Writings & Musings
Synopsis
The practice of everyday life is filtering into museums’ and artists’ practices in relation to their uses of digital technologies. The symbiotic relationship between museums and artists in relation to the uses of digital technologies reveals that everyday life in the modern world influences their application. The practice of everyday life is filtering into museums’ and artists’ uses of digital technologies, thus the boundaries between the liminal and everyday are shifting; the boundaries are becoming less defined.
Everyday technologies and aspects of the everyday are being integrated in the liminal space of the museum. This is because digital technologies are familiar and therefore accessible. They can be personalised, are potentially creative and have inventive possibilities: key characteristics of the everyday. Museums can use them as interpretive media to enable publics’ opinions to be voiced together with institutional interpretations. Changes in museological programmes have meant that personalising visitors’ experiences has taken prominence over previous visions of creating generalised cultural experiences.
Artists on the other hand use technologies to explore their potential and creative uses beyond their utilitarian and intentional functions. In this way they can highlight what is often overlooked and reveal alternative, subjective interpretations. Digital technologies are suitable tools for revealing the curiosities and complexities of the everyday due to their essential everydayness. They can be potentially visionary and demonstrate how the everyday can be re-invented.
© 2007 Naomi Kashiwagi
Synopsis
Digitised text plays a significant role in museological interpretations in terms of the production and storage of information and the scope of museological and audience generated interpretations. Multiple texts can be produced that voice opinions from diverse publics. Digitised text has also catalysed the possibility of museological information to be personally customised for and by audiences. Although there is an element of personal choice, this is fundamentally illusory because the choices can only be made within a prescriptive, programmed number of options.
Printed digitised text within a museological context can reinforce the authoritative voice of the institution due to the prescriptive, consistent and formal constructions of text. However, due to the reproductive qualities of digitised text, it also potentially enables multiple texts to be produced that could express diverse interpretations. With the vast amount of information available in this information society, it is crucial that society evolves into a learning society that is characterised by the educational and creative uses of information. Museums could potentially have a pivotal role in this equation. This is because they are educational institutions that can catalyse creative experiences and the inquisitive desire to attain knowledge through learning and engagement.
© 2007 Naomi Kashiwagi
Museums and artists have a symbiotic relationship. Museums are public/private institutions that collect, preserve and exhibit objects. Artists create work intended for exhibiting in museums/art galleries. The museums' political, social and cultural policies are observed and critically reflected upon by artists initiating challenging ideas for work. Artists can also evaluate the characteristic requirements for exhibiting in a particular museum Museological and artist interpretation of objects will be critically analysed and compared according to the approaches towards collecting, display, titling objects and narratives.
Collecting is imbued with inherent social values and codes connected with specific objects and generic meanings. Artists can link diverse ideas or objects through individual conceptual links. This contrasts with chronological and evolutionary classificatory methods used in museums. Artists interpret objects in different ways. Rather than historicising objects and researching into their individual cultural and social past, artists use them to create alternative subjective interpretations.
Case studies: The Cassel Silver, The Ashmolean, Oxford and Thirty Pieces of Silver by Cornelia Parker, Tate Britain, London will be centred on for the case studies. Both installations have the commonality of being silver domestic objects.
© 2007 Naomi Kashiwagi
Cornelia Parker's practice is centred on cataclysmically transforming objects from functional objects into spectacular installations that are poetically reminiscent of their former physical existence. Parker's intervention and ideas physically and conceptually changes the interpretation of the objects. In 'Thirty Pieces of Silver', Parker steamrolled over one thousand silver-plated objects.
Suspended from the ceiling with silver wire, constellations of fragmented objects, burnt, singed and mutated by a comic execution are reborn as sculptural installation metaphorically representing the Big Bang theory. As man creates order out of the chaos of nature and the universe, Parker creates order through the organisation of matter from the aftermath of this Little Bang. The banality of the shed is transformed into a microscopic metaphor for the Big Bang.
Parker's purchase of the objects enables them to be reborn into sculptural installation. Other peoples' personal items with anonymous individual histories form a collective history as a conceptual, sculptural installation.
Parker uses comic humour to perform the cycle of death and resurrection. Parker becomes the perpetrator in the guise of a Steamroller. Parker's Catholic upbringing is influential because the religious act of transubstantiation resonates in her work. The consequences of the collaborating objects and language through ritualistic process consecrate them. Ordinary objects can be transformed into potent metaphors.
By suspending an object or fragment, it challenges its materiality, gravitational pull and changeability. Suspension suggests the potentiality for new transformations. They are not static pieces of matter, but are transitory. Their new transformative state echoes its corporeal limitation; contrasted with its potential for imaginative transformation.
Thirty Pieces of Silver is a silver plated holocaust. Vast numbers of silver plated items were tracked down and persecuted, based upon their identity and classification. Submitted to torture, they were crushed and hung from the ceiling, but not destroyed. In Thirty Pieces of Silver, the shadows are cast below the suspended objects, as silhouetted reflections of the objects. The histories and previous identities are hinted in the shadows as simplified, cartoon symbols. The projected shadows are a metaphor casting a light on the idea that matter has a spectrum of projections and possibilities.
As an installation, Parker honours the memory of what the objects initially were together with a celebration of what they have now become. Their individual histories are collectively reborn through the shared experience of devastation. The transformation of the familiar becomes unfamiliar. What is often overlooked in everyday life can be transformed into poetic revelation.
