A CLIMATE FOR CHANGING Lucy I. Zimmerman
When I began working on Climate Changing in the spring of 2019, it was scheduled to open May 29, 2020, serving as the exhibition that would close out the Wexner Center’s 30th anniversary year. Anniversaries provide an occasion for reflexivity, to examine the past as well as reaffirm commitments into the future. I decided to tinker with this past/present/future anniversary “recipe” and revisit Chris Burden’s architectural intervention Wexner Castle (1990), a work commissioned for the last exhibition of our inaugural year. I was interested in how restaging this now-historical work would resonate today, 30 years later. How might this revisitation encourage new lines of inquiry? In thinking about reshaping the center’s iconic architecture through Wexner Castle a second time, and focusing on its original iteration as a gesture of institutional critique, I devised a list of questions to guide this exhibition: Is the museum a fortress or castle designed to protect “precious” cultural objects, or rather, is it a platform for producing new ones? If the purpose of the museum is to provide a space for culture, and by extension act as an arbiter of value, how can it forge pathways toward ethical awareness and foster active, equitable participation in shaping those values? What are artists’ roles within museums, communities, and cultures?
Whom do museums serve?
6
