New Blog

I have a new blog and website. So I probably won't be using this one anymore. It is www.shelbyrichardson.com!

BUUUUUUUUUBYEEEEEEE

north american freedom

It is the ability to conform to commodity. The freedom to choose how you will articulate your life through consumer representation. How you fit into an advertised taxonomy reflects your freedom, your value, your monetary interest in reality.

Is this the driving force for the art object or is it the underpinning structure of collecting? The collector creates the s/he persona through the collected object. The supposed universality in art is clearly articulated through the wealthy collector. Not that of the visual but of the imagined creation of a representational whole. Choice of value is determined in relation to an imagined social significance. Choice bears the illusion of a false democracy, subverting its totalizing and suffocating nature.

so anthropology.

So i am half way through my current MA in anthropology. and i guess it's not half bad. i went into this thing thinking all anthropologists are just assholes. and i suppose i was about half right.

there are those jerks who think only born anthropologists can be anthropologists. but what about born again anthropologists? i mean art is material culture isn't it, so why is it such a fucking foreign concept to people? and aren't foreign concepts what's happening? isn't that what we're all in to? god forbid you talk about something made after 1902... (that doesn't fit into the 'non-linear' linear narrative) the inalienability of objects isn't just about what we are constantly shoving in tiny boxes with tiny labels with tiny ideas circulating all over the place. (or are they big ugly ideas?)

we need to position ourselves in-between things. how else are we going to get anywhere? if we are constantly redrawing the disciplinary lines we aren't going to get anywhere and your going to continually have artists saying anthropologists are all assholes and all anthropologists saying artists are postmodern crazies. but you know i guess that's what university is about right? pay money to learn to fit in this tiny box that doesn't teach you anything about participating in real life and teaches you to unlearn the fact that theory doesn't really make a fucking difference.

too bad theory is so awesome.

anyways, anthropologists aren't all assholes...

Salish Wool Dog

Paul Kane

Detail: A Woman weaving a blanket

1848-1856

What happened to you little buddy?

We put gates around the wrong things.

Opening what wasn't meant to be opened.

Imperial taxonomies and the 'magic circle'

"Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership...also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value- that is, their usefulness, but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock, of his property."

Walter Benjamin p.13

"Only in extinction is the collector comprehended."

Hegel p.15

qtd. in Kiendl, Anthony. "Toward a New Understanding of Collecting." in Obsessions, Compulsions, Collections

oh yeah

mary anne barkhouse is pretty awesome.

image from: http://www.medicinehatmedia.com/2009/02/mary-anne-barkhouse-boreal-baroque-tonight/

reciprocity

this blog is mainly for me to complain about institutional practice and converse about art and criticism i believe to be valuable to the greater conversations of local bc and canadian culture (if those 'things' really exist).

however, sometimes components of current anthropological and art theory cross over into the personal realm and i think it is helpful to comment on these things.

reciprocal relationships are such processes. i'm not a sociologists nor have i gone to school for anything related to practical reality but i think we can think about our personal relationships in correlation with larger relationships between peoples and cultures. in the last year i entered into a relationship with someone who made me recognize the importance of facilitating talents and how the level of intellectual interaction between partners bolsters and encourages this kind of practice. we have both made (if i can speak on behalf of both) significant changes to our lifestyles in the last year and have become more productive in terms of our expressive necessities.

bringing this back to museums and art i can see a connection between this kind of relationship and the more general relationship between museums, contemporary art and first nations communities. if museums take time to act reciprocally with contemporary first nations artists their institutions will move in more positive directions of collaboration. this puts people on an equal playing field where differing perspectives reflect off each other and provide both positions with increased opportunities and possibilities. most museums still neglect to look at differing perspectives on an equilibrial level, constantly privileging the institutional perspective. this is most visible through exhibition practice and the constant confusion surrounding where contemporary art has to go and how to make room for it. over and over again these expressions of ontological thinking are separated from the 'artifacts' of everyday life, however if some museums took the time to look reciprocally at different perspectives on artistic production they would possibly realize that these boundaries don't necessarily exist.