives. Far Too Many Stories… shows objects and artifacts, activates stories through performances and includes a selection of videos documenting such works as Other Dances (one of the most emblematic spectacles of Akademia Ruchu), performances by Antoni Mikołajczyk, a film on Andrzej Dłużniewski blended with a public talk by Barbara Kruger, an interview with Nan Goldin or excerpts of an exhibition by Yoko Ono. In the next room there is a collection of posters and publications that accompanied the shows. Far Too Many Stories… also offers another significant mediation tool: the Other Lessons programme, focused on Akademia Ruchu, aims “to merge the past with the present”, Zielińska says. It includes workshops with artists such as Alex Baczyński, who uses some of AR’s performances as references, and with Jolanta Krukowska, a performer, who worked in the collective for nearly three decades with her life partner Wojciech Krukowski. A range of guided tours sheds light on the complex nature of CCA’s collection, including tours led by curators who have worked here for many years and a conservator who discusses works that were hard to deal with due to the unusual materials from which they were made. Marek Kijewski’s black-red bust on a plinth, Fred Flintstone of Knossos (1997), covered with a specific type of Haribo jelly beans is a case in point: disintegrating parts of the work were hard to replace with new ones due to declining popularity of the confectionery. Works with collective authorship such as a painterly installation by Winter Holiday Camp also pose difficulties: how can a work that was created by a people now in different locations be maintained? The problem is also relevant for collections and archives in a broader sense: how do we make sure we care for them properly? And what happens to objects with non-obvious status?

Bik Van der Pol. Far Too Many Stories to Fit into so Small a Box. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Pat Mic

KR: I have very unique things that people donate to me privately, for example the costumes that Ryszard Kisiel used for photo sessions and photos that I developed myself (the originals are slides, 300 of them) in one suitcase. Ryszard thought that they had burned in my studio, [29] but they were squeezed in between the clothes. […] This is a queer strategy of moving it [the archive], not having your own headquarters, and on the other hand, using the institution as much as possible to digitise, scan, correct, do conservation, insure it. […] I think I have to set up a foundation, because people don’t realise how much money is needed to digitise a large amount of materials, to keep them in good condition and to work with it at all. […] For example, one could say of my film Afterimages, [30] which is exclusively about one of Kisiel’s photographic films: “He just scanned it and recorded sound”. But scanning this one film, without touching it, so that it didn’t disintegrate, cost 900 zloty (each frame can be enlarged to the size of a billboard). And Ryszard has three hundred of these negatives.

 

ZR: And somewhere, at some point you have to choose something more valuable and sacrifice something else, right?

 

KR: Yes, but I also work in batches. We are also coming back to what is, maybe, an interesting topic… a bit of selfishness: you get something special and the question is how quickly you share it. Because everyone expects it immediately. If you make a discovery — you have knowledge, you take a journey, pay for the trip, convince someone, have a conversation, understand what it is, scan it, — people think that you immediately put it on the Internet and it is going to be everyone’s property, preferably in high resolution. Most people have this attitude — activists, scholars. And I think that ultimately such a democratisation of access is great — I would, of course, want a huge website with everything. But if something is part of the work, one of the stages, then I have to decide what I will take care of now, and what to hold back until I know what it is all about.

 

ZR: But I also sensed — correct me, if I’m wrong — a moment of suspension in this process, finding pleasure in having something just for yourself.

 

KR: It’s just exciting. But we’re now also talking about sources, from which I create works. When I work on residences and show the effects — like in Belarus or in Romania — that’s usually one work. (…) This exhibition shows a lot of such effects, fruits, transformations. I sometimes need to hold something for myself, enjoy it, or have exclusive use of it, so that I can then create a work that will be able to act as something more, something new.

What is perhaps more remarkable in the context of both exhibitions is the collaborative dimension of the project and the blurred borders between the exhibition format and the accompanying programme. Quite different for both: Bik Van der Pol’s presentation of their research project encompasses works conceived for the institution by many artists or left on site almost involuntarily. “Works were made for the space. And artists donated works (…) No contract, so a lot is unclear,” as the second speaker’s voice puts it. For Karol Radziszewski it flows from his practice of mapping queer microhistories almost from the beginning, restoring the memory of overlooked bodies and quotes from stories, “for the very first time with full awareness”, as he puts it, looking back at his queer childhood.

 KR: Take this Donald Duck — quite late, just before the exhibition, I found a drawing that I had done, and it is from exactly the same year as the collage by Ryszard Kisiel with the AIDS Donalds that inspired me to make this wallpaper. So when I recalled this sticker, which I put on a pencil case or backpack as a child, it suddenly turned out that this Donald Duck was also present in this form [points to his mural] — there is a sailor, a tattoo with a heart… And of course it was not conscious, but now, as I look at it through everything that I know about queer things, it can be decoded in many ways. The basic interpretation would be that my imagination, that of a 9-year-old boy in Białystok, and the imagination of Ryszard Kisiel in Gdansk, who was sticking it in the first gay zine, met somewhere. For me it is also a matter of queer time, queer memory — cross-generational, connecting memory.

Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka

Shortly after the opening of the two exhibitions, CCA announced Michał Borczuch’s performative installation Untitled (Together Again), activated live on three different occasions, which looks back at “the past intertwinement of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and political changes, especially the political transformation in Poland”, framed alongside two shows as Performing Archives.

Queer archives in The Power of Secrets and the CCA’s collection, with its backroom micro histories, complement each other, in the sense that informal narratives often push the boundaries of what is called official, bringing a new understanding of how the institutional context can serve both for its own sake and for art practice, both as a consequence of an artist’s own endeavours and a vivisection initiated through someone else’s objective or a shared objective.

Both of the exhibitions and the current context in which they appear — a change in the management of the CCA — send us back to the 1990s, the “heroic years” of an institution in the making and the pre-teen years of Radziszewski, whose protagonists such as Ryszard Kisiel were active at the time and would appear afterwards in his Queer Archives Institute. A large part of Ryszard Kisiel’s archival matter appears — accessories from photo sessions displayed in the showcases or copies of spreads from his magazine Filo, alongside covers of other magazines such as Inaczej (Polish for “Differently”) or Okay.

A crucial part of Radziszewski’s practice is the enlivening of under-represented and significant figures and concepts of queer identity. Looking at the current practices of institutions that include a queer retro-perspective in their programme (Van Abbe Museum’s long-term project Queering the Collection with reading groups, guided tours and other activities addressed to overlooked queer communities, or the major recent Keith Haring retrospective at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels), we could imagine that the CCA is considering a similar direction. And blockbuster institutional shows in recent years representing women artists show how contemporary art institutions are working to restore forgotten protagonists and rediscover important culture-forming characters that have been pushed to the margins in the past. It is clear that works by Karol Radziszewki and Bik Van der Pol’s proposal work very well in the institutional context. DIK Fagazine, a quarterly founded in 2005 which used to be Radziszewski’s trademark, with an uncanny logo by Monika Zawadzki of two penises facing each, has been showcased at the CCA several times, and Radziszewski already had a solo show there, I Always Wanted, back in 2007. This year’s event gives full rein to his almost obsessive way of working through the archives. It is the first such complete archival presentation in Poland, and has already been shown at Videobrasil (São Paulo, Brazil), Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art (Minsk, Belarus), Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (Bogota, Colombia) and Schwules Museum (Berlin, Germany), to name but a few venues.

Do the exhibitions tell us something about unknown archives or is it rather that the archives tell us about protagonists from the margins of the art world’s interest? In the opening part of Bik Van der Pol’s show we see a pile of stones which were a component of the installation Stone Circle by Richard Long (1977). The installation remained in the Castle’s deposit, but lost its certificate of authenticity and reverted to a material artifact. “This piece… it is such a shame it is covered with paint,” as we read in a line of a “dynamic script” describing Lawrence Weiner’s Far Too Many Things to Fit Into So Small a Box. The artist and the curator agreed in 1996 that the work would remain during the renovation works planned for the following year. The renovation did not happen, and the work became an informal CCA trademark until its removal a few years ago. The work now serves as the title of the show and its leitmotif of the show. Bik Van der Pol explains: “We live in very strange and radical times. If we think about climate change, maybe it would be best to get as high up as possible, to save yourself from the worst. The coastlines of Great Britain and the Netherlands will collapse, rivers will dry up, forests will be on fire, people will migrate to northern parts of the planet and the global economy will fall apart. You may say: I would like to be on a mountain in Switzerland, but actually it doesn’t matter where you will be. The best and the worst in people will come out in a situation where their lives are at stake. Lawrence Weiner’s Far Too Many Things to Fit Into So Small a Box could be seen as speaking to this as well”.

It would be easy to slip into a simplistic listing of similarities and differences between these two distinct exhibitions at the CCA. But both of them deserve a more detailed description.

The monographic exhibition of Karol Radziszewski’s works is to some extent a retrospective, as it seems to look chronologically at different stages of his practice, but it is primarily an installation, in which the artist creates an assemblage composed of his earliest and more recent works. The “childhood drawings which covered the pages of his school notebooks” (1989, 2017—ongoing, painting, acrylic on canvas; murals) depict figures of extremely femininity, at once Barbie and drag queen, together with other doodles in coloured felt-tip pen, through which Radziszewski dialogues with his preteen past. The innocent secret of a coming-of-age boy’s dream of being a princess becomes a radical statement, reenacted in a blown-up version on the walls of an institution. This entry backdrop becomes significant as it bridges past and present, a gesture that is also apparent in a series of paintings (O Snob, 2019, painting, acrylic on canvas) inspired by the front covers of an underground Brazilian queer magazine published in Rio in the 1960s, edited mostly by trans people using cosplay as a way of discovering identity.

Karol Radziszewski. Afterimages (film still). 2018. Courtesy: Artist and BWA Warszawa

ZR: You spoke of establishing historical continuity, that you were building a bridge for yourself and you were looking for identity, iconographic sources, some actions that would allow you to put yourself in context. But I also understand that at some point the mission began: you said that people seized on it and that it is also important for them. So from being a researcher for yourself, you became a researcher for others as well.

KR:There’s another important element here: this princess wearing glasses or the crucified princess… these are like my self-portraits. And it was also a surprise to me, something that I didn’t do too much in my art — and I don’t even mean drag, but entering this other sex, which suddenly appeared here as a child. It was surprise to me too. That’s why this princess is so huge. I have an awesome picture of my parents standing beside her and they are about half her size. So they stand alongside the great Karolina. I was supposed to be called Karolina.

The greater part of the exhibition is a non-linear collage of footnotes, artist’s findings and focus showcases, including the Queer Archive Institute in the central part of the exhibition with 22 Picasso-esque paintings (Poczet, 2017, paintings, acrylic on canvas) of non-heteronormative people from Polish history, looking out boldly at the viewer as if asserting their role as heroes (heroines?) of the QAI. Here, Radziszewski, in a way that is very significant for his practice as archivist or curator, shows other people’s work: a red (“carmine”) room dedicated to art historian and researcher Wojciech Skrodzki (Hommage à WS, 2019), which is an exhibition re-enactment co-curated with Szymański himself, or the archives of Ryszard Kisiel with extracts from Filo zine and props from his photo sessions, as well as a series of stills from a carnival party at the T-Club in Prague by Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková (T-Club, 1983−1986, inkjet prints). “Gay and lesbian clubs in post-Soviet countries — hidden in cellars, behind unmarked doors, promoted by word of mouth were — the perhaps still are — the most formative centers of the queer community,” we read in the work’s description. Radziszewski also evokes the recent past of Europe’s margins: Belarusian (Invisible (Belarusian) Queer History, 2016, analogue photographs) and Ukrainian (Was Taras Shevchenko Gay?, 2017, installation), resonating well with Wolfgang Tillmans’ series of portraits from Saint-Petersburg (Saint Petersburg LGBT Community, 2014, chromogenic prints). The exhibition also shows an ever growing collection of videos by Karol Radziszewski, including a series of interviews focused on queer and trans protagonists, conceived during QAI residencies, and others created though invitations such as Interview with Laerte (2016, video, 39′) featuring Laerte Coutinho, a Brazilian artist and activist, and an interview with Ewa Hołuszko, a major and until recently overlooked figure in Poland’s Solidarity movement who had to confront attempts at exclusion due to her transition process (Interview with Ewa Hołuszko (fragments), 2019, video, 30′). Radziszewski is also the author of a number of other film productions, some of which are shown in the CCA’s cinema (Sebastian, 2010, 4’30”; MS 101, 2012, 50′; Backstage, 2011, 38′; The Prince, 2014, 71′), together with videos and films by other artists (Przemek Branas, Agne Jokse, Dawid Nickel and Liliana Piskorska).

