Bishop Claire Radical Museology

7/24/2019 Bishop Claire Radical Museology

1/42

2

Radical Museology, or, Whats Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art?

The future of the public museum, able to represent the interes ts of theninety-nine percent rather than to consolidate private privilege, has neverseemed bleaker. Or has it?

In the face of austerity cuts to public funding, a handful of museumsof contemporary art have devised compelling alternatives to the mantraof bigger is better and richer. Radical Museologypresents the collectiondisplays of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacionalde Reina Sofa in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana as outlinesof a new understanding of the contemporary in contemporary art.

Radical Museologyis a vivid manifesto for the contemporary as a methodrather than a periodization, and for the importance of a politicizedrepresentation of history in museums of contemporary art.

Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at

CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Dan Perjovschi is an artist basedin Bucharest.

Koenig Books, London

CLAIRE BISHOP

With drawings by Dan Perjovschi

or, Whats Contemporaryin Museums of Contemporary Art?


2/42


3/42

CLAIRE BISHOPWith drawings by Dan Perjovschi

Koenig Books

or, Whats Contemporaryin Museums of Contemporary Art?


4/42

5

I.GOING INSIDE

Its remarkable to think that the last polemical text to be writtenon museums of contemporary art by an art historian was RosalindKrausss The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museumback in . Her essay is indebted to Fredric Jamesons critiqueof late capitalist culture not just in its title but also in its relentlesspessimism. Drawing from her experience of two contemporary art

museumsthe Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris and theprojected site of Mass MoCA in North Adams, MassachusettsKrauss argued that a profound encounter with the work of art hadbecome subordinated to a new register of experience: the unanchoredhyperreality of its architectural container, which produced effects ofdisembodiment that, in her view, correlated to the dematerializedflows of global capital. Rather than a highly individualized artisticepiphany, viewers to these galleries encountered a euphoria of spacefirst, and art second.Krausss essay was prescient in many ways:the decade to come saw an unprecedented proliferation of newmuseums dedicated to contemporary art, and increased scale and

a proximity to big business have been two central characteristics ofthe move from the nineteenth-century model of the museum as apatrician institution of elite culture to its current incarnation as apopulist temple of leisure and entertainment.


5/42

6

Today, however, a more radical model of the museum is takingshape: more experimental, less architecturally determined, andoffering a more politicized engagement with our historical moment.Three museums in Europethe Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven,the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa in Madrid, andMuzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova (MSUM) in Ljubljanaare

doing more than any individual work of art to shift our perceptionof art institutions and their potential. All three present compellingalternatives to the dominant mantra of bigger is better, and better isricher. Rather than following the blue-chip mainstream, these muse-ums draw upon the widest range of artifacts to situate arts rela-tionship to particular histories with universal relevance. They donot speak in the name of the one percent, but attempt to representthe interests and histories of those constituencies that are (or havebeen) marginalized, sidelined and oppressed. This doesnt meanthat they subordinate art to history in general, but that they mobilizethe 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 inthe task of rethinking the category of the contemporary. Through-out this essay, I will be set ting two models of contemporaneityagainst each other. The first concerns presentism: the condition oftaking our current moment as the horizon and destination of ourthinking. This is the dominant usage of the term contemporaryin art today; it is underpinned by an inability to grasp our momentin its global entirety, and an acceptance of this incomprehension asa constitutive condition of the present historical era. The second

model, which I want to develop here, takes its lead from the prac-tice of these three museums: here the contemporary is understoodas a dialectical method and a politicized project with a moreradical understanding of temporality. Time and value turn out to becrucial categories at stake in formulating a notion of what I will call


6/42

9

a dialectical contemporaneity, because it does not designate a styleor period of the works themselves so much as an approach to them.One of the consequences of approaching institutions through thiscategory is a rethinking of the museum, the category of art that itenshrines, and the modalities of spectatorship it produces.

II.MUSEUMS OF

CONTEMPORARY ART

Although the last twenty years have seen a huge diversification of

museums as a category, a dominant logic of privatization unitesmost of their iterations worldwide. In Europe, there has been anincreasing dependence on donations and corporate sponsorship asgovernments gradually withdraw public funding from culture in thename of austerity. In the US, the situation has always been thus,but is now accelerating without any pretense to a separation of pub-lic and private interests: an art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, was appointedhead of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in

January . Two months later, the New Museum controversiallyinstalled the collection of its multimillionaire trustee Dakis Joannouand employed the artist Jeff Koonsalready in Joannous collec-

tionto guest curate the exhibition. Meanwhile, it is well knownthat the Museum of Modern Art in New York regularly rehangsits permanent collection on the basis of its trustees latest acquisi-tions. Indeed, it can sometimes seem as if contemporary museumshave ceded historical research to commercial galleries: Gagosian,


7/42

10 11

for example, has mounted a series of blockbuster shows of modernmasters (Manzoni, Picasso, Fontana) as carefully curated by famousart historians as those in a traditional museum.

In Latin America, although publicly funded institutions of contem-porary art have existed since the sfor example in So Paulo

and Lima, where two museums form part of university campuses(MAC-USP and LiMAC)the highest -profile contemporary ar tspaces are all private: Jumex in Mexico City (established in ),MALBA in Buenos Aires (), Inhotim near Belo Horizonte,Brazil (). In Asia, the biggest collection-based contemporaryart museums have been established under the aegis of wealthy indi-viduals (such as the Mori Ar t Museum, Tokyo, , or the DragonMuseum in Shanghai, ) or corporations (such as the SamsungMuseum of Art, Seoul, ). It is only recently that the Chinesegovernment has opened its first state-run contemporary art museum,the Power Station of Art, based in a former Shanghai industrial

plant (October ), to be followed by the M+ museum in HongKong, slated to be the worlds largest contemporary art museum,which will open in . However, many Asian museums could

just as well be described as kunsthalles that show temporary exhibi-tions, as their commitment to a collection policy is negligible: thinkof the Beijing Today Art Museum (), Shanghais MinshengArt Museum () and Rockbund Museum of Art (), or theGuangdong Times Musem, Guangzhou ().

As critics have observed, the visual expression of this privatiza-tion has been the triumph of starchitecture: the museums external

wrapper has become more important than its contents, just as Kraussforesaw in , leaving art with the option of looking ever more lostinside gigantic post-industrial hangars, or supersizing to competewith its envelope. Although museums have always endorsed signa-ture architecture, the extreme iconicity of new museum buildings is


8/42

12

comparatively recent: I. M. Peis Pyramids for the Louvre in are an early benchmark, while the most recent avatars in Europe arethe Pompidou Metz by Shigeru Ban and Zaha Hadids MAXXI,Rome, both of which opened in . The future shadow of AbuDhabi adds further, intercultural tension to this list: a franchisedLouvre and a Guggenheim will form part of a slew of eye-popping

over-scaled buildings destined to house art and performance. Look-ing at this global panorama of contemporary art museums, whatbinds them all together is less a concern for a collection, a history,a position, or a mission than a sense that contemporaneity is beingstaged on the level of image: the new, the cool, the photogenic, thewell-designed, the economically successful.

When did contemporary art become so desirable a category? Backin , an artists manifesto, designed by Ad Reinhardt, queriedMoMAs ability to show the present rather than merely exhibitthe past, asking How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?

Artists picketed the museum and demanded more exhibitions ofcontemporary US art, rather than endless shows of early twentieth-century European painters and sculptors. It is telling that forMoMAs director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., modern denoted aestheticquality (the progressive, original, and challenging) compared tothe safe, academic, and supine neutrality of the contemporary,which simply meant work by living arti sts. In the post-war period,institutions tended to favor the term contemporary art as a substi-tute for modern: the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Londonwas founded in , opting to show temporary exhibitions ratherthan building up a permanent collection, as did many similarly

titled venues. In these examples, once again, the contemporaryrefers less to style or period than to an assertion of the present. Bycontrast, the Institute of Modern Art in Boston was renamed theInstitute of Contemporary Arts in as a way to distance itselffrom MoMAs vanguard internationalism; it turned to the more


9/42

15

capacious category of the contemporary to legitimate a regionalist,commercial, and conservative agenda.

