{"id":469,"date":"2010-06-01T11:50:41","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T15:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/crdirector\/?p=12"},"modified":"2019-02-28T11:35:26","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T16:35:26","slug":"the-newfound-excitement-of-finding-our-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2010\/06\/01\/the-newfound-excitement-of-finding-our-public\/","title":{"rendered":"The Newfound Excitement of “Finding Our Public” – by Neil Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jumping feet-first into the vast, swirling\u00a0Web-ocean\u00a0a mere month ago,\u00a0almost immediately the Creative Research\u00a0Center started to hear from all kinds of energetic and imaginative people.\u00a0 I’m going to pry open our international\u00a0“Virtual Mailbag” in\u00a0a moment and link you to some\u00a0unexpected and new colleagues\u00a0— but first, I want to share a particularly relevant quote from a\u00a0 book I’ve just finished reading called Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low <\/a>(Sternburg Press, NYC) by Bettina Funcke<\/a>, independent curator and editor, formerly of the Dia Art Foundation<\/a>.\u00a0 “However large or small,” Ms. Funcke writes, ” a public basically needs to be invented, since we can never assume it already exists.” [CRC editorial comment: Boy, is that<\/em> ever true!].\u00a0 She goes on to qualify: “Potentially an audience already exists, but one needs to capture its attention.” [CRC editorial comment #2: ditto to the foregoing.] “So one addresses somebody or takes part in an existing debate, reaching out to be heard or seen; or uses mass media to reach out\u00a0to the broader anonymous and heterogeneous public beyond one’s grasp.”<\/p>\n

Bettina’s observation\u00a0got me thinking about how\u00a0replete the blogosphere is\u00a0with one-directional, outward-facing speakers\u00a0compelled\u00a0to express their points of view and\/or vent about an endless\u00a0variety of subjects. A secondary characteristic of the sphere, it seems to me, is the desire to in some way “monetize” the act, so as to make one’s efforts into a commercially-viable metier<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0As will be obvious to our visitors, The Creative Research\u00a0Center <\/a>is not characterized by these ambitions.\u00a0 Self-promoters, by nature,\u00a0do not have time to reciprocate. They are not so much interested in communication<\/em> as they are in declamation<\/em>.\u00a0Our platform here at the CRC is\u00a0open-ended and\u00a0mediacentric, not a soapbox. Of course we want the hits <\/em>— but we have to\u00a0see and feel more gratification than mere contact; we need content<\/em> that leads to further content –\u00a0leading,\u00a0in turn to substantive, passionate\u00a0interaction.<\/p>\n

Hard to believe it was twenty-five years ago this fall when\u00a0I was working as a diligent proposal-writer in the Development Office of The New York Public Library <\/a>on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue;\u00a0 I remember standing at the arched, high threshold of Room 315, the Public Catalog Room<\/a>, as the seventy-five-year-old archival card-catalogue\u00a0was about to be dismantled and the old worn wooden drawers emptied.\u00a0\u00a0In their stead would be situated ranks of IBM computer stations, home for the high-tech, online CATNYP<\/a> catalogue system.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Our President, Dr. Vartan Gregorian<\/a>,\u00a0delivered inspirational remarks to the assembled multitudes,\u00a0even as\u00a0he cautioned, as we opened the door to a vast, uncharted realm, \u00a0“Information is not <\/em>knowledge.”<\/p>\n

All this by ruminative way of preface to opening our “Virtual Mailbag” and\u00a0digging in to a selection of the informed and<\/em> knowledgeable generosity we’ve received this month. One of our first – and most distinguished – responders was Gary Hall<\/a>, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, co-editor of Culture Machine <\/a>and co-founder of Open Humanities Press.<\/a> “Many congratulations on the\u00a0launch of your virtual centre,” Gary wrote. “It’s\u00a0certainly very exciting — and I’ve already been making use of your Web Bibliography<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