ZR: Where do you keep your archive?

 

KR: In my bedroom, because one studio burnt down and the other was partly flooded. So there are only relics of the second category, like doubled magazines or VHS cassettes. But I keep negatives in boxes in the wardrobe with clothes.

 

ZR: I am sorry to hear that. Did you lose much that was valuable in these disasters?

 

KR: Well, five years ago I lost all my work up to the age of 29, everything I had done. Other than childhood notebooks, which were at my parents’ home, all of the work I did up to the end of my studies was burnt with the studio. Over a hundred paintings, polaroids, most of DIK’s archives, sketches, gifts from artists.

 

ZR: Oh no… and how do you feel as an artist-archivist who lost such a large part of his private archive?

 

KR: Well, apart from the trauma and the fact that I lost a lot of work, I also lost a lot of money — there were whole photo exhibitions that I had produced, 70 photos, large, hand-made prints in wooden frames that I had been working on for half a year. I can’t afford to do the whole series again. Then I moved to a small, clean studio, which was meant to be an office, and repainted three works that had been burnt. But I went away for a week and when I came back the ceiling had leaked (someone upstairs had a clogged bathtub) and the works that I had repainted after the fire were flooded. So, then I realized that it is… Having lived through this trauma, I felt that I didn’t want to be an archivist, I didn’t want to deal with this materiality, to be responsible for all this. There was a period when I wanted to get rid of it all, sell it to some institution, so that someone else would take responsibility for it. But it wasn’t possible, the years went by … And then I made movies. I had a clean white studio, I made films, I didn’t paint, I didn’t want to produce any material things at all, and I only had two small boxes with these archives. The exhibition dedicated to DIK Fagazine and the archive of my magazine had been packed into a box after the exhibition and was in the middle of the studio that burnt down, so it was also burnt, the box containing all that.

 

ZR:So you self-archived your works, and they got lost anyway…

 

KR: Yes, and I thought long and hard at that point about what to do, because I didn’t want to have it on my mind. But the months and years went by […] and the archives began to accumulate again.

[…]

ZR: And what about Polish lesbian artists who might want to look for some kind of continuity for themselves?

 

KR: The biggest success is the cooperation with Liliana Piskorska, which is not just history — it is something we are building into the future. We have [shown and — K.R.] produced her works twice as part of the Pomada festivals. They became part of the narrative and I believe that this has also given her more mainstream visibility. […] The Queer Archives collection is also intended to create contemporary queer art, following the tradition of an exchange gallery. So I exchange works with other artists. And everyone is usually younger than me, because it is all such a fresh topic. People are happy to exchange, and I create a private collection — but also as part of the Queer Archives — of the queer art of the region, and that is a source of strength. These are not historical works or strictly an artistic cooperation, but my works resonate with them, and I choose them, so that I already have the beginnings of a pretty cool collection. I have drawings by Tolik [Anatoly] Belov, [31] a Ukrainian, from the period when he started working openly as the first gay [artist — K.R.], so I can put this together [with mine]. I have drawings of his daughter, whom he adopted, which also interest me — the issue of queer children. I also have Polish artists — I exchange work with Liliana. I will also create a collection of contemporary Eastern European queer art that will travel and also various curators could arrange their own travelling exhibitions. So there are a lot of plans for the future.

Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka

These two solo presentations accentuating archives as their method are widely inclusive and open-format shows where different bodies tell their own stories. The Power of Secrets begins with the queer childhood of the artist and each feature becomes a QAI artefact extending through the exhibition rooms. The creativity of Natalia LL, whose solo exhibition Secretum et Tremor was presented exactly three years ago at the CCA, works very well in this context. Her work Dulce-Post Mortem, 2019 (photographs of three neon lights tracing abstract characters) seems to conclude the exhibition.

Stressing the status of Far Too Many Stories… as an exhibition in motion, curator Joanna Zielińska says that “Even the work by Alina Szapocznikow, considered to be the beginning of the collection, was loaned from 2002 and will soon be taken back to its owner”. The show works both as a solo and collaborative proposal with countless voices gathered for its making, the objects selected according to the interlocutors’ visions, voices by Ania Nowak and Billy Morgan coming from speakers in an audioscape designed by Wojciech Blecharz, and with posters designed by the Warsaw duo Fontarte. Bik Van der Pol’s exhibition is a site-specific installation looking at the CCA’s past and its traditions and can serve to locate the current position of the Centre and its future programme. Far Too Many Stories and Power of Secrets testify to the Centre’s resilience, its ability to present different types of archival matter and artistic research. “The archives are useful. This is activism. It is the core business of the Centre”, as one of the voices suggests.

ZR: In socially-engaged research, anthropological or ethnographic, there is the concept of “action research” — you meet, act with a community, because you want to acquire some knowledge, create something, but also to improve their situation. Is it something you can relate to? Are you interested in such research, in a change-making activity?

 

KR: You know, I certainly care about change-making, but I’m not always able to use these methods because they take time. So, depending on the country and situation, I unfortunately have to step into the role of someone who kindles something, continues, tosses it and often people just continue in some other way. This happened in Minsk, where as well as meeting with historians, I met with activists and we just talked for an hour and they said that they were also starting archives, they took out my DIKs, my magazines, which they had somehow got on the Internet, which they already had at home, and they asked me where to begin. It was a kind of workshop, a very specific one.

Those two exhibitions, as critical inquiries into the past and possible futures of Polish institutions mark a turning point and a new chapter in the history of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. A major shift in the CCA’s programme is expected after the conservative Piotr Bernatowicz [32] was appointed director of the institution at the start of 2020. The nomination has evoked substantial concern both at the liberal end of the Polish art scene and internationally. [33] The CCA is a pioneering contemporary art centre in Poland, its history collates with the history of democratic transformation in Poland after 1989 and it has always been perceived a cutting-edge site for bold and critical exhibitions and presentations, a flag bearer since the 1990s for freedom of speech and the polyphonic blooming of intersecting narratives and perspectives, as Bik Van der Pol has clearly showed in the latest exhibition. For three decades (notably under Wojciech Krukowski, from 1990 till 2010) CCA was not just an institutional role model for other galleries in Poland (though, of course, with its own issues and flaws), but also a place where artistic dialogue with the audience and open cultural and political debate were shaped – a genuine agora. One might ask: will the latest exploratory exhibition be enough for this narrative to be sustained or will it be altered? Will it preserve collective memory? Will the CAA transform into an even more spacious shelter for cultural micronarratives, including overlooked conservative voices, as Bernatowicz declares, but without banishing liberal voices? Ujazdowski Castle remains one of the leading art institutions in Poland, with huge impact on the Polish contemporary art scene, and these two exhibitions raise the more general question how the historical narrative of contemporary art and its future will be reshaped. Hopefully, the narrative will become not only polyphonic, but even more heterogeneous and less centre-oriented.

Acknowledgements: Michał Grzegorzek, Billy Morgan, Karol Radziszewski, Joanna Zielińska, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

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museums as conflict zones

Museums are places that produce and expose values.

Values necessary lead to conflicts.

Museums are places of multiple conflicts.

Indeed, as James Clifford famously put it, museums are contact zones of negotiations between communities and stakeholders [1]. At least, ideally.

As this short essay seeks to show, for decades and even centuries museums have, in fact, been contact zones of failed negotiations. For all that time they have, in essence, avoided their true role. This approach, which views the museum as a place of crisis, lets us conceptualize the museum as a key institution in contemporary society and a source of ongoing class, national, and cultural conflict. The Louvre has, since its creation, always been the model for a modern public museum. Its collection and its function as an art museum of national glory was consolidated after Napoleon’s march through Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. French authorities and troops diligently and systematically expropriated museum treasures from neighboring countries, particularly Italy and Germany, and the looted art was accumulated in the Louvre. Several European museums then followed the Louvre’s example in building their own collections. This is how the modern history of museums began: national triumph and cultural accomplishments were synergetic to tyranny and robbery and generated a tension between nations and museums that lasted for decades [2].

Horse Theft from Berlin (Pferdedieb von Berlin). Caricature depicting Napoleon stealing the Quadriga from the Brandenbirg Gate. C. 1813. Courtesy: Maria Silina

The sequence of events, initiated by Napoleon’s act of plunder, continues to our day. Several lesser-known episodes occurred at the time of the First World War. When war broke out, a number of German cultural activists set to work identifying and locating works of art that had been looted by Napoleon. In case of victory, they intended to press for the repatriation of these works. Wilhelm von Bode, a founding father of modern museology, was especially enthusiastic and active in this act of historical justice [3]. Another museum worker, Ernst Steinmann, Director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana carried out comprehensive research into Napoleon’s looted art. For diplomatic reasons it was only published nearly a century later, in 2007 [4].

Steinmann’s archive research was the first step towards the creation of a Europe-wide map of plundered museum treasures. Demands for restitution extended even to the Russian Empire, or the country that by late 1917 had become Soviet Russia. In 1815, the Russian Emperor Alexander I purchased several paintings from the Malmaison Palace of the Empress Joséphine near Paris, which had been removed from the collection of Wilhelm VIII of Hesse-Kassel. Steinmann’s survey listed 21 paintings, originally held in Germany, which had reached St. Petersburg in this way. Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross (1634), now a core work in the Hermitage collection, is among them.

Hector Viger. At Malmaison, the Empress Josephine receives the Emperor Alexander (L’impératrice Joséphine reçoit à la Malmaison la visite du Tsar Alexandre Ier). 1864 © Malmaison, Musée national du château. Courtesy: Maria Silina

One obvious role of museums is to “normalize” societal conflicts. Museums serve as repositories of treasures that are endangered by wars, revolutions, and other natural disasters and human conflicts [5]. The Russian revolution of 1917 is an excellent example of such a process of normalization through an epic crisis.

Soviet historians claimed that the Russian revolution represented a major success in restoration and heritage practice, as thousands of previously inaccessible ecclesiastical treasures, icons, decorative objects, paintings, and the magnificent interiors of former Imperial palaces and homes of the wealthy aristocracy became public property. In 1914, Russia counted 180 museums, by 1920 it had 381, and by 1928 there were 805 (the second largest number of any country in the world) [6]. This was made possible by “nationalization” – a euphemism for the forced expropriation of private and corporate property [7]. Armed with revolutionary mandates, museum workers took charge of previously closed private collections and large repositories of treasures, particularly those of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a review of Western museological practice, Viktor Lazarev, a Soviet art historian of Byzantine and Medieval Russian art, called restoration the sole advanced domain in Soviet museology, thanks to the unprecedented influx of antiquities to museums after the 1917 revolution [8]. So museum workers in Russia were, on the one hand, agents in safeguarding cultural items and, on the other hand, intruders and expropriators, armed with state decrees and mandates [9].

finally, museums are ideal places to practice the althusserian symptomatic reading centered on the absence of problems or any other kind of institutional critique. museums are places that hide societal and class conflicts.

One inevitable outcome of this “heritage protection” and creation of the Soviet museum network was the separation of objects from their original settings. The treasures of a few former Imperial and aristocratic palaces were kept where they were found (some of the palaces at Petergof and Detskoe Selo near St. Petersburg), but others, like those at Gatchina, the Paley Palace in Detskoe Selo, the Winter, Anichkov, and Shuvalov Palaces in St. Petersburg, were dispersed to museums, governmental, educational and cultural institutions, or even sold abroad [10]. The icons from the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius in Moscow region were taken from the Orthodox Church and became the core of the icon exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery (Russia’s national gallery) [11]. The vagaries of war and revolution, as well as diplomatic initiatives led to major migrations of cultural objects at this time. The collection and library of the University Museum of Tartu (now Estonia) was evacuated eastward in 1915 in Nizhny Novgorod then in 1918 to Voronezh. After Estonia declared its independence, the country’s museum workers sought the return of the University collection and set to work on creation of a united museum catalogue (the work remains incomplete today) [12]. Ukraine and Poland also initiated a process of restitution of museum and cultural items under the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, signed at the end of Soviet-Polish War. Ukraine was unsuccessful in obtaining restitution of its museum collections [13], while Poland pursued negotiations at the highest level until the eve of the Second World War (from 1921 until 1937) [14]. The displacement of cultural treasures creates a special ambiguity in the functioning of museums, calling into question their role as untouchable containers of authenticity.

