SIMILAR PROJECTS
SCHUBLADEN MUSEUM
Herbert Distel, Museum of Drawers, 1970-77.
Chest of drawers containing miniature works by various artists,
overall (approx.) 72 x 28 9/16 x 28 9/16" (183 x 42 x 42 cm).
Kunsthaus Zürich. Donation of Herbert Distel and The Foundation Julius Bÿr. Photo: ©1999, Kunsthaus Zôrich. All rights reserved.
Herbert Distel adopted the role of the museum curator when he invited artists from around the world to contribute miniature works for display in the tiny "galleries" of his Museum of Drawers. The drawers in this found cabinet are filled with five hundred works by a wide range of artists, some well known, like Picasso, others obscure, creating a comprehensive survey of artistic currents in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Distel, "Museums, especially museums of fine art, are places where we become conscious of time. Like a preserving jar, they have the task of conserving and presenting a subject curdled with time--the artwork. But through and behind these works the artists appear, falling out of the screen of time, as it were, and become immortal."
The Museum of Drawers (MOD)
Museums, especially museums of fine art, are places where we become conscious of time. Like a preserving jar, they all have the task of conserving and presenting a subject curdled with time – the artwork. But through and behind these works the artists appear, falling out of the screen of time, as it were, and become immortal.
The Museum of Drawers is almost exclusively filled with art of the 1960s and 1970s, represented by the five hundred pieces installed within it, giving a comprehensive survey of a period of art whose currents were more numerous than ever before: the last two decades of modern time, immediately before the paradigm change to socalled postmodern time, in which there are no more currents to find at all. But there are also some works of the classical avant-garde; they form the background for all the currents that complete one hundred years of modern art and oscillate between artists like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.
The museum as muse - to be kissed by the muse of the Museum of Drawers -, this was my hope when I invited each of the five hundred artists to realize a work for the tiny rooms (1 11/16“ x 2 1/4“ x 1 7/8“). My dream has become reality.
Herbert Distel, July 1998
(Text for the catalogue of the show THE MUSEUM AS MUSE: Artists Reflect 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art New York, where the MOD has been exhibited)
JEMA - JOHN ERICKSON MUSEUM OF ART
JEMA is a six-year old museum. It celebrated its Grand Opening on July 25th, 2003 at 2:30 p.m. in the lobby of the Seattle Art Museum. The opening lasted two minutes. As a location variable museum, JEMA regularly works with artists to realize projects that require mobility, multi-destinational site-specificity, and/or seek to defy or question the traditional space of the contemporary art museum or the mechanisms of contemporary art practice. JEMA’s portable quality offers artists an exhibition space that encourages radical experimentation with a low financial overhead. Many art museums function with power and strength but remain bogged down by red tape and expensive exhibitions. By moving with stealth and agility, JEMA offers a vital, yet affordable, museum space and supports the quick, decisive, and efficient delivery of art to the viewing public. JEMA’s design allows for a greater focus on exhibition planning and a stronger communication between the institution, exhibiting artists, and you (the viewing public). JEMA’s galleries are housed in a series of sturdy but stylish 16"x12"x9" aluminum carrying cases. JEMA brings the art to you! Think JEMA…more or less.
THE GREATEST LITTLE GALLERY ON EARTH
Until recently, the Wrong Gallery was just an expensive-looking doorway in New York. Today it opens in its new home: Tate Modern. By Christopher Turner
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The Guardian, Wednesday 21 December 2005
Article history
If you ever visited the Wrong Gallery in New York, you might have been greeted by a blunt notice: "Fuck Off We're Closed". As it happens, the gallery, which launched in 2002 as the smallest exhibition space in New York, never actually opened. It was nothing more than an expensive-looking glass door, identical to those of the Chelsea white cubes it satirised. Viewers would peer through it into a meagre two and a half square feet of floor space, where in the course of its three-year existence the Wrong Gallery exhibited the work of 40 internationally acclaimed artists. Few passers-by would have guessed that the "Closed" sign - a piece by British artist Adam McEwen - was itself the work on view.
