A Future Museum of the Present project narrative
een toekomstig museum van het heden
a future museum of the present Publication
A Future Museum of the Present project narrative
from Keith Piper
een toekomstig museum van het heden
a future museum of the present Publication
A Future Museum of the Present The project, ‘A Future Museum of the Present’ (Een Toekomstig Museum van het Heden) grew out of a residency undertaken by the artist Keith Piper in Dordrecht, Holland over a two month period during the summer of 20101. The residency was commissioned as part of ‘Unfixed’, a multiplatform project exploring the elusive “truth” of photography and its relationship to ideas of ethnicity, culture and identity in contemporary art.2 Amongst the multiple outcomes of this project is an exhibition featuring the work of six international artists taking place at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CBK) Dordrecht from the 23rd October to the 4th December 20103. During this period, the site of the ‘Future Museum’, a small house situated at number 113 Voorstraat (the same street as the CBK) opens to the public.
1 2 3
Residency Dates. 11th July – 12th September 2010 http://www.unfixedprojects.org/index.php http://www.unfixedprojects.org/Exhibition/?
Artists Statement ‘A Future Museum of the Present’ (Een Toekomstig Museum van het Heden), grew both out of a long standing interest in Archives, their formation and their ability to shape our reception of historical narrative, as well as a new interest in the subversive potential of what could be described ‘tricksterism1’ as a working methodology within art practice. 1 In this case, ‘tricksterism’ refers to a body of practises which employ strategies such as parody, inversion, shape-shifting, comedy, profanity, masquerade and encoding as a means of subverting dominant narratives. The area of ‘Trickster Studies’ engages in an examination of a range of ancient global myths and belief systems within which ‘trickster’ entities appear, and traces their evolution within contemporary culture within the persona’s of artists, musicians and poets who employ ‘tricksterism’ within their practices. (also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster)
The ‘Future Museum’ attempts to interrogate and problematise the assumptions of authority embodied within the act of forming the Museum or Archival collection. It seeks to do this through a set of strategic acts of parody and ‘masquerade’. Within this, the project exists as part of a body of contemporary practice in which a set of actions are formalised in an attempt to, through their apparent absurdity, present a critique of the assumed authority of socially dominant classes. As in the traditions of Caribbean Carnival where the act of masquerade was often used to copy, parody and thereby render absurd the actions of the ruling classes, the idea of the ‘trickster’ figure is activated to parody the assumptions inherent in ‘Museum and Archive building’.
Taking a lead from the work of ‘trickster’ artists such as David Hammons and William Pope. L (proclaimed ‘The Friendliest Black Artist in America’2), a set of actions are devised through which the artist assumes the task of ‘making’ a museum. The evident fact of the artists subject position, of being a non Dutch speaking, ‘ethnically’ non European ‘outsider’ (a set of differences which are, within the project, visible but un-referenced) is specifically calculated as a critique of the assumptions contained within historic acts of ethnographic and anthropological museum and archive building. Within these historical acts the (invariably) European archaeologist, anthropologist or ethnologist, would cast his classifying gaze over societies and groups other than his own and attempt to construct a codex of knowledge. The resultant data, although inevitably partial, contingent, subjective and strategically slanted to bolster the imperialist project, would, through the assumed authority of the author become accepted and fixed within the archive/museum as absolute objective evidence. In the case of ‘A Future Museum of the Present’, the impulse on the part of the archive builder to unilaterally declare particular objects, habitats, traditions and activities within the observed culture as ‘archivally significant’ and to employ them in an effort to postulate particular bodies of knowledge, is destabilised through parody. However, unlike the conventional Ethnographic Museum where the ‘subjects’ are distant, disempowered and unvoiced, in the case of the ‘Future Museum’, the subjects are ever present collaborators, actively and knowingly drawn into the parodic intentionality of a project where national motifs are reflected back through the distorting perspective of the outsider. 2 From the essay by Mark H.C.Bessire. ‘William Pope.L, The Friendliest Black Artist in America’. MIT Press. 2002 p22
The central motif, which came to dominate the development of the ‘collection’ of objects within the ‘Future Museum’ arose in response to the cultural and festive moment which the Netherlands was experiencing during the opening days of the artists residency out of which the ‘Museum’ would grow. The success of the Dutch football team and it’s passage through the qualifying stages of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, saw much of Holland’s urban space swathed in the colour orange. The immediate festive significance of this colour, both as reflected in the team ‘strip’, and as the Dutch national colour personified in the name of the Royal household3 was striking. The plethora of ephemeral orange objects generated out of this popularist moment immediately spoke to the tension between the ‘disposable’ and the ‘collectable’, between junk and treasure, and pointed to questions around who would be socially empowered to declare the difference. An early set of activities within the ‘Future Museum’ therefore became the collecting, through purchase and donation of an array of orange ‘objects’. Within this context, the usurping by the outsider artist of the power to declare objects ‘museum worthy’ and to classify their significance as markers of an imagined Dutch present, could in itself be seen as a subversive reversal of the old ethnographic model.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_House_ of_Orange
Running parallel to these acts of collecting orange objects
photographic subject could be decoded and understood as
came a series of photographic portraits of members of
the trace of an ‘authentic’ documentary moment are upset by
the arts and general community wearing or in some way
the shared knowledge of both the subject and photographer
interacting with an orange object, which was either theirs,
that a playful act of masquerade is taking place. The
or had been chosen by them from the museum ‘collection’.
