Fred wilson mining the museum maryland

MINING THE MUSEUM: ARTISTS LOOK AT MUSEUMS,

MUSEUMS LOOK AT THEMSELVES

Lisa G. Corrin

If the love of art is the clear mark of the chosen, separating, by an invisible and insu­ perable barrier, those who are touched by it from those who have not received its grace, it is understandable that in the tiniest details of their morphology and their organization, museums betray their true function, which is to reinforce for some the feeling of lielonging and for others the feeling of exclusion.

PlERRE BOURDIEU AND ALAIN DaBBEL, Thr LoveofArl: Euru/tCtm Art Museums and Their Public

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again.

Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morniny, 1993

To speak of the ideological apparatus underly­ ing museum practices is to speak of the rela­ tion among power, representation, and cultural identity; of how history is written and commu­ nicated; of whose history is voiced and whose is silenced. Behind their often-cavemous halls of cultural relics, museums are places where sacrosanct belief systems are confirmed on the basis of hierarchies valuing one culture over another. Art and artifact, style and period, high and low, dominant and marginal—these are the boundaries museums rely on to sustain “society’s most revered beliefs and values.”1 This tidy formula for codifying human experi­ ence has provided museums with a comfortably

detached position from which to observe the revisionist dialogue that has reshaped art his­ tory and cultural studies over the past decade. Until recently, the museum community has been resistant to the issues raised by this dialogue, fearful, apparently, of controversies that have always arisen whenever critical art history has been translated into museum practice.2

However, it has become increasingly diffi­ cult for them to sustain this detachment because museums are in the midst of a severe crisis of identify. Shrinking resources, bouts over the First Amendment, pressures by native populations to return their cultural heritage, and calls for a renewed commitment to multi­

Barbara Kruger, Sportsac for A Museum Looks at Itself: Mapping Past and

Present at the Parrish Art Museum, 1992. Courtesy of the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, N.Y.

culturalism have raised a host of questions about the purpose of museums; the definition of “audience”; and the process by which critical decisions of acquisition, con­ servation, interpretation, and presentation are made.3 Under enormous pressure; the museum community has been forced to consider the relation between what it does and the historical, political, and social context in which it operates.4 “What am I?” asks the museum today. “If I am not to be a metamuseum, interred within my own history. what do I do?”’’

Thus with much breast beating, the Amer­ ican museum has lately performed a public purge of its past, owning up to the social inequi­ ties it reinforced through its unself-critical practices. Reinstallations of permanent collec­ tions and museological exhibitions have ex- tended the dialogue outside the museum pro­ fession to include museum audiences, inviting them to join in a “group therapy” exercise aimed at recharting the futures of these institutions. Since 1990, the National Museum of .Natural History has been involved iua seven-year effort to bring a greater degree of consciousness to the museum visitor about the way’s in which our views of the natural world and the “family of man" are skewed by the language of the mu­ seum. Interim “dilemma labels” have been de­ signed to negotiate the “outdated" displays until the collection can the reinstalled. These labels openly admit to past racist, sexist, and colo­ nialist attitudes on the part of the museum. For example, a lioness depicted passively reclining in the shade with her cubs while the male gazes at a prospective hunt, a group of zebras in the distance, implies that only the male is the hun­ ter in the pride. The “dilemma label" points out

the contradiction between the original label, which states that the female is the primary hunter in the group, and the viewer’s perception, which suggests otherwise. The project is particularly aimed at exposing and dis­ couraging the tendency to exoticize other societies in order to maintain a colonial­ ist domination over them.6

