Director’s Word

Amsterdam, May 2011

Oh, for the Love of Art!

Or

The Dark Side of

THE MUSEUM

This is not a critique. This is how it is, this is how it was, and this is how it will always be.

The architecture of the hospital must be the agent and instrument of cure.*However the real truth is that as soon as one enters the hospital, one starts feeling sicker and sicker and it is indeed hard to believe that hospitals are made for anything else but for keeping the disease and the death of the diseased alive. Same could be applied to museums-sure, they are made with best intentions of keeping the art alive but their architecture betrays them and kills the subject of their affection in one monumental and spectacular cut.

According to Foucault there are two types of places- first there are utopias-sites with no real space, fundamentally unreal spaces. And then there are places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of a society-which are something like counter sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and converted. Places of this kind are outside of all places even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality*- these places Foucault calls heterotopias.

The greatest rule of every heterotopia is exclusion.

The museum of contemporary art is a vast, architecturally incorrect, politically correct and spaciously confusing place where one feels small, undermined and self-conscious; a museum is a place the other can never belong to simply because it’s purpose is not to give a feeling of belonging but to give a feeling of awe, which ultimately leads to alienation and separation from the subject (art) the other awes. It is made for the other to see it and to admire it by being part of its audience-an external, fluid, inter changeable yet crucial part of every museum.

The Museum excludes everything that is not part of it by including everything that is part of it. It is there on display and by serving the audience; it is serving its own prolongation of existence. The Museum is a place of exclusion and separation. It is a place of distorted reality where untitled dreams are mounted on high ceiling walls, where coffee tastes better, where names are dropped, and where education of masses is sold for ticket money.

It is made for you to enter, to experience and to exit, leaving you with a taste of eternity you will never become a part of (the way to eternal is history).

This is not a critique. This is how it is, this is how it was, and this is how it will always be.

 It’s complicated:

THE ZOLDER MUSEUM

Utopic Heterotopia

The Zolder Museum is a simulating heterotopia, which has a utopia of being the real heterotopia- it is utopic heterotopia. The Zolder Museum started with an idea of taking action which can bring forth better understanding of what art institution is and what it does to art and vice versa. Having a museum inevitably influences and guides the creation and development of art community which comes together around an institution, as a place to see and to be seen. The Zolder Museum started with a question can an art institution be seen differently? Is there a life for a new museum besides having yet another alternative art space? What is a museum without an economy? How does a museum come to life, how is it created? What is needed for its worldly manifestation? What are the holding pillars of an art institution, besides its politics and economy?…Questions yet be answered.

One thing is certain, there is no art museum without art and there will never be one. Needless to say, art does have a life without a museum but if one wants to reach institutional immortality one better head right to a museum. Naturally, ambition as such is not necessary for making art; it is also not needed for being an artist. To be an artist one need not to be in a museum but to be historically immortal in his/her art, one needs a museum. This is not some crazy philosophy based on pseudo-religious, obscure and vague ideas of death, immortality and art; this is a very practical and physical reality of the art world view and its social setting. It means that if you want to reach centuries ahead of your time and if you think it is important to leave a trace (or somebody else nesting a powerful and important worldly position thinks you are important), than it can be done through a museum, or better said, through a museum’s basement known as an archive, a media for preserving and caring for a thing or for things which are considered by a huge range of wide and often contradictory, criteria, art.

 Little Maxims

 

Poetry of survival: the function of the museum is to survive; to survive the art in it, the politics around it and the global economic crises ..

Looking at art: nothing is more disappointing than a big smart fart on a place where art should be.

The biggest enemy of art in the museum is its architecture.

Museum’s greatest potential is in its architecture.

 

Terms and trends:

Research- what???

Symposiums on political art- Around the world in 60 days supported by governmental funding

Lectures- often nothing but self-indulgent and self-promotional monologues. A nice little jerk off.

All that shit killed the simple creative joy of making art.


* Jeremy W. Crampton, Stuart Elden, Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007

* Michel Foucault, 1967, Des Espace Autres (Of other spaces) French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, 1984, translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec

 

Iva Supic Jankovic

All that is written is to be taken with an understanding that the only thing certain in all is change. The Zolder Museum is a long term project mainly based on learning in the process of making.