Imaginary Museum Research Articles

Contested Memories: An Imaginary Museum for a Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyr, Liu Hulan

Over the past few years, the Chinese government has sought to assert ideological dominance and rebuild the legitimacy of the Communist Party regime through control of national memory. Although collective memory is shaped by the ruling government through ideological maneuvering, it is also reinterpreted in literature, media, and art. This article examines both the state-sanctioned narratives and the reproductions of one young female revolutionary martyr, Liu Hulan (1932–1947), to explore how the process of making Liu a martyr contributed to collective memory, how gender and sexuality support or problematize state-sponsored ideology, and how contemporary rewritings of Liu’s martyrdom question state ideology and nationalism. This article establishes an imaginary museum for Liu Hulan, exhibiting official memories and countermemories in juxtaposition. It shows that chastity and traditional gender roles remain constant concerns in the creation and commemoration of female revolutionary martyrs.

The elevation of Henry Willett

Abstract Henry Willett (1823–1905) was a wealthy Brighton brewer who, funded by a large inheritance, became a nationally renowned collector and one of the founders of Brighton Museum. This article focuses on Willett as a ‘collector of collections’ and investigates the eclecticism of the artefacts that he accumulated in a wide range of areas: archaeology, books, curiosities, ethnography, fine art, fossils, furniture, minerals, natural history, ‘objects of vertue’ and pottery. It argues that collecting (and exhibiting) objects, for Willett, was partly a strategy for collecting people, a means of elevating himself into cultural and intellectual circles in both Brighton and London. It also speculates on the idea that Willett’s serial collecting reflected a desire to create his own private museum referencing the totality of human knowledge – an ‘imaginary museum’ whose specimens remained hidden away in premises in Brighton and Hove, only occasionally seeing the light of day.

André Malraux at the Heart of Romain Gary’s Imaginary Museum

Malraux is in the center of Gary’s imaginary museum. His name and thought are regularly quoted in Gary’s work. When the author of Pour Sganarelle, La Promesse de l’aube and La Danse de Gengis Cohn refers to the metamorphosis and the museum without walls – two concepts Malraux invented –, he uses Malraux’s image and writings to reveal how himself sees the world and the artist’s role. To analyse those quotes leads to reading Gary’s work through the lens of Malraux’s. It also shows how Gary portrays himself as a « conqueror of the impossible » while making his model embody his own aesthetic and ethical aspirations. His selfportrait as a jumping jack makes Gary follow the path of his friend, who elevated Man by softening his condition.

The Imaginary Museum : From Malraux to Gary

The concept of an imaginary museum developed by André Malraux in the eponymous book was taken up by Gary, notably in his novel La Danse de Genghis Cohn. This reappropriation of the concept allows to reborn it in a more subversive form and to pose the question of the aestheticization of suffering through art. In doing so, Gary, while paying tribute to the writer and intellectual who was one of the first to believe in him, allows himself to extend his reflection on the concept of imaginary museum, thus linking their two thoughts that seem to respond to each other like mirrors placed face to face in his work.

Unter die Lupe genommen: Kompositorische Auseinandersetzungen mit Ludwig van Beethoven seit 2010

Beethoven enjoys an astonishing presence in contemporary musical life, although two hundred years separate him from our present. His mature works are considered “the foundation of modern music” (Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen 2019). However, their continued veneration and marketing has often led to a failure to recognise their potential for innovation, which once made them the new music of their time. Like “classical music” in general, Beethoven is frequently misunderstood as a self-evident exhibit in “The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works” (Lydia Goehr 1992). The tension between enduring modernity and growing historical distance makes Beethoven a central point of reference for contemporary composers. Since his 200th anniversary in 1970, numerous compositional explorations of his music have emerged, especially in the run-up to the 250th anniversary in 2020. Using a small selection of new instrumental works from the 2010s by Hans Zender, Johannes Schöllhorn, Frank Zabel, Johannes Quint, Vito Palumbo and others, this essay examines various ways of arrangements and recompositions which reflect on, update or analyse Beethoven’s music.

Accession: A collecting Booth for an AI Museum

Accession is a collecting booth for an imaginary museum whose collection is described and organised by AI. Visitors submit everyday items to the booth where they are photographed and subjected to a number of AI processes which describe and classify the objects submitted. Through the exhibition the digital collection grows but as it does so the AI management becomes more and more selective about what is and is not accepted, rejecting new items that are a poor fit for the collection. Museum collections and AI classifiers rely on maintaining ho- mogeneity. A museum that collected anything would be a dumping ground with no identity, while AIs rely on training sets that have strong visual commonality. Both rely on a sense of sameness but both are subject to critical debates about diversity and representation. Accession explores this relationship by acting out a fictional but plausible scenario through commercially available AI technologies.

