Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13

Dramatizing the Museum:

Museum-ing as the Enaction of Historical Representation

by Anders Thrue Djurslev

December 1, 2023

Introduction: Skull Maze

Allow me to begin with an image: a maze seen from bird’s-eye view, its walls drawing the familiar features of a human skull. Resembling a warning sign, almost like a cartoon pirate flag, the image poses death as its omen. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,”^[1] it could well appear to be grinning, as if painted above an entrance to the underworld.

Figure 1. The skull maze poster of Museum for fremtiden, Kunsthal Aarhus & Sort/Hvid, 2022. Illustration by Wrong Studio.

As a poster motif, the skull maze functioned as an entry, not to the underworld, but to the cross-aesthetic art exhibition and theater performance Museum for fremtiden (Museum of the Future, 2022). Nevertheless, the exhibition made out something of a death trap: a dramatic audio guide led groups of spectators through a sequence of art installations and set designs, directing the audience to stage a series of simulated collective death scenes together. After being asked if they would aid the anxiety-ridden voice of the audio guide in “establishing a museum imagining the future instead of exhibiting the past,” the spectators were invited to pretend being executed, join hands to enter an ego-death ritual, sing along in a one-note elegy, and consume a liquid presented as fungal acid that would supposedly alter their minds and transform them into something “more-than-human.” Finally, the audio guide revealed her true (although fictitious) purpose when asking the spectators to each climb onto their museum pedestal to display their present, living bodies as the historical remains of a culture past: “My museum is your mausoleum,” the voice solemnly whispered to her guests. Exit ghost.

Museum for fremtiden was the result of a collaboration between two Danish contemporary art institutions, the theater Sort/Hvid (Black/White) in Copenhagen and the contemporary arts center Kunsthal Aarhus, made in collaboration between contemporary visual artists and theater-makers. Gathering a selection of heterogenous artistic practices across the visual and performing arts to invent a hybrid format between art exhibition and theatrical performance under its paradoxical title, Museum for fremtiden explored the conditions of imagining the future in a time of permacrisis. Moreover, the collaboration was part of my practice-based dramaturgical and curatorial PhD project on the politics of time in contemporary art and theater. Accordingly, this article is written from the dual position of the production’s dramaturg and curator, on the one hand, and a practice-based researcher on the other. In both my research and this article, I frame the project’s crossing of art forms, art institutions, and artistic practices as a vehicle for an inquiry into the quasi-historical category of the contemporary as such, urgently demanding us to revise the uniform historicity traditionally associated with the museum. My objective here is to offer a conceptualization, based on the making of Museum for fremtiden, of museum-ing probing such revisions, becoming both an example of and attempt at its enactment.

Expanding History

With playwright and stage director Christian Lollike, I commissioned and dramatized art installations by the visual artists Ferdinand Ahm Krag, Helene Nymann, and Studio ThinkingHand for Museum for fremtiden. Each installation explored speculative expansions of historical time, including deep geological and planetary time (Krag), embodied memory and epigenetics (Nymann), and the queer temporalities of more-than-human agency (Studio ThinkingHand). The installations made use of different media, ranging from drawing over video to sculpture. The dramatization, then, directed the groups of spectators to engage with the artworks and become part of the installations in a staged experience, first presented at the black box theater of Sort/Hvid, and then the white cube galleries of Kunsthal Aarhus.

In the dramatization’s titular invocation of the museum along with its continuous obsession with death, meanwhile, Museum for fremtiden at the same time entertained a certain morbid tradition throughout its ambivalent and composite narrative—from the avant-garde futurism of Marinetti to the cultural critique of Adorno and the void thoughts of Smithson—of critically equating museums with cultural burial chambers.^[2] This tradition regards the act of exhibiting in museums as equal to symbolic execution; museal representation as a performative termination of social forms. Once displayed in a museum, an object is turned into a dead thing of the past, a historical artifact, a dot in the narrative of history.

It goes without saying that, today, such an understanding of the role of the museum must itself be considered historical. Like those involved in the making of Museum for fremtiden, many contemporary artistic practices as well as new curatorial models of art-based research interrogate temporalities beyond modernism’s linear historicity when dealing with both collections and new commissions. Instead of representing a past dead and gone in order to allow for the emergence of a qualitatively different future, contemporary art has “come alive,” intervening in the present to, for instance, practice care, produce knowledge, revise historical misrepresentation, or rectify the horrors of the past in and through the (con)temporary medium of the exhibition.

