Dysfunctional Museums
Held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome over the weekend, ‘Functions of the Museum’ was the first in a series of symposia considering exhibitions and audiences in the run-up to the opening of the city’s first contemporary art institution. The Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI Museum (or the National Museum of XXI Century Art), which will host both an art and an architecture institution, has been in the pipeline since 1998 and is due to open – after what sounds like a fraught gestation period – by early next year. The attitude of many of the speakers to the project was ambivalent. Some wondered whether the symposium would prompt real change in MAXXI’s programme, while the first speaker, historian and critic John Welchman, was most succinct, at one point showing a Monica Bonvicini cartoon of Hadid ordering a naked lackey to ‘cut you dick out and eat it’ alongside construction shots of the museum.
MAXXI will be, by some accounts, a tough place to stage exhibitions, due to a lack of initial guidance, and much discussion focused on the presumed end of the post-Pompidou period of glitzy architecture driven by economic policy rather than the contingencies of display. Held over two days, the event was based around four big-name speakers – Welchman, philosopher Boris Groys and artists Daniel Buren and Jimmie Durham – and two meandering panels, and hoped to offer something in the way of a self-reflexive approach to the museum’s programming.
Welchman, professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, provided an authoritative survey of institutional critique that was echoed and referred back to by subsequent speakers. He described the major shortcoming of the Hans Haacke generation as being a too narrow focus on what an ‘institution’ is – going no further than analyzing or ironizing the exhibition space. Welchman presented relational aesthetics as the point at which critique had become institutionalized, the ‘90s being the decade in which the museum was ‘recalibrated as a global delivery system.’ This was a criticism continued by both Federico Ferrari (a professor in Milan) and art critic Giorgio Verzotti, who argued that institutional critique didn’t fade out, it simply continued with different preoccupations, such as the everyday (as with Felix Gonzalez-Torres), though ultimately finishing in hopelessly self-referential mannerism that reached its apogee with the Guggenheim’s ‘theanyspacewhatever’ survey.
Welchman recommended a reinvigoration of the terms of ‘institution’, following John Searle’s and Roland Barthes’ early writing on language as a primarily social institution, a system of contractual values – a line of thinking ignored by the first generation of artists to analyze the museum. Linking this to Foucault’s injunction of studying the state from the ‘bottom up’, Welchman cited Mike Kelley as an example of an artist working along the lines of ‘bottom up’ social formation, with work such as ‘Drawings for Repressed Social Relationships’ dealing with institutional recall, personal memories inscribed in structures other than the museum.
Welchman was followed by a roundtable that ran way over its allotted time, as these things often do, each of the four speakers treating their section as a lecture rather than short presentation. (The entire first day ran close to six hours with just a ten-minute break – not good.) A highlight of this first panel was a short presentation from Wouter Davidts, Professor of Modern Art History at the VU University in Amsterdam, who gave an overview of unbuilt museums in Antwerp, following their influence – or ‘ghost lives’ – on museums that had been subsequently realized elsewhere. With plummeting endowments, the value and purpose of new museums will surely be contested subjects over the next few years, and Davidts’ approach suggested a worthwhile consideration of both past follies and sadly derailed projects.
This sentiment chimed with Joanna Mytkowska’s presentation on the second day. Mytkowska is director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, an institution still in its design stage (it is due to open in 2014). It will be the first museum to be built in the city since 1938, and is on a similarly grand scale as MAXXI (around 35,000 square metres). Given the bitter reaction to blatant representations of power in post-communist Eastern Europe, Mytkowska emphasized a conflicted approach to the museum as authoritative institution. They are working towards reconfiguring what a ‘public’ space means in this context, and have hung a large neon sign from a demolished public cinema in their temporary space; even if the museum is unsuccessful, Mytkowska sees this preliminary reflexive stage as being productive in itself. The design for the museum was run as an open submission, and the jury – which included Nicholas Serota, Daniel Libeskind and Deyan Sudjic – recommended modesty over iconic showiness. The winning design, by Christian Kerez, is a low-slung, almost Brutalist affair, far from the Guggenheim Bilbao that city government had hoped for – the original director resigned in the ensuing scandal.
Daniel Buren began his enlightening talk with the surprising claim that his writing from the late ‘60s is now largely obsolete, given the degree to which institutions have changed since then. One major shift is the popularization of the museum experience, which has led to a vastly expanded public which is no longer in awe of the institution. Buren also noted that his earlier complaints about the economic power of the museum now seems ‘almost comical’ given how little money public institutions now have.
