With drawings by Dan Perjovschi
– II. Museums of Contemporary Art
– III. Theorizing the Contemporary
– IV. Time Machines: The Van Abbemuseum
– V. Archive of the Commons:The Reina Sofía
– VI. Repetitions: MSUM Ljublana
– VII. Dialectical Contemporaneity
– Endnotes
It’s remarkable to think that the last polemical text to be written on museums of contemporary art by an art historian was Rosalind Krauss’s “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum” back in 1990. Her essay is indebted to Fredric Jameson’s critique of late capitalist culture not just in its title but also in its relentless pessimism. Drawing from her experience of two contemporary art museums—the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the projected site of Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts—Krauss argued that a profound encounter with the work of art had become subordinated to a new register of experience: the unanchored hyperreality of its architectural container, which produced effects of disembodiment that, in her view, correlated to the dematerialized flows of global capital. Rather than a highly individualized artistic epiphany, viewers to these galleries encountered a euphoria of space first, and art second. 1 Krauss’s essay was prescient in many ways: the decade to come saw an unprecedented proliferation of new museums dedicated to contemporary art, and increased scale and a proximity to big business have been two central characteristics of the move from the nineteenth-century model of the museum as a patrician institution of elite culture to its current incarnation as a populist temple of leisure and entertainment.
Today, however, a more radical model of the museum is taking shape: more experimental, less architecturally determined, and offering a more politicized engagement with our historical moment. Three museums in Europe—the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova (MSUM) in Ljubljana—are doing more than any individual work of art to shift our perception of art institutions and their potential. All three present compelling alternatives to the dominant mantra of bigger is better, and better is richer. Rather than following the blue-chip mainstream, these museums draw upon the widest range of artifacts to situate art’s relationship to particular histories with universal relevance. 2 They do not speak in the name of the one percent, but attempt to represent the interests and histories of those constituencies that are (or have been) marginalized, sidelined and oppressed. This doesn’t mean that they subordinate art to history in general, but that they mobilize the world of visual production to inspire the necessity of standing on the right side of history.
It is no coincidence that each of these museums has also engaged in the task of rethinking the category of ‘the contemporary’. Throughout this essay, I will be setting two models of contemporaneity against each other. The first concerns presentism: the condition of taking our current moment as the horizon and destination of our thinking. This is the dominant usage of the term ‘contemporary’ in art today; it is underpinned by an inability to grasp our moment in its global entirety, and an acceptance of this incomprehension as a constitutive condition of the present historical era. The second model, which I want to develop here, takes its lead from the practice of these three museums: here the contemporary is understood as a dialectical method and a politicized project with a more radical understanding of temporality. Time and value turn out to be crucial categories at stake in formulating a notion of what I will call a ‘dialectical contemporaneity’, because it does not designate a style or period of the works themselves so much as an approach to them. One of the consequences of approaching institutions through this category is a rethinking of the museum, the category of art that it enshrines, and the modalities of spectatorship it produces.
Although the last twenty years have seen a huge diversification of museums as a category, a dominant logic of privatization unites most of their iterations worldwide. In Europe, there has been an increasing dependence on donations and corporate sponsorship as governments gradually withdraw public funding from culture in the name of ‘austerity’. In the US, the situation has always been thus, but is now accelerating without any pretense to a separation of public and private interests: an art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, was appointed head of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in January 2010. Two months later, the New Museum controversially installed the collection of its multimillionaire trustee Dakis Joannou and employed the artist Jeff Koons—already in Joannou’s collection—to guest curate the exhibition. Meanwhile, it is well known that the Museum of Modern Art in New York regularly rehangs its permanent collection on the basis of its trustees’ latest acquisitions. Indeed, it can sometimes seem as if contemporary museums have ceded historical research to commercial galleries: Gagosian, for example, has mounted a series of blockbuster shows of modern masters (Manzoni, Picasso, Fontana) as carefully curated by famous art historians as those in a traditional museum.
In Latin America, although publicly funded institutions of contemporary art have existed since the 1960s—for example in São Paulo and Lima, where two museums form part of university campuses (MAC-USP and LiMAC)—the highest-profile contemporary art spaces are all private: Jumex in Mexico City (established in 1999), MALBA in Buenos Aires (2001), Inhotim near Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2006). In Asia, the biggest collection-based contemporary art museums have been established under the aegis of wealthy individuals (such as the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2003, or the Dragon Museum in Shanghai, 2012) or corporations (such as the Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2004). It is only recently that the Chinese government has opened its first state-run contemporary art museum, the Power Station of Art, based in a former Shanghai industrial plant (October 2012), to be followed by the M+ museum in Hong Kong, slated to be the world’s largest contemporary art museum, which will open in 2015. However, many Asian museums could just as well be described as kunsthalles that show temporary exhibitions, as their commitment to a collection policy is negligible: think of the Beijing Today Art Museum (2002), Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum (2008) and Rockbund Museum of Art (2010), or the Guangdong Times Musem, Guangzhou (2010).
As critics have observed, the visual expression of this privatization has been the triumph of ‘starchitecture’: the museum’s external wrapper has become more important than its contents, just as Krauss foresaw in 1990, leaving art with the option of looking ever more lost inside gigantic post-industrial hangars, or supersizing to compete with its envelope. Although museums have always endorsed signature architecture, the extreme iconicity of new museum buildings is comparatively recent: I. M. Pei’s Pyramids for the Louvre in 1989 are an early benchmark, while the most recent avatars in Europe are the Pompidou Metz by Shigeru Ban and Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, Rome, both of which opened in 2010. The future shadow of Abu Dhabi adds further, intercultural tension to this list: a franchised Louvre and a Guggenheim will form part of a slew of eye-popping over-scaled buildings destined to house art and performance. Looking at this global panorama of contemporary art museums, what binds them all together is less a concern for a collection, a history, a position, or a mission than a sense that contemporaneity is being staged on the level of image: the new, the cool, the photogenic, the well-designed, the economically successful.3
When did contemporary art become so desirable a category? Back in 1940, an artists’ manifesto, designed by Ad Reinhardt, queried MoMA’s ability to show the present rather than merely exhibit the past, asking “How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?” Artists picketed the museum and demanded more exhibitions of contemporary US art, rather than endless shows of early twentieth-century European painters and sculptors.4 It is telling that for MoMA’s director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., modern denoted aesthetic quality (the progressive, original, and challenging) compared to the safe, academic, and “supine neutrality” of the contemporary, which simply meant work by living artists.5 In the post-war period, institutions tended to favor the term ‘contemporary art’ as a substitute for ‘modern’: the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London was founded in 1947, opting to show temporary exhibitions rather than building up a permanent collection, as did many similarly titled venues.6 In these examples, once again, the ‘contemporary’ refers less to style or period than to an assertion of the present. By contrast, the Institute of Modern Art in Boston was renamed the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1948 as a way to distance itself from MoMA’s vanguard internationalism; it turned to the more capacious category of the ‘contemporary’ to legitimate a regionalist, commercial, and conservative agenda.7
The New Museum in New York is an important transitional case in the story of museums becoming presentist. Established in 1977 as an alternative to MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum initially built up a ‘semi-permanent collection’ under the aegis of its first director, Marcia Tucker. Begun in 1978, the collection was devoted to the kind of work that then had no place in the traditional museum: dematerialized, conceptual, performance, and process-based art. These works represented marginalized subject positions and staked out a position against Reagan-era politics. The museum’s idea was to destabilize the idea of collecting by keeping its sights on the present: work would be selected from shows in the building, as a form of documentation, but after a decade these works would be deaccessioned to create room for more recent pieces. This model of collecting was not new: it was more or less the same as that implemented in 1818, when the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris became the Musée des artistes vivantes—a name chosen to position the institution in direct contrast to the Louvre, which was reserved for artists who were ‘historical’ (i.e., dead). This model was also followed by Barr at MoMA as of 1931: works would either be deaccessioned after fifty years, or passed on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for posterity—a practice that continued until 1953. What makes the New Museum’s ‘semi-permanent collection’ distinctive is that it formed a bridge between alternative art practices of the 1970s (informed by institutional critique and systems art) and the market logic of the 1980s (exemplified by the continual turnover of Charles Saatchi’s collection).8 On the one hand, the semi-permanent collection functioned as an ‘anti-collection’, allowing works to flow in and out, refusing a correct or authoritative story of contemporary art. On the other hand, this perpetual motion rendered the museum “compliant with notions of obsolescence and the march of fashion.”9 Tucker later recognized that the collection’s semi-permanence refused access to the past in favor of the present, rather than setting the two in dialog. Today, there is no mention of the New Museum’s collection of circa 670 works on the institution’s website, which states that it is a “non-collecting institution.”10 The emphasis is instead on high-profile solo shows by living (or recently deceased) artists, group exhibitions, and a triennial, and there is very little to differentiate its activities from those of the Guggenheim, Whitney, MoMA, or even the Metropolitan, all of which now show contemporary art. The only discernible difference is branding: the New Museum’s demographic is younger and hipper.