Spectacle of musealization and literaturization of the world in post/postmodern society

This article discusses current issues in the evolution of museums worldwide, influenced by global phenomena. The globalization of culture, on the one hand, and the musealization of the world, on the other hand, become the plays of a spectacle of the contemporary world. The museum cultural model becomes dominant in today’s society, influencing all spheres and finding representation in the world’s literatures. Among the various approached theories, the concepts of musealization of the modelled world as a cultural spectacle, “the world as a museum”, imaginary museum, the literaturization of the museum and the musealization of literature. From this perspective, the theses of the Nobel laureates in literature Mario Vargas Llosa and Orhan Pamuk are analysed. In Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence, the museum is the structuring narratological axis of the novel, its theme and compositional nucleus.

Virtual Tourism: An Imaginary Art Museum of Soekarno’s Painting Collection Series

Abstract : Purpose: This study is concerned with the challenge of how to creatively appreciate Soekarno the first president of Indonesia’s series of painting collections.
 Research methods: Based on multidisciplinary approaches it was composed of an imaginary building as well as Soekarno’s virtual art museum gallery.
 Findings: During his life, Soekarno (1901-1970) was fond of collecting numerous of masterpiece paintings and sculptures all of which beautified in six Presidential Palaces. By accommodating interest points in museum buildings and applying Jenck’s theory of postmodern architecture, a virtual or imaginary museum was created. A video depicting the artwork was uploaded on YouTube channel, which serves as Soekarno’s legacy.
 Implications: Because it is presented in cyber space, it can be easily accessed, and to be a virtual tourism.

Are Classical Musicians Excluded from Improvisation? Cultural Hegemony and the Effects of Ideology on Musicians’ Attitudes Towards Improvisation

Since the late eighteenth century and the flowering of Romanticism, western classical or ‘art’ music has adopted aesthetics which aim to express ‘the great and sublime in nature’ (Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P. F. Collier and Son Company). However, though improvisation was a source of inspiration and motivation for creative expression, the rise of romantic aesthetics sacralised composers’ creative processes and their works, ultimately producing the more restricted concept of Werktreue, or fidelity to the score (Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). In this article, I turn to the writing of Louis Althusser (1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press) to illustrate how implicit values and beliefs within the cultural institutions of classical music form an ideology which dominates the individual in a way described as ‘hegemonic’. As a result, classically-trained musicians are excluded from improvisational practices, because: (i) they must act within a culture in which improvisation itself is misunderstood, misrepresented and suppressed, and (ii) the act of ‘interpellation’, in which ideology is interpreted by the individual, encourages musicians themselves to identify and seek fulfilment through non-creative, non-improvisatory practices. Lastly, I explore a way out from the determining tendency of ideology, explaining how the act of improvisation offers an alternative musical role which is genuinely creative and indeterminate; allowing the musician to become ideologically aware, and thus free to choose their own musical identity.

Virginia Woolf's Imaginary Museum of the Medieval in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’

This article shows that the Middle Ages Virginia Woolf imagines in her 1906 short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ are influenced by the staging of the medieval in late-Victorian museums and reflects late-Victorian medievalism. From the perspective of material culture studies, Woolf's tale reflects the representation and fabrication of the medieval by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and shapes a similar narrative of the Middle Ages. Relying on Michel Foucault's definitions of ‘heterotopia’ as well as on Tony Bennett's analysis of Victorian museums, this article argues that Woolf's fictionalisation of the medieval evidences a new, complex temporality of knowledge and consciousness of the past which also defines late-Victorian curatorial philosophy and practices. It analyses each regime of that new temporality: first, the archaeological gaze and its contribution to the grand national narrative via the literary canon and, second, the theatrical gaze, with its focus on spectacularly displayed artefacts, that partakes of an image's mystique. In temporal terms, this results in a tension between the tangible remains of a past clearly separated from the present and the mystical fusion of past and present reinscribing Woolf's poetics of the moment within a sense of history.