“Congratulations on this new initiative of yours at Montclair State,” wrote Laura Brown, an old friend not seen in many years,\u00a0 now the Executive VP for Strategy and Research at Ithaka<\/a>, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies.\u00a0\u00a0“You are\u00a0working in a space that is dead center to the kinds of issues Ithaka works with every day.”\u00a0\u00a0 Warren Sack<\/a>, director of the Social Computing Lab at UCSC, from whom I gratefully appropriated the prophetic concept of Very Large Scale Conversations, was next to check in with an update on his new work in Conversation Mapping.\u00a0I was also\u00a0heartened to hear from the\u00a0iconoclastic Australian artist Simon Penny<\/a>, who has taught in the USA for more than two decades and until recently was\u00a0founding director of the Arts Computation Engineering Program at U.C. Irvine.\u00a0 Now he’s about to\u00a0join the Segal Institute for Human Centered Design in Northwestern University<\/a>: “Interdisciplinarity lives on,”\u00a0 Simon declared, “and clearly at Montclair State!”<\/p>\n

Ramsay Burt – author of the definitive study of \u00a0The Male Dancer <\/a>as well as a recent, provocative piece on “The Specter of Interdisciplinarity”<\/a> – reached us from the Dance Department at\u00a0DeMontfort University in Leicester <\/a>in response to the CRC’s prominent\u00a0mission to help revivify dance documentation. “I certainly do look outside dance studies because we are a very small field,” Ramsey writes, “and we need to look at what other people are doing. Most people are stuck in their disciplinary boundaries…[I am trying to] get people outside dance studies interested in the ideas about the body and its creative potential for radical change.”<\/p>\n

And we extend special thanks to three leaders in the field. Julie Thompson Klein,\u00a0known to all as the pre-eminent scholar and editor whose personal bibliography is far too long for the confines of this\u00a0blog – sent “congratulations” within a week of\u00a0the \u00a0CRC launch.\u00a0 We will look forward with great anticipation to her massive Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity<\/em> coming in August. We were also\u00a0pleased to hear from Jonathan Reams at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, editor of the Integral Review<\/a>, a fascinating transdisciplinary and transcultural journal, who called the CRC\u00a0 “indeed full of possibilities.” \u00a0And last, but most certainly not least, we thank Prof. William Newell of Miami University of Ohio, Executive Director of the Association for Integrative Studies<\/a>, and his assistant, Phyllis Cox, for listing the Creative Research Center so prominently on their Interdisciplinary Connections Resources Page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We are very proud to be in\u00a0this distinguished company.<\/p>\n

Keep those (virtual) cards and letters (and links)\u00a0coming!<\/p>\n

Yours, NB<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

Flash Update<\/em> \u00a06\/13\/10<\/strong>.\u00a0 The Summer 2010 issue of ARTFORUM\u00a0<\/a>arrived in my mailbox yesterday and it\u00a0is so compelling\u00a0I haven’t been able to put it down. It is a special double-issue —\u00a0Tim Griffin’s last one as editor after seven years at the helm —\u00a0called The Museum Revisited<\/a>.\u00a0This astonishing and provocative section can be found on pp. 274-335 with commentary, images\u00a0and essays by\u00a0Kathy Halbreich, Jeffrey Deitch, Tino Sehgal, Manuel Borja-Villel, Rem Koolhaas, Ann Goldstein, Oscar Ho Hing-kay, Helen Molesworth, Pawel Althamer, Joanna Mytkowska, Roman Ondak, Ann Philbin, Tania Bruguera, Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Olafur Eliasson, Andras Szanto, Ann Temkin, Jeffrey Kastner, Lars Nittve, Adriano Pedrosa, Ines Katzenstein, R.H. Quaytman, Julian Rose, Chantal Mouffe, and Pi Li —\u00a0and a valedictory\u00a0Postscript by Tim Griffin.<\/p>\n

