Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson.

Jeanne Silverthorne

Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson would make an excellent learning device, being more case study than airtight time capsule for a now dismantled exhibition. But the book does effectively document Wilson's 1992-93 installation at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, wherein incongruous juxtapositions of museum holdings made Maryland's history congruent. The award-winning project is re-created through photographs and a tactic of paper overleafs with rips homologous to the repressions and loopholes of museum "knowledge."

This is a book of pleasurable specifics. Lisa Corrin meticulously (if, by her own admission, necessarily incompletely) draws up a history of museum-critical art that should be required reading for every artist with meta-museum aspirations and every commentator who treats each mussing of a museum's perfect hairdo as the first head ever to roll. As Corrin points out, the genre has become so familiar it may end up in a section of Janson called "museumism." It is Wilson's attention to the museum's treatment of race, she argues, that makes his installation fresh. She's right, but there's a history here, too--for instance Faith Ringgold's improvised docent-tour/performance/lecture on the African roots of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. And while Corrin justly notes the Darby-and-Joan domesticity of museum and museum critters, her need to defend the inclusion of less-well-known practitioners in her summary has its own ironies, especially when the unfamiliar number perhaps two. Corrin's excellent essay itself offered ripe opportunity for some interventionist play with the rhetoric of catalogue writing.

Likewise satisfyingly specific are Ira Berlin's charting of the convoluted relationship between Europeans and Africans in Maryland's first two centuries, and an interview with the nine docents who worked the show. When one of these guides observes that the people on her tour were convinced that blacks had been beaten on the whipping post in one of Wilson's tableaux, though it was actually "never used for that purpose," she brings up (but leaves undiscussed) the whole vexed relationship of "museumist" artists to scholarship.

The book closes with a selection of disappointingly conformist comments by visitors, none of whom seems to have taken the smallest flight let alone taxing of the imagination. This is in striking contrast to what look to be the most compelling of Wilson's unearthings--the diaries of the 18th-century African-American astronomer and surveyor Benjamin Banneker, whose journal describes his dreams as a series of hauntings, if you will, by dead souls, "infernal spirits," uncanny animals and children, whose transcendence is always marked by constraints, wounds, pains. One of the most visually imposing parts of the installation--at least as reproduced--is Wilson's bricolage of slide projections of Banneker's astronomical drawings and his re-creations on an IBM terminal of night skies Banneker might have seen. Here he triumphs over the term-paper mentality of many museum critiques, and offers the complexity of willful mapping combined with unconscious imagining--and a glimpse of the unconscious as the agent not only of repression but of generation.

Jeanne Silverthorne is a New York artist and writer.