Now
Updated
This is what Otto is focused on at the moment. It changes every couple of months, usually after a show opens and the label files finally close.
Work
Most of the week goes to Small Hours, a show of clocks from private collections opening next spring in Görlitz. Forty-one clocks, eleven lenders, and one shared problem: every owner wants their clock described as “remarkably accurate”, and only two of them still run. The current draft settles for “keeps its own time”, which everyone has agreed to dislike equally.
On the other bank of the Neisse, a small museum in Zgorzelec has asked for a bilingual walking guide to the bridges. The Polish and German versions have to fit the same signboard, so the edits happen in pairs, and every cut is negotiated across the river, sometimes literally, halfway across the footbridge.
Teaching
Two label clinics this term: one for a regional collection near Bautzen, one for a museum studies seminar in Frankfurt (Oder). The assignment is always the same. Bring three labels you secretly dislike, and leave with three you can read aloud without apologising.
Reading
- A history of the Oder–Neisse border, slowly, with a map open on the other side of the table
- A collection of nineteenth-century clockmakers' trade cards, for research and for the adjectives
- Whatever is pinned to the café noticeboard in Zgorzelec, as Polish practice
Learning
Polish, still. The grammar is fine on paper and collapses entirely in front of a bakery counter. The current goal is ordering for two people without switching to pointing.
Not doing
Not taking new exhibition commissions until Small Hours opens. Not writing the book about museum labels that people keep suggesting, at least not this year. Not adding “remarkably accurate” to anything.