I am proposing a performance to establish 10 Museums of Mental Objects. Founded in 2002 by Judy Freya Sibayan and Matt Price, MoMO is a “performance art museum for life.” At present, Price and Sibayan are the curators of and are the Museum of Mental Objects. As its method of collecting and installing art, artists whisper artworks to MoMO. To exhibit the works, MoMO recites the artists’ names and works which are never to be documented in any shape or form by the curators or the artists themselves. No video or audio recordings are made of the performance. There are no photographs taken of the event. The audience are requested to do the same. These works exist wholly dependent on how well the MoMO keeps them as memories or how memorable these works are. MoMO is only a keeper of mental objects. MoMO exhibits no physical visible artworks, thus there are no physical objects to be commodified.
During a formal performance, a work is collected, installed and exhibited. The museum narrates its history and its objectives as Institutional Critique; and dialogues with its audience. There are two ways MoMO is performed. One, it can schedule a performance in a formal setting which is announced with invitations made via the net or through word of mouth (no paper-based invitations are allowed by MoMO). The second is a more spontaneous process where anyone can request MoMO to open and perform anywhere MoMO is encountered. During such instances, no art is collected and installed. But essentially MoMO is performed anytime everywhere. MoMO/the curators however can also collect and install works anytime and anywhere via phone, or skype, and on such occasions there may or may not be an audience.
A short history of MoMO: In 1989, I resigned from the directorship of the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the most well endowed, thus the most powerful contemporary art museum in the country then. I resigned based on my unhappiness with the realization that the monolithic art center excluded those artists that didn’t practice art based on the modernist tenets Marcia Tucker listed as “progress, continuity, totality, mastery and the universal claim to history accepted as true" which were in opposition to the practices of the majority of Filipino artists; a process of exclusion which according to Pierre Bourdieu is a form of symbolic violence. Thus, if my “dis-ease” with the monolithic circuit of production, circulation, and reception of art had largely to do with its ecology of mere spectacle and monuments, of confinement, dependency and co-optation (infrastructural, institutional, historical, economic, discursive), of privilege and exclusivity, of universals and homogeneity, the path to restoring my health was a movement away from this circuit. To have left the center/Center was the only tenable response to a situation I found deeply problematic as an artist whose trajectory is to make critical art, that is, art that problematizes the making of art; art that puts into crisis the institution of art (Hal Foster).
Thus since 1994, I have engaged in a de-centered art practice in the sense that my work developed from art done at the Center of the Philippine artworld (paradoxically considered avant-garde) to the eventual moving away from a dependency on formal institutional support and valuation toward a reliance on mostly my own everyday life resources. As a process of de-centering, it was a response to what Andrea Fraser claims as the failure of the avant-garde with the institutionalization of this failure becoming the condition of another practice, that of Institutional Critique. A social position that locates the artist in relation to the center of the art institution, a de-centered practice is that of the “ex-centric” positioning the artist “off-center” establishing her aim to problematize and change the site and not to affirm, expand or reinforce her relationship to it. A term Linda Hutcheon coins in her book The Poetics of Postmodernism, the ex-centric, a post-modern subject, questions, contests, and problematizes, with the aim to change but does not destroy, “centralized, totalized, hierarchized, closed systems...part of its questioning involves an energizing and rethinking of margins and edges, of what does not fit the humanly constructed notion of the center”—a stance that positions the ex-centric paradoxically both inside and outside.Given this position as an “inside-outsider,” the ex-centric expediently uses parody as its mode of critique for the genre’s “essential reflexivity, its capacity to reflect critically back upon itself, not merely upon its target” (Michelle Hanoosh). In my practice, I have in fact conflated this two terms and concluded that Institutional Critique is the work of the ex-centric. In doing MoMO as a parody of the art institution, I am able to mock and transform, undermine and renew the art institution thus putting parody’s critical function ultimately in the service of the re-creation and continuity of the institutionof art and thus ultimately in the service of expanding this particular field of cultural production—thus the ex- centric as being an inside-outsider.
