Forget Photography

The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of photography's replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography, residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography is a strategy to reveal the redundant historicity of the photographic constellation and the cultural immobility of its epicenter. It attempts to liberate the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates, and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies, times, events, materials, memory, representation and the image. Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography, which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography and go beyond it in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as the reality or world it shows. Forgetting photography will require a different way of organizing knowledge about the visual in culture that involves crossing different knowledges of visual culture, technologies, and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and creative labor and its knowledge practices within the institutions and organization of visual reproduction

Post-critical Museology: The Distributed Museum and the Crisis of European Representational Systems

This article built on the co-author's previous AHRC-funded research 'Tate Encounters' and linked the findings to the issues of the Mela research project in terms of arguing how the exhaustion of representational practices was limiting the impact of cultural diversity policy. It argued instead for a greater understanding of how transmigration and transculturalism is producing a new form of transvisuality that curatorial practice and museological research needs to understand in order to develop new diverse audiences

Temporal Conflicts and the Purification of Hybrids: Tate, a case in point

In 2013, Chris Dercon noted of the Tate Tanks that underpin the new building that the museum of the 21st century should be understood as ‘a new kind of mass medium’ - defined by the durational practices of artists, interactive audience technology, social media, online broadcast, and archival practices. Such a description, whilst recognising the increasing convergence of art and media practices, failed to foresee even three years later the significant temporal paradoxes that are now emerging for the modern art museum from network culture which is everywhere busily questioning and inverting the foundational logic of the museum as a place of aggregation and object display. As the new Tate Modern extension opens and discussions of the collection installations come to the fore, urgent questions are emerging of how curators are responding to the new temporal conditions of hypermodernity and chrono-reflexivity that digital networked culture is producing and artists are engaging with – as well as audiences. Marked by a distributed archival aesthetic, network culture is now directly challenging the museum’s practices of collection and display and laying bare the temporal paradoxes that concepts of ‘permanent’, ‘semi-permanent’ and ‘rotational’ inherently hold within the museum’s dependency on its temporal and canonical organisation of collection. As the practices of programming and the emphasis on ‘event time’ proliferate in order to produce sustainable audiences - potentially superseding and negating the practices of collection - the museological and archival urge to freeze-frame and rematerialize the elusive, ephemeral and immaterial practices of the artist for collection can be understood as one more attempt to maintain the modernist aesthetic temporal order - through what Latour describes as the ‘purification of hybrids’. As the essay discusses, the destabalisation of the historical temporal certainties of the art museum, initiated by Tate through the demise of the chronological and periodic hang, and championed through commissioning and collaboration, is paradoxically rooted in the epistemological and market-driven fiction of the ‘contemporary,’ which, in the chronopolitical context of the migration of people, data, and objects, is diminishing in both validity and currency. What then is the future of collection and display at Tate Modern, and by implication other museums of modern art

Racism, Representation and Photography

Representation of Aborigines by Aborigines and non -Aborigines; articles by Andrew Dewdney, Mervyn Biship, Alana Harris, Sandy Edwards, Rea Saunders, Ricky Maynard , Brenda Croft, Ruth Braunstein, Michael Riley, Huw Davies, Penny Taylor, Darlene McKenzie, Kurt Brereton and Eric Michaels, annotated separately

Cultural inequality, multicultural nationalism and global diversity: Tate encounters: Britishness and visual culture

Tate Encounters was a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Diasporas, Migration and Identities Programme. The project started in April 2007 and involved three collaborating institutions: Tate Britain, London South Bank University and the University of the Arts London, through Chelsea College. The project aimed to provide an in-depth account and analysis of a sustained encounter between London South Bank University (LSBU) students who have a migrant family background and Tate Britain as an important national cultural site. The project developed knowledge and understandings of how narratives of Britishness are contained, constructed, and reproduced within the curatorial practices and collection of Tate Britain, and of how such notions are received and valued by different migrant and diasporic family members within the context and cultural practices of their everyday lives. From this encounter the project developed new curatorial and educational perspectives relevant to wider and more culturally diverse audiences and contributed towards cultural change within the Museum and Galleries sector. In April 2009 Tate Encounters concluded its two-year fieldwork period with a month-long programme of public research interviews, discussions and ethnographic film screenings at Tate Britain. The programme was divided into four strands which reflected the key areas of enquiry within the project: the history of gallery education practice at Tate since 1970; the relationship between the museum and the digital realm; the impact of cultural policy on the museum and specifically cultural diversity policy, and the forms and expressions of the diasporic encounter with the museum

Post-critical museology: theory and practice in the art museum

Post-Critical Museology considers what the role of the public and the experience of audiences means to the everyday work of the art museum. It does this from the perspectives of the art museum itself as well as from the visitors it seeks. Through the analysis of material gathered from a major collaborative research project carried out at Tate Britain in London the book develops a conceptual reconfiguration of the relationship between art, culture and society in which questions about the art museum’s relationship to global migration and the new media ecologies are examined. It suggests that whilst European museums have previously been studied as institutions of collection, heritage and tradition, however ‘modern’ their focus, it is now better to consider them as distributive networks in which value travels along transmedial and transcultural lines. Post-Critical Museology is intended as a contribution to progressive museological thinking and practice and calls for a new alignment of academics and professionals in what it announces as post-critical museology. An alignment that is committed to rethinking what an art museum in the twenty-first century could be, as well as what knowledge and understanding its future practitioners might draw upon in a rapidly changing social and cultural context. The book aims to be essential reading in the growing field of museum studies. It will also be of professional interest to all those working in the cultural sphere, including museum professionals, policy makers and art managers