Originally opened at Mana Contemporary, in Jersey City, in August of 2018, and elaborately re-installed at the Monira Foundation in 2021-2023, The Milcom Memorial Reading Room and Attention Library has been a space devoted to the study of attention in the broadest sense — which is to say, to the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the focused mind and the directed senses. A creation of the research collective known as ESTAR(SER), this installation housed a book collection, a portion of ESTAR(SER)’s archives, and an exhibition of archival objects that bear on the historicity of the so-called “Order of the Third Bird” (a self-sequestering body of attentional artists, known for giving themselves to works of art in collective, durational rites of trance-like intensity). Presenting a hybrid lounge and office environment, the Reading Room invited visitors to to engage with endangered practices of close and sustained attention. This special space, which followed on related installations at the Santozeum (Greece, 2012) and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2014), was named after Learned “Hogfoot” Milcom (1928–1972), an editor and archivist whose labors were crucial to the re-founding of ESTAR(SER) in its modern form. A follow-on Installation, The Milcom Memory Box, was installed at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City in August of 2023.
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USEFUL LINKS
A Gallery of Images and Curatorial Essay on the 2021-2023 Installation
Photos of the Original Installation
The Current Curatorial Director and Board of Trustees (as of October, 2022)
An Essay on Learned “Hogfoot” Milcom (1928-1972)
About the B.B. Chamberlin Fellowship
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(photo courtesy of Zachary Hoos)