Art/Artifact (1988), at the Center for African Art in

New York, was a seminal project which argued that museum practices rather than just mu­ seum objects are a legitimate subject for an exhibition. Art/Artifact showcased typical en­ vironments created by museums to display col­ lections and pointed out the various ways our perceptionsof the “other" are governed by those environments. A smaller exhibition. Worlds in Miniature, Worlds Apart (1991-94), at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnol­ ogy at Harvard University, explored the use of dioramas, models, and mannequins in exhibits at the Peabody through the beginning of the twentieth century. This history of museum techniques also included a discussion of how the perceptions of the anthropologists who worked in the heyday of the museum's develop­ ment guided the museum's representations of native New World cultures. Because the exhibit was mounted during the redesign and reinstal­ lation of the Pealxxly’s permanent galleries, one surmised it was intended to supply a coun­ terpoint to the new presentation of the muse­ um’s permanent collections. Into the Heart of Africa focused on the history of the museum’s African collection and documented the means by which particular objects found their way into the museum—in this case, primarily through missionaries and colonial officers.7

Other revisionist readings of collection and exhibition practices by art museums include The Desire and the Museum (1989) at the Whit­ ney Museum of American Art, Downtown (1989), Art Inside Out (1992) organized by the Depart­ ment of Education at the Art Institute of Chi­ cago (1992), and A Museum Looks at Itself: Map­ ping Past and Present at the Parrish Art Museum, 1897-1992 (1992). The Desire of the Museum illuminated the subliminal subtext of the museum, exhibiting contemporary art about the institution using visual and textual deuces that revealed the unconscious agendas of the curators and the audience as part of the exhibi­ tion. Art Inside Out introduced a contextual treatment of a concise selection of objects both as “art” and as historical artifacts. A preface to the exhibition provided a behind-the-scenes view of how objects get into collections and raised questions about how choices are made and by whom. The Parrish exhibition incorporated ob­ jects once esteemed by the museum’s founder into new, critically reflexive displays in “an at­ tempt to examine the museum itself as a his­ torical artifact.”8 The exhibition looked at the way in which the values and political stances of those in power dictated the collecting practices of the museum, which is located between an elite summer playground and a year-round rural community that is home to many Native Americans and other people of color.9

Whether the Museum of Man or Art Inside Out, the objective of these exhibitions has been to demystify the museum institution, to raise questions about the relationship among power, context, reception, and meaning. While up­ dating labels and dioramas or historicizing the museum is no doubt valuable, are these changes enough? Museums must consider the infrastruc­ ture and value systems that generated preju­ dicial practices to begin with and use this self- study to change daily practices in programs, management, and governance. The “new muse­

ology,” or critical museum history, argues that we cannot separate the exhibition from the mu­ seum or the method from the meaning of the institution. It is time for a radical examination of the museum’s role in society’, or else muse­ ums are likely to “find themselves dubbed ‘liv­ ing fossils.’”10 This means broadening the def­ inition of who is “qualified ’’ to offer alternative paradigms for the museums of the future.

In their continued efforts at self-examina­ tion, museums might also consider the work of artists who have already attempted bread cri­ tiques of the institution or of the social “frame” that makes art “Art.” Since Duchamp signed an ordinary urinal, Fountain (1917), the uneasy relationship between art and its contextual frame has been a distinct subject matter for artists.”

The early conceptual art and earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s strove to collapse the boundaries between the “white cube" and the world. Members of the Fluxus group, for exam­ ple, “were bent on subverting the very’ notions that are central to a museum’s identity’: perma­ nence, posterity, quality, authorahip.”12 Daniel Buren also wrote substantial treatises on the function of the museum in preserving, collect­ ing, protecting, and giving status to works of art, questioning, as did Fluxus artists, whether art can exist independently’ of the institutions that support it.13 Beginning in 1968, Buren placed his painted striped canvases in everyday contexts to consider “the gap between an art and non-art context.”14 Robert Smithson, whose Spiral Jetty transcended the boundaries of the museum environment, took a critical position on museums in his writings. To Smithson, the work of art must resist the aesthetic anemia induced by the antiseptic whiteness of the gallery walls. He predicted that “the investiga­ tion of the apparatus the artist is threaded through” would become a subject of art itself.15

This was indeed what transpired. During the 1970s and 1980s it became a given that the

white cube could no longer be regarded as a neutral space.16 Work by Michael Asher, Louise Lawler, Judith Barry, Andrea Fraser, and Hans Haacke, among others, have critiqued the power structures, value systems, and practices governing galleries and museums and illus­ trated how context is inseparable from the meaning of an art. work and the meaning of the museum experience itself.

