comment II

Reflecting on Matthew's post, I believe he tackled another key issue in regard with ecology and the ecological. Strangely enough, as he implies, there is something "outmoded" about it. I would rather suggest that ecology is essentially non-modern in a sense that it is not promoting a curated, well defined environment. In the man without qualities, Robert Musil describes the difference between a nobility family mansion and a bourgeois apartment. The mansion is occupied by numerous objects from different periods of time, some highly delicate while others extremely crude, sharing the same space as a trace of family history. That is radically different than the bourgeois apartment since no notion of taste pre-exists as a manner of curating content. In a way, ecology is such a mansion. The exhibition downstairs seems to be capturing it pretty well.