The Gowanus Canal, the newest Superfund site within New York City’s borders, is also home to many of Brooklyn’s transfer stations, recycling depots, and a couple of re-use businesses. The area is run-down, but densely inhabited. It is a nexus of waste and life. A project at the Observatory takes the discarded objects around the Gowanus Canal as a starting point for a new type of museum that showcases the mundane and everyday as a way to represent the area.
Gowanus Canal. Image from http://gowanuslab.tumblr.com/page/2
THE POP-UP MUSEUM of the Gowanus Canal
Curated by the Hollow Earth Society and Radio Transmission Ark
March 3 – April 22, 2012
Observatory
543 Union St.
Brooklyn, NY
*Progress Party showcasing the evolved work of the Pop-Up Museum: 8:00 PM, Friday April, 6th.*
A museum’s mission involves the categorization, preservation, and contextualization of objects within a finite space. The Pop-Up Museum is designed to function as the inverse of these practices, bringing together a set of local, “unremarkable” objects that then become art or serve as a springboard for art that references them.
Through the playful contextualization and re-contextualization of these objects, we will redefine the museum—both what a museum looks like, physically, and what it does, culturally.
Specifically, we will work with found materials from all around the Gowanus neighborhood to create a new “history” of the region and its traditions (a not entirely serious one).
As a collective, we will plow through a century of objects in order to remix in miniature the Gowanus, Observatory, and the whole enterprise of the museum—the whole enterprise of producing, categorizing, and showing off knowledge. Quick, fast, and dirty, the Pop-Up Museum presents the unpresentable: change itself.
The “art on the walls” for this show will thus consist of:
1. input – gathering of information, data, narratives, knowledges, magics, magnetisms, and (overlooked) curiosities from the physical space around Observatory
2. process – generation of media, drawings, recordings, photos, video, writing, and data analyses
3. output – a series of mixed-media art-objects, a book, a series of records, miniDV tapes, presentations, workshops, sound walks, magical fieldtrips, historical jaunts
All of these, not one of these, will become the art of the Pop-Up Museum…
Facilitators:
Ethan Gould, Wythe Marschall, Rob Peterson, Lindsey Reynolds
Artists:
Adrian Agredo, Stephen Aubrey, Grace Baxter, Emi Brady, Ted Enik, Ben Garthus, Nandini Nessa, Megan Murtha, Rob Parker, Kathryn Pierce, Oberon Redman, Nikki Romanello, Mike Rugnetta, Tim Schwartz, Jon Waldo
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Reposted from Material Culture.
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