museum

Academy and Museum

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Ecole supérieure d'art visuel and the Musée d'art et d'histoire
Geneva 1998

The Value of Things

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:52:00 +0100

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

October 2000

Location

Publisher

an August/Birkhauser publication: London and Basel

Designer

Stephen Coates

Body

Part beautiful artists book, part critical text The Value of Things is the result of over five years research, facilitated by unprecedented access to the British Museum and Selfridges Department Store.

To live in a modern city, is to live in an environment described by an astonishing array of things. Growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, electronic technology and rubbish are piling up around us. Objects are inserted into, and spill out of every shelf, cupboard, display case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and landfill site. Surrounded by a complex mesh of competing 'product narratives' that dispute ownership, contest interpretation, and disagree on value, these vast accumulations of objects are the means by which we make ourselves and our world knowable.

Events in the previous century which led to this daunting state of accumulation, unfolded as the end-game of a revolution which had begun in the nineteenth century. The giant engines of European industralisation that initiated the material avalanche of the modern age necessitated the evolution of massive institutions to both structure and display the energy of production through things.

The Value of Things sets out to explore the narratives of two institutions which perfectly represent the awesome technologies for sourcing, transportation, warehousing, accounting, stocking, display and redistribution of material things. The greatest inventions of modernity, these institutions are the most privileged sites within the social organisation of all objects, images, signs and services: the department store and the public museum.

Although clearly organised around different economic drives, what the department store shares with the museum is the encyclopaedic desire to render the whole world knowable, classified and displayed for the visitor to consume. If the museum inherited its collection and core practices from the previous aristocracy, its driven by a set of values and narratives to protect an image of singularity through souvenirs of the past. In simple contrast, the store holds the promise of a semiotic democracy, played out live amongst the profusion of the present.

But The Value of Things is not merely a task of mourning - it tracks the narrative of the museum and the store through into the newly-diffused territories of the digital age. As we enter the first decade of the new millennium, our traditional play with value has exceeded its previous limits. A principle of value based on the expression of accumulated excess, has far less relevance in electronically connected economies.

While the department store and museum act as a model to structure and narrate previous attitudes towards things, they are also caught in a process of radical transformation - they may even be accelerating towards a strange convergence.

As the store is superseded by out-of-town shopping cities, or its convenience challenged by the point-and-click of e-commerce, the ruthless forces of commerce are subsumed under an image of public service and spectacle. The store becomes a tourist destination dispersed amongst other cultural sites. In turn, as an effect of changes in both public provision and the constitution of its visiting audience, the museum has been forced to aggressively market and license its own collection. Those stored old things, are harnessed as potential new revenue streams via tiers of licensed commercial access. The museum is evolving as a 'brand', competing to control the flow of value through things, as its objects merge with a wider culture of exhibition, our most unique artifacts become seamlessely integrated into the retail present.

224 pages 17 x 23.5cm full colour

to read a review
College Art Association Reviews

to buy from Birkhauser or Amazon

Description

ISBN/ASIN

3 7643 6316 9

ArtWords Link

Pour Les Curieux

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:34:03 +0100

Sub-Title

A project to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Musée d'art et d'histoire and the Ecole supérieure d'art visuel, Geneva. In collaboration with Sylvia Alberton, Adrien Beck, Donatella Bernardi, & Michael Henry.

End Date

20 Sep 1998

Start Date

6 Jun 1998

Location

Musée d'art et d'histoire, Genéve

Body

Since the 19th century there has evolved an intimate relationship between the education of artists and their potential public; through the museum and its collection.

Pour Les Curieux explored this evolution, and the educational imperative at the heart of the public museum. We traced the legacy of drawing and copying from artworks and artifacts by students, in the museum and scool themselves. And, the extension of these reproductive practices through the dissemination of exemplary artifacts to Art Academies, through casts and copies of the collection. More recently the use of photography, slide presentations, accompanying video films, lectures, an internet presence and publications have diffused the means of reproduction and education; for artists, the museum and their shared audience.

