5) (Re)searching for art: archive of sites and practice

Art and history go together, hand in hand, with art used as a way of archiving and documenting events, views and values of societies and individual people of a particular time...

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Reading Marsha Meskimmon's book 'Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics', we can see that history (and therefore, art) holds bias and lies, which is expressed by Linda Nochlin's "account of her early feminist research, teaching and curatorial work"(Meskimmon M, 2003, pp. 1):

“…it was no mere passive conduction... but rather an active engagement and participation, a sense that I, along with many other politicised, and yes, liberated women, was actually intervening in the historical process and changing history itself: the history of art, of culture, of institutions and of consciousness.” (Nochlin L, 1999 pp. 33)

which describes "the significan[ce] of long-forgotten women and their art" that has "beg[un] to unfold in scholarly articles, highly-charged classroom experiences and exhibitions." (Meskimmon M, 2003, pp. 1) Meskimmon further discusses that the uncovering of the "substantial body of evidence" of women's impact in the cultural world, that isn't displayed in the major galleries in the world, reminded me of the artist Fred Wilson.

Fred Wilson's work 'Mining the Museum' 1992, where he rearranged the pieces in the Maryland Historical Society, promoted the idea that “What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what they don’t put on view says even more.” (Fusco C, 1994) Wilson's 'correction' of the museum's identity entailed "bringing things out of storage and shifting things already on view," which "created a new public persona for the historical society.” (Wilson F, 1992) This project brought to light the slavery and inequality that society was built on; exposing the gaps in the archives and exposing the 'truth.'

'Mining the Museum' Fred Wilson

One of his instillations that particularly stood out to me was the room where there were six busts: three of them already at the museum featuring Napoleon, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson, none of whom played a part in Maryland history. Meanwhile, the other three were empty busts, with labels reading Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass,  who were African-American's who actually were important to Maryland history, but  who were "overlooked by the ostensibly 'local' institution." (Ginsberg, E)

        

                                                                                                       

“Culture belongs to each and everyone one of us, right? And we’re allowed to celebrate it anyway we’d like.” (Tucker, M, pp. ix) but, as demonstrated in Fred Wilson's work, "the culture represented by European fine art has not always belonged to everyone... [with] history which violently excluded people of the African diaspora." (Meskimmon M, 2003, pp. 35) It has always been the case that artists documented history, but it is only now that society is willing to display the untold stories. 

References:

Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” TDR: Journal of Performance Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148

Ginsberg, E, Case study: Mining the Museum (online), retrieved 15th May 2014 from http://beautifultrouble.org/case/mining-the-museum/ 

Meskimmon, M (2003), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Routledge, New York

Nochlin, L, ‘Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian’, in Representing Women (NY and London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), pp. 7-33 (quote, pp. 33)

Tucker, M, ‘Foreword’, in Cameron et al., op. cit., pp. ix, cited in Meskimmon, M (2003), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Routledge, New York