Today, works of contemporary art cannot be separated from the present of their exhibition, from their enactment. Consequently, the museum’s role of forging and mediating a historical narrative of periodical births and epochal deaths—what Walter Benjamin would already characterize as “the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello”^[3]—has become obsolete. The contemporary—the conceptual category that simultaneously replaces (post-)modernity and challenges the idea of historical periodization on which the museum was erected—and, hence, contemporary art, emerge as rejections of historicism by expanding the present in and through the experience of temporal complexity, or contemporaneity.^[4] Consequently, the expressions of contemporary art have become, to use an expression by the philosopher Peter Osborne, “badly known”—performative, ephemeral, dematerialized, immersive, distributed, processual, eventual, sensuous, activist, presentist—and thus often mistakenly considered “exempt from historical judgment in the present.”^[5] Inside the museum, the contemporaneity of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices thus finds itself at odds with the institution’s historico-philosophical origin as the institution of historical representation par excellence and the act of exhibiting as a means of establishing a distance between the presence (or liveness) of the spectator and the pastness (or deadness) of the object. How, then, does one engage in “museum-ing” in the expanded present? What would it mean for the museum to historicize a present expanded, to musealize this time of contemporaneity evoked by contemporary art? To imagine, if only temporarily, our expanded present as past?

These, I believe, are some of the impossibly contradictory questions for contemporary art museums to ask, as well as for the practices that might undertake an exploration of what “museum-ing” might mean today. In this article, I propose a transformation of the concept of “the Museum” to “museum-ing,” inspired by the method of dramatization. Informed by the making of Museum for fremtiden and recent aesthetic and curatorial theory, I aim to conceptualize museum-ing as the enaction of historical representation. Dramatization here is not a means to “enliven” contemporary art, itself always/already performative in the present of its exhibition. Rather, dramatization as museum-ing enables a contradictory both/and mediation between the present and past, presence and distance, alive and dead. This article follows these three pairs of oppositions in its three sections, each formulating a thesis from which a practice of museum-ing might be imagined. In the making of Museum for fremtiden, museum-ing came to mean provoking a push and pull between these oppositions, embodied by contemporary visual art and theater practices, respectively. Ultimately, staging the display of spectators as museum objects suggested that an expanded present and its multiple forms of temporalization can be made historically sensible if we employ the services of representation, which, as everyone knows, is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight, theatrically. Before elaborating on this proposition, I should emphasize that the article is written not by an art historian nor a museologist, but a theater dramaturg imposing as a curator. Thus, a perhaps more adequate formulation of the article’s contribution is to offer a conceptualization of museum-ing based on a dramaturgical practice, inspired by insights from curatorial research and aesthetic theory.

Dramatizing Aestheticization

The museum is inextricably linked to the birth of Western modernity. Perhaps more than any institution, the museum manifests the modern experience of time, or the modern regime of historicity.^[6] As Foucault recalls, museums, along with libraries, are “heterochronias proper of western culture of the nineteenth century.”^[7] The museum “museums” on the historico-philosophical presumption that time itself can be stored and accumulated. Museum conservation is a process of salvaging objects from the passage of time, effectively removing them from the unfolding of the present. The French Revolution marks the origin of the modern museum as a public institution, distinguishing it from previous royal and private collections of art and historical objects. Commonly, this shift in the museum’s meaning is associated with Western nation-building, democracy, enlightenment, rationalism, secularism, and the formation of the bourgeois subject through the double articulation of discipline and enlightenment.^[8] Furthermore, critique has shown how the museum has continued, transformed, and deepened the imperialist, colonialist, racist, sexist, and exploitative characteristics of Western modernity, which contemporary artistic practices and curatorial models in turn develop ways to oppose.^[9]

