"A lot of times people just think I’m a curator,
but in fact the things I’m creating are much more
about a meta-narrative than about museums and displays."
"I really start
these kinds of museum projects without knowing what I’m
going to do. I try to just go in tabula rasa and be a sponge."
"I never have any problem with
being inspired—there’s always something new for
me to be inspired by."
Your museum projects
are an unusual kind of art practice.
WILSON:
I came to making these museum
projects and calling them art not via art history necessarily—not
via seeing Joseph Beuys or others. I came to it via being
an artist and working in the museum and gallery world creating
exhibitions, also working in museums in various capacities—educator,
preparator, museum guard. Coming from my background as an
artist, I am seeing museum space as a constructed kind of
design space, as an installation environment. Very much like
an artist you’re manipulating objects, light, color,
spatial relationships. So I thought perhaps I could manipulate
the space, make it kind of a trompe l'oeil of a museum space.
Critiquing, as well, the notion of museum.
A lot of times
people just think I’m a curator, but in fact the things
I’m creating are much more about a meta-narrative than
about museums and displays. The subject of the exhibition—which
is what most curators are concerned about—takes a back seat
to that. I’m just using the museum as my palette, basically.
When you go into one of my projects a lot of times you’re
scratching your head. You’re scratching your head because
the information—like any art work—makes you question your
own thoughts and have to work a little bit. It’s not
telling you everything. Your emotions and your feelings about
what you’re seeing and your experience are as important
as any specific information that I’m giving you. So
it’s a very different experience when you’re
in one of my projects. And it’s even a greater experience
if you didn’t know that I did it, because then you’re
just having this experience without knowing that it’s
an artist who created it for you.
ART:21:
How do these projects come about?
WILSON:
I never contact museums to do
a project. They have to want me there because what I do is
so different from what a normal curator would do. Often it’s
about the institution and one never knows what I’m
going to bring up. So they have to really want me there.
Usually the director or the chief curator invites me. With
Sweden, the director invited me to do a project there. They
don’t usually ask me to do something specific. I’m
invited to look at their collection and create a work from
their collection. I can basically have free rein to do what
I want to do. And thankfully people know what I do now in
many, many corners of the globe, so I have wonderful opportunities
to do projects with different kinds of museums. And I’m
always looking for a very different collection, different
place because that really inspires me to do something completely
different from what I’ve done before.
ART:21:
Say more about your installation
at the Museum of World Culture in Sweden.
WILSON:
I started the way I normally
start: meet everyone, look at the collection, talk to people
about the collection, research the collection, and then try
to understand the city I’m in and make a piece. This
museum had a very old history, but it ended—there was
no building. They were building a new building, but everyone
on
the staff was pretty new and certainly none of them had been
around when the things were collected. So it was an unusual
experience in that there no was memory within the walls even.
No, this was a new place. The collection’s old so I
did a great deal of research on the collection and the archaeologists
and anthropologists who collected the things.
I really start
these kinds of museum projects without knowing what I’m
going to do. I try to just go in tabula rasa and be a sponge.
I always have a little notebook about each project and write
down everything—every experience, every thought, anything
that was important along the way. In the beginning it’s
fun and then as you keep going you get a little nervous because
you have to figure out what this is, and you only have a
certain amount of time to get this piece done. So it gets
a little nerve-wracking. But it always comes together. If
I trust the process and have enough time, all the strands
come together.
Looking through all this stuff I became interested in the
archaeological things. They have huge African, Indonesian,
and Latin American collections. There were going to be other
exhibitions of African art in the museum so a lot of the
collection—the good stuff—was being used already. I looked
at the Latin American collection and became really interested
in what they had. And they had both ethnographic and archaeological
things—they had many, many, many things and the things had
been around for a long time.
Personally, one issue that came up for me was with the ethnographic
collections. I felt really uncomfortable using much of the
ethnographic collections. Not necessarily because how they
were collected—I didn’t know necessarily how they
were collected. I knew some issues, but not the subtlety
of it. I usually like to talk to the people whose things
I put on view. Usually I’m using things in a museum
that are from that culture, but here I was in Sweden looking
at native things from Latin America. There was nobody to
talk to about these things and no way to understand—on any
level—how people felt about these things or how they related
in the context of the culture.
A western art museum is something I’m familiar with,
that’s one level of understanding that I already have.
Working in the Historical Society in Baltimore, it was important
for me to understand Baltimore a bit, at least absorb people’s
feelings about their world in order for me to make a piece
that fit within that place. I never think specifically how
it fits but just something about being in a place with people
from a place, you become more a part of that place and less
an outsider, less someone who would create something that
would not make sense for that location. And that to me is
really important because that’s who’s going to
see it generally.
