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After reading Hans Haacke’s “Managers of Consciousness” I found myself wondering about the role of museums as institutions and participants of a "consciousness industry." Haacke's controversial ideas on "disinterested pleasure," "controlled ambiguity" and "social lubricant" made me consider it would be interesting to pay a visit to The Rubin Museum and it’s current thematic series: BRAINWAVE 2017(PERCEPTION) which calls to “change our brains, unshackle ourselves from the past, and unleash creativity, growth, and inspiration.”
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About The Rubin Museum
Facts: ● Opening date: October 2, 2004 ● 1.4 million visitors who have enjoyed over 100 exhibitions and 3,500 programs to date ● 75,000 square feet of space, a dedicated 5,000 squarefoot Education Center, a shop and Café Serai ● 5 gallery floors; two dedicated to the permanent collection; three for special exhibitions ● The original Rubin Museum of Art structure was designed by Beyer Blinder Belle and was occupied by Barneys New York.
The Rubin Museum’s permanent collection includes over 2,500 objects spanning more than 1,500 years to the present day. Included are works of art from the Tibetan plateau, with examples from surrounding regions including Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and Mongolia. The museum’s collection is primarily comprised of scroll paintings (thangka) and sculptures from the region, but also includes a wide variety of artwork, including masks, textiles, and illuminated manuscripts. The museum offers programs for K-12 , universities, families and adults along with digital resources and an online media platform. The “institution” aspires to: "create a connection between contemporary life and the art of the Himalayas and other eastern cultures." They emphasize the presence of immersive experiences that according to them encourage personal discoveries and new ways of seeing the world and they to this by designing events, itineraries and thematic series.
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Last Friday I went to their film program related to the Brainwave series, the movie was introduced by a psychologist and educator, that attempted to make a connection between human perception and mirror meditation. The selected film for the event was "Duck Soup" by The Marx Brothers. This movie has a particular political undertone which is clearly very appropriate for our current times and all the potential to provoke interesting reactions; however I kept on wondering why was I the only young adult in the audience and why everyone around me seemed to be white upper class citizens particularly numb. The over-all sensation was a lack of inquisitive stimulous or provocation from the speakers as part of the educational event, which interestingly was a similar feeling to the general experience of the museum. Even though there were two interesting exhibits that involved sound spaces and interactivity, for some reason I kept on thinking about "the social lubricant" and "a vineyard of consciousness."
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On Sunday the museum offered a mask making workshop for children and families, as part of their ample educational agenda which includes professional development programs, art-making workshops, “21st century skills: creativity, critical thinking, global competency”(I thought this was interesting, the notion of 21st century skills) amongst others. I was particulary interested in this event because I used to teach a mask-making workshop back home in Colombia for children during Carnivals along with a self-portrait course, here you can find the syllabus: (https://github.com/daniellagr/teachingasart/blob/master/ArteWorkshop1.pdf)
And here a possible curriculum for a workshop at The Rubin museum:
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An acoustics of change begins with an encounter. There is white, and a systematizing confusion.
There is civilization : There are Drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, Hollywood, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, bull fighting, fashion shows, poodle dogs, condoms, pessaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neurosis, etc., etc.
There is love. There is art. Yes, there is love, art, life and other demons.
Flamingos and zebras too.
Art that triggers, that cares, that makes you believe in yourself and in others and in whatever you want. Art that opens eyes and emotions to possibilities; Art that could be read and felt even by those who are not in the alphabetical system.
Art that feels like the beginning of the morning when you have fallen in love, like opening a window and smelling luminosity. Art that is as didactic and primary, yet intense and elaborate as a kiss; Art that wants to kiss slowly and passionately. Art that rejoices in the dialogue with life, and suffers along and makes some melodic colorful noise too; fearless of piercing through the hallucinations that nowadays pass for reality.
Art that is human; with all errors and perfections, with boundaries, but Art that observes and acknowledges the importance of observation; an anatomy of the soul, always pushing the limits. Art that accepts differences of all kinds, but is into the de-luxe taste of love! Art that can’t live without imagination and love making.