Pour les Curieux attempted to make the various, and powerful technologies of education in the Museum apparent. This included drawing attention to the museum's principle device of representation; the assembly of artifacts and reconstructed objects into themed 'exhibitions' or theatrical 'tableau'. But also attending to the supporting technologies of display; vitrines, plinths, frames, text panels, documentary photographs, pamphlet guides, museum tours, children's workshops, accompanying audiovisual displays, film and lecture programs, etc.

Imagine an auditorium: with rows of chairs laid out waiting for the audience, the chairs address a lecture podium on top of which is a microphone, small light, a glass and carafe of water; the microphone is connected to an amplifier and large free-standing speakers. Twin slide projectors with long-lead controls are on a stand ready, pointing towards a large white screen. During the exhibition these artifacts, labeled with museological precision become prt of an exhibitionary tableau; museum objects worthy of attention. And yet during the Thursday lunchtime Public Lectures, they have the potential to function as a 'working' lecture theatre. Through exhibition, an object has been made out of the medium, for the delivery of education; the audience hover, uncertain of their or the lecture theatre's status.

A tableau of a life drawing room - a 19th century device for instruction- complete except for the posing model, begins a display sequence which culminates in a contemporary Art School seminar room; the body has been replaced by the book.

We recognize the exponential growth of the Museum, and the expanding role funding and policy makers expect of them. No longer contained by the physical site of the building, the museum's practices extend discursively beyond its walls. So to coincide with our exhibition and as integral part of our project we organized the following:

1. Curate the public Thursday Lecture Program at the Museum during the month of June (focused around the theme of education and its institutions, their histories and practices)

2. Choose the Object of that Month: a collaboration with the newspaper La Tribune des Arts, inviting readers to locate a 'highlight' object in the Museum collection.

3. Arrange the 'advertising' vitrine at Musee Rath in the Ave Corraterie for the duration of the project.

4. Link the Museum and the School's web-site via our page devoted to the project.

5. Organise a Children's Workshop in the Museum and School

6. Produce a Pocket Companion exhibition guide.

Through discussion -and a chance photograph near Rue de Chantepoulet our title for the project became Pour les Curieux. The idea of natural curiosity tempered by eduction perfectly fits the aspiration of both the museum and the school.

Errata

admin — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:29:08 +0100

Sub-Title

Commissioned by Bruce Ferguson for
Walking, Thinking, Walking part of No/Where

End Date

8 Sep 1996

Start Date

15 May 1996

Location

Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art, Denmark

Body

Errata is a parasitical intervention into a public museum, via the catalogue of the collection.

From the Introduction

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is comprised of a sequence of buildings that have evolved since the 1950`s, extending self-consciously, but unobtrusively through out the surrounding parkland. The buildings simultaneously embrace and exclude the environment. Trees, greenery and shocking glimpses of the Sound -the sea separating Denmark and Sweden- expand your experience of the collection through a spectacular succession of glazed passages, galleries and picture windows.

As you walk through the museum, its spaces unfold; entrance, gallery, corridor, garden, another gallery, children's house, cafe, beach, reading room, terrace and shop. The shift in qualities of space is reflected in the values of the artefacts contained; if not in the artefacts, then in the quality of attention you extend to them. A parallel material sequence may include; money, painting, chair, print, sculpture, tree, postcard, another painting, book, glass, souvenir, etc...

While following the catalogues formal blueprint Errata proposes straying and sliding from art to artefact and back again. Errata uncovers the means by which the museum constructs and authorises specific objects, by tracing the dissemination, regulation and exclusion of the collection through display, presentation and representation of objects and images.

Errata was freely availible during the exhibition as an additional guide to the Museum, and included with every catalogue purchase.

Read a review of the work in Critique and Compliance by Patricia C. Phillips, Sculpture Magazine May 2000 - Vol.19 No. 4

Or visit Louisiana

Lost Property

admin — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:31:16 +0200

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

October 1996

Location

Publisher

Chance Books & Public Art Development Trust; London

Designer

Stephen Coates

Body

A book resulting from a collaboration between us, the London Underground and Public Art Development Trust. It represents a selection of things from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office.