The New Museum in New York is an important transitional casein the story of museums becoming presentist. Established in asan alternative to MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American

Art, the New Museum initially built up a semi-permanent collec-tion under the aegis of its first director, Marcia Tucker. Begun in, the collection was devoted to the kind of work that then hadno place in the traditional museum: dematerialized, conceptual,performance, and process-based art. These works representedmarginalized subject positions and staked out a position againstReagan-era politics. The museums idea was to destabilize the ideaof collecting by keeping its sights on the present: work would beselected from shows in the building, as a form of documentation, butafter a decade these works would be deaccessioned to create room formore recent pieces. This model of collecting was not new: it was

more or le ss the same as that implemented in , when the Muse deLuxembourg in Paris became the Muse des artistes vivantesaname chosen to position the institution in direct contrast to the Louvre,which was reserved for artists who were historical (i.e., dead). Thismodel was also followed by Barr at MoMA as of : works wouldeither be deaccessioned after fifty years, or passed on to the Metro-politan Museum of Ar t for posteritya practice that continued until. What makes the New Museums semi-permanent collectiondistinctive is that it formed a bridge between alternative art practicesof the s (informed by institutional critique and systems art) andthe market logic of the s (exemplified by the continual turnover

of Charles Saatchis collection). On the one hand, the semi-permanent collection functioned as an anti-collection, allowingworks to flow in and out, refusing a correct or authoritative storyof contemporary art. On the other hand, this perpetual motionrendered the museum compliant with notions of obsolescence and


10/42

16

the march of fashion.Tucker late r recognized that the collectionssemi-permanence refused access to the past in favor of the present,rather than setting the two in dialog. Today, there is no mention ofthe New Museums collection of circa works on the institutionswebsite, which states that it is a non-collecting institution.Theemphasis is instead on high-profile solo shows by living (or recently

deceased) artists, group exhibitions, and a triennial, and there is ver ylittle to differentiate its activities from those of the Guggenheim,Whitney, MoMA, or even the Metropolitan, all of which nowshow contemporary art. The only discernible difference is branding:the New Museums demographic is younger and hipper.

III.

THEORIZING THECONTEMPORARY

In tandem with this proliferation of contemporary art museums, thestudy of contemporary art has become the fastest-growing subjectarea in the academy since the turn of the millennium. Here, thedefinition of contemporary has become a moving target par excel-lence: until the late s, it seemed synonymous with post-war,denoting art after ; about ten years ago, it was relocated to start

somewhere in the s; now the s and s generally tend tobe viewed as high modernist, and the argument has been put for-ward that we should consider as the beginning of a new era,synonymous with the fall of communism and the emergence of globalmarkets.While each of these periodizations has its pros and cons,


11/42

18 19

Other theorists have claimed the contemporary as a question oftemporal disjunction. Giorgio Agamben, for example, posits it asa state of being founded on temporal rupture: contemporariness,he writes, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunc-tion and an anachronism, and it is only by this untimeliness or dys-chrony that one can truly gaze at ones own era. He evocatively

describes contemporariness as being able to fix your gaze on thedarkness of the epoch and being on time for an appointment thatone cannot but miss.Anachronism also permeates the reading ofTerry Smith, one of the few art historians to tackle this question. Hehas persuasively argued that the contemporary should be set equallyagainst the discourses of mode rnism and postmodernism, because itis characterized by antinomies and asynchronies: the simultaneousand incompatible co-existence of different modernities and ongoingsocial inequities, differences that persist despite the global spread oftelecommunications systems and the purported universality of mar-ket logic.

These discursive approaches seem to fall into one of two camps:either contemporaneity denotes stasis (i.e., it is a continuation ofpostmodernisms post-historical deadlock) or it reflects a break withpostmodernism by asserting a plural and disjunctive relationshipto temporality. The latter is of course more generative, as it allowsus to move away from both the historicity of modernism, charac-terized by an abandonment of tradition and a forward propulsiontowards the new, and the historicity of postmodernism, equatedwith a schizophrenic collapse of past and future into an expandedpresent. Certainly, an assertion of multiple, overlapping tempo-

ralities can be seen in many works of ar t since the mid-s byartists from countries struggling to deal with a context of recentwar and political upheaval, especially in Eastern Europe and theMiddle East.Art his torian Christine Ross has argued that contem-porary artists look backwards in order to presentify the modernist

the central drawback is that they operate from a Western purview. InChina, contemporary art tends to be dated from the late s (theofficial end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of thedemocracy movement); in India, from the s onwards; in LatinAmerica, there is no real division of the modern and the contem-porary, because this would mean conforming to hegemonic Western

categoriesindeed, a prevalent discussion there still revolves aroundwhether or not modernity has actually been realized. In Africa,contemporary art dates variously from the end of colonialism (thelate s/s in Anglophone and Francophone countries; thes in the case of former Portuguese colonies), or as late as thes (the end of apartheid in South Africa, the first African bien-nials, and the start of NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art).

It almost goes without saying, then, that the attempt to periodizecontemporary art is dysfunctional, unable to accommodate globaldiversity. Most recent theorists have therefore positioned it as a

discursivecategory. For philosopher Peter Osborne, the contempo-rary is an operative fiction: it is fundamentally a productive actof the imagination, because we attribute a sense of unity to thepresent, one that encompasses disjunctive global temporalities wecan never grasp; as such it is a time of stasis. For Boris Groys,modernism was characterized by a desire to surpass the presentin the name of realizing a glorious future (be this avant-gardeutopianism or the Stalinist five-year plan); contemporaneity, bycontrast, is marked by a prolonged, potentially infinite period ofdelay, prompted by the fall of communism.For both Osborneand Groys, a future-oriented modernism has been replaced by a

static, boring present (we are stuck in the present as it repro-duces itself without leading to any future). Groys points to thesecular ritual of repetition that is the video loop as contemporaryarts instantiation of this new relationship to temporality, whichcreates, he argues, a non-historical excess of time through art.


12/42

20

regime of historicity and thereby to critique its futurity; artists areless interested in Walter Benjamins approach to history as radicaldiscontinuity, she writes, than in potential[izing] remains as formsof resistance to and redeployment of modern life.However, othercritics have questioned whether these artistic efforts are ultimatelymore nostalgic and retrospective than prospective: Dieter Roelstraete

has lambasted contemporary arts turn towards history-telling andhistoricizing for its inability to grasp or even look at the present,much less to excavate the future.

A less contested approach to disjunctive temporalities can be foundin the revival of inte rest in anachronism among art historians.Its central advocate, Georges Didi-Huberman, has argued thatanachronism is so pervasive an operation in art throughout historythat we should see its presence in all works: in each historicalobject, all times encounter one another, collide, or base themselvesplastically on one another, bifurcate, or even become entangled with

each other.Building on the work of Aby Warburg (),Didi-Huberman puts forth the idea that works of ar t are temporalknots, a mixture of past and present; they reveal what persists orsurvives (Nachleben) from earlier periods, in the form of a symptomin the current era. To gain access to these stratified temporalities,he writes, requires a shock, a tearing of the veil, an irruption orappearance of time, what Proust and Benjamin have described soeloquently under the category of involuntary memory.Takingtheir lead from Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel and ChristopherWood demonstrate in Anachronic Renaissance() the co-existenceof two temporalities in works of art circa , as culture shifted

from religious Medieval to secular Renaissance. Arguing againstthe historicist idea that each object or event belongs in a specifictime and place (the idea upon which anachronism is founded), theyinstead propose the term anachronic to describe the way in whichworks of art perform a recursive temporality.


13/42

23

Nagel and Woods investigation, while compelling, is mono-directional: by their own admission, they reverse engineer from thework of art backwards (into its own past, its own chronotopology),rather than beginning with a diagnosis of the present that necessi-tates research into the early Renaissance as a means to mobilize adifferent understanding of today.By contrast, what I call a dialec-

tical contemporary seeks to navigate multiple temporalities withina more political horizon. Rather than simply claim that many orall times are present in each historical object, we need to ask whycertain temporalities appear in particular works of ar t at specifichis-torical moments. Furthermore, this analysis is motivated by a desireto understand our present condition and how to change it.Lest thismethod be interpreted as yet another form of presentism, a preoccu-pation with the now masquerading as historical inquiry, it should bestressed that sightlines are always focused on the future: the ultimateaim is to disrupt the relativist pluralism of the current moment, inwhich all styles and beliefs are considered equally valid, and to move

towards a more sharply politicized understanding of where we canand should be heading. If, as Osborne claims, the global contempo-rary is a shared fiction, then this doesnt denote its impossibility, butrather provides the basis for a new political imaginary. The idea thatartists might help us glimpse the contours of a project for rethinkingour world is surely one of the reasons why contemporary art, despiteits near total imbrication in the market, continues to rouse suchpassionate interest and concern.

