Artists in Museums

I made a presentation as part of: Artists Work in Museums: Histories, Interventions and Subjectivities at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London in October 2012

The two-day conference brought together artists, curators, historians and museum professionals to explore the history and impact of artists working in/with or against museums.

I performed the V&A Bicentenary, the text for the presentation was subsequently published (in the book above) and is available from Wunderkammer Press.

You can also see a moving image document of its subsequent itereation at Utopography

Extracts follow...[....]

Well its great to be here with you, really great to be here with you, as part of your bicentenary celebrations. I’ve really enjoyed the day so-far......

Thanks so much for Linda and Matilda for inviting me. I’m sure Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, could never have imagined the institution they initiated would still be alive in 2057. Or maybe they would.

Linda suggested, given my age and enhancements that I perform a local live-thread recall for you today……I’m a little out of practice,……..but I’ll do my best. So, I’m going to disconnect from Composite........now………

OK I’m present.

And, in keeping with the ‘old-school’ nostalgia of this face-2-face conference, I’d like to invite you to do the same too. Could you all just, also disconnect…………

Thanks

Well, you’ll appreciate as with all live-thread recalls, this will be partial and flawed. The thread I’ll be re-running, is something like institutional subjectivity, or, how the V&A became conscious of itself……[.....]

2035
By 2035, trust, circulating through logistical systems of attention; systems of  capture, accumulation, and distribution were producing new ecologies of value.

Attention is both a power and a communicative medium, and nothing moved outside of its sphere of influence; everything is permeated by attention. By the same token, no exchange of attention, no matter how small, bodily and intimate, or vast in volume and scale is possible without trust.

The V&A commands and redistributes trust and attention, it’s a super-institution, a super-node in the contemporary ecologies of value.…[.....]

2037

I remember it well,  it’s a landmark event. On the 6th February 2037, at the Ferguson Research cluster at the Manchester Open University, an organic-synthetic assembly participated in the legendary Turing Test.

In an examination that lasted more than three and a half hours a panel of human judges were unable to agree on which of the participants was a human subject, an organic-synthetic assembly is credited with human-like intelligence. An evolutionary firewall is breached.…[.....]

2039

In January, the V&A inhabits the first in a series of affinity buildings, commissioned from Sapience Habitat Ecologies, its located in downtown Fortaleza, in the Ceará region of Brazil.

As well as nestling sensitively in the local permaculture (it used a lot of upcycled materials) the building exhibits biotic responsiveness. It senses emotional communications within visitors,…….or emotional excess, and is able to environmentally respond.…[.....]

2043

In economies of attention, to attend is to invest. Its to invest in values not yet known; fugitive, constituent values.

Time, trust, generosity, prestige, love and respect are the currencies in these economies of attention. Although there are aspects of private interests, and residual retail culture that strive to capture attention. They thrive on minimum, short-term, quantified, calculated investment; attention to be bought and sold.

Any long-term investment of attention, of creativity, of love and generosity are always at risk. Skirmishes break out, often escalating into local conflicts for the social currencies at play. There is a diffused sense of permanent emergency, a low-grade war…[.....]
 
2046
Britain Can Make It  - an uncanny echo of The Great Exhibition of 1851 - was a legendary, vast, temporary exhibition of product design and manufacturing at the V&A in 1946, intended to kick-start consumerism after the disaster of WWII.
The Centenary exhibition was no task of mourning, although some of the exhibitionary architecture of the first iteration was reinstalled……..

It was an opportunity to explore the legacy of resource profligacy, and the ethics of belonging….[..]

The V&A Bicentenary was inspired by Self Portrait Arnolfini, Industrialtownfuturism and inspired More Things