MoMO is actually a parody of Scapular Gallery Nomad (SGN), an earlier parodic performance where I wore a gallery that I curated for five years. With SGN, I empowered myself by becoming the whole institution of art thus investing myself with all the agencies necessary in producing the belief in the value of the work of art as part of the reality of the work (Bourdieu). I was all of the following—curator, critic, publisher, artist, dealer, academic, editor, press relations officer, graphic designer, vehicle of the gallery, architect and builder of the gallery, gallery manager, and gallery archivist. The production of discourse about the work is of course is one of the more crucial conditions of production of the work. The enactment of the critique aside from embodying it through performance (acting it out) was also enacted through the production of discourse. I established “Works of Winged Women,” as the gallery’s publishing arm. I wrote, designed, and printed little exhibition catalogues to accompany each of the one-person exhibitions of thirty-two artists. I gave myself all the power and control over the production of my art as a way of demonstrating where agency lies in the production of art. A work of decentering, I could claim that I was an artist independent of the resources of the usual art structures that produce art and artists. This performance art gallery yielded several more parodic works, since a good parody inherently yields other parodies of itself, making the work more complex, for each future parody redounds upon the source (Hanoosh). These consequent parodies were works critical too of the art institution with the same goal to expand and evolve the institution to accommodate the practices and values I wish to institutionalize: an art institution that readily questions itself; an institution of art that is, as a matter of course and without debate, self-reflexive, thus auto-critical. One of the parodies that issued from SGN, is MoMO, a performance that does away with all the materiality of SGN.
For the past 9 years, MoMO has essentially been performed at the margins but it has also performed at the centers of the artworld. In 2002, at the international workshop “Museum Practices of the 21st Century” sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Asia Art Archive, MoMO was invited to deliver a paper about itself and collect and install an artwork to demonstrate how it is a 21st century museum practice. In 2006, MoMO was in Glasgow to perform at the National Review of Live Art at the Tramway. In 2007, MoMO was hosted at PEER Gallery Space in London where it collected 10 artworks by 10 London-based artists. This was a special event because for the first time the two curators, Price (who is based in London) and Sibayan performed together as MoMO. On January 20, 2010, MoMO performed at Just Madrid Art Fair. Chosen by the curatorial team Filipa Oliveira and Miguel Amado to take part in their “On the Table” project for the Curators’ Desk program, MoMO went to the art fair to collect, install and exhibit artworks that could not be purchased, traded, or commodified. In this art fair, MoMO collected art that negated the very raison d’etre of a market of commodity fetishes. Thus it went to an art fair to circulate oppositional ideas. MoMO continues to enter the fray at the center with the aim to speak truth to power.
After 9 years of performance, it is time to evolve MoMO. It would be ideal to have this performance done as a parallel event at an international art fair. I would like to take advantage of the art fair again to circulate oppositional ideas and again to speak truth to power by furthering the parody, by continuing the de-centering, by proliferating the Institutional Critique. By multiplyng MoMO, I now release it away from me and into the hands (bodies) of other artists further explorating and propagating this practice as a 21st century museum praxis. This time, I parody the practice of major museums like the Guggenheim which clones itself in other major cities. Whereas museums such as the Guggenheim are monolithic and cumbersome, the future MoMOs as parodies are agile, mobile, self-reliant, non-monumental; they are able to do away with commodifying structures and practices. As ironic inversions of these mausoleums, these MoMOs will circulate away from the entomb and the hierarchical and as living museums themselves will produce art among the living and the rhizomatic. They will bring art to the here-and-now and away from the eternal; to the open and away from the walled-in; to the humble, messy and the sordid and away from the clean, the unshadowed, and the sanitized; to the quotidian, the dull, the rote, the repetitive, and the habitual; to the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the demotic and vernacular, and away from the unique, the new, the precious and the singular; to the din and the noisy and away from deep silence and stillness; to the variegated, the textured, the heterogeneous and away from the homologous and the very white cube; to the unseen, the invisible, to the only-imagined and away from spectacle, the spectacular and the large scale; to the inconsequential and away from the significant, the valorized and momentous; to the profane and the secular and away from the sacred and sacramental; to the humble and away from power and influence; to active, whole and fully present conversing bodies (audiences) and away from the silenced, fragmented audience of disembodied eyes; to mostly the margins, borders and the periphery and away from the center most of the time; to the accidental, random and aleatory, serendipitous and providential and away from closed and controlling systems.