In tandem with this proliferation of contemporary art museums, the study of contemporary art has become the fastest-growing subject area in the academy since the turn of the millennium. Here, the definition of ‘contemporary’ has become a moving target par excellence: until the late 1990s, it seemed synonymous with ‘post-war’, denoting art after 1945; about ten years ago, it was relocated to start somewhere in the 1960s; now the 1960s and 1970s generally tend to be viewed as high modernist, and the argument has been put forward that we should consider 1989 as the beginning of a new era, synonymous with the fall of communism and the emergence of global markets.11 While each of these periodizations has its pros and cons, the central drawback is that they operate from a Western purview. In China, contemporary art tends to be dated from the late 1970s (the official end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of the democracy movement); in India, from the 1990s onwards; in Latin America, there is no real division of the modern and the contemporary, because this would mean conforming to hegemonic Western categories—indeed, a prevalent discussion there still revolves around whether or not modernity has actually been realized. In Africa, contemporary art dates variously from the end of colonialism (the late 1950s/1960s in Anglophone and Francophone countries; the 1970s in the case of former Portuguese colonies), or as late as the 1990s (the end of apartheid in South Africa, the first African biennials, and the start of NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art).12
It almost goes without saying, then, that the attempt to periodize contemporary art is dysfunctional, unable to accommodate global diversity. Most recent theorists have therefore positioned it as a discursive category. For philosopher Peter Osborne, the contemporary is an ‘operative fiction’: it is fundamentally a productive act of the imagination, because we attribute a sense of unity to the present, one that encompasses disjunctive global temporalities we can never grasp; as such it is a time of stasis.13 For Boris Groys, modernism was characterized by a desire to surpass the present in the name of realizing a glorious future (be this avant-garde utopianism or the Stalinist five-year plan); contemporaneity, by contrast, is marked by “a prolonged, potentially infinite period of delay,” prompted by the fall of communism.14 For both Osborne and Groys, a future-oriented modernism has been replaced by a static, boring present (“we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future”).15 Groys points to the secular ritual of repetition that is the video loop as contemporary art’s instantiation of this new relationship to temporality, which creates, he argues, a “non-historical excess of time through art.”
Other theorists have claimed the contemporary as a question of temporal disjunction. Giorgio Agamben, for example, posits it as a state of being founded on temporal rupture: “contemporariness,” he writes, “is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism,” and it is only by this untimeliness or “dyschrony” that one can truly gaze at one’s own era.16 He evocatively describes contemporariness as being able “to fix your gaze on the darkness of the epoch” and “being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss.”17 Anachronism also permeates the reading of Terry Smith, one of the few art historians to tackle this question. He has persuasively argued that the contemporary should be set equally against the discourses of modernism and postmodernism, because it is characterized by antinomies and asynchronies: the simultaneous and incompatible co-existence of different modernities and ongoing social inequities, differences that persist despite the global spread of telecommunications systems and the purported universality of market logic.18
These discursive approaches seem to fall into one of two camps: either contemporaneity denotes stasis (i.e., it is a continuation of postmodernism’s post-historical deadlock) or it reflects a break with postmodernism by asserting a plural and disjunctive relationship to temporality. The latter is of course more generative, as it allows us to move away from both the historicity of modernism, characterized by an abandonment of tradition and a forward propulsion towards the new, and the historicity of postmodernism, equated with a ‘schizophrenic’ collapse of past and future into an expanded present.19 Certainly, an assertion of multiple, overlapping temporalities can be seen in many works of art since the mid-1990s by artists from countries struggling to deal with a context of recent war and political upheaval, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.20 Art historian Christine Ross has argued that contemporary artists look backwards in order to “presentify” the modernist regime of historicity and thereby to critique its futurity; artists are less interested in Walter Benjamin’s approach to history as radical discontinuity, she writes, than in “potential[izing] remains as forms of resistance to and redeployment of modern life.”21 However, other critics have questioned whether these artistic efforts are ultimately more nostalgic and retrospective than prospective: Dieter Roelstraete has lambasted contemporary art’s turn towards history-telling and historicizing for its “inability to grasp or even look at the present, much less to excavate the future.”22
A less contested approach to disjunctive temporalities can be found in the revival of interest in anachronism among art historians. Its central advocate, Georges Didi-Huberman, has argued that anachronism is so pervasive an operation in art throughout history that we should see its presence in all works: “in each historical object, all times encounter one another, collide, or base themselves plastically on one another, bifurcate, or even become entangled with each other.”23 Building on the work of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Didi-Huberman puts forth the idea that works of art are temporal knots, a mixture of past and present; they reveal what persists or “survives” (Nachleben) from earlier periods, in the form of a symptom in the current era. To gain access to these stratified temporalities, he writes, requires a “shock, a tearing of the veil, an irruption or appearance of time, what Proust and Benjamin have described so eloquently under the category of ‘involuntary memory’.”24 Taking their lead from Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood demonstrate in Anachronic Renaissance (2010) the co-existence of two temporalities in works of art circa 1500, as culture shifted from religious Medieval to secular Renaissance. Arguing against the historicist idea that each object or event belongs in a specific time and place (the idea upon which anachronism is founded), they instead propose the term ‘anachronic’ to describe the way in which works of art perform a recursive temporality.25
Nagel and Wood’s investigation, while compelling, is mono-directional: by their own admission, they “reverse engineer” from the work of art backwards (into its own past, its own chronotopology), rather than beginning with a diagnosis of the present that necessitates research into the early Renaissance as a means to mobilize a different understanding of today.26 By contrast, what I call a dialectical contemporary seeks to navigate multiple temporalities within a more political horizon. Rather than simply claim that many or all times are present in each historical object, we need to ask why certain temporalities appear in particular works of art at specific historical moments. Furthermore, this analysis is motivated by a desire to understand our present condition and how to change it.27 Lest this method be interpreted as yet another form of presentism, a preoccupation with the now masquerading as historical inquiry, it should be stressed that sightlines are always focused on the future: the ultimate aim is to disrupt the relativist pluralism of the current moment, in which all styles and beliefs are considered equally valid, and to move towards a more sharply politicized understanding of where we can and should be heading. If, as Osborne claims, the global contemporary is a shared fiction, then this doesn’t denote its ‘impossibility’, but rather provides the basis for a new political imaginary. The idea that artists might help us glimpse the contours of a project for rethinking our world is surely one of the reasons why contemporary art, despite ts near total imbrication in the market, continues to rouse such passionate interest and concern.