Kateryna Butska. Museumfication of reality as a feature оf the postmodernist worldview: the image of the museum in the novel “Flights” by O. Tokarczuk

Active expansion of the functional area of contemporary museums allows us to speak about museumfication – of history, of culture and its particular phenomena. Collecting, inventorying, quoting, archiving, which are some of the key cultural procedures of today, are the essence of the phenomenon of museumfication that expands over our everyday culture and experience. The article is dedicated to the museumfication of reality as an artistic practice and as distinctive feature of the postmodernist worldview. The purpose of the article is to identify the peculiarities of the literary interpretation of the phenomenon of the museum in the novel “Flights” by O. Tokarczuk. Museum is one of the emblematic images of the postmodernist ideological and aesthetical paradigm. Moreover, in this paradigm museum functions as a universal metaphor and a specific model of the world. The novelty of the article is determined by the fact that the first time the image of the museum as one of the key elements of the artistic world in the works of O. Tokarczuk is analysed. Research methods: descriptive, cultural historical, analysis, synthesis of information. Conclusions. The artistic practices of the museumfication take an important place in the novel “Flights” by O. Tokarczuk. It is noteworthy that these practices are not only present at the thematic level of the novel, but the authoress herself employs them in her work, composing “Flights” as a kind of an imaginary museum, a collection of narratives. The image of the museum in the novel embodies a number of features that are distinctive for the postmodern ideological and aesthetic paradigm: the principles of fragmentariness and constellation, implementing baroque naturalistic aesthetics, formaland thematic antagonism in relation to coherent grandnarratives, artistic modeling of the world in the form of panopticon, etc.

Did Bach Compose Musical Works? Thinking with Adorno through Paradigms of Possibility

Abstract This essay presents Theodor W. Adorno’s case pro and contra the regulation of the work-concept in a tradition that long sustained a great 1800 divide. The case is made through the provocation offered in Lydia Goehr’s Imaginary Museum of Musical Works that “Bach did not intend to compose musical works.” The essay investigates the many references to Johann Sebastian Bach in Adorno’s aesthetic, social, and philosophical writings to show that his Bach case was not merely illustrative but paradigmatic of every case he made for a critical theory of possibility. Adorno’s case was an urgent matter of rescue and justice, made by linking Bach’s compositions to Arnold Schoenberg’s paradigmata of a possible music through the mediation of the work-concept for which Ludwig van Beethoven was made in the tradition paradigmatically to stand.

Why Quantum Art was born

This is the story of my thought and my artistic activity from the early 70s of the last century, until the publication of the Manifesto of Quantum Art. In this paper I retrace my ideals as a young dreamer of a different world and how these were expressed through the use of the camera and the darkroom. My innovative ideas have found space in the creation of photographic works and photo sculptures, in the publication of the Manifesto of “Photography and Substantial Art” which have been a prelude to my human, artistic and professional growth. All this background is the basis of the Manifesto of Quantum Art published in 2008 and now on display at the Verghiano Imaginary Museum in Vizzini, Catania, Italy.

Australian colonial newspapers and the sharks of Sydney Harbour

ABSTRACT In nineteenth-century Australia, a distinct editorial interest developed for woodcut images in illustrated newspapers depicting sharks attacking people and people attacking sharks in Sydney Harbour. This article argues they were part of a culture of display of the savagery of the frontier that was the British colony. These mass-reproduced images reached a wide public both within and outside Australia. They dramatized settler-colonial life and shaped relationships of human and nonhuman beings in the oceanic environment of the expanding marine city of Sydney. Consumed in the context of empire, they formed part of a vast record that gave visible form to the remote, the strange and often the feared dimensions of colonial life. As this article shows, the careful selection of images and their juxtaposition within texts about everyday settler-colonial life served the purpose of an imaginary museum of local history. The article also draws a parallel between a colonial determination to dominate sharks and wilderness and a will to control Aboriginal people, Australia’s First Peoples.

André Malraux’s Comparative Theory of Art

The article deals with André Malraux’s (1901–1976) comparative theory of art. He, a French intellectual, novelist, and philosopher developed an original philosophical approach to art works and their transformations in time which has still a significant impact to contemporary comparative studies of art. The idea of metamorphosis expresses Malraux’s radical turn from classical academic aesthetics and his closeness to existential philosophical and aesthetical thinking. It reinforces the concept of the imaginary museum and provides a more philosophical background. Each culture perceives and accepts the art of other cultures according to its own viewpoints in a process which is defined by Malraux as metamorphosis. The full significance of metamorphosis appeared in modern civilisation—the first which collected art forms from any period and place. The work of art lives its own life deliberated from history and its consequential postulation of human permanence. The metamorphosis is the key to Malraux’s humanist metaphysics of art.

