Contemplative Life
The medieval cloister of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as an ideal meeting point between new art and contemporary society.
Introduction
the light of the reflections in the classroom about the recent development of new types of temporality within museums seems to me extremely interesting hypothesis proposed construction of one of period rooms of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has always been among the areas most strongly characteristic of the museum.
Fiske Kimball, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for thirty years, from 1925 to 1955, the museum had placed a strong didactic, borrowed from European models such as the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
He wanted the museum is totally oriented towards the public, while respecting the needs and curiosity, and facilitating the understanding of the collection with a course that constituted a real time travel. For this
ordered that the works were placed inside the museum galleries in chronological order and, as an expert in architectural history as he was, created environments that faithfully recreates great architectural works of different periods and areas of the world, period rooms . At the time
period rooms were a very innovative trend in U.S. museum exhibits, a famous example was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1924 he had thirteen.
At the official opening of the great Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 26, 1928 a resounding success in the public confirmed the insights of Kimball: The staff found that the period rooms were judged by many visitors as one of the most interesting parts of the entire collection .
The Romanesque cloister and the Contemplative Life
I chose to focus my thoughts on a dining room of medieval period, the Romanesque cloister with elements Abbey of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, from Roussillon, France and dating from the second half of the thirteenth century.
Fiske Kimball, who, after satisfying the opening of the museum, had continued the acquisition of architectural elements to set up the second floor of the museum, (Knight Foundation Gallery) in 1930 was rebuilt in the south, the severe portal Augustiniana Abbey of Saint-Laurent, through which you could enter in that environment of the cloister, at whose center stands the Fountain from the Monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa.
My aim is to reflect on the temporality that characterizes the museum, and more specifically on the strong connotation of historicized period rooms, engaging in this type of structure the most ephemeral element of the temporary exhibition.
All this in order to offer the public an event that combines the two aspects of time and entertainment: the viewer will be moved to temporary event curiosity (connotation most spectacular), which makes it more exciting the time of the museum, and in this case the medieval period room, but at the same time must be brought to pause to reflect on the themes of the show (time duration).
First I focused on the area of \u200b\u200bthe cloister and what it represents in the Western tradition.
The cloister leads us immediately to think of the monastic life, marked by prayer and work, an extended time of meditation and dense, in other words the contemplation.
The concept of contemplation is very complex and goes back to ancient tradition, even before to the Middle Ages (which the burden of religious connotations).
Aristotle in 'Nicomachean Ethics defines the contemplative life (bios theoretikòs ) the highest of human activities " since the intelligence is the most high
that is in us, and, between the knowable things, the highest are those of the ' intelligence is concerned. [...] The man should not, as some say, to know human things as man, as mortal mortal things, but it has become, as far as possible, immortal, and do everything to live according to what is in him higher: although this is little in quantity, value and power exceeds all other things . "
The contemplative life, then, is to intellectual pursuits, the critical observation of the world and phenomena is an essential component for achieving knowledge of the truth.
This vision is inspired more secular contemplation Contemplative Life.
Playing on the complementarity of the two theoretical concepts of contemplative life and active life you want to meditate on the artistic practices of yesterday and today, featuring works from the permanent collection of contemporary art in a historical context and traditional.
Quest 'operation allows us to create connections with topics that are once again be the focus of theoretical as well as the work of artists.
How can we not see art that deals with public issues and an echo of the so-called social life, of that commitment into concrete company that the Stoics preached be indispensable?
And the metaphysical or formal research is not reaching beyond the contingent reality to contemplate the light of truth?
Or maybe every artistic gesture are (or should be) a dialectical synthesis of both these aspects?
The viewer is confronted with these questions that should inspire in him the food for thought.
In each of us is the inherent desire to know the unknown, that is what attracts the crowds to the shows.
It is on this inner motion of curiosity that exposure should build in order to awaken in the viewer the pleasure of knowledge and a willingness to explore the concepts and the deep ties that exist between certain artistic practices and the historical-critical paths that have intersected in ages past .
parallel experience:
Fred Wilson and meditation on the past
With regard to the reflection on the past and the issues that they have been going on until today, is of considerable interest in the work of an African American artist, who lives in New York, and it is known for great His multimedia works.
Fred Wilson made installations that combine historical artifacts, kitsch objects, works of art, video, sound, text and captions fictitious ironic that reinterpret some "accepted notions of history and truth."
Wilson often uses the museum's collections as a raw material for his works, in which addresses both historical and imaginary subjects, as is the Pavilion of the United States of America, represented by Fred Wilson at 50. International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. For that occasion
Wilson had done a thorough historical research about the presence of blacks in the African Renaissance Venice el'intrecciarsi relationships with other inhabitants of the lagoon city.
Through the evocation of iconographic images of blacks, which are present at all levels of the Venetian artistic production, supported by the garish lamps died smiling, some of the masterpieces of great masters such as Paolo Veronese,
the artist makes a gesture of thanks which reunite the pieces of a mosaic that was left unfinished and that raises some painful aspects of this.
Wilson manages to actually talk about the problems of contemporary society, such as immigration, multiculturalism, tolerance, through the filter of past experiences, which for some reason had been removed.
emblematic is the fact that Wilson has asked a tourist from Senegal to pretend to sell counterfeit goods, in fact produced by the artist, the entrance to the Pavilion, to create a direct link between the semantic analysis, conducted from a historical perspective, the condition of Africans in Venice, and meditation criticism on the situation of immigrants in the present. Not to mention the natural comparison is established between New York today and the Venice of the time, as reference points for commercial activities and places of encounter between different ethnicities and religions.
More than ten years earlier, in 1992, Baltimore's Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) housed the exhibition was shown in the contemporary art scene Fred Wilson: Mining the Museum . It had
"as the subject of social justice as a medium and museology."
There were three main objectives of the artist in this exhibition: to dig inside of the collections to show the presence of racial minorities, display historical materials moving from the emotional point of view, to awaken the conscience and cause a social and institutional change and, finally, to find reflections of himself in the museum.
Divided into eight rooms, the Mining Museum dell'MdHS occupied the entire third floor.
The walls of the rooms were dyed different colors, creating a real sense of location for the visitor, who moved from the gray of the historical truths, the green of human emotions, through the violent red of slavery and rebellion, to come blue dreams and achievements with the effort.
The artist, that in the seventies had work experience in important museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History, in the second half of the eighties had created a series of "fake museum" in places totally unrelated to the practice exhibition .
In this case, however, had, for the first time at its disposal an institutional environment to reverse at will, building a proper staging using all the tools that museums seek to establish, including fake titles. These devices were used
artist-curator to articulate his critical speech against racism and stereotyping processes manipulation of the truth that they are constantly in the cultural industry.
Maintaining a delightful sense of humor , Wilson leads us, therefore, in the past, to discover the roots of some of the problems that still afflict the modern world.
Wilson's work, in a sense, represents a synthesis of the two concepts of active and contemplative life: he chose the instrument of contemplation, research and intellectual history to provoke the viewer and force him to reflect, and at the same time with his artistic action is to generate currents of change in institutional and social contexts.
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