subsequent use of digital image manipulation tools3 to, for
A simple photographic studio using flash lighting and a
instance, further enhance the stripping away of physical
solid white backboard was constructed as the setting for
context by the placing of the subject into a pure white space
this series of ‘collaborative’ portraits growing out of a set
further acts to baffle any attempt to read the image as an
of convivial interactions. The deliberately staged and ‘un-
authentic document or indicator. Through these means, a
naturalistic’ setting of the studio along with the request
deliberate distance is created between these images and
that the photographic subject should ‘invent’ a gesture
the histories of anthropological and ethnographic portraiture
involving a selected but also at times arbitrary orange object was used as a strategic device in order to destabilise still prevalent assumptions which surround the photographic portrait as a fixed system of knowledge. At its most extreme, these assumptions have led historically to the use of photography as a tool within the ‘Anthropometric’ classification of human type within the work of nineteenth century British Photo Anthropologists Thomas Henry Huxley and John Lamprey. This can be clearly traced through their desire ‘to produce a photographic document that would permit the subsequent recovery of reliable comparative and morphometric data’1. As a direct repost to the extreme formalism of Huxleys ‘photometric instructions2’, the subject being photographed is asked to spontaneously ‘invent’ a pose. The conventions of visual anthropology and semiotics through which the 1 Frank Spencer. ‘Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’ Anthropology & Photography p100 Edited by Elizabeth Edwards. Yale University Press. 1992 2 Ibid p101
3 The digital image manipulation software Adobe PhotoShop™ is heavily used in each image.
functioning as it does in an attempt to ‘document’ and ‘fix’ ethnic, regional or cultural ‘type’ as part of an evolving system of knowledge. Instead, these portraits seek to play with those conventions, at one point alluding to some type of cultural significance embodied within the interplay of the subjects with ‘orange’, whilst at the same time resisting any attempt on the part of the viewer to assemble those readings into a fixed system of knowledge.
The Books
As a key element of the residency, it was decided to employ the book form as a device for the organisation and presentation of a number of the small ‘projects’ whose outcomes would feed into the wider institution of the ‘museum’. Like the central concerns informing the collection and presentation of orange objects and individuals interacting with orange, which were accumulated into a book entitled ‘Beelden van Oranje (Images of Orange), each book employed a different strategy designed to destabilise the assumptions of knowledge embodied in the act of constructing a visual archive. Once again, in an attempt to parody the assumptive power of the formal institution, the second floor space of the ‘Museum’ was converted into a ‘Reading Room’ within which the various ‘publications’ of the Museum could be examined.
Pages from the Book ‘Beelden van Oranje’ (Images of Orange), as displayed on the ‘ISSUU’ web site (http://issuu.com/keithpiper88/ docs/images_of_orange). All books are available in hardback for one off purchase through ‘Blurb” (http://www.blurb.com)
The Archeology (Archaeology) of Sealed Surfaces was the first book
produced in the sequence. It take’s as it’s starting point the tension between the conventional and empowered position of the formal Archaeologist, and the informal artist observer/ explorer of urban space.
The formal Archaeologist arrives at the ‘site’ as an individual with the authority to ‘dig’ and gain knowledge through a process of the excavation of surfaces, which are rendered ‘porous’ either through age, underdevelopment or systematic rupture with sharpened tools. Within this process, ‘excavation’ becomes an expression of power. ‘ Knowledge building’ becomes strategic a process of transformation, of ‘territorial inscription’, with the body of the site inextricably marked through the act of cutting. The informal artist/observer on the other hand, especially when faced with the ‘overdeveloped’ civic spaces of a contemporary ‘first world’ urban landscape such as Dordrecht, is confronted by surfaces which are non-porous, sealed and set. The act of knowledge gathering is therefore confined to scanning the visible ‘skin’ of the land/ cityscape. The documents which result from this process reveal the dense patterning of surfaces, but systematically confound our ability to ‘read’ beyond or beneath that ‘skin’.