© 2007 Naomi Kashiwagi
Synopsis
Paradoxically, everyday found objects can be liminally experienced in art galleries and museums. Civilising rituals inside public museums paradoxically reveals that found objects can be liminally interpreted. Found objects can be experienced as profound illuminations. In a century of art and consumer culture, the aura of found objects in the age of mass reproduction can be seen as a critical response to commoditisation, consumerism and the mundane qualities of everyday life. By interpreting everyday culture, artists intervene, obscure the boundaries between art and everyday life, can reveal the everyday as extraordinary and carry out explorations in the hermeneutics of the visual.
It is also possible to liminally experience other 'profane' objects in a museological context. In terms of everyday life, theories from Surrealism to the present emphasise the potential of the everyday as being poetic, creative and unfamiliar. Therefore if the mundane associations of the everyday were to be suspended, the poetic, enigmatic and liminal qualities could be potentially experienced. The practice of everyday life could be imbued with subtly integrated liminal experiences, that found objects in art museums can catalyse. This awakening to the liminal possibilities in everyday life isn't necessarily a double bind but an idea that could be found in the Jeff Koons Handbook.
© 2007 Naomi Kashiwagi
Synopsis
Apartment was an alternative exhibition space in a one-bedroom council flat in an urban 1960s tower block in Manchester curated by practising artists Paul Harfleet and Hilary Jack between 2004 and 2009. The artworks on show were site specific/responsive and displayed amongst everyday objects belonging to the resident/co-curator, Paul Harfleet.
Domestic spaces have connotations with the museums. The concept of the museum evolved from private personal collections that were displayed in a domestic context, thus Apartment had a paradoxically museological provenance; a symbiosis of art and the everyday. Apartment challenges the concept of suspending the everyday modes of social behaviour to experience a different state of consciousness that is involved when engaging with art in a gallery or museum environment.
Apartment also highlights that it is a space that relates to Lamoureux's concept of'here-as-elsewhere'. Encountering the space and the art/objects in the domestic space catalyses new interpretations and meanings. Therefore different spaces, indoor/outdoor, private/public, static/mobile are possible destinations for site specific/responsive work. Apartment embraces the juxtaposition between the interpretations of everyday objects and art. What happens to liminality when art is presented in an everyday context amongst everyday objects?
Excerpt from 'Apartment: Museum of the Everyday
The Kitchen
Kitchen Cabinets of Curiosity are an insight into personal methods of classification. These private solid wood cabinets do not reveal, but conceal, unlike their glass museological relatives. On the lower of the three levels, a collection of Food in various types of packaging was stacked, not in a chronological or evolutionary order. A domestic method of classification was chosen that could potentially include placing the items used frequently at the front of the cupboard or squeezing what will fit in any haphazard order. The objects aren't intended to be shown to visitors. Therefore packets of food may be on their side, open, half eaten, ripped and not appreciated for their aesthetic appearance. Unlike the objects in the classical Museum Cabinets, these particular objects are moved around, eaten, or replaced (or not if the product wasn't desirable to the resident). They are in a constant state of flux. This shelf is at eye level so the objects can be clearly identified and allude to a higher frequency of use.
On the middle shelf are a collection of Cups and Glasses. There is no further form of methodology used to categorise the Drinking Implements in terms of size, function, colour, the date of purchase or evolution of design. Pragmatic methods may have been adopted, such as Drinking Implements used frequently being placed at the front of the Cabinet. On the top shelf there are a collection of Large Cooking Implements. They are stacked to utilise the given space, further concealing other objects that are in the Large Pan. They may not be used as often because they are on the top shelf. The Kitchen Cabinets of Curiosity have been designed for Kitchen Objects, but not specifically targeting a person's own collection. Therefore the objects have to be adapted to the given space. Classical Museum Cabinets of Curiosity are designed to display specific objects and therefore more consideration and importance is placed on their display, how they are lit and conserved; and not their functional use.
The Drying Rack in The Kitchen has been specifically designed to categorise and display Plates, Cups and Bowls in specific places whilst they dry after being washed. Other Miscellaneous Implements/Utensils have to adapt to The Drying Rack. Methods of display may change depending on the quantity and fragility of Kitchen Objects drying at one time. The Utensil Rack has been designed for a similar purpose. Knives, Forks, Spoons and other larger Kitchen Utensils can be displayed vertically, accentuating their visibility , easing access and the identification process, by clearly revealing their material, size, design and functional use, whilst they dry after being washed. The Drying Rack and The Utensil Rack display cooking implements that facilitate in the making of everyday meals and beverages. The Kitchen Drawers conceal, but reveal when used, thematically categorised everyday cutlery. Object Drawers in museums conceal the identities of the objects, but reveal them through interaction and personal choice.
An old Typewriter sits on a table in The Kitchen. A Typewriter isn't classified as a Kitchen Object, yet it is displayed in The Kitchen. It could relate to collage and montage techniques are techniques used by Surrealists. Amalgamating images of contrasting everyday objects transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar. Although the ordinary can be transformed into the extraordinary, to Surrealists the everyday is perceived as being already strange, but is generally perceived in the mind as being mundane and habitual. This Typewriter becomes unfamiliar because of the juxtaposition with The Kitchen environment. It highlights and subverts subconscious domestic and everyday customs and forms of classification, by placing it in a juxtaposing context.
© 2006 Naomi Kashiwagi