What this museum does …..
The big title ‘Museum of openness’ is intended to be an ironic contradiction in terms. Things in Museums are historic and rare or at least recently gentrified and established to be of popular appeal or of importance. There is a Museum of Journalism, hopefully and maybe a museum of anger, a museum of love and MOR the museum of rejection. According to the Museum of the World, there are 55 000 museums in 200 countries. 35 000 in the US alone, where they have the power to create unity on both a social and political level, but also on a local one.
The term openness in ‘M.o.o. ’ can stand for a number things, from open walls and ceilings to open senses. For me it stands for open ended. All exhibiting artists have in common that they address transformation. Sure, all creative art has that in common, even those that repeat. But this is not a museum of ‘Open’. Openness implies that there is an active process.
Unfortunately, I am the museums only visitor, so you have to take my word for it, but I assure you, every time I did an exhibition in this makeshift place, something unexpected happened. An unforeseen revelation came like an answer to a question that I could not have phrased at the beginning. Astonishingly these are not questions that came up because of predicament of showing art in the Duchampian or surreal scale of a shoebox. They are questions that I carried with me for a long time. Unfortunately I was always to busy running around in the so called real word, that I never found the time to address them.
In the exhibition ‘Turner in Kent’, I thought I could play with the landscape around my studio. Whitstable is next to Margate where Turner lived, on a flat half island, surrounded by the North Sea on three sides, so it has wide open skies and dramatic light. It is unavoidable to share Turner’s appreciation of the weather here. To stage an exhibition at Moo, of the atmospheric wonders here and my lifelong appreciation of Turner’s late work, I took photos of the clouds and the sea and started reading about him. The result was that I crossed out the ‘in Kent’ from the title. Turner’s instinctive sense of the rapidly changing times he lived in, was to overcome likeliness. Art historians like Maja Schepelmann write fascinatingly about ‘Conditions of Perception and Cognition in William Turner and Martin Heidegger.’( published by Brill) It seems my attempt to place him in a landscape was as banal as the many anecdotes that try to give this very private man a heroic touch, just because he was declared a national hero. An unexpected but very welcomed outcome of my visit to the Museum of openness.
Maybe I should turn the museum’s attention to two other local residence, who are not mention ‘in Kent’ by a single note. Whitstable’s most famous son, W. Somerset Maugham and the secret life of Uwe Johnson in Sheerness.
The big title ‘Museum of openness’ is intended to be an ironic contradiction in terms. Things in Museums are historic and rare or at least recently gentrified and established to be of popular appeal or of importance. There is a Museum of Journalism, hopefully and maybe a museum of anger, a museum of love and MOR the museum of rejection. According to the Museum of the World, there are 55 000 museums in 200 countries. 35 000 in the US alone, where they have the power to create unity on both a social and political level, but also on a local one.
The term openness in ‘M.o.o. ’ can stand for a number things, from open walls and ceilings to open senses. For me it stands for open ended. All exhibiting artists have in common that they address transformation. Sure, all creative art has that in common, even those that repeat. But this is not a museum of ‘Open’. Openness implies that there is an active process.
Unfortunately, I am the museums only visitor, so you have to take my word for it, but I assure you, every time I did an exhibition in this makeshift place, something unexpected happened. An unforeseen revelation came like an answer to a question that I could not have phrased at the beginning. Astonishingly these are not questions that came up because of predicament of showing art in the Duchampian or surreal scale of a shoebox. They are questions that I carried with me for a long time. Unfortunately I was always to busy running around in the so called real word, that I never found the time to address them.
In the exhibition ‘Turner in Kent’, I thought I could play with the landscape around my studio. Whitstable is next to Margate where Turner lived, on a flat half island, surrounded by the North Sea on three sides, so it has wide open skies and dramatic light. It is unavoidable to share Turner’s appreciation of the weather here. To stage an exhibition at Moo, of the atmospheric wonders here and my lifelong appreciation of Turner’s late work, I took photos of the clouds and the sea and started reading about him. The result was that I crossed out the ‘in Kent’ from the title. Turner’s instinctive sense of the rapidly changing times he lived in, was to overcome likeliness. Art historians like Maja Schepelmann write fascinatingly about ‘Conditions of Perception and Cognition in William Turner and Martin Heidegger.’( published by Brill) It seems my attempt to place him in a landscape was as banal as the many anecdotes that try to give this very private man a heroic touch, just because he was declared a national hero. An unexpected but very welcomed outcome of my visit to the Museum of openness.
Maybe I should turn the museum’s attention to two other local residence, who are not mention ‘in Kent’ by a single note. Whitstable’s most famous son, W. Somerset Maugham and the secret life of Uwe Johnson in Sheerness.