I was inspired by Donald Preziosi's article, which is printed in a reader entitled Deconstruction and The Visual Arts, to apply tactics and ruses to a museum visit.
Why exactly the museum? Primarily because NY is famous for its museums and secondly, because museums are prime examples of highly administered, thoroughly disciplined, social institutions. Thus to succeed in subverting the prefabricated order of this apparatus, this technology of subjectivation, would be a double triumph: Firstly, in its own right, to evade forms of disciplinary power and secondly, to do it right there in NY, in the most famous museums, the museums par excellence, right under the nose, so to speak, of dominant power.

But what is it that makes the museums such an interesting site of resistance?

Preziosi writes, "Above all, museums are social instruments for the fabrication and maintenance of modernity. Historically coterminous with our modernity, they have served as one of its central and definitive institutions and instances. Museums frame history, memory, and meaning through the patterned deployment of artifacts abstracted from our own and other societies, choreographing these together with the bodies of the beholders" (141).

Museums are quite simply normalizing institutions that produce and maintain a certain arbitrary narrative of Western and foreign (art) history. Their disciplinary organization, their aspiration to an uncritical epistemology, and their panoptic organization invite the viewer to perceive the museum as a disinterested, neutral location of display, while in actual fact it is infused with infinite power relations. What is on display, where and how, what has been omitted, what added, how are visitors to behave, observe the artifacts, stroll through the halls of display, engage with the vitrines, etc. all these elements resemble a complex of techniques of subjectivation, which I planned to escape, evade, subvert in order to challenge the flawless image of the museum as unbiased, apolitical arena of high-culture.

For more information on Foucault's Discipline and Punish, click here.

For links related to Donald Preziosi, click here.