This is just so genius.
I adore these photographs. They are from the French photographer, Stefan Draschan.
These photographs are beautiful, funny and unique. They make a beautiful harmony between the work of art itself and the visitor. Take a look yourself. Enjoy scrolling and finding the matches.
further reading:
https://www.boredpanda.com/people-matching-artworks-stefan-draschan/
A great talk to listen to on a saturday night.
People and Art. People and Art and Looking.
Part four
This video always makes me smile. Museums are just too cool for school.
The High-Line! One of the greatest public spaces to be built in the 21st century.
Amanda Burden can be credited as the brain-child of the development of the high-line. She was the director of the New York City Department of City Planning and Chair of the City Planning Commission under Major Michael Bloomberg from 2002 to 2013. She has left a sizeable legacy on changing the public landscape of New York City.
We can learn a lot from how she creates public spaces. What can we learn and use in museum spaces?
Here is her TED talk from 2014:
Happy Friday everyone
further readings:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/ny-high-line/goldberger-text
There are some wonderfully strange museums out there.
Here is a post dedicated to the delicious world of food museums.
Frietmuseum, Bruges, Belgium
The museum opened the Frietmuseum in 2008, in a 14th-century building in the seaside Belgian town of Bruges. The museum boasts a collection of vintage chip fryers, pre-Colombian potato artifacts, and crispy frites cooked–sorry, double-cooked–onsite in a vintage fryer.
Kimchi museum, Seoul
I just read that supposedly this museum has more then 100,000 visitors a year! The museum is located in one of Seoul’s many malls and chronicles the history of the national food dish, kimchi. With multiple different exhibits, there is a sampling room, as well an area containing microscopes so visitors can watch the fermentation at work.
The Ramen Museum, Yokohama
This museum sounds amazing, it sounds more like a theme park dedicated to ramen noodles than a traditional museum. It houses some educational exhibitions about ramen in general, plus a food culture retrospective on the inventor of Cup o’ Noodles Momfuku Ando. BUT the central attraction is the two story recreation of Tokyo in 1958 (the same year instant noodles were invented). There are nine ramen shops operated by real Japanese ramen restaurants and designed to match the time period. Each shop gives visitors a passport stamped with its emblem, a sign of their nostalgic visit to the golden age of RAMEN.
The Spam Museum, Minnesota
At the moment this ‘honourable institution’ is closed for redevelopment, set to reopen in 2016. Previously, the museum had a SPAM wall made of nearly 4000 old cans, and advertising exhibits, video displays and even a Monty Python exhibit dedicated to the famous SPAM skit. I would really love to see what the redevelopment of this institution will look like.
Prince Edward Island Potato Museum, Canada
Dedicated to the glorious potato, this museum houses the largest farm implements and machinery related to the growing and harvesting of potatoes in the world. The museum is also surrounded by fertile potato growing fields where the humble potato has played an important role in the economy for many years. In addition, who wouldn’t like to take a photograph next to the BIG POTATO!
City of Pickles, Lübbenau
This is home to the only museum in Germany dedicated to the pickled cucumber. In the museum they exhibit the history of the pickle, which has been growing in the region since the 8th Century. Pretty incredible. You can taste these delicious pickles called Spreewaldgurken.
further reading:
http://thisbelongsinamuseum.com/post/104855730329/gurken-museum
http://thisbelongsinamuseum.com/post/13234840094/so-it-doesnt-feel-left-out-let-me-also-mention
http://www.peipotatomuseum.com/canadian-potato-museum/
http://www.luebbenau-spreewald.com/pages/en/luebbenau/city-of-pickles.php?lang=EN
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11275495/Top-10-strangely-specific-food-museums.html
http://www.bonappetit.com/trends/article/10-food-museums-besides-the-museum-of-food-and-drink
When the Obliteration Room was created by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery, it was for the purposes of engagement with children. Although the target audience is children, the work has the ability to relate to teenagers and adults alike and I think that says something about the nature of engagement and how museums can use this to its advantage.
Last year, I worked with a philanthropic arts organisation (Kaldor Public Art Projects) on an exhibition that highlighted the participatory work of a Slovakian artist called Roman Ondak. When working on this project I could not see the parallel to Yayoi Kusama’s now iconic Obliteration Room work. They both highlighted engagement with core of the creation of the artwork itself. On a base level they got people to understand the value of art in creating communities and unity through highlighting people’s similarities (be it how people arrange their ‘dots’ in the Obliteration Room or how tall they are in Measuring the Universe).
