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exploring object-based performance:
on fred wilson and mining the museum samantha scott
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hrough object-based performance, artist Fred Wilson provides audiences the space to think through ideas of meaning and memory within the context of the museum. He utilizes the museum, specifically art and historical museums, as his medium; it is a living archive and Wilson’s intervention is into the museum as an archival site. He “mines the museum,” exploring the deep archive to reveal objects that have been hidden or forgotten...or hidden and forgotten. With these found objects, Wilson creates exhibitions, which allow him to establish an institutional critique that forces the audience to call into question their understanding of the museum, how it functions, and how it places meaning upon the objects.
intervention The museum exists as a site for the cultivation of superior culture. There is a selective valuation of certain objects over others that happen in a series of steps: selecting and privatizing public worldly property, placing it in the private setting of the Western museum, putting it on display and extracting it from its cultural context to finally create a desired system of representation (González). As a response, institutional critique, “indicates the detailed analyses of networks of power and systems of representation the artists perform in order to reveal the cultural mechanisms at play in museums and other social institutions that market or display art; [it provides] “a specific commentary on the power and pervasiveness of market capitalism, patriarchy, patrimony, or race discourse operates through social institutions, especially art institutions (González, 67).” Wilson follows this pattern of unraveling authoritative networks, using his performance pieces as a method for locating “other” subjectivities; he calls into question the way in which this particular archive shapes our understanding of the repertoire. Specifically, he exposes internalized assumptions surrounding racialized hierarchies and the way in which museums have been structured around both colonial and imperial relations (González, 67). For example, after being taken from those that they belong to, these artifacts are racialized and are made to stand in for the peoples they supposedly represent. Further, through his perfor-
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mance, Wilson explores understandings of beauty and ugliness. In a video titled “Beauty and Ugliness” he explains that, Beauty can hide meaning...there is meaning in beauty; there is meaning in ugliness...I try to bring out that tension...not acknowledging that beauty is complex is the problem...I enjoy making it complex for people.
In pretty simple language, the preceding passage explicates the fact that often, that which is understood to be beautiful is to be valued and accepted without question, in the same way that meanings constructed by the museum are to be accepted without question. In an interview Wilson states, I try to bring out the meanings that I see in the objects, often the ones that for one reason or another, are hidden in plain sight. This is not to replace the museum’s view of the object’s meaning with my own, but to let both meanings or multiple meanings be present at the same time. I am interested in at least acknowledging that the object can be understood from many different vantage points. I think the average person has difficulty with the idea that what they believe to be true about a thing is completely negated (silently) by the museum.
Through bringing out these varied meanings, he dismantles the museum as being the authority at the same time.
so much trouble in the world Within this paper, I look at what Wilson calls The Dartmouth Project entitled, “So Much Trouble in the World-Believe it or Not!” The exhibit was shown from October 4 to December 5, 2005 at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire. According to Wilson, the naming of the exhibition stems from the inevitability of war at that time and on his drive to Hanover, he listened to that specific Bob Marley song. He presents the project at the University of Southern California, using photographs of the exhibit.
dark The exhibit is shown in three separate rooms, painted in varying shades of red, each room darker than the last. The first room features 50 images and objects, which belonged to Daniel Webster, a “well-known American who saved Dartmouth from becoming a public institution.” Among the artifacts on display
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was a pair of Webster’s socks; his contributions to Dartmouth were so important that they held on to personal items, including his socks. Located above the red, above these several objects were a handful of images of people of color and women of note. Simply images - no personal items included.
The first of the three rooms, featuring images and objects belonging to Daniel Webster.
darker In the next room, Wilson includes items found in deep storage, what he refers to as “arcane collections; things that are never seen in the art museum.” He notes that there is no climate control or protection of these particular objects and therefore they are chipped and damaged putting on display both the historic nature of these objects (violence done unto them as they were acquired, wear and tear over the years) as well as the value that the museum placed (or did not place) on them.
“...objects in the museum do not exist just to be looked at; they have a presence that exists beyond their aesthetic value.” Wilson extracts several dark busts that portray various peoples of color from deep storage. He explains that they were created by making casts of real people’s faces. At the time they were made, these casts were to be distributed amongst historical museums to look at different race types. To that point, each of the busts had its own taxonomic label and wore a slight grimace. Upon further research, Wilson discovered that the original casts were much more expressive but these instances of objection were covered up by sculptors who tried to smooth
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out and make pleasant their faces. With these expressions in mind, it is clear that those who were made casts were not just being looked at. They were looking too and they responded to the conditions they were being put under. He dressed each bust in a white scarf not only as an honorific gesture but also to hide their taxonomic category. He also included a label with something he thought they might be saying. For example, Ota Benga says, “I am the one who never came back;” the Filipina woman says, “Someone knows my mother.” Wilson does this not to give these figures speech, but instead, acknowledges that they have the very capacity to speak. Similar to the first room, these busts are juxtaposed with a display of the “hands of great men,” which had names, versus the busts that had no names.
darkest The third room, the darkest of them all included a series of horrific images, paintings and prints, all of which were shrouded with veils. Within this space, the viewer is required to have a private experience with each image and is driven to understand that “images are not all the same.” Though constructed as such, objects in the museum do not exist just to be looked at; they have a presence that exists beyond their aesthetic value. In addition we see damaged pieces of statues, again putting on display the violence done to objects for the sake of collection.
conclusion Overall, Wilson’s work, and this project in particular seems to, in some ways, hinge on Judith Butler’s idea of dispossession. His restructuring of the museum and its objects calls into question existing systems of representation and necessity of unveiling the truth of the past – acknowledging the colonial and imperial history that shapes the museum and the way that it functions…I wonder if this moves toward new possibilities for the museum and what it can be or if this work will render this particular archive obsolete. Without the deep archive, this type of project cannot exist. But as Wilson keeps digging, we are forced to see the museum’s inadequacies. Further, with Wilson’s work, the audience is forced to engage with the object in its presence, not just as present. To recognize the newly rendered meanings, which challenge their subject-position in relation to the particular objects on display as well as considering more largely their existence within their particular time and space. Wilson provides an uncomfortable and completely necessary complexity.
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references Beauty & Ugliness. Perf. Fred Wilson. Art 21, 2014. Film. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, 1992-1993 González, Jennifer A. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008. Introduction. 1-21. González, Jennifer A. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008. “Fred Wilson: Material Museology.” 64-119. Graham, Mark A. “An Interview with Artist Fred Wilson.” Journal of Museum Education. 32.3 (2007): 209-217. Print.
about the author...
Samantha Scott is a senior in the College of Arts of Sciences at Emory University pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies with a minor in African American Studies. This essay was written origially for Introduction to Performance Studies, a Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies/Theater Studies course that explores resistive techniques through performance art and peformance studies. From the course description: “[participants] focus on queer, feminist, and practicioners of color, whose work primarily intervenes in the institutionalization of difference by altering us to the production of bodily excess.