Where do museums fit into this? My argument is that museums with a historical collection have become the most fruitful testing ground for a non-presentist, multi-temporal contemporaneity. This is in direct contrast to the commonplace assumption that the privileged site of contemporary art is the globalized biennial; the operational logic of the latter remains locked within an affirmation of the zeitgeist, and any navigation of the past tends to serve only as a foil for younger artists. Of course, for many curators, the historical weight of a permanent collection is an albatross that inhibits the novelty so essential to drawing in new audiences, since the incessant turnover of temporary exhibitions is deemed more exciting (and profitable) than finding yet another way to show the canon. Yet today, when so many museums are being forced to turn back to their collections because funds for loan-based temporary exhibitions have been slashed due to austerity measures, the permanent collection can be a museum’s greatest weapon in breaking the stasis of presentism. This is because it requires us to think in several tenses simultaneously: the past perfect and the future anterior. It is a time capsule of what was once considered culturally significant at previous historical periods, while more recent acquisitions anticipate the judgment of history to come (in the future, this will have been deemed important). Without a permanent collection, it is hard for a museum to stake any meaningful claim to an engagement with the past—but also, I would wager, with the future.28
Of course, most museums have only experimented with their holdings to the extent of devising thematic hangs, in the belief that an abandonment of chronology is the best way to refresh permanent collections and make them more exciting and contemporary (in the presentist sense). This experiment began at MoMA with Modern-Starts (1999), where it was rapidly jettisoned in favor of a return to canonical chronology, but the approach continues today at Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou.29 But while thematic hangs have permitted a greater diversity of displays, they also give rise to the hermeneutical question of historical anchoring: if the past and the present are collapsed into transhistorical and transgeographical clusters, how can the differences between places and periods be understood? Perhaps more importantly, do they prevent the museum from expressing its commitment to, or preference for, one historical reading over another? It is not hard to argue that the relativism of thematic collection hangs post-2000 is in perfect synchronicity with museum marketing: a gallery to please every demographic, without having to align the institution with any particular narrative or position.30 It is therefore striking that almost all of the literature on museum collections since 2000 has assumed that Tate Modern’s four collection suites offer the ‘good’ riposte to MoMA’s ‘bad’ example.31 Few have criticized the Tate, and yet its approach to history is just as apolitical as MoMA’s devotion to chronology: its wings revolve around the collection’s strengths (Surrealism, Abstraction, Minimalism), connecting these movements both to recent work and historical precursors, but these rooms are presented as interchangeable modules, endlessly open to reshuffling.32 Meanwhile, the lack of chronology in the exhibition display is anxiously overcompensated for by the presence of huge timelines decorating the foyer walls of each floor, which struggle to populate the Western narrative with new global additions.33
In the rest of this essay, I will turn to new collection display paradigms that have not only succeeded Tate Modern but which also present a new category of contemporaneity: the Van Abbemuseum, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía, and MSUM Ljubljana. Each of these institutions has hung its collection to suggest a provocative rethinking of contemporary art in terms of a specific relationship to history, driven by a sense of present-day social and political urgencies, and marked by particular national traumas: colonial guilt and the Franco era (Madrid), Islamophobia and the failure of social democracy (Eindhoven), the Balkan Wars and the end of socialism (Ljubljana). Driven by clear political commitments, these institutions stand apart from the presentist model of the contemporary art museum in which market interests influence what is displayed. These institutions elaborate a dialectical contemporaneity both as a museological practice and an art-historical method.
The Van Abbemuseum was founded in 1936 around the collection of a local cigar manufacturer in Eindhoven, Henri van Abbe. The museum comprises two buildings: the original structure from 1936 (a symmetrical suite of modestly proportioned, top-lit galleries) and a postmodern extension, which opened in 2003, with five stories and an auditorium. Its current director, Charles Esche, joined the museum in 2004 after running the Rooseum Centre for Contemporary Art (Malmö), curating several biennials (including Gwangju, Istanbul, and Riwaq), and setting up two alternative institutions in Edinburgh, the Modern Institute and the Proto-Academy. Since his arrival, the Van Abbemuseum has been relentlessly experimental, exploiting the full resources of the institution—its collection, archive, library, and residencies—to present a catalog of possible ways to exhibit its holdings in single-gallery installations referred to as ‘Plug Ins’.34 The first phase of this research, “Plug In to Play” (2006–2008), conceived the museum displays less as a historical narrative than as a series of discrete installations, some organized by in-house curators, some by guest curators, and some by artists. Rather than staging temporary loan-based exhibitions, the museum used the collection as a temporary exhibition.35 This dynamic period of experimentation lasted for three years, but while “Plug In to Play” creatively exploded the range of ways in which the collection might be displayed, and in extraordinarily vivid ways, the drawback was that they produced only a fragmented menu of possible options for displaying modern and contemporary art, rather than deploying these strategies to produce a narrative.36
The next phase was an eighteen-month, four-part program called “Play van Abbe” (2009–2011), in which the museum attempted to think of itself as a series of interconnected displays, rather than as a concatenation of individual installations. The first part, “The Game and the Players,” emphasized institutional transparency and historical contingency: “Who are these ‘players’ within a museum and which stories do they tell? How does the current director present the collection? In what way does an art museum position itself—both in the present and in the past?”37 One display showed works that were acquired by Edy de Wilde when he was director between 1946 and 1963 (Plug In #34), while a further display (Plug In #50) showed the original kernel of the museum collection: twenty-six paintings (none by major international figures) bought by Henri >van Abbe in the 1920s and 1930s. “Repetition: Summer Displays 1983” reinstalled a collection display curated by Rudi Fuchs when he was director, in order to ask how we perceive this conservative period today—thereby drawing a sharp contrast between Fuchs’s and Esche’s approaches.38 These curatorial frames rendered the displayed works subject to a double temporality: as individual voices speaking in the present, but also as a collective chorus once considered essential at a previous historical moment.
The second part of “Play van Abbe,” titled “Time Machines,” grew out of the museum’s ambition to be a ‘museum of museums’ or a ‘collection of collections’, showing the history of ideological display and exhibition archetypes and models. Again, repetition was a key strategy: the museum revived the project, set in motion by Jean Leering when he was director in the 1960s, of collecting reconstructions of historical environments. In 2007 the museum had already commissioned a reconstruction of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Workers’ Reading Room (1925); in 2009 it fabricated László Moholy-Nagy’s Raum der Gegenwart (1930), invited the artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh to reconstruct Lina Bo Bardi’s exhibition display system for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1968), and commissioned the Museum of American Art in Berlin to remake El Lissitzky’s Abstraktes Kabinett (1927–1928). The third part, “The Politics of Collecting—The Collecting of Politics,” featured conceptually oriented art from Eastern Europe and the Middle East: the former region because it relates to the past and possible future of communism, and the latter because it addresses contemporary Islamophobia in the Netherlands, as well as provides a platform for artistic projects that oppose the ongoing occupation of the West Bank. For example, Picasso in Palestine (2011) realized a proposal by Khaled Hourani, the artist-director of the International Art Academy Palestine, to bring a Picasso painting to Palestine for the first time, and to exhibit it at his institution.39 The final part, “The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker),” proposed three different models of spectatorship, with accompanying audio guides that allowed these epistemological biases to become explicit.40
Esche directly connects his reorganization of the collection to the political upheavals of 1989 and the changes to museums that have taken place since then, as institutions follow the market far more closely, expanding both the geographical scope of collections and their physical limits by building extensions. Post-1989, clusters of ever-changing narratives seem to have replaced one unifying art historical discourse; Esche nevertheless argues that the task of the museum is to take a position, because relativism is the dominant narrative of the market, where everything is equalized by exchange value. Accordingly, Esche’s selections and priorities as a director are based around a set of ideals and identifiable concerns: the emancipatory drive of modern art and its continuation in certain strands of contemporary art (there is, for example, a notable absence in the Van Abbemuseum’s collection of works with a high-profile market status—no Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Matthew Barney); the memory of cultural internationalism and a need for planetary thinking, as the museum places continual emphasis on the legacy of communism and the possibilities for its reactivation; the social value of retelling histories that lead to other imagined futures, by revisiting marginal or repressed histories in order to open up new vistas. These motivating questions, combined with the museum’s creative use of the archive and documentation, which are continually integrated into the displays, position the contemporary museum as a partisan historical narrator. Yet last year the Van Abbemuseum was threatened with a twenty-eight percent cut to its budget, due to the city council’s objection to its low visitor figures and refusal of cultural entrepreneurship. Ironically, this complaint was made by the Social Democrat party; the solution, in their eyes, was more populist blockbuster exhibitions. Eventually, the cuts were reduced to eleven percent, in part due to online international support and lobbying.
While innovative exhibition design has been central to historical displays at the Van Abbemuseum, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía has embraced a more classical approach to the installation of twentieth-century art. Founded in 1992, the Reina Sofía occupies two enormous buildings in the center of Madrid: an eighteenth-century hospital by Francesco Sabatini, and a large extension by Jean Nouvel. The present director, Manuel Borja-Villel, joined in 2008, after ten years as director of Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). It should be stressed that despite the formal similarity between the Van Abbemuseum and the Reina Sofía as old buildings with new extensions, they are hardly equals: the former is a regional museum in a small Dutch city, while the latter is the national museum of contemporary art in Spain’s capital, triangulated with two other major art collections, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Reina Sofía’s collection of masterpieces and central location ensure there is never an anxiety about viewing figures; the steering question for the museum is not whether people will visit the museum but how they will view the works.
At first glance, the Reina Sofía’s program seems to be business as usual, dominated by major solo and group exhibitions. Yet the presentation of the permanent collection has undergone important changes in the past few years as the museum has adopted a self-critical representation of the country’s colonialist past, positioning Spain’s own history within a larger international context. For example, the gallery introducing the third collection suite, “From Revolt to Post-modernity, 1962–82,” begins with Agnès Varda’s photographic series Cuba Is Not the Congo (1963), while a vitrine of publications by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus is placed alongside Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s film about African art and the effects of colonialism >Statues Also Die (1953); in the center is a large projection of Gillo Pontocorvo’s anti-colonial film The Battle of Algiers (1966). As this display typifies, one of the most notable characteristics of the collection hang is the presence of film and literature alongside works of visual art. The Cubism display opens with a large projection of Buster Keaton’s One Week (1924), drawing attention to a simultaneous use of distorted perspectival forms in painting and popular culture. In one of the most emotionally devastating suites, “Art in a Divided World, 1945–68,” the opening gallery contains a single Lee Miller photograph of US troops at Buchenwald (1945) adjacent to two works by Picasso, illustrations for Pierre Reverdy’s Song of the Dead (1946) and the painting Three Lambs’ Heads (1939), which are installed next to a large projection of Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955). The room immediately following this contains Antonin Artaud’s radio recording To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947): a theater of cruelty and absurdity expresses the impossibility of retrieving aesthetic meaning after the unspeakable horrors of World War II.