Zooming in on the aesthetic function of the museum, however, the philosopher and media theorist Boris Groys focuses his account somewhat differently. In his essay “On Art Activism,” Groys explicates the origin of the museum when confronted with the emergence of so-called activist artistic practices in contemporary art. Groys argues that, since the French Revolution, the museum has functioned as a symbolic cemetery of culture. Instead of destroying the ceremonial objects of the Old Regime by way of iconoclasm, the French revolutionaries displayed them inside the museum, removed from their social and ceremonial function—from their present. When confronted with an object inside a museum, visitors face an artifact that has been declared dead, wrung out of time, never to return to its function in everyday life. According to Groys, the display of objects of a now former cultural formation and political imaginary as art—along with the transformation of ceremonial buildings into museums—thus constitutes a process of violent aestheticization. In this line of thought, the museum exhibition originally involves a certain kind of revolutionary “pastification.” “So, since the French Revolution,” Groys writes with characteristically wide brushstrokes, “art has been understood as the defunctionalized and publicly exhibited corpse of past reality.”^[10] In temporal terms, the museum, through aestheticization, establishes a historical distance to the object displayed through its defunctionalized re-presentation in the present. In this part of the article, I follow Groys to destabilize the opposition between past and present through his idea of aestheticization.

While Groys’s account may appear anachronistic considering contemporary art, his essay explicitly deals with the current emergence of what he calls activist art. When contemplating the ongoing approximations of art and activism, Groys distinguishes between two forms of aestheticization: art aestheticization and design aestheticization. Design aestheticization puts objects to use in the present, whereas, in the context of art and the museum, “to aestheticize things of the present means to discover their dysfunctional, absurd, unworkable character—everything that makes them nonusable, inefficient, obsolete.”^[11] Following examples of the historical avant-garde, Groys argues that modern as well as contemporary art re-enacts the art aestheticization associated with the museum with objects of the present. “To aestheticize the present,” Groys concludes, “means to turn it into the dead past.”^[12] In other words, museum-ing holds a revolutionary promise. The emergence of activist art challenges this decisive statement by enacting the change it desires to make in the present. Many contemporary artistic practices are activist in the sense that their intended meaning is activated in the present in which they are presented. Such practices are not concerned with re-presenting the present as past or demonstrating the obsoleteness of its inventions, but about making the world a better place, redeeming past injustices, or putting technologies to use within the public gathered in the museum space. Considering this development, Groys provokingly reminds his readers that the political, even revolutionary, promise of art (in the West, we should add) lies in its fundamental negativity: not what it brings to life, but what it determines as dead. In this conception, re-presentation of current ideas, objects, and phenomena in a museum becomes a performance of aestheticizing these as past.

Dramatizing Museum for fremtiden, I found Groys’s philosophically informed and characteristically conceptual generalizations useful in thinking about the tension that arises when bringing together the museum specter and contemporary artistic practices; a tension that will become key in my conceptualization of museum-ing. Common to the quite different practices of the selected artists in Museum for fremtiden is that their works seek to intervene in the present of their exhibition. Ferdinand Ahm Krag imagined staging an ecstatic ritual in the space of his installation, Hall of Psychopomps (2022), momentarily causing time and space to drift for the participants, pointing to a planetary consciousness across evolutionary states.

Figure 2. Ferdinand Ahm Krag, Hall of Psychopomps, 2022. Installation view, Museum for fremtiden, Kunsthal Aarhus & Sort/Hvid (2022). Photo by Emilia Therese.

Helene Nymann wanted the audience to sing together in her video and sculpture installation, Ode to Creode (2022), enacting the results of her anthropological research in the Indigenous mnemonic techniques of Aboriginal Songlines merged with the theory of epigenetic and bodily memory. Following epigenetic theory, according to which affects and experiences condition and alter genetic composition, Nymann’s installation points to a dissolvement of the opposition between genetic lineage, cultural heritage, and social constructions.

Figure 3. Helene Nymann, Ode to Creode, 2022. Installation view, Museum for fremtiden, Kunsthal Aarhus & Sort/Hvid (2022). Photo by Emilia Therese.

Studio ThinkingHand’s installation of sculptures made with SCOBY, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, called Vita . Necro . Vita (2019–2022), sought to decenter the human and destabilize the opposition between life and death through the presence of a simultaneously organic and synthetic nonhuman life form, living, dying, and reviving throughout the exhibition’s opening period. Joined by an unexpected fly invasion, the sculptural installation enacted its own semi-autonomous ecosystem of bacteria transferred by the hands of the spectators and the bodies of flies; the sculpture an object of continuous becoming, an evolving organism, rather than a dead representation.

