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
Chronological ordering highlighting human cost of the Vietnam War
"Maya [Lin] unexpectedly won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while a Yale student, and it threw her into a huge storm of controversy. The controversy over Maya Lin's design showed the raw emotional wounds that still had not healed when it erupted in 1980, and Maya Lin's finished memorial showed the power of art to affect people and touch upon important issues of society.
...
Lin wanted her memorial to evoke tears in the viewers, to act as a vehicle for veterans to begin to heal from their experience. One of the most touching scenes in Freida Lee Mock's documentary is the beginning scene, watching the reaction of veterans as they look at the names of their fallen comrades in the black wall. In a particular scene, two veterans are looking at the name and one veteran exclaims, 'Look at all these names!' and he begins to cry. What most moved about these scenes was how the memorial touched these veterans, how it honoured the individuals who were killed by making them more than just a statistic. A veteran mentioned that a name may not mean much to one person, but it would mean much to another. Lin put the names in chronological, rather than alphabetical order, to help individualize the names. If the names were in alphabetical order, then a loved one would be lost in a sea of Smiths or Jones or whatever that person's last name is, and it would depersonalize that individual. It would take a person longer to look up the name and find it if the names were in chronological order, but the process would be worth it to a family member or a friend."
(Angelo Lopez, 26 May 2008)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
