|
About the Exhibition
Slought Foundation is pleased to announce Commercial
America, a project that takes as its starting point the
closure of the Commercial Museum. The Commercial Museum was
built in 1899 in part to preserve materials from world's fairs,
but since its closure in 1991 these rich holdings of cultural
artifacts and ephemera have been dispersed to museums and
other non-profit organizations in the Greater Philadelphia
area. In presenting a selection of the remaining artifacts
from April 30 through June 12, 2010, we seek to raise questions
concerning storage and preservation, and in particular the
presumption that collecting institutions store artifacts in
perpetuity. The project also calls attention to the dispersion
of these holdings to other institutions, in order to raise
questions about how collections come into being and the manner
in which cultural value is determined. It has been organized
in conjunction with a 2010 curatorial seminar in the Department
of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Commercial Museum was founded by William Wilson, a botany
professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Inspired by the
monumental Columbian World's Fair in Chicago of 1893, it opened
in 1899 and became the official repository for artifacts from
world's fairs of that era. It displayed objects from around
the world, and in so doing functioned both as a tourist destination
as well as an educational resource about foreign commerce
and industry. The Museum also distributed a monthly publication,
Commercial America, from which this exhibition takes its name.
It is particularly ironic that the Museum's history reflects
late 19th century optimism and an embrace of commerce given
the museum's subsequent dissolution and its inability to adapt
to changing values and trade ideologies over the course of
the 20th century.
Upon the museum's closing, the City of Philadelphia, according
to the legal requirements set forth by the Orphan's Court,
distributed the collection among universities and cultural
organizations. Through this process institutions including
the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania's
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology selected artifacts
for their collection; later, a wide variety of smaller organizations
including Temple University's Anthropology Lab, the Philadelphia
Free Library, and the Mutter Museum, among others, chose remaining
items. The artifacts on display in the Slought Foundation
galleries were chosen from those still remaining in storage
nineteen years after the Museum's closure and include a broad
selection of items from unidentified time periods including
feathered headresses, Polynesian oars and spears, baskets,
dioramas, figurines, and jars of dry food. Shortly thereafter,
on February 17, 2010, all unclaimed items were discarded by
the city. To reinforce the displacements of these objects
from the collection of which they were once a part, and the
accompanying loss of history and provenance this entails,
the objects on display at Slought Foundation are shown without
captions, in acknowledgement of their anonymous status.
The theoretical framework for this project builds upon Thomas
Keenan's essay The End(s) of the Museum, in which he claims
that “Museums are built on loss and its recollection.
There is no museum," he argues, "without the threat
of erasure or incompletion, no museum not shadowed by the
imagination of the impending destruction of what it therefore
seeks to stabilize and maintain.” Here museums are revealed
as sites of perpetual tension, where the struggle to preserve
and protect against the passage of time confronts the need
to acknowledge the inevitability of change and finitude. In
1967, Robert Smithson referred to this process as entropy,
in speaking of the museum as a place of corrosion where things
“flatten and fade.” The project also responds
to the work of Michel Foucault, which challenges us to privilege
moments of rupture in order to better understand our past.
The closing of an institution like the Commercial Museum,
which was explicitly created to preserve the past by documenting
its cultural representations, represents one such instance
of discontinuity.
The project examines not only questions about the history
of collections and the identity of museums today, but also
questions about cultural ownership. Accordingly, we have invited
institutions that have accepted objects from the original
collection of the Commercial Museum to place one of these
items on display. In so doing, we map the distribution of
the original collection through diverse organizations in the
city of Philadelphia. Moreover, we have invited members of
the community to loan individual works from the collection
on display. We hope in so doing these artifacts find new life
not in storage but rather in active circulation. Artifacts
will be made available for loan to private residencies, sites
of commerce, and educational institutions.
About the Foundation
Slought Foundation ('Sl-aw-t') is a non-profit organization
in Philadelphia that broadly encourages new futures for contemporary
life through public programs featuring international artists
and theorists. The foundation's programs are purposely critical
and provocative in an intimate and participatory environment.
|