Figure 4. Studio ThinkingHand, Vita . Necro . Vita, 2019–2022. Installation view, Museum for fremtiden, Kunsthal Aarhus & Sort/Hvid (2022). Photo by Emilia Therese.

In and through their temporal complexity, these works and practices resist the notion of art aestheticization that Groys regards as a form of historical temporalization. None of them imply a negative aestheticization of the present, of defunctionalizing the objects they display, nor the ideas they enact. Instead, they expand the present with notions of deep geological or planetary time, embodied memory, and more-than-human agency. They enact ways to experience time differently, live together differently, identify differently, remember differently, relate differently to the deep geological past, the body, and the more-than-human world. In other words, they want to improve the world through their exhibition. Tellingly, Krag and Nymann repurposed ancient inventions and employed Indigenous practices in their works, not to represent these as past cultures never to return, but to invite spectators to actualize them in the present. The works are manifestations of artistic practices that extend beyond the artwork itself. They constitute ongoing and open-ended practices not unlike those of research. In fact, each practice engages in institutional research processes: Krag is a professor at the Royal Danish Art Academy; Nymann is an artistic PhD fellow at the interdisciplinary Interacting Minds Center at Aarhus University; and Studio ThinkingHand collaborates with science and research facilities to conduct scientifically informed explorations of more-than-human life. In Groys’s terminology, one could understand these practices as activist in the sense that they activate certain ideas in the present of their exhibition rather than functioning as representations. How, then, do they relate to the idea of the museum? How do we enact the idea of the museum, the idea of historical time, when the objects and artistic practices in question resist and even oppose this idea in both their material and ephemeral forms? Theater and dramatization might prove useful here. In this context of museum-ing, I agree with Groys’s solicitation that we allow the revolutionary potential embedded in the act of exhibiting to haunt the contemporary. This means embracing—and arguably sustaining—the inherent contradiction between art aestheticization and activism as a productive conflict in museum-ing. As Groys affirmatively writes:

The fact that contemporary art activism is caught in this contradiction is a good thing. First of all, only self-contradictory practices are true in a deeper sense of the word. And secondly, in our contemporary world, only art indicates the possibility of revolution as a radical change beyond the horizon of our present desires and expectations.^[13]

In the very beginning, playwright and director Christian Lollike and I imagined—rather naively, time would tell—that we as theater-makers would aid the artists in “activating” their works, bringing them to life in a performative experience. Instead, invoking the museum specter, our dramatization constantly pointed to the quality of the museum—and theater—as a representational death machine. Lollike and I wrote a script in which the ideas enacted and actualized through the practices of the visual artists were interpreted by an unreliably subjective narrator as the “desires and expectations” of a crisis-ridden present: the longing for being another, for perceiving planetary contemporaneity, for connecting differently to others and to the land, for relating differently to nonhuman environments. The audio guide, directing spectators through headphones, staged these longings in what could be interpreted as collective death scenes, acted out by the participants. By becoming part of staged tableaus in each installation, audiences were made to not only enact the ideas of the artistic practices involved but also become theatrical representations of the fictitious narrator’s imaginary scenarios—her “desires and expectations.” Underlining the performance of historical representation in and of the present, the final installation asked the spectators to step onto museum pedestals and listen to the ideas enacted and the longings explored throughout the exhibition as told in the past sense.

Before moving on to analyzing how this tension between enaction and representation might be understood in the context of the curatorial, we can preliminarily formulate a thesis on the concept of museum-ing, excavated from the dramatization of Museum for fremtiden in relation to the provocations of Groys: museum-ing embraces the contradiction between activating the present and aestheticizing it, simultaneously seizing the expansion of the present and experiencing its loss to historical time, to the museum we leave behind when we exit:

Museum-ing is a self-contradictory practice of simultaneously activating the present and aestheticizing this activation as historical past.