Where do museums fit into this? My argument is that museums witha historical collection have become the most fruitful testing ground

for a non-presentist, multi-temporal contemporaneity. This is indirect contrast to the commonplace assumption that the privilegedsite of contemporary art is the globalized biennial; the operationallogic of the latter remains locked within an affirmation of the zeit-geist, and any navigation of the past tends to serve only as a foil for


14/42

24

younger artists. Of course, for many curators, the historical weightof a permanent collection is an albatross that inhibits the noveltyso essential to drawing in new audiences, since the incessant turn-over of temporary exhibitions is deemed more exciting (and prof-itable) than finding yet another way to show the canon. Yet today,when so many museums are being forced to turn back to their collec-

tions because funds for loan-based temporary exhibitions have beenslashed due to austerity measures, the permanent collection can be amuseums greatest weapon in breaking the stasis of presentism. Thisis because it requires us to think in several tenses simultaneously: thepast perfect and the future anterior. It is a time capsule of what wasonce considered culturally significant at previous historical periods,while more recent acquisitions anticipate the judgment of history tocome (in the future, this will have beendeemed important). Without apermanent collection, it i s hard for a museum to stake any meaning-ful claim to an engagement with the pastbut also, I would wager,with the future.

Of course, most museums have only experimented with their hold-ings to the extent of devising thematic hangs, in the belief that anabandonment of chronology is the best way to refresh permanentcollections and make them more exciting and contemporary (in thepresentist sense). This experiment began at MoMA with Modern-Starts (), where it was rapidly jettisoned in favor of a re turnto canonical chronology, but the approach continues today at TateModern and Centre Pompidou.But while thematic hangs havepermitted a greater diversity of displays, they also give rise to thehermeneutical question of historical anchoring: if the past and

the present are collapsed into transhistorical and transgeographi-cal clusters, how can the differences between places and periods beunderstood? Perhaps more impor tantly, do they prevent the museumfrom expressing its commitment to, or preference for, one histori-cal reading over another? It is not hard to argue that the relativism


15/42

27

of thematic collection hangs post- is in perfect synchronicitywith museum marketing: a gallery to please every demographic,without having to align the institution with any particular narrativeor position. It is therefore striking that almost all of the literatureon museum collections since has assumed that Tate Modernsfour collection suites offer the good riposte to MoMAs bad exam-

ple.Few have criticized the Tate, and yet its approach to historyis just as apolitical as MoMAs devotion to chronology: its wingsrevolve around the collections strengths (Surrealism, Abstraction,Minimalism), connecting these movements both to recent work andhistorical precursors, but these rooms are presented as interchange-able modules, endlessly open to reshuffling.Meanwhile, the lack ofchronology in the exhibition display is anxiously overcompensatedfor by the presence of huge timelines decorating the foyer walls ofeach floor, which struggle to populate the Western narrative withnew global additions.

In the rest of this essay, I will turn to new collection display para-digms that have not only succeeded Tate Modern but which alsopresent a new category of contemporaneity: the Van Abbemuseum,the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofa, and MSUM Ljubljana. Eachof these institutions has hung its collection to suggest a provocativerethinking of contemporary art in terms of a specific relationship tohistory, driven by a sense of present-day social and political urgen-cies, and marked by particular national traumas: colonial guilt andthe Franco era (Madrid), Islamophobia and the failure of socialdemocracy (Eindhoven), the Balkan Wars and the end of social-ism (Ljubljana). Driven by clear political commitments, these insti-

tutions stand apart from the presentist model of the contemporaryart museum in which market interests influence what is displayed.These institutions elaborate a dialectical contemporaneity both as amuseological practice and an art-historical method.


16/42

28 29

IV.

TIME MACHINES:THE VAN ABBEMUSEUM

The Van Abbemuseum was founded in around the collectionof a local cigar manufacturer in Eindhoven, Henri van Abbe. Themuseum comprises two buildings: the original structure from (a symmetrical suite of modestly proportioned, top-lit galleries) anda postmodern extension, which opened in , with five storiesand an auditorium. Its current director, Charles Esche, joined the

museum in after running the Rooseum Centre for Contempo-rary Art (Malm), curating several biennials (including Gwangju,Istanbul, and Riwaq), and setting up two alternative institutionsin Edinburgh, the Modern Institute and the Proto-Academy. Sincehis arrival, the Van Abbemuseum has been relentlessly experimen-tal, exploiting the full resources of the institutionits collection,archive, library, and residenciesto present a catalog of possibleways to exhibit its holdings in single-gallery installations referred toas Plug Ins.The first phase of this research, Plug In to Play(), conceived the museum displays less as a historicalnarrative 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 museumused the collection asa temporary exhibition.This dynamic periodof experimentation lasted for three years, but while Plug In toPlay creatively exploded the range of ways in which the collection

The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo: Peter Cox


17/42

30 31

might be displayed, and in extraordinarily vivid ways, the drawbackwas that they produced only a fragmented menu of possible optionsfor displaying modern and contemporary art, rather than deployingthese strategies to produce a narrative.

The next phase was an eighteen-month, four-part program called

Play van Abbe (), in which the museum attemptedto think of itself as a series of interconnected displays, rather thanas a concatenation of individual installations. The first part, TheGame and the Players, emphasized institutional transparency andhistorical contingency: Who are these players within a museumand which stories do they tell? How does the current director presentthe collection? In what way does an art museum position itselfboth in the present and in the past?One display showed worksthat were acquired by Edy de Wilde when he was director between and (Plug In #), while a further display (Plug In#) showed the original kernel of the museum collection: twenty-

six paintings (none by major international figures) bought by Henrivan Abbe in the s and s. Repetition: Summer Displaysreinstalled a collection display curated by Rudi Fuchs whenhe was director, in order to ask how we perceive this conservativeperiod todaythereby drawing a sharp contrast between Fuchssand Esches approaches. These curatorial frames rendered thedisplayed works subject to a double temporality: as individual voicesspeaking in the present, but also as a collective chorus once consid-ered essential at a previous historical moment.

The second part of Play van Abbe, titled Time Machines,

grew out of the museums ambition to be a museum of muse-ums or a collection of collections, showing the history of ideo-logical display and exhibition archetypes and models. Again,repetition was a key strategy: the museum revived the project, setin motion by Jean Leering when he was director in the s, of

Installation view of Repetition: Summer Display 1983, part of Play van Abbe: The Game and thePlayers. Work by On Kawara, Jannis Kounellis and Marcel Broodthaer s. 28 November 7 March 2010.Photo: Peter Cox

Installation view of Plug In #18: Kijkdepot (Viewing Depot), part of Plug In to Play,16 December 2006 28 November 2009. Photo: Peter Cox


18/42

32 33

collecting reconstructions of historical environments. In themuseum had already commissioned a reconstruction of AleksandrRodchenkos Workers Reading Room (); in it fabricatedLszl Moholy-Nagys Raum der Gegenwart(), invited the artistWendelien van Oldenborgh to r econstruct Lina Bo Bardis exhibitiondisplay system for the Museu de Arte de So Paulo (), and

commissioned the Museum of American Art in Berlin to remakeEl Lissitzkys Abstraktes Kabinett(). The third part, ThePolitics of CollectingThe Collecting of Politics, featured con-ceptually oriented art from Eastern Europe and the Middle East:the former region because it relates to the past and possible futureof communism, and the latter because it addresses contemporaryIslamophobia in the Netherlands, as well as provides a platformfor artistic projects that oppose the ongoing occupation of the WestBank. For example, Picasso in Palestine() realized a proposal byKhaled Hourani, the artist-director of the International Art Acad-emy Palestine, to bring a Picasso painting to Palestine for the first

time, and to exhibit it at his institution.The final part, The Pil-grim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker), proposed threedifferent models of spectatorship, with accompanying audio guidesthat allowed these epistemological biases to become explicit.

