Mining the Museum

The museum as an institution is an interesting conundrum. The curatorial hand pretends to be omniscient and objective. It doesn't take more than a few steps into research to realize that curators inherently color their collections by the knowledge and experience.

Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough is being publicly called out for his censorship of the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery. Clough specifically targeted artists that were gay and lesbian as unfit for the national portrait gallery.

In response to or in accordance with the "Members of the Republican Study Committee, a key House Republican group, unveiled their proposed cuts of the federal budget today — and left the Smithsonian Institution off the list." In an attempt to censor art for the sake of conservative ideals house republicans have inserted themselves into a conversation over what is appropriate for viewing.

what they don't know is that gay and lesbian porn is free on the internet.

The real issue here is the continued archaic discussion over the objectivity of museums. No, the space is not objective, the subjects not objective, and the art is not objective.

We must understand the metadata of an institution before we can really respond to what it is housing.

http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2011/01/revealing-cloughs-spin-as-a-falsehood/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2011/01/debunking-cloughs-spin-part-two/

Art-focused Journalism by Tyler Green

Tyler Green Modern Art Notes January 24, 2011, 12:28 pm

"Three low pedestals to the right of the case supported portrait busts below eye level.
Harsh lighting caused shadows to pool in their eye cavities, imparting an air of cranky melancholia
to a toga-clad Henry Clay, and Napoleon Bonaparte and Andrew Jackson in uniform. None of
these worthies had ever lived in Maryland; they exemplify those previously deemed deserving of
sculptural representation and subsequent museum acquisition. To the left were three higher and
empty pedestals that bore only small plaques proclaiming the names of celebrated African
Americans who were Marylanders: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Banneker.
By dramatizing the absence of their portraits, Wilson found a canny way to reveal the slights of
history and to indicate major gaps in the museum's collections."

-Sins of Omission: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum
By Judith E. Stein
First published in Art in America, October 1993

http://yougenics.net/griffis/courses/arts344/readings/MiningMuseum.pdf

"Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages."
"Will there be dry photography?"
"Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately."

This piece is humbling. often we are searching for the new discovery, bent on being the first to conqure an idea or a field. This article from 1945 reminds us that we are not alone and that we have to pay homage to those that came before. There are tools to discovery everywhere and they merely need force more than individual genius to begin. Bush predicts so righty countless inventions with which he has no connection to the kind of technical programing they will require to work.
The memex is a topic of the library scientist. A machine to streamline research, to access a wealth of knowledge from a single location. We continue to live up to the exspectations of such a profit. Imagination is championed in this speech predicting the invention of the computer 50 years before it was how we know imagine.

July 1945 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

"The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."

http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/BUSH_BERRNIER.html

yougenics.net/griffis/courses/arts344

Read: Vannevar Bush "As We May Think".

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