Launch
Speech held by Thomas Herzen at launch event at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Friday March 24 in London
I will first briefly outline a point made by the German art theorist Boris Groys concerning the nature of the new and the archive - based on this I will then go on to propose a cultural programme that renders specific cultural sites obsolete.
Now, we usually think of museums as second-order spaces of mediation, spaces of representation where a painting of a cow or – say – an old fisherman tugging his boat across a beach – can be exhibited. The actual mooing cow or the exhausted fisherman – who belong to the first order, the primary space of reality, are left to their own devices after we have secured our painting.
This task of representation concerns the archival function of museums to select and collect from reality what is valuable and relevant for a given culture. Now, I claim - following the analysis of Groys - that this seemingly innocent task has profound implications for our perception of reality and in a wider historical perspective for the course of our civilization.
The archive, the museum, collects and mandates what has not yet been collected which in turn means that the so-called reality is essentially nothing but the sum of what has not been collected.
What happens is that the new and real is not recognized or cannot be diagnosed before it has entered into a relation with what has died - dead objects and memories being the stuff of archives. Thus it follows that the function of the archive not only consists in the depiction of human history – to represent history– to fixate the memories of human history, memories of how real events took place. Instead the archive – the museum – is a prerequisite for such a thing as history in the first place –an archive must be in place for comparisons between new an old to take place – comparisons, which works to produce history as such. The archive is a machine for the production of memories – a machine which fabricates history out of the material from unarchived reality.
This results in a tension where on one hand the museum, the archive, has a task to collect and represent what is outside of the archive – but on the other hand at the same time it is reconfiguring archived objects – archived objects are seen as valuable and worthy of keeping whereas the decay, mortality, and transience of the profane objects outside the archive is accepted as a matter of course. Thus a fundamental difference between the objects in the archive and objects outside the archive emerges, a difference which subverts any attempt of representation at the outset – a difference in worth, in fate, in relation to mortality, in relation to death…
Now, if one for a moment assumes that objects collected in a museum are supposed to represent the world outside the museum, then one will quite soon realize that these objects are to be found in the museum – not because of this mandate of representation – but as a result of the fact that they differ favourably from other objects in the world – maybe because they were paintings of a particularly good painter, or because they’ve been framed very well, or because they cost a lot of money.
The museum system as a whole then strives to avoid the loss of these paintings. What no one cares for - is to save the objects of reality from perishing. To go back to our old struggling fisherman on the beach – assuming that the fisherman has been painted well - there will be an effort to save his image – but no one cares for the fate of the poor fisherman or the mooing cow for that matter, it is simply of no interest.
This in turn means that the defining quality of reality – its transience – cannot be depicted or represented in the museum or the archive. And addressing those of you who would object by referring to artists like Jannis Kourellis who brought horses into the gallery - this also goes for the artwork that tries to stage its own transience in art sites – because this too will be documented, archived and stored.
With the assertion that reality is nothing but the sum of what hasn’t been collected, the museum suddenly emerges as an all-powerful institution that decides through negation what is real and what is not real.
____________
In my view this results in a disastrous devaluation of reality and public space as the locus of heroic deeds and accomplishment.
Thus, the museum has become a privileged space of the first order vis-à-vis the secondary residue of reality.
We - the children of the middle class - experience this as impatience with all that occurs outside the archive or the cultural site – all that is unframed, unmediated, contingent and so seemingly meaningless. When we determine what takes place in reality, we apply our pristine criteria, which originated in the mediated spaces. This has as consequence that we do not object to the spin machine of New Labour because of its real, political consequence but because of its amateurish use of techniques inherent to the arts. Thus we ridicule Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair not because of their politics but because of the fact that they suck as actors and artists. We ridicule the staging on the Firdos Square in Baghdad when a crowd of exile Iraqis was brought in to cheer while US soldiers took down the statue of Saddam – not because of its real message but because of its dilettante aesthetics. Thus – we children of the middle class - loathe the dilettantes of what has become second order reality and seek to flee from it - into the – essentially - never-changing mausoleum of the archive.
The programme I wish to propose here is a programme where reality reclaims its first order status. Not by retaking reality’s lost territory, but by completing the takeover and to declare the whole world a museum– an expansive art space – and praise dilettantes like Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell and the Pentagon in their bold attempts to introduce aesthetic practices into the real world thus revaluating, reinstating the order of reality as a framework for meaningful, aesthetic action. We need more of this. My middle class colleague Thomas Altheimer, who’s here with us today, is one such distinguished character who try to reverse the movement away from reality - tomorrow he will travel to Washington, DC to seek inspiration for the scripting of a democratic revolution, which will open this fall in Tehran – a sequel to the ’79 revolution.
But not only Iran will be saved - by declaring the whole world a museum, a gallery, an archive – I extend the sphere of eternity to include the mooing cow and all its offspring and extended family in all future; I save the struggling fisherman from obscurity and death to place him, his family and his boat on the eternal pedestal of life.
