Ongoing research projects

Artists as Curators

Art by Telephone

Curiosity Cabinets

Curiosity Cabinets or Kunstkammer were collections that were assembled by European aristocracy and royalty as early as the 14th century. They combined natural specimens with rare fabricated objects. The collections often included gems, minerals and taxidermy along with sculptural objects and  oddities. These became a pre-modern taxonomy system that allowed an upper class to create their sense of the world. This was a time when scientific discovery relied on word of mouth. Scientific illustrations were often based on eyewitness reports taht varied in accuracy and sometimes resulted in  strange hybrid creatures appearing in collections– like the corpse of a monkey attached to a fish’s tail to resemble a “mermaid”. These collections presented the strange, obscure, and exaggerated, and are often referenced in both histories of art and the natural sciences.

“The Renaissance idea of creating a collection of (formerly) animate, inanimate, and botanical objects, and even odd specimens, came from a human desire to place mankind somewhere within the larger scheme of things.”

Institutional Critique

Andrea Fraser poses as a docent in her performance that led museum visitors on a tour parodying the power of the museum and exposing its subliminal classism.

"For the most part…I have understood ‘site’ not as physical, geographical, or architectural spaces and places, but as relational, discursive, and also temporal. Site specificity can also be understood as a kind of boundary of critical intervention: the limit of its possible efficacy. Site specificity in this sense implies that a critical intervention is only going to function as such, at best, within the very specific conditions of the historical moment, physical place, and social relationships for which it was conceived.” - Andrea Fraser

In his work Kunsthalle Bern, 1992, Michael Asher moved all of the pre-existing radiators of the exhibition space and displayed them at the entrance way. Each radiator kept their original plumbing and continued to function as a source of heat, although newly imbued with sculptural presence by Asher’s deft architectural intervention. 

“This “displacement of givens” offers a perfect example of site-specific practice, one that took the gallery space and the institution itself as its subject.”

In 2002, David Hammons turned The Ace Gallery into a completely empty space without any lights. Visitors are to pick up a mini flashlight emitting blue light at the reception desk before entering the gallery to guide them through the dark unknown. Concerto in Black and Blue was inspired by a trip to Japan where he visited Zen gardens and came to the conclusion that there were so many different types of “nothingness”.

“Concerto in Black and Blue was his title: exhibition as composition, to be performed, experienced, with nothing left at the end but a memory…An empty gallery still has rooms and bodies in space, and an empty gallery in the dark turns darkness into a kind of permeable solid. When the gallery is no longer the realm of the visual, what happens when there is seemingly nothing to be seen?”