overview
Counter-Conduct in the Museum , or the
Practice of Academic Iconoclasm
Clémentine Deliss Global Humanities Professor in History of Art at the University of Cambridge , Guest Professor at Städelschule , Frankfurt , and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin
What I shall present below represents the current state of my work on counter-conduct as a performative instance , and academic iconoclasm as a methodological stance , and their significance for decolonial exercises performed as part of the redeployment and interpretation of museum collections . This is connected to models for a Metabolic Museum-University ( MM-U ) that I have worked on since I left the Weltkulturen Museum in 2015 . I have been seeking to develop a new cross-sectoral method of interpretation by bringing the university into the space of the museum , and thereby translocating roles and practices . The background to this work can be found in condensed form in “ The Metabolic Museum ” ( Hatje Cantz 2020 , Garage Museum 2021 ).
The first exercise toward a museum-university took place in 2015 in Kiev at the Museum of the History of Ukraine . It involved a group of self-elected citizens who chose to accompany me to the flea-market . There they searched for artefacts of ‘ contention ’. Back at the Museum , we installed a table and several chairs in the entrance . Visitors were invited to take part in the elucidation of the diverse objects that had been purchased , and unpack their ambivalent and problematic meanings . A further model was developed with students at the University of Art and Design , in Karlsruhe . It was presented at the 33rd Biennial of Graphic Art , in Ljubljana , in 2019 . Chairs were customised with small projectors so that visitors could “ spam the hang ”, projecting their own archival images between the paintings . During the sessions of the MM-U , a young faculty presented a wide range of lectures , which were attended by unsuspecting visitors . The result was rewarding for the museum , the participants , and the public . The latest model of the Metabolic Museum-University is being developed at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin , and is based on a reassessment of Berlin ’ s collections .
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Observing Memories Issue 6