A HOUSE FOR A MUSEUM RESIDENT

 

 

What is a museum…?

 

And what is a house / home…?

 

And what does it mean to live in a museum, even for only thirty days?

 

The clever experiment of a museum in Chicago could be worth thinking about, but not in terms of the happy-go-lucky attitude that the “event” generated.

 

It does seem like an incongruence, no…? Living in a museum. As if between Living and a Museum there are irreconcilable differences…!?!

 

And indeed, there are! How would something that essentially is a repository of relics BE ALIVE…?????????? Is it not a contradiction in terms…? An oxymoron…?

 

To land / end in a museum is to land / end in a grave, although it is the dream of almost any artist. But to be invited to “live” inside a museum, as one would live inside a house / home, does seem to show a serious need the museum has these days (and it had it for some time, maybe always) to enliven itself, by whatever means.

 

Of course, an air of having fun was amply displayed in this case, but underneath lurk serious problems… the same problems that brought first the restaurant and the cafe and the gift shop inside the museum bring now the bed and the stove and the washing machine of the artist, not to mention the very artist herself / himself.

 

The initiative is not really unique. In the same city The Museum of Contemporary Art brought a whole studio into the museum, for a month or so: in a similar attempt to erase or dilute the frontier between art and life.

 

But making fun of a serious problem does not always solve that problem. Most often it does not, actually.

 

So how would A HOUSE FOR A MUSEUM RESIDENT look like…? That is, how would a House for someone who lived for a month in a museum become…? Would its inhabitant be transformed, by the experience…? And would this “inner transformation” be reflected in the house as well…?

 

Jean Nouvel said that we should bring the office into the home and the home into the office.

 

Could we replace the word “office” with the word “museum…?”

 

Essentially, bringing someone to live in a museum is like bringing someone to live in a tomb for thirty days, that is, bringing Life into Death, for thirty days.

 

Then, maybe, and symmetrically, A HOUSE FOR A MUSEUM RESIDENT would be a house where the museum would be brought into the house, that is Death would be brought into Life.

 

To unite the two, even temporarily, is the task of this competition.

 

Please send us ANY work, ANY size and ANY format that responds to the theme to works@icarch.us. We will publish all the works on our website, www.icarch.us. The deadline is February 15th, 2011. If you have any questions, please contact us.

 

Thank you,

 

ICARCH Gallery