neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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Museum

This is a written-up version of a more discursive seminar at Chelsea College of Arts on the 28th January 2019, as to why Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, and Jean Rhy’s Wide Saragasso Sea are forever linked, for me, to processes of decolonisation...

I wrote it up, as part of my participation in Decolonising the Curriculum

Audio Journeys

I was one of three artists commissioned to make a new artwork to coincide with the launch of The Box. After six months of research, with several site visits and meetings with designers, curators, Learning and Engagement staff, local politicians and Box management, as agreed in the contract, I made a proposal. Here it is:

Box: Plymouth proposal draft

Audio Journeys (working title)

I would like to make a series of audio journeys, that accompany visitors through their visit to the Box. The journeys will be audio files. The files could be downloadable from various locations – for example; a dedicated platform, the existing Soundcloud account, the Boxs' web presence, etc, so visitors can listen to them on their own devices. Like a podcast, they can even take them away with them.

Micro Narratives

Cascading micro-narrative architecture, as Composite performs a human performing a live-thread recall on the ocassion of the V&A Cluster's Bicentenary 2055.

The Box

I'm one of three artists commissioned to make a new artwork to coincide with the launch of The Box.

The Box in Plymouth is an art institution for the 21st century. It will host extraordinary gallery displays, work with high profile artists and produce memorable exhibitions, as well as exciting events and performances that take visitors on a journey from pre-history to the present and beyond. The Box is intended to be a symbol for the city's current regeneration, and a springboard for its future.

The Box brings onto one new site five previously dispersed archives and collections, and will include: an archive for Plymouth and the southwest to preserve the heritage of the city and region for future generations; a museum with stories of Plymouth and how it reached out to the world and invited the world back into Britain; a location for contemporary art exhibitions, artist commissions and major touring shows; a new study centre for the Cottonian Collection and a purpose built location for the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA).

Fascinating tour of the renovation @PlymouthMuseum and the evolution of a new #archive and #collection cluster @theboxplymouth pic.twitter.com/J5kZNxHd8Q

— Neil Cummings (@neilarise) April 23, 2018

Browse

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...

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….

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