The commitment to expanded historical contextualization can also be seen in the presentation of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the main draw of the collection. This is still presented amid several rooms of Picasso’s drawings and paintings, but now framed by other works from the Civil War era, including propaganda posters, magazines, war drawings, and a maquette of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic, where the painting was first shown in 1937. Guernica itself is installed directly opposite a gallery showing Jean-Paul Dreyfus’s Civil War documentary Spain 1936. A filmic record of civilian trauma and destruction therefore confronts Picasso’s painterly version as two forms of monochrome reportage. The effect is to ground Guernica in social and political history, rather than in an art-historical discourse of formal innovation and singular genius. This attention to contextualizing art within visual culture can also be seen elsewhere in the museum, where movements that would otherwise be relegated to the archive due to their lack of visuality (such as Lettrisme and the Situationist International) are now given due space, represented through publications, films, newspaper cuttings, and audio recordings.
While all these galleries present art conventionally thought of as modern rather than as contemporary in terms of periodization, I would argue that the total system of display is dialectically contemporary: as the curators point out, the museum presents constellations of work in which conventional artistic media are no longer the priority, which are driven by a commitment to emancipatory traditions, and which acknowledge other modernities (particularly in Latin America).41 Temporary group exhibitions, meanwhile, are used as testing sites for rethinking the museum’s overall mission and collection policy. In 2009, for example, the museum initiated “The Potosí Principle,” curated by Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer. The exhibition argued that the birthplace of contemporary capitalism might not be the Industrial Revolution of northern England or Napoleonic France, but the silver mines of colonial Bolivia.42 The show juxtaposed seventeenth-century colonial paintings with recent work by artist-activists critical of globalization (particularly the exploitation of migrant workers by neoliberal elites in China, Dubai, and Europe), implicitly drawing a connection between these two forms of colonization.43
The display activities of the Reina Sofía nevertheless remain only the most visible and symbolic of the museum’s activities, which also penetrate deeper behind the scenes to affect acquisitions policy, research, and education. Borja-Villel has developed a method by which to rethink the contemporary museum, using triangular diagrams to express the dynamic relationships underpinning three different models—the modern, the postmodern, and the contemporary. In each diagram, corner A denotes the guiding narrative or motivation, corner B refers to the structure of intermediation, and corner C alludes to the museum’s destination or goal.44 In the modern museum model, exemplified by MoMA, the guiding narrative is linear historic time, advancing towards the future on a Western-centric horizon; its dispositif is the white cube, destined for the modern notion of the public. In the postmodern museum, exemplified by Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou, the apparatus is multiculturalism, seen in the equation of contemporaneity with global diversity; its structure of mediation is marketing, addressed to the multiple demographics of economically quantifiable ‘audiences’.45
Borja-Villel’s alternative to these scenarios is informed by recent writing on the ‘decolonial’ (seeing the world from the perspective of the global south) and the commons (which seeks to produce new models of collective ownership). The starting point for this museum is therefore multiple modernities: an art history no longer conceived in terms of avant-garde originals and peripheral derivatives, since this always prioritizes the European center and ignores the extent to which apparently ‘belated’ works hold other values in their own context. The apparatus, in turn, is reconceived as an archive of the commons, a collection available to everyone because culture is not a question of national property, but a universal resource. Meanwhile, the ultimate destination of the museum is no longer the multiple audiences of market demographics, but radical education: rather than being perceived as hoarded treasure, the work of art would be mobilized as a ‘relational object’ (to use Lygia Clark’s phrase) with the aim of liberating its user psychologically, physically, socially, and politically. The model here is that of Jacques Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmaster,” based on a presumption of equality of intelligence between the viewer and the institution.46
These ideas are beginning to be implemented at the Reina Sofía. The question of multiple modernities is addressed by the museum’s collaboration with Red Conceptualismos del Sur, a research network founded in 2007 that attempts to preserve local histories and the political antagonism of conceptual art practices produced under the Latin American dictatorships.47 Cooperation with this network necessarily influences how the museum acquires work from this region. Rather than buying up artists’ archives, like Tate’s activities in Latin America or Viennese institutions in Eastern Europe, the Reina Sofía devises new ways of operating. For example, the Chilean group CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte, 1979–1985) recently offered their archive to the Reina Sofía, lacking confidence that a Chilean institution could preserve it. The Reina Sofía paid two researchers to catalog the archive and worked to ensure that an institution in Chile would house it; in return, the museum received an exhibition copy of this archive. In the case of CADA, whose work consisted primarily of performances, actions, and interventions, the line between work of art and documentation is negligible. However, this documentary status increasingly defines the most politically engaged art of the late twentieth century.48 In order to redefine the Reina Sofía as an ‘archive of the commons’, the museum is therefore attempting to legally recategorize works of art as ‘documentation’.49 This recategorization increases accessibility to works of art—for example, the public can go to the library and handle them, alongside publications, ephemera, photographs of works of art, correspondence, prints, and other textual materials.50
Finally, education brings these activities together. The museum believes that representation of the other is not enough (for example, by collecting works from far-flung cultures) and that it needs to find new forms of mediation and solidarity between the intellectual culture of the Reina Sofía and social movements. The museum’s education program, therefore, is not limited to the usual art-appreciation classes for children, young adults, and students—these all continue to exist, although their content has somewhat shifted (such as the workshop “Viewing the Viewers,” in which teenagers are made aware of the museum as a discursive apparatus). The museum’s education budget has been directed towards the maintenance of long-term programs, such as the “Programa de Prácticas Críticas” (Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices), a free six-month seminar for young artists, researchers, and activists who, due to the recession and high unemployment, constitute one of the most disaffected groups in the city.51 At the moment, public funding underwrites all these initiatives, although with the election of the right-wing People’s Party in November 2011, budgets have already been slashed by eighteen percent.
My third and final model for curating the contemporary is the Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova (Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, or MSUM) in Ljubljana, which opened in Autumn 2011. Designed by the Slovenian firm Groleger Arhitekti, the museum is located in Metelkova, a former military base during the Yugoslav period that was squatted in the 1990s and to some extent remains the epicenter of alternative culture in the city. The museum’s director, Zdenka Badinovac, has served since 1993 as director of the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, which also administers MSUM, and her staff work across both sites. It goes without saying that the annual budget of the Moderna Galerija and MSUM is barely comparable to that of the Van Abbemuseum, much less to that of the Reina Sofía; part of the reason for including it in this essay is to show what can be done with straitened finances in a small city without a developed art system. (Ljubljana’s only commercial gallery recently decamped to Berlin, where several of Slovenia’s leading artists are now also based.) Unlike my first two examples, Ljubljana also offers a case study of contemporary art at the cross-section of ‘multiple modernities’: Slovenia only became independent in 1991 following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and is located in a region that was rapidly torn apart by ethnic conflict, most intensely in Bosnia and Croatia. The museum thus has to reconcile two conflicting projects: the desire for nation-state representation and the obligation to hold its own in a globalized contemporary art world insistent on transnational (or even postnational) cultural production.