With this collection, this was not the
case, these ethnographers from Sweden brought things in and
so I had no sense of the context of
these things. It was just me and these objects and I felt
very uncomfortable.
Part of the problem with ethnographic museums in general
is that these things are put on view without the culture
or the people who made them. There’s very little sensitivity
around that and I didn’t want to be a part of that.
So I really avoid ethnographic collections.
Archaeological collections I found I could work with a little
more. The communities were no longer the same in contemporary
times as they were a thousand years ago, so I felt that I
could work with those materials because there wasn’t
really a community to talk to about them. I could lay over
whatever I thought about them as much as anyone else. But
what really got to me was that I was going through these
ethnographic collections, particularly I was looking through
ceramics, and they had all these stones. The hysterical thing
about this was, I really didn’t think I was going to
use stone the first few days I was there. I had this film
crew coming, following me around, and I knew they wanted
me to pull out something and say, “Yes, I’m going
to use this,” for the cameras. I didn’t know
what I was going to use but I thought, “Well I’m
not going to use stone, so I will just go and look at the
stones.” And so I went over to the stones to pull out
a stone just to say, “Yes, this is really interesting
to me.” I didn’t want to say that I was going
to use it or not use it, but I thought, “Well, this
is something I probably won’t use so I’m safe
to have some vague interest in it.”
The thing I found was something from my family’s island.
The Caribe Indians, of which my family is a part, had these
ancient stones from islands in the Caribbean the size of
a volcano. These stones were taken by so-called archaeologists
in the 1700s or early 1800s. And here they were. I’d
never seen anything like that before. So this thing I thought
I would not use at all became the center point for how I
thought about looking at the collection—the idea that these
ancient stones have no provenance. There’s no way to
know where it came from on the island, what it was used for,
where it had been, they were just in the collection—in
the basement. They would never be displayed, ever, they would
just sit down there. And here I was seeing this thing that
relates to my family. There’s very little to be seen
of the Caribes. Columbus came to my family’s island
in 1498 and everybody knows the story of what happened with
Columbus and then the colonialists. And then here these stones
are in a basement in a museum in Sweden. They would just
sit there and nobody would ever know that they were there.
So I thought, “How much of the world is moving around
like this, where people have no idea where their cultures
or the things that might relate to them have ended up?”
ART:21:
It’s often said that movement,
especially global travel, is a very modern thing.
WILSON:
But it’s been happening
forever, for various reasons. For positive and sometimes
not such positive reasons. I just thought it was interesting.
I began to think that it’s a lot about why things move
around in the world, and how the museum is in the center
of all of that. So the exhibition title is “Site Unseen:
Dwellings of the Demons.” And I view the "site
unseen" as the literal things that are never seen before
by the public. But also these invisible processes of museums
as things that are unseen.
ART:21:
Do you often confront radically
different processes in museums around the world?
WILSON:
There is an international way
of working in museums: I’ll come to a museum and say, “I
want to do this,” and they won’t allow me to
move anything around—they all do that. (LAUGHS)
But...pretty
much if I’m there long enough they give me the white
gloves and I can start to move things. Sometimes they have
museum designers...I decide on paper how I want it designed,
but then these designers come in and it all goes up by itself.
The museum comes and does it. And sometimes I’m the
only exhibition that’s happening at that moment and
so everything’s focused on me. And so I have this crowd
of people to doing what I want them to do. And sometimes
I have absolute silence and am able to concentrate. Sometimes
there are a lot of meetings with different museum people,
and sometimes there’s no meetings and I’m able
to do what I want to do, freely, and I have only a few people
to work with. It tends to be very different.
Since this is
a brand new museum everything is happening at the same time.
Everyone is trying to get things ready. The museum itself,
the building is being made ready as well. So there’s
a lot activity here. Probably more than I’ve experienced
because it’s the grand opening of the museum. I thought
I should mention that because it is such a different experience.
In the United States, certain things are allowed and certain
things are not allowed. I can move certain objects and I
can’t move other objects. I was in Holland and did
a project where they brought out these Vincent Van Gogh paintings
and I was able to hang them myself. And of course a Van Gogh
painting in the United States, I would never get anywhere
near it! But in Rotterdam, they’ve got so many of them!
So in different museums I have different experiences. With
American Indian objects, some things you can see and work
with and other things you can’t even see. They’re
closed in a room because they’re sacred objects. Or
they’re secret objects that only certain members of
the tribe can view them, the chief or the religious person.
You can’t even go in the room. There are many protocols
concerning exhibiting objects in the same room when working
with American Indian objects. So each environment is very
different, and that’s of course what makes it interesting
for me being in new places—different cultures, different
people, different collections. I never have any problem with
being inspired—there’s always something new for
me to be inspired by.
