Hello cats and human beings in the Eastern half of Europe and thereabouts - we have an important announcement: The PInky Show will be doing two sessions at the upcoming event Warsaw under construction, an annual event produced by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. On one day we will be doing a joint session along with our friends from Radical Education Collective (Slovenia) and also Free University Warsaw, who we have read about but we have not met yet. The next day The Pinky Show will be doing a workshop. I think this is all going to be very nice. I can’t find a schedule of events posted on the internet yet but my best guess is that you will be able to find it at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw’s website: http://www.artmuseum.pl

The tentative title for our talk is Epic Planetary Fail & You: The Pinky Show’s Easy 3-Step Approach to Fixing Everything.

Our workshop is titled D.I.Y. Learning-Weapon: Context > Theory > Practice > Reflect (Repeat), and will focus on the relationship between public modes of critical inquiry and pedagogy.

See you in Warsaw.

Posted by Bunny.

P.S. For those of you who missed us at the Berlin Biennale this past June, we will be back in Germany to do a big workshop & stuff at ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Karlsruhe) ~May/June 2011. Not sure about the exact dates yet but please check back here for updates as more information becomes available. B.

Did you know that museum people read magazines about museums? Neither did I. Well, our The Pinky Show Future Museum Report: Some notes on our time-travel expedition, 2028-2098 will be published in the upcoming September/October issue of Museum-ID. Finally human beings are starting to get it - bully to museum people to be among the first to start paying close attention to what cats have to say (not counting poets, with whom we’ve had a good working relationship for literally thousands of years). Museum-ID is a magazine and think tank based in England. Visit their website here: www.museum-id.com.

Pinky finally finished putting the report together, it is available here.

What amazes me is that she took two months to put together a 24-page report whereas it took yours truly only 40 days to design & build A FULLY FUNCTIONAL TIME-TRAVEL MACHINE AND LUGGAGE POD.

Bunny

[ note from Pinky: We'll see if my report lasts longer than a month before it falls apart though. ]

kim: bunny next time since your time-machine is not working any more can you please build it bigger because this one was really cramped inside.

Bunny: We would’ve had more room if somebody didn’t beg me to install a coffee machine in it…

kim: sorry.

Announcement: We’ve closed the Pinky Show store. We did that because right now Bunny and I are working hard to build a permanent studio.

Details: Since we started this project five years ago, we’ve been making all our Pinky Show stuff in a cramped, dimly-lit, unruly mess of old computers, semi-functional audio equipment, tangled cables, crumpled/trampled scripts, etc. etc… arrgh, what a nightmare. Well, finally I had a nervous breakdown (or something like it) and after throwing my “I CAN’T TAKE THIS MESS ANY MORE!!!” mini-tantrum I asked Bunny to shut down the store so that we could have some time to focus on cleaning up. Hopefully in a few weeks we’ll have a less crazy (and depressing) work environment to work in. So that’s what we’re doing at the moment. Well, actually we’re still doing Pinky Show work (that stuff never really stops) but the work-space cleaning/rebuilding is the main reason why the store is closed now.

Oh, by the way, for those of you who were on the verge of ordering a Pinky Show t-shirt or some other item, we apologize for the unexpected wait. We’re planning to open a new Pinky Show store after we have things cleaned up and organized around here - my guess is (I’m not good at guessing timetables)… sometime during September?

The new Pinky Show store will be at:

www.pinkyandbunny.com

We’ll make an announcement here when it’s open. Oh, and it will have some new stuff in it too!

Please take care,
pinky

Couldn’t believe this letter we received yesterday:

“From: American Indian Movement
To: Pinky, Daisy et al:

The San Francisco chapter of the American Indian Movement (AIM) would like to commend your work for its insightful, innovative, and broad-scoped examination and criticism of current human power structures.

AIM would also like to applaud the Pinky Show for its consistent attention to Indigenous issues and current struggles. We believe that open-minded dialogue and exchange between the empowered European colonial culture and the indigenous and non-human cultures of the world is critical to our common survival.

Yours in struggle,
Mark Anquoe
AIM-West
http://www.aimwest.info ”

Wow. AIM is one of those organizations that has been a huge inspiration to us, so it was more than a little weird (but in a fabulous way) to get such a nice letter from them. Still can’t believe it.

Bunny

Bunny & Pinky

We just dismantled our installation and interviewing station at the American Association of Museums’ giant annual conference/trade show/extravaganza-thing in Los Angeles. We’re tired but happy with the results. It may take us a few weeks but as soon as we find the time we’ll convert our installation into some kind of internet-friendly format so that everybody can see what we did.

