I want the museum to be. To gather together.

I want the museum for me to be seen and heard and felt.

I want the museum to welcome my smell, my noise, my inadequacy and my struggle.

I want the museum to make space to overcome my voice silenced loudly before.

I want the museum to wake up to this new world with necessity.

I want the museum to dismantle its paywall, its safety nets and its desire to entertain.

I want the museum to give us direct access to the art we need to demolish the limits to our ability to find each other.

I want the museum where “we” is inevitably the right mode of address.

I want the museum to build coalitions, across colors, sounds, materials, cultures and affinities.

I want the museum to be a space spurred by contemplation and empathy.

I want the museum to be a place that opens through motion — between modes of we and belonging of I. A place in which we can give ourselves over not only to visions considered our own, but new visions yet for us to imagine.

I demand the museum to undo the division between the rational and the crazy to help us imagine that which we have failed to see.

I demand the museum to abolish the imperial mindset that gave rise to its current form. 

I need the museum to start from scratch, because we need it now more then ever before.

* * *

I want a museum to recognize that for culture to take place, our bodies must appear.

I want a museum giving rise to our sense of self, to us as individuals AND as members of communities. Where we can feel a stability that is recognized and hailed by others.

I need the museum to always be where we explicitly show up for each other. I appear to you and you to me.

I want a museum that can hold difference and dissonance without fear. 

I want a museum that inverts hierarchies and value systems in art and in people.

I want a museum to create its own unregulated wildness. To resist binding its objects and viewers to rules and instead release the wild in us, fusing our hunger into action.

I want a museum where we can find the things that are not, as they slip through the cracks of their absence into an inevitable presence.

* * *

I want the museum to refuse the refusal of violent traditions.

I want the museum to be a public, and therefor already political space. I want the museum in fact to contest the division between public and private, demonstrating that politics are already in the home, in the streets, at our work.

I want the museum to arise of the organization of people, their acting and speaking together.

I want the museum to be a place where people cannot help by speak, materializing the freedom and radicality of conversation. In response I want the museum to be quiet and listen.

I want the museum to lead its viewers away from passive admiring to an active viewing, instilling an honest will to re-enact.

I want the museum to become the echo chambers of calls to action.

* * *

I want the museum to realize that those stripped of representation are still here — gagged by a collective blind spot.

I want the museum to laugh at its own prejudice and draw new lines of vision.

I want the museum to tear down its colonial present.

I need the museum to move on.

I want the museum to emphatically court those who have been uninvited and who have never felt the need to cross the threshold of its doors before.

I want the museum to recognize that it not only needs those missing but actually fails in its entirety without.

* * *

I want a museum to be a space for the movement of things, of values, of meaning.

I want a museum to be a space where I can glance back at those who are looking.

I want a museum to foster disorientation for me to linger with perception. —

I want a museum to disorganize my thoughts.

I want a museum to transpire prejudice as a predicament of privilege.

I want a museum to liberate my desire into a yet indeterminate form.

I want a museum to be a space that makes us realize that I need pay attention, again.

* * *

I need a museum to be a space to breath.

I need a museum to give me shelter from the monolithic, the dogmatic and more.

I want a museum to offer free food, a bathroom and education.

I want a museum loud and quiet, bright and dark, concrete and abstract.

I want a museum to be a public space of visual and tactile experience. A space for all to train a more sensitive seeing and being. A space to enter everyone’s eyes and bodies into the rich and knowledgeable domain of thinking and feeling.

I want a museum to give us tools to undo visual regimes generated to blind us.

I need a museum to offer a space in which we spend less time antagonized and antagonizing.

I need a museum to support a democratic people. In crisis, exhibitions should multiply, art activities should continue and increase. Because art is no luxury or pastime. It is a fundamental necessity.

I need a museum that in tragedy and strain, offer the people the refreshment of the spirit art can give – so they can carry through unfalteringly the hard things that must be done.

 

I demand a museum to be a site of collective study and never call to order. A space of dissonance and noise. A space of a public weave to which one sends one’s imagination visiting.

I need a museum teaching by examples rather than by theories found in the abstractions of books.

I need a museum to invite us patiently and persistently to be present to what it means to be alive.

I insist a museum to endure a productive discomfort. Where we can ask wise or foolish question, and may stay to have our eyes opened to something entirely new but yet already present.

Now.

* * *

I want the museum to be open until 10pm.

I want the museum to be a place to take apart the “being-part-of.”  Simply to find each other alive and living.

I want the museum to offer spaces of resistance against the terror of disappearance.

I want the museum to eclipse banality.

I want the museum to endure its paradoxes — taking measure of our anxieties of loss, collecting histories of pain and at the same time offering a space to tease out possibilities, asking what those losses may release us to imagine.

I need the museum to be a place of courageous vulnerability.

I need the museum to be a place that allows me to rest.

* * *

I want a museum in which I don’t walk from void to void, but I rather stumble from present to present.

I want a museum to be a place where time expands. Where we can be with time instead of being emptied without.

I want a museum that does not categorize art as old or new, conservative or radical but opens it to us, as a continuous and living expression.

I want a museum to be a place where the past is gone but folded into the meaning of our potent present.

I want a museum to be committed to this moment.

* * *

I want a museum to teach me that truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

I want a museum to unhinge an assembly of opinions.

I want a museum to essentially be concerned with meanings. Meanings not always expressible in words; but more profound, more subtle, and more deeply ingrained in us, as a matter of emotion, of sensibility, of individual reaction, and of deep instinctive and intuitive wisdom.

I want a museum to demonstrate that art has much to say in its own right as an expression of humankind outside the frames of institutions.  

* * *

I need the museum to be corrective to our highly technological culture.

I want the museum to be a space in which things feel closer together, closer to me and to you and to us.

I need a museum where practice and theory is one, where walls let go of their delineation and offer open connections to what lies beyond.

I want the museum to be where space starts to tremble and floors crack open.

I want the museum to be the space where my feet starting to dance so my voice can’t help but sing.

I want the museum to be a place of practice liberation.

* * *

I want the museum to escape the barriers of language.

I want a museum to contribute to mass education in subjects inadequately covered or even omitted in formal education.

I want a museum to contribute on innumerable levels to filling in the bare outlines of literacy, of specialized professional education, of training in the limited practical techniques of earning a living and of carrying on daily modern life.

I want a museum to teach a new kind of vanishing point. To offer those who visit not a room of their own, but a space in the world. Because they need to be in the world with others and believing it continuously anew.

I want a museum to show that even though art has its conventions, peculiar to a time and place and people, a little patience renders them only footnotes that fill out a story with detail and background and local color to make it more emphatic and complete.

I want a museum to demonstrate that a people may be known most thoroughly in its art.