Introduction to the 2019 Acquisitions Catalog
About the Ontological Museum
As I am preparing a lecture for August 15, 2024 for the Visual Poetry and Color Exhibition and the Ontological Museum I wanted to collect my thoughts together about the Ontological Museum. Below is an introduction to the idea of Ontological Museum.
Introduction to the Catalog
The Ontological Museum is an art project started in the mid-1990’s at the dawn of the Internet. The idea was to use the concept of a museum to create an institutional identity online for use as a member of the International Post Dogmatist Group (founded in 1987 by art department students at the University of Texas, Arlington). Originally the intention was to create a ‘proof of life’ for the IPDG that would collect and record documents of members of the group as our way of developing our own institutional power through which to interact among ourselves and with institutions outside of our group. However, since the IPDG is virtually open to anyone, and that everyone is presumed to be a member based on our policies of inclusiveness, The Ontological Museum has grown at a rate and scope vastly beyond original expectations.
Being an artist and not a trained museum person, I was not particularly adept nor could I anticipate the level of organization required to take in the overwhelming number of contributions of art and objects that have accumulated in the archives which I estimate to be somewhere around 25,000 items since the start of the collection in the late 1990’s. Many of the works in the archives came into the collection via a variety of projects and exhibitions. Additionally, I collected things such as 20th century black and white and color vernacular photography and there have been many independent contributions or exchanges and the collection includes one estate of collage art from a collage artist’s family from Rome who died in 1999 at the age of 99.
At first, things were organized and registered by project or for an exhibition or a publication. Eventually however, I figured out it would be much better to have a registration system that gave each item its own unique global inventory number regardless of what department of the museum the work came in for. I concluded that the best logic is chronologic.
The departments include The International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction, The Archives of the Eternal Network (for mail art) the Fluxmuseum (for contemporary Fluxus items) the Department of Linguistic Records for concrete, visual poetry, asemic writing, publications in general, etc. and the Department of Photographic Records, among others.
The thing I have developed since 2010 for my own creative production is to ‘cap’ each year with an annual catalog. This forces me to account and document everything before publication and this has been working well in terms of creating finality, accountability and a deadline. I am well practiced at it at this point. I often say that all an artist gets to keep is his trail and my annual catalogs map out that trail for me. I find it extremely useful. As an artist I live in a kind of timeless state in my head so this can let things slide along and causes slippages in the passage of time and hence memory loss if left unchecked.
So, I am going to start doing this same annual catalog process for the museum archives: a catalog such as this one where I really check off everything that came in and know it is organized and accounted for. Once I have the present and hence the future well controlled through this carefully devised set of procedures, I will go backwards and create the catalogs for past years.
Till now the organization has been kept through the annual acquisition blogs as found linked at ontologicalmuseum.org but since this is malleable technology, items can be added to the year of acquisition indefinitely and hence not solving the problem of urgency that a hard copy publication creates. So, this is the primary reason for creating the annual catalog of acquisitions.
As far as the collection is concerned, I often say that I am working on museum time, which is to think in terms of decades and centuries rather than weeks and years. On a personal level this helps to reduce the stress of feeling too much urgency in getting something done at every moment. That would feel overwhelming and I don’t like feeling overwhelmed. However, this collection is envisioned to go forward for an indeterminate length of time and keep growing, yet my own lifetime is limited. How that is going to happen is beyond my current understanding. But this thought helps to guide my organizational activity which is to leave things to a future overseer in a way that can be understood.
Again, my wife Rosalia and I are working artists not an organization of museum professionals. We approach this as a big, massive assemblage project and an ongoing communal performance. I learn things and develop skills as the need arises as an artist does while making a body of artworks. One gets better at the process; one’s vision becomes clearer and one’s expectations become more precise through the practice of working. At least that is the way it is for me. The museum, as a work of art, started as a blank canvas and is always a work in progress and must be cared for on a low budget and as time and energy permit.
One thing I am considering, as I sit here, is to have the introductions to this series of books be as if chapters of an ongoing dialog about the archives as a genre of assemblage or installation or performance. It is, in my opinion, a form of Gesamtkunstwerk or Total Work of Art.
Maybe, starting with the 2020 catalog which will begin in a few weeks, I will try to write ongoing notes through the year on my reflections about the idea of the museum archives and its contents. Again, this will be as an artist not as a museum professional. There are so many potential things for an artist to think about and consider and most of these things I have yet to flesh out in language.
Cecil Touchon, Founding Director
Rosalia Touchon, co-founder
Monday Dec 9, 2019
Buy the catalog Ontological Museum - New Acquisitions 2019 Catalog
New acquisitions catalog for registered works into the Ontological Museum Archives. Items include mail art, collage art, fluxus art, visual poetry, photo montage, assemblage, bricolage, postcards, books and asemic writing. WORKS BY: Mckenna Mitchell, Brittani Myers, Adam Freeman, Doren Robbins, Paige Wi, Amelia Currier, Susan Mabray Gnaedinger, Michael Arata, Carlyle Baker, Judith Amanda Hay, Jennifer Zoellner, Chris Lawson, Julia Payne, Maria de Lourdes Rabello Villares, Lisa B. Forman, Karen A. Miller, Elizabeth Concannon, Martha Whittemore, James White, Bea Savellano, Sassu Antonio, Horst Tress, Gustave Morin, Debra Mulnick, Russell Manning, Frips, Claire Marcus, Joan Schulze, Joey Zanotti, Elizabeth Bogard, Pal Csaba, Dennis Parlante, Lance Carlson, Alice Harrison, John Paul Gardner, Pere Saguer Jofre, Angela Caporaso, UU, Pamela Nelson, Linda Hertz, Carolina Rosario Nunez Diaz Corralejo, Judith Meyer, Joan Harrison, Jon Foster, Joan Desmond, Michael Basinski, Lova Delis, Louise LaPlante
Due to an undue amount of upheaval, loss and rearranging of things since the Pandemic. I have yet to print further annual catalogs but they are in preparation.
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Whew, just reading this - wow what an undertaking.