ISEA workshop blog: ‘The Museum of Ordure’ by Bilyana Palankasova

The Museum of Ordure’s Mission is to examine: 

  1. The cultural value of ordure, shit, rubbish. 
  2. The waste of human resources through various ownership, production, and management regimes. 
    What is shit for some, has value for others.1  

The Museum of Ordure was a project by Stuart Brisley, Geoff Cox and Adrian Ward. It is a self-institution concerned with the management of human waste, the mandate for clean and proper language and the Internet as “an image dump”.2  

 

BOUNDARIES 

 

As a project, The Museum of Ordure has lapsed and when browsing its website today, encountering a number of broken links and blank pages, a visitor will certainly be conscious of its transience. During the “Networked Art Practice after Digital Preservation” workshop, Anisa Hawes’ preservationist voice suggested that it is important to capture the website as it is now, for example, the World in Motion (2014)3 page where a visitor can find a series of embedded YouTube videos, one of which is unavailable due to copyright, others are blank embeds, while some are still available to watch.4

 

However, preserving the website of the work of art will somewhat contradict the concept of the work itself. Is there value in documenting the broken pages of the website, to preserve it as a snapshot of the state in which it is at the moment? In Geoff Cox’s words, The Museum of Ordure was always meant to be arbitrary and is not concerned with whether or not it is accessible.5 Preserving the website as it is, is a complex issue because the obsoleteness of the webpages is not intended, it is an accident, even a “natural” and expected outcome of technological decay but not one that has been anticipated as fundamental to the work itself. It testifies to the lack of agency in historical processes and the obsolescence of digital technologies. In a way, the preservation status of The Museum of Ordure is informed by forgetting as an important component of memory – an inverted way of documenting the forgotten and the wasted.  

 

Any conversation about preserving the website as a snapshot of the project, positions it as essential to the work, while according to Goeff Cox, it is “just a website” that’s been left unkept to decay. This raises questions about materiality and suggests a conversation about what the essence of the artwork is. The persistent need to have a visual artefact of a work of art pushes us to consider preserving its website, while in reality the website serves as documentation, a curated display of what The Museum of Ordure was. The website is very much a device for presentation and documentation, existing outside of a “legitimate” institution, thus it is permissible to be left unkept and to break. Different methods for interrogating the network, such as Wayback machine perhaps lend themselves more useful in this case, since they show us a fragment of something that used to be. In Cox’s words “it lends to that authenticity of it being a broken thing, a memory.”6

 

To go further, the work of art in question is not a net art piece, it’s a collaborative work of art which is a speculation on an institution, a sort of self-institution, collecting waste material and concerned with value. The images of the various projects the museum realised, as a form of documentation, are distributed online, but the website itself does not represent the essence of the work. The core is the immaterial concept and the immaterial labour of the network that created the museum. In that sense, The Museum of Ordure resists an authentic artist as much as it resists an authentic artwork, it oscillates between critiquing the authenticity of the subject and the authenticity of the object.  

 

If capturing broken pages on the website constitutes capturing documentation, this process seems to not be concerned with the work itself, but rather with its provenance. From a preservation perspective, the website as documentation is certainly valuable. However, the state of the website with broken links and blank embeds draws our attention to the obsoleteness, of both work and document. Instead of making a work of art obsolete, its image gives it new value in the sense that it could precede the encounter with the “original”. That is of course something already described by Jean Baudrillard, but insightfully taken further by McKenzie Wark in suggesting it is the copy of a work that creates the provenance of the original and authenticates it.7  

 

In that context, documentation is a simulation of the work, as it is the document making its way to an audience, a collector or a conservator. While the artwork is a derivative, it was the documentation, the JPEG, which signifies value, and which matters. Wark considers not just individual artworks, but art itself as now a derivative of its simulation. Ultimately concluding that the most interesting thing about the relationship between art and information is the reciprocal relation between art as rarity and information as ubiquity.  

 

What is particularly interesting with The Museum of Ordure is that it doesn’t relate to reproduction and copies, nor does it present versions of a work in the sense of a digital piece. It does not fit with either, it rather critiques what both of these domains preoccupies itself with on a preservation level. It shifts attention to the material and immaterial waste that these processes accumulate, and the value borders they draw. In a way, it contemplates precisely this tension between art as a rarity and information as ubiquity.  

 

CARE 

 

The Museum of Ordure is a prime example of networked art practice, one where the essence of the work of art is the concept and its realisation by a network of agents – an inherently collaborative process resisting materiality. As such, its preservation poses significant challenges. In the context of the “Networked Art Practice after Digital Preservation” workshop, Annet Dekker’s proposition for networks of care was considered as a preservation methodology. 

