Radical Museology / Working the Collection
"Drawing from Claire Bishop's recently published Radical Museology Or What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? and taking place against the backdrop of our reading of the Arts Council England Collection, this roundtable focuses on the economic, historiographical, geopolitical and wider societal stakes of public acquisition and collection display. Focusing on museums that offer non–conservative and critically–reflective models.
Participants include Jesús Carrillo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid), Francesco Manacorda (Artistic Director, Tate Liverpool) and Marta Dziewanska (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw). Chaired by Claire Bishop."
(Chaired by Claire Bishop, 22 May 2014, Nottingham Contemporary)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Arcades Project: a world of secret affinities
"the entire Arcades complex (without definitive title, to be sure) remained in the form of several hundred notes and reflections of varying length, which Benjamin revised and grouped in sheafs, or 'convolutes;' according to a host of topics. Additionally, from the late Twenties on, it would appear, citations were incorporated into these materials–passages drawn mainly from an array of nineteenth–century sources, but also from the works of key contemporaries (Marcel Proust, Paul Valery, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Georg Sinunel, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno). These proliferating individual passages, extracted from their original context like collectibles, were eventually set up to communicate among themselves, often in a rather subterranean manner. The organized masses of historical objects–the particular items of Benjamin's display (drafts and excerpts)–together give rise to 'a world of secret affinities;' and each separate article in the collection, each entry, was to constitute a 'magic encyclopedia' of the epoch from which it derived. An image of that epoch. In the background of this theory of the historical image, constituent of a historical 'mirror world;' stands the idea of the monad–an idea given its most comprehensive formulation in the pages on origin in the prologue to Benjamin's book on German tragic drama, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Trauerspiel)–and back of this the doctrine of the reflective medium, in its significance for the object, as expounded in Benjamin's 1919 dissertation, 'Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik' (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism). At bottom, a canon of (nonsensuous) similitude rules the conception of the Arcades."
(Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, p.x)
Benjamin, Walter (2002). "Das Passagen–werk [The Arcades Project]", US: Harvard University Press. 0674008022
Fig.1 Edizioni Brogi (circa 1880). No.4608 "Ottagono della Galleria Vittorio Emanuele", Milano.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Walter Benjamin: Das Passagen-werk / The Arcades Project
"The Arcades Project is Walter Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth–century history and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed 'true history' that underlay the ideological mask. Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project was constructed over the course of thirteen years–––'the theatre,' as Benjamin called it, 'of all my struggles and all my ideas.' According to Benjamin, an arcade is a city in miniature catering to consumer needs. It is an abstraction that condenses a heterogeneous environment of shopping opportunities and goods into a unified experience."
(Howard Eiland & Howard Eiland)
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