Opening the second day, Boris Groys was largely optimistic about the future of the museum, continuing his knack for pithy inversion – demonstrated in last year’s Art Power – with a series of unexpected arguments. He began by noting that, pace Beuys, rather than everyone becoming an artist, everyone has become a curator, linking the curatorial role to its etymological root as ‘curer’, nursing the ‘sick’ artwork back to recovery in the hospital-like museum. Groys focused on the points at which the institution’s ‘medical tricks’ cannot be hidden, the points at which the museum both cures the work and contributes to its continuing illness. By way of example, he compared a show of Marcel Broodthaers’ films some years ago, presented on the original equipment, with a more recent survey of Warhol’s films shown on flatscreen televisions. The supporting hardware of the former exhibition triggered a nostalgic response in visitors and meant that attention was diverted from the work itself, while the latter show was presented on means that were completely foreign to its mode of composition. ‘Every mode of presentation is ruinous to the work’, he concluded.
‘I’m going to tell stories, mostly about museums I like’, claimed Jimmie Durham at the beginning of his modest keynote, before noting that he had never visited a museum until the early ‘80s. He mentioned the Prado as his favourite museum, as, after kilometres of bad painting you finally reach the El Grecos and think, ‘Wow, even painting could be art…’ More seriously, Durham singled out Jan Hoet’s tenure at SMAK in Ghent as a model for how an institutional as social rather than educative hub, ‘not where the muses stay but where they might come to.’
A topic that was touched upon by a couple of the speakers, though not fully explored in any single presentation, was how digital and online work can be properly displayed in the museum. Groys told a short anecdote about visiting the first ‘net art’ shows in the late ‘90s and noting that the light of the computer terminals gave visitors the illuminated appearance of some baroque painting. It was only afterwards that he found out that most of the works had crashed so people were just checking their emails. New media of course calls for new approaches to display. Welchman quickly discussed the rise of ‘black box’ presentations of film work in the ’90s (the inverse of the white cube), before noting that new media seems to threaten the institution, its intrinsic qualities appearing to suggest a kind of ‘ubiquitous museum’. How to display works that are freely circulated online? How does independent and potentially infinite choice relate, in this context, to curatorial selection? Does YouTube mean that the collective experience is increasingly coming to be based on simultaneous private experience? These are all questions that MAXXI’s curators claim to be listening to, though we’ll have to wait another year to see how successful their answers are.
Held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome over the weekend, ‘Functions of the Museum’ was the first in a series of symposia considering exhibitions and audiences in the run-up to the opening of the city’s first contemporary art institution. The Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI Museum (or the National Museum of XXI Century Art), which will host both an art and an architecture institution, has been in the pipeline since 1998 and is due to open – after what sounds like a fraught gestation period – by early next year. The attitude of many of the speakers to the project was ambivalent. Some wondered whether the symposium would prompt real change in MAXXI’s programme, while the first speaker, historian and critic John Welchman, was most succinct, at one point showing a Monica Bonvicini cartoon of Hadid ordering a naked lackey to ‘cut you dick out and eat it’ alongside construction shots of the museum.
MAXXI will be, by some accounts, a tough place to stage exhibitions, due to a lack of initial guidance, and much discussion focused on the presumed end of the post-Pompidou period of glitzy architecture driven by economic policy rather than the contingencies of display. Held over two days, the event was based around four big-name speakers – Welchman, philosopher Boris Groys and artists Daniel Buren and Jimmie Durham – and two meandering panels, and hoped to offer something in the way of a self-reflexive approach to the museum’s programming.
Welchman, professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, provided an authoritative survey of institutional critique that was echoed and referred back to by subsequent speakers. He described the major shortcoming of the Hans Haacke generation as being a too narrow focus on what an ‘institution’ is – going no further than analyzing or ironizing the exhibition space. Welchman presented relational aesthetics as the point at which critique had become institutionalized, the ‘90s being the decade in which the museum was ‘recalibrated as a global delivery system.’ This was a criticism continued by both Federico Ferrari (a professor in Milan) and art critic Giorgio Verzotti, who argued that institutional critique didn’t fade out, it simply continued with different preoccupations, such as the everyday (as with Felix Gonzalez-Torres), though ultimately finishing in hopelessly self-referential mannerism that reached its apogee with the Guggenheim’s ‘theanyspacewhatever’ survey.
Welchman recommended a reinvigoration of the terms of ‘institution’, following John Searle’s and Roland Barthes’ early writing on language as a primarily social institution, a system of contractual values – a line of thinking ignored by the first generation of artists to analyze the museum. Linking this to Foucault’s injunction of studying the state from the ‘bottom up’, Welchman cited Mike Kelley as an example of an artist working along the lines of ‘bottom up’ social formation, with work such as ‘Drawings for Repressed Social Relationships’ dealing with institutional recall, personal memories inscribed in structures other than the museum.
