Closing
Jon:
During the early years of the colonial project to construct first the colonies, then the nation-state of so-called australia, settler administrators established a network of galleries, libraries, museums, botanic gardens, and zoos. They considered these institutions important, a priority to model protocols of civilised behaviour.
After all, then as now, the mind is the frontier.
The colonial authorities set out to encourage the public to devote leisure time to absorbing and therefore reproducing these codes of acceptable behaviour. They recognised how important it was that the public chose this willingly. It was the difference between installing and multiplying their ideals of aesthetic and technical excellence – ideals that would produce and reproduce people who would contribute to the settler colony’s cultural and economic development.
In museums of art, these protocols restricted touch to approved professionals. They encouraged quiet and demure appreciation of artworks, with bodies held at bay.
Fayen:
The concept of the model citizen emerged in a ‘rat king’ tangle with eugenics logic. Legacies of discrimination were spun up and set in motion, ritualising then automating the dehumanisation of bodies that did not conform.
In this place, and in the next place, what imagination do we have for a museum of art that embraces ways of being and doing and gathering — against the protocols of the civilised body?
Can that imagination become a counter-protocol?
We ask, and wait, and ask again —
to and at and across a museum
or a practise
or a house
that embraces learning from one another.
That lingers in the attempt, or in the possibilities
that form in the slipperiness of translation,
in the always-partial perspective, multiplied,
ankle or waist or neck deep
in the joyful, unruly messiness of
the collective.
Of anotherness.