Esche directly connects his reorganization of the collection to thepolitical upheavals of and the changes to museums that havetaken place since then, as institutions follow the market far moreclosely, expanding both the geographical scope of collections andtheir physical limits by building extensions. Post-, clusters ofever-changing narratives seem to have replaced one unifying art

historical discourse; Esche nevertheless argues that the task of themuseum is to take a position, because relativism is the dominantnarrative of the market, where everything is equalized by exchangevalue. Accordingly, Esches selections and prioritie s as a director arebased around a set of ideals and identifiable concerns: the emanci-

Installation view showing archive of the Degenerate Art Show (1937) and the Grosse DeutscheKunstausstellung (1937) (on left) and the history of exhibition display (on right). Part of Play van Abbe:Time Machines Reloaded, 25 Se ptember 30 January 2011. Photo: Peter Cox

Museum design of the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi for the Museu de Arte de So Paulo (MASP)in 1968, part of Play van Abbe: Time Machines Reloaded, 25 September 2010 30 January 2011.Photo: Peter Cox


19/42

34 35

patory drive of modern art and its continuation in certain strandsof contemporary art (there is, for example, a notable absence inthe Van Abbemuseums collection of works with a high-profilemarket statusno Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Matthew Barney);the memory of cultural internationalism and a need for planetarythinking, as the museum places continual emphasis on the legacy

of communism and the possibilities for its reactivation; the socialvalue of retelling histories that lead to other imagined futures, byrevisiting marginal or repressed histories in order to open up newvistas. These motivating questions, combined with the museumscreative use of the archive and documentation, which are continually

Installation view of Picasso in Palestine, exhibition of Pablo Picassos Buste de Femme(1943)at the International Aca demy of Art Palestine, Ramallah. 24 June 20 July 2011.Photo: Ron Eijkman

Installation view of Museum of American Art Berlin, ethnographic display of the Museum ofModern Art New York and reconstruction of El Lissitzkys Abstraktes Kabinett. Part ofPlay van Abbe: Time Machines Reloaded, 25 September 2010 30 January 2011. Photo: Peter Cox

integrated into the displays, position the contemporary museum asa partisan historical narrator. Yet last year the Van Abbemuseumwas threatened with a twenty-eight percent cut to its budget, due tothe city councils objection to its low visitor figures and refusal ofcultural entrepreneurship. Ironically, this complaint was made bythe Social Democrat party; the solution, in their eyes, was more

populist blockbuster exhibitions. Eventually, the cuts were reducedto eleven percent, in part due to online international support andlobbying.


20/42

36 37

V.

ARCHIVE OF THE COMMONS:THE REINA SOFA

While innovative exhibition design has been central to historicaldisplays at the Van Abbemuseum, the Museo Nacional Centro deArte Reina Sofa has embraced a more classical approach to theinstallation of twentieth-century art. Founded in , the ReinaSofa occupies two enormous buildings in the center of Madrid: aneighteenth-century hospital by Francesco Sabatini, and a large exten-

sion by Jean Nouvel. The present director, Manuel Borja-Villel,joined in , af ter ten years as director o f Museu dArt Contem-porani de Barcelona (MACBA). It should be stressed that despitethe formal similarity between the Van Abbemuseum and the ReinaSofa as old buildings with new extensions, they are hardly equals:the former is a regional museum in a small Dutch city, while thelatter is the national museum of contemporary art in Spains capi-tal, triangulated with two other major art collections, the Prado andthe Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Reina Sofas collection ofmasterpieces and central location ensure there is never an anxietyabout viewing figures; the steering question for the museum is not

whetherpeople will visit the museum but howthey will view the works.

At first glance, the Reina Sofas program seems to be business asusual, dominated by major solo and group exhibitions. Yet thepresentation of the permanent collection has undergone important

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid. View of the Sabatini building. Photo: Joaqun Corts


21/42

38 39

changes in the past few years as the museum has adopted a self -criticalrepresentation of the countrys colonialist past, positioning Spainsown history within a larger international context. For example, thegallery introducing the third collection suite, From Revolt to Post-modernity, , begins with Agns Vardas photographicseries Cuba Is Not the Congo (), while a vitrine of publicationsby Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus is placed alongside ChrisMarker and Alain Resnaiss film about African art and the effects ofcolonialism Statues Also Die(); in the center is a large projectionof Gillo Pontocorvos anti-colonial film The Battle of Algiers().As this display typifies, one of the most notable characteristics of

the collection hang is the presence of film and literature along-side works of visual art. The Cubism display opens with a largeprojection of Buster Keatons One Week(), drawing attentionto a simultaneous use of distorted per spectival forms in painting andpopular culture. In one of the most emotionally devastating suites, Installation view of Pablo Picasso, Guernica(1937), printed matter and maquette of the

Pavilion of the Spanish Republic (1937). Photo: Joaqun Corts

Installation view of Gillo Pontocorvo, The Battle of Algiers(1966), Chris Marker and Alain Resnais,Statues Also Die(1953) and a vitrine of publications by Franz Fanon, Claude Lvi-Strauss,Albert Camus and others. Part of From Revolt to Postmodernity, 1962 82, 2012. Photo: Joaqun Corts

Installation view of Pablo Picasso, Three Lambs Heads(1939) and Alain Resnais, Night and Fog(1955).Part of Art in a Divided World, 1945 68, 2012. Photo:Joaqun Corts


22/42

40 41

temporary: as the curators point out, the museum presents constel-lations of work in which conventional artistic media are no longerthe priority, which are driven by a commitment to emancipatorytraditions, and which acknowledge other modernities (particu-larly in Latin America). Temporary group exhibitions, mean-while, are used as testing sites for rethinking the museums overallmission and collection policy. In , for example, the museuminitiated The Potos Principle, curated by Alice Creischer,

Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer. The exhibitionargued that the birthplace of contemporary capitalism might notbe the Industrial Revolution of nor thern England or NapoleonicFrance, but the silver mines of colonial Bolivia.The show juxta-posed seventeenth-century colonial paintings with recent work by

Installation view of Lettrist International publications, poetry recordings, and film, 2012.Photo: Claire Bishop

Art in a Divided World, , the opening gallery contains asingle Lee Miller photograph of US troops at Buchenwald ()adjacent to two works by Picasso, illustrations for Pierre ReverdysSong of the Dead() and the painting Three Lambs Heads(),which are installed next to a large projection of Resnaiss Holocaustdocumentary Night and Fog(). The room immediately follow-

ing this contains Antonin Artauds radio recording To Have Donewith the Judgment of God (): a theater of cruelty and absurdityexpresses the impossibility of retrieving aesthetic meaning after theunspeakable horrors of World War II.

The commitment to expanded historical contextualization can alsobe seen in the presentation of PicassosGuernica(), the main drawof the collection. This is still presented amid several rooms of Picas-sos drawings and paintings, but now framed by other works fromthe Civil War era, including propaganda posters, magazines, wardrawings, and a maquette of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic,

where the painting was first shown in . Guernicaitself is installeddirectly opposite a gallery showing Jean-Paul Dreyfuss Civil Wardocumentary Spain . A filmic record of civilian trauma anddestruction therefore confronts Picassos painterly version as twoforms of monochrome reportage. The effect is to ground Guernicainsocial and political history, rather than in an art-historical discourseof formal innovation and singular genius. This attention to contex-tualizing art within visual culture can also be seen elsewhere in themuseum, where movements that would otherwise be relegated to thearchive due to their lack of visuality (such as Lettrisme and the Situ-ationist International) are now given due space, represented through

publications, films, newspaper cuttings, and audio recordings.

While all these galleries present art conventionally thought of asmodern rather than as contemporary in terms of periodization, Iwould argue that the total system of display is dialectically con-


23/42

42 43

narrative is linear historic time, advancing towards the future ona Western-centric horizon; its dispositifis the white cube, destinedfor the modern notion of the public. In the postmodern museum,exemplified by Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou, the appa-ratus is multiculturalism, seen in the equation of contemporane-ity with global diversity; its structure of mediation is marketing,

addressed to the multiple demographics of economically quantifi-able audiences.

Borja-Villels alternative to these scenarios is informed by recentwriting on the decolonial (seeing the world from the perspectiveof the global south) and the commons (which seeks to produce newmodels of collective ownership). The starting point for this museumis therefore multiple modernities: an art history no longer conceivedin terms of avant-garde originals and peripheral derivatives, sincethis always prioritizes the European center and ignores the extentto which apparently belated works hold other values in their own

context. The apparatus, in turn, is reconceived as an archive of thecommons, a collection available to everyone because culture is not aquestion of national property, but a universal resource. Meanwhile,the ultimate destination of the museum is no longer the multipleaudiences of market demographics, but radical education: rather thanbeing perceived as hoarded treasure, the work of art would be mobi-lized as a relational object (to use Lygia Clarks phrase) with theaim of liberating its user psychologically, physically, socially, andpolitically. The model here is that of Jacques Rancires ignorantschoolmaster, based on a presumption of equality of intelligencebetween the viewer and the institution.

These ideas are beginning to be implemented at the Reina Sofa.The question of multiple modernities is addressed by the museumscollaboration with Red Conceptualismos del Sur, a research net-work founded in that attempts to preserve local histories and

artist-activists critical of globalization (particularly the exploita-tion of migrant workers by neoliberal elites in China, Dubai, andEurope), implicitly drawing a connection between these two formsof colonization.

