Keeping Time: On Museum, Temporality and Heterotopia

Are museums loci of fossilised objects, deprived of their initial vitality and immediacy of life? What kind of time governs the western museum culture, and how does it relate to the time of conservation and its object? And how does the temporal logic of museums and structures of keeping and care impact the artworks’ identity? This paper offers an excursion into the temporal concepts underpinning the system of collecting, musealising and conserving works of art. Drawing on several ideas of continental philosophers and authors concerned with the theme of museums both as sites of revival and death, I interrogate the museum’s alleged capability of keeping time. I further purport that recent art – including the dispositive of performance, event and media – subverts the idea of fixity and stasis that for decades underlined the logic of collections. How does art matter in these temporal constellations and how is this mattering always already temporal?