MEMOIRS ON SIGMUND FREUD'S DREAM MUSEUM (Eng)

1. The Museum of the Non-Representable: A Prehistory [1]

Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum is a single work of art that consists of many different parts, a total installation, created by the artist Vladimir Kustov and I as curators. The museum opened on November 4th 1999, marking the centennial anniversary of the publication of Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams". Incidentally, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the combination of words "single work of art that consists of many different parts" can actually be applied to subjectivity. During the 1920s, Freud consistently maintains that the human being is a collection of different representations of the self. In this sense, the installation corresponds to its name rather accurately – Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum.

The idea of founding the museum arose about ten years before its physical realization. Throughout these ten years, the idea underwent a great number of transformations. And overall, the museum's origins are over-determined, as is any creative event. To put it differently, it was re-determined many times over.

One might say that the history of the museum's foundation begins with the shoeboxes, which I used to build scenes from the Mesozoic era in my childhood. In the dark of a closet, a small light bulb lit prehistoric landscapes with dinosaurs, which I copied, colored, cut, and pasted into shoebox dioramas from a Czech album on paleontology, them, deeply immersed in the space of waking dreams.

One might say that the history of the museum's foundation begins in conversations with my friend Michael Molnar. During the late 1980s, Michael, a great expert on the history of psychoanalysis, told me about Sigmund Freud's collection of antiquities. Several years later, we began to talk about the possibilities for exhibiting pieces from this collection. Throughout, neither Michael nor I wanted to be the curators of this exhibition in the sense that it is usually understood in Russia; we didn't want to transport and arrange tens or hundreds of antiquities. We have longed for a creative process and a creative result. Maybe I also wanted to return – without realizing it - to the magical dinosaur theater of my childhood. Yet the fresh wind of reality laid siege to our dreams. The curatorial oneiroid hit upon the logic of vigilant reason. Michael called the British Embassy in Moscow with the suggestion of organizing the exhibition in Russia. The bureaucrats only asked him one question: oh, so Freud British then? The conversation was over.

One might say that the history of the museum's foundation begins in negotiations with one prominent European museum for contemporary art. During the mid-1990s, I suggested an exhibition, based upon objects from Sigmund Freud's collection and the texts of his dream-theory. I was largely motivated by a theoretical interest: I wanted to understand and establish the connection between the collection's objects and the "Interpretation of Dreams". At the time, I perceived this motivation as a curatorial interest. Yet this task seemed so important to me that I was hardly concerned with the question of whether originals would be brought from Sigmund Freud's museum (and former apartment) in London or whether we would use copies. For the curators from the museum of contemporary art, this was the primary – if not to say the only – question. They were only interested in originals, and the only question they were worried about most was how to keep down insurance and transportation costs. It is hardly surprising that our cooperation came to a rapid close. You can theorize to your heart's content at conferences and congresses, about Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, simulacra and simulationism, but when matters come to a crunch, curators say no to copies. Yet this "no" actually had two positive consequences for me: first, I finally understood what I wasn't interested in material objects, so-called originals; second of all, I realized that it was necessary to build a museum of immaterial objects in Saint-Petersburg, a city with a reputation for being not quite real, as one might say.

Why "immaterial" objects?

• Because the question of original vs. copy had no primary meaning to Freud as he was collecting his private museum.
• Because of the calling into question of the opposition between the reality of "what actually was" and the reality of imagination proved fundamental to the birth of psychoanalysis in 1897. Its object of inquiry became psychic reality.
• Because "The Interpretation of Dreams" is a book, the "Bible of psychoanalysis", from which my curatorial ideas have been drawn. [2]
• Because even if I didn't realize it, I wanted to combine my two passions, art and psychoanalysis because it was this combination that oriented Freud's thinking 100 years ago.

Thus, my curatorial desire matured. A conceptual plan was forged: it was necessary to represent psychic reality, hallucinations, and dreams, to present the non-representable. Why non-representable? Because, as we all know, when we sleep, we are not; when we wake up, there are no dreams. Our ideas of dreams, represented as oral narratives, notes, drawings, or movies, are never actually identical with dreams as such. In their reproduced form, dreams can never be the same as the reality of dreaming. Furthermore, this reality of dreaming does not literally exist in and of itself. To put it differently, dreams are copies without an original. The original is always already beyond our existence. Through its absence, the mirage of dreaming sustains our existence.

