Avant-Garde Museology: Toward a History of a Pilot Experiment, Arseny Zhilyaev, 2015
Fedorov's 'common task' of mankind was to conquer death, which involves attaining immortality, as well as resurrecting the legacy of their indebted forefathers. The museum thereby becomes a church-like institution registering every birth, death and assuring resurrection.
"Partial abstraction or idealisation" of artefacts in a museum- " the elements of a museum always contain some aspect of artificiality: none belongs to primary reality in its pure form, which we encounter in everyday life." [41]Ā
The Museum, its Meaning and Mission, Nikolai Fedorov, c.1880
The fate of everything donated to a museum is inactivity; its collections are obsolete and "it is collecting, under the guise of old tatters, the departed souls of the dead [ā¦] the only thing that is higher than the old tatters preserved in museums is the very dust itself" (reference to the fetishisation of decay). [61-2]
However, museum artefacts are given a revived purpose as they are transferred āto a domain of investigation, to the hands of descendants [ā¦] for the museum, there is nothing hopeless, "sung out", i.e. something that is impossible to revive and resurrect." [64-5]
Therefore, "the museum is not an aggregate of objects, but a congregation of persons; its activity consists not in accumulating dead things, but in restoring life to the remains of the dead, in reestablishing the dead through their works, via living agents." [76]
"Museums are mostly born, rather than created"- Fedorov bemoans that there is no concrete project of collecting, that "museums in their nature are random, not ubiquitous; the growth of each of them is nonlinear, inconsistent, not discontinuous, and the internal arrangement of objects in them represents more a random pile than orderly collecting." [78]Ā
'The passive museum'- "the museum as representation, as a likeness of imaginary resurrection, as only a depository" is on one hand, a reflection of the world (past and present) through objects and on the other hand, the creation of the intelligentsia. [79]
Fedorov refers to museums as institutions of congregation/unification, where scholars become an active, teaching, serving social class, because they mediate between a site of investigation by scholars and collections of everything unscholarly. [96-100]
"Every person will have his own book, his life's work, where his soul will be transferred, and then at death, human bodies will be transferred to the cemetery while their souls, in the shape of these tomes, books, and pamphlets will return to the museum." [138]
On the Museum, Kazimir Malevich, 1919
Malevich's "concession to the conservatives" is to establish a crematoria/pharmacy- "in burning a corpse we can obtain one gram of power: accordingly, thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on one chemist's shelf."
The powder of Reubens' paintings for example, will arise ideas that are "often more alive than actual representation (and take up less room)." [270]
On the Question of Museums: Record of the Discussion of Problems and Objectives of Fine Art Museums at the Art and Industry Board, Moscow Department of Museum Affairs, 1919
"Professional museum workers have created fetishes of the artistic artefacts of the past; these must be disposed of, and it can only happen by transferring control over museums to artists." [282]
Fluidity of collections- "works should be arranged and rearranged continuously; the ideal museum would have all works on moveable panels; the tendency toward immobile iconostasis must be rooted out." [285]