The Wrong Gallery's founders were Italian art-world jester Maurizio Cattelan (most famous in Britain for his controversial mannequin of the Pope crushed by a meteorite) and two editors turned curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick; they jokingly referred to the sliver of a gallery as "the back door to contemporary art" - one that's "always locked". It was entirely non-commercial, literally only accessible to window shoppers. The name came about because, as Cattelan now explains: "We loved the idea of people saying: 'It's a great show, but it's in the wrong gallery.' "
In July, the Wrong Gallery was evicted from its doorway. This week a full-scale mock-up will appear, Tardis-like, on the third floor of Tate Modern, where the Wrong Gallery has been granted temporary asylum.
It remains to be seen how the Wrong Gallery's signature pranks will be adapted to the canonical collection of the Tate. Most of the interventions it has staged have played in some way on the idea that there might be more - or less - to the gallery than met the eye. The Polish artist Pawel Althamer hired two Polish illegal immigrants to smash in the door with a baseball bat every Saturday - "I think we had to change four or five doors in total," Cattelan recalls, "a good way to keep the window cleaned!" Jamie Isenstein displayed a "will return by" sign that was motorised so that its clock always pointed a quarter of an hour into the future. Andreas Slominski kidnapped the door and took it to a dinner party in Hamburg, where he held it hostage for two weeks. At a recent show in London's East End, a photocopy was displayed reading "Lost. Have you seen this door?" accompanied by a grainy picture of the Wrong Gallery and a telephone number.
Cattelan, Subotnick and Gioni have free rein over what they can show in their Tate Modern toe-hold. "We'll have to adjust to a different environment," Cattelan says of the transfer to the Tate, "gather new energies from our neighbours and at the same time work against them, try and look different from them." He drily suggests that they might start selling works, or subletting their space to commercial galleries. When they originally leased their doorway in New York's Chelsea district, it was on the condition that they exhibit the work of the landlord's wife. The curators made no effort to mask the nepotism: "Once a year we had the Landlord's Wife's Show," Cattelan tells me. "I hope we don't have to do anything like that at the Tate!" Their first exhibit there is the Orgasm Box, a video installation by 72-year-old artist Dorothy Iannone, which shows her younger self masturbating. But whatever it shows, one thing is sure: the subversive gallery has itself become a work of art.
It has also, despite itself, become a kind of institution. It even publishes a yearly newspaper, the Wrong Times. The gallery has been given its own space at the upcoming Whitney Biennial in New York (its exhibit has already proclaimed its independence by having different opening and closing dates to the rest of the show), and the directorial trio has been invited to curate next year's Berlin Biennale. They immediately started a fake Berlin Gagosian gallery (a cheap knock-off of the New York, London and Los Angeles versions, housed in a shabby former plumbers' merchants), hijacking the actual gallery's logo and stationery to create a bootleg or "guerrilla franchise". They describe it as a "stepsister" to the Wrong Gallery - Cattelan jokes that "our dream is at one point that Larry Gagosian buys the Berlin branch".
When I visit the building in New York that once housed the Wrong Gallery the shutters are up; there are no clues to the doorway's former use. There is a Jehovah's Witness hall next door and a waiter is arranging a table of fluted glasses in a gallery on the other side of the street. A block away, Andrew Kreps, the gallerist whose basement doorway the Wrong Gallery occupied and who was evicted from the building at the same time, is shivering in his new temporary space. He has a pair of longjohns wrapped around his neck and a magnum of champagne cooling on the desk beside him.
"We still get their mail," he says, laughing. "They had the same address as we did." (the Wrong Gallery simply added a ½ to Kreps's 516A, and were amused to get numerous job applications for gallery assistants and guards.) "Basically," Kreps says, "they were a parasite." Later, Cattelan tells me: "We used his pens, pencils, hammers, nails, screws, drills, ladders, mailboxes, answering machines. We would sit in the office and have coffee when it was winter and we were installing in the street." He drilled a hole through the wall that divided the two galleries and connected the Wrong Gallery's lights to Kreps's. "They'll be a parasite on Tate Modern too," Kreps says, with mock seriousness. "They need hosts, and then they infect them."