Konstantin Korygin. Vacation retreat of the The Red Army Air Force in Marfino. 1937. Courtesy: Maria Silina

The most striking and far-reaching action of isolating objects from their national and cultural settings is undoubtedly the colonial expropriation of cultural goods in the 19th and 20th centuries. The issue was recently highlighted by Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, who in autumn 2017 called for a process of restitution of Africa’s looted heritage. A year later, in November 2018, a state-commissioned report, entitled “Toward a New Relational Ethics” was published by Bénédicte Savoy, the leading European museologist and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese scholar and cultural activist. Restitution requests, led by Ethiopia and Nigeria, date from the 1960s, but have drawn little attention until today. According to the Savoy-Sarr report, the British Museum holds 69,000 objects from Africa, the Weltmuseum in Vienna has 37,000, the soon-to-open Humboldt Forum in Berlin lists 75,000 and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris has 70,000. Meanwhile, as of 2007, all the museums on the African continent have no more than 3000 objects [15]. The report is radical in its assumptions. It calls for a restitution process based on the assumption that all kinds of displacement of objects from the African continent during the colonial era (particularly from 1885 to 1960), including military trophies, objects brought back from scientific missions and expeditions of all kinds, as well as special gifts should be treated in the context of colonial mobilization and exploitation of the economy, politics, and culture of African countries [16].

View of interior of the Museum of quai Branly. Paris. Courtesy: Maria Silina

The state and museum authorities today generally acknowledge that many museum collections were accumulated in dubious ways. When the legality of ownership is put in question or contested, they often respond in an idealist perspective, citing moral and cultural considerations. Anti-restitution strategies vary from assertions of the “universality” of Africa’s heritage to the alleged incapacity of African countries to collect and safeguard their heritage [17], A popular counter strategy is to champion the creation of new “universal” museums. One of the most ambitious initiatives of this kind is led by Berlin museums, which plan to open the Humboldt Forum in Berlin — a hyper-universal museum, which will amalgamate collections from the city’s state museums, including the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst. The concept was put forward in 2002 in the well-known Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, signed by the heads of major state museums in North American and Europe. The second part of the Declaration is worth citing in full (with some minor omissions): “The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums. Indeed, the sculpture of classical Greece, to take but one example, is an excellent illustration of this point and of the importance of public collecting.
<…> Calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collections for many years have become an important issue for museums. Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Museums are agents in the development of culture, whose mission is to foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation. Each object contributes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors” [18].

Humboldt Forum. Berlin. Cover of the review. March 2018. Courtesy: Maria Silina

The Humboldt Forum in Berlin, due to open in 2019, promotes itself as just such a “place for all”, likening its concept to that of the old Kunstkammer — a collection of art and marvels (usually the privilege of royal or wealthy personages) where “objects from local and foreign cultures were divided into the categories of nature (naturalia), science (scientifica), and art (artificialia)” [19]. In this perspective educational goals and the spectacular diversity of objects overshadow the problematic of any restitution claims.

Alongside assertion of the universalist and normalizing objectives of museums, some institutions are attempting more nuanced strategies to deflect restitution claims. One initiative by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (a participant in the Humboldt project) is particularly intriguing. In 2017, the Staatliche Museen launched a funding program addressed to recent immigrants from Syria and Iran, who would be trained as volunteer museum guides for the Near East collection. This project promotes socially meaningful actions like mapping local immigrant culture and legacy in a metropole, engaging local immigrants and inviting 20−25 people to work with their national art while gently avoiding any questions of restitution [20]. The British Museum, another fervent defender of universal values of art [21], which has been under a barrage of restitution claims from Greece in recent decades, has followed the Berlin initiative [22].

Finally, museums are ideal places to practice the Althusserian symptomatic reading centered on the absence of problems or any other kind of institutional critique [23]. Museums are places that hide societal and class conflicts.

Tellingly, today, it is mostly artists themselves and small museums which have been willing to subject underrepresentation in museums to critical scrutiny. The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts has added labels to works in the classical interior of the portrait gallery of respected citizens of the United States [24], telling visitors “which early American subjects benefited from slavery”, while the Baltimore Museum has sold works by established, mostly male artists in order to acquire works by underrepresented artists [25]. Canadian museums have taken some steps to readdress normativity of the colonial gaze by renaming paintings. So, for example, Emily Carr’s work, Indian Church (1929), is now exhibited under the title Church at Yuquot Village [26].

Portrait of Russell Sturgis. The new sign reads “In 1783 Russell Sturgis’s brothers-in-law … established a business in Santo Domingo, now Haiti, which traded in flour, horses, and slaves.” © The Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. Courtesy: Maria Silina

The #Metoo movement, which burst into the mass media and cultural world in early 2017, has encouraged redefinition and reframing of the persistently patriarchal and “grands hommes” strategies of museum, as well as addressing neglect of human rights violations by artists. Michelle Hartney recently intervened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a series of labels that tell a neglected story behind famous paintings by such artists as Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Balthus. The text placed by Hartney next to Paul Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women (1899) cites a comment by the feminist author, Roxanne Gay: “We can no longer worship at the altar of creative genius while ignoring the price all too often paid for that genius. In truth, we should have learned this lesson long ago, but we have a cultural fascination with creative and powerful men who are also ‘mercurial’ or ‘volatile,’ with men who behave badly” [27]. The labels were quickly removed from the museum.

Another case — that of the video by Beyoncé and Jay-Z shot in the Louvre, which went viral in 2018 — is especially important for grasping the twofold image of the modern museum as an open-to-all institution promoting cultural accomplishments and a successful enterprise based on capitalist productivity. It provoked heated debates about the acceptability of filming a pop-music video in a major museum and the message behind the oeuvre of American celebrities. The artists wanted to critically reframe the absence of black history and culture in museums, an action to be read in the context of the Decolonize this Place initiative. But what the debate set off by the video showed most clearly was the scale and depth of belief in the museum as a place of art and culture, which must not be “endangered” by pop culture. Interestingly, the video has also revealed much about the managerial strategies of the Louvre, a museum that, according to hundreds of social network commentaries and posts, is still perceived as an untouchable and elitist sanctuary for white, eurocentric culture. In reality, the Louvre has recently taken unprecedented steps to market and rent out its “sacred spaces” to all sorts of commercial activity, attracting wealthy corporations and Hollywood giants to make use of its halls [28].

Screenshot from Apeshit video by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David at the background. 2018. Courtesy: Maria Silina

This synergy of museums and the marketing industry is increasingly prevalent. Urban museums have become highly visible and controversial agents of the hyper-and overproduction of cultural goods and commercialized public spaces. “Artwashing” and “gentrification” are important keywords that describe museums as agents of crisis in a context of societal disparities (museums are also tellingly described as “brandscape spots” and “mass tourist attractions”). The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement — a coalition of affinity groups in Los Angeles [29] — is leading an anti-gentrification war in the US city: “What the neighborhood needs”, the groups insist, “is more affordable housing, and residential services such as grocery stores and laundromats” and not museums and art galleries for a privileged few [30]. Numerous studies have shown at museums tend to be integrated into exclusive cultural districts and “museum islands”, conglomerates of pure (consumerist) culture segregated from social facilities [31].

Recent exposés of the role of museums in urban social erasure as well as other controversial aspects of museum life (the irregular or unlawful way in which national collections were amassed, museums that were created thanks to war and revolution, as well as hidden social and cultural conflicts behind museum displays) make the crisis angle of museum functionality highly thought-provoking. They demonstrate the embeddedness of museums in the state ideological apparatus and the successful institutional enterprise of modern national regimes. Museums as creations of nationalism, idealism, and the class-agenda of Western culture will always be containers or vehicles of conflict. This elusive and paradoxical situation is well described by Donald Preziosi, who wrote that “the seeming luxury, marginality, or even disposability of the museum may be read in fact as the very mark of its totalizing achievement” [32].

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mikhail sumgin’s subterranean museum of eternity

In 1927 the Far Eastern Geophysical Laboratory published a book titled Permafrost soils in the USSR. The author, Mikhail Ivanovitch Sumgin, summarized disparate studies (some dating as far back as the 18th century) of crystosphenes, made a valid case for the use of the term “permafrost,” delineated the boundaries of the permafrost zone on the map and put forward a number of ground-breaking hypotheses and insights. For instance, he discussed the ancient, pre-historic genesis of this phenomenon and the gradual degradation (that is to say, the warming and thawing of permafrost and the concomitant decrease in the thickness or the areal extent of permafrost) in our times. Furthermore, in one of the chapters of his book Sumgin argued that a “subterranean museum of eternity” should be created in order to preserve the most valuable documents, samples of plants, animals and even corpses of people. The idea was to safeguard these “model exhibits” for future research and study by relying on the preserving properties of the frozen soils.

Such project went far beyond the narrow instrumentalist and practical attitude towards permafrost that had dominated Russia’s scientific discourse on the subject and its research since the late 19th century. In 1937, in the book’s second edition, Sumgin still asserted the importance and beneficial role of his museum project for the humankind as a whole. From his first encounters with the permafrost in 1910s onwards he opted for an integrated approach to this phenomenon, which he regarded as a “Russian Sphynx”, an enigma waiting to be solved. Sumgin’s passion, energy and personal integrity, his ability to think in terms of projects, ultimately led him to spearhead the institutional creation of the new branch of Soviet science: geocryology, the study of frozen soils.

A brief overview is due of the scientific context of the era and of Sumgin’s biography. From the 17th century onwards written sources have been mentioning accounts of the Cossacks about the subterranean ice deposits. However, for a long time it was believed that these disparate accounts were mere legends. The colonizers, faced with the necessity to procure water, could not dig wells, because the ground was frozen. The first discursive descriptions of permafrost (Lomonosov, Gmelin, Middendorf) are recorded in the 18−19th centuries.

In the first half of the 19th century, a certain Yakutian merchant by the name of Shergin managed to dig a well 116 meters deep. He did not reach water but the well shaft that he had dug became a scientific sensation of sorts and a testing site for measuring temperatures deep underground amidst the thickness of the ice. The outset of the construction of the Trans-Siberian inaugurated the new era in the study of permafrost from the practical point of view that took into consideration the tasks and objectives faced by the engineers. The industrial construction that was then underway necessitated development of specific methods and strategies of building on permafrost foundations, as well as the study of its properties and features. Different governmental agencies that had to do with the colonization of Siberia began to create specific departments and offices dedicated to the study of this phenomenon. One of these service agencies, the Amour Expedition of Transmigration Administration, came to play a vital role in the life of Mikhail Sumgin. By 1910, when Sumgin joined the Amour expedition, he was a political prisoner who had been exiled to the Tobolsk region.

A son of a scribe from a small Mordovian village, Sumgin was kicked out from the Saint Petersburg University (and not once, but twice!) for his participation in various underground groups and student riots. By the early 1900s he had joined the Socialist-Revolutionary party and was an enthusiastic member of Samara’s revolutionary circles. Most notably, he played an active role in the creation of the short-lived separatist peasant movement, the so-called Stary Buyan Republic, for which he was later sentenced to five years in exile. A chance encounter with the Asian expedition of the Transmigration Administration of the Ministry for Agriculture enabled Sumgin to participate in the scientific exploration and research in the Amour area, where he dedicated himself to the study of frozen soils. By 1917 Sumgin had become a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party but soon left the party because he disagreed with the terror that the SRs unleashed against the Bolsheviks. He appealed to the Joint State Political Directorate, asked to be rehabilitated and promised to abandon any political activity for good. The period of stagnation during which Sumgin was not able to lead a productive professional or social life lasted for ten years. Sumgin tried to survive, took on odd jobs as a common laborer, or statistician, while simultaneously writing a book about permafrost.

A portrait of M. I. Sumgin (Kristina Popova, 10 years old, Igarka).

The late 1920s saw the institutionalization of permafrost studies, the onset of what came to be known as “the golden decade” of the new branch of science, geocryology, and a rather happy time for Sumgin himself, who managed to spearhead and coordinate the entire process. In rapid succession a Commission for the Study of Permafrost was set up, followed by a Committee for the Study of Permafrost, until finally, in 1939 the Institute of Permafrost Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences headed by and named after Vladimir Obruchev was established. All this time scholarly works about permafrost were being published, special Arctic stations and laboratories for the study of frozen ground were being founded and university curricula were put together. Predictably, the major thrust of Soviet geocryology was quite practical: it was important to study this phenomenon in order to develop appropriate construction methods of building on frozen ground, to be able to drill all the way down to reach the sub-permafrost waters and to understand how permafrost can serve the country’s economy. Thus, Sumgin’s first book carries a characteristic preface written by the director of the Far East Geophysical Observatory P. Koloskov. The preface reads: “Our ultimate task should be the destruction of permafrost by the joined forces of science and technology” [1].

