Mining the Museum 1992
"Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson" was organized by the then siteless art organization The Contemporary and sited at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD. Wilson carefully researched the holdings of the museum and developed a presentation from the collection to reveal the potent social/cultural histories attached to them.
"At the museum's invitation, he sifted through three centuries' worth of artifacts, from paintings to potholders, and assembled a show. This is, of course, standard curatorial procedure, putting objects together to tell a story. And because museums tend to be conservative places, the stories are frequently soft and predictable, telling us things we basically already know and like to hear. Mr. Wilson, however, chose unusual, often unpretty things, and made them even more unusual by the way he combined them. The results were, in their undemonstrative way, eye-opening.
"In one vitrine, labeled "Metalwork 1793-1880," he placed ornate silver goblets and pitchers and iron slave shackles side by side. Elsewhere, he tucked a vintage Ku Klux Klan mask into an antique baby buggy. And in an installation titled "Cabinetmaking 1820-1960" - reconstituted at the Studio Museum - he had four fancy parlor chairs attentively facing a cruciform wooden whipping post once used at a Maryland jail.
"'Mining the Museum' was far from the first show to engage critically, even subversively, with an institutional context. Hans Haacke had been doing such work for years, and the Center for African Art's 1988 exhibition "Art/artifact" offered a model from which Mr. Wilson might have learned much. But the Baltimore project, which focused on excavating and recovering a specific history, American racial history, from a specific range of existing materials, brought a bracing, investigatory spirit to contemporary art. Soon other artists started digging away.
from: http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news13/news630.html
Posted by delpesco at November 9, 2003 05:21 PM