de Hood. Emerging out of a series of walks along the Voorstraat, the street on which the ‘Future Museum’ is sited, ‘de Hood’ becomes at its most basic level a documentation of various shop fronts, displaying the particularities and diversities of the commercial and cultural landscape of a shopping street in Dordrecht during the summer of 2010. However, in each shot we are aware through the reflected image within the shop front, both of the urban/commercial landscape on the opposite side of the street, and the figure of the photographer caught in the act of capturing the image currently being viewed. Through this device we are reminded that far from being a neutral ‘document’ we are witnessing a subjective and framed construction capturing the point of view of the figure in the frame. As this figure is, through the operation of deep rooted societal presumptions around race and gender, a member of a group more often fixed as the subject of photographic surveillance, and whose act of looking and recording (in the post 9/11 age of racial paranoia) is capable of engendering a sense of potential threat, a whole set of contested boundaries are crossed. The only text appearing in the book is the title, which exists as a play on colloquialism and language. The definitive article ‘de’, which exists both as the Dutch word and the ‘Ebonic’ slang for the same word, is seen prefixing the term ‘Hood’, a colloquial derivation of the term ‘Neighbourhood’, more often associated with ‘black’ urban spaces1 The term also exists in English as a shortened form of the term ‘hoodlum’, suggestive of threat and criminality, a character ‘up to no good’. What is attempted here therefore, is the interlacing of a number of different messaging systems which begin engage in a commentary on documentation, language and societal perception.
1
this can be seen in the title of John Singletons 1991 film ‘Boyz n the Hood”
Notes in the Margin of a Dutch Landscape. As the first in a series of ‘outsider’ reflections on the Dutch Landscape, this book reflects on the state of ‘not knowing’, projecting an encounter with landscape in which things are ‘unknown’ or for which information is only partially available. This project takes as its starting point traditions of ‘travel writing’ and in this case, passages taken from the science fiction novella “The Time Machine” by H.G Wells (1895). Within the Wells text, we are carried through a narrated account of an un-named ‘Time traveller’ who purports to have built a machine allowing him to travel into the distant future. What becomes of interest upon reading the book are the moments at which the time traveller engages in speculation about the nature of the landscapes and societies which he encounters based upon the knowledge systems which he carries with him, only then to acknowledge the limitations of those knowledge systems and their tendency to render his conclusions flawed or incomplete. These passages are presented alongside a series of unlabelled ‘non-places1’ within Dutch urban and rural landscapes as a means of giving expression to the limitations of the photographic gaze.
1 A term taken from Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé. Verso (1995)
Augmented Dordrecht. Augmented Dordrecht concerns itself with an act of tracing. It takes as its starting point an examination of the photographic archival memory of Dordrecht’s cityscape as preserved and presented through a range of printed publications. Key amongst these are the photographs of HJ Tollens (1864 – 1936) as recorded in the publication ‘Het Dordrecht van Tollens1’ (Boekhandel De Bengel, 2000). This encounter with the traces 1 Het Dordrecht van Tollens / met een inleiding van F.J. IJsinga-Van Boxsel. - Dordrecht : Stadsarchief ; Boekhandel De Bengel, 2000. - 23 cm, 128 blz., foto´s. - ISBN 90-805975-0-1 Circa 110 foto´s van het Dordrecht rond 1900 van de hand van de beroemdste plaatselijke fotograaf aller tijden, H.J. Tollens (1864-1936). € 22,50
of early photography and its re-presentation in the present through the mobile medium of the mass printed book provides the base line for another set of interventions. In this case digital imaging technologies are employed in order to speculatively imagine a reactivation of the historical archive within the real space of contemporary Dordrecht through the use of contemporary ‘locative media2’. In a sense, this book acts as a proposal for a larger work, which reactivates the historical archive, placing the viewer back into the physical space once occupied by the photographic tripod of Tollens, allowing us to view the ‘archival trace’ alongside the contemporary through ubiquitous prism of a proposed ‘Smartphone App’. 2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_media
Within the various acts of parody and playfulness that made up the project ‘A Future Museum of The Present’, the notion that the collection of physical and photographic objects accumulated during the production period would be eventually subsumed and represented as digital artefacts within a ‘virtual’ archive, was central. This virtual archive deploys the user interactive and ‘hyperlinked’ structures of contemporary information technology and data retrieval systems, acknowledging their current centrality within our desire to classify and order information. At the same time however, through the use of randomisation and other strategies, it is an archive which seeks to confound our expectations around the organisation and structuring of knowledge, and the objective utility of the archive within acts of knowledge gathering.
A VIRTUAL MUSEUM
Using the interactive programming system ‘Adobe Director™’ a series interfaces have been constructed allowing the user to ‘visit’ various sections of the virtual museum. Through the use of an interactive ‘touchpad’ positioned on a table, the spectator is able to ‘control’ a large projected image within the otherwise darkened and empty gallery space. Through this means, a series of encounters are set up through which the user can choose a pathway through the virtual museums ‘collection’ of ‘Portraits’, ‘Objects’ and ‘Landscapes’, the three categories which are often employed within efforts to stratify our traditional reading of Dutch art. In each section, the user is confronted by a series of interactive spaces allowing access to programmed fragments of some of the projects outlined in this book. However, in many cases, the computer itself disrupts through act of viewing through acts of random labelling in order to generate alternative meanings, random selection, sequencing, and artificially imposed limits on the duration of viewing.
Piper:MMX