Editorial

Kitty Zijlmans
I think what we are confronted with is the idea that the museum for a long time has been seen as an institution which has a fixed place and a fixed format. Even if it is fluid within the format of a museum, it is collecting, it is presenting, it does research, and all those kinds of things.

And we are now in a period that the museum as an institution is criticized and challenged because of, I think, at least two things. One is the idea that the museum is still formed or based on a format that is basically North Atlantic. I use here the term derived from James Elkins in his latest and final book.^[1] There he says that, whereas contemporary art is changing around the world rapidly, the format of the writing of art history isn’t changing, because it is still in one dominant format: that of the writing of art history, which started in a North Atlantic paradigm. The same parallel can, I think, be seen within the museum, because it is a parallel discussion and a parallel development. The museum has been very much in tandem, if not totally intertwined, with what has become art historical writing, and initially museums very much followed the art historical canon.

So, what you see happening is that the institution of art history, as well as the institution of the museum, are in tandem, are like twins. They may change within, they may be critical about themselves and see themselves as far too Eurocentric now—but basically, when you really look at the format and the institutional ground, it is still very much something that had its origin in the North Atlantic paradigm.

This whole idea of the institution is challenged, and if we really want to have museums that are places where we can learn and encounter the world, something needs to change radically.

We don’t get there by just adding some interesting artists from elsewhere into the canon, because the whole idea of a canon is something that is under fire. Therefore, making the word “museum” into a verb is something that might open up possibilities to see where change can occur. “Museum-ing” is doing something. Of course, with keeping the idea that you collect and present, but also reaching out to audiences and getting far more artistic practices within. Thus, slowly changing the whole format of what a museum actually is and what it is for. The problem is that we are confronted with such deeply entrenched institutional structures that you cannot just change them or throw them overboard entirely; but you can make them clear and try to find answers there.

The other thing concerns the question of how we can open this up and make a museum more into something you do, that does, rather than something that is. I want to stress the importance of this, because I see the same parallel in art historical writing, and that is changing only slowly. We need impetus from “elsewhere”—Okwui Enwezor’s term—wherever elsewhere is; it could be in the Netherlands, it could be from far away, it could be rethinking, or maybe other disciplines.

And, crucial for me is: What do artists do? How can artists contribute to this change of what a museum can be? I hope that this issue shows at least some ways to proceed. It is a massive change that needs to occur.

Anna Maria Pinaka
Everything is pretty much said eloquently by Kitty. Thank you, Kitty. If I may contribute a bit, I would say the way I entered this issue was because Charl, as a head of curatorial practice, wanted to bring this notion of practice-led research to the forefront.

And I was quite confused about why he would want to do that in the issue about museum-ing in the sense that, you know, museum sounds so far away from anything close to the artist, close to artistic research. It is indeed the number one power that has the authority to say what is worth seeing, what kind of art is valuable So, it has the superpower that has been drawing the course of art history, essentially. I was wondering, how are we going to get artist-led research into that context? Sounds like an impossible project. But it is actually interesting and fun, and contributing in the sense that it opens at least small doors into the possibility that we can maybe play. So, am thinking of the seriousness of the museum or the macho-ness of it, its neoliberal kind of bravado. And how it could perhaps crumple through practice-led approaches.  I’m thinking, for instance, of questions such as, how can we bring different kinds of qualities, different kinds of aesthetics, into the ways we negotiate what a museum is and what it can be? Is there something about the ontology of artistic research that could address these questions differently than other methods of praxis and analysis?

Reading through the contributions of this issue, I realized that maybe we don’t have as many artists doing research as we hoped for, but we have some curators, we have some historians, and the way they approach this issue can be thought of as artistic research in the sense that they don’t necessarily only talk about their curatorial practice.

They talk about a site or a situation they encountered, or how they reacted to that in a way that it became a question for them that led their research. Opening this process is part of practice-led research.

So, in that sense, I think there is some success in this issue, in that we have attempted the impossible. I can visualize it as little children trying to play with a giant.

Charl Landvreugd
To speak to the idea of museum-ing, really, was to think about how the museum can become a verb. Rather, how can it become a practice, so to speak?

So, we were talking about and thinking about museum-ing inspired by the practice of Stedelijk Museum director Rein Wolfs of hiring artists, designers, and community activists as part of the team. This practice leads to the question of how artistic practices really form and shape a museum.