How individual choices “frame” the mean­ ing and perceived value of objects has been the subject of work by Michael Asher and Louise Lawler. Asher’s installations in museum set­ tings, such as projects at the Museum of Con­ temporary Art (Chicago, 1979) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1979), have consistently questioned assumptions inherent in museum presentation, turning the museum process in­ side out and questioning the contradictions between art and its context. Lawler’s photo­ graphs of “icons” of modernism as well as her installations using objects from permanent museum collections also consider how the con­ text of the museum, the private collection, or the commercial gallery confers meaning on objects and governs our relationship to art. For the ex­ hibition A Forest of Signs (1989), Lawler exhi­ bited her choices from the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, adding her own photographs, labels, printed cards, and paperweights. The project placed a selection of well-know modern art objects from the collection in unexpected contexts, inviting the viewer to ask questions about his or her rela­ tionship to the works.

The exhibition Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object (1986), at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, brought together art works that examined what the critic Hal Foster called the “art/commodity dialectic.” The exhibition design was an “inter­ vention” by artist Judith Barn, known for her highly theoretical environmental installations

that focus on the structure of the relationship between art objects and the newer. In the case of Damaged Goods, Barry drew on the lan­ guage of the “highly orchestrated environ­ ment” of the department store, thereby under­ scoring the complicitous relationship between artists/museums and the marketplace.

The silent agenda of the museum was further explored in this exhibition by Andrea Fraser, alias “docent, Jane Castleton.” Fraser provided guided “tours” not only of what one sees in the museum but. also what is not readily exposed: the implications of the preoccupation with protecting works of art. Her “tour” of the museum’s security systems raised questions about the connection between protecting arti­ facts and destroying cultures. Fraser's audio installation for the Austrian pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale considered how nation­ alistic agendas are expressed through a muse­ um’s choice of objects as representative of a particular culture. The piece consisted of con­ versations by visitors commenting on other pavilions—not on the works of art they con­ tained but on this hidden nationalistic agenda.

Hans Haacke’s explorations of “what the benevolent facade of cultural patronage is intended to conceal” take full advantage of the museum vocabulary: museum banners, excerpts from public relations materials, board lists, and packing crates.17 Haacke’s work traces the movement of art through the art world “system,” a system governed by social, economic, and political interests.

Recently there has been a reconciliation between artists and the museum, suggesting that, “notwithstanding its ideological charac­ teristics,” it “might still be preferable to much else as a space for imaginative, contemplative, and critical experiences.”18 Indeed, artists have returned to the museum, no longer just looking at it as the “apparatus the artist is threaded through” but using its format to create their

own “exhibitions” and “museums,” or acting as “curators," manipulating permanent collec­ tions to question the boundaries of the museum and its usefulness for addressing contempo­ rary aesthetic and social issues.

Orshi Drozdik creates collections of objects reminiscent of those found in the first science museums—objects that resemble inventions, experiments, and models. Drozdik’s work has often focused on the inadequacy of scientific lan­ guage and investigation to describe physical phenomena. Works such as Natural History— Botanic, Tubuli (Naming Nature) (1989), and Adventure in Technos Dystopium (1986-89) use as their basis a virtuoso display of the artist’s knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen­ tury science, including its paraphernalia. In addition, the resemblance of her objects to actual antiques gives them a sense of authentic­ ity. Consequently, her work causes one to medi­ tate on “the fate of all things to end up as curiosi­ ties in an unknowable future”—not unlike what happens in the average museum.’9

Mike Kelley’s The Uncanny (1993), created for Sonsbeek ’93, included historical artifacts, photographs, art objects, toys, and film stills all linked by their oblique reference to the current vogue for exhibitions about the body. Showing blatant disregard for traditional categories of objects and taste, all of the objects, artfully arranged, were given the same value and impor­ tance. Their sheer quantity numbed the viewer to the obvious fetishistic quality of the artifacts. By extension, Kelley’s installation became an ironic metaphor for the fetishizing of curators.

