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THE
MUSEUM OF CORNTEMPORARY ART: AN INTRODUCTION
Victor Margolin
Director, Museum of Corntemporary Art (Link to Selected
Images of the Collection) The Museum
of Corntemporary Art is one of the lesser-known small private
museums in the United States. Founded in Chicago in 1988, it
comprises about four hundred objects. Corntemporary art is a
new category of material culture. It should not be confused with
kitsch, which scholars and critics have tended to characterize
in a patronizing or derogatory way. The Museum of Corntemporary
Art rejects the high/low distinction and prefers an independent
system of judgment for its collection. Corntemporary art arises
from conditions of use and must be considered in terms of its
social value as well as its visual qualities. It refuses the
appellation “kitsch” because it is neither bereft
of significance nor short on aesthetic value. The “taste” for
corntemporary art is based on two factors, one social and the
other aesthetic. Because this art reveals a great deal about
human values as they are filtered through systems of local and
national production, it belongs to the pool of material artifacts
that constitute cultural gestalts. Often politically and socially
incorrect, it represents the dark side of material culture, which
is so pervasive that evidence of it can hardly be swept under
the metaphoric rug. Figures of sleeping Mexicans, for example,
can still be found in Mexican souvenir stalls and in shops on
the U.S. side of the border. Despite their stereotypical representation,
they continue to be produced for tourists. Consider also, the
supine female nude whose breasts function as salt and pepper
shakers or the male body-builder whose firm buns serve the same
purpose. Although they are regarded as offensive by some, they
circulate widely as jokes in material form. Whether or not we
appreciate corntemporary art, it makes us more conscious of how
the full range of human values is embedded in material culture. Although corntemporary
art has as much power to explain the social values and practices
of the recent past as flints and axes do for the earliest human
societies, it is still the bastard child of material culture
and is rarely displayed in museums of history or ethnography.
There is more than one reason for this. First, corntemporary
art is frequently produced on a small scale and appears inconsequential
compared to larger objects such as utensils or furniture in a
history museum vitrine. However, consider the importance of the
period in a writing system. As an object, the period is infinitesimal
compared to the size of a letter but it plays a powerful role
in the text. In short, it prevents one sentence from running
into another. Similarly corntemporary art objects, while generally
diminutive in scale, are powerful bearers of meaning that establish
boundaries for cultural concepts just as a period defines the
length of a sentence. But they are rich in aesthetic value too
and thus transcend the limits of ethnographic discourse. One difference
between corntemporary art and high art is the materials it is
made of. Unlike the tradition of decorative art that bases the
aesthetic value of an object in part on the richness or fineness
of its material, corntemporary art is produced with the cheapest
of materials such as plastic, wood, and lead. It derives its
aesthetic virtue from the way those materials are manipulated
to create an object’s meaning. Within the Museum of Corntemporary
Art’s collection, for example, are a number of small chairs
and stools made from Pepsi Cola cans and other soda containers.
Their “beauty,” is achieved by transforming a cheap
aluminum alloy into an elegant object. The folk artists who make
such furniture are skilled at curling aluminum cans to achieve
decorative effects, thus drawing an otherwise “low” material
into a new aesthetic orbit. Or consider the cheap ceramic salt
and pepper shakers that were originally made in Japan and are
now produced all over the world. They are a popular version of
the more elite Meissen figurines of the eighteenth century and
the strong semantic value of their subject matter, whether Dutch
couples kissing on skates or dogs pissing on hydrants, draws
the cheap clay they are made of into a higher realm of meaning
than would otherwise be achievable. In straddling
the social purpose of the ethnography museum and the aesthetic
agenda of the art gallery, corntemporary art falls between two
stools. In the ethnography museum, it challenges the more ponderous
methods of constructing social meanings with objects that represent
conventional cultural categories - bows and arrows, hand tools,
furniture, pottery, dolls, musical instruments, and writing implements.
