Bruce Altshuler, ed. Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art

摘要

With its title implying wild excitement or a raving madness, The Delirious Museum: A Journey fromthe Louvre to Las Vegas prepares us for a re-appraisal of the museum. And indeed, the issuesfamiliar to museological discourse are less relevant to Calum Storrie than the museum's 'messyvitality' and 'richness of meaning' (p. 3).Storrie argues that the 'delirious' museum runs parallel to its traditional, or rationalcounterpart. In giving definition to the delirious museum, he aims to subvert the association of themuseum with order and classification. The need for subversion arises because 'neutral taxonomicsystems?-used as a means of "clarification" and education' often 'has meant limiting, either byaccident or design, the possible interpretations of the museum' (p. 2). This is a valid proposition.The model of the traditional museum has evolved from discourse which locates museums withinthe parameters of the 'rational' based on their nineteenth-century legacy in the construction ofhistory, and deterministic and patriarchal assumptions about cultural identity. The twenty-firstcentury museum is thus understood through its past emergence in colonial ambitions, based ontaxonomies and classifications that disavowed previous schemas as irrational.Storrie presents his argument through reference to a range of exhibitions, events, andarchitectural spaces that he classifies as 'delirious'. In keeping with its subject matter the bookhas a fairly labyrinthine, though not unwieldy structure that he describes as, 'neither purearchitectural analysis, nor urbanism, nor history nor literature alone; instead it weaves theseforms together.' He goes on: 'Perhaps the book itself is a Delirious Museum mimicking what itdescribes, for it is, among other things, a repository of anecdotes and arcane facts. It is mycollection' (p. 4).