It is really about how artistic practice as a method can be applied to a museum, to drive the idea of museum-ing. Possibly by hiring artists and designers, actually practicing people who bring their work into what it is that they are doing in the museum. In the case of Stedelijk Studies, you see how it transformed into a practice-led research platform, rather than a site for purely academic review. And I think this an example of bringing art-based practices into the museum as a form of governance. Perhaps that’s the word?

Kitty Zijlmans
Governance or policies; policymaking and governance actually build a different kind of museum.

Charl Landvreugd
So, for me, the impetus toward this experiment that Anna Maria is talking about is also the reason that we have people with practice-led PhDs on our editorial board. In this way, art-based research has the potential to be a structural part of the governance or policy forming museum practice.

Kitty Zijlmans
Perhaps what you are emphasizing is that what we are doing is also practice-based. It’s not only cerebral and happening in the mind, it is also a practice by revising discussion, putting what you know into practice, or work in a different way. What I like about artistic practice as the inspiring example is the unpredictability of ideas compared to what I come up with, because that’s what artists do for me: looking in an oblique way, from the sideline, from a different perspective. And then you see things in a different way.

Charl Landvreugd
And what was clear to me within the abstract is that people saw it as a way of promoting practices that actually reflects on the practice. You know, what does it do? How does it function? What can the world learn from it, or how can it be?

Anna Maria Pinaka
Something maybe worth documenting is the fact that there is still very little consensus as to what artistic research or practice-led research is, and how it is not well financed or supported, if at all, and thus difficult for artists to access.

I’m also thinking that perhaps what is interesting about artistic research is that it escapes definition; maybe it is less tamable than that.

We can use the opportunity of this issue to make a suggestion or a gesture about how we would like artistic research to lead the way.

Kitty Zijlmans
Also, a way to think about it is seeing artistic practice, again, not as what it is, but what it does. What is the form of an action or a direction, rather than “this is the presentation, go and see.”

And I totally agree with Anna Maria, that the difficult thing is to be doing something and at the same time reflecting upon what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Anna Maria Pinaka
Yes, because naturally the artists want to say my work “worked,” you know, and there is a part of artistic research that supposed to allow space for it to not work in a way that art history has persuaded us that work has to “work,” like, to be successful or profitable.

Thinking as an artist myself, it could be rather tricky to have the opportunity to publish my own words about my own work in a journal like this.

As artists, we don’t have the privilege to often or publicly negotiate our works beyond their successes—and I honestly think that artists having the space to explore the meaning and values of our works beyond having to justify them, or stand by them all the time, could actually change the course of art history.

Kitty Zijlmans
The word museum comes from the Greek mouseion, which is the place where the muses gather. Well, you can of course debate what the muses are, but you can also stick with the word gathering.

So, what does it mean to gather? And who is the person who invites and who are the invitees, the publics? I mean, if a museum is less a place where art is than a place for gathering, in what kind of way can that function? What kinds of active participation can be explored?

Meredith North
I think this is the core of our issue, as the articles here generate ideas that resist the traditional museological frameworks, conceptually, academically, and artistically. Active participation, access to spaces of creativity, artistic interventions, and research investigations of not only material but also the active structures of the museum are under investigation in this issue. I wonder if the editors could speak about some of the articles that stood out in ways that addressed these debates?

Kitty Zijlmans
Well, for instance, in Vid Ingelevics’s article on the museum’s use of photography and his “hybrid projects,” we see the investigation of documentary photography of a museum. This may unknowingly show how the museum presents itself in a certain way, by means of its documentary photography.

Meredith North
Yes, Vid’s contribution addressed some of these larger issues of the museum, and also the aspect of labor. And I wonder, Anna Maria, if you could talk a little bit about artistic labor, because as we keep working with practicing artists and artists who have PhDs, this aspect of artistic practice and artistic labor, I think, is really brought about in Vids work.

This idea that an artistic practice is also an artistic aspect of labor, and how that is integrated. How is that working within the museum and the institution, specifically?

Anna Maria Pinaka
To me, Vid’s work asks how artistic labor can actually be acknowledged by institutions beyond the exhibiting of their work—what would it take for a museum to share with the public a body of research that touches, for example, the very notion of intentionality or purposefulness, or a circumstantial or strategic lack thereof, and in this way may be involving work that seems ambivalent in determination. In other words, how can artistic labor actually be measured? And what about the extra labor artists have to do to prove the value of the steps they take? His essay also accounts as to how museums may have been drawing from artistic research in developing their own work, programs, and general oeuvre.

Meredith North
Vid’s essay really examines overlooked labor, and not only in the sense of photography but also in the sense of these kinds of really acknowledged absences.

