Simon Baier

Professor, University of Basel

Ecologize the Institution: The Museum as a Body (in English)

Transcorporealities (2019), Museum Ludwig, Cologne

In 2019, under the title “Transcorporealities” the artist Nick Mauss invited both visual artists and dancers to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in order to transform the foyer of the museum. Working with the collection as well as the architecture of the museum, specific choreographic strategies were introduced in order to invert the hegemonic understanding of the difference between museum, object and the human body. I selected this project in order to propose a new critical imperative: instead of trying to animate the supposedly static and inorganic through the means of dance, the project did the reverse: how can we think of the museum itself as a body? Only when the human body is decentred and articulated as a mere knot, threshold and thing, can the museum itself be thought as a living being and its workings as an ecology.

Simon Baier is Laurenz-Professor for Contemporary Art at the University of Basel. He studied Art History and Philosophy in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and New York and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich with a thesis on El Lissitzky’s and Kazimir Malevich’s work around 1928. Simon Baier also works as an art critic. His texts appeared in Artforum International and Texte zur Kunst. 2005-2006: Fellow for Critical Studies, Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 2008-2013: Researcher at Eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel; 2009-2013: Scientific Assistant, Art History Department, University of Basel; 2013-2015: Scientific Assistant, University of Zurich; 2016-2017: Scientific Assistant, Art History Department, University of Vienna.

https://kunstgeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/personen/simon-baier/