Or else it counters the sacred significance of ritual objects
such as masks and chalices. The image of a culture that we usually
find in an ethnography museum is one bereft of corntemporary
art, which does not fit easily into the conventional categories
of daily life or sacred ritual. The aesthetic of corntemporary
art is generally found wanting by high art curators who only
tolerate vernacular forms when they are either incorporated aesthetically
into high art, when they are used by contemporary artists who
eschew formal aesthetics for intellectual irony, or when they
are presented in categories such as “outsider art” as
the production of recognized “outsider artists.” The birth
of the museum My impetus
to found the Museum or Corntemporary Art was a small Greek ouzo
bottle housed in a frame of plastic caryatids and capped with
a top in the shape of an Ionic column. The bottle was literally
rescued from the gutter where it had most likely been cast by
an inebriated reveler. The incentive for retrieving it was an
overwhelming feeling of aesthetic pleasure. For months it stood
mutely on a shelf, inarticulately evoking this feeling but revealing
nothing of its own workings. Only gradually, did the elements
of a corntemporary aesthetic begin to emerge. The beauty of the
ouzo bottle was derived from the way classical Greek iconography,
previously associated with temples and monuments, had been dissected,
miniaturized, and then transposed onto it. Elegant marble was
transmuted into common plastic. A capital was severed from its
architectural setting and transformed into a bottle top. And
the rectilinear Greek decorative ornament was printed on shiny
paper and wrapped around the plastic rim of the bottle case.
The ouzo bottle reeked with the grandeur of Greece’s classical
heritage. What was so intriguing was the quality of the aesthetic
moves that produced it. The ouzo bottle revealed a sincere desire
to embed the majesty of Greek culture in a form that that could
circulate widely and reach people from all walks of life. Once the characteristics
of a corntemporary aesthetic had become clear, myriad objects
presented themselves as candidates for inclusion in this new
category. Travels far and wide made possible visits to souvenir
stores, flea markets, junk shops, antique malls and other sites
where such objects are bought and sold. Sometimes they are offered
for sale as “collectibles” but often they appear
as inconsequential agglomerations of matter, waiting patiently
to be yanked from the dustbin of history and reinstated as objects
of cultural worth. At first, the
acts of acquiring such objects seemed to be simply the indulgence
of a junk snupper’s private passion. And as the acquisitions
accumulated, they fit no existing categories of collecting. Although
some might have been placed in existing categories of collectibles
such as “salt and pepper shakers” or objects “Made
in Japan,” they were not procured for that reason nor did
the collecting process take on the compulsion of the serial collector
who, once he or she identifies a category of collectibles, must
fill that category with as many exemplars as possible. The eclecticism
of the purchases was, in fact, troubling since they made no sense
as a collection. The acquisition process was in no way comparable
to the amassing of snuff boxes, hat pins, or cookie jars. Soon
it became evident that the only way to continue the collection
was to house it in a museum where its cultural meaning could
be explored through the conventional scholarly practices of exhibition,
research, and publication.
The future
of the museum In its long-range
plan, the Museum of Corntemporary Art has defined three major
goals. The first is to continue building the collection and perhaps
even expand into new areas. The second goal is to find a permanent
home for the museum. It does not yet have its own building but
is considering plans to convert the Grecian Holiday Motel, an
abandoned structure in southern Illinois. As a prime example
of the Greek Revival Motel style, the Grecian Holiday is graced
with a number of features such as caryatid gas pumps, which make
it an excellent example of corntemporary architecture. Along
with exhibition spaces, offices, a library, and gift shop, plans
drawn up by WDW Design in Chicago call for the creation of a
five star French restaurant, tentatively titled the Cornucopia. And lastly,
the museum wants to exhibit its collection more extensively.
Corntemporary art has much to contribute to the cultural milieu.
To use Stephen Greenblatt’s terms, it is filled with resonance
and wonder. “By resonance,” he writes, “I mean
the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal
boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex,
dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which
it may be taken by a viewer to stand. By wonder I mean the power
of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks,
to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted
attention.” Many of the objects in the Museum of Corntemporary
Art will have been previously understood as cheap artifacts of
a global culture that disgorges commodities indiscriminately
and endlessly. My aim is to rescue these objects from that perception
and re-present them in a context where their resonance and wonder
can enhance our sense of what it means to be human. In 2003, Prestel
Verlag in Munich published a book on the collection entitled Culture
is Everywhere: The Museum of Corntemporary Art. The book
was a joint project of myself and photographer Patty Carroll,
who produced a large collection of dioramas using objects from
the collection. A few are posted along with my text. Prestel
is no longer distributing the book. New or used copies can still
probably be obtained from Amazon.com or other sites that sell
used books such as Abebooks or Alibris.
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