Nevertheless, Sumgin continued to promote his own figurative, “poetic” notion of “permanent frost” and to advocate his project of the Subterranean Museum of Eternity. His determination was given a further boost by the successful experiments conducted by P. N. Kapterev who reported on finding viable amoebas and ciliates in the Transbaikalian permafrost sediments at the Skovorodinskaya permafrost station in the 1930s [2]. Perhaps, sensing that his own project was vulnerable at best, in the 1937 introduction to the second edition of his book Sumgin maintains that his “fantasies” were perfectly realistic. In one of the chapters of his work he writes: “Would it be possible to completely reverse the situation and to let the scientists who would live tens of thousands of years after us, examine the animal world of today through the study of permafrost? In other words, can the preservation of dead bodies within the permafrost, which up until now has been a matter of whimsical accident, become the conscious objective of human activity?” [3].

He continues: “Let us now imagine a storage place dug inside the permafrost into which corpses of animals that are of practical and scientific interest to humanity are systematically deposited. Once every millennium, corpses of different animals will be taken out of the depository for study and comparison with similar species, who will inhabit that distant future. And this scientific research will be carried out from one millennium to the next. I will not go into details as to the significance of such a museum for science, this is a task better left to zoologists. I merely propose the idea of using permafrost as a scientific museum-cum-fridge. However, I cannot help but dwell on one specific idea. Human corpses belonging to people of differences races can also be stored in this museum for thousands of years.

What is going to happen to humanity many thousands of years from now, when people’s life styles, diet, occupations and their way of relating to each other will have changed beyond all recognition, and when humanity will have in fact merged to form one big family?

we are talking about an institution that should be able to continuously operate for thousands and thousands of years without a slightest interruption. even a minor interruption is bound to destroy the results of centuries and millennia of work.

Even beyond those ambitious objectives, it would be really interesting to chronicle the development and evolution of certain organs of the human body: brain, heart, the digestive system, etc. However, this museum-cum-refrigerator can serve other purposes as well. Continuous and uninterrupted exposure to the very low temperatures of the permanently frozen ground enables scientists to conduct experiments with long-term anabiosis lasting hundreds and even thousands of years…

Moreover, our museum built into the frozen ground can become a custodian of the most valuable and unique manuscripts of the famous people, of archival sources, of photographs documenting significant events and so much more… [4]“.

“We are talking about an institution that should be able to continuously operate for thousands and thousands of years without a slightest interruption. Even a minor interruption is bound to destroy the results of centuries and millennia of work. Can we really vouch for a refrigerator operating without a hitch, for thousands of years on end? No, we cannot guarantee that a surface-mounted refrigerator will be able to operate trouble-free for so long. In contrast, the “refrigerator” of the permanently frozen ground is certain to function without a hitch for thousands of years and to safely preserve its contents. Moreover, if a social or a geological disaster were to ever destroy the museum-refrigerator inside the permafrost, its contents would not be damaged, although it would be difficult for humanity at large to conceive of the contents of this subterranean repository. I am convinced that despite the skepticism of the “sensible” naysayers and “well-wishers”, such a museum is bound to be created one day to serve the humankind, and in doing so, it will contribute to its progress much more than the pyramids have ever done [5]“.

Thus, the conservation of model samples of plants, animals and cultural artifacts for the purposes of comparing them with the evolved “offsprings” in the distant future becomes the key objective for Sumgin. By way of example, he speaks of a horse, that progress is certainly bound to change biologically, and argues that it would be really illuminating and fruitful for science to be able to compare contemporary (early 20th century) horses with the horses of the future. The very idea of preserving model samples in order to compare them with similar species in the future is closely linked to the constituent practice of establishing wildlife sanctuaries and reserves that was popular in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s. These natural conservation areas were conceived of as a matrix or model of entire eco-systems that are subject to preservation. Sumgin’s ideas on the subject dovetailed with the thinking of V.V. Dokuchayev, V.I.Vernadsky and the like. Parenthetically, Vernadsky’s support of Sumgin and his authority in the academic community played a non-small part in the creation of the Commission for the Study of Permafrost in 1929.

Both editions of Sumgin’s book contain almost identical deliberations on the subterranean museum of eternity. The popular science-fiction publication “The Conquest of the North”, however, that Sumgin co-authored with Boris Demchinsky, a journalist, adds new touches to the subject: an enthusiastic description of the future museum itself: “The interior design of the museum can be very austere and simple, and yet magical, as if belonging in a fairy-tale. The pillaring and wall coverings leave much room for artistic creativity. Nothing on the surface above the site shall give away that there is a magnificent edifice concealed underneath. Perhaps, the only visible marker of the hidden museum would be the towers erected above the day-drifts equipped with elevating machines and integrated management of the lighting circuit and of automation devices installed inside the mines. Since the museum’s interior space needs to be guarded against the impact of exterior temperatures, the vertical passage into the mine should be fenced off with isolating compartments to prevent warm air from entering the galleries. Electric lamps with their warm light gushing out would have been dangerous for the permafrost. That is why their light should be cold. Cold air injected from outside might cool the lamps and eliminate that danger. Galleries will be located on several levels or floors of the structure, one above the other. This would enable engineers and planners to have spaces with different temperatures at their disposal. At a certain depth the change of cold and warm seasons no longer has its effect. While on the surface bitterly cold winters give way to sweltering summers and the torrents of spring ice over in autumn, deep down under the surface temperatures do not fluctuate and remain continuously very low. At a certain distance from the subterranean museum of permafrost (so as not to disturb its smooth operation), a city of science should be built, with laboratories, study rooms and apartment blocks for scientists and researchers. This will inevitably resuscitate the surrounding region, spurring its economic and cultural development…

This grandiose project would be unique and unrivaled in the entire world in terms of its scale and originality! Nothing would serve the cause of life better than its silent galleries. Science would translate their silence into its own language. The process of evolution in its entirety would be displayed right in front of the viewers’ eyes for all to see, thereby bringing into sharp relief the laws of life. Such a museum would be an invaluable gift for the future generations, exposing them to evolution, culture and the past in all their entirety [6].”

The lofty rhetoric and the non-academic tone of the book, among other things, suggest that it was probably authored by B. Demchinsky who drew on the ideas of Sumgin, rather than by Sumgin himself. Sumgin’s conception itself, just like the discursive field of the then nascent area of geocryology is located in between the noosphere as an area of thought and the practical studies of that period geared towards the creation of underground depositories to serve economic or industrial purposes, not unlike Krylov’s project for underground glacial storages.

Glacial storages designed by M. M. Krylov, created in the early 1930s.

For example, in December 1936, the geocyologists at the Igarka permafrost research station that at the time was operating under the auspices of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route (also known as Glavsevmorput’) began to construct a large-scale underground research laboratory. Constructors took particular interest in the issues of technical exploitation of subterranean spaces as natural refrigerators or traffic arteries. One of the underground chambers functioned as a biological museum since 1942. It contained frozen lizards, bumblebees, ruffes, as well as a sphinx-moth in the state of anabiosis, a ladybug and a fly. Scientists replenished the collection of the museum whenever possible and welcomed visitors.

Seeking to translate into life Sumgin’s idea about the preservation of documents, museum and historical objects de vertu inside the subterranean depositories, staff members of the Igarka permafrost research station decided to deposit a stack of war-time newspapers into this repository on April 6, 1950. Among the publications — “Pravda”, “Izvestia”, “Trud” and “Krasnoyarsky rabochy”. In memory of the war dead the entire staff of the Igarka permafrost research station with L.A. Meyster at the hem declared that the box filled with newspapers should be open on May 9, 2045. The newspapers were put inside a wooden container which had been specifically manufactured for the occasion and had been well insulated to keep humidity out. The box was then placed at the center of chamber # 5 at the depth of two meters below the floor. In March 1965, a piece of Whatman’s drawing paper (with the copy of the “Act” about the burial of the newspapers on it) was frozen-in, embedded into the permafrost [7].

The head of the permafrost research station, a certain A.M.Pchelintsev, decided to put into action Sumgin’s idea. Besides the conservation of biological material and valuable documentation proposed by Sumgin, Pchelintsev conceived of a project to construct an underground skating rink, or rather a 120-meter long race track in the shape of two concentric circles carved out of the permafrost. V. Yaroslavtsev, a journalist for the “Krsanoyarsky rabochy”, reported on this construction project: “The usual skating rinks in the Arctic are covered with layers and layers with snow during the heavy blizzards that last for many days on end. Moreover, it is not really that pleasant to skate outside when temperatures drop to — 40 degrees. [The new skating rink] will allow the locals to enjoy skating come rain or shine, in winter and in summer alike”.

Construction of the museum began in February 1965: chamber # 5 was enlarged to match the size (3×7) of the small hall of the Museum of Permafrost, designed by Pchelintsev. The “burial” place of the newspapers-filled box was properly fitted out, a copy of the “Act” documenting the burial of the newspapers was installed in a wall niche inside two sheets of ice. The floor of the chamber was covered with water and frozen thoroughly. And thus, work began to fill the museum with exhibits.

A special register of all the exhibits of this museum that dates back to March 20, 1965, contains a complete inventory of all the objects that constituted its first exposition: a total of 34 items, mostly academic scholarship on the study of permafrost. The books were embedded, frozen inside the sheet of clearest ice taken from the Yenisey River. Workers used electric carpenter’s plane to treat the ice sheets that were then filed down and smoothed thoroughly with the help of heated steel plates. The polished ice sheet was “stamped” with a hot stamping tool to match the size of the books. Books were then placed inside the indent and covered with another sheet of ice and finally frozen through and through with the help of wet snow.

Unfortunately, the “Diary of the Museum of Permafrost” does not contain entries for every occasion. The most detailed notes were made by the Museum’s first ever guide Pavel Alekseevitch Evdokimov since 1972 onwards.

The Museum of Permafrost became an integral part of the system of the country’s academic and research institutions, and was mentioned in the reference book “Museums of the Soviet Academy of Science” and “Museums of the Academies of Science of the Soviet Republics” published between 1980 and 1985 [8].

Blueprint for a skating rink inside the permafrost by A.M. Pchelintsev (1965, Igarka).

Thus, the idea of an underground museum of eternity articulated within the nascent Soviet academic community, was partially realized. What is more, it was realized within its own institutions. However, it is interesting to view it against the backdrop of the global philosophical thought of the early 20th century on the one hand, and on the other, to juxtapose it with certain theories, including some that are still relevant today in the sphere of arts. If viewed in the context of the latter, Sumgin’s project can be regarded as something refreshingly original and sensible.

As I have noted earlier, certain ideas of the founder of geocryology came close to the noospheric thinking of the time, so it is possible to say that they were implicitly characterized by certain general “scientific esotericism”, “integral to the scientific discourse of modernity” [9]. Yet even more importantly, the author makes a special point of stressing that the subterranean museum of eternity denies overt metaphysics and symbolization of permafrost. By applying poetic, lyrical terms M. Sumgin nevertheless, believed it was important to reclaim them back from theology, and to understand these terms in their strict natural-philosophical sense: “I think that the authors that protest against the use of the word “eternal” in relation to permafrost, have issues with the use of terms that have already been deeply entrenched in theology. But this is nothing but a tactic of defeatism in the face of theology, while what we should really be doing is to launch an all-out offensive, including the sphere of terminology: we have to reclaim and repossess the terms and concepts appropriated by our opponents, and to imbue them with the natural-philosophical meaning, whenever possible [10]“.

This specific focus distinguishes Sumgin’s beliefs from Pavel Florensky’s ideas about permafrost [11], and even more so, from Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre (“World Ice”) cosmological theory, which was built around mythical epiphanies and later put at the service of German Nazism. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the museum intentions of the “World Ice” doctrine on the one hand and of the Subterranean Museum of Eternity on the other can become the subject of further research and study [12].

The absence of overt references to metaphysics also sets apart Sumgin’s museum from the museum conceived of by Nikolay Fedorov. Russian Orthodoxy was at the heart of Fedorov’s thought, while Sumgin refused to undergo the ceremony of confession at his wedding.

