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Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement
Museums After Modernism is a unique collectionthat showcases the ways questions about the museum go to the heart of contemporary debates about the production, consumption and distribution of art. The book features expert artists, curators and art historians who grapple with many of the vibrant issues in museum studies, while paying homage to a new museology that needs to be considered.
274 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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About the author
Griselda Pollock
102 books76 followersGriselda Pollock is a visual theorist, cultural analyst and scholar of international, postcolonial feminist studies in the visual arts. Based in England, she is well known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. She is professor of social and critical histories of art at the University of Leeds.
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August 20, 2023
Preface
• Museum studies: an intervention in that space between art history and cultural studies
• While much of Museum Studies in recent years has been propelled by Foucauldian analyses of the institution as discursive formation, of the museum as site of narratives and ideologies, and of debates about museums and their publics, few collections address the core idea of the museum as a place for discursive thinking.
• It is not a question of ‘‘the museum and its public,’’ but in what sense the museum can be(come) a public place, publicly responsible for stimulating and housing critical thinking in and through art.
• Can we recast the museum as critical site of public debate distinct from the museum as privileged manager or professionalized administrator of cultural heritage, authorizing selective stories and formalized pasts?
• How can we prevent art from being lost in the system of curation, as inert matter, the material support of museal discourses and institutional practices?
Ch 1. Un-Framing the Modern: Critical Space/Public Possibility by Pollock
• In Frames within Frames: The Art Museum as Cultural Artifact, Suzanne Oberhardt argues that, from the inside, the museum effaces itself to become an invisible frame for the art or artifacts it appears merely to house, conserve, and exhibit
• berhardt proposes an open, other, critical space through which we can critically engage with the histories and possibilities of that distinctive product of modernity: the museum.
• Creating a four-framed model on an axis running diagonally from profane to sacred, Oberhardt identifies the first, close-in Frame 1 as the adoring art-historical model, in which the museum positions art both on the side of the sacred, set apart from ordinary life, and as a source of moral authority. Its direct counter-frame is New Museology, a political critique of the museum as institution and ideology, situated in the colonial and imperial histories of modernity’s constructions of nations, races, and genders. The third frame ‘‘scrutinizes the discourses of the art museum not through texts displayed by the art museum but rather through how the museum itself is represented and talked about in contemporary society.’’
o Here the academic voice and its self- or counter- representations fade into a larger picture in which neither is central. Beyond lies yet another space in which no frame has dominance.
o It is this knowing the art museum differently that goes beyond the opposing forces of Frames 1 (adoring art-historical) and 2 (new museological).
o OKAY SO
1. Adoring art-historical
2. New Museological
3. Museum in pop culture
4. No frame/all frame
• Thus the museum ‘‘after’’ what we might call the moments of solid modernism is a museum in the world of liquid modernity.
• Whereas the museum of solid modernity from the Louvre to the National Galleries of many Western nations called on the examples of the Classical Temple or Renaissance Palace to create the semantics of unbroken cultural authority, the museums built in postmod- ern (Charles Jencks’s term) mode are generating their own rhetoric of otherness.
• In this first reading of a museum hang as text, Duncan and Wallach argued that the recapitulation of ancient rituals and iconographies serviced a contemporary capitalist ideology, shaping the art-viewing subject for the modernist, competitive, and individualistic society
• the dissemination of our generic knowledge of things as ‘‘art’’ is structurally dependent on technologically expanded modern musealization itself. This effect, however, is not bound to architecture and place.
• Thus expanded, Art makes that place – the museum – which still offers specific, if over-visualized, encounters, itself merely the already known guardian of the original of the image. The original must in many ways always disappoint because of the heightened expectation raised by repro- duction of its exclusive visuality through a technology that intensifies luminosity and gloss in comparison to the solid, aging materiality of crafted things and painted surfaces. This paradox is what offers particular possibilities for current interventions via museum programming in the museum as site of a concrete embodied, social, and intellectually directed encounter, either through the exhibition or a different access to the collection itself.
• Talking of museums as warehouses of cultural debris, the once revolutionary minister of culture in France Quatreme`re de Quincy (1816–39) expressed what became a standard regret at its very foundations at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The museum was seen to wrench works from their vital sources in social and religious life to assemble only the material husk: ‘‘It is doubtful that you transferred the network of ideas and relations that made the works alive with interest. Their essential merit depended on the beliefs that created them, on the ideas to which they were tied, to the circumstances that explained the community of thoughts that gave them their unity.’
• But some invert the nostalgic complaint that museums petrify and fossilize
o The museum mediates between the necessary conditions of art’s making and its rebirth in consciousness and reflection.
o Historical consciousness is precisely the product of a lapse of time, of a gap. It shares in a psychoanalytical sense of desire with its constituting verso of loss or absence.