If artists as curators of their own exhibition is no longer uncommon, neither is the artist- created museum or collection. Early examples in­ clude Marcel Duchamp’s La Boite-en-Valise (first version, 1941), Marcel Broodthaers’s Musee d’ Art Modern*, Department des Aigles (1968-1972) and the Fluxus Group’s invented museums, which existed on paper or in concept but nowhere else.

The artist-exhibition, an installation with the characteristics of a “real” exhibition, often takes museology' as its theme. Barbara Bloom’s The Reign of Narcissism (1989) was a parody of a famous writer museum using what appeared to be a collection of furniture and miniatures belonging to a “great” author. Images of the artist herself took the form of chocolate cameos, porcelain teacups, and a leatherbound set of books with the artist’s name on their spines. This “vanitas exhibition” illustrated the complicity of the artist and the museum in perpetuating myths of authorship.

More recent artist-created museums in­ clude Christian Boltanski’s Inventory of Ob­ jects Belonging to a Young Woman of Charleston (1991) and La Reserve du Carnegie Interna­ tional 1896-1991 (1991), Sophie Calle’s Ghosts (1991-92), Lawrence Gipes’s Century of Pro­ gress Museum (1992) and Ann Kessler’s Art History Lesson (1993). Judith Barry has even posited a museum entirely’ in the mind. As part of the 1991 Carnegie International, she cre­ ated a mnemonic museum, one created within the memory', using an ancient recall system activated by the viewer.20

These artists use museological practices to confront the ways in which museums rewrite history through the politics of collecting and presentation. However, their work often inad­ vertently reasserts the validity' of the museum. A case in point is Incident at the Museum, or Water Music (1992) by Ilya Kabakov. Kabakov’s fictitious Barnaul Art Museum was home to the works of Stepan Yakovlevich Koshelev, an equally fictitious social realist painter. Water leaked from a damaged roof over the Barnaul’s dark, luxuriant, and deserted spaces. The viewer could not separate Koshelev’s art from the dank surroundings and the music created by the dripping water. Only in the quiet of the museum could this “orchestral event” be experi­ enced. Kabakov’s installation questioned the

validity of painting, but it also affirmed the sanctity of the museum. Commenting on the importance of its sacred quality, Kabakov insists that this work “does not treat museums ironically. It is an apotheosis of the museum and should be considered as such.”21

One particular artist-museum goes fur­ ther than any other in resisting the critical vocabulary of either museology or museumist art. With its official nonprofit status, engraved formal letterhead, museum shop, and exhi­ bitions with “scholarly” publications, David Wilson’s storefront Museum of Jurassic Tech­ nology in Los Angeles provides all the evidence required to pass muster as a “proper” museum. In its usurpation of museological language and its defiance of the objective rationalism of the modern museum, Wilson’s museum validates the contradiction, ambiguity, and idiosyncracy found in early natural history museums, with their relics, curios, and specimens. Wilson’s method is to lead the museum visitor from the familiar to the unfamiliar by presenting quasi- scicntific exhibitions that redefine the concept of what knowledge is. It achieves this by carica­ turing traditional scholarship and re-invoking the slighly sham oddness and exhibitionism of early museological ventures: the displays of relics and curiosities in medieval parish churches (such as the Abbey of Corbie), univer­ sities (such as Leyden), and early public collec­ tions (such as Elias Ashmole’s and, of course, Mr. Peale’s museums). But Wilson also sub­ verts postmodern notions of a metamuseum. Is his curiosity collection the first serious museum of museology? An anachronistic ren­ dering of eighteenth-century science muse­ ums? A parody of “museumism”? Wilson has shrewdly contrived to so thoroughly conflate the boundaries of his institution as a museum of science and as a postmodern art installation that the Museum of Jurassic Technology defies critical language.22