The display activities of the Reina Sofa nevertheless remain onlythe most visible and symbolic of the museums activities, whichalso penetrate deeper behind the scenes to affect acquisitions policy,research, and education. Borja-Villel has developed a methodby which to rethink the contemporary museum, using triangulardiagrams to express the dynamic relationships underpinning three

different modelsthe modern, the postmodern, and the contem-porary. In each diagram, corner A denotes the guiding narrativeor motivation, corner B refers to the structure of intermediation,and corner C alludes to the museums destination or goal. Inthe modern museum model, exemplified by MoMA, the guiding

Installation view of The Potos Principle: How Can we Sing the Lords Song in a Strange Land?,12 May 16 September 2010. Photo: Joaqun Corts


24/42

44 45

the political antagonism of conceptual art practices produced underthe Latin American dictatorships.Cooperation with this networknecessarily influences how the museum acquires work from thisregion. Rather than buying up artists archives, like Tates activi-ties in Latin America or Viennese institutions in Eastern Europe,the Reina Sofa devises new ways of operating. For example, the

Chilean group CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Ar te, )recently offered their archive to the Reina Sofa, lacking confidencethat a Chilean institution could preserve it. The Reina Sofa paidtwo researchers to catalog the archive and worked to ensure that aninstitution in Chile would house it; in return, the museum receivedan exhibition copy of this archive. In the case of CADA, whosework consisted primarily of performances, actions, and interven-tions, the line between work of ar t and documentation is negli-gible. However, this documentary status increasingly defines themost politically engaged art of the late twentieth century.In orderto redefine the Reina Sofa as an archive of the commons, the

museum is therefore attempting to legally recategorize works of artas documentation.This recategorization increases accessibility toworks of artfor example, the public can go to the library andhandle them, alongside publications, ephemera, photographs ofworks of ar t, correspondence, prints, and other textual materials.

Finally, education brings these activities together. The museumbelieves that representation of the other is not enough (for exam-ple, by collecting works from far-flung cultures) and that it needs tofind new forms of mediation and solidarity between the intellectualculture of the Reina Sofa and social movements. The museums

education program, therefore, is not limited to the usual art-appre-ciation classes for children, young adults, and studentsthese allcontinue to exist, although their content has somewhat shifted (suchas the workshop Viewing the Viewers, in which teenagers aremade aware of the museum as a discursive apparatus). The muse-

ums education budget has been directed towards the maintenanceof long-term programs, such as the Programa de Prcticas Crti-cas (Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices), a freesix-month seminar for young artists, researchers, and activists who,

due to the recession and high unemployment, constitute one of themost disaffected groups in the city.At the moment, public fundingunderwrites all these initiatives, although with the election of theright-wing Peoples Party in November , budgets have alreadybeen slashed by eighteen percent.

Beatriz Preciado speaking at the Somateca seminar,part of the Programa de Prcticas Crticas, 2012 2013.Photo: Joaqun Corts/Ramn Lores


25/42

46 47

VI.

REPETITIONS:MSUM LJUBLANA

My third and final model for curating the contemporary is the Muzejsodobne umetnosti Metelkova (Museum of Contemporary ArtMetelkova, or MSUM) in Ljubljana, which opened in Autumn. Designed by the Slovenian firm Groleger Arhitekti, themuseum is located in Metelkova, a former military base during theYugoslav period that was squatted in the s and to some extent

remains the epicenter of alternative culture in the city. The museumsdirector, Zdenka Badinovac, has served since as director of theModerna Galerija in Ljubljana, which also administers MSUM,and her staff work across both sites. It goes without saying that theannual budget of the Moderna Galerija and MSUM is barely com-parable to that of the Van Abbemuseum, much less to that of theReina Sofa; part of the reason for including it in this essay is toshow what can be done with straitened finances in a small city with-out a developed art system. (Ljubljanas only commercial galleryrecently decamped to Berlin, where several of Slovenias leadingartists are now also based.) Unlike my first two examples, Ljubljana

also offers a case study of contemporary art at the cross-section ofmultiple modernities: Slovenia only became independent in following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and is located in a regionthat was rapidly torn apart by ethnic conflict, most intensely in Bosniaand Croatia. The museum thus has to reconcile two conflicting

Muzej sobodne umetnosti Metelkova (MSUM), Ljubljana. Photo: Dejan Habicht


26/42

48 49

projects: the desire for nation-state representation and the obligationto hold its own in a globalized contemporary art world insistent ontransnational (or even postnational) cultural production.

The question of historical representation is particularly fraughtin museums throughout former Yugoslavia. When deciding how

to show and collect art from the period , one of thecentral questions is whether to align with art from Western Europe,with whomin Slovenias casethere was frequent contact(particularly with neighboring Italy and Austria) or to identify withart from the former Soviet bloc, with whom there was less frequentcontact, but whose ideological context is more comparable to ex-Yugoslavia. The second contested area concerns the YugoslavWars of the s, where the representation of history is arguablyeven more charged: how to acknowledge and display the trauma ofconflict and genocide that ravaged this region? These questions havereceived vastly different answers in different parts of former Yugo-

slavia. In Zagreb, a vast new Museum of Contemporary Art (theMSU) opened in ; although it has an outstanding collectionof primarily Yugoslav art from the s onwards, the weight ofthe war is largely carried by ejla Kameri cs Bosnian Girl (), abillboard-size self-portrait with superimposed writing, taken fromgraffiti by a Dutch soldier near Srebrenica in : No teeth?A mustache? Smel (sic) like shit? Bosnian Girl! Dispatchedin one biting but attractive billboard, the trauma of the wars barelyresurfaces. In Sarajevo, by contrast, the National Gallery closed itsdoors in September due to lack of government support andfunding, and the National Museum followed the same path in

October .

In Ljubljana, the first display encountered by the viewer is titledWar Time: it includes a small anonymous documentary pho-tograph of the occupation of Metelkova in , alongside Jenny

Holzers Lustmord(), a photo series of text on skin, allud-ing to the rape of Bosnian women. Thereafte r, the museums entiredisplay is organized around thematic categories relating to overlap-ping temporalities: Ideological Time (the socialist past), FutureTime (unrealized modernist utopias), The Time of the AbsentMuseum (approximately the ss, when artists compen-

sated for the absence of a developed art system by self-organizingand self-criticizing), Retro Time (the late s, when artistsbegan to self-historicize), Lived Time (body and performanceart), Time of Transition (from socialism into capitalism) andDominant Time (present-day global neoliberalism). Contem-porary art is therefore staked as a question of timeliness, rather thanas a stage on the conveyor belt of history; the necessary condition ofrelevance is the presentation of multiple, overlapping temporalities,geared towards the imagination of a future in which social equalityprevails.

These displays formed part of the museums inaugural hang, ThePresent and Presence, which asserted these two words as centralto an understanding of contemporary art. The present refer s tothe period in which Slovenia (and Europe more broadly) is nowliving, which started with the fall of communism. Presence, bycontrast, is staked in opposition to both capitalism (seen as a returnto the past) and future-oriented communism; it is not modernismsforward march of progress, never glancing back, but a bringing intoconsciousness that which modernity has suppressed. One of themuseums tasks is therefore self-reflection: the attempt to compare theideals of Yugoslav self-management with what Badinovac calls the

authentic interests of contemporary art.

Once again, contempo-raneity is staked as an antinomic relationship to temporality: unlikethe Tates something for everyone relativism, MSUM is committedto taking the side of traditions that have historically proven to haveemancipatory social potential.This means not only eschewing the


27/42

50 51

or catalog are possible, so recycling is necessary. Four further pointsargue for the appropriateness of repetition: rather than succumbingto the pressure to give consumers the new, the museum advocatesthe value of rereading; repetition is one of the fundamentalfeatures of contemporary art (video loops, re-enactment, etc.), soit is appropriate to repeat an entire collection display; repetitionconstructs historythrough publications, research, the artmarketso a repeated display retroactively helps to constructresponses that produce history; finally, repetition is driven bytrauma, and in Ljubljana this is twofoldthe traumatic absence

of a contemporary art system and the unrealized emancipatoryideals of communism. The museum has subsequently rehungThe Present and Presence two more times: Repetition (OctoberNovember ) and Repetition (JanuaryJune), focusing on movement and the street, respectively.

big players of the contemporary art market in favor of works thatexpand the horizon of possibilitie s for collective experience, but alsogiving space to practices that have been historically overlooked. Forexample, the Moderna Galerijas display of Art of the PartisanResistance presented drawings and prints by the anti-Nazi forcesas equal in significance to other twentieth-century art movements.

