GUIDE TO LIFE ARCHIVE GUIDE TO LIFE ⇒

I want to understand what museums mean or more specifically what the art and objects of the post mean to me. What does it mean when I have an aesthetic response to an object that is culturally removed from me? Are objects from the past of my culture culturally removed from me – do objects stay with the time in which they are made or are thy carried forward? If they are carried forward then are they the same object or are they constantly recreated? If they are constantly recreated then what relevance have concepts of age and authenticity? What relevance is there in looking at the time they came from in order to understand them when an “ignorant” present-time-locked response is just as valid? It seems like there are two elements in experiencing an object from the past: the purely aesthetic response and the response related to its age. My experience of looking at a work of art is always an experience of connection with its creator, and that always involves some attempt at picturing the creator in terms of the time in which they lived. It’s hard to separate what’s happening as the art itself always gives clues to its age so it’s almost impossible to have a “pure” experience in which you have no idea of what kind of time period it came from.

Is the experience of cultural removal the same when it’s because of time as it is when it’s because of culture? At what point and how far back in the past does identification change to removal? Is the experience the same with functional objects that haven’t undergone stylistic changes historically to the same extent? Maybe the experience changes when it gets beyond “living memory”. In looking at works from the 50s I can still picture Mum and Dad alive even if not myself. Or maybe it’s to do with historical knowledge because the period of the English revolution fells quite vivid because I know something about it. I think it’s probably a gradual thing that increases as you go further backwards and the culture gets more alien. I still feel more connection with the Beaker people than I do with contemporary African tribes, though there’s no logic to that. The Beakers may have occupied the same piece of earth as me but it makes very little sense to picture myself as descending from them in the sense of a biological lineage. All this stuff ties in a lot with my ideas of connection to a country. What I feel though is that so many of my feelings around this are constructed within culture. Who is recognised as connecting and who is seen as alien is really deeply embedded in the psyche and crucial to how we are in the world. This is where museums come in as a primary place where we encounter other cultures – that doesn’t make sense as we encounter other cultures all the time but I guess the museum is a place where we go to learn about that encounter and where we can experience that encounter in its pure form unmediated by the reality of actual people belonging to another culture.

Why is it seen as important to know about the past? Why do we see the past as relevant? The past is completely gone and although we live in the present that has emerged from the past, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s inevitable or that it has any value to look at the past. It would be a valid cultural choice to never think about it, to not preserve any objects from it, to not make any attempt to preserve or perpetuate anything.

Museums present two kinds of objects: those from other cultures and those from the past of our culture and I want to know how the experience of looking at those two things is different. There’s also the experience of cultural dislocation within a culture with sub-cultures like lesbians etc. To a large extent this experience is chosen though. Except that dissidents are a vital part of our culture so that in being a dissident and feeling apart from the culture you’re actually fulfilling an important cultural function.

Specifically connected with art there are lots of ideas around continuity/discontinuity with the past and the different values placed on those two things. Is art practice the same now as it was in the renaissance say or does art today fulfil a completely different function? Is it appropriate to call them both art? But if they are different then there must be some kind of continuum containing them both as they are still both called art. But then what is it about contemporary art that leads people to say that it’s not art? Have they always said that about contemporary art in every time period or does it just happen in this century? Does the art of the past have any relevance to my art practice or is it just that tey’re tow completely unrelated things which I happen to be interested in?