It is now common for artists to “raid the icebox”—as Andy Warhol did at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 1970— curating exhibitions drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and using personal crite­ ria to determine what will be seen and how. Drawing from the museum’s storage vaults, Warhol found in the inaccessible and over­ stuffed closets of objects a treasure trove of endlessly fascinating bric-a-brac—the more ordinary the bettor. His exhibition included jars, shoes (slippers, pattens, mules, oxfords, pumps for the opera, pumps with straps, colo­ nial pumps, wedding pumps, riding boots and ice skates, sandals and socks, storm rubbers, bathing shoes, tennis shoes, clogs), parasols, Windsor chairs, and other nearly forgotten bits and pieces that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades. Warhol chose merely what he liked, his actions mimicking the subjective criteria of the curatorial staff. He was very specific about his requirements, requesting that catalogs for each item include as much data as possible. In the end, Warhol’s own choices became part of the registrar's files on each object and thus “part of their ever expanding meaning.” 23

The objective of At Home, with the Collection by Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio (1992) was also to show that the selective crite­ ria used by museum curators are in fact based on personal taste and judgment. The series of three projects used the permanent collection of the Lakeview Museum of Art in Peoria, Illinois. The artists asked members of the mu­ seum staff to select their favorite object from the collection and choose a site for it in their own home. In February 1992 the objects were removed from the museum to the chosen home sites and were photographed for a follow-up exhibition. In addition, the artists devised “The Lakeview Questionnaire,” requesting staff to respond to personal questions about their work, tastes, habits, and emotions. Charts and graphs

of their responses were hung in the galleries.24 Joseph Kosuth’s pointed political installa­

tion, The Play of the Unmentionable (1992), resembled a traditional exhibition, juxtaposing wall texts and objects from the Brooklyn Muse­ um’s permanent collection to review the history’ of art censorship in the wake of the American “culture wars” over National Endowment for the Arts funding. To create this “exliibition,” Kosuth culled artifacts from many departments of the museum, crossing cultures and time peri­ ods, acting as both artist and curator. The result clearly illustrated that by deploying rather than denying its position as a site of ideological con­ test, the museum provides an arena for engag­ ing contemporary issues.

For Sonsbeek ’93, Mark Dion worked with the collection of the Bronbeek Royal Veterans Home, a quirky repository of objects that related to Dutch colonialism. His two-part installation juxtaposed a historical re-creation of a curiosity cabinet restored to its original arrangement (using an antique lithograph of an identical cab­ inet as a blueprint), with another cabinet substi­ tuting objects owned and chosen by veterans still living in the home. Dion’s activity transformed a fruitless effort to objectify an essentially un- classifiable group of static objects into a “living” museum in which the remaining veterans and their personal associations played a crucial role.

In 1993, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, presented Rendez(-)vous, a scries of “curated” mini-exhibitions using a collection of favorite personal objects donated by the local cit­ izenry. In an open invitation, residents of Ghent brought their valued mementos to the museum and told the stories behind the objects. The museum, in turn, offered the objects to artists Ilya Kabakov, Henk Visch, Jimmie Durham, and Huang Yong Ping, who were asked to discover new relationships between the objects through exhibitions of their making. Like other installa­ tions using permanent collections, Rendez(-)

vous considers the function of the museum in structuring our relation to art and to culture.

In a slight twist on artists working with col­ lections to create their own art, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK) in­ vited ten contemporary' artists to reinstall the museum’s permanent collection (1986-1993). The MAK project brought these artists and its curators together in order to bring new per­ spectives to the objects in the collection. Accord­ ing to the museum’s director, Peter Noever, the artists pursued personal display and interpreta­ tion strategies, while remaining mindful of their primary’ task—to add a contemporary dimen­ sion to the viewing experience without “self pre­ sentation.”25 The artists in this project achieved a parity with the curatorial staff.