The institution did not view the labor of these artists and workers as significant enough for them to credit their work, but used their work in service to the aims of the institution. And he really gets into how the institution frames itself through these erasures or absences of information.

Kitty Zijlmans
I’m happy with your addition, because that is exactly what it was about, and what I think is interesting. It’s not the documentary photography per se, but what it actually reveals. And that is precisely as you say; sometimes in the little corners you see the labor, from the cleaners to the guards to, of course, the artists. It is not visible because when, in the end, an exhibition is opened or an artist is presented, it’s the final product you see. You don’t see all the labor that is involved in it.

So, it’s very much still product-oriented, which is maybe hard to escape, but maybe that’s also a line of thinking: How can we make what it actually means to produce an artwork and to install or present it more visible?

Meredith North
As Or Tshuva and Karni Barzilay investigated in their work?

Anna Maria Pinaka
Theirs is an important piece, because it also kind of documents, shortly but eloquently, what came up during the COVID pandemic. So, it speaks about how we kind of understood our precarious conditions as cultural workers and art workers, as artists, as curators, as researchers.

They start from this point of having no-contract positions in institutions. When the pandemic kicked in, it made them feel their own instability. They wanted to create this new paradigm or this new model for curating by creating a show and accessing funds to buy artworks and then lend these artworks to the public.

So, their intention is to suggest another way for people participating in art; essentially, another art economy. They present this thought experiment, which ties into this place of imagination, of playing, of daring to imagine other ways of being an art world. By the way, I would like to credit Yiou Penelope Peng’s essay for this, because  she is actually using these words, she’s talking about the museum becoming a playground. She’s talking about imagining, about a fantastic place and fantastic institution.

Kitty Zijlmans
I’m happy you mentioned Penny [Yiou Penelope Peng], because of the playfulness and that she brings in the concept of wanwu [ten thousand things/myriad happenings]. What I think this also points out, is that there are notions out there, be it lumbung (see Ruangrupa at documenta 15), ubuntu from South Africa (“I am because we are”), or other notions from different cultures, which we might integrate in the vocabularies within the museum because they are hinting at a form of collectivity that we seem to have lost. Anyway, this is a line of thinking that I think we should allow more, and change the jargon by introducing other notions and concepts.

Charl Landvreugd
The process of creating a situation, but also playing with notions and playing with the concept of museum-ing as a verb. I think it’s important to delve into it, because audience participation, for instance, is one of the things that is being asked of the museums.

The question of how we can create a program that actively invites groups in society to participate in whatever it is the museum is doing. So, it’s specifically there, in that participation question, where a museum moves from being this collection of objects, so to speak, where we come and watch, to a space where one can be, where one can play, where one can basically be alive.

So, this question of play is present, and it is especially here where these different notions that Kitty just mentioned can be important. And it’s not like we possibly didn’t have any of these ideas in the West, but rather that we may have lost sight on  them, right? How to be together, how to be together in a space.

Kitty Zijlmans
This “how to be together in a space,” for me, refers to another theme, that of the relationship between human and nonhuman. An artwork (nonhuman) is an entity in space, just like a human being. How do you live with this being? Be with this being?

It’s not so much that we enter and we watch and we go back as if nothing then happens, and as if the artwork and practices do not have their agencies as well. It is precisely by allowing more of the agencies to work that a space for play or experiment may open up. This brings me briefly to Khristina Wright’s article. What I like about her example is that, in Kenya, with this long history of trying to build up a museum, you see how difficult that is, but also the strength. There are some ideas that we might learn from, spaces that are especially reserved for a particular kind of action, such as the Creativity Gallery and the Discovery Room, enabling museum-ing practices, workshops for young artists-in-residence, and participatory, community-based art projects, such as Who I Am, Who We Are.

Maybe a space for imagination which is not already filled with artworks, but rather incentives to stir the imagination and give you all kinds of ideas.

Anna Maria Pinaka
In this sense, maybe what is missing a little bit, or what could also have supported the issue, is a case study that would give us a different sense of what it means to be there together, or what it would mean to gather up. Perhaps a suggestion about what it could feel like, because it doesn’t mean that, for being together or gathering up to be successful, it also needs to feel constantly pleasant or comfortable in a certain sense. A linear state of happiness isn’t necessarily the sign that would say that “being together” has worked out. Being together successfully could also mean friction or tension or awkwardness—and our ability to endure these, together.