When it comes to funding, the situation is dismally familiar: as aresult of the election, which returned to power the neoliberalSlovenian Democratic Party, the museum has suffered dramatic

cuts in cultural funding. The museum has dealt with this byrepeating the presentation of their inaugural collection display, in aslightly expanded and revised form. The Present and PresenceRepetition justified this repetition in a five-point manifesto. Thefirst point states the fiscal reality: due to budget cuts, no new display

Installation view of IRWIN, East Art Map(2000 2005), part of The Present and Presence , 2011.Photo: Dejan Habicht

Installation view of The Body and the East Archive, part of The Present and Presence Repetition 1, 2012. Photo: Dejan Habicht


28/42

52 53

Repetition in the form of historical self-reflection is further assertedin the archival work on display: the Body and the East Archiverevisitsthe Moderna Galerijas eponymous landmark exhibition from ,the first synoptic historical overview of body art in Eastern Europe;the Bosnia Archivedocuments the Moderna Galerijas project tocollect works by significant regional artists for a future museum of

contemporary art in Sarajevo; a performance art archive shows thenumerous ways in which this type of practice can be communicatedto future generations (photography, video, objects, reperformances);the Archive-in-Becomingcontains oral histories (video interviews withsignificant artists from the region); and a further archive, Question-naires, concerns the presence of artists from the Moderna Galerija col-lection in other public and private collections in Slovenia and abroad.Finally, the so-called Punk Museum documents the Slovenian punkscene from to , and is open to donations from the public.

As at the Reina Sofa, MSUMs education program seeks to con-

nect art to political activism, following the guidelines of the RadicalEducation Collective, developed at the Moderna Galerija in .Alignments are forged with other organizations also strugglingagainst commercialization, creative industries, and increasingideologization of our local space.Instead of the usual museumcaf, MSUM has a bookstore and seminar room, conceived bystudents of architecture and design who also program the spaceand organize an independent series of seminars and interpreta-tion. The activist group Anarhiv uses the room for political theorydiscussions. Complementing these local ties, the museum hasinitiated international partnerships so that the institutions voice

can be heard internationally. For example, the collaborative networkLInternationale, established by Badinovac, allows seven Europeanmuseums and institutions to make their collections available to eachother, disrupting the usual East/West European art historical narra-tives, but also conventional patterns of collection ownership.

Installation view of An Archive of Performance Art, part of The Present and Presence Repetition 1, 2012. Photo: Dejan Habicht

Installation view of Bosnia Archive, part of The Present and Pre sence Repetition 1, 2012.Photo: Dejan Habicht


29/42

55

VII.

DIALECTICALCONTEMPORANEITY

My respect for these three museums is not without reservations, andthe shortfalls of each institution become apparent in the comparison.The Van Abbemuseum has failed to embed itself into the localculture in Eindhoven and the region; the displayed publications at theReina Sofa cannot be read, while its approach to exhibition displayis not always coherent (a projection of Hitchcocks Rear Window

[] sits in uneasy dialog with Abstract Expressionist painting);while the MSUMs celebration of documentation is of ten unmanage-able (the museum has so many banks of video monitors documentingactions, performances, and interventions that every visitor has tobecome her own curator, making decisions about which works toview or ignore). Overall, however, the varied propositions put forwardby the Van Abbemuseum, the Reina Sofa, and the MSUM, onlybriefly sketched here, offer a trampoline from which to leap forward,suggesting alternatives to the privatized contemporary museumcreatively and intellectually crippled by its reliance upon blockbusterexhibitions designed to attract corporate investors, philanthropists,

and mass audiences. The Van Abbemuseum offers the exhibitionapparatus of display as a vehicle of historical consciousness; the ReinaSofa rethinks education and the medium-specific status of the collec-tion; MSUM deploys multiple, overlapping temporalities as a way towrite an as-yet-unarticulated historical context.


30/42

56

These museums create multi-temporal remappings of history and artis-tic production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks, ratherthan opting for a global inclusivity that pulls everything into the samenarrative.An apt term to describe the result of these activities is theconstellation, a word used by Walter Benjamin to describe a Marxistproject of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established

taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties. This approach is, Ithink, highly suggestive for museums, since the constellation as a polit-icized rewriting of history is fundamentally curatorial. For Benjamin,the collector is a scavenger or bricoleur, quoting out of context in order tobreak the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing itblazing into the present, and keeping history mobile in order to allowits objects to be historical agents once again. Replace collector herewith curator, and the task of the contemporary museum opens up to adynamic rereading of history that pulls into the foreground that whichhas been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominantclasses. Culture becomes a primary means for visualizing alternatives;

rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of trea-sures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons.

It is of course banal and predictable to invoke Benjamin at the end ofan essay in , but it is striking that his theories have been so influ-ential on visual art yet have had so little impact upon the institutionsin which it is shown and the histories they narrate. In his Theses on thePhilosophy of History (), Benjamin draws a distinction betweena history spoken in the name of power, which records the triumphsof the victors, and a history that names and identifies the problemsof the present day, by scouring the past for the origins of this present

historical moment; this, in turn, is the determining motivation for ourinterest in the past. Can a museum be anti-hegemonic? The threemuseums discussed in this book seem to answer this question in theaffirmative. They work to connect current artistic practice to a broaderfield of visual experience, much as Benjamins own Arcades Project


31/42

59

sought to reflect on Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, by juxta-posing texts, cartoons, prints, photographs, works of art, artifacts, andarchitecture in poetic constellations. This present-minded approach tohistory produces an understanding of today with sightlines on thefuture, and reimagines the museum as an active, historical agent thatspeaks in the name not of national pride or hegemony but of creative

questioning and dissent. It suggests a spectator no longer focused onthe auratic contemplation of individual works, but one who is awareof being presented with arguments and positions to read or contest.Finally, it defetishizes objects by continually juxtaposing works of artwith documentary materials, copies, and reconstructions. The contem-porary becomes less a question of periodization or discourse than amethodor 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 wedisrupt a distended now that colonizes past and future. But such a

historicist approach condemns previous ages to a remoteness divorcedof relevance to the current day, and does nothing to address the causesof our current presentism: the role of technology in collapsing spatialdistance and accelerating our lived experience of time; the threat ofglobal catastrophe, from nuclear war to terrorism to environmentaldisaster, diminishing our ability to project into the future; and thespeculative short-term investments of finance capitalism, sellingabstractions such as currencies, bonds, stocks, and derivatives ratherthan material production. All of these have unquestionably affectedour spatio-temporal coordinates: for the average person in what usedto be called the first world, the future is no longer equated with a

hopeful modern vision of progress (if indeed it ever were), but aseething pit of anxiety about short-term work contracts, unaffordablehealthcare, and a lifetime of debt repayments (mortgages, studentloans, credit cards). Rather than succumbing to this presentism, atigers leap into that which has gone before may be supremely


32/42

61

relevant to mobilizing an understanding of our situation. Dialecticalcontemporaneity is therefore an anachronic action that seeks to rebootthe future through the unexpected appearance of a relevant past.

Others will say that the museum is itself a conservative institution andthat 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 considerimportant in culture, and offer a space to reflect and debate our values;without reflection, there can be no considered movement forwards.Itseems telling that the three museums I have presented are named after anindustrialist, a queen, and a military baseyet all of them denouncebarbarities of power and exploitation, narrating the past through adiagnosis of the present, while keeping their eyes on the future. It is alsosignificant that the activities of all three museums have, since , comeunder pressure from neoliberal governments and city councils playingthe mood music of austerity: their budgets have been decimated becauseaccess to culture is not perceived as a basic right like education and wel-

farealthough these are also being systematically expropriatedbuta luxury that can be farmed out to the private sector. And this sectoris all too willing to step in, because museums are not only economicgenerators, but can enhance social status and the value of ones privatecollection. Two systems of value hereby come into conflict: the museumas a space of cultural and historical reflection, and the museum as arepository of philanthropic narcissism. In the face of this impasse, theability of the public museum to adequately represent the interests of theninety-nine percent might seem ever bleaker. It is therefore crucial toconsider the alternatives that do exist, working below the radar to deviseenergizing new missions for the museum of contemporary art.

Neoliberalisms subordination of culture to economic value den-igrates not only museums but the humanities more broadly, whoseown systems of assessment increasingly have to justify themselvesaccording to metrics (grant-income revenue, economic impact, cita-


33/42

62

tion as a measure of influence).We seem hopelessly unable to devisean alternative value system: technocracy unwittingly abetted by post-structuralism has dismantled much of the vocabulary in which thesignificance of culture and the humanities was previously couched,making the task of persuasively defining this in non-economic termsever more pressing. Yet we can and must argue for culture and the

humanities to be appreciated as important and extraordinary in theirown right, existing outside the language of accounting and use value,and whose acts of imagination are enshrined in the institutions wehave devised to protect them.The curatorial goals outlined in thisessay might appear to be new forms of instrumentalization, but theyare in fact a means of protecting this autonomy, since they build uponwhat is already implicit in works of art in order to question and raiseconsciousness, rather than merely consolidating private prestige.