I believe that there should more of these kinds of artworks within museums and galleries (even within public spaces like squares etc). Look at how popular Leornard Elmrich’s Merchant’s House was last year as part of Sydney festival. People want to engage. They want to connect to art. They want to connect to the spaces within museums.
I am not saying people do not engage in museums already. And I don’t necessarily believe that constant participatory artworks is the answer for all museum issues in relation to audience interaction, but I believe it will help in fostering these relationships.
I don’t know, maybe it is just me getting a thrill out of seeing all these awesome children’s spaces and wanting to partake like in Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room.
images and videos:
The Obliteration Room:
Measuring the Universe:
The Merchant’s House:
further reading:
http://thesnapassembly.com/art/art-leandro-erlichs-incredible-optical-illusion
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/01/yayoi-kusama-obiliteration-room/
http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/roman-ondak
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/kids/exhibitions/current/yayoi_kusama_the_obliteration_room
The arty farty party was an experimental birthday party that perfectly fits with the ideas and beliefs of the museum collective.
The premise came from the MCA’s Artbar, a public program, which allows contemporary Australian artists to curate the Gallery space however they want for one evening. Often these evenings are aimed towards the mid twenties to early thirties group and involve copious amounts of alcohol, art-making and dancing- a perfect combination of fun and learning. What do I mean by learning? Yes, people do learn, by having the opportunity to create work with no boundaries people are engaging with artistic ideas and understanding the role art plays within society (even if this unconsciously done so).
Taking inspiration from the Artbar model, the collective set off to create their own alternate version, and coinciding with my (cayn’s) birthday there was no better reason to trial.
The aim was to allow people to come together and create artworks within my apartment space. Display these works on the walls of the apartment in a salon style. Allow people’s imagination to go wild. Art supplies were provided. This included pipe-cleaners, magazines, craft glue, glitter, ink, coloured pencils, texters and other craft material.
With the possibility of a complete failure the party to many people’s surprise was a success. Not only did people get involved into the art-making activity they pushed the idea.
People were forced to interact with complete strangers and make friends with one another.
Friendships were formed, a small community. Turning the ordinary and making it extraordinary, intangible connections were formed.
It forced people to challenge their preconceptions of what is art because anything that was made or created was placed on the wall. A pipe cleaner warped into a spiral, a page torn from a book with highlighted words and a stick drawing of robin thicke all included on the walls.
The arty farty was a great way to test the concepts and ideas aligned with the museum’s collective. It proved that maybe this crazy idea just might work.
Before we begin to define what is the museum collective we should define what a museum is, which is much harder than you think.
According to the ICOM Statutes, adopted during the 21st General Conference in Vienna, Austria, in 2007:
“a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment…”
With the rapid development of technology the concept of the space is becoming a blurred concept. We want to challenge the idea of the physical museum space. We want to create a museum everywhere and anywhere.
Museums today are becoming more interested in participation and engagement of audiences with the museum space rather than the preservation and conservation of the objects. If the museum is attempting to create human experiences and engagement, should it not be our job as future museological professionals to attempt to create and preserve these human experiences as a way to create communities and to inform future generations?
We want to collect people’s ideas, interactions and intangibility of heritage. We will create events and spaces that allow for people to gather, discuss, listen, showcase, learn and teach. The digital realm gives us a place and space to display and preserve our collection of human experience. We will document these online, allowing the archive to be the collection.
We want to collect and create human experiences.
At the moment, the realms of one’s imagination and constrains for time are the only limits to the museum collective. Some ideas for future actions and events include:
Cayn Rosmarin is currently a postgraduate student at The University of Sydney. She completed a Bachelor of Art Education at the College of Fine Arts. Her research interests are in art education and museum studies to enhance and create community engagement.
Helen J. Waller is currently a postgraduate student at The University of Sydney. She completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Archaeology at The University of Sydney. Her research interests are in community heritage and museum studies.
cayn rosmarin
helen j waller
http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Birth_of_the_Museum.html?id=GwNWG2ggT7oC
Click to access Duncan%201995.pdf
Click to access contextual_model_of_learning_notes_1_.pdf
wearethemuseumcollective 