4 . Metabolic Museum-University , Ljubjlana 2019 . Photo by Urška Boljkovac , Archive , MGLC
self-representation . Art has become an extended debating chamber voicing controversies beyond walls and across disparate worlds , yet with very palpable consequences .
Museums are urged to negotiate acute disparities in employment equity , and to respond to demands for the returns of significant cultural heritage , extricated , albeit with some controversy , from an original environment and system of ownership . The falling of monuments , the defamation of board members and patrons , disputes over divisive appointments , petitioning , the wrangling around the new ICOM definition of the museum , the competition in Europe for being the fastest driver on the track of restitution politics ; all of these situate critique within the broader public realm . Increasingly under scrutiny , the tax-funded museum monitors itself in relation to tightening protocols of behavioural management , economic imperatives , curatorial normativity , for which communication with consumers is regarded as paramount . At a moment when artists are pushed to provide transparency and follow a common standard ,
transgressive , even heretic , exercises in radical dialogical thinking are necessary , but they cannot be easily shared with the public in the first instance .
Not responding to the command of public visibility and institutional auditing constitutes another form of counter-conduct , potentially suicidal when it comes to grant applications and funding , both individual and institutional . The refusal to respond to public transmission as required can constitute a stance , a Haltung , that is conceptual , aesthetic and form-giving , not to mention political . The museum in a post-pandemic context dispenses social medicine but it requires protection backstage , not front of house , in order for this complex institution to survive . This is counter-conduct as necessary askesis , as willful “ communicational abstinence ”, claiming the right to non-disclosure , to holding back contextual information . As Luke Willis Thompson , artist and faculty member of the MM-U asks , « Does digital hypervisibility serve the decolonial work we undertake ? How can the institution become a channel for artistic interference and classificatory transgression ?»
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Observing Memories Issue 6