CONFERENCE DOCUMENTATION / MUSEUM WHY? PRACTICE, AGENCY AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE ART MUSEUM (ENG)
“DREAM” MAKES A GIDDY SOUND
Presentation by Floating Museum. Keynote chaired by Anne Thomasen.
As an adjacent actor that regularly engages with a panoply of museums and cultural institutions, Floating Museum observes a wide range of percolating and persistent tensions. We are rarely certain what aspects of these tensions — between the stability of a reputation and the uncertainty of risk, between the self and the state, between systems and emotions, between resources and dreams, and so on — are real or perceived. Regardless they are palpable, and a regular topic of conversation and negotiation. Museum Why offers a chance to hold onto these tensions for a moment; to embrace them as openings for new work.
From where do these tensions flow?
Do they emanate from the need to reconcile internal demands, for example, in addressing the complexities of difference within organizational structures, coordinating across disciplinary boundaries, or navigating long-standing expectations about the conventions of professionalism in practice? Do stresses emerge because the independence of museums is more of a mirage than we tend to anticipate — that the form of each institution’s identity is everywhere entangled with larger apparatuses of power, culture, political identity, economic viability, national history, and so on?
Do strains emerge because of the relationship between an institution’s mission and the personal or interpersonal expectations or desires of its audiences? Who are those audiences? Are they fulfilled? What might engage, surprise, disturb. entice or expand them? Or are there unavoidable contradictions that emerge because the pace of change almost never jibes with institutional time or timings? Does this create a perpetual state of contradiction between the ideologies that inform social structures with our actual experience, or perception of them at any point in time? How might Floating Museum expand on the range of techniques we’ve previously rehearsed in collaboration with other institutions? Could we invent ways to do that with a new degree of precision? Could we invite collaborators to delight, together, in exposing some of the overlooked and under-considered assumptions that inform many institutional practices, and our own? Could we map the structural basis of a few institutions to better understand some productive pressure points? Or will we discover that it’s impossible to abolish chance? Can we translate what’s learned and take some risks? Could we entice some institutions to play along, to speculate with us, or others like us, via a series of ephemeral experiments or to collaborate for a longer term?