However, for our current purposes it is more important to highlight their similarities, such as orientation towards projects and universality. Planetary (and cosmic, in Fedorov’s case) regulation certainly constitutes a chain of long-term museum projects. In this sense they are rigidly teleological. In Sumgin’s case, a world museum constructed inside permafrost is integral to the planetary regulation in the future. Both Fedorov’s and Sumgin’s projects imply an exclusively scientific, research purpose of their museums: their museums are created by researchers and for researchers. “The Radiant Future” belongs in this world, it arrives as a result of the collective efforts and labor of the entire humanity, it is not given from above. It is important to overtake and possess nature and to triumph over death. Sumgin suggests that the way to do it is through the development of scientific methods, biology and experimentation with anabiosis, while Fedorov believes that the Resurrection of the dead is the key. Although Sumgin, the founding father of geocryology, does not explicitly speak about the triumph over death, in a sense, his references to the conquest of nature and his avid and continuous interest in anabiosis do imply exactly that. The very term “eternity” in the name of the museum suggests a certain finality of this project, the potential “unlocking” or opening up of human life span in the Future.

Both Sumgin and Fedorov believed it was important to engage the general public into their respective projects. While accumulating information about permafrost, Sumgin initiated a project of collecting observations from representatives of different social strata (alluvial miners, ethnographers, educators and students). In the early years of his life, Sumgin began his studies driven by a dream of becoming a “travelling professor” who could work towards improving the situation of the Russian peasantry. In the following years, whenever circumstances demanded it, he repeatedly sacrificed his academic pursuits to revolutionary activities and his work with the peasants. Ultimately, his academic and revolutionary pursuits merged into one big project that had to do with permafrost.

it is quite clear today that contemporary art is a systemic art of capitalist world order, and that is why we can often here calls for overcoming it, which essentially means, calls for overcoming capitalism per se.

When Sumgin came up with a proposal to create the Subterranean Museum of Eternity, in a sense, he instrumentalized the present for the sake of the Future, renounced the aesthetical properties of material objects for the sake of their function in future research. In other words, he postulated the supra-aesthetical mode of their existence, in which aesthetics was subjugated to certain more important tasks and objectives.

This correlates with the ideas of several contemporary theoreticians who are trying to solve the “access problem”, the problem of the “subject-object relations” and that of overcoming contemporary art, “exiting” art and creating a supra-aesthetical mode of existence for contemporary art.

It is quite clear today that contemporary art is a systemic art of capitalist world order, and that is why we can often here calls for overcoming it, which essentially means, calls for overcoming capitalism per se. Contemporaneity is conceived of as Capitalocene or Anthropocene — a historical period when the scale and intensity of the impact that capitalism has on the planet have become truly menacing, “geological”, which only goes to show that humanity has to find some ways of vanquishing this world order and moving on to a safer and more harmonious mode of being. This transition will inevitably lead to a change in the modality of being for society and for art in particular. Philosophers of speculative realism show that the art of the last two centuries is the art of correlation that operates and “happens” first and furthermost in the perception of the viewers without enabling them to access things “as they are”, without as much as giving them hope of ever gaining such an access. But the most important thing is that art and contemporaneity are extremely self-involved, obsessed with themselves and anti-utopian in nature. The horizon of the Future as a point of attraction is missing, at times appearing in the guise of commodifiable ruins and ghosts, at best. It is exactly the urgent task of dramatically altering the objectives and modes of being that dictates the need of “exiting”, abandoning art [13].

Theoreticians raise the question of creating a non-correlational art, an art that is born out of humanity’s encounter or collision with the “arche-fossil”, that is to say, with a certain fact that precedes the history of humankind. For example, Suhail Malik suggests the ultimate project for such a museum: not unlike an “arche-fossil”, an artwork can exist for an indefinitely long period of time within an eternal darkness. “The demand here upon contemporary art is strictly non-trivial: it removes subjective interpretation or experience as a condition or telos of the artwork, and therewith collapses the entire edifice of the contemporary art paradigm [14].”

In a sense, the discovery of the remains of mammoths and other pre-historical animals, as well as certain “successful” cases of anabiosis of protozoans in the permafrost conditions outlined a particular horizon for contemporary scientific inquiry, not unlike the one that according to Quentin Meillassoux, is outlined by the problem of “arche-fossil” [15]. Sumgin’s response to this — the project of the Subterranean Museum of Eternity — is a repository or a storage place of sorts, a machine manufacturing “ache-fossils” for the Future. It is an anti-teathron, a place of not-seeing, an art sanctuary, a port-franco and a duty-free storage [16], a solution to the problem of “access” on the part of natural sciences, a radical project of art without any viewers in the present. These are the objects that radically withdraw themselves from the field of experience, critical assessment and aesthetics in the present. This is the kind of art that seeks to become the “arche-fossil” itself. We are talking about a totalistic teleological museum project that postulates art and culture not as a flight of fancy or a frustrated desire, but as a rational knowledge and a project-oriented activity.

In that sense, Sumgin proposed a project of a supra-aesthetical museum, a museum with a “delayed” or “deferred” viewer, a museum-repository or archive of “arche-fossils” preserved for the future. The Subterranean Museum of Eternity postulates the duty of each and every individual to dedicate his or her life to the wellbeing of all the other people, including those, who have not yet been born. It warns us against being overly focused on the short-term trivial concerns. To this effect, it is geared towards the overcoming of the Present as it asserts its concept as a holistic creation, uninterrupted by the generational change, with a focus on the piecing together of a cohesive unity. Reason is called upon to govern that mega-project. This is the language of Utopia, which is still a non-being, but a potentiality, a project that constitutes (at least in the realm of language) an explicit possibility of existence.

Today it is one of the practices that are capable to a certain extent of providing an outline of the present and of overcoming its totally anti-utopian essence. Benjamin H. Bratton, for example, seeks to delineate the project of exiting the Anthropocene, that is to say, our current predicament, through accelerationism, the perception of the Present as an incubator for a certain xeno-Future and the shifting of attention towards the forms of this future, would-be “Other”. This implies, among other things, inverting the logic of the “arche-fossil” but redirecting it towards the present. In the words of Benjamin H. Bratton, “For the post-Anthropocene, and our contingent disorientations (apophenias, aesthetics, designs) we must pivot and rotate that arche-fossil’s temporal trajectory from one of ancestrality toward one of alien descendence”. It means visualizing and encountering our descendants that we already carry within us in a form of complex biotechnological processes and “for which we are the ancestor and for which we are the unthinkable fossil” not very different from the Caenozoic Era fossils [17]. This rotation of the logic and trajectory of the “arche-fossil” was integral to Sumgin’s thinking as well. His Subterranean Museum of Eternity was a project of collecting arche-fossils for the future that today can be regarded as an attempt to guarantee a Future, a different, post-Anthropocene kind of future, by making it a matter of concern.

Thus, we can adapt the project of a global museum inside permafrost to these current demands by reconsidering and redefining a number of its conditions or stipulations.

Irina Filatova, The Subterranean Museum of Eternity. This project was implemented on the premises of the underground laboratory of geocyrology at the Institute of Permafrost Studies, within the framework of the Arctic Biennale of Contemporary Art. (Yakutsk, 2016, transmission customized by Aleksei Romanov).

First of all, we should radicalize the supra-aesthetical mode of being of this subterranean museum that implies a total absence of viewers in the present and in general, a substitution of viewers by future researchers. By fulfilling this stipulation we can hope to be able to overcome contemporary art as an industry of display and demonstration and to identify a solution to the philosophical «access problem». It will also help constitute a museum of non-correlationist realism in the present.

Secondly, it is suggested, that a certain xeno-descendant in the Future will become a researcher. For now we can ignore the anthropocentric character of Sumgin’s project that is also centered around science, while maintaining its teleological essence. The planet Earth itself is drawn into the project with all of its geological layers. Artifacts belonging to human culture, art, animals, biomaterial, plants and any other possible entity become equally important and valuable as exhibits.

Thus, the modified museum envisioned by Sumgin receives a new emphasis and focus that turns it into a project that accelerates and overcomes contemporary art in its conventional forms, which support the status-quo, and more generally, Anthropocene and Capitalocene as expressions of the logic of algorithmic neoliberal capitalism on its route to post-Anthropocene.

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les statues meurent aussi (statues also die)

The film exhibits a series of sculptures, masks and other traditional art from Sub-Saharan Africa. The images are frequently set to music and cut to the music’s pace. The narrator focuses on the emotional qualities of the objects, and discusses the perception of African sculptures from a historical and contemporary European perspective. Only occasionally does the film provide the geographical origin, time period or other contextual information about the objects. The idea of a dead statue is explained as a statue which has lost its original significance and become reduced to a museum object, similarly to a dead person who can be found in history books. Interweaved with the objects are a few scenes of Africans performing traditional music and dances, as well as the death of a disemboweled gorilla.

During the last third of the film, the modern commercialisation of African culture is problematised. The film argues that colonial presence has compelled African art to lose much of its idiosyncratic expression, in order to appeal to Western consumers. A mention is made of how African currencies previously had been replaced by European. In the final segment, the film comments on the position of black Africans themselves in contemporary Europe and North America. Footage is seen from a Harlem Globetrotters basketball show, of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and a jazz drummer intercut with scenes from a confrontation between police and labour demonstrators. Lastly the narrator argues that we should regard African and European art history as one inseparable human culture.

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the permafrost

The Biennale was organized by the Yakutsk-based Laboratory for Complex Geo-Cultural Research of the Arctic (LKGIA) in collaboration with several Yakutian organizations. A room rented at the National Museum of Art became the exhibition venue for the main project. The work of curators and artists-in-residence was funded by the Office of the Mayor of Yakutsk. The LKGIA Lab had been set up three years prior by a group of Yakutia-based scholars and culture-makers supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation. It was conceived of as an interdisciplinary research platform for arts and humanities. Dmitry Zamyatin, a Moscow-based geographer, author and cultural theorist, was invited to head the LKGIA Lab; he, in turn, invited myself and a few other people from the Moscow academic community to join in their work.

The “complex geo-cultural research” masterminded by Dmitry Zamyatin became the central focus of the Lab. In general, this institution has aspired to somehow “get a hold” of the Arctic discourse in the field of humanities and social studies by positioning and promoting Yakutsk, the city that is currently undergoing a remarkable surge of activity, as the “capital” of this discourse. Yakutsk has always been one of the hubs for the exploration and development of the Arctic, which today experiences a new wave of colonization, although this time this colonization is to a large extent, academic and artistic.

The Permafrost-themed Zeroth Arctic Biennale was to become the culmination, the grande finale of the LKGIA Lab [three-year] activities. I was invited to curate the main project and a two-week residency for several artists whom I had selected. For the residency it seemed important to create projects in collaboration with Yakutia-based institutions and artists, as well as other local cultural workers. There was also an open call in Yakutsk supported by the organizers. We managed to work together with a number of institutions, for instance, with the Melnikov Yakutian Institute for Permafrost Research, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, that enabled us to receive some exhibits from them and to install one of the projects on their premises. We also collaborated with the Museum and Center of The Khomus of The People of The World, the National Moving Image Archive of Sakha-Yakutia, the Mammoth Museum, the Emelyan Yaroslavsky Yakutian State Museum of History and Culture of the Peoples of the North, the Sakha-Yakutian Artists’ Union, the Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts, as well as with a number of local historians.

Of the ten participating artists (Ayiyna Alekseeva, Alina Fedotova, Irina Filatova, Dzhuliana Semenova, Antonina Shadrina, Max Sher, Yegor Sleptsov, Mikhail Starostin, Nina Velmina, Nikolay Vetter) only three were from Moscow, the rest were based in Yakutsk. This means that the project was almost completely entrenched in the local context. The show comprised moving imagery and exhibits from the Institute of Permafrost. For me as a curator, it was important to create a coherent narrative of the permafrost by embedding particular projects into it. “Lateral” connections among the exhibits grew increasingly important as the project enfolded while the works of artists from various contexts, as well as scholarly objects, archival and local history materials (including works authored by someone who had never worked as an artist before) became equal in terms of their functional status.

The exhibition was divided into sections and their sequence worked to develop the narrative. The key points of it were the Subterranean Museum of Eternity; the scientific discourse on the permafrost and the work of the Institute of Permafrost; the underworld as a reality of animism as juxtaposed with the scientific discourse of human beings as such; immortality and the surface of Earth; going deeper into the Earth as humanity’s perennial dream. In the future, each of these topics, albeit overlapping, can become a research subject in and of itself. The purpose of this text is to introduce the project that took shape in Yakutsk and to provide an overview of all of the topics listed earlier. It was also meant to function as an index section for the exhibition.

