Thursday, August 16, 2007
Musée
Patamécanique
Here’s my essay on the Musée Patamécanique, a tiny art institution filled with
marvelous, curious contraptions in
Below are excerpts (out of order) from
one of my interviews with the Musée’s curator, Neil Salley:
Patamechanics is both
the study and the manifestation of physical objects and effects which are
designed to entice pataphysical modes of inquiry.
[Pataphysics] is the science of imaginary solutions. It is the underpinnings of
our entire society. All words being equal, you can come up with any definition
of it you like.
If you do, Mr. Cook,
concur with the notion that we are what we pretend. Then what must naturally
follow is so is everything else. … The heart of this endeavor is the notion
that the order of things is a magnificent human creation. And its existence is
legitimized through an unending series of sometimes beautiful, sometimes
hideous, but they’re always meaningful, and this is the key word, imaginary
solutions. Most of us are ignorant of this submerged imaginary order that joins
us all under the surface. If you follow the little red numbers,
you do some archaeology, a little digging, you might come up with some more
reasons for why and how and the way things work at Musée Patamécanique. There’s
stuff there that can be gotten to if the viewer is curious. It’s not just a
bunch of fun and silliness, although it is.
It’s a domain inspired
by the work of a gentleman by the name of Dr. Faustroll. And it’s fun for the
potential visitor if the function and the identity and the dimension of this
domain are left playfully undefined. There’s some place for the potential
visitor to go. Once the order is established for them and all the reasons are
laid out, completely imaginary or not, then it’s not the experience that it was
meant to be.
What we’re experiencing
right now [a phone conversation] is an illusion. It’s trickery. I’m not really
there. But you believe it. Who knows, I could be an artificial intelligence
program and you wouldn’t even know it.
[The Musée] is a sensorium.
The odor machine that mixes manmade odors into a yet another
layer of illusory manmade odor. There are optical devices that make you
see things that really aren’t there. There is a machine
that actually effects the surface of your skin and
makes you feel things, well they’re there, but it affects your sensorium in a
playful way. It is a sensorium of illusions. And it’s no different from the
sensorium that we exist in now. I drove into
I don’t think confusion
is a bad thing.
The symbol of the
museum is a whisk. It’s
the icon that has been chosen because it’s a blend of audience participation, it’s performance, it’s immersive installation, and it’s
brought together in an attempt to render in the imagination of the visitor a
world not unlike a child’s creation, a dream world. But it’s manifested as a
means to rediscover the real world, which is ultimately revealed as yet another
dream world.
It’s a playful manifestation
of it. Businesses do it all the time. Organizations, institutions, schools,
they invent themselves. And they take this all very seriously. But it’s all
created. And this notion that we’re all part of this never-ending
imaginary solution, all this unending creativity that is our world but we take
it all very, very seriously. A thing like the Musée Patamécanique
couldn’t exist inside another museum. It couldn’t exist in a gallery. It
couldn’t even exist in a wonderful place like the
You end up in a hall
of mirrors. And that’s where I like to be. Where you come to
the conclusion that, gosh, this is all just made-up stuff. It’s all a
creative universe that we live in. Everything. It’s
created. That line that people create between what’s real and what’s imaginary,
there really is no line. The line is created just like that line I drove by
today when I went from
The wonderment’s gone.
We know now, science tell us, art theorists tell us “this is what, this is how,
this is the reason,” and it’s all been put into neat little boxes for us. All
the reasons are there in these encyclopedias, and my
kids’ books even, it’s all organized perfectly, this is how it is to be. But no
one ever stops and says this is all just really made-up stuff. I think once you
point to that beautiful things happen. I see the world
as a much more enticing and creatively driven place.
It’s outwardly engaging
in that ready-made analytical language of science or technology or historic or museumological paradigms. That’s what I enjoy being engaged
with on the outside. But inwardly, what’s interesting for me and potential
visitors is to utilize these same contexts as a muse, as a whisk again. We
attempt to stir up ideas and blur those distinctions we make between science or
art, or reason or unreason, or truth or deception, the real and the illusory.
It’s a playful reassessment that for me solicits a heightened awareness of the
human mind’s capacity for tolerating epistemological dissonance. That is not a
bad place to be.
Photos from top to bottom: Mr. Salley
with the "Earolin" in the foreground and "A Time Machine"
behind, photo by Richard Dione, and an image related
to Musée contributor Hans Spinnermen's "The Dream of Timmy Bumble
Bee," which was exhibited at Boston University's Photographic Resource
Center in April.