 

Networks of care describes a dispersed knowledge network with a non-hierarchical structure, in which knowledge about a work of art is distributed across different people, where each person holds some knowledge, but not all of it. Meaning that everyone keeps an element, and no element contains the full scope of the project.8

 

In thinking about networks of care, any decision to preserve The Museum of Ordure would have to constitute a complex process, taking into account the multiple agencies of those involved in the project. In the area of art conservation, authenticity is crucial and used to indicate the originality of an artwork and its completeness.9 That being said, “the ease and tolerance of replication, appropriation and versioning in the World Wide Web further complicates authenticity.”10 Interestingly, The Museum of Ordure’s relationship to such notions of authenticity and authorship seem evasive, while also central to the work itself. 

 

In discussing mouchette.org, Dekker considers the conservation difficulties inherent in maintaining an active artwork, which is heterogeneous and exists as a website, repeatedly renegotiating its own conceptual structures.11 Dekker ultimately asks what knowledge and support are necessary for a website to remain accessible. While this is a fundamental question about web-based works of art, it’s worth highlighting that The Museum of Ordure is not primarily a web-based artwork, even though its current existence is solely online.  

 

The crucial difference between The Museum of Ordure and mouchette.org is that the former is not its website, whereas the latter very much is. In preserving The Museum of Ordure, we aim to preserve a networked piece, but not necessarily a digital one, which presents its own set of challenges. Nevertheless, Dekker’s method of networks of care is fundamentally relevant to The Museum of Ordure since it challenges notions of authenticity and authorship in art and feels close to The Museum of Ordure’s concept and ethos as related to networked thinking and collaborative practice.  

 

In thinking about networks of care, Dekker draws on a few theoretical concepts related to networked thinking and organisation. For instance, noted critics of social media and platform capitalism, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter proposed the concept of “orgnets” – organised networks – as an opportunity for “intensive collaboration within a limited group of engaged users with the aim of getting things done.”12 Such networks operate through people coming together for the common purpose of building goal-oriented connections. Rather than traditional institutions, a network of individuals and small organisations form units taking care of an artwork’s legacy.13

 

Thinking about legacy, a network of care does not necessarily concern preservation in an art historical sense, it could be oriented towards the future of a work, not its past but its future audience. Where there’s prolongation and evolution of things, a network of care holds the potential to reveal which elements of a work are crucial and which are shelved, rather than advocating storing, it propels reusing. It is important to keep in mind how scarcity creates value – often resisting documentation creates a strong value for an audience. With this in mind, tasked with the challenging preservation of a networked art piece, such as The Museum of Ordure, how do we need to construct its network of care in a way that is sustainable and in tune with its fundamental concern with waste?  

 

The museum doesn’t draw lines between physical and virtual, it draws lines between things of value and not. If we determine that the value, or essence, of the work of art, hence this worth preserving, is its concept of a self-institution concerned with ordure, we must concentrate our network of care efforts towards preserving it for the future. As Roddy Hunter points out, this is perhaps a curatorial task, one related to possibly restaging the project in a different context and time.14 The only reason for revisiting it is to draw attention to the way information, value and waste are currently being produced and framed. In a way, to ascribe new sets of values to the project, and to give it contemporary resonance. And with looming ecological disaster, big data, repositories such as GitHub and GitLab, and Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, there’s certainly scope for considering value and waste. 

 

References

 

  1. “Mission | Museum of Ordure,” accessed February 14, 2021, http://www.ordure.org/about-the-museum/mission/.
  2. Geoff Cox, “Networked art practice after digital preservation” Workshop, ISEA 2020, 17 October 2020 via Zoom. Personal notes.
  3. “World in Motion (2014) | Museum of Ordure.” Accessed February 16, 2021. http://www.ordure.org/collection/world-in-motion/.
  4. Anisa Hawes, “Networked art practice after digital preservation” Workshop, ISEA 2020, 17 October 2020 via Zoom. Personal notes. In reference to “World in Motion (2014) | Museum of Ordure,” accessed February 14, 2021, http://www.ordure.org/collection/world-in-motion/.
  5. Geoff Cox, “Networked art practice after digital preservation” Workshop.
  6. Geoff Cox, “Networked art practice after digital preservation” Workshop.
  7. McKenzie Wark, “Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative – Journal #77 November 2016 – e-Flux,” E-Flux, no. 77 (2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/77374/digital-provenance-and-the-artwork-as-derivative/.
  8. Annet Dekker, “Networks of Care,” in Collecting and Conserving Net Art (Routledge, 2018), 91–92, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351208635.
  9. Pip Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations,” Tate Papers Autumn, no. 6 (2006), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/06/authenticity-change-and-loss-conservation-of-time-based-media-installations.
  10. Dekker, “Networks of Care,” 73.
  11. Dekker, 78.
  12. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, Organization After Social Media (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2018), 10–11.
  13. Dekker, “Networks of Care,” 89.
  14. Roddy Hunter, “Networked art practice after digital preservation” Workshop, ISEA 2020, 17 October 2020 via Zoom. Personal notes.