læs bogen her - Den Frie

ture. Collections are continuously reshaped and relocated,
but the difficulty with the changing economy of collecting is
that instead of collecting multiple items, as one did in the
past, you might engage an artist to critique your collections
or collect a single conceptual piece so, instead of fieldwork
and research, you have a critical object. It may illuminate
ideas and politics in the short term, with the contemporary
artist acting as a critic, but that contemporary artist stands
alone fifty years later. So the terms of cultural production
within collections has changed, and challenges our vision as
to the legacies we are building and the role of museums for
the present and the future. At present, we are still working
through those historic collections that we have inherited,
and we can invite artists to create new assemblages of objects/ideas
and then exhibit these as a result of that interaction
and integration. However, the difference between
that type of display and Ground Floor America is the interest
in commissioning and generating artwork through the ethnographic
process. Ground Floor America seems to be creating
the evidence for the future; the artists are making new
collections, which could easily be exhibited next to historic
collections. This form of art practice is much more creative
and productive.
PDG: But then the danger is that it eats itself.
HL: There is indeed a danger that the “ethnographic turn”
is endlessly self-referential, and overly critical that it ultimately
gets in the way of things moving on or our thinking
differently about the issues pertaining to museums and collections.
The danger is that it does not inherently forge new
avenues of collecting and that it results in a circular way of
doing and thinking about things. It also creates an obsession
with the past, so that museums are all about the past and all
they ever do is reflect and construct themselves around the
past. That is another shift in the perception of museums.
When they were founded in the in the 18th-19th centuries
they were essentially about the future.
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PDG: And this exhibition is about exploring and rummaging
through the past to a significant extent.
Frans Jacobi (FJ): As I understand, this exhibition is made
with the afterthoughts of the Istanbul Biennial 2009, and
when I saw that exhibition, it did not have that feeling at
all. It felt like it was about what is going on right now and
current problems in the world. It was really funny coming
from northern Europe - suddenly it was like they had something
going on, which we did not know about.
The exhibition in Istanbul was much bigger and there was a
very heavy framework of Bertolt Brecht that was present all
over the exhibition. There were arrows on the floor pointing
in different directions and quotations of his all through the
catalogue and exhibition. This idea of Bertolt Brecht’s political
ideas and pedagogic was present somehow, and that
was strange because it is an old-fashioned idea. There were
also works, like those here that dealt with Middle East issues
and mixed in with the Arabic world it was about contemporary
frictions. That is interesting because the last few
times I have been to the Istanbul Biennial, it has seemed as
if Istanbul was trying to make a Western contemporary art
exhibition. But the last one was the first that felt like something
else was going on, something that we in the north do
not have access to.
Malene Natascha Ratcliffe (MNR): I am happy that you say
that it is the current political issues because until I talked
with Henrietta and Paul, that was exactly my perception of
this exhibition; that these are the current discussions going
on. But I also have the feeling, which is irritating me
that their culture is coming into the forefront more than
the problem or the discussion really is. And that contradicts
how I want to understand myself as a viewer. Even in Vahid
Sharifian’s semi-holographic paper it comes up before I see
anything else. It becomes about a history and a context that
I do not understand at first. It is because it is Eastern and
Middle Eastern history and contemporary problems at hand
at the moment, which he deals with. It is therefore really