the artist’s task is to deconstruct the walls of the museum

 in one of my previous writings, i drew from various sources to discuss how the artist, in a contemporary context, can be defined as someone whose primary medium is data and whose primary technique is performance.

in a sense, the lines that used to distinguish curator, artist and the museum have been blurred. artists are not only expected to perform and present their work, they are expected to arrange it, and they are expected to produce the spaces that can contain their work. now the artist has to wear many hats—they have to generate the work, curate it, and produce the spatial architecture that contains it. artist are not only responsible for creating the object, but the spaces that hold, care for, and cultivate them.

throughout this transfiguration of the role of the artist, the place of the museum has come under scrutiny. across the nation (and world-at-large), museums are hosting conferences and discussions about what their future looks like—curators are engaging in conversations about what the future of curation looks like.

in an age when art is digital, anyone with image-making (or other) software can make it, anyone with a social media account can curate it and anywhere can become a place to appreciate it. things are different now. 

you no longer have to pay an entrance fee or get off of your couch to have a front-row seat to experience art. you no longer need a traditional arts education to produce it. 

because of this, the institutions that distinguish themselves by gatekeeping these processes are under threat.

if the technological landscape wasn’t making it complicated enough, social media technologies make it even more complicated.

people are able to produce counter-narratives to the narratives that museums produce and undermine their authority as meaning-making agents. 

the museum as we know it signifies a stand-in for power and hegemony, and exists as an entity that must be countered. 

after all, if these institutions which are funded by the most well-off patrons haven’t taught us how to see well enough to steer away from the bedlam we can sense on the horizon, then have they fulfilled the task that we’ve all collectively assigned to them? 

the space of the museum and its curators voice is a text, and as a society we no longer seem to be able to find meaning within that cultural script, but rather in the marginal annotation formulated outside of its walls. 

the artist here becomes an usher, taking the museum-goer outside, and offering a new way to see. 

through ‘going outside’, the artist deterritorializes, and engages in a nomadic practice. through extending their performance with software, they alter their bodies, and they rewrite themselves as post-human—the artist is a cyborg who selfhood becomes intertwined with ’the thing’ she generates.

the artist and the her performance, and what she performs, are one in the some and are engaged in a symbiotic act of co-producing each other. 

the artist’s work is to subvert and distort the labels of ‘artist', ‘curator', and ‘museum'. their work is manipulate materials (including data-objects), source energy, absorb voices, and channel a communal spirit that allows viewers to daydream, or catch a glimpse of a world that exists beyond the periphery of toxic hegemony. 

for so long, the artist has actually been kept out (or gate-kept in) and pigeon-holed into categories that have subjected them to the domineering bureaucracy of the museum.

the structural integrity of institutions that claim to have an ‘artist first’ approach is being put to the test. 

artists are hacking and breaking the space of the museum to produce alternative visualizing technologies—they are engaged in a practice of lens-crafting.

what was left out of the picture, the felt-absence that haunted the museum, becomes the presence we now attempt to fixate on.

we scour the margins and the edges for what was left out, so that we can integrate it into our epistemologies.

if the market is a perceived deity (zapf and seele), or some omnipresent entity that is delegated responsibility for organizing human life, and the museum is a 'mouseion' (μουσεῖον) for its imminence, then the artist is a spirit-medium of sorts, working with the ecological and natural muse. 

the artist channels the piercing shriek of a dying world, and returns to their function as poet, representatives of the goddess of nature—as opposed to the machinic, ominous market deity that has been summoned as a kind of egregorie of toxic practices and whom the museum seemingly represents.

the subversive artist is working with a different muse than the muse that the institutional museum is working with. 

here, the artist is clearly distinguished from any practice as a profiteer, but makes a clear return to their anthropological origin as shaman and healer. 

the artist is healing our myopia, and our speechlessness by offering a new vision of life, and a voice that verbalizes the unarticulated angst of so many who suffer at the hands of hegemonic power. 

the character jaques in shakespeare’s play ‘as you like it’ embodies the nature of the artist when he says, “give me leave to speak my mind, and i will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world, if they will patiently receive my medicine”.

the artist voices a performance whose ultimate aim is healing—marking her return to her shamanic, and medicinal roots. 

the artist isn’t just engaged with challenging the museum, and setting up their own alternative through engaging in the same power-seeking behavior that enables museums to survive.

their task is to deconstruct the walls of the museum as a concept until art spills out and contaminates the world.

their task is to bridge the space in-between, and produce new bodies—to merge the imagined and the real.

this merging isn’t just an attempt at producing an escapist baudrillardian hyper-reality, but an attempt at using language as a vehicle to steer consensus into new worlds.

it is an attempt to interrupt and invade the looping cultural script of toxic hegemony and find a textual break which will allow life to make an exit from the grip of history. 

any other definition of artist will not suffice—this is not to create exclusion or enforce hierarchy, but to raise the bar for what we expect from artists.

if we as a culture accept anything short of what was described here, i don’t see how we can make it out of the predicament that we have collectively found ourselves in.

if the artist cannot work at the shadow of our humanity, then without a shadow of a doubt, this shadow will consume us.

it’s up to the artists to light the way to our escape—they’re our only hope.