This is how the idea of founding Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum was conceived. My theoretical interest warmed, as I read Freud's own texts, articles on his collection and on his love of classical art. [3] It became clear that the most important thing was to make sense of Freud's hidden aesthetic, namely his theory of representation. Both art and dream represent absent, hallucinated objects, desires fulfilled. [4] Art and dreams are superimposed upon one another imperceptibly. [5] It remained to be seen how exactly to represent the non-representable. In order to make the dream of the Dream Museum come true, I needed an artist. By the way, without cooperation with a great many different people – artists, theoreticians, psychoanalysts, and curators – the creative process is devoid of any meaning in general.

One might say that the founding of the museum begins in a partnership that has lasted for many years, namely in my collaboration with the artist Vladimir Kustov, a perfectionist, necrorealist, conceptualist, and installation-artist. [6] It is also important to realize that Kustov had his own latent agenda, namely to create a corridor of death. This corridor is one of the main ideas in his work. I must say that I always smiled to myself ironically when I thought of Vladimir's idea, but only until I found myself in the Valley of the Pharaohs in Luxor, several years after the foundation of the Dream Museum. When I first entered the corridor of tombs, I was immediately reminded of Kustov's ideas. It seems that he was right. [7]

For two years, Vladimir Kustov and I discussed which form Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum might take. The most important thing about this collaboration was the collaboration itself. It would be a grave simplification to understand our interaction as the specialized relationship between the curator and the artist, the theoretician and the designer. [8] No, no, no! Creative interaction erases the boundary between these social roles, between such narrow capitalist specializations. One might say that some of the theoretical ideas were actually put forth by Kustov, while some of their practical solutions came from me.

However, this would be wrong. Sinking into the oneiroid state of creativity, in the affected exchange of ideas, is it really possible (and more importantly, necessary) to draw a line between one person and the other? [9] To interject something like "that was my idea", and "I thought of this" means to bury the idea itself. Collaborative creativity is not only a form of resisting the capitalist call for specialization but is also a form of hidden struggle with the illusion of the "autonomous ego". We were so interested in the process itself that we hardly even devoted any thought at all to the moment when the museum would be built. To me, the most unexpected, even shocking episode in the entire story occurred when the museum was opened to the public. As it turned out, I had forgotten about this completely. One day, a visitor appeared on our doorstep with the words "I've arrived in Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum." I was dumbfounded as if one of the dinosaurs from my childhood's shoeboxes had come to life.

In deciding on how to represent the connection between dreams and Freud's book, we set ourselves the goal of revealing the mechanisms of representation. In other words, we wanted to represent how dreams worked, but not dreams as such, which would be impossible. We decided to present what Freud called Traumarbeit, dream-work, displacement, condensation, and representability. In this sense, Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum is a museum of oneirotechnology.

We were also able to solve a number of general questions. For example, the question of the dream's space. This space has little in common with the space of the waking world. We wanted to break the installation's physical dimensions. We wanted it to be neither small nor large, but something that shifts and deforms endless before your very eyes. It only became clear to me in how far we succeeded in making the museum's space subjective about a year after the museum was opened. The group of artists and musicians "2012" was supposed to perform there. At first, one of the group's members came to visit, looked around and left. Later another came. He was also alone. Finally, the group's manager appeared. "Really, some people…", he said, "one of them comes back and tells me that the space is really big. The other goes and comes back to tell me that space is far too small, but, to me, it's neither nor…"

2. THE MUSEUM OF NEGATION

Thus, the museum is devoted to the idea of psychoanalysis, to dreams, fantasies, and theories, as well as to Freud's passion for collecting antiquities. He begins to collect archeological artifacts and to excavate psychic life almost simultaneously at the very end of the 19^th century, just as he was writing his book on dreams. The museum is devoted to theories, dreams, and the book.

Conceptually, the Dream Museum is constructed in the form of triangle whose notional vertices consist in the following: a) the collection of artworks that Freud accrued for more than 40 years from 1897 onward, b) his dreams, which he interpreted psychoanalytically beginning in 1895, c) the psychic apparatus, whose basic principles of operation Freud explored beginning with his formulation of the "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899.

