Alvarez Mari-Tere - Remix: changing conversations in museums of the Americas

The International Museum Institute, the research unit of the Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California, has existed in a loose and extended partnership with the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporneo (MUAC) in Coyoacn, Mexico, and the Universidad Nacional Autnomo de Mxico (UNAM) in Mexico City for a little over a decade. Known as IMI, this provocative think tank focuses on disrupting the hierarchies and disciplinary demarcations that, even as they offer structure, have also effectively limited our conversations in the museum world. Through a series of intimate workshops, lectures, and conferences held in Mexico and the United States, IMIs horizons have continued to expand, break down, and build up that worlds normal communications networks.

The first book that IMI produced, Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), presented the results of its search for a set of agreed-upon qualitative and sustainable values for museums that could be shared with a wide swath of museum-interested parties. The sessions leading to our conclusions were lively and surprising, as we discovered that values we had all thought to be universal and self-evident were actually subject to question when debated in an open and international arena. What we agreed upon throughout the process, however, was that our findings were needed in the field in order to provide an alternativean antidoteto the then generally accepted belief that any museums worth could best be demonstrated quantitativelythat is, by the number of admissions it generated.

Beyond the Turnstile thus evolved into a kind of advocacy handbook, offering a decalogue of qualitative values we did all agree upon. More than that, our readers encountered a broad and international range of interpretations of those values. Beyond the Turnstile was helpful in inspiring more enthusiastic support from our stakeholders. Not only did it help those stakeholders gain a clearer understanding of the indispensability of museums to society, but it also gave them the language to encourage others in their circles to lend their support to the museum enterprise. Of course, Beyond the Turnstile was expressly useful for museum professionals themselves, as it allowed for an expanding consciousness about the world in which they/we work. And, finally, for students of museums, it was, as one reviewer noted in the words of Claude Lvi-Strauss, good to think with.

From its earliest days, IMI has focused on uncovering the nature of sustainability in museums. Now, in Remix, we are traveling beyond a discussion of sustainable values toward one focused on recognizing museums life cycles in order to better guide us in our quest for sustainability. We should add here that although IMIs scope was initially more broadly international, in recent years it has found itself gravitating toward the Americas. In the western hemisphere we have been encountering a compelling critical mass of elective affinitiesalong with their attendant challenges and opportunitiesthat, when gathered together, afford the possibilities of changing conversations.

And so, Remix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas, IMIS second book, delivers to its readers an unexpected web of the visions, voices, and perspectives of museum practitioners, philosophers, statesmen, collectors, artists, practitioners, theorists, and fundersall of them writing from or about the Americas. Because the essays we included are organized under life-cycle themes ranging from origins to renewal, and since they are presented panarchically (that is, neither hierarchically nor by discipline), they direct the reader toward an open-ended and experimental vision for museums, while at the same time interrogating the broad role of museums in the Americas. We are calling this vision a Panarchy, and we will discuss it thoroughly in the introduction to follow.