Page 213 - The Black Box Book

platforms of transmission and exchange but may now just as often in- CASE STUDY: THE MUSEUM OF ORDURE
tervene within and divert the direction of its otherwise pervasive data
flows. Networked art practice, in this sense, is an interventionist practice, The Museum of Ordure (2001–onwards) actively resists preser-
consciously documenting and exchanging the affects and effects of our vation by “present[ing] the process of digital decay ‘ bit rot’ ex-
globally networked society. ploring cyberspace as a site where language and imagery
6 Months Without takes its place within a genealogy of concep- disintegrates just as in the physical world” (Whitely, 2011,
tual and performance art in which documentation and information pro- p. 155). The formation of the Museum was directly informed by the practice
vide the work’s material base. This tradition includes On Kawara’s I Got of pioneering performance artist Stuart Brisley and primarily his estab-
Up (1968–1979), in which he sent two picture postcards stamped with lishment of the Collection of Ordure in 2000, inspired by Freud’s dream
the time he woke up from his location daily. Tehching Hsieh’s One Year of a Museum of Excrement (Brisley, n.d.). Brisley’s work since the 1960s
Performance series (1978–1986) also explores self-deprivation, variously has investigated the physiological embodiment of psychological alienation,
of freedom (Cage Piece, 1978–1979), personal time (Time Clock Piece, derangement and trauma. Living and working through the post-WWII and
1980–1981), outdoor space (Outdoor Piece, 1981–1982) or personal space cold war periods, Brisley explored the construction and estrangement of
(Rope Piece, 1983–1984, with Linda Montano) or of making art at all the subject in the context of the material and ideological conditions of
(No Art Piece, 1985–1986). Rönkkö, like Kawara and Hsieh, explores regi- East-West European power relations, through durational performances.
mented documentation and communication of daily existence and themes In 1972 he made the work And for today… nothing in which he immersed
of autonomy and restriction simultaneously. Unlike the well-rehearsed view himself in a bath of black water for two hours a day for two weeks, sur-
whereby documentation is understood as undermining the authenticity or rounded by rotting offal. A year later, in 1973–74, during his DAAD res-
liveness of performance, Kawara, Hsieh and Rönkkö’s strategy arguably idency in West Berlin, Brisley crossed the wall and visited Poland, later
exists to generate documentation as the vital material of the performance. loosely chronicled in his short novel Beyond Reason: Ordure (2003).
The main distinction between Kawara and Hsieh‘s systems of doc- In this novel, he introduces the heteronym Rosse Yael Sirb as the curator
umentation and Rönkkö‘s in 6 Months Without is that Kawara and Hsieh of the Collection of Ordure.
developed systems prior to online algorithms and GPS, but Rönkkö The stated mission of the Museum is “to examine ‘the cultural
investigates these experiences in an online world of default self-surveil- value of ordure, shit, rubbish’ and the waste of human resources through
lance. As with Kawara and Hsieh‘s exhibitions too, stepping away from various ownership, production, and management regimes” (Museum of
the pervasiveness of online experience produces physical proof that Ordure, n.d.). A museum dedicated to shit, to the excremental product
is progressively reified and fetishized. In Rönkkö’s case, the archives of capitalist overproduction and consumption and its cultural, environ-
of unique handwritten letters she relied upon to communicate across mental and political implications and impact more broadly. A reliquary of
the offline/online, private/social divide come to stand both in place and something which, since the late eighteenth century, has been anathema
as the work (Figure 7 and Figure 8). to sensibility, something undesirable to be expunged, never to return.
The experience of being offline for a day invites further speculation The efficient management and disappearance of which becomes a hall-
on how it would feel to be offline for longer. How long could you be offline? mark of public hygiene in maintaining health, efficiency, and taste, and
What would it be like to be offline for six months? When we talked with hence, by extension, a society‘s civilizing influence in comparison to “prim-
Nastja about this work, one of the things that came up was, of course, itive cultures that had failed to differentiate muck from what mattered”
the conditions of the global health pandemic caused by COVID-19 and (Moore, 2018). Shit is undoubtedly essential, however, whether as bodily
resulting ‘lockdowns’. Many of us have spent much more time online in or social excrement. It is also inescapable, we realise, in the context of
2020 than we might have otherwise. And therefore, our desire to be offline the climate emergency, with digital oversaturation and overconsumption,
might have increased. Since then, people have written to Nastja to ask her bullshit jobs and human-induced ecosystem collapse, when “ it is easier
whether she felt better prepared for the pandemic because of her experi- to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (Fisher, 2009).
ence making the project. So, the work develops a strange resonance and In elevating something as apparently transient but wholly imminent as
increased relevance over time where her idea of its performance stopped ordure as a deserving subject of museumification, the Museum of Ordure
at the end of that six months, but other people’s interest in the possibility critiques assumed cultural value otherwise and elsewhere.
of re-enacting or re-performing the work has continued. Re-enactment The earliest snapshot capture of “www.ordure.org” by the Way-
as a form of preservation becomes resonant with this work, particularly back Machine web crawler took place at 01:22:00 on 24 January 2001.
in our current environment affected by anti-pandemic measures. It comprises of links to an introduction, “OrdureAbfall” by the curator
Rosse Yael Sirb; two texts concerning Sirb by Brisley, one a biography and
the other entitled “The Viable World of Rosse Yael Sirb” that later featured
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