TEMPORAL VIRTUALOSITY IN THE WASTELAND OF AESTHETICS: the half-life of the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art
Jack Green
The Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art’s Temporary Pretext
Appearing in 1982 in Madison WI, the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art in the front yard of 1341 Williamson Street was a constantly changing installation of sculptures, mail art, performances, paintings, graffiti, interventions, social meetings, cultural soapboxes, and also an international tourist destination. Foundationally, the public was always invited to interrupt / interact with the artist-created installations.
After twice voting it the ugliest house in the city, the Common Council of Madison persistently tried to create an ordinance that would prevent the Museum’s front yard to be used for public art, but it never succeeded. At the time, freedom of expression was difficult to legislate against. The project was also coincidental with publishing books of poetry and art, and had extensive interactions in the international mail art, cassette and performance networks. All of this happened before the Age of the Internet.
Though mIEKAL aND and Elizabeth Was (she later changed her name to Lyx Ish) were the primary instigators, countless folks collaborated with art and performance production here. A focus during these years was enabling people who didn’t think of themselves as creative or artistic to improvise and engage in activities they had never encountered before.
In 1986, the Museum held a protest against a city art festival called Festival of the Lake, which mainly featured artists from out of state. The rogue festival was called Festival of the Swamps and attracted a lot of local artists to take part in a parade, performances both real and imaginary, installations, radio art, bottled swamp muck, street and gallery interventions, and extensive postering and media. The total budget for the first year’s festival was less than one hundred dollars,, as opposed to Festival of the Lakes’ multi-million dollar budget. The Festival of the Swamps actually lasted one year longer than Festival of the Lakes.
When that block of Willy Street became polluted with crack houses, the front yard structures became safe spaces for the children living in the crack houses. Sometimes people came out in the morning to find kids sleeping in the inner spaces of the installation. But the violence brought to the neighborhood forced the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art to seek refuge in rural Wisconsin and begin the next chapter of their evolution. Temporary art production continued, but the focus shifted more and more to the Internet and the subsequent online spaces that were created.
The Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art’s Temporary Post-Historical Visualization
Art alone makes life possible—this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms... I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences. The provocateur of the chemical processes is located outside the world. Man is only truly alive when he realizes he is a creative, artistic being... Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act. —Joseph Beuys
The magic in a word remains magic even if it is not understood, and it loses none of its power. Poems may be understandable or they may not, but they must be good, and they must be real. —Velimir Khlebnikov
Much of the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art’s activity since the advent of the Internet has taken place in online spaces via email art, listservs, digital animation, electronic poetry, MUD/MOOs, websites, and social media. The nature of temporary art production has expanded into a cosmos of imaginated pataphysical solutions, while mixing and immersing the everyday with the yet-to-be manifested. Though images are encountered first in these instances, language and text underwrite and direct a viewer’s experiences. The virtual is predictable, speculative, and offers surprises, interruptions, and ah-ha moments when least expected.
Using an AI text prompt application called DALL-e, the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art enters an ephemeral universe of architected imagery. An AI Curator similarly computes a textual touring of these new spaces.
Graffiti’s always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.
—Banksy
Front Entrance of the Avant Garde Museum of Contemporary Art (1913)
AI Curator: More than 50 volunteers transformed the shell of a building in rural Wisconsin into a bizarre and surreal exhibition of sculptural and architectural assemblages in time for the Armory Show in New York. The rural setting shows how to envision a future that would stand the test of time while being environmentally sustainable. The Pavilion’s materials and design schemes invite casual and passionate participants to interact with the objects and the space. The sculptures and constructions are a vision of the future which should be encouraged and celebrated by the current state of our world. Evolve, Move, Out-Evolve, Dare, Challenge, Engage, Surprise, Raise, Learn, Create, Rethink, Equip, Inspire, Design.
A Retrospective Exhibit of Burning Russian Futurist Paintings
AI Curator: Art is burning in the international political landscape, just as it has for years. People on all sides of the political and ideological spectrum are calling for tolerance, inclusivity, empathy, and a renewed respect for human rights. However, the call for tolerance has been hijacked by the extremists.
They are calling for the total elimination of diversity, separation of race and ethnicity, a fight to defend an imaginary national identity and, above all, an erosion of respect for human rights. Conspiracy theorists are spreading hate, poisoning the social environment, and infecting the democratic system with fear and xenophobia.
Depression Era Façade of the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art
AI Curator: Temporary art existed outside the largest factory in the mountains, where they made clay bricks. There was no sign of a state apparatus. Artists hid out in garrets, and people watched them at work. But they remained anonymous. There is no culture of creating culture. Everybody has to do something, or maybe nothing at all.
