(Pressrelease, Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum – Rotterdam)

Following a series of guest-curated exhibitions initiated by the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in 1988, Sarat Maharaj, Co-Curator of Documenta11, has been invited to comment on the museum’s collection. Sarat Maharaj teaches modern art theory at London’s Goldsmiths College and is currently Rudolf Arnheim guest professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His research centers on the tremendous importance of Marcel Duchamps’s work for the tumultuous development of Western and non-Western contemporary art. Maharaj developed an early interest in British artist Richard Hamilton (1922), one of Duchamp’s best-known admirers. Since 1956 Hamilton has translated Duchamp’s many statements on art into English, remarks which are almost identical with the hypertexts generated by today’s computers. Hamilton was also one of the first artists to exploit the advanced visual potential of computer technology.

Ecke Bonk, designer of the Documenta11 non-Logo and artist of documenta X, in his work on information aesthetics was also inspired by Duchamp too. In 1997 he collaborated with Richard Hamilton for documenta X.

It is with this “team” – Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk - that Sarat Maharaj now turns his attention to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum’s collection. In view of the fact that our acquaintynce with works of art is mediated more and more by reproductions, this team makes little or no use of real objects from the museums wide-ranging collection.

Marcel Duchamp is an important artist for the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. Although the Boijmans does not have any “real” Duchamps. The Museum do not have multiples and other editions which have been in the collection since 1989, including a replica of the famous suitcase, the green and white boxes containing documents, and a work by Hamilton about Duchamp. Like Marcel Duchamp’s work, this exhibition was conceived as an experiment and a laboratory in which to speculate on the museum’s future: an Archive Without a Museum?

The exhibition is grouped in five islands:

The Hamilton island (Works by Richard Hamilton)

The reading island (The complete contents of the “Green Box”)

The random island (an avalanche of reproductions of the museums collection)

The instrument island (optical instruments)

The Duchamp island (Ecke Bonks Duchamp Database Initiative: Duchamps notes)