Posted by Steve Dietz on October 24, 2005 11:26 PM
A Monologue About Dialogue
Steve Dietz
in Expanding the Center
Walker Art Center and Herzog & de Meuron
Andrew Blauvelt, ed.
October 2005
I received my contributor copies of Expanding the Center: Walker Art Center & Herzog & de Meuron today. With sections titled: Designing, Constructing, Unveiling, Collecting, Staging, Screening, Interacting, Gathering, Patterning, Framing, Signing, and Connecting, the book takes process seriously. In the process, it manages to be both visually lush and polemical. It works as a paen to architectural superstardom that will please the image conscientious, but it also purports to tell to a story that takes seriously the role of that same architecture to enhance and even change the mission, programs, and audience of a museum.
Interestingly - or not - the section with the most texts, Interacting, is the one area where the Walker cut back its programming during the expansion, abolishing the new media curatorial program, which may or may not be further evidence for "the art formerly known as new media" moving out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.
I contributed A Monologue About Dialogue, about the process leading up to the Dialog Table (nee telematic table) by Marek Walczak, Jakub Segen, Peter Kennard, and Michael McAllister, a project that was started on my watch.
There are some famous tables, such as the round table of Arthurian legend, but mostly tables are sites of or for some transaction, whether it is breaking bread at the Last Supper or breaking rules and taking bribes under the table. In parliament, to table a motion is to delay its consideration. In common parlance, to put something on the table is to make it part of a negotiation. Table manners are societal mores, which may or may not be observed while indulging in neighborly table talk. Some tables are functionally specific, like coffee tables and pool tables. Sometimes the table signifies distance in a relationship, like Orson Welles sitting across a gulf of table from Ruth Warrick in Citizen Kane, while at other times there is a forced intimacy as when Sidney Poitier comes to dinner. Judy Chicagoç—´Dinner Table brought to the table silenced and neglected historical figures for public attention. Even in the symbolic world of the periodic table, conversion tables, and database tables, the tableç—´ function is explicit, to create a relationship: 1 euro = $1.25, etc.