The question of historical representation is particularly fraught in museums throughout former Yugoslavia. When deciding how to show and collect art from the period 1945–1989, one of the central questions is whether to align with art from Western Europe, with whom—in Slovenia’s case—there was frequent contact (partic ularly with neighboring Italy and Austria) or to identify with art from the former Soviet bloc, with whom there was less frequent contact, but whose ideological context is more comparable to ex-Yugoslavia.52 The second contested area concerns the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, where the representation of history is arguably even more charged: how to acknowledge and display the trauma of conflict and genocide that ravaged this region? These questions have received vastly different answers in different parts of former Yugoslavia. In Zagreb, a vast new Museum of Contemporary Art (the MSU) opened in 2009; although it has an outstanding collection of primarily Yugoslav art from the 1960s onwards, the weight of the war is largely carried by Šejla Kameri´c’s Bosnian Girl (2003), a billboard-size self-portrait with superimposed writing, taken from graffiti by a Dutch soldier near Srebrenica in 1994: “No teeth…? A mustache…? Smel (sic) like shit…? Bosnian Girl!” Dispatched in one biting but attractive billboard, the trauma of the wars barely resurfaces. In Sarajevo, by contrast, the National Gallery closed its doors in September 2011 due to lack of government support and funding, and the National Museum followed the same path in October 2012.53
In Ljubljana, the first display encountered by the viewer is titled “War Time”: it includes a small anonymous documentary photograph of the occupation of Metelkova in 1993, alongside Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (1993–1994), a photo series of text on skin, alluding to the rape of Bosnian women. Thereafter, the museum’s entire display is organized around thematic categories relating to overlapping temporalities: “Ideological Time” (the socialist past), “Future Time” (unrealized modernist utopias), “The Time of the Absent Museum” (approximately the 1980s–1990s, when artists compensated for the absence of a developed art system by self-organizing and self-criticizing), “Retro Time” (the late 1990s, when artists began to self-historicize), “Lived Time” (body and performance art), “Time of Transition” (from socialism into capitalism) and “Dominant Time” (present-day global neoliberalism).54 Contemporary art is therefore staked as a question of timeliness, rather than >as a stage on the conveyor belt of history; the necessary condition of relevance is the presentation of multiple, overlapping temporalities, geared towards the imagination of a future in which social equality prevails.55
These displays formed part of the museum’s inaugural hang, “The Present and Presence,” which asserted these two words as central to an understanding of contemporary art. ‘The present’ refers to the period in which Slovenia (and Europe more broadly) is now living, which started with the fall of communism. ‘Presence’, by contrast, is staked in opposition to both capitalism (seen as a return to the past) and future-oriented communism; it is not modernism’s forward march of progress, never glancing back, but a bringing into consciousness that which modernity has suppressed. One of the museum’s tasks is therefore self-reflection: the attempt to compare the ideals of Yugoslav ‘self-management’ with what Badinovac calls the “authentic interests of contemporary art.”56 Once again, contemporaneity is staked as an antinomic relationship to temporality: unlike the Tate’s ‘something for everyone’ relativism, MSUM is committed to taking “the side of traditions that have historically proven to have emancipatory social potential.”57 This means not only eschewing the big players of the contemporary art market in favor of works that expand the horizon of possibilities for collective experience, but also giving space to practices that have been historically overlooked. For example, the Moderna Galerija’s display of “Art of the Partisan Resistance” presented drawings and prints by the anti-Nazi forces as equal in significance to other twentieth-century art movements.58
When it comes to funding, the situation is dismally familiar: as a result of the 2012 election, which returned to power the neoliberal Slovenian Democratic Party, the museum has suffered dramatic cuts in cultural funding. The museum has dealt with this by repeating the presentation of their inaugural collection display, in a slightly expanded and revised form. “The Present and Presence—Repetition 1” justified this repetition in a five-point manifesto. The first point states the fiscal reality: due to budget cuts, no new display or catalog are possible, so recycling is necessary. Four further points argue for the appropriateness of repetition: rather than succumbing to the pressure to give consumers the new, the museum advocates the value of rereading; repetition is one of the fundamental features of contemporary art (video loops, re-enactment, etc.), so it is appropriate to repeat an entire collection display; repetition constructs history—through publications, research, the art market—so a repeated display retroactively helps to construct responses that produce history; finally, repetition is driven by trauma, and in Ljubljana this is twofold—the traumatic absence of a contemporary art system and the unrealized emancipatory ideals of communism. The museum has subsequently rehung “The Present and Presence” two more times: “Repetition 2” (October–November 2012) and “Repeti tion 3” (January–June 2013), focusing on movement and the street, respectively.
Repetition in the form of historical self-reflection is further asserted in the archival work on display: the Body and the East Archive revisits the Moderna Galerija’s eponymous landmark exhibition from 1998, the first synoptic historical overview of body art in Eastern Europe; the Bosnia Archive documents the Moderna Galerija’s 1994 project to collect works by significant regional artists for a future museum of contemporary art in Sarajevo; a performance art archive shows the numerous ways in which this type of practice can be communicated to future generations (photography, video, objects, reperformances); the >Archive-in-Becoming contains oral histories (video interviews with significant artists from the region); and a further archive, Questionnaires, concerns the presence of artists from the Moderna Galerija collection in other public and private collections in Slovenia and abroad. Finally, the so-called Punk Museum documents the Slovenian punk scene from 1977 to 1987, and is open to donations from the public.
As at the Reina Sofía, MSUM’s education program seeks to connect art to political activism, following the guidelines of the Radical Education Collective, developed at the Moderna Galerija in 2006.59Alignments are forged with other organizations also “struggling against commercialization, creative industries, and increasing ideologization of our local space.”60 Instead of the usual museum café, MSUM has a bookstore and seminar room, conceived by students of architecture and design who also program the space and organize an independent series of seminars and interpretation. The activist group Anarhiv uses the room for political theory discussions. Complementing these local ties, the museum has initiated international partnerships so that the institution’s voice can be heard internationally. For example, the collaborative network L’Internationale, established by Badinovac, allows seven European museums and institutions to make their collections available to each other, disrupting the usual East/West European art historical narratives, but also conventional patterns of collection ownership.61
My respect for these three museums is not without reservations, and the shortfalls of each institution become apparent in the comparison. The Van Abbemuseum has failed to embed itself into the local culture in Eindhoven and the region; the displayed publications at the Reina Sofía cannot be read, while its approach to exhibition display is not always coherent (a projection of Hitchcock’s Rear Window [1954] sits in uneasy dialog with Abstract Expressionist painting); while the MSUM’s celebration of documentation is often unmanageable (the museum has so many banks of video monitors documenting actions, performances, and interventions that every visitor has to become her own curator, making decisions about which works to view or ignore). Overall, however, the varied propositions put forward by the Van Abbemuseum, the Reina Sofía, and the MSUM, only briefly sketched here, offer a trampoline from which to leap forward, suggesting alternatives to the privatized contemporary museum creatively and intellectually crippled by its reliance upon blockbuster exhibitions designed to attract corporate investors, philanthropists, and mass audiences. The Van Abbemuseum offers the exhibition apparatus of display as a vehicle of historical consciousness; the Reina Sofía rethinks education and the medium-specific status of the collection; MSUM deploys multiple, overlapping temporalities as a way to write an as-yet-unarticulated historical context.
These museums create multi-temporal remappings of history and artistic production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks, rather than opting for a global inclusivity that pulls everything into the same >narrative.62 An apt term to describe the result of these activities is the constellation, a word used by Walter Benjamin to describe a Marxist project of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties. This approach is, I think, highly suggestive for museums, since the constellation as a politicized rewriting of history is fundamentally curatorial. For Benjamin, the collector is a scavenger or bricoleur, quoting out of context in order to break the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing it blazing into the present, and keeping history mobile in order to allow its objects to be historical agents once again. Replace ‘collector’ here with ‘curator’, and the task of the contemporary museum opens up to a dynamic rereading of history that pulls into the foreground that which has been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominant classes. Culture becomes a primary means for visualizing alternatives; rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons.63
It is of course banal and predictable to invoke Benjamin at the end of an essay in 2013, but it is striking that his theories have been so influential on visual art yet have had so little impact upon the institutions in which it is shown and the histories they narrate. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin draws a distinction between a history spoken in the name of power, which records the triumphs of the victors, and a history that names and identifies the problems of the present day, by scouring the past for the origins of this present historical moment; this, in turn, is the determining motivation for our interest in the past.64 Can a museum be anti-hegemonic? The three museums discussed in this book seem to answer this question in the affirmative. They work to connect current artistic practice to a broader field of visual experience, much as Benjamin’s own Arcades Project sought to reflect on Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, by juxtaposing texts, cartoons, prints, photographs, works of art, artifacts, and architecture in poetic constellations. This present-minded approach to history produces an understanding of today with sightlines on the future, and reimagines the museum as an active, historical agent that speaks in the name not of national pride or hegemony but of creative questioning and dissent. It suggests a spectator no longer focused on the auratic contemplation of individual works, but one who is aware of being presented with arguments and positions to read or contest. Finally, it defetishizes objects by continually juxtaposing works of art with documentary materials, copies, and reconstructions. The contemporary becomes less a question of periodization or discourse than a method or practice, potentially applicable to all historical periods.
