Lecture 004

Fred Wilson

• add Baltimore's slave past to Maryland Historical Society's display

• "Mining the Museum"

• past is ideologically charged cultural construct

• encourage present-day subjects to delink from Western epistemes

Irene Winter: Foucauldian archeologist

Background:

• African, Caribbean, American Indian descent

• minimalism, institutional critique

• trained: as sculptor and theatrical design

"American Exhibition": institution slavery

"No Noa Noa": history of Tahiti

• south pacific isle

• a French painter's face with same name

"Rooms With A View": highlight effect of museum wall color and arrangement.

Create "Museum" environment himself (p30)

• "The Other Museum"

• "Primitivism: High and Low"

• My thoughts

  • Prohibited by classical museum: touch (paintings), smell (odor), taste, hear (no noise)
  • Kinda allow by modern museum: touch, hear
  • smell, taste?
  • and interaction between the objects with museum wall
  • can VR, as a container solve the problem? It can't. Then we are limited in VR, can't touch and feel the texture.
  • art as an experience, customize experience

"Primitivism": (p32)

• "Friendly Natives": plastic skeleton. Named: "Someone's sister" People who are lost within the embrace of kinship structure. (not human remain for science)

• colonial power

• European museum as production of alterity (arrange "primitive" to "civilized")

Class

"Whipping Post"

• wood whipping post + chair already in meuseum

• manipulate arrangement, not objects, to create new meanings

Museum "machine" are built to serve purpose

• identify "the other"

Black Nanny raising white children: this could have become a weapon.

• KKK cloth in baby cart