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Universes in Universe Welten der Kunst | Worlds of Art | Mundos del Arte |
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The Museum as Medium Introduction by Pablo Helguera Throughout the Twentieth Century, artists have dedicated time and attention to their relationship with museums, those spaces that in theory would host their creations for posterity. The works that reflect on the museum have often adopted the form of critique or homage, either through the appropriation of the museum language, or through investigative experiments that in many cases have helped to redefine the role and direction of these institutions. My professional interest in the topic started with my participation in the 1992 project by Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco, "The Couple in the Cage", in which both artists exhibited themselves inside a zoo-like cage as recently discovered Amerindians at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (and where I reluctantly was summoned to act as both jail guard and museum docent, explaining the origins of the specimens to the perplexed public). My other interest arose from encountering the work of Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta, able falsifier of contexts and historical and natural myths in museums. But obviously the politicization of the museum during the Eighties and the subsequent and profuse manipulation of the museum context and its language in the Nineties aren't but a small part of a very rich history. From Duchamp's portable museum or "boite en valise", going through the imaginary museums of Marcel Broothaers, to the virtual museums of today, or from Peter the Great's eccentric collections to the work of Damien Hirst and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A., or from El Lissisky's proposal for a "Kabinet der Abstrakten", an exclusive space for exhibiting abstraction, to the opening of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a hybrid between a club and a kunsthalle, and the emergence of "relational aesthetics", the experimental history of exhibition spaces and the one of the artist as an observer and innovator of the museum is long and complex. This genealogy has been documented in some of its aspects by various publications and exhibitions throughout the last decade, for example the exhibition "The Limits of the Museum", presented in 1995 at the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona and curated by Guggenheim curator John G. Hanhardt, and the more recent exhibition "The Museum as Muse", curated by Kynaston McShine for the Museum of Modern Art in 1999, and concluding with the recent book by James Putnam, "Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium" in 2001. Also, last year the MAK Museum in Vienna offered a lecture series titled "The Discursive Museum", with participants like Hans Belting and Joshua Decter, who reflected on the possibility of separating the institution of the museum from its visual base. With the support of these previous efforts in articulating the historical narrative of artist commentaries on the museum, or of the attempt of reconfiguring the relationship between museums and visual culture, this forum has the objective of analyzing those new strategies that contribute to effectively renew the function of the museum as a vital space for society, and to identify the steps to follow in order to activate these processes. The treatment of this topic is made for the first time in a substantial manner in Latin America and by way of a dialogue between Mexico City and New York, two very different, but yet absolutely vital centers for cultural production in the American continent. Both cities will hold parallel discussions, identical in theme although with different participants. Each city and their institutions face, in different ways, similar problems. How to satisfy the needs of a public that is every time more extensive and diverse? How to adapt, as an institution, to the radical transformation introduced by technology, the market, urban and popular culture? What is the best way to showcase these changes that now conform great part of contemporary artists' vocabulary? As far as artists is concerned, the challenge seems to lie in having to answer to an urban reality that every time is more and more overwhelming, either through their work inside or outside of the museum, and learning how to insert their voice into what sometimes may appear as an impenetrable and inert institutional system. This symposium seeks to discuss issues around the reinvention of museums, the relationship between the technological processes and art, and finally, about the transgression or possible elimination of the boundaries of the institution. In this international art environment in which cities have become in a way in museums (as archeological memorials, culture containers, historical landmarks), international dialogues like the one we seek to have here are necessary to help us contextualize contemporary visual culture. The strategy that we have set ourselves to realize through these dialogues is of a gradual and accumulative character, starting off by identifying and classifying the relevant aspects of the themes at hand. From there that we decided to generate this first document, as a preliminary dialogue of sorts in which we invited the participants to establish some of their points of view. In this first phase, as we shall see, there are already several parallels, discrepancies and complementary comments around the problems posed by globalization to the museum, key questions around today's function of the museum artifact, the - perhaps insoluble- problems that museums face in terms of contextualizing certain aspects of culture in their premises, and finally, the critical consideration on the public in all of our artistic endeavors. |
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