I am proposing a performance to establish 10 Museums of Mental Objects. Founded in 2002 by Judy Freya Sibayan and Matt Price, MoMO is a “performance art museum for life.” At present, Price and Sibayan are the curators of and are the Museum of Mental Objects. As its method of collecting and installing art, artists whisper artworks to MoMO. To exhibit the works, MoMO recites the artists’ names and works which are never to be documented in any shape or form by the curators or the artists themselves. No video or audio recordings are made of the performance. There are no photographs taken of the event. The audience are requested to do the same. These works exist wholly dependent on how well the MoMO keeps them as memories or how memorable these works are. MoMO is only a keeper of mental objects. MoMO exhibits no physical visible artworks, thus there are no physical objects to be commodified.
During a formal performance, a work is collected, installed and exhibited. The museum narrates its history and its objectives as Institutional Critique; and dialogues with its audience. There are two ways MoMO is performed. One, it can schedule a performance in a formal setting which is announced with invitations made via the net or through word of mouth (no paper-based invitations are allowed by MoMO). The second is a more spontaneous process where anyone can request MoMO to open and perform anywhere MoMO is encountered. During such instances, no art is collected and installed. But essentially MoMO is performed anytime everywhere. MoMO/the curators however can also collect and install works anytime and anywhere via phone, or skype, and on such occasions there may or may not be an audience.
A short history of MoMO: In 1989, I resigned from the directorship of the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the most well endowed, thus the most powerful contemporary art museum in the country then. I resigned based on my unhappiness with the realization that the monolithic art center excluded those artists that didn’t practice art based on the modernist tenets Marcia Tucker listed as “progress, continuity, totality, mastery and the universal claim to history accepted as true" which were in opposition to the practices of the majority of Filipino artists; a process of exclusion which according to Pierre Bourdieu is a form of symbolic violence. Thus, if my “dis-ease” with the monolithic circuit of production, circulation, and reception of art had largely to do with its ecology of mere spectacle and monuments, of confinement, dependency and co-optation (infrastructural, institutional, historical, economic, discursive), of privilege and exclusivity, of universals and homogeneity, the path to restoring my health was a movement away from this circuit. To have left the center/Center was the only tenable response to a situation I found deeply problematic as an artist whose trajectory is to make critical art, that is, art that problematizes the making of art; art that puts into crisis the institution of art (Hal Foster).
Thus since 1994, I have engaged in a de-centered art practice in the sense that my work developed from art done at the Center of the Philippine artworld (paradoxically considered avant-garde) to the eventual moving away from a dependency on formal institutional support and valuation toward a reliance on mostly my own everyday life resources. As a process of de-centering, it was a response to what Andrea Fraser claims as the failure of the avant-garde with the institutionalization of this failure becoming the condition of another practice, that of Institutional Critique. A social position that locates the artist in relation to the center of the art institution, a de-centered practice is that of the “ex-centric” positioning the artist “off-center” establishing her aim to problematize and change the site and not to affirm, expand or reinforce her relationship to it. A term Linda Hutcheon coins in her book The Poetics of Postmodernism, the ex-centric, a post-modern subject, questions, contests, and problematizes, with the aim to change but does not destroy, “centralized, totalized, hierarchized, closed systems...part of its questioning involves an energizing and rethinking of margins and edges, of what does not fit the humanly constructed notion of the center”—a stance that positions the ex-centric paradoxically both inside and outside.Given this position as an “inside-outsider,” the ex-centric expediently uses parody as its mode of critique for the genre’s “essential reflexivity, its capacity to reflect critically back upon itself, not merely upon its target” (Michelle Hanoosh). In my practice, I have in fact conflated this two terms and concluded that Institutional Critique is the work of the ex-centric. In doing MoMO as a parody of the art institution, I am able to mock and transform, undermine and renew the art institution thus putting parody’s critical function ultimately in the service of the re-creation and continuity of the institutionof art and thus ultimately in the service of expanding this particular field of cultural production—thus the ex- centric as being an inside-outsider.