데이터베이스로서의 상상의 박물관과 새로운 서사: 디지털 인문학 관점을 중심으로

본 연구는 뉴 미디어 시대 데이터베이스로서의 상상의 박물관이 갖는 함의를 분석하는데 그 목적이 있다. 앙드레 말로가 1940년대에 개념화한 상상의 박물관은 우리로 하여금 단선적 역사 서술에서 벗어나 이미지들의 아틀라스인 상상의 미술사적 도정을 가능하게 했다. 이 과정에서 복제미디어인 사진은 무한한 자료의 수집과 분류를 촉진시킨다는 점에서 핵심적인 역할을 수행한다. 다시 말해 상상의 박물관은 복제 미디어 시대 예술사 지식 구조의 새로운 패러다임을 제시한다. 이러한 맥락에서 벽 있는 박물관과 벽 없는 박물관으로서의 상상의 박물관 사이의 대립은 큐레이션이라는 전문 영역의 변화와 긴밀히 연관된다.BR 1990년대 디지털 혁명이후 상상의 박물관은 현실이 되었다. 상상의 박물관이라는 개념은 미디어, 서사, 미술관에 대한 정의와 그것을 연구하는 방법의 근본적인 가정을 재고할 수 있는 가능성을 제공한다. 따라서 상상의 박물관은 기억 확장자로부터 하이퍼텍스트에 이르는 데이터베이스로서, 매체사적 관점으로 재맥락화될 수 있다. 데이터베이스로서의 상상의 박물관은 역사 서술의 방식이 단선적 구조로부터 공간적 항해로의 패러다임 변화를 겪고 있음을 보여준다. 결론적으로 데이터베이스로의 상상의 박물관은 엘리트가 생산하는 지식으로서의 거대서사를 상대화하고 변모시킨다.

Reflexão sobre a construção de sentido na performance musical pela perspectiva do intérprete de música indeterminada

Este trabalho é um desdobramento da pesquisa de doutorado ainda em andamento, intitulada, Acaso e indeterminação na música brasileira: uma análise do repertório violinístico após 1950. Aqui, discutiremos a genealogia do conceito de obra musical até sua cristalização por volta de 1800 e seus reflexos no desenvolvimento da notação e performance musical; as transformações estético-composicionais que surgiram a partir da segunda metade do século XX e suas principais vertentes; e por fim, procuramos oferecer uma breve reflexão sobre a construção de sentido na performance musical pela perspectiva do intérprete de música indeterminada, ou seja, aquela que está sujeita a múltiplas interpretações e relações intersubjetivas. Para isso, fizemos uso de três trabalhos que deram suporte filosófico: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992) de Lydia Goehr, que se empenhou em traçar a genealogia do conceito de obra musical; Estética: Teoria da Formatividade (1993) de Luigi Pareyson, em que o autor analisa a obra de arte a partir de um ponto de vista formativo – a obra como um objeto em construção e em permanente formação; e Obra Aberta (2003) de Umberto Eco, que apresenta estreita relação com a leitura anterior e trata, entre outras coisas, da dicotomia entre obra aberta e fechada.

‘Walking Backwards into the Future’: Music, Museum Culture, and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition (1889–1890)

In 1889–90 the city of Dunedin staged the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the colony instigated by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by indigenous Māori and representatives of the British Crown. In acknowledgement of the bicultural perspective encoded in the Treaty, this article takes a tour of the musical artefacts of the exhibition, including both Māori and Western instruments and musical works, to reveal how colonial identity was forged through museum culture: whereas Māori instruments (taonga puoro) were curated by settlers and exhibited as the curiosities of a supposedly dying race, Western musical instruments and practices were beholden both to narratives of progress and to the rhetoric of the imaginary museum of musical works, inherited from Britain. However, while the framing of music at the exhibition often contradicted Māori perspectives, a closer look at the exhibition of music in New Zealand in 1889–90 reveals unexpected resonance between the two Treaty parties. Moreover, by tracing the afterlife of one of the Māori instruments displayed at the exhibition, this article reveals how Māori have more recently helped to reshape museum culture itself.

Brides Stripped Bare: Surrealism, the Large Glass, and U.S. Women’s Imaginary Museums

Brides Stripped Bare: Surrealism, the Large Glass, and U.S. Women’s Imaginary Museums

THE EDIFICE AND THE FLIES, OR, THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF THE WORST COMPOSERS IN THE WORLD

AbstractThis short article draws on, without mentioning, a very large body of works written over a very long period of time which share a common critique of the musical canon of great works as traditionally conceived. Chief among the musicologists drawn from are Georgina Born and Lydia Goehr (especiallyThe Imaginary Museum of Musical Works). Readers familiar with these criticisms can safely skip to the final two sections, which explain why I am reinventing this particular musicological wheel at this moment in time. While I believe my framing is reasonably novel, I am under no illusions that the argument being made here is a new one. Nevertheless, the emphasis on community and practice feels urgent and perhaps merits retelling a story that is by now very old indeed.