Last Thursday I attended a lecture given by Phillippe de Montebello (en)titled Encyclopedic Museum: Enlightened or Entitled? De Montebello, in a voice akin to Patrick Stewart doing his best Patrick Stewart impression, preached largely to the choir on the subject of the ethical debate involved in 'discovering', purchasing and showcasing antiquities in modern encyclopedic museums.

De Montebello began his lecture with a brief history of museums in general and the development of the concept of the 'encyclopedic' museum- one intended to showcase and explain virtually all the cultures of the world and their artifacts. (One imagines this stems from the same impulse for amounts of information so large as to be unprocessable that brought us the internet.) Mr. De Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, cited shows that he presided over at his museum to illustrate the educational and cultural benefits of exposure to these antiquities, notably the Year One exhibit which took place in the year 2000 at the Museum and included a glimpse at what the craftsmen and artists of cultures worldwide were producing at or around the time of the year 0.

De Montebello approaches his topic with a love and nostalgia for the encyclopedic museum that can hardly be faulted in a man who has spent his life advancing its cause. The Metropolitan did nothing but flourish under his guardianship, and as one who spent formative years within visiting distance of the Museum, I must (and do) thank him, deeply. In point of fact, I have very few qualms with the concept of the encyclopedic museum, either on personal, ethical or cultural levels. I agree with Mr. de Montebello's assertion that national museums - or other museums devoted to one narrow place, artist, time or cultural movement - do not permit the comparison necessary to fully understand the place that an object holds in the entire span of human cultural history. Museums such as the Metropolitan (and the Art Institute here in Chicago, where I attended his lecture) provide a certain kind of context that facilitates a deeper understanding of the works they show. At least historically.

The problem that keeps coming up for museums such as these is the pedigree of the works they choose to display. De Montebello repeatedly referenced a carving of the Code of Hammurabi which was originally carved in a country we now know as Iraq, but wound up buried beneath a country we now know as Iran for 3,000 years before being unearthed by Western excavations. Sadaam Hussein's request for the return of the piece to modern day Iraq provoked questions of who can really claim to be the cultural heir to such a piece. Does it belong to whatever country is now on top of the nation in which it was produced? Does it belong to the place where it has spent the most time (in this case, Iran) or to the country that financed the excavations which led to its (re)discovery? Do we need genetic testing to see which country is the most genetically tied to the Babylonian empire?

De Montebello poses these questions with only slightly less exaggeration and disdain than I. He is a humanist at heart, one who solidly feels that the ends justify the means. And when the ends are the cultural enrichment of the people of the world over the national pride of the people of one country, I am inclined to agree with him. But he makes another point, subtly. In the history of museums that began his lecture, de Montebello refers to museums not as a part of our way of life, but as a part of our urban way of life. He also makes several allusions to the idea that "to the victor go the spoils." The interesting twist on this debate is who that victor is, exactly. We are no longer talking about the ancient Romans raiding their Barbarian neighbors, or the Muslim artifacts taken as trophies in the crusades. This is not even a matter of the booty brought back to France by Napoleon, or the looting and raiding of museums during the military maneuvers in Iraq. The real victory here is one of class over class and culture over culture. While I am generally inclined to agree with Mr. de Montebello in his stand (at least in part due to my own love of seeing beautiful pieces) I do find it hard to avoid the fact that collecting is a game for the rich, and exoticism a passion of the bored. The hordes of young white Americans who flock to Buddhism, Rastafarianism, or even something as simple as backpacking through Europe are all examples (and I include myself among them) of those who seek out new cultural validity when they feel their own cultures have failed them. The difference is that thoughts can be absorbed and left to remain in the place where they originated. Objects, naturally, must be brought back. To the enlightened (or entitled) go the spoils.

Consumed with domestic issues lately, a large part of which is an upcoming move. I move at least every 12 months. Since 2005, i have lived in six places. Before that it's just as bad, but I was in school so that doesn't count somehow. I hope to stay in this new place for a while. I think I'm getting frustrated with not having any roots. I wonder if it's natural to be afloat like I sometimes think I am. Although there is no doubt in my mind that soon I will be restless again, I'm looking forward to something tying me down a bit.

I will be setting up a darkroom in the bathroom attached to my room. There is some extra space at the top of a stairwell that I hope to use to visualize some installations. Assuming I get it together and register for the class, soon I will be learning etching.

Pull it together. Pull it together. Pull it together.

-------------------

I have just read (in five hours) Haruki Murakami's Dance, Dance, Dance. The man is amazing, although after reading a few of his books there is a tendency for too many plot points to be the same. Not enough to be formulaic, but enough to illicit a sort of, "Oh, that again" feeling every time a character walks into another world or there is a precocious and beautiful teenage girl. For that matter, every time a thirty-something man living alone eats well, appreciates jazz, elects not to sleep with a beautiful woman, drinks some whiskey and goes to bed only to have surreal dreams that he can't quite interpret and decides to go along for the ride.

Not that I could write any of this any better. And not that it stops me from devouring his books. But I wonder how many more I can read before, like Tom Robbins, they all get a little less revolutionary.