The Underground Museum of Eternity by Irina Filatova; video streaming screenshot, streaming set up by Alexey Romanov

The permafrost lies beneath the surface layer of soil. It is a strange world incomprehensible to humans who, for most of their history, have been trying to make sense of it or to “tame” it by entering into communication with it. For humans, this world has been both a subject and an object at the same time. It has been actively defining the human forms of life on the one hand, and has also served as a “stratum” from which natural resources are extracted, an object of scientific study and research.

There are, perhaps, three vectors or three approaches that we can pursue in our exploration of the permafrost: 1) the pagan tradition of imbibing the underworld with a soul, making it animate 2) scientific discourse 3) consumerist attitude towards it as a subsurface resource waiting to be conquered and appropriated. This division is tentative, though, for the subjectification of the surrounding world in pagan beliefs ensures an environmentally conscious and sustainable management of natural resources. Mikhail Sumgin, the founder of the permafrost science, called it the “Russian Sphinx” [1], implying the many enigmas it concealed. The “objective” science often stemmed from utopian projects or dreams, such as the [Soviet] space program that emerged from the reflections of Nikolay Fedorov on how to send the dead, who he hoped, would be soon resurrected, to other planets.

An electromagnetic probe used for geophysical exploration from the Museum of the Institute of Permafrost and three video projections that flow and spill into each other, representing the three parts of the exhibition are placed in the middle of the room. The first video is a 1934 archival film Povelitel L’dov (“The Master of Ice”), directed by Grigory Kabalov. It illustrates the Soviet ambition to “conquer and subjugate nature”. The second projection is a selection of archival materials about the Yakutian Permafrost Research Station (YANIMS) and it denotes the scientific approach to the subject in question. The third screen displays a fragment from a documentary Wooly Mammoth: The Autopsy (2014) that covers the 2013 discovery of the best-preserved body of a mammoth with soft tissues and blood-like liquid in Yakutia (the so-called Malolyakhovsky Mammoth nicknamed Buttercup). The film was shot by visiting researchers obsessed with the idea of cloning mammoths. The displayed frames show the permafrost at it starts bleeding with mammoth blood — a pivotal and shocking point in the story when what appeared to be dead suddenly seems potentially alive. It is the moment when our understanding of the world can be turned upside down, while the ancient pagan beliefs collide with advanced science, and a possibility of cloning the long-dead body can potentially shatter the conventional boundary between the living and the non-living, between the subject and the object. Unexpectedly, the electromagnetic probe, the phallic-shaped device used to penetrate deep below the surface of the Earth tapping into knowledge, which is also a symbol of life, turns out to be a dead object, while the passive stratum of matter, the thick frozen rock, in which holes are drilled, appears to be alive and bleeding. Nature and culture, subject and object, the male and the female thus swap places.

It seems that we have now reached the point at which the boundaries of a deeply entrenched mental “map” of scholarly disciplines need to be revisited and reconsidered. The permafrost is not only an object of study and inquiry but also something external with respect to humanity in general, something “non-human” that exposed the gap between its phenomenological projections, the linguistic constructions and itself — a thing-in-itself that exists in a different temporality and modality.

A frame from Wooly mammoth. The Autopsy

This gap could be filled on a complex material level where the entire world and everything in it, from objects and processes to humans, mechanisms and animals to images and brands, emerges as a complex material surface. On this level, globality is replaced with planetarity [2], ecology sprawls to an all-encompassing size, while everything on the planet and the planet itself become alive and dead in equal measure.

Properties of thinking and representation are attributed not only to humans but to a broadly defined “life”. Contemporary philosophy, science and art have arrived at this standpoint in part in an attempt to put an end to a preying, destructive attitude towards Earth and to reduce conflict of different kind. The indigenous ethnic groups of the North with their animistic traditions, self-objectification and shamanism have known the importance of a sustainable, respectful treatment of the environment from times immemorial, for animism, according to curator Anselm Franke, is, above all, a practice of resisting objectification [3].

In today’s world, various discourses and practices coexist and can be both functional or not. No worldview or theory can claim the ability to comprehensively describe the world any longer. The dichotomies suggested by the Enlightenment, such as “soul versus body”, “nature versus culture”, “civilization versus barbarism”, “subject versus object”, “the sacred versus the profane” and so forth, are crumbling. It is largely accepted today that the key political move on the way to decolonize our imagination would be to reject any disciplinary boundaries that confine and restrict imagination, to eschew divisions of any kind, and to rethink accepted borders so as to probe their instability.

Under and Above the Ground: The Influence of the Permafrost on the Sacred and the Powerful

Yakutian ethnologist Semyon I. Nikolaev-Somogotto argued that the image and concept of the underworld in Yakut paganism was shaped by the images of Biblical Hell after Russian Orthodox Christianity had been brought to these lands. [4]. Before the arrival of the Russians, the Yakuts buried their dead on or above the ground, and not inside it. This world equally belonged to the dead and the living who took turns (“shifts”) reigning it (days were the time of the living, while at night the dead took over), while space was commonly shared. Not unlike Christian dogmas, the pagan underworld was linguistically constructed as a heterotopia, or “another” space, “the other world”.

In their joint project Infrastructural Ethnography, Max Sher and Antonina Shadrina reflect on the unstable status of infrastructure in the permafrost area. Power cables and pipelines laid above the ground resemble the ancient arangas — aerial burials. In this sense, the infrastructure of death in the pre-Christian Yakutia was as real as the present-day Arctic infrastructure. On the one hand, spirits and creatures inhabiting this infrastructure also become intrinsic to this world. On the other hand, it is a reflection on the essence of power and its metaphysical “infrastructural” status (whether power is profane or sacred, otherworldly or real). But it is also a decolonizing gesture that populates the state-controlled infrastructure with traditional mythological figures.

Electromagnetic probe

The fact that the infrastructure in the permafrost areas is built above the ground and is directly influenced by permafrost accounts for a number of important religious and civilizational features of geo-cultures that have taken shape here.

Birds figure prominently in the work of the Yakutsk-based artist Antonina Shadrina. Birds connect the ground and the air within the cosmology of Siberian pagan beliefs. Creatures and spirits that dwelled in the sky were guided by the same principles as were the humans that resided on Earth. Not unlike the gods of Ancient Greek, these creatures and spirits could descend on Earth and enter into various relationships with humans. Shadrina’s birds signify the world’s inseparability, the interconnectedness of everything, which, today, also adds an environmental dimension to the subject of major social migrations and population movements. The birds’ own kind of freedom in the works of this artist is only possible on the surface of the ground as the subterranean roots trap them, hold them and keep them from flying. While in the air, a bird becomes a totem, a mighty creature capable of encompassing the whole infrastructure with a gaze from above thereby claiming ownership of it. Memory and a link to the underworld with all its roots acquire here a somewhat fatal and even ominous character.

Universalizing, global deterritorialization processes engender the reverse reterritorialization once expressed in the “longing for one’s ancestral homeland”, “getting back to one’s roots”, or “national revivals” large and small. The indigenous peoples of the North have gone through a complex, multistage process of identity formation, which still continues today, as topical as ever. Involved in the interplay between the global and the local, the subterranean and the “above-the-ground” become significations of sorts, albeit not as straightforward as they may seem at the first glance. The Yakut pagan beliefs included an Upper world of their own, which was not connected to any globalization processes. It was later somewhat reimagined in the Olonkho [epic] and gained some traits of a universal national modernity.

The Northern Hero: the Strong Man and the Blacksmith

The person living on the face of Earth enters into special relationships with the Lower world. The Yakut Olonkho epic warriors often went under the ground to conquer a woman or to go through a series of trials. This is comparable to the concept of “conquering the depths of the Earth” in the Soviet narrative of modernization, for the Soviet ideologues believed that the riches of the Earth should be extracted, wrestled from its bowels through heroic effort fraught with many dangers and perils. In this sense, the Lower underground world is always a dangerous environment concealing a much-needed resource.

Nikolai Vetter. The Man who Works with Earth. Spiritual Sculptures

The epic 1934 movie documenting the rescue operation of the Lena Expedition trapped in ice reflects this heroic effort to assert the human power over nature that the nascent Soviet warrior society set out to do. The rescue of the ice-locked expedition was made possible thanks to the use of explosives and an icebreaker that violated the hard surface of ice/water.

The epic Olonkho warrior is always a strong man tempered in the furnaces of Kydai Bakhsi from whom he receives his armor and weapons. Kydai Bakhsi is a patron of smithcraft and the craft in general, which has traditionally been very important for the Yakuts. Legends have it that Kydai Bakhsi resides in the Lower world. In many other ethnic myths blacksmiths dealt with the underworld, “partnered” with evil spirits and possessed huge power.

The present-day Yakutian man of muscle Nikolay Vetter is known on the Internet as “the man who bends nails and metal” [5]. Vetter says he feels strength as a heaviness, which suddenly overcomes him and needs to be released or discharged somehow. In no small part, he receives this strength from his interaction with the subterranean: Vetter is a caretaker at one of Yakutsk’s cemeteries. Like ancient blacksmiths and Yakut epic warriors, he enters into special relationships with the metal, acquires a certain power over it and goes underground to replenish strength, to strike a “contract”. Furthermore, the outcome of his effort looks like abstract sculptures while what he makes with bare hands makes him a quintessential sculptor — a masculine human who makes a physical effort and masters the material.

The main topic explored by the well-known Yakutsk-based painter Mikhail Starostin is a Northerner. The artist is searching for a generalized image with the same recurrent attributes, such as snow goggles that also have been made from metal. They erase the individuality transforming a human face into a mask. This mask is a special subject shaped by the Arctic that plays the role of a “device” with the help of which people can adapt to and, at the same time, “medialize” oneself, or distance from the harsh environment.

Antonina Shadrina, Max Sher. Infrastructural Ethnography

A painting by an unknown artist provided by the Institute of Permafrost serves as a rhyme of sorts. In it, the human and the environment are abstracted ad maximum but the environment remains manifestly Arctic. Complex subject-object relationships in which the northerner and nature are entangled to a certain extent erases subjectivity, renders it uncertain and unstable — “floating”. In this context, it is fascinating to reflect on the Russian names of the Yakuts: as though intentionally “nondescript”, they function as a disguise, an avatar, while also inscribing themselves in the well-known tradition of changing babies’ names many times in order to confuse and drive away the evil spirits, the tradition that used to be observed by the Arctic peoples.

Deep or Up: Flowing of States

Humans have long been fascinated by the inner space of the Earth. This fascination has given rise to many legends and theories about the hollowness of the Earth and the various forms of life that may exist underneath. Vladimir A. Obruchev, for instance, the founding director of the Moscow Institute of Permafrost, wrote a novel titled Plutonia in which he describes a star at the core of the Earth and populates the planet’s inner surface with prehistoric animals and humans. The scholar has thus turned time into space by placing the past underground, which is essentially congruent with archeology’s constituent practice as well as with the popular perception of the underworld. Obruchev chose to place an orifice canal between the two worlds in the Arctic.

In his fairytale-like novel Dunno on the Moon, Nikolay N. Nosov located a capitalist civilization of shorties on the inner core of the moon (which the locals refer to as the Earth, too). Within the context of the historicist Soviet Marxism, this heterotopia also reflected another time — another historical formation that Communism was supposed to replace. In the meantime, a character in the Yakut fable Yi kyyha escapes to the Moon from the misfortunes and bitterness of her unhappy life and she does so by changing her physical state — literally, evaporating into atoms. The Earth offered to help the girl but she was afraid of the underworld and turned that help down. Artist Ayiyna Alexeeva depicts two episodes from this tale in her prints — the girl’s atomization while she is contemplating her bitter destiny and looking into an ice hole. This black hole in the ice leads deep inside, opening an entrance into the world underneath, the world of the dead.

In her animation Into the Deep, Alina Fedotova seeks to create a generalized, suggestive image of moving deep into Earth as an old dream of the humankind. At a certain point, moving deep into the planet becomes identical to flying into space. Traveling back in time suddenly turns inside out with the future and a new horizon, the one not yet attained, for humans have not yet been deep inside the Earth.

The first issue of the wall newspaper Yakutski Merzlotoved (“Yakutian Permafrost Scientist”), 1963.

Into the Deep looks like a hole, a funnel. That is exactly the way any mine or hole in the ground looks like, be it a well or an ice hole. References and allusions to the female element are laid bare here. The Earth is always female: it keeps its secrets and riches deep inside and they should be conquered (just like a woman is conquered in traditional societies) through a strong-willed masculine effort. Each in their own way, Olonkho epic warriors, scientists and pioneering geologists display this effort.

