Heritage Troubles – extracts from an interview

On Saturday, June 30th 2007, I met Mr. Rudolf W. for an interview in Munich / Germany. We talked about his work at the association of non-governmental museums in Bavaria and his private collection of luxury paper, which can be regarded as very substantial.

I will upload the audio file of the interview as soon as I will have edited it. In the meantime, I will try to give an overview of the most significant things that have been said during the interview.

One of the most interesting issues for me was Mr. W’s outlook for the regional museums in the South of Germany. There are many voices in international museum & cultural studies research who prognose a growing interest in regional museums and regional cultural events. A broad diversity of festivals, from historical events up to local fairs and market days, are being arranged. In Castells’ second volume of his trilogy about the network society, The Power of Identity, he describes the growing interest in “local identity” as the chance and the power of local culture, as it offers “resistance to the centrifugal force of capitalist globalization”.

However, Mr. W has a different opinion on that. He stressed the fact that it is getting increasingly difficult for regional museums to a) cope with enormous bureaucratic demands, b) raise money for the acquisition of new artefacts, but also for the maintenance of what is already in storage and c) develop strategies to get people’s attention within a “museumisationalised society.”

(remark by the author: In Germany we use the word “Musealisierung” to describe the contemporary vogue for the institutionalisation of cultural memory – I know that there is the English term “museumisation” – but I don’t know if it is grammatically correct to speak of a museumisationalised society – well, dear commenters, feel free to correct me.)

“We have more than 1.100 non-governmental museums all over Bavaria”, Rudolf W points out. “and still they are growing in numbers. This means also that they really have to compete for people’ s attention.”
Mr. W is not the only one to raise these issues. Eva Sturm, author of the book “Konservierte Welt – Museen und Musealisierung” suggests that museumisation is more and more becoming a lifestyle or a social movement.
Indeed, there has never been such a multitude of museums worldwide. According to that we are witnessing a shift from the preservation responsibilities from memory institutions, which are traditionally assigned with the preservation of cultural heritage, to institutions and private persons outside of the museum domain.
Mr. W is a good example for that, too. He has been collecting luxury paper for many decades now and meanwhile has created a large private collection. When I asked him what he wishes to do with this collection, he replied: “the best thing that could happen is that one of my sons would continue the collection. However, they do not have this interest and a collection which is not actively taken care of is not really a collection any longer.” When I pointed out the possibility to donate the collection to a museum, he immediately refused that. “No way”, said Mr. W, “I know where the collection would end up – in the storage. And that’s not the place where I want to see it.”
Here we touched upon a really interesting issue: there is so much to inherit these days. Not only money, but also an incredible amount of cultural goods, both tangible and intangible. But if the heirs are not ready to accept the legacy (and the reasons can be manifold: not enough time, not enough expertise on the respective field, a lack of interest…) – what is going to happen with the cultural heritage?
Mr. W told about a collector’s meeting he recently attended. Many of the participants have been in their Seventies and talked about what might happen to their collections after their passing. And nearly everybody had the problem that they had sons and daughters, but no heirs who deliberately wished to safeguard what has been established by their fathers. “And here I see a major cultural change” said Mr. W. “Whereas in the old days Germany has been the land of private collectors and hobby historians, those collectors and safeguarders are about to disappear from our society.”

That’s a clear contradiction to what I have stated above: that the safeguarding of cultural heritage shifts more and more to places and people outside of museums.
But probably Mr. W represents a more traditional kind of cultural bearer: a collector, who has his main interest in the retrospective quality of the cultural heritage. As the word’s immanent implication suggests: heritage evokes a retrospective view on cultural goods. Opposite to that, there are bearers of culture who focus more on contemporary aspects. A good example for that is the upcoming trend of regional crafts fairs – a combination of regional cultural heritage practices and future-focused ways of capitalising these practices not only for regional, but global markets.
We can also see that in the importance of the internet for these two types of cultural bearers. For Mr. W, the internet is almost irrelevant. He is travelling to fairs, auctions and fleamarkets all over Europe and communicates with traders and collectors personally or over the phone. Having said that, the more contemporary promoter of regional cultural services is much more connected to the web, using it as a dissemination platform for a worldwide audience.
This fits quite well to the trend which Jeremy Rifkin, chair of the Foundation on Economic Trends, foresees in his book “The Age of Access”: Here he describes the absorption of the cultural into the commercial sphere, which signals a fundamental change in human relationship. Rifkin shows how museums, festivals and parks turn into “experience industries”. He states: “More and more of the global cultural sphere – its natural wonders, cathedrals, museums, palaces, rituals, festivals – is being siphoned off into the marketplace.” Thus the cultural sphere increasingly serves as a backdrop for enacting “paid-for cultural experiences”, very often separated from their historical context.
I have to say that the interview with Rudolf W. has been very fruitful for me: Not only did it provide some new insight into the cultural roots of my country, but also in the philosophical approach of a private collector and his own heritage troubles.