Distancing Immersion

In the current academic qualification of art-based research, the discourse of the curatorial takes center stage. The curatorial shares its preoccupation with the present of aesthetic experience with contemporary art. As opposed to curating, the curatorial “does not only consist in exhibition-making, re-presenting something that already exists or is already known.”^[14] Rather, the curatorial implies perceiving what is being curated—exhibition, performance, or otherwise—as an experiment of knowledge. The curatorial produces knowledge by putting relations in motion and setting up conditions for an experiment to unfold within a certain format and time frame.^[15] Often referencing the constructivist philosophy of Deleuze, the curatorial changes the objective of the curator from the illustration or representation of ideas to the enaction of ideas. For Deleuze, the method of dramatization signifies the enaction of philosophical ideas in the fictionalized accounts of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, transforming the philosophical text into a laboratory in which narrators and characters alike become test animals, so to speak; a method to write through philosophical problems in character. More generally, dramatization constructs conditions under which ideas can eventually be actualized. Deleuze writes:

I will try to define dramatization more rigorously: what I have in mind are dynamisms, dynamic spatio-temporal determinations, that are prequalitative and pre-extensive, taking “place” in intensive systems where differences are distributed at different depths, whose “patients” are larval subjects and whose “function” is to actualize Ideas…^[16]

As “spatio-temporal determinations,” dramatization stages a spatial framework where ideas play out under a given temporal duration. In this way, dramatization banishes representation in its immersion of its “patients.” Ideas are not illustrated or represented, but carried out or enacted by test subjects. In the context of museum-ing, however, the rejection of representational means in what Deleuze calls a “theater of immanence” renders visible a contradiction within the idea it seeks to enact: the museum. If we are to conceptualize museum-ing as a mode of dramatization, I would argue, we must complicate the strictly enactive conception of dramatization as a practice dependent on non-representational immanence. For this purpose, I have found curator and theorist Bridget Crone’s curatorial reformulation of Deleuzean dramatization useful while developing Museum for fremtiden and conceptualizing museum-ing. Defining the curatorial as a self-contradictory “sensible stage,” Crone argues that dramatization instigates a “double-action”; a “simultaneous push and pull between illumination and disintegration, immersion and separation.” The sensible stage presents itself as a unified paradox of sensible immersion and distanced representation, bringing me to the second dichotomy in question here, between presence and distance: […] twinning the words ‘sensible’ and ‘stage’ mobilizes both the entanglement of bodies in and with the world through their common capacity for sensation, and the structure that acts to delimit movements, relations and becomings that is evoked through the image of the stage. This movement of simultaneous expansion and contraction suggests a doubling that is at the heart of theatre in which there is a tension between the experience of commonality and estrangement, immersion and separation, affection and distance, action and passivity. Put very simply, this is the distinction between being immersed in sensing the world, and the representation of that experience set apart on stage.^[17]

Crone here mediates a typical opposition in aesthetic theory, well-known in theater and performance studies, the strife between Artaud and Brecht, between sensuous experience and distanced Verfremdung.^[18] On the sensible stage, we are at once immersed in the world with our own entangled bodies and separated from this immersion as a staged encounter. On the path to conceptualizing museum-ing, I would not hesitate to reformulate this statement in temporal terms: on the sensible stage, I would add, we are at once immersed in the (expanded) present and separated from it as a staged historical encounter. How so?

In the case of Museum for fremtiden, the confusion of presence in and distance to the present was constructed through the dynamic relation between enactive works of art, immersive scenography, directive script, sound and light design, and—as would reveal itself to be the case—meta-communication initiatives, such as the exhibition catalogue, public events, and handouts. The exhibition of Museum for fremtiden placed its spectators in a series of separate immersive environments, three set designs and three art installations. The first two spaces were set designs by Franciska Zahle and Helle Damgård, introducing the participatory situation, or “condition,” of the experience, the use of headphones, and the absent presence of the audio guide. In the first space, a hall of mirrors, the audience was welcomed by the narrator (voiced by actress Sicilia Gadborg Høegh) to “Museum of the Future.” The voice began recounting her personal resentment of museums from when she was a child, “this dead place with dead things from the past, haunting us with its stone axes and its statues of dead men.” She spoke in the chronicle form to imitate the historical authority of the traditional museum while the spectators could look at themselves and each other:

Oh yes. So did European Man. This is how he dressed; this is how he painted. This is how he constructed his self-image. This is how he remembered the past. This is how he seized the future. What future are we to seize?

