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Twenty years ago, in 1997, I researched and curated a complex multi-site exhibition.....

Collected

26th April - 21 June 1997
 Exploring the depth and diversity of the collection...from Egyptian antiquities via 18th century paintings to Marilyn Monroe memorabilia.. at the Photographers Gallery, The British Museum, Habitat, The Royal College of Surgeons, Richard Lowe’s flat, Selfridges, Paul Smith, The Wallace Collection and Sir John Soane’s Museum.

On an individual and national scale we are associated with a bewildering array of clothes, tools, art, bibelot, gifts, cuisine, souvenirs, technology and rubbish. Objects are spilling from every shelf, cupboard, display case, vitrine, supermarket, gallery, shop, museum and land-fill site. Societies are collective, we are defined by evolving methods to classify, structure and direct this material avalanche.

[..] The activity of collecting, perfectly plays out the tension between the drive for order and the tendency towards excess and chaos implicit in our relationships. The collection cuts across all categories of objects, from the almost worthless to the literally priceless. Collected things hold the promise of a coherent space within the profligate material world.

Temporarily removed

I'm part of an insurgent research group working on the Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva, and London (TAAG and TAAL).

Value of Things

 

The Value of Things explores the evolution of the department store and the public museum as perfect technologies for the sourcing, transportation, accounting, stocking, and exhibition of material things and the people and values that swirl around them. Unfortunately its out of print.

You could browse a hacked photocopy of the preface and introduction, download it from the foot of the page, or read on...

Value of Things This is an extract from the introduction

The Value of Things

 

The speed and stunning profusion of modern material life has deformed the nature of culture. Values are no longer implemented from above -the influence and taste of a few- but ripple and fluctuate through a networked web of images, objects, spaces and media. On an individual and public, national and international scale we are described by an astonishing array of things; a growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, knowledge, electronic technology and rubbish piles-up around us.

This vast accumulation of things, from an ancient egyptian sandals to ‘new’ software exist in a complex mesh of competing narratives which dispute ownership, contest interpretation, disagree on value, and correct and incorrect usage. There is an endless struggle to control, classify and interpret objects, as they are inserted into and spill out of every shelf, cupboard, display-case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and land-fill site.

In hindsight, our previous century unfolded as the endgame of the 19th century.

Pitt Rivers

On Saturday I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the first time in a long-time….

sympathetic magic

 

In the 1990's I used to lead a five week seminar at Chelsea College of Art and Design entitled Adrift in Taste. It was a chance to leave the college to visit other exhibitionary institutions, and also reflect on our -students and staff - habits and practices. Here's the introduction;

This seminar will presume to dismantle some of our prejudices about art, and evolve tools to build some new ones. It will in part, attempt to put `theory' into `practice'.......

On an individual and cultural scale we are described by a bewildering range of clothes, tools, art, trinkets, gifts, cuisine, souvenirs, electronic technology and rubbish. Objects and images are spilling from every shelf, cupboard, display case, television, vitrine, monitor, supermarket, studio, gallery, shop, museum and land-fill site. Adrift in Taste will begin to unpick our learned habits; the values our parents, teachers and friends taught us about art. We will also uncover some of the the wider institutional structures that have evolved to produce, accumulate and classify the stuff -therefore the meanings- within our cultures.

V&A Bicentenary

CompDoc 191058:

Partial record of Victoria and Albert Museum's Bicentenary celebrations, 19. 09. 2057

Composite performs a human performing a live-thread recall.

Arists in Museums

Artists Work in Museums

utopography 0.1

I participated in the inaugural workshop

Utopography: Imaging, representing and critiquing imagined worlds organised by the Arts and Science Fiction research group, the Department of Things to Come at the Baltic 39, 31-39 High Bridge, Newcastle, NE1 1EW,

 19th September - 20th September 2013

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had, and will never have.

Italo Calvino

Estuary

As part of Estuary at the Museum of Docklands, London I will lead a cycling tour

Thames duskSat 8 Jun 2013, 2pm-6pm
Leaving from, and returning to the Museum of London Docklands

ITINERARY:

We will explore East London and see how tides of former industry, contemporary art and finance flow together in the economy of the Thames and its tributaries.

We'll meander through the Limehouse basin, follow the Limehouse Cut pasy former industrial sites, to the river Lea, up to Three Mills, then north past the Olympic site, through the Hackney Wick of artists studios, start-ups, social enterprises and trendy micro-breweries, down the Bow Cut to Chisenhale and back to the museum via Matt's Gallery on the Regents Canal.

text, sign, utility

I've been visiting the Shabako Stone, at the British Museum, for as long as I have been living in London, its a source of wonder.

In the twenty-fifth Dynasty, sometime around c700 BC, an Egyptian mythological text was incised for eternity in a basalt stela.  The text contains an account of the creation of the world by Ptah, God of Memphis and patron deity of craftsmen.....

.....For the very great one is Ptah, who gave [life] to all the gods and their kas through this heart and through this tongue, in which Horus had taken shape as Ptah, in which Thoth had taken shape as Ptah. Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that Ptah is in every body and every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives,.....

 

Lost and centuries later refoud, the stela was repurposed as the base of a mill. A square hole was cut, the 'eye', to locate the mill shaft, and shallow radiating furrows to produce the flour from the milled grain as the top stone turned. Decades of grinding grain slowly obliterated most of the text.

V&A bicentenary

V&A BicentenaryI made a presentation as part of: Artists Work in Museums: Histories, Interventions and Subjectivities

Friday 12th and Saturday 13th October 2012
at the V&A Museum, London

This two-day conference brings together artists, curators, historians and museum professionals to explore the history and impact of artists working in/with or against museums. The conference will explore the diverse, often hidden ways museums function as environments of cultural and identity production.

images

Artists Work in Museums: Histories, Interventions, SubjectivitiesProfessorial Platform eFlyerArt, technology, finance, education and climateTemplatebreakfast in a forestno name