Welchman was followed by a roundtable that ran way over its allotted time, as these things often do, each of the four speakers treating their section as a lecture rather than short presentation. (The entire first day ran close to six hours with just a ten-minute break – not good.) A highlight of this first panel was a short presentation from Wouter Davidts, Professor of Modern Art History at the VU University in Amsterdam, who gave an overview of unbuilt museums in Antwerp, following their influence – or ‘ghost lives’ – on museums that had been subsequently realized elsewhere. With plummeting endowments, the value and purpose of new museums will surely be contested subjects over the next few years, and Davidts’ approach suggested a worthwhile consideration of both past follies and sadly derailed projects.
This sentiment chimed with Joanna Mytkowska’s presentation on the second day. Mytkowska is director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, an institution still in its design stage (it is due to open in 2014). It will be the first museum to be built in the city since 1938, and is on a similarly grand scale as MAXXI (around 35,000 square metres). Given the bitter reaction to blatant representations of power in post-communist Eastern Europe, Mytkowska emphasized a conflicted approach to the museum as authoritative institution. They are working towards reconfiguring what a ‘public’ space means in this context, and have hung a large neon sign from a demolished public cinema in their temporary space; even if the museum is unsuccessful, Mytkowska sees this preliminary reflexive stage as being productive in itself. The design for the museum was run as an open submission, and the jury – which included Nicholas Serota, Daniel Libeskind and Deyan Sudjic – recommended modesty over iconic showiness. The winning design, by Christian Kerez, is a low-slung, almost Brutalist affair, far from the Guggenheim Bilbao that city government had hoped for – the original director resigned in the ensuing scandal.
Daniel Buren began his enlightening talk with the surprising claim that his writing from the late ‘60s is now largely obsolete, given the degree to which institutions have changed since then. One major shift is the popularization of the museum experience, which has led to a vastly expanded public which is no longer in awe of the institution. Buren also noted that his earlier complaints about the economic power of the museum now seems ‘almost comical’ given how little money public institutions now have.
Opening the second day, Boris Groys was largely optimistic about the future of the museum, continuing his knack for pithy inversion – demonstrated in last year’s Art Power – with a series of unexpected arguments. He began by noting that, pace Beuys, rather than everyone becoming an artist, everyone has become a curator, linking the curatorial role to its etymological root as ‘curer’, nursing the ‘sick’ artwork back to recovery in the hospital-like museum. Groys focused on the points at which the institution’s ‘medical tricks’ cannot be hidden, the points at which the museum both cures the work and contributes to its continuing illness. By way of example, he compared a show of Marcel Broodthaers’ films some years ago, presented on the original equipment, with a more recent survey of Warhol’s films shown on flatscreen televisions. The supporting hardware of the former exhibition triggered a nostalgic response in visitors and meant that attention was diverted from the work itself, while the latter show was presented on means that were completely foreign to its mode of composition. ‘Every mode of presentation is ruinous to the work’, he concluded.
‘I’m going to tell stories, mostly about museums I like’, claimed Jimmie Durham at the beginning of his modest keynote, before noting that he had never visited a museum until the early ‘80s. He mentioned the Prado as his favourite museum, as, after kilometres of bad painting you finally reach the El Grecos and think, ‘Wow, even painting could be art…’ More seriously, Durham singled out Jan Hoet’s tenure at SMAK in Ghent as a model for how an institutional as social rather than educative hub, ‘not where the muses stay but where they might come to.’
A topic that was touched upon by a couple of the speakers, though not fully explored in any single presentation, was how digital and online work can be properly displayed in the museum. Groys told a short anecdote about visiting the first ‘net art’ shows in the late ‘90s and noting that the light of the computer terminals gave visitors the illuminated appearance of some baroque painting. It was only afterwards that he found out that most of the works had crashed so people were just checking their emails. New media of course calls for new approaches to display. Welchman quickly discussed the rise of ‘black box’ presentations of film work in the ’90s (the inverse of the white cube), before noting that new media seems to threaten the institution, its intrinsic qualities appearing to suggest a kind of ‘ubiquitous museum’. How to display works that are freely circulated online? How does independent and potentially infinite choice relate, in this context, to curatorial selection? Does YouTube mean that the collective experience is increasingly coming to be based on simultaneous private experience? These are all questions that MAXXI’s curators claim to be listening to, though we’ll have to wait another year to see how successful their answers are.
