Disclaimer: Wir, die Mitarbeiter*innen des Kunstmuseum Bochum, sind ein internationales Team und gestalten unsere Kommunikation dementsprechend so offen wie möglich. Deshalb haben wir uns für die englische Sprache entschieden für unsere Weeknotes.
We at the Kunstmuseum Bochum are an international team and want to keep our cooperations international as well and as open as possible. Therefore, we decided to write our weeknotes in English.
Week 5
Welcome back to our weeknotes! This week Eva - our deputy director and curator – is writing and we’re talking about a major aspect of our inventory process: documentation. We want to take photos of as many sculptures as possible. That means a lot of work, but we wanted to take advantage of the fact that they are outside of their usual tight storage situation in a large, bright space. Because when does that ever happen besides in an exhibition?
1. We need pictures to work with
We need pictures for our database. If you go through the digital files, looking for something, having a reference photograph and not just title, artist, date and material of an object, is very handy. In a long-term perspective we assume that the photographs will also serve as an important resource for our public digital collection platform. We are happy to have the artist and photographer Emre Abut join our team to take on this huge task.
A shy sculpture in the exhibition “Inventur” - © H.Holtgreve, 2022
2. How does art want to be photographed?
With his professional experience and some intuition Emre prepared a studio-setting with a white backdrop, evenly lit, creating a smooth curve, so that the objects placed on it almost seem to float in a vacuum. Just by themselves, no context. Really?
At our first jour fixe of the inventory team, we discussed the proposed setup, guidelines issued by other museum organizations, in order to decide on a standardized form that would work for us and that Emre should follow. Again and again the word „neutral“ was used. Flipping through older catalogues of the museum we came across photographs showing objects in recognizable environments like the exhibition space, a field that was just ploughed, a garden, the terrace in front of the museum, among a group of people and so on. They were not floating, not „neutral“, and fascinated us. At the end we agreed on two things: 1. To go for the studio setting with the white backdrop for technical reasons and 2. to refuse calling this neutral and rather hold a conversation around this particular photographic tradition.
3. We invited guests and historians to join the conversation
The photo historian Matthias Gründig joined our weekly public inventory conversations on Wednesdays. First Emre gave the public a tour of his workspace and explained that to him, photographing art objects seems similar to the way prisoners are being photographed: front, left side, right side, maybe also back and bottom. But then comes his last and favourite shot that feels more like an aesthetic encounter, where he tries to find out „how the object itself wants to be photographed“.
4. Even so-called neutrality has a history
Besides other older examples Matthias introduced us to the work of Romualdo Moscioni (1849-1925) who as an independent photographer earned money with photographs of objects from the Vatican collections. Already at that time the objects were decontextualized in their photographic representation. They appeared as isolated from the background of the image through different manual techniques. Matthias called this a double decontextualization: first when the object is put in a museum and then again, when it is photographed. We discussed that this is reminiscent of how things are photographed when they are to be sold: Images that suggest that an object could be a commodity. That it is “tamed” and can be taken wherever if someone pays for it. Matthias emphasized that this is no coincidence, but that the image formula of commodity photography existed before museum object photography was established.
The talk ended with an outlook into 3D model techniques and their possibility to zoom in on detail. They create the desire to get closer and closer to the object, without ever actually getting it into your hands.
4. “INVENTUR” questions order and museum practice
It seems like our exhibition “INVENTUR” is constantly oscillating between creating order and questioning it, overwhelming us with coincidence and unexpected context. Besides collecting data, it is our aim to activate the inherent potential of our collection. Are we maybe too well-behaved, following the photographic tradition of decontextualization and singularization?
Thank you for reading us, see you next week!
- EB
Where all the pictures are taken in the exhibition “Inventur” - © H.Holtgreve, 2022
About us:
The Kunstmuseum Bochum is a small art museum in Bochum, Germany, rethinking its collection.
Through these Weeknotes we want to document insights and share thoughts about our ongoing inventory process at the Kunstmuseum Bochum. We call it “process”, not “project” on purpose because beyond a need of order, our collection needs a re-telling of its stories, in all its iterations. For more information, you can contact us at: cnies@bochum.de or if you’re reading this for the first time, join our Substack for regular updates.