The museum is an ustorious mirror

Abstract

“The museum is the colossal mirror in which man, finally contemplating himself in all forms, and finding himself literally an object of wonder, abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in art magazines.” According to Georges Bataille (Documents, 1929), the mirror was a metaphor of the museum as a whole. A long intellectual tradition in Latin American thought (particularly in Chile, from Sarmiento to Lihn) has maintained a subject/object divide to analyze how material, cultural, social and political constructions function on both sides of this relationship as both come inscribed with histories and identities and can also change one another within the space of the museum.