I would like to repeat yet again that the museum is not dedicated to the events of material reality. It does not deal with what people call historical facts. It is not dedicated to any real human being, living or dead. It is not dedicated to Sigmund Freud. Instead, it is devoted to his book, in which we find ourselves immersed into ideas, experiences, dreams, interpretations, and desires. One of Freud's dreams was to find a partial resolution to the conflict between an individual's narcissistic desires and his power of reason. The figure for this resolution might have been the white Baboon of Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and death, a figurine from his collection. This image, representing a non-human, became the emblem of Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum.

The Petersburg museum has ties of kinship to two material Freud museums in Vienna and London. The Viennese museum was created in the psychoanalytical apartment in which Freud worked for nearly fifty years, receiving patients, dreaming, theorizing. The museum in Vienna memorializes this creative process. The London Freud Museum was founded in the apartment where Freud lived during the last years of his life. Today, it still houses his library, his famous couch, and his collection of antiquities, which numbers more than two thousand objects in total. In other words, the London museum was founded in what was already a museum. Its status was simply changed from private to public. Our non-material superstructure, our cabinet of dreams only materialized thanks to the material support of the museums both in Vienna and in London, thanks to the openness, unselfishness, and uncomplicatedness of Inge Scholz-Strasser and Erica Davies.[10]

Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum is located in Saint-Petersburg, "a city with a reputation for being not quite real, as one might say", a city that still seems to me to be the most appropriate place for this kind of museum. Saint-Petersburg is a city of topoi and utopias, a dream-city, a ghost-city, a city of dreams. This is not only due to its history from the moment of its conception in the mind of Peter the Great, not only because of its atmospheric phenomena but also because of its mythology, its endless descriptions, its literary quality, its attachment to texts. To paraphrase Andrei Bely, one might say the following: "If there wasn't the Petersburg of Peter, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Brodsky, Petersburg would not exist. It only seems as though it exists." An unreal museum for an unreal city! A dream museum for a city of sleep! [11]

Thus, in contrast to the museums in Vienna and London, the Dream Museum is not so much connected to a concrete place where Freud lived, nor does it have much to do with material things. Instead, it deals with his dreams, with that which is ideal, ephemeral, phantasmal, virtual, and scarcely discernable.

Unlike the other two Freud museums, the Dream Museum appeared in a place where the famous psychoanalyst did not ever set foot. Freud was not only never physically in Saint-Petersburg (nor Petrograd, nor Leningrad), nor did he ever travel to Russia at all. After all, Freud's Dream Museum is a museum of dreams, and dreams can not be fixed to a concrete location. You can fall asleep in Vienna and find yourself in the architecture of Petersburg; you can sleep asleep in Petersburg and find yourself on Mars. Dreams soar where-ever they please.

Perhaps the reader has already noticed that this article contains many instances of the word "not". Of course, this is not a coincidence! It is easier to describe the Dream Museum's distinctive features through negations. For an example, one might immediately make note of the fact that it is neither a museum of dreams in general nor a museum devoted to Freud; rather, it is Sigmund Freud's Dream Museum. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call it a non-museum, or even a museum of negation. The psychoanalytical idea of the museum of negation does not belong to me. As I said before, more than one artist and more than one curator participated in the museum's construction. There were many curators and many artists. The idea for the museum of negation belongs to the excellent curator and Director of Scholarship at the Freud Museum in Vienna, Lydia Marinelli. In attempting to understand why we were building a Freud museum in a place that Freud had never even visited, she came to the following conclusions:

Since Freud's Dream Museum appeared in a place that Freud never visited, it does not rely upon "the guarantee of the mnemotechnics that endow historical discourse with its location". "The rhetorical function of the memorial place […] becomes its own opposite; the most vivid, vibrant impression turns out to be the feeling that nothing of historical import has ever happened here. This paradox falls out of the framework of classical rhetoric, approaching the form in which Freud clothed the problem of how unconscious meaning is construed." [12] Freud's Dream Museum seems to say: there was nothing here. Nothing but desire's effects.

