Local
Global
Cloud
An exhibition proposing a new culture of memory and archiving in the true spirit of the beehive
A series of conversations propose a new culture of temporality, non-permanence and change
Slought is pleased to announce "The Museum in Flames," a series of public conversations that proposes a new culture of temporality and non-permanence. This series focuses on the American organization as one of the most overt and prolific embodiments of contemporary cultural practice.
The series title acknowledges the incendiary aggressiveness with which Marinetti questioned the cultural establishment of his time. "The Museum in Flames" translates the literal incendiary desires of the Futurists into a purely conceptual framework and extreme metaphor as a way of striking at the heart of our cultural discomfort with the idea of non-permanence and change in all their forms. The events are presented with Peregrine Arts and co-organized by Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire.
With Bob Perelman, Jean-Michel Rabaté
Thursday, November 11, 2004
At a time when organizations valorize work that is accessible and that provides immediate gratification for audiences, this event examines practices that are predicated on, and in turn encourage more reciprocally cunning and mercurial tactics of engagement between contemporary practice and audiences. This event questions the organizational impulse to prescribe and proscribe contemporary practice in the interest of consistently fulfilling organizational and audience expectations. Ideas of duplicity and cunning may be read positively to suggest alternative modes of engagement with cultural practice. Perelman will address fakes and forgeries in contemporary literary practice; Rabaté will address the practice of lying and its implications.
This event will be accompanied by an introduction to and reading by Thaddeus Squire of the Traité particulair de l'Echo / Treatise on the Echo (1626), author unknown, transmitted as a letter to Marin Mersenne during preparation for the Traité de l'Harmonie universelle / Treatise on Universal Harmony (1636). The Treatise on the Echo appeared in Mersenne's correspondence during the time he was developing the first science of spatial acoustics, which he named Echometrie / Science of Echoes and figured prominently in his theoretical works on music. The echo became a particular obsession of 17th-century scientists and appeared frequently as a trope in both literary and scientific works of the time. Almost universally, the authors express a concern and even fear that the echo's mercurial and duplicitous manifestation may never fall subject to their mastery (Download a rough translation of the treatise).
With Susan Stewart, Michèle Richman
Friday, December 17, 2004
As George Bataille writes in the first volume of his Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy, "It is not necessity, but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." This event seeks to reorient cultural organizations away from a dependence upon classical models of economics in which principles of scarcity and escalation of commitment dominate. The lavish application of altruism and expenditure provides a powerful alternative to classical models of economics.
Following Bataille, can we envision an alternative institution built on alternative forms of cultural altruism and expenditure? This event also questions traditional distinctions between art and organization, and asks whether the organization itself has risen today to the level of an aesthetic form in itself. This event will begin with a reading from theoretical texts including Bataille's Accursed Share and Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Stewart will address forms of life, forms of art, and forms of organization, and 'give and take' as functions of form. Richman will address how social movements and political actions both emerge from alternative social formations and recognize individual practice.
With Marian Godfrey, Paula Marincola
Friday, February 25, 2005
Following Marinetti's First Italian Futurist manifesto with which this series began, this event hypothetically takes the incendiary demise of the museum at its premise. Questioning Western impulses to preserve culture that often emanate from the monumental and the museological, this event explores what the field of cultural practice might look like in a hypothetical extreme that presumes an absence of such monumental nodes. Participants to the conversation will speak not as officers of their respective organizations, but as individuals with their own professional opinions about the culture industry.
The conversation will begin by addressing questions such as the following: Are all cultural organizations that aspire to growth (or achieve it) beyond a certain capacity or size forced to insert themselves into a financial-based economy? Is it possible or desirable to envision cultural practice living and growing independent of financial concern or the agendas that unavoidably accompany, to varying degrees, such support? What do philanthropies and grantmaking agencies think of as their principal assets as they consider these questions? Do these assets include the programs and institutions they support, money, prestige and the valorizing power that accompanies this regard? And how and in what ways do they see these assets leveraged in the service of culture? Similarly, do Foundations consider themselves direct contributors (and thus arbiters) within cultural practice or merely oblique participants (practicing more remove or "objectivity")? In a healthy cultural ecology, there are organizations and cultural practices that are fundamentally provocative or confrontational and by definition do not possess the more decorative attributes that lend them to be inserted in a more substantial money-based cultural economy. How can we support non-decorative practices outside of incubators like the academy?