Some will of course argue that periodization cannot be discarded: only with a grasp of clearly delineated historical periods can we disrupt a distended now that colonizes past and future. But such a historicist approach condemns previous ages to a remoteness divorced of relevance to the current day, and does nothing to address the causes of our current presentism: the role of technology in collapsing spatial distance and accelerating our lived experience of time; the threat of global catastrophe, from nuclear war to terrorism to environmental disaster, diminishing our ability to project into the future; and the speculative short-term investments of finance capitalism, selling abstractions such as currencies, bonds, stocks, and derivatives rather than material production. All of these have unquestionably affected our spatio-temporal coordinates: for the average person in what used to be called the first world, the future is no longer equated with a hopeful modern vision of progress (if indeed it ever were), but a seething pit of anxiety about short-term work contracts, unaffordable healthcare, and a lifetime of debt repayments (mortgages, student loans, credit cards). Rather than succumbing to this presentism, a ‘tiger’s leap’ into that which has gone before may be supremely relevant to mobilizing an understanding of our situation. Dialectical contemporaneity is therefore an anachronic action that seeks to reboot the future through the unexpected appearance of a relevant past.
Others will say that the museum is itself a conservative institution and that is more urgent to focus efforts on social change. But it is not a choice of either/or. Museums are a collective expression of what we consider important in culture, and offer a space to reflect and debate our values; without reflection, there can be no considered movement forwards.65 It >seems telling that the three museums I have presented are named after an industrialist, a queen, and a military base—yet all of them denounce barbarities of power and exploitation, narrating the past through a diagnosis of the present, while keeping their eyes on the future. It is also significant that the activities of all three museums have, since 2011, come under pressure from neoliberal governments and city councils playing the mood music of austerity: their budgets have been decimated because access to culture is not perceived as a basic right like education and welfare—although these are also being systematically expropriated—but a luxury that can be farmed out to the private sector. And this sector is all too willing to step in, because museums are not only economic generators, but can enhance social status and the value of one’s private collection. Two systems of value hereby come into conflict: the museum as a space of cultural and historical reflection, and the museum as a repository of philanthropic narcissism. In the face of this impasse, the ability of the public museum to adequately represent the interests of the ninety-nine percent might seem ever bleaker. It is therefore crucial to consider the alternatives that do exist, working below the radar to devise energizing new missions for the museum of contemporary art.66
Neoliberalism’s subordination of culture to economic value denigrates not only museums but the humanities more broadly, whose own systems of assessment increasingly have to justify themselves according to metrics (grant-income revenue, economic impact, citation as a measure of influence).67 We seem hopelessly unable to devise an alternative value system: technocracy unwittingly abetted by post-structuralism has dismantled much of the vocabulary in which the significance of culture and the humanities was previously couched, making the task of persuasively defining this in non-economic terms ever more pressing. Yet we can and must argue for culture and the humanities to be appreciated as important and extraordinary in their own right, existing outside the language of accounting and use value, and whose acts of imagination are enshrined in the institutions we have devised to protect them.68 The curatorial goals outlined in this essay might appear to be new forms of instrumentalization, but they are in fact a means of protecting this autonomy, since they build upon what is already implicit in works of art in order to question and raise consciousness, rather than merely consolidating private prestige.
The task of articulating cultural value is now urgent in both the museum and the academy, where a tsunami of fiscal imperatives threatens to deluge all that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous, and critical in the public sphere. Significantly, it is a question of temporality around which this struggle now takes place: authentic culture operates within a slower time frame than the accelerated abstractions of finance capital and the annual cycles of accounting (based on positivist data and requiring demonstrable impact). But it is precisely this lack of synchronicity that points to an alternative world of values in which museums—but also culture, education, and democracy—are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet or the statistical mystifications of an opinion poll, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present, and to realize a different future. This future does not yet have a name, but we are standing on its brink. If the last forty years have been marked by ‘posts’ (post-war, post-colonialism, postmodernism, post-communism), then today, at last, we seem to be in a period of anticipation—an era that museums of contemporary art can help us collectively to sense and understand.
1. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” in: October, no. 54, Fall 1990, p. 14. Krauss goes on to discuss an article in Art in America that reports museums deaccessioning their collections, noting the incursion of a managerial mindset and the pressure of the art market upon museum activities.
2. Here I am referring to Susan Buck-Morss’s arguments in Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2009. Buck-Morss argues that universal history involves the denationalization of events in order to reinscribe them as questions of universal concern. (The Holocaust, for example, does not belong to German history or to Jewish history, but is a calamity for all humankind.) In retrieving the universal as a category, Buck-Morss joins a number of recent thinkers, including Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, who seek to recuperate the universal after its dismantling by poststructuralist assaults on metanarratives. Her aim is not to interpret universality as inclusivity (i.e., pulling everything into the same narrative), but rather to use it as a methodological intervention into history.
3. As artist Hito Steyerl notes, “Contemporary art is a brand name without a brand, ready to be slapped onto almost anything for a quick face-lift touting the new creative imperative for places in need of an extreme makeover […] If contemporary art is the answer, the question is: How can capitalism be made more beautiful?” Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” in: e-flux journal #21, December 2010, available online at: www.e-flux.com.
4 In fact, as Richard Meyer has shown, MoMA’s program during the 1930s had been remarkably varied, including exhibitions of prehis-toric rock painting, Persian frescoes, and reproductions of Cézanne paintings. US artists had been shown at the museum, but Reinhardt and the organization American Abstract Artists objected to the fact that these artists were too old, too conventional, or too popular to qualify as authentically modern. See: Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2013, chapter 4.
5. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., letter to Paul Sachs, October 1940, cited in: ibid., p. 38.
6. The outlier here is the City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, founded in 1954. It changed its name to the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998.
7. “The Institute’s intermingling of curating and commerce would, for better or worse, increasingly come to mirror the logic of contem-porary art in America.” Meyer, op. cit., p. 251. In 1950, MoMA, the Whitney Museum and the ICA Boston issued a joint manifesto declaring the modern tradition alive and well—a public reversal of Boston’s previous assertion that modernism had died in 1939. See: J. Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban Modernity, Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, 1998, p. 250.
8. Saatchi’s acquisition strategy has controversially involved buying young artists’ work wholesale and then reselling the entire set once the market value has increased. See, for example: Arifa Akbar, “Charles Saatchi: A Blessing or a Curse for Young Artists?”, in: The Independent, 6/13/2008: “Saatchi’s most outspoken protegé-turned-critic was the Italian neo-expressionist painter Sandro Chia, whose work was bought and then disposed of in the 1980s. There was speculation that Saatchi’s sale of his entire holdings of Chia’s work effectively destroyed the Italian’s reputation.”
9. See: Brian Goldfarb et al., “Fleeting Possessions,” in: Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1995, pp. 9ff.
10. See: NM Press FAQ (PDF). Recent work to have been purchased for the museum by its trustees includes Ugo Rondinone’s Hell, Yes! (2001), installed on the façade of the building 2007–2010. None of the collection has been included in any of the exhi-bitions at the New Museum since its move to the Bowery in 2007. Email from Gabriel Einsohn, press officer at the New Museum, 3/29/2013.
11 See, for example: Alex Alberro, response to “Questionnare on ‘The Contemporary’,” in: October, no. 130, Fall 2009, p. 55; Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989, exhibition at ZKM | Karls-ruhe, 2011; Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson (eds), Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2013.
12. See also: Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary Art in Africa Since 1980, Damiani, Bologna, 2009: “[C]ontemporary African art comes both at the end of traditional arts (seemingly precolonial) and at the end of colonialism; that is to say, its condition of existence in the present is postcolonial” (p. 12).
13. Peter Osborne, “The Fiction of the Contemporary,” in: Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013, pp. 15–35.
14. Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” in: Going Public, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2010, pp. 84–101.
15. Ibid., p. 90, and the following quote, p. 94.
16. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”, in: What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009, p. 41. Italics in the original.
17. Ibid., p. 46.
18. This world came into being in the late 1980s, he argues, but exists decisively in common consciousness after 9/11. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2009.
19. The term ‘historicity’ is used by the French historian François Hartog to describe the dominant order of time in a given era: how society conceptualizes and treats its past. See: Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2003. ‘Schizophrenic’ is the term deployed by Fredric Jameson to characterize postmodernism’s prefer-ence for heightened but disconnected experiences of the present. See: Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in: Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, The New Press, New York, 2002, pp. 13–29.
