Storefront Salon: The Performative Museum

Over the last decade, art museums have restaged many performances and dances, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. Not quite live, not quite dead, these reenactments have introduced a zombie time into these institutions. Sometimes this hybrid temporality, neither present nor past, takes on a gray tonality, not unlike that of the old photographs on which the reenactments are often based, and like these photos the events seem both real and unreal, documentary and fictive. Sometimes, too, the spaces that are proposed to present this undead art are imagined as gray: along with the white cube for painting and sculpture and the black box for projected-image art, “gray boxes” are envisioned to maintain such work in this state of suspended animation. These and other phenomena were discussed.

Storefront Salon is a informal gathering at Storefront’s gallery space that addresses the 25 issues of OfficeUS, a project introduced at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The salon promotes dialogue connecting art and architecture to these broader contemporary issues, which include:

Ex-Im, Trojan Horses, Best Practices, Crude Ideals, International Comfort, Reprogramming, The Invisibles, Global Citizenship, Magical States, Profit Margin, Smart Concrete, Little Americas, Anger/Love Management, Cargo Cult, Housing Public Good, Bullets Without Ideology, Code Upgrade, Culture Capital, Superlatives, Big Box Rules, Network Patents, Mission Good, Around the clock, Labor LEED and Mission Statement

These facilitated discussions are open to everyone, and will bring together Storefront’s members, network, and the community to discuss and dissect the role of culture in the most recent and relevant public debates. The OfficeUS project maintains the momentum and spirit of transformative thought coupled with collaborative action that was present at the US Pavilion, and captures its vigor in order to bring to New Yorkers a model of social engagement through art and architecture. This model deals with both ideas and practice that are simultaneously intellectually stimulating, innovative, cross-disciplinary, and accessible.