From Kunstkammer to Modern Museum Architecture (and back again)

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Speak Your Design

Cabinet of curiosities from Museum Wormianum, 1655.

Last night at the Mint Museum, architect Preston Scott Cohen spoke about the historic precedents behind his recent museum designs. The conversation spurred fond memories for me of kunstkammers, wunderkammers and those other early modern collections of objects, generally grouped under the category “cabinets of curiosity.” (Remember the piece of furniture that displayed your grandmother’s Hummel figures, the “curio cabinet”? There you have it. Do you see the aha moments I’m handing out here?)

The scholarship and debate on the kunstkammer (literally, “art-room”) runs deep and a bit hot in certain circles. Sounds like real, perhaps slightly mad, art history geekery I know, but the reason is this: cabinets of curiosity and the like were the beginnings of what we now recognize as mainstays of civilized culture – museums.

I’m telling you, this is good stuff. If you’re interested in geeking out with your art history and museology cousins, here are a few essays on the subject:

Andrew McClellan, “From Boullée to Bilbao: the Museum as Utopian Space”, from Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of Discipline (2002)

Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, “From the mastery of the world to the mastery of nature: the kunstkammer, politics, and science,” The Mastery of Nature (Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1993).

And a personal favorite of mine on collections: Jean Baudrillard, “The Non-Functional system, or subjective discourse”, The System of Objects.

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Perspective: Dancing our way through January 2013

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Speak Your Design

Imperial Gesture: Blakeley White-McGuire on stage, composer/pianist Pat Daughtery in the pit.

Last week, over the course of 5 days, I danced nearly 25 hours. Sure, that’s nothing for a professional dancer, but when you’re running a communications business and managing renovation projects a state away during the same time period, I’d like to think it shows commitment if nothing else.

January was a month of dance for me and for Charlotte–from Martha Graham Dance Company’s captivating performance at the Knight Theater (courtesy of UNC Charlotte’s CoA+A) and classes with SYTYCD stars like tWitch and Alex Wong to performing in the fashion-meets-dance event at NC Music Factory’s Osso and meeting the lady with one of the coolest communications gigs in town working for North Carolina Dance Theatre (NCDT). And let’s not forget Urban Bush Women’s performance on Thursday (also thanks to UNC Charlotte’s CoA+A) and NCDT’s Innovative Works program (one of my favorite shows of their season, running through February 16).

Why do I dance? Talk to any dancer and they’ll probably say the same. Because I need to. Because it brings something out of me that nothing else does. Some designers have a passion for drawing. Some communications pros are tech geeks. But my outlet is navigating space – occupying and moving through it with intention and feeling. This is my outlet. It makes me grateful for everything and everyone in my life. It gives me a perspective that is uniquely my own, one that informs my professional life and work. I wouldn’t let it go for the world.

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Art Spotlight: Vik Muniz on photography and perception

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Speak Your Design

The Birth of Venus, after Botticelli (Pictures of Junk) by Vik Muniz. (Photo via MintMuseum.org, courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

Last week, the New York-based, Brazil-born artist Vik Muniz presented a lecture on his work–primarily photography–at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. And Charlotte showed up. The Mint changed locations to accommodate the rush of RSVPs, and even then, the event was standing room only.

Muniz was smart, funny and refreshingly non-egocentric. He’s an exceptional, thoughtful artist, but no one argues that point. Except, perhaps, his ex-girlfriend. (Muniz told the crowd that he originally pursued a career in art to spite an ex-girlfriend with Harvard accolades who told Muniz he’d never be an artist. Fighting words.)

Muniz is a prolific maker now collected by the top museums. The Mint itself acquired one of his works via their Vote for Art campaign in November.

Here are a few of our favorite sound bites from Muniz’s talk:

“Art is not something that you make. It’s something that flows through you like life. You’re like a filter catching the residues of culture.”

On marketing tropes and social conditioning: “Diamonds are forever. So is granite.”

On photography and digital manipulation: “Art has become a race between image technology and cynicism.”

The coolest discovery? Muniz is a phenomenologist. One off-hand reference to Primacy of Perception, and I knew this was a kindred spirit. Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” changed my life. No histrionics here; I mean that whole-heartedly.

The exhibition VantagePoint X / Vik Muniz: Garbage Matters will be on view at Mint Museum Uptown through April 28, 2013. If you haven’t seen the Oscar-nominated documentary “Wasteland” that follows the creation of his Pictures of Garbage  series in Brazil, don’t miss the Mint’s screening on January 29.

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