The task of articulating cultural value is now urgent in both themuseum and the academy, where a tsunami of fiscal imperatives

threatens to deluge all that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelli-gent, adventurous, and critical in the public sphere. Significantly, it isa question of temporalityaround which this struggle now takes place:authentic culture operates within a slower time frame than the acceler-ated abstractions of finance capital and the annual cycles of account-ing (based on positivist data and requiring demonstrable impact). Butit is precisely this lack of synchronicity that points to an alternativeworld of values in which museumsbut also culture, education, anddemocracyare not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet or thestatistical mystifications of an opinion poll, but enable us to access arich and diverse history, to question the present, and to realize a differ-

ent future. This future does not yet have a name, but we are standingon 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 anticipationan era that museumsof contemporary art can help us collectively to sense and understand.


34/42

64 65

ENDNOTES

Rosalind Krauss, The Cultural Logic of the Late CapitalistMuseum, in: October, no. , Fall , p. . Krauss goes on todiscuss an article in Art in Americathat reports museums deaccession-ing their collections, noting the incursion of a managerial mindsetand the pressure of the art market upon museum activities.

Here I am referring to Susan Buck-Morsss arguments in Hegel, Haitiand Universal History, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh,. Buck-Morss argues that universal history involves the dena-tionalization of events in order to reinscribe them as questions ofuniversal concern. (The Holocaust, for example, does not belongto German history or to Jewish history, but is a calamity for all

humankind.) In retrieving the univer sal as a cate gory, Buck-Morssjoins a number of recent thinkers, including Slavoj iek and AlainBadiou, who seek to recuperate the universal after its dismantlingby poststructuralist assaults on metanarratives. Her aim is not tointerpret universality as inclusivity (i.e., pulling everything into thesame narrative), but rather to use it as a methodological interventioninto histor y.

As artist Hito Steyerl notes, Contemporary art is a brand namewithout a brand, ready to be slapped onto almost anything for aquick face-lift touting the new creative imperative for places in needof an extreme makeover [] If contemporary art is the answer, thequestion is: How can capitalism be made more beautiful? Steyerl,Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy, in: e-flux journal #, December , available onlineat: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-democracy/.

In fact, as Richard Meyer has shown, MoMAs program during thes had been remarkably varied, including exhibitions of prehis-toric rock painting, Persian frescoes, and reproductions of Czannepaintings. US artists had been shown at the museum, but Reinhardtand the organization American Abstract Artists objected to thefact that these artists were too old, too conventional, or too popularto qualify as authentically modern. See: Richard Meyer, What WasContemporary Art?, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, , chapter .

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., letter to Paul Sachs, October , cited in:ibid., p. .

The outlier here is the City Gallery of Contemporary Art inZagreb, founded in . It changed its name to the Museum ofContemporary Art in .

The Institutes 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. . In , MoMA,the Whitney Museum and the ICA Boston issued a joint manifestodeclaring the modern tradition alive and wella public reversal ofBostons previous assertion that modernism had died in . See:

J. Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban Modernity,Ashgate Publishing,Aldershot, , p. .

Saatchis acquisition strategy has controversially involved buyingyoung artists work wholesale and then reselling the entire set oncethe market value has increased. See, for example: Arifa Akbar,Charles Saatchi: A Blessing or a Curse for Young Artists?,in: The Independent, //: Saatchis most outspoken proteg-turned-critic was the Italian neo-expressionist painter Sandro Chia,whose work was bought and then disposed of in the s. Therewas speculation that Saatchis sale of his entire holdings of Chiaswork effectively destroyed the Italians reputation.


35/42

66 67

See: Brian Goldfarb et al., Fleeting Possessions, in: TemporarilyPossessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection, The New Museum ofContemporary Ar t, New York, , pp. ff.

See: http://www.newmuseum.org/files/nm_press_faq.pdf. Recent workto have been purchased for the museum by its trustees includes UgoRondinones Hell, Yes! (), installed on the faade of the building

. None of the collection has been included in any of the exhi-bitions at the New Museum since its move to the Bowery in . Emailfrom Gabriel Einsohn, press officer at the New Museum, //.

See, for example: Alex Alberro, response to Questionnare onThe Contemporary, in: October, no. , Fall , p. ; GlobalContemporary: Art Worlds After , exhibition at ZKM | Karls-ruhe, ; Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson (eds),Contemporary Art: to the Present, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, .

See also: Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary

Art in Africa Since , Damiani, Bologna, : [C]ontemporaryAfrican art comes both at the end of traditional arts (seeminglyprecolonial) and at the end of colonialism; that is to say, its conditionof existence in the present is postcolonial (p. ).

Peter Osborne, The Fiction of the Contemporary, in: Anywhereor Not At All: Philosophy of Contempora ry Art, Verso, London andNew York, , pp. .

Boris Groys, Comrades of Time, in: Going Public, SternbergPress, Ber lin, , pp. .

Ibid., p. , and the following quote, p. .

Giorgio Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, in: What is anApparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, Stanford,, p. . Italics in the original.

Ibid., p. .

This world came into being in the late s, he argues, but existsdecisively in common consciousness af ter /. Terry Smith,What IsContemporary Art?, Chicago University Press, Chicago, .

The term historicity is used by the French historian Franois

Hartog to describe the dominant order of time in a given era: howsociety conceptualizes and treats its past. See: Hartog, Rgimesdhistoricit, Editions du Seuil, Paris, . Schizophrenic is the termdeployed by Fredric Jameson to characterize postmodernisms prefer-ence for heightened but disconnected experiences of thepresent. See: Jameson, Postmodernism and Consume r Society,in: Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture,The New Press, New York, , pp. .

In Eastern Europe, the disavowal of the communist past in officialdiscourse has given rise to numerous video works exploring the psy-

chological impact of the transition, therapeutically incorporating oldfilm stock or technology (such as Anri Salas Intervistaand DeimantasNarkeviciuss His-Story, both ); in the Middle East, a powerfulbody of work has addressed the Lebanese Civil War and episodesfrom the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict (consider the extensivearchival work of the Atlas Group/Walid Raad or Emily Jacir). InWestern Europe and North America, by contrast, artists have seizedupon overlooked moments in the history of psychotherapy, colonial-ism, feminism, and civil rightsat their best, interested less in the pastfor its own sake than in the possibilities it contains for opening up alter-natives for the future (Stan Douglas, Sharon Hayes, Harun Farocki).

Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; Its the Future Too: The Tempo-ral Turn in Contemporary Art,Continuum, London, , p. .

Dieter Roelstraete, The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeologi-cal Imaginary in Art, in: e-flux journal #, March , available


36/42

6968

online at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-way-of-the-shovel-on-the-archeological-imaginary-in-art/. Italics in the original.

Georges Didi-Huberman, History and Image: Has the Epistemo-logical Transformation Taken Place? in: Michael Zimmermann(ed.), The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices,Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, Williamstown, , p. .

Georges Didi-Huberman, Before the Image, Before Time: TheSovereignty of Anachronism, in: Claire Farago and RobertZwijnenberg (eds.), Compelling Visuality, University of MinnesotaPress, Minnesota, , p. . See also: Didi-Huberman, TheSurviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology, in:Oxford Art Journal, vol. , no. , , pp. .

Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance,Zone Books, New York, , p. .

Ibid., p. .

My position also differs from that of Thomas Crow, for whomthe work of visual art has a unique temporality compared to thatof literature, music, or dance, because its objects are the actualthings fashioned and handled by the subjects of history themselves.(Thomas Crow, The Practice of Art History in America, in:Daedalus, vol. , no. , Spring , p. .) The use of reproduc-tive technologies in contemporary art has weakened the viability ofthis claim; see the discussion of documentation at the Reina Sofaon p. .

At the New Museum, for example, history appears only in theregister of fashionability, like a well-chosen retro interest. Evengroup exhibitions whose themes provide a perfect opportunity forhistorical research are presented without argumentation. For exam-ple, Ostalgia(), a survey of Russian and Eastern European art

since the s, juxtaposed works on the basis of sensibility, withoutany acknowledgment of the ideological transition that took place. The show replaced the frame of political history withthat 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 VICTORIAthe Art of being Contemporary (sic)). Moreover, the exhibition title

grouped all work under the rubric of ostalgia, despite the fact thatthe majority of exhibits dated from the pre- period.

In Western museums devoted solely to work from the s onwards,thematic clusters have become the norm, since there is an assumptionthat the art of this period shares enough context to make the practiceof decade-shuffling unproblematic. When the thematic approach isseen to fail, it tends to result not from generationaljuxtapositions butfromgeographical: the creation of dialogues between Western andnon-Western art, especially if the latter is positioned as belated andderivative (if modern) or simply non-modern (if indigenous).