This first scene destabilized the boundaries between guest and artwork, participation and display, sensible immersion and distanced representation. The spectators were given simple directions to follow while looking at themselves and each other in the mirrors: waving at one another, jumping up and down, closing eyes, and opening them again to imitate the Skrik (The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893) emoji during the narrator’s enumeration of the crises of the present that she felt were stealing her future: endemic depression, technological terror, climate catastrophe, loss of futurity. Each direction was marked by a dinging sound, providing an impersonal authority to a deeply subjective character. Before moving on, she asked the group if they wanted to establish a museum with her that would begin imagining the future instead of exhibiting the past. “You are welcome to nod,” she persuasively suggested after yet another ding. In the following art installations, the artistic practices behind the commissioned artworks were staged within this dramatic framework. The artists furnished spaces similar in size with their distinct practices, and the dramatized voice and participatory situation established a common dramatic condition under which the ideas of the artistic practices would play out.

Writing the script, Lollike and I met the participating artists together and separately to exchange the ideas of their practices and discuss the staging of the exhibition. This process continued almost until the opening; as I was editing the exhibition catalogue, for instance, in which we presented interviews with the artists, some of their reflections found their way into the script, now voiced by the fictitious narrator. The expansion of the present suggested by each artistic practice was dramatized as a longing for other futures or other ways of being in time, performed in the present of the exhibition as transitory death scenes by the participants. A ding would then interrupt this action to guide the group toward the next installation and the next longing, connected by the voice and the common desire for imagining other futures. By doing so, the exhibition enacted the ideas of the artistic practices while dramatizing a temporal distance to their enactment by interrupting each scene with a ding to move on to the next. Obviously, this dramatic construction raised concerns of the art installations becoming scenography, the dramatization overriding the temporal complexity at play in the artworks. To counter this “reduction,” meta-communication initiatives such as handouts, wall texts, public artists’ talks, and an extensive catalogue became increasingly important to do the artistic practices justice and articulate this tension within the project; an articulation that was deepened during the move from the theater venue to the kunsthalle, where discursive mediation and self-reflection is still much more common.^[19]

To briefly summarize with regards to the conceptualization of museum-ing, in the framework of the exhibition, Museum for fremtiden audiences were asked to immerse themselves in the ideas enacted by the artworks exhibited and at the same time asked to experience this immersion as a staged encounter. Too often, immersion is considered as a totalization of the “aesthetic illusion” of the exhibition or performance; indeed, as a “theater of immanence.” On the contrary, I concur with performance scholar Doris Kolesch that immersion should not only be regarded as an extension or totalization of “aesthetic illusion,” even if this often is the case. Rather, we should understand immersion as follows:

not as unreflective absorption, not as a naive amalgamation with a world formed through media, but rather precisely as the interruption of aesthetic illusion. […] not as a supposedly total absorption in an environment constructed in one way or another, but rather precisely as the dynamic of oscillating between embeddedness and distance, of submersion and surfacing.^[20]

Equally, our concept of museum-ing must seek to enable an oscillating dynamic by way of confusion, not just in spatial but also in temporal terms. A second thesis would then sound something like this:

Museum-ing confuses immersion in the present of the exhibition and the representation of this present as past.

Ghosting the Guest

How does museum-ing enable the experience of the expanded present as past? In the final scene of Museum for fremtiden, spectators were invited by the narrator to climb pedestals in a solemnly lit space. Recounting a brief history of the politics of display, from the religious objects of prehistory, through Greek statues, to the racist European human exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,^[21] the narrator disclosed her preposterous motives of staging the audience as representations of a culture past: “My museum is your mausoleum.”

Figure 5. Scenography by Franciska Zahle and Helle Damgård, Museum for fremtiden, Kunsthal Aarhus & Sort/Hvid (2022). Photo by Mikkel Kaldal.

