MUSEUM FATIGUE

No Earthrise in China?

December 28, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

This week was the fiftieth anniversary of the perspective-changing image of the Earth taken from Apollo 8 while in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. The iconic photograph of the Earthrise—the first color image of Earth from space—and its effects on our understanding of our home planet were the topic of many articles in the media this past holiday week. So imagine my utter surprise when I showed this photograph to a classroom of over seventy Chinese college students at […]

Categories: China, Environment, Photography, Scripts • Tags: Earthrise

Utopian Gesture #1: Recycling Bins

November 7, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

As a first example of a utopian gesture, I present the most beautiful and ideal collection of recycling bins I have ever seen. In fact, it seems unfair to refer to the collection of such a wide variety of objects at one location in such nicely designed containers as simply recycling. It is more like a recycling station or miniature recycling center—it collects a wide variety of things in six different major categories. Pull-top cans: soft drinks, Sprite cans, beer cans, Coke […]

Categories: Consumption, Environment, Utopian Gestures • Tags: garbage, Jussi Parikka, recycling

Utopian Gestures

November 6, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

For some time I have been sensitive to the variety of utopias that I encounter here in China. Of course, by utopias, I don’t mean the comprehensive, complete, all-encompassing social utopias of the type that national leaders or religious figures imagine and occasionally attempt to realize on a large scale—like the communist one featured in Chinese propaganda imagery from the 1940s through the 1970s. Rather, I have been attracted to much smaller utopias—the attempted everyday utopias that are intentionally modest […]

Categories: Objects of Power, Utopian Gestures, Utopias and Dystopias

Hanging “Public Relations Advertisements” (Propaganda Displays)

November 4, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday, for the first time ever I passed some workers installing one of the many displays of the “Core Values of Socialism” that have proliferated around the city over the past few years. The Core Values can be found in numerous formats (paper posters, painted on surfaces, printed on surfaces, carved in stone and displayed or projected visually) and in a wide variety of locations (at street intersections, at bus stops, on construction barriers, on or in busses, in taxis, […]

Categories: Advertising, Scripts • Tags: China, marketing, propaganda poster

Taiwan Election Sickness (March 21, 2000)

November 2, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

Many times over the years I have shared an anecdote with various colleagues who work in China about an article I once read in the Mainland Chinese newspaper, The Global Times, about “Election Sickness” in Taiwan during the second presidential election in March 2000. The article was memorable for its recounting of the deleterious effects that the democratic elections were having upon the bodies and minds of the electorate. I remembered clipping the article and saving it, but had forgotten […]

Categories: Bodies, Mythologies • Tags: democracy, election, sickness, Taiwan

Mystery Object #24: Truck With Masculine Steel Ball Hitch

October 27, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

Today’s news that there has been an arrest in the case of the mysterious pipe bombs sent to vocal critics of Donald Trump was accompanied by images of the alleged perpetrator’s white van plastered with layers of partisan political stickers. This immediately reminded me of other such vehicles that I have seen over the years. Specifically, I recalled the red pickup truck of a Trump supporter that I saw in Arizona last year. The back of the truck was covered with […]

Categories: Colonialism, Gender, Mystery Objects • Tags: bumper stickers, masculinity, pickup truck

The Convenience Store at the End of the World

October 24, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, then the post-apocalyptic grocery store is there to help imagine both. Catastrophically emptied of employees with shelves left stocked waiting to be raided by roving bands of survivors—it is common to the mise en scène of the end-of-the-world film genre as a sign of the collapse of the economic relations that define our current globalized-capitalist-market-economic system. Products in the store-at-the-end-of-the-world are left unguarded and free […]

Categories: Consumption, End of Times, Retail • Tags: consumption, post-apocalyptic, smart store, surveillance, the eerie

Time to Get Back to Blogging?

March 29, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

There is something that I have always liked about blogging. I like the feeling of having my own space on the Internet, my own URL and my own ability to format and post and share things. I like that blogging is public because it commits me to a measure of seriousness, but at the same time it is a style and format that lends itself to a certain informality. Screens always feel like they involve less commitment than the printed […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: blogging

The Strange Case of Nanjing Bicycle Sacrifice

September 27, 2017 by Museum Fatigue

On two separate occasions, in different parts of Nanjing, I have observed a local practice of bicycle use that is a sad commentary on value and waste in urban Nanjing—bicycles chained to the ground along the side of the road as ritual sacrifice. While they were created to be ridden for transportation and enjoyment, the sad, twisted objects with their tortured frames pegged to the ground will never again be used as a means of locomotion. Their “bicycleness” has been […]

Categories: Bicycling, China, Mystery Objects, Ruins • Tags: automobiles, Nanjing, parking, trash

“Liu Xiaobo” and the Power and Weakness of the Digital

July 14, 2017 by Museum Fatigue

char nametoberemoved[11] = {‘L’, ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘ ‘, ‘X’, ‘i’,’a’, ‘o’, ‘b’, ‘o’, ‘\0’}; When he died yesterday, Liu Xiaobo got quite a lot of press in the West. A Nobel Peace Prize winner and notable participant in the Tiananmen protests that culminated in the events of June 4th, 1989, he was an iconic dissident figure. In fact, I have a hunch that when we look back from some future point, Liu Xiaobo’s passing will have also marked the eclipsing […]

Categories: China, Memory, Technology • Tags: censorship, Digital Culture, Liu Xiaobo, WeChat