Capture in the News

I thought it might be useful and fun to create a platform where we could discuss theory off the cuff, outside of class. It is purely optional, non-graded, and not something to worry about. 

It could be a place to put late-night thoughts about theory that you might not remember otherwise. It could be a place to connect your individual content interests with the critical framework of the class. It could be a place to ask questions and hear each other out about whatever might be percolating, but with (perhaps) less of a sense of pressure about getting off a fully-formed comment during class time.

I'd like it to be a place where it feels relatively safe to put out ideas that aren't fully formed. If you have suggestions about how to make it more of such a place (such as using a different platform, or changing the settings on this one), I am open to making changes.*

So here's what I was thinking about with theory today:

Protest at the Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum in New York incarnates (in its distinctive architecture) and continually reaffirms its programmatic relationship with the avant-garde.

I mean, look at it.

At the same time, the history of the museum is a history of capture. (In fact, I don't know of any famous museum that isn't primarily about capture, although there have been avant-garde attempts at museums that could be about flight, dispersal, non-authenticity, such as the Virtual Museum of the Avant-garde). 

The foundation that originally housed a "Museum of Non-Objective Painting" in rented quarters in the late 1930s has become a mammoth global art institution, its brand identity remaining quintessentially "New York" yet its name ever-expanding to grace new museums opening worldwide. It has spawned "sister museums" elsewhere - in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Abu Dhabi.

The protest above - staged accidentally (but appropriately) during an exhibit on the Italian avant-garde movement known as Futurism - called out the museum for the disconnect between its ostensible/original artistic mission and its current practices. In order to do so, the protestors make visible this disconnect, and in doing so they reveal the nature of the museum as an apparatus of capture.

banners are dropped

pamphlets flutter down

At the same time, their protest also resignifies the museum as an avant-garde space. Some museum-goers were undoubtedly excited to see a takeover of the museum during an exhibit of the (historical) avant-garde, to see the disruption of the capture, or its fruitful incompleteness, to experience the unruliness of the avant-garde erupting even as its historical meaning appears to be sealed.

After I finished writing this, I realized that oneway to think about this blog - and about what it means to theorize - is as a practice of translation. Translating the news, current events, or other aspects of the everyday, into the terms of theory. Many of you are already doing this mentally - I can see it in class - and it could be helpful to read about how it is for others and articulate how it is for you.

*I am going to try to make everyone in the class an author of the blog. If I have understood the FAQ correctly, that means that you can also change settings on the blog. Please feel empowered to go ahead and do so. Right now the blog is "public" but we could set it to "private." We could also talk about having the blog be public vs. private.