Translation: Song Xiaomeng
Museum of Capitalism, Blake Full Conroy’s “Police Flag”. This artwork shows a world where capitalism has become obsolete. (Photo courtesy of Bria McAnally)
If the end of capitalism has come, should we build a museum to reflect on its past and preserve its history? This summer, curators Timothy Furstnau and Andrea Steves implemented the idea in Oakland, California.
▲"Museum of Capitalism" exhibition site,
Photo source: Museum of Capitalism
In 2010, at a speech at the London Marx Festival, Alec S. Kalinix said that one day he would like to visit a museum of capitalism similar to the apartheid museum in South Africa. Curators from Auckland, the duo nicknamed "FICTILIS" Timothy Forsteneau and Andrea Steves, first heard Kalinix's remarks. , they were wondering what such a museum would look like? They organize exhibitions and interventions through this humorous way of interrogating social institutions and between fiction and reality, which is lively and interesting.
In 2015, the duo began looking for a suitable site for their museum, eyeing Oakland's semi-industrial waterfront and working with a local nonprofit, the Jack London Improvement District. In 2016, FICTILIS received US dollars from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation to acquire a large, deep, two-story commercial space in Jack London Square that had not been rented out for many years. This is an upscale market that has never fully taken shape. And there are still traces of the previous tenants, with quotations about food from Virginia Woolf, Julia Child and James Beard adorning the downstairs walls.
"There is no way we can afford to pay the asking price for this land, even just part of it." Forsteno, who is gentle and thin, with brown hair as fluffy as a dandelion, was born on the 6th. Yue Shi told me this. And it was very close to the museum’s opening night. "I think it can be said that we were treated generously by the landlord."
▲Kabui Olujimi, The GiniQuotation,
2017, Image source: MOC facebook page
▲Jordan Bennett's work "Artifact Bags",
2013-2015, picture source: Museum of Capitalism
The placement of the artworks in the museum is in progress smoothly. The Museum of Capitalism adopts a futuristic style, envisioning a world where capitalism has become obsolete. "Perhaps one day capitalism will come to an end, although that in itself shouldn't be that controversial," Forsteneau said, citing "Stein's Law" created by economic advisers to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. , “What cannot go on forever will eventually stop.” In the center of the curved mezzanine, above a red metal structure originally designed as a food counter, there is a set of banners created by Danish art collective Superflex. The banners feature the logos of banks that went bankrupt (or were merged) during the 2008 financial crisis.
After Berlin and Brussels, Auckland is the third city to have a museum on capitalism. Exhibits on this theme have appeared before: In 1982, Oklahoma Christian University built "Enterprise Plaza" with a series of multimedia exhibits - including an arcade game, "Protect Your Rights," in which players shoot at encroachers Aliens from their private property; an animatronic display, "Singing Money," extolls the virtues of the free market and rails against the dangers of government overreach. (That museum closed in 1999.
) Although FICTILIS’s Museum of Capitalism has been years in the making, it feels especially timely amid the Bay Area’s housing and homelessness crises and vast economic inequality. However, FICTILIS complains that the Capitalist Museum project, which was previously considered too political, is actually not political enough given the current political climate. Forsteneau also admits that the project attracted some people who didn't really understand its tone. “We got some emails saying, ‘Oh, that sounds great, I’d give money to a museum like this’ — like a Rand pro-free market museum or something,” he said.
Steves, wearing overalls and a tool belt, stopped by our conference room table. This conference room is located in the exhibition hall of Oliver Ressler's work "Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies" - which contains videos of economists and historians discussing libertarian autonomism and anarchist ambidextrous democracy. edge. She made a small cardboard box. "Do you know anything about trading toys?" she asked. "If Morgan Stanley invested in Olive Garden, a deal toy company might be hired to create a Plexiglas tombstone with a small salad and tomato slices inside to celebrate the deal," she said. Jasper Waters, an industrial designer, designed a trading toy for the FICTILIS project, a paperweight-sized monument with a marble base that reads "Congratulations on receiving investment from the U.S. Treasury" and several more below. Names of banks and companies -- Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup -- and the dollar amounts they received in the 2008 government bailout. Inside the plexiglass is a graph showing the Dow Jones index plummeting. (The Museum of American Finance on Wall Street also has a collection of trading toys.)
▲Blake Fall-Conroy "Police Flags",
2009, photo source: Museum of Capitalism
When I visited there earlier this week, the exhibition was in full swing. Small museum labels have been laid out, commenting on the surroundings, the museum and the art itself in the voice of the future author of the museum.
(In Jordan Bennett’s “Handmade Backpacks” exhibition, a set of leather grocery bags serve as labels, illustrating the use of plastic bags as “thin, flexible petroleum-based films” in capitalist society It has been everywhere and sparked controversy)
Exhibits throughout the area range from the overtly political to the satirical. A work by Packard Jennings, the "Mindfulness Meditation Pavilion" is designed to create a relaxing space for police officers, equipped with sponge-cushioned lounge chairs and soft lighting; a robotic female voice conveys empathetic wisdom - ―“When the world around you is filled with anger and frustration, your mission requires you to remain calm and keep a cool head.” ―Accompanied by weird electronic music, a concluding prayer is also offered, “I am one of the many living beings. "It's polite."
▲Christy Chow "ComeRun in Me 2",
2017, photo source: Museum of Capitalism
A group of teenagers were arguing. Is it appropriate to introduce police brutality to young children while gazing at Evan Desmond Yi’s “Dream Shop,” a mirrored replica of the museum’s actual gift shop (where visitors can buy ribbons There are trademark Museum of Capitalism totes and T-shirts, as well as computer-shaped stress balls and beautifully packaged coal blocks), but the shelves are empty. Both stores are painted "millennial pink" and tucked behind a community library. The library houses early twentieth-century volumes from the U.S. Patent Office, annual reports of the National Labor Relations Board, and political theory books on Marx's philosophy.
In Tara's "A Nation's History of Capitalism," inside a wooden building with a refrigerator-sized safety device, visitors are invited to record their own experiences of capitalism. video.
A small screen in the room displays a prompt: "What is the best or worst thing you have ever bought?" In the corner, a glass display case holds a "magic wand," a collection of rectangular technology exhibits - Remote controls, barcode scanners, Hitachi personal massagers, eyelash brushes - organized and labeled by the Tactical Magic Center.
▲CoClimate "Bust of the Worst",
2007, photo source: Museum of Capitalism
"About what's inside the museum, what's outside, and We gave a lot of thought to the idea that the exit from the Museum of Capitalism is the entrance to the actual Museum of Capitalism,” Steves told me. She hopes people will "start to see objects as exhibits or museum pieces and keep looking at things that way." The museum will move out of Jack London Square this week. Initial renovations are already underway and will showcase Tatin Bakery's new roastery and coffee factory.
A well-coiffed real estate agent wearing a shiny purple button-down shirt guided other potential tenants through the exhibition area and gathered around the museum’s only permanent exhibit, a Around the glass display case of a slightly worn Jack London Square rental mannequin that has been here since 2008. An architect walks through the crowd, holding a stack of architectural drawings. Steves pointed glumly at a hole in the hallway floor where construction workers accidentally drilled through the ceiling. In addition to a residency at the Hedlund Center for the Arts this fall, the future of the institution—thematically, precariously—we’ll have to wait and see. Fausteno speculated that perhaps the museum simply moved from a limited display area to an all-encompassing space outside the building. "When you think about it, this is a huge expansion," he said.