Coming off from the idea that I wanted to play with the social atmosphere of a museum, I did some reading to inspire me for an idea. I mulled over a couple of ideas but I found it hard thinking of anything specific. In Social Works Performing art, supporting publics (2011) by Shannon Jackson, she explains “the trick would be to place social systems in the foreground of analysis despite the fact that they usually occupy the background of experience” (p.6). This approach would mean that I would need to take a theme or some sort of signifier of something you would usually expect to find in a museum and place it boldly in the middle of the gallery. But at the same time I needed to think of a theme that had some relation to the site. When I met with my group other ideas were formed, in the end we went with one that came from somebody else in the group. Born from another member of the group, we decided to focus upon the purpose of ‘housing art’ a way we would present this would to use the stigma surrounding the homeless to make people question why art is housed. Also as we were taking place in the gallery we wanted to use homeless people’s belongings or objects people would identify with homelessness and present them as part of the collection. We wanted to question if “Art is garbage…” or if “…garbage could be art” (Edelstein, 2007) Yet still with this idea I believed that the notion of having homeless people and homeless aesthetics within the museum, a place you wouldn’t expect to find them challenged the social experience of the museum. It would cause people to conduct themselves in a way that would usually in a museum. We came up with a few ideas in which we could to achieve this. For instance we wanted to create a pop up soup kitchen outside the museum inviting people into the museum and our ‘exhibit’. The thought behind this was to, firstly, introduce and convey our use of the homeless atheistic. As we served our visitors soup, we would invite them in and speaking to them as if we were treating as if they were part of the homeless community. As we served them hot soup it would also play the idea of ‘taking care of them’ by serving them with something warm and sheltering them, using the museum.
Jackson, S. (2011) Social Works performing art, supporting publics. New York: Routledge