20. In Eastern Europe, the disavowal of the communist past in official discourse has given rise to numerous video works exploring the psy-chological impact of the transition, therapeutically incorporating old film stock or technology (such as Anri Sala’s Intervista and Deimantas Narkevicius’s His-Story, both 1998); in the Middle East, a powerful body of work has addressed the Lebanese Civil War and episodes from the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict (consider the extensive archival work of the Atlas Group/Walid Raad or Emily Jacir). In Western Europe and North America, by contrast, artists have seized upon overlooked moments in the history of psychotherapy, colonial-ism, feminism, and civil rights—at their best, interested less in the past for its own sake than in the possibilities it contains for opening up alter-natives for the future (Stan Douglas, Sharon Hayes, Harun Farocki).
21. Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art, Continuum, London, 2013, p. 41.
22. Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art,” in: e-flux journal #4, March 2009, available online at: www.e-flux.com. Italics in the original.
23. Georges Didi-Huberman, “History and Image: Has the ‘Epistemological Transformation’ Taken Place?” in: Michael Zimmermann (ed.), The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, Williamstown, 2003, p. 131.
24. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,” in: Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds.), Compelling Visuality, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2003, p. 41. See also: Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” in: Oxford Art Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–70.
25. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, Zone Books, New York, 2010, p. 14.
26. Ibid., p. 34.
27. My position also differs from that of Thomas Crow, for whom the work of visual art has a unique temporality compared to that of literature, music, or dance, because its objects are “the actual things fashioned and handled by the subjects of history themselves.” (Thomas Crow, “The Practice of Art History in America,” in: Daedalus, vol. 135, no. 2, Spring 2006, p. 71.) The use of reproduc-tive technologies in contemporary art has weakened the viability of this claim; see the discussion of documentation at the Reina Sofía on p. 44.
28. At the New Museum, for example, history appears only in the register of fashionability, like a well-chosen retro interest. Even group exhibitions whose themes provide a perfect opportunity for historical research are presented without argumentation. For exam-ple, >Ostalgia (2011), a survey of Russian and Eastern European art since the 1960s, juxtaposed works on the basis of sensibility, without any acknowledgment of the ideological transition that took place 1989–1991. The show replaced the frame of political history with that of good taste, effectively permitting the market to hold sway (appropriately, the show was funded by a Russian gas oligarch, Leonid Mikhelson, whose art foundation is called VICTORIA—the Art of being Contemporary (sic)). Moreover, the exhibition title grouped all work under the rubric of ‘ostalgia’, despite the fact that the majority of exhibits dated from the pre-1989 period.
29. In Western museums devoted solely to work from the 1960s onwards, thematic clusters have become the norm, since there is an assumption that the art of this period shares enough context to make the practice of decade-shuffling unproblematic. When the thematic approach is seen to fail, it tends to result not from generational juxtapositions but from geographical: the creation of dialogues between Western and non-Western art, especially if the latter is positioned as belated and derivative (if modern) or simply non-modern (if indigenous).
30. However, such relativism is clearly not value-free and is belied by hierarchies within the temporary exhibitions: in the case of Tate Modern, for example, the majority of (income-generating) solo exhibitions continue to be by Western male artists, while female and non-Western artists tend to be confined to the (unticketed) Turbine Hall and project spaces. See: T. J. Demos, “The Tate Effect,” in: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Where is Art Contemporary? The Global Art World, vol. 2, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2009, pp. 78–87.
31 One notable exception is Okwui Enwezor’s critique of Tate Modern’s neo-colonial gaze. See: Enwezor, “The Post-Colonial Constellation,” in: Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Duke University Press: Durham/NC, 2008, pp. 207–229.
32. For example, the 2012 collection hang at Tate Modern was organized around the following four suites: “Poetry and Dream” (which took its lead from Surrealism, but also includes John Heartfield’s photomontages, Santu Mofokeng’s 1997 slide show Black Photo Album: Look at Me, and sculpture by Joseph Beuys), “Energy and Process” (centered on Arte Povera, but which also included a gallery of gifts from the collector Janet Wolfson de Botton), “States of Flux” (based around Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism), and “Structure and Clarity” (devoted to inter-war abstraction, but spanning Cubism and Cory Arcangel).
33. Below these timelines, an oppressive apparatus of bright red multimedia booths emblazoned with corporate sponsorship keeps the museum on message with the dominant neoliberal norm.
34. Another series of displays, called “The Living Archive,” presented elements of the museum’s own history to visitors, while also holding a mirror up to the museum itself as a reminder of what it has been and could be once more (the museum’s website describes the series as “a treasury of ideas about the future”). The series revisited key exhibitions from the museum’s history (such as The Street, 1972) and presented archival information about an experimental space in Eindhoven called Het Apollohuis (1980–1997), but also showed facsimiles of the museum’s documentation files (“Museum Index—Research in Progress”), the result of research into the provenance of works in the collection that were looted by the Nazis before or during World War II.
35. Some exceptions to this rule have nevertheless taken place, such as the temporary exhibition Forms of Resistance: Artists and the Desire for Social Change from 1871 to the Present (2007), a manifesto of sorts for the Van Abbemuseum.
36. The most notable experiments in this series included “One on One: Frank Stella’s Tuxedo Junction” (Plug In #32), which showed Stella’s 1963 painting alone in a gallery, accompanied only by a chair and a small table with reading matter relevant to the work (publications, correspondence, exhibition history, condition reports, and illustra-tions of previous installations of the painting); also on the table was a tape recorder on which one could listen to an interpretation of Stella’s work by art historian Shep Steiner. “Kijkdepot” (Plug In #18) offered visitors a chance to select their favorite work from the collection on the condition that they provide a reason for wanting to see it. The results were then brought out of storage and put on display, providing the museum with a sense of what local residents were interested in seeing, and leading to a “collective accidental curating” (Christiane Berndes, in: Plug In to Play, 2010, p. 78). Plug In #28, curated by the Dutch artist duo Bik van der Pol, displayed work by Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman alongside 140 books published by Loompanics Unlimited (1975–2006), which produced controversial self-help guides such as “How to Start Your Own Country,” “Homemade Guns and Homemade Arms,” and “How to Clear Your Adult and Juvenile Criminal Records.”
37. Van Abbemuseum promotional literature, available online at: www.vanabbemuseum.nl.
38. Created by Fuchs after he had returned from directing Documenta 7 (1982), “Zomeropstelling van de eigen collectie” (Summer Display of the Museum’s Collection) continued his hallmark celebration of the autonomy of the work of art, the neutrality of the exhibition space and the visual experience of the viewer.
39. See: video documentation of the project by Khaled Hourani and Rashid Masharawi was shown at Documenta 13, 2012.
40. Different viewing behaviors were also encouraged via a map of the museum as a fantasy geography (for the tourist) or an empty note-book to be written in and passed on from one viewer to the next (the flâneur). Throughout “Play van Abbe,” institutional transpar-ency was foregrounded: diagrams outlining the number of male, female, and non-Western artists in the collection (among other statistics) were placed on the gallery walls, while Charles Esche made video responses (still available on YouTube) to questions from the public about the displays.
41. See Jesús Carillo and Rosario Peiró, “Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945–1968),” p. 15, downloadable pdf.
42. As Borja-Villel writes, “What would happen if we substituted Descartes’ ego cogito with Hernan Cortes’ ego conquiro, or Kant’s principle of pure reason with what Marx called the principle of primi-tive accumulation?” Manuel Borja-Villel, “Museos del Sur,” in: El País, 12/20/2008, cited in English by Ricardo Arcos-Palma in “The Potosí Principle: How Can we Sing the Song of Our Lord in a Foreign Land?”, in: Art Nexus, issue 80 March–May 2011, available online at: certificacion.artnexus.net. The exhibition went on tour to Berlin and then to La Paz, Bolivia.
43. Two years later, the exhibition Atlas: How to carry the world on one’s back? (2011) revisited the montage method of Aby Warburg in order to provide a counter-reading of twentieth-century art. As its curator Georges Didi-Huberman writes: “The ‘Atlas’ exhibition was not conceived to bring together beautiful artifacts, but rather to understand how certain artists work—beyond the question of any masterpieces—and how this work can be considered from the perspective of an authentic method, and, even, a non-standard transverse knowledge of our world.” Available online at: www.museoreinasofia.es.
44. The diagrams are based loosely upon Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII from 1969–1970, L’envers de psychanalyse, in which the permutations of a four-term configuration are used to elaborate “Four Discourses” (of the Master, the University, the Hysteric, and the Analyst). Rather than relying upon fixed terms (subject, object, history, etc.), the diagrams are dynamic models that explain the relationship between each discourse and its agents.
45. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is a form of neutralization: “an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other.” Žižek, “Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face,” in: The Guardian, 10/3/2010. See also: Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in: New Left Review, September–October 1997.
46. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991. In this much-cited book, Rancière describes how the idiosyncratic French schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot used a bilingual book to teach a group of students who spoke only Flemish. See: Ángela Molina, “Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel/Debe-mos desarrollar en el museo una pedagogía de la emancipación,” in: El País, 11/19/2005, available online at: elpais.com.
47. See: “Declaración Instituyente Red Conceptualismos del Sur,” available online at: conceptual.inexistente.net.
48. Boris Groys argues that documentation is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary art today: it is not the presentation of art (because that happens elsewhere), but merely a reference to art. Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documenta-tion,” in: Groys, Art Power, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2008, pp. 52–65.
49. This policy is a continuation of Borja-Villel’s efforts at MACBA, which resulted in the Centre d’Estudis i Documentació (established 2007). The Centre was set up “out of the conviction that since the beginning of the last century, and especially from the fifties onwards, artistic production cannot be understood simply through the artwork in itself, and that the document is an element of the language that makes up complex cultural productions such as art. The Archive also aspires to contribute to counterbalancing the lack of attention that documentary holdings have been given in this specific context.” Available online at: www.macba.cat.
50. This type of recategorization has precedents. John Carman has demonstrated the shifting status of archaeological heritage in the UK, from a Liberal concern with public welfare and education in the nineteenth century, to a discourse of ‘good nations and a stable international order’ in the mid-twentieth century, through to the current managerial discourse of heritage as a ‘resource’ (value for money and effective use). See: Carman, “Good citizens and sound economics: The trajectory of archaeology in Britain from ‘heritage’ to ‘resource’,” in: Clay Mathers, et al. (eds.), Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown: Reshaping Archaeological Assessment and Significance, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2005, pp. 43–57.
51. See: www.museoreinasofia.es. The 150-hour program offers a striking contrast to the profit-making educational courses offered by MoMA (where five two-hour classes cost $300) and Tate Modern (where five ninety-minute seminars cost £120).
52. It is telling that the present government of Slovenia prefers the former display option, while the museum prefers the latter.
53. See: www.cultureshutdown.net. On 4 October 2012, after 124 years of existence, Bosnia’s National Museum (Zemaljski Muzej) closed down due to the government’s failure to secure adequate funding.
54. This list is not complete: other sections include “Time Without a Future” (subcultures of the 1980s) and “Quantitative Time” (individual systems founded on autonomous forms of logic).
55. Although Badinovac definitively equates contemporaneity with periodization (“war in the Balkans marked the beginning of our contemporaneity”), the collection displays contain works that go back to the 1950s. Zdenka Badinovac, “The Present and Presence,” in: The Present and Presence—Repetition 1, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2012, p. 106.
56. Ibid., p. 103.
57. Zdenka Badinovac, “New Forms of Cultural Production,” 10/1/2012, available online at: www.arteeast.org.
58. The museum has been criticized for not pairing this with the art of the White Guard, the movement that collaborated with the occupying forces during World War II.
59. See: www.mg-lj.si and radical.temp.si.
60. Adela Z´eleznik, “On Education in MG+MSUM,” unpublished document, p. 1. Z´eleznik is senior curator for education at the MSUM and Moderna Galerija.
61. The other institutions are the Július Koller Society (Bratislava), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (MuKHA, Antwerp), and the Van Abbemuseum. In 2012, the Reina Sofía and SALT (Istanbul) joined the network. See: internacionala.mg-lj.si. In 2013, L’Internationale received a five-year grant of 2.5 million euros to support the program The Uses of Art—The Legacy of 1848 and 1989, coordinated by Esche at the Van Abbemuseum.
62. One might argue that biennials already do this, and none more so than the most recent Documenta 13 (2012), with its abundance of works memorializing history and archives (e.g., Michael Rakowitz’s installation in which library books damaged by Allied bombing in 1941 are recreated in stone by carvers in Kabul, and placed along-side vitrines of texts and objects comparing the Taliban’s cultural destruction to that suffered by Kassel in World War II; or Kader Attia’s installation with books, vitrines, and a slide show, compar-ing the ‘repair’ of African objects to the ‘reconstruction’ of soldier’s faces, through plastic surgery, after World War I). Yet I would draw a distinction between Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s project and the one I am outlining here, primarily because the huge range of artistic positions represented in her exhibition (from social practice to per-formance to painting to the ‘archival impulse’) did not, as a totality, produce an identifiable position so much as yet another example of indecisive relativism, while its pervasively retrospective mood communicated—as per Roelstraete’s article, cited above—only a resigned inability to face the future.
63. John Carman has begun to map out a related project in archaeological heritage with the idea of “cognitive ownership.” See: Carman, Against Cultural Property: Archaeology, Heritage and Ownership, Duck-worth, London, 2005.
64. “The Copernican Revolution in historical perception is this: before one held the past for the fixed point and saw the present as an effort to advance knowledge gropingly toward this point. Now this rela-tionship is to be reversed and the past becomes the dialectical turn-about that inspires an awakened consciousness.” Walter Benjamin, cited in: Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 1989, p. 338.
65. As Charles Esche writes, “Art contributes to a democratic culture by stimulating skills, like open-mindedness and the possibility to see and imagine things differently that are of vital importance for a constructive political process where differences have to be constantly negotiated and there are always alternatives.” Esche, interviewed by Dominiek Ruyters, “A Cosmology of Museums,” in: Metropolis M, 4/17/2013, available online at: metropolism.com.
66. For a discussion of museums and the ninety-nine percent, see: www.occupymuseums.org. At its worst, museum value is no longer determined by a politically conscious art history, but by an art market bloated by the disposable income of hedge-fund managers and Russian oligarchs; hence the preponderance of oversized, glittering works by male artists. Alternative institutions under socially conscious directors in the Americas have also managed to produce singular new models, such as the education program of Queens Museum of Art, New York, or the integrated art and education program of the new Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro.
67. This is exacerbated by the tendency for the position of museum director to be split into two positions, the artistic and the financial, with the latter holding sway. For an impassioned plea for reconceptualizing the value of the humanities, see: Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For?, Penguin, London, 2012.
68. Use value includes the perception of culture and the humanities in terms of the ‘cultural industries’, ‘education’, ‘recreation and tourism’, ‘symbolic representation’, ‘legitimation of action’, ‘social solidarity and integration’, and ‘monetary and economic gain’. See: Carman, Against Cultural Property, op. cit., p. 53.
CLAIRE BISHOP is an art historian and critic based in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate/Routledge, 2005) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012). She is the editor of Participation (MIT/Whitechapel, 2006) and 1968/1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (Warsaw, Museum of Modern Art, 2010), and co-curated the exhibition Double Agent at the London ICA in 2008. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and an occasional contributor to October (MIT Press).
DAN PERJOVSCHI is an artist who mixes drawing, cartoons and graffiti, and who has played an active role in the development of civil society in Romania through his editorial work for Revista 22 magazine. His drawings are frequently a political commentary on current affairs and cultural events. He represented Romania at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has shown in biennials and museums worldwide, notably the Istanbul Bienali (2005), Tate Modern (2006), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007) and the Paris Triennial (2012). He has published his drawings in the form of free newspapers and small books, including Mad Cow, Bird Flu, Global Village (2007), Postmodern Ex-Communist (2007) and Recession (2010). He lives and works in Bucharest.
This little book was sparked by a number of intertwined events. The first was my relocation to the US in 2008 and encountering the conservatism of its museum institutions. The second was teaching a seminar at CUNY Graduate Center on “The Contemporary Museum” during Autumn 2010, in preparation for the conference The Now Museum: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models, which I co-organized with Independent Curators International and the New Museum and was held in New York in March 2011. The students in the seminar were inspirational and energizing interlocutors, as were many of the speakers in the conference. The third event was the program of austerity that accompanied Europe’s lurch to the right in 2010 by way of response to the crash of 2008. Cuts to public funding in the arts, particularly in the Netherlands, led to a wave of protests among arts professionals, but little sympathy from other public sectors also facing devastating cutbacks.
Theoretically, I am indebted to the work of Susan Buck-Morss,whose lectures at CUNY Graduate Center on the “Universal History of Art” in 2011 were formative for my thinking. Thanks are also due to members of the Committee for Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center, to my fellow Fellows at the Clark Art Institute (Spring 2013), and to Sven Lütticken and Stephen Melville, all of whom gave advice on early drafts. This text benefited, like so much of my writing, from the generous editorial feedback of Nikki Columbus, and I dedicate this book to her.
COLOPHON
© 2013 Claire Bishop, Dan Perjovschi and Koenig Books, London
Photographic credits: © Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands for p. 28–35; © Museo Nactional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid for p. 36–46; © Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana for p. 47–53.
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