We are easily seduced into acquiring, exchanging and displaying vast quantities of material things. Accumulation, in its broadest sense, is the literal writing-into-being of an individual or culture.

Things are found, polished, displayed and treasured; bought, bound or framed and collected; the object, plucked from the generic soup of a media culture, is momentarily arrested and woven into an intimate personal narrative, "I bought this when I was in Paris". It is this enveloping which marks the thing as a possession and simultaneously allows the narrator to refine and evaluate experience, to evolve a sense of difference or belonging. The thing itself, as commodity, inheritance, gift or souvenir, has become a privileged vehicle for establishing an emotional and intellectual identity. Things authenticate experience.

This much is well known.

The dark shadow within our seamless assembly of possessions and continuous narration of `self`, is loss. The word loss delineates a terrifying space, it is the void over which all exchange and collection precariously take place, but, from which no insurance or story can ever protect. Loss infuses accumulation with fear, everything, even our most precious belongings continuously circulate within its grasp.

Lost Property touches the wound opened between lost property, and the emotional investment implicit in personal possession. There will be no attempt to suture that gap. Comprised of photographs and texts, the book mimics the dispassionate style of a museum catalogue in an effort to re-inscribe the absence all the more emphatically. Inevitably, the book has more to do with the conventions of representation, than recovering a material presence. The things pictured, are still missing from these pages.

A temporary collection bound by this catalogue parodies the conventions established by museum acquisition. Although the collection is a well known paradigm of perfection, the objects here are always already incomplete, misplaced, fallen from narration, and never to return.

Lost Property is a selection from one days property recovered by the London Transport Lost Property Office; on average, some three hundred items. Designed as a desirable pocket size souvenir by Stephen Coates, Lost Property was released at the moment of spectacular accumulation, Christmas 1995

Description

148 pages, 140 B & W images

ISBN/ASIN

0-9513932-4-3

ArtWords Link

Reflective Practice

admin — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:58:15 +0100

Reflective Practice

Dan Smith's essay for the catalogue of the project Free Trade

The footnotes are missing

Gallery 9 occupies a key position in the newly reopened Manchester Art Gallery. It looks unassuming enough, a room that amounts to little more than an antechamber between the grand staircase leading up from the main entrance and the sumptuously arranged collections of nineteenth-century works that populate the first floor. However, it is inevitably the focus of much of the traffic that passes through the building, a pivotal location on the potential routes that visitors might take. Many - if not most - visitors would pass through Gallery 9, and would probably do so as either the first or last of the galleries that they encountered. Gallery 9 is a point at which the types of experiences made possible within the rest of this museum may be subtly influenced, altered or determined. That museums in general are spaces which frame and condition certain modes of behaviour and experience has already been proposed and much discussed (particularly within the field of Museum Studies). One aspect of this is addressed in an essay by the artist Julian Walker, in which he refers to the fact that some museums will insist that visitors’ bags be left in a cloakroom. This insistence, he suggests, is not for the convenience of the visitor, but rather an assertion of the importance of objects on display over a visitor’s personal belongings:

Tate:gift giving

admin — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:06:38 +0100

Gift Giving
Capital, Tate 2001

A Pocket Companion

admin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:35:57 +0100

Pour Les Curieux: A Pocket Companion was the exhibition catalogue and guide for Pour Les Curieux our project to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Musée d'art et d'histoire and the Ecole supérieure d'art visuel, Geneva. In collaboration with Sylvia Alberton, Adrien Beck, Donatella Bernardi, & Michael Henry.

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part of Collected, London 1997

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Browse, part of Collected 1997

museum

Academy and Museum

The Value of Things

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Pour Les Curieux

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Errata

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Lost Property

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Body

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ArtWords Link

Related Films

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Reflective Practice

Reflective Practice

Tate:gift giving

A Pocket Companion

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