• The museum retrospectively flushes all art of the post-medieval era with the mourning colors of its post-religious exile, which is then disavowed by the substitu- tion of the artist-genius and the cult of art distilled as style. Here lies not only the aestheticization of art but also its sacralization. Malraux writes: ‘‘What genius is not fascinated by the extremity of painting, by the appeal before which time itself vacillates? It is the moment of possession of the world. Let painting go no further, and Hans the Elder has become God.’’
• Museum studies: an intervention in that space between art history and cultural studies
• While much of Museum Studies in recent years has been propelled by Foucauldian analyses of the institution as discursive formation, of the museum as site of narratives and ideologies, and of debates about museums and their publics, few collections address the core idea of the museum as a place for discursive thinking.
• It is not a question of ‘‘the museum and its public,’’ but in what sense the museum can be(come) a public place, publicly responsible for stimulating and housing critical thinking in and through art.
• Can we recast the museum as critical site of public debate distinct from the museum as privileged manager or professionalized administrator of cultural heritage, authorizing selective stories and formalized pasts?
• How can we prevent art from being lost in the system of curation, as inert matter, the material support of museal discourses and institutional practices?
Ch 1. Un-Framing the Modern: Critical Space/Public Possibility by Pollock
• In Frames within Frames: The Art Museum as Cultural Artifact, Suzanne Oberhardt argues that, from the inside, the museum effaces itself to become an invisible frame for the art or artifacts it appears merely to house, conserve, and exhibit
• berhardt proposes an open, other, critical space through which we can critically engage with the histories and possibilities of that distinctive product of modernity: the museum.
• Creating a four-framed model on an axis running diagonally from profane to sacred, Oberhardt identifies the first, close-in Frame 1 as the adoring art-historical model, in which the museum positions art both on the side of the sacred, set apart from ordinary life, and as a source of moral authority. Its direct counter-frame is New Museology, a political critique of the museum as institution and ideology, situated in the colonial and imperial histories of modernity’s constructions of nations, races, and genders. The third frame ‘‘scrutinizes the discourses of the art museum not through texts displayed by the art museum but rather through how the museum itself is represented and talked about in contemporary society.’’
o Here the academic voice and its self- or counter- representations fade into a larger picture in which neither is central. Beyond lies yet another space in which no frame has dominance.
o It is this knowing the art museum differently that goes beyond the opposing forces of Frames 1 (adoring art-historical) and 2 (new museological).
o OKAY SO
1. Adoring art-historical
2. New Museological
3. Museum in pop culture
4. No frame/all frame
• Thus the museum ‘‘after’’ what we might call the moments of solid modernism is a museum in the world of liquid modernity.
• Whereas the museum of solid modernity from the Louvre to the National Galleries of many Western nations called on the examples of the Classical Temple or Renaissance Palace to create the semantics of unbroken cultural authority, the museums built in postmod- ern (Charles Jencks’s term) mode are generating their own rhetoric of otherness.
• In this first reading of a museum hang as text, Duncan and Wallach argued that the recapitulation of ancient rituals and iconographies serviced a contemporary capitalist ideology, shaping the art-viewing subject for the modernist, competitive, and individualistic society
• the dissemination of our generic knowledge of things as ‘‘art’’ is structurally dependent on technologically expanded modern musealization itself. This effect, however, is not bound to architecture and place.
• Thus expanded, Art makes that place – the museum – which still offers specific, if over-visualized, encounters, itself merely the already known guardian of the original of the image. The original must in many ways always disappoint because of the heightened expectation raised by repro- duction of its exclusive visuality through a technology that intensifies luminosity and gloss in comparison to the solid, aging materiality of crafted things and painted surfaces. This paradox is what offers particular possibilities for current interventions via museum programming in the museum as site of a concrete embodied, social, and intellectually directed encounter, either through the exhibition or a different access to the collection itself.
• Talking of museums as warehouses of cultural debris, the once revolutionary minister of culture in France Quatreme`re de Quincy (1816–39) expressed what became a standard regret at its very foundations at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The museum was seen to wrench works from their vital sources in social and religious life to assemble only the material husk: ‘‘It is doubtful that you transferred the network of ideas and relations that made the works alive with interest. Their essential merit depended on the beliefs that created them, on the ideas to which they were tied, to the circumstances that explained the community of thoughts that gave them their unity.’
• But some invert the nostalgic complaint that museums petrify and fossilize
o The museum mediates between the necessary conditions of art’s making and its rebirth in consciousness and reflection.
o Historical consciousness is precisely the product of a lapse of time, of a gap. It shares in a psychoanalytical sense of desire with its constituting verso of loss or absence.
• The museum retrospectively flushes all art of the post-medieval era with the mourning colors of its post-religious exile, which is then disavowed by the substitu- tion of the artist-genius and the cult of art distilled as style. Here lies not only the aestheticization of art but also its sacralization. Malraux writes: ‘‘What genius is not fascinated by the extremity of painting, by the appeal before which time itself vacillates? It is the moment of possession of the world. Let painting go no further, and Hans the Elder has become God.’’
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