However, such relativism is clearly not value-free and is belied byhierarchies within the temporary exhibitions: in the case of TateModern, for example, the majority of (income-generating) soloexhibitions continue to be by Western male artists, while female andnon-Western artists tend to be confined to the (unticketed) TurbineHall and project spaces. See: T. J. Demos, The Tate Effect, in:Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Whereis Art Contemporary? The Global Art World, vol. , ZKM | Centerfor Art and Media, Karlsruhe, , pp. .

One notable exception is Okwui Enwezors critique of TateModerns neo-colonial gaze. See: Enwezor, The Post-ColonialConstellation, in: Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and NancyCondee (eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity,Contemporaneity, Duke University Press: Durham/NC, ,pp. .


37/42

70 71

For example, the collection hang at Tate Modern was orga-nized around the following four suites: Poetry and Dream (whichtook its lead from Surrealism, but also includes John Heartfieldsphotomontages, Santu Mofokengs slide show Black PhotoAlbum: Look at Me, and sculpture by Joseph Beuys), Energy andProcess (centered on Ar te Povera, but which also included agallery 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, butspanning Cubism and Cory Arcangel).

Below these timelines, an oppressive apparatus of bright red multi-media booths emblazoned with corporate sponsorship keeps themuseum on message with the dominant neoliberal norm.

Another series of displays, called The Living Archive, presentedelements of the museums own history to visitors, while also holdinga mirror up to the museum itself as a reminder of what it has

been and could be once more (the museums website describes theseries as a treasury of ideas about the future). The series revisitedkey exhibitions from the museums history (such as The Street,)and presented archival information about an experimental spacein Eindhoven called Het Apollohuis (), but also showedfacsimiles of the museums documentation files (Museum IndexResearch in Progress), the result of research into the provenance ofworks in the collection that were looted by the Nazis before or duringWorld War II.

Some exceptions to this rule have nevertheless taken place, such asthe temporary exhibition Forms of Resistance: Artists and the Desire for

Social Change from to the Present(), a manifesto of sorts forthe Van Abbemuseum.

The most notable experiments in this series included One on One:Frank Stellas Tuxedo Junction (Plug In #), which showed Stellas

painting alone in a galler y, accompanied only by a chair anda small table with reading matte r relevant to the work (publications,correspondence, exhibition history, condition reports, and illustra-tions of previous installations of the painting); also on the tablewas a tape recorder on which one could listen to an interpretationof Stellas work by art historian Shep Steiner. Kijkdepot (PlugIn #) offered visitors a chance to select their favorite work from

the collection on the condition that they provide a reason for wantingto see it. The results were then brought out of storage and put ondisplay, providing the museum with a sense of what local residentswere interested in seeing, and leading to a collective accidentalcurating (Christiane Berndes, in: Plug In to Play, , p. ).Plug In #, curated by the Dutch artist duo Bik van der Pol,displayed work by Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman alongside books published by Loompanics Unlimited (),which produced controversial self-help guides such as How toStart Your Own Country, Homemade Guns and HomemadeArms, and How to Clear Your Adult and Juvenile Criminal

Records.

Van Abbemuseum promotional literature, available online at: http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en/browse-all/?tx_vabdisplay_pi[ptype]=&tx_vabdisplay_pi[project]=.

Created by Fuchs after he had returned from directing Documenta (), Zomeropstelling van de eigen collectie (Summer Displayof the Museums Collection) continued his hallmark celebrationof the autonomy of the work of art, the neutrality of the exhibitionspace and the visual experience of the viewer.

See: http://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/browse-all/?tx_vabdisplay_pi[ptype]=&tx_vabdisplay_pi[project]=&cHash=d-babfbca. Video documentation of theproject by Khaled Hourani and Rashid Masharawi was shown atDocumenta , .


38/42

72 73

The diagrams are based loosely upon Jacques Lacans SeminarXVII from , Lenvers de psychanalyse, in which the per-mutations of a four-term configuration are used to elaborate FourDiscourses (of the Master, the University, the Hysteric, and theAnalyst). Rather than relying upon fixed terms (subject, object,history, etc.), the diagrams are dynamic models that explain therelationship between each discourse and its agents.

As Slavoj iek has argued, todays tolerant liberal multiculturalismis a form of neutralization: an experience of the Other deprivedof its Othernessthe decaffeinated Other. iek, Liberalmulticulturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face,in: The Guardian, //. See also: iek, Multiculturalism,or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in: New Left Review,SeptemberOctober .

Jacques Rancire,The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford UniversityPress, Stanford, . In this much-cited book, Rancire describes

how the idiosyncratic French schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot used abilingual book to teach a group of students who spoke only Flemish.See: ngela Molina, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel/Debe-mos desarrollar en el museo una pedagoga de la emancipacin,in: El Pas,//, available online at: http://elpais.com/dia-rio////babelia/_.html.

See: Declaracin Instituyente Red Conceptualismos del Sur,available online at: http://conceptual.inexistente.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=:declaracion.

Boris Groys argues that documentation is one of the most prevalent

forms of contemporary art today: it is not the presentation of ar t(because that happens elsewhere), but merely a referenceto art. Groys,Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documenta-tion, in: Groys, Art Power, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, ,pp. .

Different viewing behaviors were also encouraged via a map of themuseum 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 flneur). Throughout Play van Abbe, institutional transpar-ency was foregrounded: diagrams outlining the number of male,female, and non-Western artists in the collection (among otherstatistics) were placed on the gallery walls, while Charles Esche

made video re sponses (still available on YouTube) to ques tions fromthe public about the displays.

See Jess Carillo and Rosario Peir, Is the War Over? Art in aDivided World (), p. , downloadable pdf: www.museoreinaSofa.es/images/descargas/pdf//JC_en.pdf.

As Borja-Villel writes, What would happen if we substitutedDescartes ego cogitowith Hernan Cortes ego conquiro, or Kants prin-ciple of pure reason with what Marx called the principle of primi-tive accumulation? Manuel Borja-Villel, Museos del Sur, in:

El Pas, //, cited in English by Ricardo Arcos-Palma inThe Potos Principle: How Can we Sing the Song of Our Lordin a Foreign Land?, in: Art Nexus, issue MarchMay ,available online at: http://certificacion.artnexus.net/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=. The exhibition went on tour to Berlinand then to La Paz, Bolivia.

Two years later, the exhibition Atlas: How to carry the world on onesback?() revisited the montage method of Aby Warburg inorder to provide a counter-reading of twentieth-century ar t. As itscurator Georges Didi-Huberman writes: The Atlas exhibitionwas not conceived to bring together beautiful artifacts, but rather

to understand how certain artists workbeyond the question ofany masterpiecesand how this work can be considered from theperspective of an authentic method, and, even, a non-standardtransverse knowledge of our world. Available online at: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones//atlas_en.html.


39/42

74 75

This list is not complete: other sections include Time Withouta Future (subcultures of the s) and Quantitative Time(individual systems founded on autonomous forms of logic).

Although Badinovac definitively equates contemporaneity withperiodization (war in the Balkans marked the beginning of ourcontemporaneity), the collection displays contain works that go

back to the s. Zdenka Badinovac, The Present and Presence,in: The Present and PresenceRepetition , Moderna Galerija,Ljubljana, , p. .

Ibid., p. .

Zdenka Badinovac, New Forms of Cultural Production,//, available online at: http://www.arteeast.org/pages/ar te-news/article//.

The museum has been criticized for not pairing this with the art of

the White Guard, the movement that collaborated with the occupy-ing forces during World War II.

See: http://www.mg-lj.si/node/ and http://radical.temp.si/.

Adela Zeleznik, On Education in MG+MSUM, unpublisheddocument, p. . Zeleznik is senior curator for education at theMSUM and Moderna Galerija.

The other institutions are the Jlius Koller Society (Bratislava),the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), theMuseum van Hedendaagse Kunst (MuKHA, Antwerp), and the

Van Abbemuseum. In , the Reina Sofa and SALT (Istanbul)joined the network. See: http://internacionala.mg-lj.si/. In ,LInternationale received a five-year grant of . million euros tosupport the program The Uses of ArtThe Legacy of and ,coordinated by Esche at the Van Abbemuseum.

This policy is a continuation of Borja-Villels efforts at MACBA,which resulted in the Centre dEstudis i Documentaci (established). The Centre was set up out of the conviction that since thebeginning of the last century, and especially from the fifties onwards,artistic production cannot be understood simply through the artworkin itself, and that the document is an element of the language thatmakes up complex cultural productions such as art. The Archive

also aspires to contribute to counterbalancing the lack of attentionthat documentary holdings have been given in this specific context.Available online at: http://www.macba.cat/en/the-archive.

This type of recategorization has precedents.

Documents

Bishop Claire Radical Museology