Despite being a parasite, the Wrong Gallery soon had a greater share of the building's facade than the Andrew Kreps Gallery, though the facade was, of course, all they had. They expanded into another doorway of the building a couple of years ago, and flipped the font on their new glass door so that it looked like a mirror version of the original. "We thought that one day," Cattelan says, "we would get to have as much real estate as Gagosian, only split up into very, very small lots."
Some "lots" have been, frankly, infinitesimal. There is a mousehole-sized replica of the Wrong Gallery in a Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, and collectors can now buy an 18in-high scale model of the doorway for just under £700, which includes miniatures of all the artworks ever shown there (a homage to Marcel Duchamp's famous museum in a suitcase). "The idea is that anyone can play at being a dealer at home," Cattelan says. "It is a sign of the times. In the 1960s every man could have become an artist; now everyone wants to make money."
As I put heel to toe to measure the small recess that was once the gallery, I notice that someone has used the narrow niche to take a dump ("In Italy it's good luck to step in shit," Gioni later reassures me). Perhaps it was left there by an art lover, and intended as an homage to the Wrong Gallery's litany of scatological shows. Paul McCarthy's Santa Butt Plug was decorated with excrement, and Noritoshi Hirakawa manipulated a volunteer's diet to produce the perfect odourless turd. Says Cattelan of my find: "One man's trash is another man's treasure"
· The Wrong Gallery opens today at Tate Modern, London SE1. Details: 020-7887 8888.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/dec/21/art
ANTI-MUSEO Y PÚBLICO NÓMADA: EL CENTRO PORTÁTIL DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO
Centro Portátil de Arte Contemporáneo.
DVD, 44'39'' (2008-2010)
Fecha: 9 de marzo
Lugar: Edificio Nouvel, Centro de Estudios.
Hora: 20:00 h
Entrada: Gratuita, hasta completar aforo.
Tipo de actividad: Conversaciones. Las políticas culturales
La continua fundación de centros y museos de arte contemporáneo en años recientes ha generado una densidad institucional planteada como eco de un modelo cultural homogéneo. Detrás de la estabilidad y permanencia de esta institución, se manifiesta el predominio de elementos como el edificio, la representación política y la reordenación urbana, al tiempo que destacan las carencias en plantear relaciones con la comunidad, el público en toda su extensión o las posibilidades del arte como elemento de cambio y toma de conciencia.
El Antimuseo es un proyecto constituido en este vacío, una institución horizontal, difusa y sin contenedor, surgida de la transformación de un espacio independiente de Madrid, el Ojo Atómico (1993-2007), en una idea de participación y exposición de tensiones públicas. En palabras de sus fundadores, Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, y María María Acha, el trabajo del Antimuseo no consiste en enseñar productos artísticos a una audiencia, sino en restablecer relaciones sociales que conviertan esa audiencia en un (contra)público, en una comunidad cultural y políticamente activa.
Una de las iniciativas del Antimuseo es el CPAC (el Centro Portátil de Arte Contemporáneo), un dispositivo móvil itinerante, activado por artistas y colectivos tras un proceso de debate y estudio específico de cada caso, que transita zonas de conflicto, marginalidad y exclusión social, exponiendo y activando en su precariedad algunos de los temas que, paradójicamente, genera la persistente fundación del museo como edificio, desde la gentrificación hasta la desaparición de la memoria de la ciudad.
Esta presentación inaugura el ciclo Conversaciones, un nuevo programa en el que el Museo Reina Sofía invita y acoge propuestas de debate de diferentes agentes culturales, cuestionando el rol de la institución museística como enunciador cultural privilegiado, reconociendo así la discusión en campos diversos, desde las políticas culturales hasta la producción artística.
Participan:
María María Acha. Artista y co-directora del Ojo Atómico - Antimuseo de Arte Contemporaneo.
Tomás Ruiz-Rivas. Artista, comisario y co-director del Ojo Atómico - Antimuseo de Arte Contemporáneo.
Marcelo Expósito. Artista, investigador y profesor del Programa de Estudios Independientes del MACBA.