Meredith North
Indeed, as the articles in this issue draw into purview, looking outside the museological structures or traditions to other methods of engagement offers new ways of critically engaging with artistic practices in the past and present with regard to audiences. Whether this is cultivating ecological concerns into mobile museums, as Colin Sterling and Asia Komarova examine, or supporting structures of care in the middle of New York, as Alison Burstein recounts, the potential for a return to gathering together is there.

However, contributions like Jill Price’s ecological entanglements of nonhuman objects, or Anders Thrue Djurslev’s formation of dramatization of museum-ing, which “enables a contradictory both-and mediation between the present and past, presence and distance, alive and dead,” acknowledge the unpleasantness of challenging topics.

Anna Maria Pinaka
On that note, I wanted to mention Sonia Lau’s essay, as she touches a little bit more on an unpleasantness. She draws a series of farewells or goodbyes, and she dares to bring that to the reader. She dares to make us ache a little bit to feel this, the pain of, for example, departure or separation. What does it mean for it to be dismissed and how this dismissal obviously shapes art history in undocumented ways, and so on. She talks about “the phenomenon of disappearing artists and art histories as a response to power shifts,” or what “cannot always remember, but it can also never really forget.” The essay brings in notions such as resilience and the resilience of the work, what it means for it to survive.

Meredith North
I think with Sonia Lau and Christina Wright, we have two really deep historical examinations of nation-building and identity-building through the institution of a museum in very different ways, obviously.

As they show, so much hinges on the museum in this role, which is kind of obvious to state, but even as recently as our discussion in S-Zine #2, for instance, the ways in which the apparatus of the museum is intricately connected to not only governments for funding but also the idea structures that come with that support and the ways in which those ideologies are mapped.

I think, Kitty, this was actually one of the first ideas you brought up in one of our very first discussions: how to bring the outside in and the inside out. And what is the point at which there is no wall or door? But it’s simply going back to the idea of the mouseion, that open structure, right?

Anna Maria Pinaka
Could it be that it’s all the fault of how cold it is in the Northern countries? Because, seriously though, we spend so much more time outdoors in the South.

Kitty Zijlmans
I absolutely love your remark, because we are inside people more than outside. And it’s totally true. It’s easier to gather when there are no walls and you can just walk in and out.

I would like to briefly link into Meredith’s idea of the identity marker, where museums are used by governments as a strategic way to build a certain identity, a national identity. It’s “Dutch” art, or whatever you call it. This is one of the things that I really think is challenged with modern and especially contemporary art and artistic practices, because there is not just one national identity.

These are, to quote Kwame Appiah, “the lies that bind”^[2]: all kinds of ideas of one fixed people, one language, one nation. Well, we see it happening now in the most brutal way we can imagine. Call them lies, call them tales, but there are things that we believe in (or are made to believe in), and museums emphasize that, supporting the idea of “Dutch” but excluding everything that actually made the Netherlands—to stay with the example—the country that it is, with all the input from outside, with all the forced things that have happened.

What I’m getting at is that this whole idea of identity is something that the museum can and should be incredibly critical about, and open; open it up to other ideas of identity markers, how people can feel like being together again.

Charl Landvreugd
So, how can artistic practices help in that process?

Kitty Zijlmans
By opening up the plethora of ways of being, which artists, I think, can do. So, not confirming and emphasizing what is there, but opening up by means of imaginations. It sounds perhaps banal when I say, opening up to what it means to be human.

Of course, everybody needs identifications and identity markers, but these should not be preconceived by a party other than a person, him- or herself or themselves. I have no precise answer to this, and maybe Anna Maria can help.

Anna Maria Pinaka
I think artists and their research can help, because they are the only ones who can stand by their work in what may be perceived as negative terms. We consider this context where the market has the authority to mark a body of work as worthy of discussion or not. But how would it be if artists found ways to claim that discussion? They can turn around the paradigm of what it means to talk about one’s work and stand by it. We are constantly asked to know our purpose, the meaning of our work, the value of it, and constantly defend it. And I think the artistic research paradigm can actually allow space to see what happens to the market itself, if we resist these terms, if we resist reproducing this discourse.

Which means we need institutions or other structures to hold safe spaces for artists to be able to open up the discussion and exist together in some kind of momentary discomfort—I mean the discomfort of speaking from a place of not knowing, of doubting, of questioning, while resisting the neoliberal model of unbreakable confidence.

Maybe this can open up a small door to an unknown space of exploring what it means to be, and be together, without having to define ourselves all the time. Perhaps there we can build new codes of communication and negotiation regarding identities and value.