This rather banal image of the museum as a cultural cemetery—bringing me to the final pair of oppositions mentioned in the introduction, that of life and death—gained an ambivalence in the interplay with the earnest artistic practices enacted throughout the exhibition. However, as I have argued here, museum-ing is a method of self-contradiction. The image of exhibited spectators and the revelation of the narrator as a museal entity, a figure of symbolic revolutionary power, concluded that, for her longings to be realized, the present culture of the spectators had to be made past. In this scene, the element of participation—commanding rather than inviting throughout the exhibition—offered a negated version of itself. Simultaneously present and absent, prerecorded as she was, the narrator of Museum for fremtiden evoked what Derrida called “the visor effect,” the eerie experience of being looked at, of being directed and observed, without being able to see the ghost looking at you.^[22] Upon their departure from Museum for fremtiden, spectators were confronted with screens of uncanny surveillance footage of themselves staged in the exhibition, archiving their participation as part of the museum’s recordings. On the screen, the narrator addressed their recording as “My little ghosts.”

As art historian Claire Bishop concludes in her study of socially engaged art, participation is not merely a vehicle of political inclusion, but at the same time a medium of negation.^[23] Rather than solely enacting the change it desires to create in the present, museum-ing does so while simultaneously displaying the fundamental negativity and historical distance invoked by the museum specter. We might even suggest spectrality as a defining trait of our conceptualization of museum-ing. Both dead and alive, past and present, present and absent, museum-ing haunts the present with the betrayed promises of emancipation engrained in the fictitious dramatizations of historical time and their real effects. The third and final thesis I would like to offer in conceptualizing museum-ing involves a “spectralization” of spectator participation:

Museum-ing implicates spectators in the representational apparatus of the museum by using their participation as a medium of negation.

Verbalizing the museum with an -ing suffix, museum-ing comes to mean sustaining the ambiguities of the contemporary and the historical, forcing a push and pull between embracing the changing constitution of the present and mediating this embrace as a historical moment, as a transition. Rather than claiming Museum for fremtiden to be particularly successful in this endeavor—a relatively small experiment of crossing art forms and artistic practices in the provincial context of the Danish art and theater scenes—I have tried to salvage three theses from its making to inspire future self-contradictory experiments of museum-ing in a broader context. According to this conceptualization, museum-ing relentlessly demonstrates the impossibility of “the Museum” and the impossibility of historical totalization in the expanded present of contemporaneity—but does so by implicating its artists, curators, dramaturgs, and visitors in the impossible attempts to imagine history. Without a concept of history, the future is at stake. As the contemporary artist and writer Hito Steyerl writes:

History only exists if there is a tomorrow. And, conversely, a future only exists if the past is prevented from permanently leaking into the present […]. Consequently, museums have less to do with the past than with the future: conservation is less about preserving the past than it is about creating the future of public space, the future of art, and the future as such.^[24]

Museum-ing is not a method of historical totalization. Rather, museum-ing is a performance of the uneven and contradictory processes of historical totalization, asking spectators, artists, and scholars what kind of fictions, experiences, images, and objects it would take to imagine our decomposed present as historical past.

About the Author

Anders Thrue Djurslev (1990) is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Aesthetics & Culture at Aarhus University, while functioning as a dramaturg at the theater Sort/Hvid (Black/White) in Copenhagen. As a part of his curatorial and dramaturgical research project, funded by the New Carlsberg Foundation, Djurslev has curated the cross-aesthetic art exhibition and theatrical performance Museum for fremtiden (Museum of the Future, 2022) at Sort/Hvid and Kunsthal Aarhus. In his practice-based research, Djurslev explores the politics of time in contemporary art and theater practices, interrogating the contemporary as a critical concept. Djurslev has published in the dramaturgy journal Peripeti and contributed to several Danish publications related to theater productions. He holds an MA in Modern Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen.

[1] A reference to Dante’s Inferno from the Divine Comedy, when the poet descends to Hell. Dante Alighieri, “Canto III” (1308–1321), in The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri, Vol. 1 (Hell), trans. H. F. Cary (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1814), 10.

[2] F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), in Futurism: An Anthology, eds. Christine Poggi et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 49–53; Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum” (1953), in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 173–186; and Robert Smithson, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums” (1979), in The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 41; Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” in In the Flow (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2016, 2018), 43–60.

[3] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 396.

[4] See Jacob Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022).

