It seems that the Scanlan pavilion is intended to disappear gradually on its tour through different art institutions. At every halt fewer elements will be available to resurrect the pavilion Joe Scanlan had developed. It will never make it to the museum. At this moment Potential Estate is negotiating its aquisition for the mud museum. More later.
Muhka is not a mud museum.
Potential Estate reflects on why this is the case. In doing so the entire archive will be integrated in a game matrix, to be played on location. Potential Estate reflects on the use of the collection and on a possible alternative public mediation of it. Looking through the archive Potential Estate came across one artist whose contribution to Cabinet Jurino became invaluable : Jimmie Durham. A Cherokee political activist, Durham has developed an important body of work confronting western cultural models of cultural authentification and classification. Potential Estate will acknowledge the pre-modern component of Durham’s work and its reflexivity.
Note also that the serpent is part of Jimmy Durham’s formal vocabulary (see The Center of the World, part of Muhka Collection or the Paper Museum project in Italy).
" My brain is frozen. I have to break free from this culture of mechanical reproduction and the thick incrustration who die on the surface "
in « House of 10.000 corpses », Rob Zombie, 2003.
— Tricksters or fakes, assistants or ‘toons, they are exemplars of the coming community
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press
Steps and ladders are an ancient and universal device for representing the growth, the upward and downward motion of nature. They are the symbol of achievement in the rise and descent through space, just as the circle, the coiled serpent, is the symbol for the rhythm of time...
David Freedberg / Pathos at Oraibi : What Warburg did not see
« Our ancestors sold Manhattan for trinkets. Today with the acquisition of the Hard Rock cafes we’re going to buy Manhattan back one hamburger at a time. »
Press conference Seminole Tribe
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