This exhibition was a retrospective of the activities and artworks that constitute The Portable Hawkers Museum, made between February 2003 and February 2005. Within this body of work, it was my intention to hold aspects of museological discourse up for a particular kind of looking through foregrounding the processes of looking within the gallery. The exhibition was divided into two rooms, and the two parts of the exhibition were linked with the use of surveillance technology. In the first room, viewers were presented with various kinds of documentary material, (labeled as such), of the past activities of The Portable Hawkers Museum, as well as representations of the objects belonging to The Portable Hawkers Museum. The second part of the exhibition included re-presentations of The Taxonomy of The Portable Hawkers Museum and Authentic Reproductions. These artworks were displayed in vitrenes, borrowed from The Johannesburg Art Gallery. The installation parodies displays within natural history museums. The method of display, as well as the choice of objects on display challenge systems of value within the institutions of art, and the ways in which those values are communicated to the viewer. Viewers were monitored by surveillance cameras, while looking at the objects in the vitrenes. The surveillance footage was on display in the first room of the exhibition. Through this display, viewers in the first room could watch other viewers looking at the second part of the exhibition.
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The portable Hawkers Museum was initiated in February 2003. It is through this ongoing project that I explore notions of cultural value, and who determines what is valuable in culture. I began to question the institutions of art [and here I include the discipline of art history], as institutions that to a large extent determine cultural value, and influence cultural production. To foreground this issue, I initiated The Portable Hawkers Museum that collects objects that cost R10 or less, purchased from the hawkers of Johannesburg. The Portable Hawkers Museum challenges the relationship of museums to the objects housed within them and the communities they supposedly serve through the kinds of objects it houses and the way in which the collection is displayed. The collection is exhibited in open public spaces, while documents of the public exhibitions or representations of the items belonging to the museum collection are exhibited within galleries. The traditional museum is therefore denied access to the original work of art. This ongoing artwork can be understood as a means of critiquing the institutions of art through parody. Individual works within this project are directed at critiquing specific institutional practices and conventions.
The work, titled Souvenir, or I Love the Portable Hawkers Museum explores the notion of the souvenir, as well as issues of museum display. It offers the viewer a constructed scene, reminiscent of tableau’s one finds in a natural history museum: a kind of ‘real life re-enactment’. This tableau is accompanied by a selection of post-card souvenirs of the portable museum [a series of five images, limited edition of 300, each is dated, numbered, signed and stamped with the official Hawkers Museum Stamp]. The images on the post- cards are documentations of the museum when it is open to the public, and together form a narrative that gives insight into how the museum operates outside the gallery context. These post-card souvenirs offer the viewer the ability to possess part of The Portable Hawkers Museum and, in mimicking the process of collecting, like all souvenirs, to add to their own ‘museums of experience.’
During a three-month stay in Basel, as part of an artists exchange program, I constructed a sub- section, The Poisons Section of The Portable Hawkers Museum in a suitcase. Inside this suitcase, I placed catalogue photographs of the poisonous objects in the collection of The Portable Hawkers Museum. I also placed photographs of the plaster reproductions of those objects that were installed at the Skulpturenhalle, as well as some photographic documentation of street scenes in Johannesburg, to contextualise these objects for the foreign audience. The first performance took place at the main tram stop, in the square of the middle class part of the town. The second performance took place in the square, outside The Historical Museum, in the upper class part of the town. As with the performances in Johannesburg, the sites were chosen in order to interact with different members of the community. Visitors to my museum were provided with a text, detailing my intentions, and the history of The Portable Hawkers Museum, translated into German, in order to bridge the language gap. These performances took place concurrently with the installation at the Skulpturenhalle, and a group exhibition that I was participating in, in Basel at the time. The aim of the project was to bring part of urban cultural practice from Johannesburg into the European museum context through the simultaneous installation at The Skulpturenhalle and the public performance.
The artwork titled, Authentic Replicas: An installation at The Skulpturenhalle Basel continues my investigation of issues to do with the value of the reproduction, and the relationship of the reproduction to the original work of art. This work consisted of an installation of plaster replicas of some of the objects that form part of the poisons section of The Portable Hawkers Museum’s collection at The Skulpturenhalle in Basel. The Skulpturenhalle houses a collection of plaster reproductions that were made for didactic purposes, so that art students could learn from the so-called master sculptors, as well as to reinforce the values that underpinned Enlightenment European culture. Through exhibiting my plaster replicas in The Skulpturenhalle these replicas acquire a similar value as the other plaster reproductions within the museum, by association. The irony of my plaster objects is that they are untimely more valuable than the plaster reproductions in the Skulpturenhalle, because, although they are replicas, they are also ‘original works of art’. This accounts for the ironic and somewhat cheeky title. Thus the artwork becomes an interrogation of value and the relationship of the original work of art to the copy, as well as a means of bringing a part of urban culture in Johannesburg into the European museum context.
The artwork titled, Authentic Reproductions consists of a series of catalogue images of the Authentic Replicas printed on cotton paper. This work continues my investigation of issues to do with the value of the reproduction, and the relationship of the reproduction to the original work of art, as well as issues to do with the conventions of catalogue photographs. The objects are photographed on plain white backgrounds, dislocated from time, space and context. The scale of the objects is not evident, and in some instances, the whole object is not visible, while in others, more than one object is present in the photograph.