Next week we are off to Berlin, to do a presentation at the Berlin Biennale.

Bunny

Mimi is now a mommy. Kitten Zoe was born today; welcome to this world! I asked Mimi if it was really painful and she said “not really”. She made just one kitten, and she is very cute. So now we are all aunties!

Bunny

Our friend Daisy has been in Hawaii for the past several months doing research. In his spare time, sometimes Daisy documents talks and stuff, which is great because usually he sends us the video afterwards. He shoots, we edit and post. So, we now have three new videos posted for you to enjoy in the Pinky Presents area:

Donna Haraway on the movie Avatar.

Sunsara Taylor on the oppression of women and the need for revolution.

Greg Grandin on the Tea Party movement and American Exceptionalism.

If you find any of this stuff useful, please support our work. We (Daisy included) are broke.

Posted by Bunny.

Here is a guest blog that Pinky wrote for the Center for the Future of Museums blog announcing our crashing the American Association of Museums’ Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo next month in Los Angeles. Click here to go to the original post at the CFM blog.

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Hello Museum People!

My name is Pinky and I am from The Pinky Show. Bunny and I were invited do a guest CFM blog, so here we are. We realize that many of you may not know who we are or why we are interested in museums, so we will start with that.

We run an education project called The Pinky Show that studies social structures, ideology, and power. As you can imagine, this makes us particularly interested in certain institutional formations - especially schools and museums. For us, museums are fun to study because they’re so often discussed via such a fascinating mess of contradictory, reductive representations that make it almost impossible to see clearly what they really are or how they’re really functioning. For example:

Museums are instrumental in drawing attention to under-known histories and knowledge;
Museums are inherently conservative in nature.

Museums help educate the general public about democracy and injustice;
Museums are instrumental in maintaining the hegemony of the ruling class.

Museums try to be as fair as possible in the presentation of histories and ideas;
Museums allow themselves veto-power over marginalized people’s ability to represent themselves.

Museums promote compassion and fairness;
Museum institutional culture is extremely hierarchical and anti-democratic.

Community programming is a high priority for most museums;
Museums’ community programming is not done with communities, it is done for communities.

Museums want broad-base support and audience participation;
Certain classes of people are not welcome.

Museums are all about education;
Feminist, radical, grassroots, and other forms of counter-hegemonic educational practices don’t count as legitimate forms of education in museum education departments.

Museums are interested in bettering society;
Museums uphold the dominant values and practices of capitalism.

Museums are constantly mindful of the future;
Museums people do not think revolution, only reform.

We could go on and on with a hundred more examples, but basically we just think (hope!) that trying to untangle this giant heap of narrative-static will bring us closer to unlocking the mysteries of how people understand their complicated relationships to history and power. Which reminds me…

Next month, May 24, 25, & 26, The Pinky Show will be at the American Association of Museum’s Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo in Los Angeles. We’ll be there, along with over 4,000 museum people from all over the world, to do two things:

1. We’ll be exhibiting a small collection of museum-related artifacts that we brought back from our recent expedition to the future. (Actually, it would be more accurate to add an “s” - as in “futures” - since there are actually an infinite number of futures…) Our expedition was not a comprehensive survey of possible futures, but rather, due to the high cost of gasoline, we were only able to stop off at a few random future-moments. However, the objects that we were able to bring back with us are pretty neat to look at. Time-travel is a pretty big hassle so if you can stop by for even a few minutes that would make our day - especially for Bunny, who really wore herself out building the time travel machine.

2. We’ll also be bringing a video camera & microphone and will be interviewing anyone willing to share their thoughts and ideas concerning the future of museums. We’re focusing our attention on what you - museum people - have to say about where museums are headed because, One, you’re the ones who perform the day-to-day, hands-on transformational work that will directly reshape museums’ relationship with the general public; and Two, the general public isn’t allowed inside the convention hall.

We’re very excited to do something at the AAM Thing because we believe that museums are like everything else in the world - they can be used for good or they can be used for evil (or most likely some undetermined ratio of both), and of course if we can do something to nudge things more toward the former and away from the latter, that’s wonderful. Coming at things from an education perspective, we always think it’s a good idea to start where people are at, so showing up with a microphone and asking simple questions about the future of museums seems like a reasonable way to go. If you’re going to be there, please come looking for us!

Hope to see you in Los Angeles!

pinky & Bunny

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