What are the implications of such activi­ ties? From dissecting the museum apparatus to mastering it on its own terms, artists have not only returned to the museum as a site of activity but have also reshaped the institution in permanent ways that will affect the way's audiences see collections in the future.

Yet these types of projects and installa­ tions—The Museum Looks at Itself or The Artist Looks at the Museum—have formed a veritable movement within museums that stu­ dents may well find termed “museuinism” in the next edition of II. W. Janson’s History of Art. This genre, “built on the museum’s ruins,” has increasingly become politically neutralized, now coexisting comfortably within the archetypal white cube it intended to critique.26 In short, as a result of being called art , acquired for the col­ lection, and exhibited like a Matisse or a Chip­ pendale chair, artwork that laid political and ethical landmines to explode the ideological apparatus of museums is often defused.

Although critical in nature, these museum- based works have had to avoid direct discussion of the relation of a commissioning museum to issues of race, a subject that most museums

would prefer to sidestep.27 This should hardly be surprising, for, as Maurice Berger has pointed out, “most art museums offer little more than lip service to the issue of racial inclusion. Art that demonstrates its ‘difference’ from the main­ stream or that challenges dominant values is rarely acceptable to white curators, administra­ tors, and patrons.”28

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum at­ tempts to address this challenge by examining the ideological apparatus of the museum in general and by exploring how one museum in particular has ignored the histories of people of color. Wilson’s method, as an artist-in-resi­ dence, was to study closely the Maryland His­ torical Society's collection of art and artifacts, read extensively in the society’s archives, and then install objects of his choosing so as to raise questions about the ways museums represent (or fail to represent) African-Americans and Native Americans. The entire third floor of the society was given over to the installation, which featured well over one hundred objects.

Mining the Museum examined how the Maryland Historical Society defines itself and how this self-definition determines whose his­ tory has been included (or excluded) in its nar­ rative of Maryland history. It also addressed how those excluded have come to view the museum. The project dealt with the power of objects to speak when the “law’s” governing museum practices are expanded and the artifi­ cial boundaries museums build arc removed. It considered how deconstructing the museum apparatus can transform it into a space for ongoing cultural debate.

Wilson’s exhibit represented a departure from the “museumism” genre. For it is one thing to talk about race and museums in an alternative space or a hip commercial gallery, but it is quite another to address it in an established museum by using its own collection and its own history.

Wilson’s insights into the ways museums

shape our understanding of cultural artifacts first surfaced in his Rooms with a View: The Struggle Between Culture, Content, and Context in Art, an exhibition he curated for the Bronx Council of the Arts in 1987-88. Each of three distinct spaces in the installation simulated dis­ play environments referring to different types of museums: ethnographic, Victorian “salon,” and the minimalist space of a contemporary gallery. In each room Wilson placed different works by thirty artists, surrounded by the accoutrements appropriate to the specialized space. The “ethno­ graphic museum” grouped objects according to type, with vague labels identifying the artistic medium but not the maker. The “Victorian mu­ seum” gave the objects a rarefied disposition, suggesting precious, antique objets d’art set on ornate pedestals. The “white cube gallery” gave the works the necessary “cutting-edge” mys­ tique to certify them as contemporary art. The new contexts so thoroughly transformed the audience perceptions of the artwork that Wilson decided to take on the museum itself in his own work. Describing his reasons for choosing the museum as his aesthetic preoccupation, Wilson said, “It is there that those of us who work toward alternative visions receive our so-called ‘inspiration. ’ It is where we get hot under the col­ lar and decide to do something about it.” 29

His next series of installations employed a mock exhibition format, using reproductions and artifacts that he coyly manipulated to par­ ody curatorial practices. Wilson acquired his “museum collections” from street vendors and occasionally castoffs from the deaccessioning process through which museums cleared their basements of Victorian exhibition gear, politi­ cally incorrect dioramas, and taxidermic objects. Wilson’s working method made “use [of] the whole environment of the museum as my palette, as my vocabulary. I sort of look at everything and try to distill it and re-use it [to] squeeze it of its meaning and try to reinvent [it].”30

