Reflections
Reflections on Roseware
Contextual Consciousness
The integration of Installations like Roseware in the context of a museum in the first place brings along practical problems. If we assume that the most important tasks of the traditional museum are: the establishment of a collection, the exhibiting, keeping and restoring of artworks, than it becomes clear that they are confronted with several practical problems today. One of the fundamental changes that these kind of installations bring along is their time based character. Contrary to traditional paintings of which the spectator decides for himself how long he absorbs the artwork, contemporary art take a certain amount of time to ‘experience’. For Heiner Holtappels this is exactly the ‘new’ in New Media Art: “The spectators time and how to deal with that is a new aspect which implies large changes with respect to the exhibition of art†(Holtappels 1999: 135). This for example brings along the seemingly banal but fundamental change that museums are being forced to offer retourtickets to see the exhibition as a whole because the artworks take more time to experience (‘experiencing’ increasingly has to be taken literally) as for example was the case with ‘Cinema without Walls’ during IFFR02.
Ursula Frohne (1999) says we should find new ways for dealing with this kind of works in collections. For her it is up to the artist to decide whether he want his work to be shown in other contexts. On the other hand, Jeffrey Shaw (1999) thinks that the fast progress which is inherent to new media, has to be seen as a central characteristic of the art works and that we shouldn’t try to hold on too much to the material form of the work. “In fact, because its machinery DOES become obsolete, the media artwork has to find a way to migrate from one machine to another to stay alive†(Shaw 1999: 151) Instead of conserving and restoring the original work one has to try to save the software, the description and the functionality, and maybe even more important as Josephine Bosma told at a conference on ‘the living memory’, the relationship between the artwork and the spectator.
We can imagine that the context in which these multimedia installations are being shown is more important than was the case with traditional art forms. It seems that “Contextual Consciousness” is becoming an essential characteristic for our museums of tomorrow.
As for Roseware…
A couple of the above remarks go very well for Roseware. Context is a very important concept in relation to this installation. It was the product of a certain group of people, brought together in the context of an installation in a certain space and at a certain time. But it is a rather traditional reflex to try to keep these experiences alive as Jeffrey Shaw was suggesting. Roseware was not a product by Chris Marker and Laurence Rassel nor by the people who inserted their memories into the machine that had to be saved for the future. It was an attempt to open up the space of the museum as a space for process and experiment, not just for products. This is an interesting thought to hold on to. Maybe museums shouldn’t try to approach these kind of works of art in the traditional way only adjusted to new technologies (i.e new possibilities and difficulties) – but maybe it can radically start to rethink it’s role in the ‘process’ of these installations. The museum as a space for experiment, for workshops, for try-outs and failures; not as a space for products and as a repository for the future…