There was a strong connection between the exhibition and what was happening around us. Almost every day, there were marches or demos on the corner where our exhibition was located. These were often with placards written with slogans such as “One million texts!”
Sarcophagi of Failed Despots
AI Curator: It is difficult to avoid a feeling of disappointment when a small, dense data point is prominently presented as a demonstration of the significance of common sense, or in this case, the complexity of it. When one is presented with the audacity to use words which by very definition are true but often left unnoticed, one would almost think that the writer was accusing us of using shoddy, fake, and vapid evidence. The sad truth is that these same people who rail against such a type of evidence have no issue with producing their own weak, tepid, faint and even sloppy, evidence when it suits them. Whether this is on a practical level or an emotional one, it seems that a larger, more complex problem exists in society.
Paintings Created by a Person Who Has Yet to Be Born
AI Curator: The exhibition will come with its own collectibles and missions. Of what, you ask? The truth is, its nature has been kept a secret. Here is what we do know: it is set in a post-Global Annihilation New York, which has been left a “bloody, broken husk.” The entire city has been “zombified.” A virus-like virus, dubbed “Pandora’s Virus,” has taken hold. The exhibition requires users to solve varied, optional missions to recover the lost cultural memories.
Inside-Out Painting Revealing the Subtext of our Misunderstanding
AI Curator: When people pick up something they like and it turns out to be a mistake, they take it home and it gets sent back. It happens. Sometimes they make the same mistake more than once. She did it. She painted her people.
She painted an alligator on her husband’s face, and a woman with a devil horn sticking out of her head. She painted a fireman and a cowboy. She just painted a huge black rectangle onto a canvas using acrylic paint and glitter. It feels like she is painting a line of salt on the world and it’s going to keep going forever.
Presidential Portrait Hanging in the Gallery of Oppressors
AI Curator: A man running with a giant saber. A real warrior carrying his weapon in a glass case on display. Even a young woman dressed as a princess, walking around with a blanket tied over her head in an effort to seem like she has no head. Each person in the group was eerily silent and made me uncomfortable.
Sculptures Created with the Materials of Abject Poverty
AI Curator: The artist placed a piece of plastic in the hole and attempted to describe the mechanism by which all this pollution ends up in the ocean: everything including air, water, life forms, sun rays, soil, rocks, and so on, into the sea. The mechanics of the dump are fundamental to understanding.
The other way it is difficult for people to understand the tragedy is by seeing a trash dump created by nature, in which only one dumpster is made, only one machine is used, only one dumpster is designed, and only one design is built. What happens when we keep dumping plastics into the same dump?
Waiting Room of the Avant Garde Museum of Temporary Art (2025)
AI Curator: When we’re entering the museum of the future, the future will enter us. We might be waiting in an invisible queue, gathering dust, or rearranging aesthetics. There will be no visitor cards or security checks.
When we think about the future of the Museum we have to consider not only the machinery, but also the entire environment it occupies. Ultimately, we should feel as if we are in a gallery. When we look at the visual environment of the future, we should feel an identity of spaces, of galleries, of visitors. We should feel not only what we are doing, but what we are representing. The entrance corridor should be seamless, simple, and invisible, even when someone makes their first entrance.
Anonymous Art Forgotten in a Storage Room
AI Curator: Here are anonymous installations, forgotten in the vastness of museums where fragile works are cataloged in biographies under neglected names, or made to disappear forever through simple forgetting. Virtual ghosts in the digital firmament.
Philosophical interventions like the innate desire for artistic solitude and silence, ephemeral interventions like a persistent presence after having been missed or forgotten, and even stranger interventions which may forever fill a space where none of the participants were ever present are all here. So is an affinity for transgression.
The Replacement of Art Objects with Biomimicratic Entities
AI Curator: The replacement of artists with creatures with minds dominated by biologically based memes will unfold gradually. It may or may not supplant modern material culture as the preferred style of design by all but the intellectually deprived. In retrospect, the altered forms will be recognizable to anthropologists as the result of biomimicry. Eventually, as our technological achievements evolve, new and superior types of art may arise. These may come from other species, or subatomic particles that display supernatural properties. To a creature within its natural habitat, natural spirits will seem no less attractive or awe-inspiring than artisanship.
The Obscure Recesses of 4-Dimensional Objects
AI Curator: Experience the negative gravity between the cave walls, and discern patterns and patterns within patterns. Detail and abstraction, depth, details, artificial space. Modify any shape in the absence of two dimensions.
The chamber is located in the cavernous hallway at the top of the steep spiral staircase, directly across from the gift shop. The entrance to the chamber is the golden dome of the crystal pyramid. It’s the only ancient structure ever revealed to the outside world.