Museum Metadata – provided by everybody

Please note that this post was originally published in the netart curating blog I am writing together with NY-based media artist Ursula Endlicher. The netart curating blog has the form of an ongoing dialogue about the challenges of curating digital artworks…However, I felt that the topic of my last entry fits very well in this research platform.

Dear Ursula,

thanks so much for your remarks and thoughts about the terminological struggles surrounding media art, netart, digital art, digital culture, networked art…(ok, I’ll stop here
I especially appreciated your remark about Rhizome’s ArtBase, which allows people to create an individual terminology for their respective artworks.
This brings me to a related article I currently read in the Infotangle blog:
Ellyssa Kroski writes about the “Hive Mind: Folksonomies and user-based tagging.” In this article she examines users, who “are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems.” She has found an interesting conclusion for the evolving folksonomy platforms worldwide, I quote: “Metadata is now the realm of the everyman.”
I think this observation is worthwile to place against the backdrop of the shifting roles of curators. Given the fact, that art institutions increasingly have to deal with digital or other types of intangible or ephemeral artworks these days, we can already witness a change of paradigms from the object towards the process surrounding an object. Furthermore, there are growing numbers of artworks which invite their audience to interact with them, edit them or even add new contents to them.
This development poses a fresh set of challenges to curators and apparently it triggers an additional, new notion of curatorial work, which I would describe as “enabling feedback processes”. Does that make sense? I am especially refering to new initiatives such as the tagging prototype tests led by the “>Metropolitan Museum of Art: They invited their online audience to provide keywords and tags for their art collection. The New York Times reports of “staggering results” and quotes Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” The Archives and Museums Informatics Group supports initiatives like that and points out that contents are often hidden away from nonspecialists. “We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.” says Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto.
There is apparently a growing number of museums which start to rethink their online collections. Have you heard for example of the steve.museum tagging project? They call their project “the first experiment in social tagging of art museum collections.” I was really striked when I read about their endeavour. The participants of this project (= everybody who is interested) are “building a tagging tool, collecting tags, analyzing data, and engaging in discussion.” Their overall aim is to find new ways of improving access to works of art. Wow, I think this is quite an interesting approach.
Well, but it’s not only the collections which tend to involve user-generated contents, tags and taxonomies. There is also a new trend to publish books as open-source wiki books, which invite everybody to add and comment on them. As an example, I want to mention the book “New Media Art” by Mike Tribe and Reena Jana. This Wiki book is published under the “Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5″ Creative Commons License.
I think this is an extraordinary interesting development. In my opinion, that’s exactly what Manuel Castells describes as a process which “shapes culture and gets shaped by it at the same time.”
And, last but not least, your latest work, the HTML-butoh fits perfectly in this framework. It encourages a worldwide audience to submit their visual vocabulary of the HTML-language. This user-generated library is actually the basis of the artwork. It would be great, by the way, if you could tell us a bit about the reactions of your audience to this project.
So, that was it from Berlin for today.
We will have an Upgrade! field trip later that day and visit the NewYorkRioTokyo gallery.
All the best,
Ela

The California Files – Side Effects of Cultural Memory

http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2007/californiafiles/

This exhibition, curated by Ariane Beyn, examines the reassembling of artefacts out of cultural storage systems and archives – with an eye towards the side effects of cultural memory.

The curator presents a variety of artistic works which are all based on an archival approach, be it a collection of print ephemera or an archive of African American culture.

The starting point for this exhibition is a group of California-based, self-organized archives that assemble collections of uncommon materials and process them in inventive ways. Why am I presenting this exhibition on the museum & intangible cultural heritage research platform?
Because I think it is an excellent example of sampling practices which are already existing on the internet, thus increasingly influencing the way how culture is produced and presented these days. In my opinion, museums are facing a shift not only from object to process, from the tangible to the intangible, but also from display to re-use. This is due to an ever-growing number of source materials which are stored in museums and the need to re-contextualise them. The vast storages of museums contain not only artfecats, but also stories, interviews, links and so on. I believe that in the years to come, more and more museums will have to think of ways of how to re-use what they have been storing over the course of many decades. This approach would “resist a continuous narrative or a comprehensive representation”, as Ariane Beyn writes in the introduction of the California Files catalogue.

It might be an interesting task to open museums storages to young curators and let them compile what they find in there. Maybe this would bring up interesting new approaches of how to sample tangible and intangible expressions of culture? Why is the concept of found footage mainly known in the film/video domain? I would be curious to see the results of a curatorial call for storage & archive compilations of museums worldwide.

Or has this been done already? My web search on this topic led me to the sites of found footage filmmakers, such as Craig Baldwin or Joseph Cornell. And I found an interesting blog which deals with the Recycled Cinema: http://recycledcinema.blogspot.com/

Is it true what Michael Zryd claims, that found footage filmmakers mine the unconsciuos of film? And if so, is it possible to take this approach into museums? What could we learn about our relation to the past? About the things we have inherited, about things we want to maintain and safeguard and others which we deliberately let sink into oblivion?