Art Against the Grain of “Collective Sisyphus:”The Case of Allan Sekula’s 'Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum' (2010-2013).

This research project centers on 'Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum' (2010-2013) by the North American artist, theoretician, critic, teacher and poet Allan Sekula (1951-2013) [fig. 1-5]. Sekula produced this multifaceted artwork containing over one thousand objects at the end of his life, in order to pay tribute to efforts of human now labor irretrievably lost in history. In his view, joint forces of past generations still have not sufficiently led to constructing real civil alliances among people, such as an international imposition of fair labor conditions. Our project investigates how 'Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum' aims to go “against the grain” (cf. Sekula, 1984) of this “collective Sisyphus (Dimendberg, 2005, n.p.).” Three objectives are pursued: 1) the publication of a catalogue raisonné containing detailed analysis of each object; 2) a theoretical analysis of 'Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum' as a nodal point in Sekula’s oeuvre, specifying how his last work can be understood as a major contribution to the central theme of his creative enterprise: imagining possible forms of human solidarity in a globalized economy confronted to an ever-more critical extent with its own limitations; 3) a research trajectory in curatorship serving to grasp how “curating as another medium of artistic production” (O’Neill, 2012, 129), as pursued by Sekula in 'Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum,' affects existing museum practices of collection conservation, disclosure and display.