Art, which has no intention to be called Art in order to belong; it needs no ideology, label, or institution. It can be given any desired name, yes, it is also an invitation to play. I will call it art for practical purposes, and for my personal desire to believe it is what it is. Once a magical-religious artifact then a technique for imitating reality, Art is now seen as an instrument towards modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.
This art is chameleonic enough to accomplish its major goal: To transform and help. Take these words as you please, for they need no avant-garde explanation.
Dynamite! knowledge remains open-ended and mysteriously infinite, available for all who allow themselves to perceive. There is no feasible scheme for universal liberation, for good and bad, for truth or happiness. Challenge that with action, we need gut and significance!
Men remain awaiting for miracles, for a miracle that would reveal the essence of things. How different would it be, if men were able to see miracles as always happening, if they discover the joyful enchantment of life instead of the unadventurous task of blindly searching for truths. Like Carnival, the possibilities of the marvelous, which lie concealed in the commonplace.
The symbol of desire versus the rigid punctilio; “everyday that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us. Every day that we live in harness with the woman whom we no longer love we destroy our power to love and to have the woman whom we merit. The age we live in is the age which suits us;” but there is always space for transformation, for a business suit and equations also fit into this art form, we encourage an Excel Manifesto!
A melodic outburst of colors, sounds, thoughts, beliefs and dreams.. What we see, what we think we see and what we think we know –all in the thin interconnection of space. It is the construction of a democratic space by modes of sensibility what must be pursued; and just as dance, empowers the human being, art breaks down barriers between people, carnival builds its own world versus the official world, the realization of the power inherited in human sensibility is the best weapon for social change.
No daring is fatal!
To fly while dancing, to feel like flying while dancing passionately in the middle of the streets, being whatever or whomever you want to be. The importance is in feeling it through your veins, the full potential of life inside you; uninhibited and free, with all of your heart, with your heart in your hands. If there is one specific point, one main intention of this Art, is precisely for everyone, really everyone to experience this feeling.
Rastreando Adentro del ser cosmico superior. Nadando en las orillas del alma Con savia que alimenta la alegria. Haciendo de la vida o de la muerte, algo hermoso. Donde esta el amor? En este navio solitario Lejos de todo Infinito como el mar? siempre en mi corazon.
Seeking Inside the superior cosmic being, Swimming in the shores of the soul With sap that feeds joy Making of life Or death, something beautiful. Where is love? In this lonely vessel Far from everything Infinite like the sea? Always in my heart.
The Political Agenda of an Artist? 1. To question 2. Believe 3. Dream 4. Create 5. Look inside to go outside 6. Help others to see; to understand the importance of observation. The Artistic Agenda of a Politician? 1. Be an artist 2. Believe 3. Dream 4. Act 5. Look outside to go inside 6. Help others to help each other
Load your words and actions with dynamite White | Yes Squares | Lines Love | Always Please, echo pure.
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This workshop is inspired in a manifesto that I wrote a couple of years ago along an installation piece that I always envisioned as an education or communal learning/ experimental experience.
" I would like to experiment with a complexity of interconnections by linking and exploring dialogues across the globe. Generating a space where individuals can interpret and represent their own notions of raw pure emotion, a poetic body wearing the traces of its history through different mediums of communication, technology, craft and experience. I see this experiment as an anthropological study, for it brings into being a possible locality, filled up with traces of human thought, reflections and interpretations coming from internal loci; thus producing a network of thought in constant transformation. This malleability can be mapped and I suspect it has musicality. The experiment, a collaborative work based on observation, to connect intensely disparate planes of existence in any given numbers. It is not particularly a chance operation but a process of experimentation. -The gap between art and life with multiple possibilities of being narrowed down.-
This project is visibly linked to specific words but not framed or limited by them. The concepts of ‘love’ and ‘manifesto’ are intended to be used as vehicles, in order to find a common space, a position of vicinity in which individuals can find themselves face to face with the possibility of being art."
References/Inspiration: UltraRed (http://www.ultrared.org/mission.html) Hans Haacke
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