Negation leads to the dispersion of meaning; each of the museum's exhibits is not only characterized by the affirmation of its own polyvalence, but also by its negation of meaning. "The museum in Saint-Petersburg refers to the absence of a direct connection between its place and the events that interest us. This negation illuminates and transforms it into a psychoanalytical space. There is nobody to remind the visitor of Freud's personality, nor is there any reference to the unfolding of historical events. Thus, the museum's subject unexpectedly becomes the principle of psychoanalytic interpretation itself."[13]

Sometimes, in pursuit of desire, one wants to follow the psychoanalytic method to its very end. To its impossible end. To the negation of negation itself. To the dispersion of the mirage that it called Freud's Dream Museum, a mandala gone with the wind. [14] There was nothing here, not even a Museum of Negation.

3. THE MUSEUM OF IMMATERIAL CULTURE

There was nothing here. Only the whisper of the muses. Only a hallucinatory murmur.

Any museum is a shrine of muses. And in this sense, Freud's Dream Museum is indeed a museum. It is inhabited by Freud's muses, the inspirations of his images, his possible memories. [15] Yet in the traditional sense, Freud's Dream Museum is still an anti-museum, since it is not a collection of material valuables. But it is not only the negation of what has already taken place.

The Dream Museum is an unreal museum in terms of its subject (dreaming), but it is also not completely real in terms of its exhibits. In principle, Freud's Dream Museum is not a museum as a repository for the objects of material culture. The museum's exhibits are not objects but their representations. These are not paintings, statuettes, colors, masks, books, letters, or etchings but their images. The principle is clear: in dreaming, we are not dealing with objects – (people, colors, paintings, death-mask, sculptures, book bindings, cathedrals), but with their representations.

By the way, one should take the affirmation that "Freud's Dream Museum is not a museum of material culture" with a grain of salt. First of all, like artwork or installation is already an object of material culture. Second of all, among the many images that Sigmund Freud might have contemplated, one can find a number of contemporary artworks that pay tribute to psychoanalysis, hinting at these or those psychoanalytical formulas. On the whole, this incorporation of contemporary culture does not only turn chronology upside down, forcing time to return from the future. Instead, it also reminds us of the fact that we are not only not speaking about the man Freud, der Mann Freud, but that it is impossible to speak of him. Freud is a mirage in the prism of the present day. Thus, the father of psychoanalysis' dreams is "infused" with artists like Pavel Pepperstein and Judith Barry, Sergei Bugaev-Afrika and Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Olga Tobreluts and Sophie Tottie, Gljukla and Andrei Khlobystin, Stas Makarov, Gosha Ostretsov and Vitaly Pushnitsky, SunTechnics and Michaela Spiegel.[16]

Let us also not forget that all of these artworks are incorporated into an installation by Vladimir Kustov; one might say that they are in the partial object. Their pressure onto the viewer has been minimized. To quote the Dutch art critic Eric Hagoort: “The contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk by psychoanalyst Viktor Mazin and artist Vladimir Kustov, the Freud’s Dream Museum, could perhaps fulfill the role of a Kaaba in the arts, a place where art is sheltered from transparency. <…> In effect, the Gesamtkunstwerk swallows up all the individual artworks, in a phantasmagoric diorama: the Hall of Dreams. Mirrors, projections, and sheets of transparent plastic reduce the view of the artworks to fragments”.[17] Thus, the Dream Museum finds itself on the frontline of the battle against illusionism, at a time in which realism is returning to Russia in full force, as a form of overt illusionism.

 

4. THE MUSEUM OF MEMORY

From a psychoanalytical point of view, every dream is a particular form of remembering that presents unseen objects in a distorted form. Dreams are an alternative form of memory, the memory of the distracted, scattered subject. One might say that dream-work is the work of the subject's memory without the subject itself.

The Dream Museum is organized like a theater of memory. Meanwhile, memory is one of psychoanalysis' principle subjects, at least from the point at which Freud identifies psychic trauma with memory disorders onward. Memory – with all of its mechanisms of forgetting, its screen memoirs, its hallucinations, and its dreams – is the museum's invisible fabric.

The museum of memory is not a museum-memorial; instead, it is a museum of forgetting. As the American artist Spenser Tunick puts it, it is "the tunnel of mind". The only thing that one can be sure of here is that you don't know something, that you have forgotten something, that there is something that you can't remember.