This deluge of critical thought has resonance for me\u00a0because the section so thoroughly\u00a0interrogates the viability of the museum as an institution in today’s decentered and fragmented culture in much the same\u00a0fashion that the Creative Research Center <\/a>is trying to forge its own\u00a0path as a new virtual gathering place.<\/p>\n

Kathy Halbreich was for many years the Director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis<\/a>, a place\u00a0I visited regularly and came to love for its seemingly-effortless blend of user-friendliness and curatorial openness. In the pages of ARTFORUM, Ms. Halbreich is still looking for better ways to connect with her public now that she has become associate director of MOMA<\/a>.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Jeffrey Deitch has made the transition from gallerist to director of L.A. MOCA <\/a>where he, too, speaks of wanting to engage a broader constituency. Manuel Borja-Villel, who runs the Reina Sofia in Madrid<\/a>, wonders whether museums have lost a degree of “mediatory power” in the multiple networks of creative industries. Ann Goldstein moved from L.A. MOCA to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam where she presides over a museum under perpetual construction, suffering from the extended absence of its home base and\u00a0resulting public backlash. Helen Molesworth at ICA in Boston <\/a>speculates about the sheer volume of artistic production in today’s world and how museums are supposed to accommodate and cope with it;\u00a0 Ann Temkin at the Met <\/a>confesses to her mortification at the amount of artwork in storage that never sees the light of day.\u00a0\u00a0 Ann Philbin at the Hammer Museum has noticed that visitors now crave more participatory experience when they walk through the doors, not only reverent looking at a distance. And so it goes.<\/p>\n

Many of you reading this post\u00a0may have grown\u00a0up, like me,\u00a0in the old world of material culture where you\u00a0visited a museum of a weekend afternoon to meander through the galleries and observe\u00a0beautifully-lit artifacts under the\u00a0“do not touch”\u00a0eye of vigilant\u00a0guards. The\u00a0ambiance was appropriate to the ritual; there was no other Reality<\/em>\u00a0in those archaic times. The thing itself was “it.”<\/p>\n

Needless to say, the arts\u00a0currently inhabit an utterly revised and dispersed range of perceptions and experiences. So many of our waking hours are spent in virtual places where nothing is out of range.\u00a0 So when we make the shift from digital to analog, there is a perceptual phase of adjustment, unconscious but obligatory.\u00a0People enter the\u00a0foyer of a museum with their sensoria<\/em> predisposed to expect more. Museums — as institutions that need to survive and still honor their (antiquated? nineteenth-century?) missions as cultural repositories —\u00a0are looking inward to determine how best to respond.<\/p>\n

This introspective mood is one of the enduring\u00a0forces behind the star-studded ARTFORUM gathering. The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera\u00a0<\/a>weighs in\u00a0idealistically — if a touch hyperbolically: “I would like to see a museum in the not-so-new XXI century,” she declares in an outspoken sidebar, “that abandons the idea of looking for the idea of activation; one that is not a building or even a fixed space but\u00a0a series of events and a program; one where the institution gives up authority; one that is dedicated to research into the practical usefulness of art; one where art entails actual social transformation, instead of providing merely highly speculative strategies for bringing about such transformations. One where things are not excised from their contexts — where objects are contextualized instead of historicized. One that is not a structure, but a moment; that is not a place to visit but a presence…<\/p>\n

…A museum that is more a part of the Internet, open-source<\/a>, and Wikipedia culture.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jumping feet-first into the vast, swirling\u00a0Web-ocean\u00a0a mere month ago,\u00a0almost immediately the Creative Research\u00a0Center started to hear from all kinds of energetic and imaginative people.\u00a0 I’m going to pry open our international\u00a0“Virtual Mailbag” in\u00a0a moment and link you to some\u00a0unexpected and new colleagues\u00a0— but first, I want to share a particularly relevant quote from a\u00a0 book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-director-s-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1036,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}