Victoria's 2nd reading

Hito Steyerl
Is a Museum a Factory?


Link: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/07/61390/is-a-museum-a-factory/

Reading for Monday the 25th

Boris Groys
Politics of Installation

Link to the Reading:
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/02/68504/politics-of-installation/

Isabella’s Website

https://isabellaguttuso.myportfolio.com/

In Relation to Smithson's Site/Non-Site: Marlene Creates

Robert Smithson but also,, Anish Kapoor

Reading about Donald Judd getting upset having his art reproduced not because of it's original site specificity but because HE was not the one reproducing it made me think a lot of Anish Kapoor and the fact that he patented the shade Vantablack so no one else could legally use it:

https://www.wmagazine.com/story/anish-kapoor-stuart-semple-blackest-black

Also, I researched a more in depth analysis on Smithson's theory of non-sites because I was really confused:

http://interventions-arthouse.blogspot.com/2011/11/robert-smithson-mapping-and-concept-of.html

I had heard of Smithson before but wanted to refresh myself with some of his works. I got all of these images on good ole google!

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Driven: True Stories of Inspiration 

Video here

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles holds many splendid, unique, and puzzling treasures. It's a carnival of delights and ideas, weaving art and science, fiction and data, all together into something enchanting and joyful. In this first of two segments on the museum, curator David Wilson describes the origins of the project. He says, "I wanted to know, I was compelled to know, what would happen if a person put everything they had, all of their emotional, financial, spiritual resources behind a single project."

READING PROMPT QUESTIONS pg. 205-233

Charles Esche was at the forefront of developing new institutional strategies that moved art into an active social engagement with the spectator. In this process, new institutionalism adopted the corporate vernacular of industries such as media, corporate culture, and science. Eschew advocated the new institutional spaces "have to be part community center, part-laboratory, and part academy, with less need for the intended showroom function. Descriptions of this work are peppered with phrasing such as "construction site," "laboratory," discussion platform," "distribution channel," and "think tank."

Claire Doherty responds to these strategies by asking, "If the exhibitions and projects which have emerged from this discourse (particularly those in Europe) mimic the experience economy of the real world does this lead to yet more coded patterns of behavior for visitors rather than potentially surprising or liberating points of engagement."

Discuss how the adoption of Esche's new institutional;l strategies for engagement are altering the contemporary spectators (and your own) experience of "the exhibition." Compare Esche's and Doherty's positions on the topic and offer your own thoughts on ways these approaches impact the roles of the curator and artist by providing both exciting new possibilities and also potential pitfalls. 

In your discussion consider the final quote in the book by Jacques Ranciere: "The fundamental question is to explore the possibility of maintaining spaces of play. To discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, forms for the organization of spaces, that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as of political creativity is consensus - that is, inscription within given roles, possibilities, and competencies"

2 paragraphs.