The Underground Museum of Eternity

The permafrost as a notion was constructed within the Soviet scientific discourse. Mikhail I. Sumgin put it to institutional use in 1927 [6]. A model of the permafrost was instrumental in order to be able to include engineering and construction projects for Arctic areas into the Soviet modernization project. Integral to this project was a perception of Nature as something external to Culture, something that had to be explored, conquered and subjugated, while eliminating all its properties that were negative and counterproductive for the humankind. However, the enigmas of the permafrost stirred futuristic imagination. Sumgin called it “the Russian Sphinx” and proposed the creation of a vast underground refrigerator museum where the bodies of animals and humans of various races would be kept for thousands of years. He also suggested that the museum’s holdings should include important manuscripts and that experiments with the state of anabiosis should be conducted on the museum’s premises.

Artist Irina Filatova revisits the ideas of the 1920s by placing portraits of the founders of the permafrost science into the Institute of Permafrost’s underground lab and by arranging video streaming “up to the surface”. Sumgin’s ideas are intrinsically connected to a range of utopian projects that today are considered avant-garde museology. In this sense they are no less valuable than Nikolay F. Fedorov’s thoughts on the museum. The form in which they had been implemented within the context of institutionalized science is all the more interesting for that. In Irina Filatova’s project, this “museum of eternity” now houses representations of the founders of the permafrost science. To create these representations the artist resorted to the medium that is primarily associated with reflections on eternity: oil painting.

Nearby the visitor can see several exhibits provided by the Yakutsk Institute of Permafrost, including books by Sumgin, his bust by Nina Velmina. Velmina, a hydrogeologist and permafrost scientist who designed water supply systems for Russia’s major Arctic ports, such as Tiksi, Dickson, and Provideniya, is a woman of many talents. She followed in the steps of the many Russian scientists before her who variously combined professional interest in science with a passion for artistic creativity. Velmina authored a book of science-fiction about the permafrost titled The Ice Sphinx and made illustrations for it herself.

Irina Filatova’s The Underground Museum of Eternity. A video streaming screenshot. Courtesy of Alexey Romanov

Upon retiring, Velmina took to sculpting and completed a full-fledged course taught by a well-known sculptor Valentina V. Alexandrova-Roslavleva at the Moscow House of Scientists’ People’s Studio. She then created a series of sculptured portraits of scientists and writers. The first issue of the Yakutski Merzlotoved (“The Yakutian Permafrost Scientist”) bulletin-board newspaper is also displayed in this section. It was published in celebration of the founding of the institute and of the permafrost lab in a new building in 1964.

X-raying the Surface

Extreme cold in Yakutia is associated with the advent of Ehee Diyla — a bull from the Arctic Ocean. This mythical animal embodied the features of both the familiar domestic bulls and the fossil mammoths whose remains are still found in the permafrost. During the ice drift on the Lena River, the body of the winter bull floats back to the Arctic Ocean sweeping away the souls of dead humans and animals. Dzhuliyana Semenova created “sneaking” photographs of ruptured surface of snow and ice, with an elusive secret embedded within them: a formation or a trace of the past that is hiding underneath the surface. The signs and patterns of her photographs signify the manifestations of a hidden structure, both in the ruptures of the material surface and in its image per se.

Yegor Sleptsov, on the contrary, seeks to X-ray or scan this surface in order to present a hypnotizing mark of another reality and to expose it by translating it into a precise language of figures and geophysical scans. The artist uses the Oko-2 (“Eye-2”) ground penetrating radar (GPR) to make imagery of underground rocks in the area surrounding Yakutsk. These “underground” structures largely define the physical existence of buildings and networks above the ground. The GPR-sourced imagery made by Sleptsov reveals the existence of a different, underground reality. But do they add anything significant to our understanding of any vital processes and mechanisms?

Semyonova’s and Sleptsov’s projects viewed together make visitors reflect on the limits of the Enlightenment processes. Is there a need to preserve some kind of a mystery, and only hint at its presence under the surface, or should we do our best to shed light on the invisible structures? Today it is clear that the result of this deconstruction and critique may seem no less complex and enigmatic than their starting point. And scientific imagery sourced from a radar may turn out to be a skillfully made artistic “fake” with an artist making minor but important modifications to the document, that raises a question about the legitimacy and verifiability of criteria of our scientific knowledge.

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«the next step for the progressive museum will be post-critical realism»

arseny zhilyaev: Katya, like me, you have been putting together projects for Moscow’s non-art museums for quite some time now. Why is it that lately there seems to be this feeling of exhaustion, like continuing these kinds of collaborations is no longer possible? Of course, there are some objective factors. The cancellation of the exhibition in the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, harsher censorship policies – but it seems to me, these are only surface-level. If we are going to talk about censorship, then the conversation needs to be about not only state censors, but also self-censorship and the attempts of institution or museum workers to predict – and in this case, actually enforce – the ideologically correct interpretation of their exhibitions. In this sense, the situation with the MMC was extremely interesting, because the Russian museum is the first to so openly demonstrate that it is doing practically the same thing as the artists –developing alternative worlds, with only varying levels of correlation to actual reality. “We do not like the interpretation of the future that Zhilyaev offered us in Cradle of Humankind, and so we will prove that the future can be different from this artistic vision.” This is very similar to how Groys described the transformation of Socialist Realism, which gradually evolved from simple painting into a conceptual project, due in part to the fact that artists were expected to anticipate future shifts in the political course of the party. But to return to the question from the beginning: is it possible that this factor, the museum’s own self-awareness as an independent creative unit – in a way, making it the artist’s competitor – is what makes interaction next to impossible in the here and now?

katerina chuchalina: It’s true, we have put together more than a few projects in non-art museums, and I have always been interested in the museum as an artistic medium; in these kinds of situations, the thematic proximity between the art project and the museum has always served as just a pretext (in the best sense of the word), a codeword for the possible start of a conversation on the politics of representation, methodology, ideology, etc; few actually do anything interesting in the museum. The Central Armed Forces Museum, the Presnya Historical Memorial Museum, the Institute for African Studies, Museum of Entrepreneurs, Patrons of the Arts and Philanthropists – they all have different stories, the outcomes of which have been dramatized to different degrees.

You say that these days it’s impossible to work and there’s a feeling of exhaustion. For me, that feeling arose already last year. I’ve sworn off attempting to forge relationships with museums in areas that haven’t been broken in in advance, and decided that I would only ever repeat that experience if there was at least a minimum of mutual interest. As for the incident with the MMC, what’s really remarkable is that it was the museum that showed such an active interest in your project and in our [i.e., V-A-C Foundation – Ed.] work in general. That’s the reason I even agreed to the idea.

Arseny Zhilyaev, Sketches for “Cradle of Humankind 2” at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics

Without a doubt, this state of self-censorship in which the museum finds itself creates a broad field for the construction of reality – or, more precisely, for the construction of a rhetoric of doubt. In the case of the MMC, this was a powerful mix of the rational and the mystical: from arguments about the cosmos and the history of scientific and technological progress to the pretense of issues with the fonts and designs used in your project, to turning to the unseen higher power (along with the cosmonauts), who presides over all the decision-making that goes on in the Museum of Cosmonautics, and who felt compelled to nix the Cradle of Humankind offered by Zhilyaev. Genuine respect goes to the efforts expended by the museum in piling up arguments, little by little building up to the conclusion that it would be utterly impossible to make the exhibition, rather than delivering a simple, crude “no,” which would have done just as well. But you’re right – the museum conducts itself entirely as an art project; the rhetoric around the cancellation was built on a whole other vision of Cradle of Humankind, which, with a considerable degree of the sublime, thanks to the conversations about the cosmos.

What’s also interesting to me in this situation is always the mechanism for decision-making on the presence of art in a museum. It is clear that in the majority of situations, this right belongs wholly and indivisibly to the director. At the MMC, it was more interesting, as there they have an art collection and quite a lot of experience in holding temporary exhibitions, but this means that, on the one hand, there’s formal procedure for consultation with the advisory board of the scientific museum, but on the other hand, it has a confidence in regards to its competency in determining what is art and what isn’t. And we passed through all of this, all the discussions, the meetings with the research director of the museum. Interesting that at the end of this tunnel, just at the final bend in the director’s office, there’s always this call for some document from above, which needs to certify that this is indeed art (once in a desperate situation – a week before the opening of an international project – I had to bring this kind of document to the Institute of African Studies from the Ministry of Culture.) And of course, I had no doubt that if I had that kind of document with me at the MMC, this whole episode might not have happened.

a.z.: That’s really interesting! It strikes me that this rhetoric of doubt is pretty much inherent in critical or artistic perspectives – almost as a rule. Actually, it is through this constant questioning of the monolithic ideological structure presented to us from above that art to this day pretends to possess some kind of special knowledge. In part, this is what used to distinguish the professional from the amateur, the art of the avant-garde from mass culture and kitsch. But what has happened is that in today’s reality, the artist now faces some serious competition. And here I’m not talking in terms of production capabilities – no one has any doubt here that mass media and polytechnical departments have incomparably greater potential when it comes to the formation of images and the creation of situations – but rather in terms of the inherent critical view of intention. You could say that we’ve found ourselves in an era beyond the looking glass, when what appears at some moment to be a scanning gaze turns out to be locked in a system of broken, critical mirrors. And there is no longer a clearly defined system for the ideological apparatus of the state. This public space beyond the mirror, the space of mutual surveillance, where it is already decidedly difficult to identify where the original impulse came from and which way it was pointing.

Arseny Zhilyaev, Sketches for “Cradle of Humankind 2” at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics

It’s at this point that we could use a new theory of reflection, one that takes all of these transformations into account. If we must acknowledge the dissolution of the critical gaze in its traditional form, so to speak, then the next step of the progressive museum will be post-critical realism. That is, a gesture that would be able to reflect (or reflect on) the total reflectiveness of contemporary Russian (and not only Russian) reality. This brings us to the very important issue of developing a new method of working. It seems to me that it is through this experience of institutional cooperation – an experience that moves beyond the framework of the individual artistic gesture – that we can map out the path for developing an adequate modern approach. To this end, could you tell us a little more about the projects in the Central Armed Forces Museum and the Institute for African Studies, and what it took to realize them?

k.c.: Yes, as it happens, our point of departure for these projects was that hypothesis about a possible way out of this situation through institutional cooperation. All the institutions we worked with were quite varied in terms of their bureaucratic and social status. A tiny, private museum, an institute in the Russian Academy of Sciences, an affiliate of a big state museum, a pavilion at V.D.N.Kh., a museum belonging to the Ministry of Defense – all of these are cultural institutions with different reflective capabilities.

The Central Armed Forces Museum, for example, where we did the project with Misha Tolmachev, “Beyond Visual Range“, is in a state of radical monumentalization. The social inquiry into the history of war as an instrument of civic education is so high that the museum exhibition is presented to us as a sacred history, inscribed on tablets, not subject to any doubt nor any discussion. A critical opinion is simply not possible there; any critique of it would have immediately led to the failure of the project. This is why the artist’s work took the form of a metatext, scattered through the halls of the main exhibition, which implicitly raised the fundamental question for this kind of museum: that of the “witness of evidence.” It just wasn’t possible to get any closer. In this situation, obviously, there is no complicated system of mirrors, there is an order from the cultural department of the Ministry of Defense concerning modernization and the need for some kind of “contemporary art” for the museum; it needed to be implemented and so it was implemented. Formally, this path was unobstructed, but the museum remains impermeable to the conversation, by virtue of its internal structure.

i am coming from a boundless faith in the museum. This provides the strength to act, no matter what.

I should say that all the projects we did were attempts at interventions, at establishing the artist’s presence not in the hall for temporary exhibitions, but within the permanent exhibition. This simple technique enables us to understand the museum and to work with it, rather than in it. Of course, any museum will always fend off this technique, and this is totally normal. After all, one of the basic principles of its functioning is the preservation of its visual and conceptual shell. Attempts to switch the placement of various objects within the museum display or to add some new twist to them is seen as a kind of attack, a desecration. The museum display is a sealed bottle; no one wants to let any genies out. And this, by the way, follows the legal model – the set of exponents inside it have been consecrated as a document by the higher authority. Obviously a museum that tows the general line with its presentation of state history, military history, or scientific and technological progress, must be wary of any cracks or breaches, where the very body of that history can begin to be transformed – which means one history can give way to a multitude.

