VISUAL CULTURE ART 218: Fred Wilson, American, b. 1954

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Fred Wilson, American, b. 1954

Fred Wilson
Link here to watch ART 21 video.

Watch and Listen:

Scholl Lecture Series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v2as0pNkog

Read:

Nasher Museum of Art.

http://www.artsjournal.com/flyover/2009/10/fred_wilson.html

"As a student of material culture, I knew the importance of allowing objects and their makers to speak. As a poet and fiction writer I know that stories can kill as well as cure." How Objects Get Their Meaning by John Perreault. Source Link: http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2004/05/fred_wilsons_quest.html

Mining The Museum, 1992

Maryland Historical Society

What we don't see on display is significant.

Didactic - Intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive.

Provocative - Causing a strong reaction, especially deliberately.

Context - The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement or idea.

Display - Make a prominent exhibition of (something) in a place where it can be easily seen.

Wilson’s intervention was a correction of the museum’s identity in the sense that it made the underlying racism apparent. Using glass cases and neat labeling, Wilson’s installations mimicked the usual methods of museum display but with a twist so that a new voice or persona was created. As he said it himself: “By bringing things out of storage and shifting things already on view, I believe I created a new public persona for the historical society.”

Slave shackles surrounded by silverware.

Synecdoche - A figure of speech in which, most commonly, a part stands for the whole. Wilson uses found objects synecdochically. In other words, a pair of crude slave shackles stands for slavery and the repression of its meaning and history.

Modes of Transport

Wilson communicated his critique through a strategic juxtaposition of the museum’s artifacts. The audience was left to draw the conclusions. Wilson exhibited an old baby carriage in which a Ku Klux Klan hood substituted the usual bedding. The baby carriage was placed next to a photograph of black nannies with white babies — their future employers. Again, Wilson did not make any explicit statements, but simply provided the audience with a strong visual statement about the persistence of racial hierarchies. The suggestion that children readily absorb their parents’ prejudices was clear.

Selections from the Maryland Historical Society

Plantation furniture surrounding a slave whipping post used until 1950's.

Guarded View

Wilson commented:

“The majority of museum guards...tend to be African American...Many of the museums on the East Coast pride themselves, and get...funds...for having such large minority employment. But actually all the employment is in the guards, and the fact that they’re in that level of the museum and not on the upper levels, affects the kind of artwork that’s displayed and the kind of visitor that comes through the door.” 2

The piece consists of posed black mannequins dressed in security uniforms displayed on a small platform; this piece was later developed into a performance by Wilson. Invited by the staff of the museum to give a pre opening tour, he greeted them as himself, and then arranged to meet with the group elsewhere, during the short lapse of time Wilson changed into a guards uniform and waited at the designated space, not one member of the team recognised or approached him and it was only when he announced his presence and the purpose of the deception, that Guarded View’s point transpired and was fully understood.

Another section of the installation appropriated Picassos’ Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Aware that Picasso had been inspired by ethnographic collections and tribal masks from ‘primitive’ cultures when making Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Wilson adorned some of the nudes with tribal masks and when viewers peered through the cut out eyes they were met with the eyes of two Senegalese people and Wilson himself on a videotape asking questions such as “if my contemporary art is your traditional art, is my art your cliché?”3

Wilson's work at the Maryland Historical Society was as much about exposing the Eurocentric structure of museums as it was a healing process for all of those affected by their history being concealed. In a form of conclusion Wilson states

“Museums are afraid of what they will bring to the surface and how people will feel about certain issues that are long buried. They keep it buried, as if it doesn’t exist, as though people aren’t feeling these things anyway, instead of opening that sore and cleaning it out so it can heal.”4

Source Link: http://www.archivesandcreativepractice.com/fred-wilson