Ontological Museum: Beginnings
25 years of experimentation
Following up on the previous post from 1999…
So… For myself, I decided to start the Ontological Museum a few years prior to the 1999 post. I had been thinking about it, starting to set up a website and all of that kind of thing. The internet as we know it today was still in it’s infancy. It was a construction zone. I got my first computer in 1994 that I bought from my Aikijutzu sensei who wanted to upgrade from a 386 to a 486 personal desktop computer. I knew utterly nothing about computers. Everyone was still working with a dial up modem. It was brutally slow. But life was slow at the time so we all accepted that fact because it was new and mysterious and cool.
A few years earlier in 1987 a gang of us in the Art department at the University of Texas at Arlington founded the International Post Dogmatist Group as a response to Post Modernism. Post Dogmatism was a lot better idea in our opinion. Three of us were the actual founders and we worked out the general idea in March of 1987. All three of us were into the spiritual path and esotericism and Eastern spirituality mainly Taoism, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism and Sufism. We were all painters working in the painting studio but we also had diverse backgrounds in photography, theatre, film, construction, mechanics, etc. We were all three in our 30’s.
So our idea of Post Dogmatism had to do mainly with artists looking within more that without and developing intuition as their main path toward art making. This meant that every individual had to find their own unique inner way of working. Post dogmatism is about removing dogma rather than creating and maintaining dogma.
’Dogma, in its broadest sense, is any belief held unquestioningly and with undefended certainty.’
As artists, we consider it wise to question everything especially those things that seem so obvious that we would never think to question them, the hidden beliefs and cognitive biases. This is not to say beliefs are not useful and important in many ways. I don’t want to delve too deeply into this idea because the main thing I want to talk about is the idea of the museum.
Since we were thinking about all of these things in relation to the art world at large and the ecosystem of the art world we decided it might be a good idea to think of ourselves as an organization rather than individuals. But an organization that was a façade that mimicked the idea of a bureaucracy without any internal cohesion, regulation or restrictions. Every member of the group could form their own office, desk, research facility, laboratory, conservatory, department, etc. that expressed their own interest and we could communicate with each other through a moniker, sobriquet, nom de plume, pseudonym, or alias. One would still use their own name but attached to some sort of self created organizational title such as director, chief, field officer, supervisor, etc.
We thought of it from the beginning as a holographic bureaucracy - the Official Avant Garde - where each member is the entire organization from a particular point of view. (I think it was Patrick O’Kelly who envisioned the holographic bureaucracy idea.) Hence, we all benefit and support each other as the organization but without any restriction on anyone’s point of view or any need to hold any point of view or any particular philosophy or any jointly held belief other than each member’s personal freedom and autonomy to pursue their own internal trail. You could say a community of anarchists - ‘absence or denial of any authority or established order’ But in the sense of human authority or human established orders with the intent to follow a greater order, the order at the root of things, the natural, universal order. The order that is found inwardly - the Great Harmony, the Tao, the Kingdom of Heaven, or however you want to call it. In this regard we, as a group, are not for or against anything in particular. However, individually, each member is welcome to their own opinion and to think what they want and do as they please.
All of this is to say that I have developed a lot of different organizational aliases over the years with the most active being the Ontological Museum and the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction. Then there is the Archives of the Eternal Network, The Fluxmuseum, The Fluxnexus, Fluxus Laboratories, The Department of Photographic Records, the Department of Linguistic Records, etc. and so on.
In recent years I eventually just went with the Ontological Museum (the name originally dreamt up by Ed Benson who died in Hong Kong a few years back) as the umbrella organization in order to be able to inventory the things that come into the archives from all the different departments. A museum archive seemed to me to be the ultimate art object inside of which every imaginable thing and activity and experiment can be tested and played out and accumulated for the future.
I am an artist, not a trained museum professional, so how I am doing the museum archives is a self taught part time activity and hence quirky. It is an art project after all and the thing, in its totality, I regard as an art object. An assemblage of assembled things mostly centered around collage art.
As artists we become masterful at what we do through continuous self disciplined practice and immersion in our creative activity whatever medium it might be in. I approach the museum archives with the same effort up to the extent I am able. In order to be self sustaining I have to put most of my effort in my studio making art. So I came to think about the efforts in the Archives in ‘museum time’ which is to say thinking in decades and centuries instead of weeks and years. So this gives me a larger window of time to work at things in the archives so that I can be patient and open to the idea that it will never be finished. So I do what I can when I can do it, just plodding along. This helps me keep from being frustrated or overwhelmed by it. It will out live me. How? I don’t know. But now that I am starting to get old I am beginning to think about it as a puzzle that needs to be solved sometime fairly soon.
It is a small record of the last years of the 20th century and first quarter of the 21st century and my reach into the global art community via the use of the internet and international mail service. I think it is fascinating myself.
Ok, so there is some of the background and rational for the archives of the OM. In the next article I’ll try to explain some of the insights I have learned along the way.
I should finish with the disclaimer that I am speaking from my own perspective and must include the Standard Disclaimer…
THE STANDARD DISCLAIMER:
“The ideas, views, opinions, attitudes, conceptions or insinuations, bot explicit and implicit, contained herein may or may not be those of the International Post-Dogmatist Group at a whole or any of its constituent members, associates, affiliates, subsidiaries or institutions.”
Read more about the Standard Disclaimer here
Artists Should Be Their Own Museums
The following is a 1999 email response to a conversation on the defunct Yahoo email group Fluxlist (now on facebook) that I wrote in my early 40s from Cuernavaca, Mexico containing some of my though…
I enjoy reading about your history, how things came about, where ideas came from. We all have those but rarely write them down or share them. And there’s a bit of vicarious living on my part, because my path as an artist veered off.