All of these exhibitions were and remain social structures, built not just from the artist’s own work, but also from the inter-institutional relationship. The collaboration with museum workers on every level (from foundations, archives or research departments) is just as interesting as the diplomatic negotiations with the management. At the Armed Forces Museum, there was a lot of this internal work – the artist incorporated quite a lot from the stores of the museum in his own work. But, for example, the project “Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks,” which was curated by the WHW collective, would never have taken place in the Institute for African Studies, if there was not already a solidarity between institutional structures like the Junior Scholars Council or the Kinoclub. About a month before the opening, there arose a sharp crisis between us and the institute. The director requested that we “leave everything alone” – in the silence and dust of the decadent interiors of an abandoned colonial storefront for the Soviet project. The advisory board stepped in with an official note of support for the project, which led to the fragile truce that ended up being broken all the same, after the work of the group Chto Delat in the courtyard was censored by the director, spending the opening covered up with a black cloth.

“Pedagogical Poem” in the Presnya Museum

Together with you and Ilya Budraitskis, we put together “Pedagogical Poem” in the Presnya Museum. We invited theorists, historians, curators, and artists from all over the world there to discuss issues around history, art and the museum. This was an unprecedented event (in my opinion) for that museum, and yet the leadership managed to remain absolutely indifferent to what was going on all year long. That is, up until it came down to the final exhibition. Tell me, what do you take away from these two experiences – Presnya and MMC – to help understand how an artist’s project should be in order to work with museums in these public situations?

a.z.: I am coming from a boundless faith in the museum. This provides the strength to act, no matter what. On the one hand, there’s a tremendous temptation to shut oneself up in the hermetically-sealed bottle of contemporary art and to set sail on the ocean of time, in the hope that sooner or later the bottle will be picked up by some fisherman, and the message inside will finally be deciphered. Perhaps in some sense this scenario is inevitable, especially if we are talking about Russia, where the current artistic context lacks even the minimal instruments for any adequate perception of what’s going on here and now. But the transformation of this scenario is an end in itself, with the fetishization of the lonely artist and – more broadly – the autonomy of art, striking me as pretentious decadence.

It’s clear that real institutional mechanisms are transformed extremely slowly. IN all likelihood, it takes much longer than the lifespan of one artist, let alone of one artistic project. If we are coming from the radical perspective of the museum as a place capable of not only accurately reflecting reality, but of serving as its agent of progressive change, then, it goes without saying, the position of the artist is more advantageous, in the sense that the artist can slip into the mode of an laboratory experiment to create scenarios of developing reality, which includes the museum as its own vital part. Would Fedorov’s Museum of Resurrection even be possible today? In its entirety, definitely not. But the concept of the museum as a community, a cathedral for the people, directing its activities towards the transformation of art, society and humanity in general, is fully attainable in the field of art. The first Museum of Resurrection appeared in Voronezh when Fedorov was still alive. It was set up in Lev Solovyev’s own house. The museum was dedicated to Solovyev’s late wife and in addition to the permanent exhibition included a free painting school. Or we can take a more recent example: “A Museum of Immortality“, which was based on an idea proposed by Boris Groys, and realized as an installation by Anton Vidokle with the participants of his school in Beirut.

A diagram of Supramoralism, from Fedorov’s manuscripts.

But we can go even further, to try to move beyond the bounds of the laboratory format. In a certain sense, what intelligence agencies and corporations like Google and Facebook are doing today largely corresponds with Fedorov’s impulse towards the maximum possible preservation of data about the lives of each human being. But it’s clear that the archives generated by the intelligence agencies and the corporations will not be used for resurrecting the dead, or, for that matter, any other kind of social transformation geared towards developing human potential. Control, suppression and making money – these are their primary objectives. But can we imagine a museum connecting the artist with technologies and institutional possibilities to rival those of the intelligence agencies and the corporations? This is a deliberately audacious way to structure the question, but it cannot help but inspire.

Modern museums are complicated in that they are already the products of a muddled composition of contradictory forces and circumstances. I still have some warm relationships with some of the staff at the MMC. I am convinced that people like these – people who genuinely love their work – will not allow the museum to die. This is why in every conflict it’s necessary to remember that, yes, there is this particular monolithic image of the museum as an object in itself, but then there is also the real state of affairs. For example, as we found out later, at the MMC, the leadership – including the director Natalia Artyukhina and the deputy director Vyacheslav Klimentov – worked on a contract basis, renewed every year. A contract signed under one set of political circumstances could come into effect in a completely different situation. Fluctuations in the framework of the approved ideological and business plan for the year basically set the ceiling for what they could do. In this sense, there is nothing surprising about their necessary fabrications and contradictory statements, which might strike the outside observer as quite sudden and unexpected. In all actuality, it was just an attempt to calibrate to the new shifts in the president’s administration or tweaking of Moscow’s cultural policy.

But is it enough just to service the political elite’s desire for an institution like the museum? Obviously not. So, it seems to me, that this brand of “museum limitchik,” armed with their fads and contracts and other human weaknesses, can not last too long in the museum. The museum doesn’t need them, it’s not interested in them. It surpasses them, it’s too complex. This is why I don’t lose optimism. Although the incident with the Presnya Museum provides us with a more dramatic example. There you have people who are quite dear to me and my colleagues, who truly believe in the museum, but who ended up being forced to leave it. Not too long ago, Sasha Povzner told me how at an intersection he pulled up to a taxi, and who should be behind the wheel but one of the former directors from the Presnya Museum. That same one who helped us with “Pedagogical Poem,” and then again later, when Ilya Budraitskis curated the exhibition dedicated to the tragic events of 1993. Sasha remembered this director as he was the one who had helped him hang his work on the façade of the building.

Arseny Zhilyaev, Sketches for “Cradle of Humankind 2” at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics

But to return to your question. Let’s speak a little more about the methodology of creative collaboration with museums and art projects that use the museum as a medium. I have always wondered how you feel about taking the role of curator in these projects? Where exactly does the boundary lie between the artist and the curator, if we’re talking about mutating the boundaries of the individual art work or about the figure of the artist taking up the position of curator? It seems to me that a lot of the museum projects that you have made had some common features, which speaks to the depth of your involvement in them. Could you give us a glimpse into your curatorial – or curator-artist – kitchen?

k.c.: You say that you have a boundless faith in the museum and its potential as an agent of progressive change. Speaking just in the abstract, I do too. But I fear that, realistically speaking, I just do not see any reason to hope for this kind of proactive position and power right this moment. I think that this potential can be returned to the museum only through a total depressurization, an open engagement with very different types of human activity, in particular with art and with artists, but I am not seeing any movement in that direction. Of course, for the museum, this would lead to the dissolution of their concept and the institution itself, but there is no other way.

I tend to act and feel like I would in the absence of the museum – not in grief over the loss, obviously, but in careful consideration of what gets called a museum right now. Our society is radioactive, the DNA of public institutions is breaking and mutating. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure that it’s possible these days to conduct a real analysis of the list of institutions that fall under the general rubric of “museum.” What do the Garage Museum and the Museum of Entrepreneurs, Patrons of the Arts and Philanthropists have in common? Probably nothing (that is, other than their anecdotal opposition: the latter, alas, doesn’t have any patrons of the arts, and the former doesn’t have a garage.)

Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger), 2014. Installation by Peggy Buth © Wolfgang Günzel

I should say that, even in the current conditions of underfunding and the relative impoverishment of the museum, we still need to desperately fear the scenario of an empty void striving to fill every centimeter of its space, constantly producing a visual environment. It’s important to understand the who, what and why of what is being done. The models in the Butyrka Prison museum are made by the prisoner’s own hands; the Forest Museum consists of objects made by woodwork; in the main display at the History Museum is a photo-collage of Hollywood films. Commercial and industrial props can be found everywhere; garlands hang over the entrance to the Gulag; kilometers of landscapes fill the biological museums, etc. Working in this environment can be fascinating, especially as art is taking on pretty much the same things – documents, archives, objects, spatial compositions, audience, social networks, media effects. But with museums and contemporary art, we find ourselves in two different worlds locked in against each another, visiting one another like squeamish critics, if at all. In the interest of fairness, we should admit that this is mutual.

There is, by the way, this incredibly fascinating phenomenon, that merits its own study museologically, but also artistically. Recently I was invited to a seminar of museum workers organized by the Gulag Museum. They basically invited people from all over the country who had made exhibitions about the Gulag. It was all self-organized initiatives and independent museum projects, not connected by any overarching directives, nor methodology, all working in response to one common need, but under different conditions: one museum was made by hiking enthusiasts, another created by the owner of the neighborhood shopping center, a third using the resources of a corporation. Or there are the museum clones in the closed military cities, which are the opposite, created to be identical, but now they are forming their own visual identity, despite the shared history forced on them.

In the international arena, I get the feeling we are treading on the same turf that was marked out through earlier projects like Fred Wilson’s famous “Mining the Museum.” This area is developing, sometimes even radicalizing – see, for example, the efforts of Clémentine Deliss, a curator heading up the newly-municipal ethnographic museum in Frankfort (municipal authorities terminated the contract with the Weltkulturen Museum last spring). She acted in an entirely radical way, “canceling” the main exhibition and handing over the exclusive right to interpret the enormous, (literally) city-building collection of this classical German museum directly to artists. Obviously, this is an area with a lot of names and projects that could be cited.

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum

Returning to my own work, I can say that I’m equally interested in both creative research in the field of the real museum, and the systemic phenomena of gaps and loss (thematic and historical), aberration (a museum of torture and butterflies) and wholly fictional museum projects, created by artists.

It seems to me that Avant-Garde Museology makes a major contribution to this conversation. I’m sometimes asked about how you see your role as an artist when you’re dealing with a body of texts that you’ve selected, and how this situation might differ from the role you take on as the artist behind a project like Cradle of Humankind, let’s say.

a.z.: Well, yes, there probably is some form of that question that’s worth being articulated. I was following the responses to the English publication of the book, and one day I came across this post in which someone I don’t know wrote that Avant-Garde Museology is a wonderful example of a literary hoax. Because really, even for me, many of these texts seem so extravagant that it’s difficult believing in their authenticity. And by this I primarily mean the materials connected with the Marxist experiments. After the revolution, as part of the idea for forming a new proletarian identity, a lot of people without any professional cultural education went to work in the museum. Their language is really similar to that of a propaganda poster. It’s full of a transformative energy, although it often expresses itself through a set of templates. There’s nothing like it today. Except maybe in literature, like, perhaps, in the last part of Vladimir Sorokin’s early novel, Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny [“Marina’s Thirtieth Love”], which consists of a stream of ideological clichés, taken from the speeches of Soviet nomenclature. The main difference in Sorokin’s automatic writing from the materials of these museologists is that at the end of the 1920s, this type of speech still carried some sort of meaning. But, just picture what an English-speaking researcher should think when reading about how the esteemed Soviet neurophysiologist Bekhterev suggested creating a museum commission that will open up the skulls of prominent citizens of the Soviet state to extract their brains and put them on display in the museum!

Typically my art projects explore a fictional history, purposefully made to mimic non-fiction. In the case of Avant-Garde Museology, the situation is reversed. So, in some senses, a more artistic interpretation would detract from the radicality of the materials presented in the publication.

Arseny Zhilyaev, Sketches for “Cradle of Humankind 2” at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics

But if we’re speaking seriously, then of course, in many ways I think of Avant-Garde Museology as its own conceptual project. The idea came about as a continuation of my own research as an artist, and it carries this trauma of its birth. If we are to approach Avant-Garde Museology from the position of the strict criteria of academic knowledge, in the best sense of the word, then I should confess that the book might not fully measure up. But that was never the goal for me. The idea was always about marking out new territory and drawing up a preliminary layout. As it were, the term “avant-garde museology” didn’t exist before, as no one ever thought to bring together so many different authors and museum projects. And my basic thrust was directed at proving the possibility of considering them together as part of a larger project, albeit on a superficial level, with some significant differences intact. The book opens with a section on Russian Cosmism, which was born out of Russian religious philosophy. In particular, we published a wonderful text by Florensky on the uniqueness of the church ritual as a specific kind of synthetic art, not prone to museification. In the last part, there is a section devoted to museums of atheism and the attempt of secular exhibitions to surpass the power of religious ritual. But all of this is just part of a larger discussion about the limits of the museum, of our society, of man, science, and even the Universe, if you’ve like.

k.c.: I would love to continue this conversation, expanding it to include even more participants. Sometimes the museum gives us occasion to talk about the Universe, and sometimes you have to be precisely accurate and practical. I sincerely hope that our shared experience and the book, Avant-Garde Museology, will serve as a point of attraction for the always active cell of our colleagues from different spheres of art and culture, and that we might realize other exhibition or publishing projects in this direction.