Visitors to The Other Museum, (1990-91) at White Columns and the Washington Project for the Arts viewed African trade masks blindfolded with the flags of French and British colo­ nizers. Others were labeled “stolen from the Zonge tribe,” highlighting how museum euphemisms whitewash the acquisition of such objects. These “spoils" were displayed in dramatic colored spaces with theatrical lighting, sometimes animated with the addi­ tion of video special effects.31 This method, according to Wilson, illustrated how the aesthetization by museums “anesthetizes their historic importance...certainly covers up the colonial history...which keeps imper­ ial attitudes going within the museum.”32 The project also displayed “The Last Ancestor from the Last Excavation of the Last Sacred Burial Site,” “The Vertebrae of the Last Large Mammal," and “The Last Murdered Black Youth,” created just after the murder of Yusuf K. Hawkins in Ben- sonhurst, Brooklyn. Wilson used the face of one of the Scottsboro boys in “Murdered Black Youth” because he “was interested in the con­ nection between abuse of African- American men over a period of years, over a history of the United States and of course now with Rodney King it’s all the more poignant.”33

Wilson’s Primitivism: High and Law (1991), at Metro Pictures Gallery, parodied two controversial exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Primi­ tivism in 20th Century Art and High and Low, in addressing how museums think of “the cul­ tural other,” that is, nonwhite, non-Western peoples and their histories. A group of skele-

Fred Wilson, “Spoil #2,” detailfrom

The Other Museum, 1990-91.

Courtesy of the artist.

Fred Wilson, The Other Museum, 1990-91, detail: view ofblindfolded

I rude masks. Courtesy of the artist.

Fred Wilson, “Zonge Mask,” label

from The Other Museum, 1990-91. Courtesy of the artist,

tons, “friendly natives," were labeled “Someone’s Mother,” “Someone’s Sis­ ter," and so on to recall the controversy over returning human remains to na­ tive populations and the loss of hu­ manity that, necessarily occurs when museums exhibit them as mere ob­ jects. In “Picasso/Who Rules?” the figures in a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon wore tribal masks. Viewers peering into their eyes were met by eyes of two Senegalese people and Wilson on a videotape ask­

ing such questions as, “If my contemporary art is your traditional art, is my art your cliche?” and, “If your contemporary art is my tradi­ tional art, is your art my cliche?” “If the world

is so small,” Wilson asked, “how can we come up with a new way of looking at art using all the philosophies and...his­ tories about art to create some­ thing really new and vibrant?”34

Another of Wilson’s pieces, Guarded View, posed black mannequins in museum security uniforms on a display

plat form, a reminder of the invisible role played by people of color in museums. Remarked Wil­ son, “The majority of museum guards...tend to

be African-American.... Many of the museums on the East Coast pride themselves, and get...funds...for hav­ ing such large minority employment. But actually all the employment is in the guards, and the fact that they’re in that level of the museum and not on the upper (management and governance] levels, affects the kind of artwork that’s

displayed and the kind of visitor that comes through the door.”33 Ayear later, Wilson created a performance on the same theme at the Whit­ ney Museum of American Art. Invited by the

Fred Wilson, “The Last Murdered

Black Youth," detailfrom The Other

Museum, 1991. Courtesy of the Artist.

museum to give a tour to the staff and docents, he greeted them and arranged to meet them elsewhere in the museum. Changing into a guard’s uniform, Wilson took up a post in the room where the group was wait­ ing for the artist they had met just a few minutes ear­ lier. He was suddenly invisi­ ble to them; the docents

paced in the galleries anxiously looking for him, walking by him time and again. Wilson exposed his ploy by identifying himself to them later. This performance proved that the point of Guarded View was irrefutably accurate.