THOMAS ALTHEIMER
I will first briefly outline a point made by the German art theorist Boris Groys concerning the nature of the new and the archive - based on this I will then go on to propose a cultural programme that renders specific cultural sites obsolete.
Now, we usually think of museums as second-order spaces of mediation, spaces of representation where a painting of a cow or – say – an old fisherman tugging his boat across a beach – can be exhibited. The actual mooing cow or the exhausted fisherman – who belong to the first order, the primary space of reality, are left to their own devices after we have secured our painting.
This task of representation concerns the archival function of museums to select and collect from reality what is valuable and relevant for a given culture. Now, I claim - following the analysis of Groys - that this seemingly innocent task has profound implications for our perception of reality and in a wider historical perspective for the course of our civilization.
The archive, the museum, collects and mandates what has not yet been collected which in turn means that the so-called reality is essentially nothing but the sum of what has not been collected.
What happens is that the new and real is not recognized or cannot be diagnosed before it has entered into a relation with what has died - dead objects and memories being the stuff of archives. Thus it follows that the function of the archive not only consists in the depiction of human history – to represent history– to fixate the memories of human history, memories of how real events took place. Instead the archive – the museum – is a prerequisite for such a thing as history in the first place –an archive must be in place for comparisons between new an old to take place – comparisons, which works to produce history as such. The archive is a machine for the production of memories – a machine which fabricates history out of the material from unarchived reality.
This results in a tension where on one hand the museum, the archive, has a task to collect and represent what is outside of the archive – but on the other hand at the same time it is reconfiguring archived objects – archived objects are seen as valuable and worthy of keeping whereas the decay, mortality, and transience of the profane objects outside the archive is accepted as a matter of course. Thus a fundamental difference between the objects in the archive and objects outside the archive emerges, a difference which subverts any attempt of representation at the outset – a difference in worth, in fate, in relation to mortality, in relation to death…
Now, if one for a moment assumes that objects collected in a museum are supposed to represent the world outside the museum, then one will quite soon realize that these objects are to be found in the museum – not because of this mandate of representation – but as a result of the fact that they differ favourably from other objects in the world – maybe because they were paintings of a particularly good painter, or because they’ve been framed very well, or because they cost a lot of money.
The museum system as a whole then strives to avoid the loss of these paintings. What no one cares for - is to save the objects of reality from perishing. To go back to our old struggling fisherman on the beach – assuming that the fisherman has been painted well - there will be an effort to save his image – but no one cares for the fate of the poor fisherman or the mooing cow for that matter, it is simply of no interest.
This in turn means that the defining quality of reality – its transience – cannot be depicted or represented in the museum or the archive. And addressing those of you who would object by referring to artists like Jannis Kourellis who brought horses into the gallery - this also goes for the artwork that tries to stage its own transience in art sites – because this too will be documented, archived and stored.
With the assertion that reality is nothing but the sum of what hasn’t been collected, the museum suddenly emerges as an all-powerful institution that decides through negation what is real and what is not real.
____________
In my view this results in a disastrous devaluation of reality and public space as the locus of heroic deeds and accomplishment.
Thus, the museum has become a privileged space of the first order vis-à-vis the secondary residue of reality.
We - the children of the middle class - experience this as impatience with all that occurs outside the archive or the cultural site – all that is unframed, unmediated, contingent and so seemingly meaningless. When we determine what takes place in reality, we apply our pristine criteria, which originated in the mediated spaces. This has as consequence that we do not object to the spin machine of New Labour because of its real, political consequence but because of its amateurish use of techniques inherent to the arts. Thus we ridicule Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair not because of their politics but because of the fact that they suck as actors and artists. We ridicule the staging on the Firdos Square in Baghdad when a crowd of exile Iraqis was brought in to cheer while US soldiers took down the statue of Saddam – not because of its real message but because of its dilettante aesthetics. Thus – we children of the middle class - loathe the dilettantes of what has become second order reality and seek to flee from it - into the – essentially - never-changing mausoleum of the archive.
The programme I wish to propose here is a programme where reality reclaims its first order status. Not by retaking reality’s lost territory, but by completing the takeover and to declare the whole world a museum– an expansive art space – and praise dilettantes like Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell and the Pentagon in their bold attempts to introduce aesthetic practices into the real world thus revaluating, reinstating the order of reality as a framework for meaningful, aesthetic action. We need more of this. My middle class colleague Thomas Altheimer, who’s here with us today, is one such distinguished character who try to reverse the movement away from reality - tomorrow he will travel to Washington, DC to seek inspiration for the scripting of a democratic revolution, which will open this fall in Tehran – a sequel to the ’79 revolution.
But not only Iran will be saved - by declaring the whole world a museum, a gallery, an archive – I extend the sphere of eternity to include the mooing cow and all its offspring and extended family in all future; I save the struggling fisherman from obscurity and death to place him, his family and his boat on the eternal pedestal of life.
THOMAS ALTHEIMER
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