Dream-work is the articulation of desire through distortion, displacement, and condensation.

Condensation presupposes the combination of many things into one. The transparency of the images in the space of the museum allows the eye to displace them. Condensation does not only create collective images but also provides for the possibility of seeing the other in the one, seeing the face of the one as the countenance of the other. Today it seems that the idea of many transparent (maybe even spectral) layers of meaning sprang to mind as soon as Vladimir Kustov and I began to work together.

The work of displacement is left up to the visitor. In order to read a fragment of some statement from "The Interpretation of Dreams", he-she will need to continuously change his-her point of view. As this point of changes, so does the bigger picture of "dreams" as a whole. A symptomatic dialogue on the displacement of meaning somehow took place with the mayor of the town Graz. Upon visiting the museum, he exclaimed: "This is the most anti-totalitarian museum that I have ever had the opportunity to see!" "Thank you", I answered, "but this museum has no direct relationship to politics." "But I don't mean politics; I'm talking about what the museum actually shows: if you change your point of view, the entire picture changes." This displacement of accentuation allowed me to discover Lacan's points du capiton (quilting points) in "Freud's dreams": the intersection of contexts changes the meaning of any text, including the text of the museum.

Furthermore, displacement makes it evident that nothing is principal or secondary. This was the thought that Vladimir Kustov and I were pursuing: we wanted to present a changing oneroid multiplicity, a kaleidoscopic image. It is also in this sense that Freud's Dream Museum is an anti-museum. In a traditional museum, some hierarchy will fall into place nolens volens. Practically every art museum is famous for one image or painting, fulfilling the function of a kind of brand or trademark. This already surprised me in my youth, even before I actually understood that I had understood anything at all. It happened in the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden. I simply couldn't understand why all of the visitors in a hall full of fantastic Renaissance paintings were all crowding around Rafael. And there is another problem: all too often, museum professionals are tied to the chariot of this type of branding. For an example, the Louvre is full of signs, directing the visitor to the altar, to Leonardo's famous painting.

Yet alas, despite "our" idea of decentering[18], the Dream Museum also has an altar. This altar is the dream-screen.

5. THE DREAM-SCREEN

According to our idea, the dream-screen fulfills two functions. First of all, in terms of design and technology, it brings additional light to space through which the visitor moves. Second of all, it represents the well-known psychoanalytical phenomenon of the dream-screen, onto which images are projected as in a cinema. However, from the first day of the museum's opening onward, this screen actually "works".

One visitor came up to me and told me that he hadn't dreamed once in forty years. I put forth that he might simply be forgetting them. He didn't know whether to believe me or not. About twenty minutes after our conversation, this person burst into my office: "I saw!!! I saw a dream on the screen! I saw a pack of wolves chasing a hunter!" Now I didn't know whether to believe him or not.

In the museum, we started a guestbook for the visitors to share their experiences. The number of dreams seen on the screen rose rapidly. [19] On the one hand, we were pleased to discover that people's imaginations still work. It also made us happy that the screen worked as a lightning rod for discharge rather than as an accumulator. On the other hand, an altar appeared. This is something we hadn't considered. But to worship something or somebody, be it Sigmund Freud or Buddha Gautama, means blocking and sealing off one's critical function.

By the way, dreams are always full of the unexpected: “A couple of girls and boys, who are seated on the floor in front of the empty screen, are meditating. A man in the lotus position is seemingly drinking in the light. The installation has evidently taken on a meaning that goes beyond what the creators ever imagined.”[20].

Thanks to the fact that the dream screen actually works, the Dream Museum was able to formulate its function as an anti-museum Video-screens, computer-screens, TV screen, movie-screens, and even the screen of painting all show something. Encountering the dream screen for the first, the museum's visitor will usually freeze up in bafflement. And then, he will ask, "When will the screen begin? When will it start to show something?" The answer: "Whenever you begin." You will only see something on this screen if you un-concentrate yourself if you relax… The museum doesn't show some random range of images, but the visitor's own images. The museum does not upload. It downloads.