MoMO is actually a parody of Scapular Gallery Nomad (SGN), an earlier parodic performance where I wore a gallery that I curated for five years. With SGN, I empowered myself by becoming the whole institution of art thus investing myself with all the agencies necessary in producing the belief in the value of the work of art as part of the reality of the work (Bourdieu). I was all of the following—curator, critic, publisher, artist, dealer, academic, editor, press relations officer, graphic designer, vehicle of the gallery, architect and builder of the gallery, gallery manager, and gallery archivist. The production of discourse about the work is of course is one of the more crucial conditions of production of the work. The enactment of the critique aside from embodying it through performance (acting it out) was also enacted through the production of discourse. I established “Works of Winged Women,” as the gallery’s publishing arm. I wrote, designed, and printed little exhibition catalogues to accompany each of the one-person exhibitions of thirty-two artists. I gave myself all the power and control over the production of my art as a way of demonstrating where agency lies in the production of art. A work of decentering, I could claim that I was an artist independent of the resources of the usual art structures that produce art and artists. This performance art gallery yielded several more parodic works, since a good parody inherently yields other parodies of itself, making the work more complex, for each future parody redounds upon the source (Hanoosh). These consequent parodies were works critical too of the art institution with the same goal to expand and evolve the institution to accommodate the practices and values I wish to institutionalize: an art institution that readily questions itself; an institution of art that is, as a matter of course and without debate, self-reflexive, thus auto-critical. One of the parodies that issued from SGN, is MoMO, a performance that does away with all the materiality of SGN.
For the past 9 years, MoMO has essentially been performed at the margins but it has also performed at the centers of the artworld. In 2002, at the international workshop “Museum Practices of the 21st Century” sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Asia Art Archive, MoMO was invited to deliver a paper about itself and collect and install an artwork to demonstrate how it is a 21st century museum practice. In 2006, MoMO was in Glasgow to perform at the National Review of Live Art at the Tramway. In 2007, MoMO was hosted at PEER Gallery Space in London where it collected 10 artworks by 10 London-based artists. This was a special event because for the first time the two curators, Price (who is based in London) and Sibayan performed together as MoMO. On January 20, 2010, MoMO performed at Just Madrid Art Fair. Chosen by the curatorial team Filipa Oliveira and Miguel Amado to take part in their “On the Table” project for the Curators’ Desk program, MoMO went to the art fair to collect, install and exhibit artworks that could not be purchased, traded, or commodified. In this art fair, MoMO collected art that negated the very raison d’etre of a market of commodity fetishes. Thus it went to an art fair to circulate oppositional ideas. MoMO continues to enter the fray at the center with the aim to speak truth to power.
After 9 years of performance, it is time to evolve MoMO. It would be ideal to have this performance done as a parallel event at an international art fair. I would like to take advantage of the art fair again to circulate oppositional ideas and again to speak truth to power by furthering the parody, by continuing the de-centering, by proliferating the Institutional Critique. By multiplyng MoMO, I now release it away from me and into the hands (bodies) of other artists further explorating and propagating this practice as a 21st century museum praxis. This time, I parody the practice of major museums like the Guggenheim which clones itself in other major cities. Whereas museums such as the Guggenheim are monolithic and cumbersome, the future MoMOs as parodies are agile, mobile, self-reliant, non-monumental; they are able to do away with commodifying structures and practices. As ironic inversions of these mausoleums, these MoMOs will circulate away from the entomb and the hierarchical and as living museums themselves will produce art among the living and the rhizomatic. They will bring art to the here-and-now and away from the eternal; to the open and away from the walled-in; to the humble, messy and the sordid and away from the clean, the unshadowed, and the sanitized; to the quotidian, the dull, the rote, the repetitive, and the habitual; to the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the demotic and vernacular, and away from the unique, the new, the precious and the singular; to the din and the noisy and away from deep silence and stillness; to the variegated, the textured, the heterogeneous and away from the homologous and the very white cube; to the unseen, the invisible, to the only-imagined and away from spectacle, the spectacular and the large scale; to the inconsequential and away from the significant, the valorized and momentous; to the profane and the secular and away from the sacred and sacramental; to the humble and away from power and influence; to active, whole and fully present conversing bodies (audiences) and away from the silenced, fragmented audience of disembodied eyes; to mostly the margins, borders and the periphery and away from the center most of the time; to the accidental, random and aleatory, serendipitous and providential and away from closed and controlling systems.