[5] Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013), 1–8. In a curatorial and museological context, Nora Sternfeld suggests connecting such terms under the common denominator, “the post-representative museum.” See Nora Sternfeld, “Inside the Post-Representative Museum,” in Contemporary Curating and Museum Education (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016), 175–186.

[6] François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2015). Originally published as Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003).

[7] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), in Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, eds. Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 78.

[8] Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1996), 58–80.

[9] Such critiques and reactions are manifold and complex, but some key examples are summarized in Nora Sternfeld’s writings. See Sternfeld, “Inside the Post-Representative Museum.”

[10] Groys, “On Art Activism,” 49.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 55.

[14] Jacob Lund, “Aesthetics and the Curatorial: An Exercise in Metamorphosis,” in Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines, eds. Max Ryynänen and Zoltan Somhegyi (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, forthcoming).

[15] The approximation between art and research involves a host of related potentials and problems as both an expression and critique of contemporary cognitive capitalism. See Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020); and Marina Vischmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

[16] Gilles Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatization” (1967), in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 108.

[17] Bridget Crone, “Notes Towards a Sensible Stage,” in The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, ed. Bridget Crone (Bristol: Intellect Books), 171.

[18] Jacques Rancière opens his influential book on spectatorship with a critique of the two general presuppositions inherent in theatrical spectacle, represented by Brecht’s epic theater and Artaud’s theater of cruelty, privileging in the first case “distanced investigation” and in the second “vital participation.” Both positions presuppose an ignorant spectator that must be emancipated through the theatrical performance, either through strategies of distance or immersion, passivity or activation. Rancière concludes that contemporary performance experiments might revoke this opposition and offer one “being at once a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context among other spectators.” Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2009), 1–23.

[19] The Museum for fremtiden catalogue presented interviews with and sketches by the participating artists, original contributions by contemporary Danish artists and authors, including Madame Nielsen, Ida Marie Hede, and Center for Militant Futurologi, as well as essays by Boris Groys, political scientist Françoise Vergès, and curator Mela Dávila Freire, translated into Danish. The selection was made to offer a multitude of often conflictual speculations on what a “Museum of the Future” might look like, including fictional accounts, theoretical imaginaries, and critique of its namesake in Dubai, UAE. For the catalogue in Danish, see Anders Thrue Djurslev and Mathias Kokholm, Museum for fremtiden, exh. cat. (Aarhus: Antipyrine, 2022). The three translated texts appearing in the catalogue can be found in English versions: Boris Groys, “The Museum as a Cradle of Revolution,” in The Logic of the Collection, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021), 264–279; Françoise Vergès, “The Museum of the Living Present,” in Das Museum der Zukunft: 43 neue Beiträge zur Diskussion über die Zukunft des Museums, eds. Schnittpunkt and Joachim Baur (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2020), 267–268; and Mela Dávila-Freire, “Museums of the Future – Between Promise and Damnation,” in Schnittpunkt and Baur, Das Museum der Zukunft, 105–108.

[20] Doris Kolesch, “Immersion and Spectatorship at the Interface of Theatre, Media Tech and Daily Life: An Introduction,” in Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!, eds. Doris Kolesch et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 8.

[21] For an anthropological study of the human exhibitions in Denmark from the 1870s to 1910s, see Rikke Andreassen, Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays (London: Routledge, 2015).

[22] Derrida’s image of the visor effect appears several times in his authorship, notably in Spectres du Marx and Mal d’Archive. The image arises from Derrida reading Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and the ghost of Hamlet’s father haunting his son without being seen, his identity concealed by a helmet visor: “Like the father of Hamlet behind his visor, and by virtue of a visor effect, the specter sees without being seen. He thus reestablishes the heteronomy.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 61. The visor effect resembles “perhaps the supreme insignia of power”: “This is what distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it shares this incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to see without being seen.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. In the context of theater and performance studies, the scholar Rebecca Schneider has read Derrida in her influential book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), which has inspired the dramaturgical conception of Museum for fremtiden. See Anders Thrue Djurslev, “Exhibiting the Present, Staging Contemporaneity: Museum of the Future and Theatre as a Site of Curatorial Research,” in Peripeti 19 (35) (2022), 59–70.

[23] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 284.

[24] Hito Steyerl, “A Tank on a Pedestal,” in Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 8.