Furthermore, the museum literally shows the spectator an image of him-herself. The museum makes use of a multitude of mirrors. Some of them distend space unto infinity. This simple technique once overwhelmed me in one of Calcutta's Jain shrines. Its entrance consisted of a system of mirrors, showing the supplicant the endless series of reincarnations, going on and on into nameless oblivion.

In the Dream Museum, the mirror does not only distend and disorient space – what seemed to be in front of you, is now behind you; what seemed so far away is now coming closer – but reminds us of Freud's idea that every dream is a form of narcissism. Everything that we see when we dream is actually a part of our imagination, an element of ourselves. This part is a fragment. The exhibition's mirrors are also fragmented. Behind the looking glass, beyond the mirror-stage lies the dissipated ego. Dissolution is disillusion. I'm so scattered…

The worshippers of the dream-screen usually miss out on the first hall. They go straight to the screen. They don't pay any attention to the information in the first hall. In an ordinary museum, this would probably call for a feeling of protest or indignation: so they came to Freud's dreams and don't want to know anything about him. But we actually welcome this. Because one of the tenets of psychoanalysis is knowthyself!

6. INFORMATION ON THE SIDE

The first hall of the Dream Museum is somewhat of a concession to the traditional museum. It is well-lit, "conscious-preconscious", and informative.

In the second hall, "the hall of Freud's virtual dreams", there are neither labels nor captions to explain the images, texts, and objects. The Dream Museum is an anti-museum in the sense as well. This doesn't mean that the visitor is supposed to guess what exactly is going on, but that he sees exactly what he sees. It is as if Stephen Hawking's anthropic principle had been put into effect. We see the world in this way and not in that because it is we who are looking at it. In other words, as Freud demonstrates insistently: there is no pristine, virginal form of perception. We see the world in the way we can and want to see it.

The dialogue could replay the typical situation of psychoanalysis:

• What does that image mean?
• What does it mean to you?

Nevertheless, in recognition of the fact that the human being cannot survive being starved of information, we have created the first hall, in which one can look at photographs, read quotes from "The Interpretation of Dreams", or, more concisely, to find out about the life and work of Sigmund Freud. Aside from this, Vladimir Kustov was working according to the principles which Ilya Kabakov structures his installations, which requires a transitional space between the installation itself and "the street". It can be dangerous to suddenly fall into dreams.

7. THE MUSEUM OF THE UNREMEMBERED

Before actually visiting the museum, people often call on the telephone in an attempt to satisfy their preliminary curiosity.

• What will we see there?

How do you answer a question like that?

• Photographs of reproduction that Freud brought back with him from his travels in Italy; copies of letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud's closest friend while he was writing "The Interpretation of Dream"; pages from the Phillipson Bible from which Freud learned to read; illustrations that intertwine with his dreams; photographs of bookcases; quotes from "The Interpretation of Dreams"? But it's not so much about what they are; it's more important to consider how they are represented.
• Words and images, hardly discernable in the half-light? Like in a dream, we cannot discern everything; we don't remember all of what comes to the surface of our soul.
• Virtual dreams of Freud? Fragment of words and images, the rebus of the dream he might have seen.
• Ourselves? But we aren't actually taking a glimpse of someone else's dreams; instead, we rebuild them through our own imagination, our fantasies, and our hallucinations. A walk through Freud's virtual dreams is invitation to close one's eyes to the outside world and to dive into the world of the psychoanalyst's musings, whose origin lies in his dreams, to which his fantasies were connected. And this entry into another person's inner world turns out to be a form of self-immersion.

The more the outer world becomes more and more like somebody else's fancy – thanks to movies, TV, advertising, and computers - the more it becomes necessary to find onself in this foreign dream. Our own dreams are the last resort of our individuality. Today, there is a far more pressing need to engage with dreams, even far more than in those times when they were a technique of existence.[21] Dreams are not only the path to self-recognition, but they are also a form of resistance against the totalizing imperialist hallucination and its whole-sale trade in industrialized identities.

For the museum's curators[22], the most pleasant reaction is when visitors say, "I'm beginning to feel myself", "I'm beginning to remember something very, very important", "something has happened to me", "I haven't understood anything; all of these questions came up, but I can't formulate them yet." [23] It is my hope that the artist and the curator find themselves in the same perplexity, forcing them to formulate new questions over and over again.