An afternoon at the Art Institute

The last trip I made to the Art Institute here in Chicago (who can resist when it's free all month) was a strange sort of de-contextualized one. Maybe I've been spending too much time thinking about context lately, but nothing seemed like what it was. Or what it was intended to seem like.

The European Decorative Arts section looks like this at the moment:



It's a strange sight made even stranger by the bizarre Yayoi Kusama-esque display of paperweights attached in a smaller room.





Maybe this is a consequence of contemporary people with contemporary thoughts designing displays. There was something funny about looking at such objects on display as purely decorative. It's almost as though, in truth just balls of glass, they masqueraded for a while as paperweights, somehow a different thing entirely, and have now been rendered (by their new found uselessness) balls of glass once more. Purely decorative at last, as perhaps they always have been.

Also fascinating was the Maya pottery from the Late Classic period decorated by Ah Maxam. At least, so says the sign. There is a strange kind of hubris is claiming that knowledge. Apparently the 'artist's ' name comes from a glyph on the side, although various groups have attributed it to the owner of the vessel or a professional title or perhaps the name of the artist. But doesn't it sound important if we know the artist's name? Doesn't it seem as if the museum is doing an especially good job?

The graphic qualities of this work are astonishingly striking and startlingly beautiful. It requires a much better look than I can offer you.

Consciousness (mostly) regained after a few days of sleeping off a cold of mysterious origin, I would like to edit this most recent post about the proposed blocking of funding for the arts included in the President's proposed stimulus package. It's deserving of a coherent thought or two.
_______________________________________



Art or Idiocy?, one of the blogs I follow, brought this to my attention. (I listen to NPR for at least a few hours a day, but I still seem to always be the last to know.) To quote from the Americans for the Arts website:

During their consideration of the Economic Recovery bill, the Senate approved an amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) that prohibits funding for "...museums, theaters and arts centers..." This amendment, approved by a vote of 73-24, if included in the final version of this legislation would prevent the economic recovery funding from supporting these areas of the non-profit arts community.

On this website there is also a link to a form letter you can send to your senators. By entering your zipcode, your state's senators come up with a letter either thanking and encouraging them for voting against the amendment and for funding for the arts, or expressing disappointment at their decision that the arts are not worth funding.

I have to admit, I'm a skeptic about these mass e-mails of approval/disapproval, but if you click your heels three times and say, "Obama" maybe it will work. In any case, I'm sick of the arts being deemed excessive. We give money to schools, aren't museums and arts institutions an equal source of education? And continuing education for those no longer in the government mandated school system is just as important as teaching children. The Americans for the Arts website claims that without this funding 260,000 jobs will be lost; aren't those people as American as auto factory workers? It's a strange kind of reverse elitism to deny funding to those who aim to educate and advance cultural causes in favor of those who advance economic causes purely. A job is a job, and with an economic forecast as bleak as ours, is it really the time to bring up the old debate about government funding the arts?

Here's an excerpt from the 1992 ruling in the case of Karen Finley (performance artist) v. the National Endowment for the Arts:

The NEA was created by Congress in 1965 as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities (the "Foundation"). In establishing the Foundation, Congress found that "it is necessary and appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of . . . creative talent." 20 U.S.C. 952(5) It was the intent of congress to encourage "free inquiry and expression," and to insure that "conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged" and that "no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression." 111 Cong. Rec. 13, 108 (1965).

a few shots from the Morpho Gallery show

"...a sedimentation of meaning."

I aim to steal more colors from Peter Doig.

I aim to steal more thoughts from Walter Benjamin.
___________________________________


I have recently begun reading The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris. After a few attempts trying to jump into the deep end of critical philosophy, I have decided to start at a reasonably historic point of beginning. By this, I mean that I am not interested, or realistically able, to conduct an entire survey of Western thought by myself, so I am starting at a place that most other (failed) efforts have led me to see as something of a beginning.

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is a book I have read twice and understood fully neither of those times. Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View stumped me about half-way through. (Plus I had to return it to the library) Benjamin it is. And so far, reading this book is akin to someone is explaining to me the things that I already think, but in a much more coherent and comprehensive way. The introduction to the book is more or less a guide to Benjamin's approach to writing and how we as the reader must consider not only his intended meanings but the way in which his 'sober' method of writing not only adds to but is part of the meaning itself. There are plays on the words representing thought (the 'old' fashion of writing) and presenting thought (Benjamin's inteded goal). Writing is broken up into sentances, forcing the reader to pause and reflect, the same way pauses in spoken word can affect a listener.

A favorite quote from the introduction:

"Our knowledge of a subject is the means by which we relate to that which we do not possess."

Every now and then I think of this Edward Keating photograph of the dust settling on objects after the towers fell on September 11th. I remember seeing it in the New York Times on my parent's kitchen table, and thinking it was so much more striking than the photos of the crashes themselves or the people jumping (which, luckily, I have never seen).

I mean to say nothing more than that I think about it. It's a beautiful photo, I wish I could find a better image of it.