Thinking About Exhibitions

Bruce W. Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, Sandy Nairne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134820016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians plus artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances, in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.

PART I

THE FUTURE OF HISTORY

1
THE MUSEUM AND THE ‘AHISTORICAL’ EXHIBITION
The latest gimmick by the arbiters of taste, or an important cultural
phenomenon?

Debora J.Meijers

INTRODUCTION

‘The museum is a house for art’, according to Harald Szeemann, the independent Swiss exhibition designer, well known for such events as documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972), Junggesellenmaschinen (Bern, 1975) and Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (Zürich, 1985). Art is fragile, Szeemann continues, an alternative to everything in our society that is geared to consumption and reproduction. That is why, according to him, it needs to be protected, and the museum is the proper place for this.¹

This is quite a change from the open museum of the seventies, of which Szeemann himself was an ardent proponent, when attempts were made to make social contradictions visible in the museum, on the one hand, and to free art from being sentenced to the museum, on the other hand, by connecting it once more with the world outside.

After this ‘museum revolution’ of the seventies, Szeemann’s statement sums up in a nutshell the notion which has dominated the eighties. The recent museum boom can be directly connected with it: never have so many museums been built or expanded as in the last decennium.

The museum is an institution which plays a decisive part in determining the significance of works of art. It is impossible, however, to say anything about this in general. A more specific question is required. I have therefore decided not to assume the position of an artist who tries to imagine the future significance of her work— after all, I am not an artist. Instead, I shall proceed to a kind of art-historical self-reflection by examining what a number of exhibition designers have done. If the significance of an individual work is determined anywhere, then it is by the place that it is assigned among other works. It is precisely in this field —art in its setting— that an interesting recent development can be detected.

This development is the trend toward the ‘ahistorical’ exhibition. In spite of all their differences, these exhibitions have in common the fact that they abandon the traditional chronological arrangement. The aim is to reveal correspondences between works from what may be very distant periods and cultures. These affinities cut across chronological boundaries as well as the conventional stylistic categories implemented in art history. The classical classification in terms of material is abandoned too, so that Einfühling (empathy) finally makes it possible to connect a fifteenth-century chair with a female portrait by Picasso and an installation by Joseph Beuys. This combination was part of the exhibition which Harald Szeemann designed at the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1988, entitled A-Historische Klanken (‘Ahistorical Sounds’).

Another example is provided by the activities of Rudi Fuchs, from his documenta 7 in 1982 to the reorganization of the Haags Gemeentemuseum, where he was appointed as director some years later. The Boymans Museum recently gave another guest curator a free hand with the entire collection of the museum: the film director Peter Greenaway.

Szeemann’s exhibition is an exceptionally lucid example of this style of design. The first striking feature is the amount of light and space. The general impression is balanced and carefully considered, despite the fact that upon closer inspection the objects prove to be extremely diverse. Is this visual balance just a matter of good taste, just as antique furniture can fit into a well-designed modern interior, or is there more to it than that?

There is, according to Szeemann’s explanatory comments.² I want to discuss his ideas on the utopian potential of art, which should find expression in the space between the works, but I shall start with the visual aspect of the rooms, and in particular the way in which he made use of their existing triple division.

A sculpture occupied the central position in each area: Joseph Beuys’s Grond in the middle, Imi Knoebel’s Buffet to the right, and Bruce Nauman’s Studio Piece to the left. Szeemann then proceeded to allow these sculptures to resonate in other works of art to produce a spatial dialogue. In this way he wanted ahistorical sounds to resonate, and so convey today’s verdict on yesterday.

But beside this timeless, aesthetic atmosphere, he gave form to three neoBreughelian parables:

The main room—and I am still quoting Szeemann here—is the site of spiritual confusion, a vigorous appeal to human creativity, and suffering and death: Breughel’s Tower of Babel (confusion), Beuys’s batteries and office furniture combined with older pieces of furniture (creativity), and Rubens’ Three Crosses (suffering).

The right-hand room is dominated by ‘the cryptic silence of emptiness and monochrome’: Knoebel juxtaposed with The Adoration of Mary by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, a silver urn from 1918, Morandi, Broodthaers and van Elk.

Finally, to the left we find ‘the sacral elevation of the apparently trivial’: Nauman in combination with Rothko, Hieronymus Bosch, Saenredam, Mondriaan and a Venetian glass dish from the sixteenth century.

Kandinsky’s Lyrisches hangs in a central position, as if to accentuate the leitmotiv of this visual composition: the painting refers to the same ‘urge toward the Gesamtkunstwerlk’ which Szeemann always finds in himself, his tendency to seek constantly for the essential link between the different arts, as a reaction to the penchant for classification which dominates the practice of museums.

Is this all obvious to the visitor? I do not think so, except for the initiated. Perhaps you should surrender to the direct visual impact of the exhibition, which was powerful enough and full of surprises. But then we run up against the following issue.

Various critics have drawn attention to the emergence of a new type of arbiter of taste coincident with this type of ahistorical exhibition. Particularly in the world of modern and contemporary art, museum directors and some freelance exhibition designers have sometimes acquired an unassailable, guru-like status. This phenomenon recently came in for some sharp criticism from the Belgian art critic Frans Boenders in his kunst zonder kader, museum zonder hoed (Art without a Boundary, Museum without a Hat),³ a booklet whose title pokes fun at Jan Hoet, the Ghent museum director and documenta designer. According to Boenders, arbiters of taste are only interested in an egotistical show: they are not really interested in the art that they display. The artists they select form their coterie; and there is absolutely no form of scrutiny of the criteria for the choice of items collected and put on display in this way. Arbiters of taste like to justify their choices as intuitive, and this, Boenders says, guarantees their omnipotence.

Are these critics right? And to what extent can the genre of the ahistorical exhibition be considered as an instrument in this power game? Or is there more to it than that, and is this an important cultural phenomenon?⁴ I would like to set these questions against the background of a number of moments in the history of the art museum, for the present trend has its roots in this history. It harks back, for instance, to the impregnability of the aristocratic maecenas; to the classical Academy as the site of untrammelled artistic exchange; and to the ‘mixed’ eighteenth-century gallery. We can also note the affinities with the sacralization of the museum room as a ‘white cube’ in the twenties; nor should we forget a type of exhibition that appeared in the first decennia of this century, in which non-Western, ‘primitive’ art was combined with abstract Western art. What kind of new phenomenon is being created from these fragments of museum history?

1.1 Harald Szeemann, A-Historische Klanken, view of exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1988. Photograph by Jannes Linders, courtesy of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

MUSEUM HISTORY AS TOOL-SHED

If we are to understand the end product better, we have to scrutinize the ingredients more closely. First of all, there is the ideal of the aristocratic maecenas. In the early eighties Douglas Crimp published an article entitled ‘The art of exhibition’, in which Rudi Fuchs’s 1982 documenta came in for heavy criticism.⁵ The points made by Crimp resemble Boenders’ objections to the arbiter of taste, but they are more specific. For instance, Crimp draws attention to the official postcard of documenta 7 showing the Neo-Classical statute of Landgrave Friedrich the Second of Hessen-Kassel. The statue of the man who commissioned the museum around 1770 stands in the square in front of the building. Here, however, he is portrayed in all his power and isolation. It is as if Fuchs wanted to rehabilitate this isolated figure silhouetted against the sky, turning him into a mascot for his own enterprise.

There are more levels at which Fuchs referred to an aristocratic past. In his own words, he wanted to see his documenta as an academy, that is ‘not as a school, but as one of the magnificent institutions which existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before they became stupid and doctrinaire. They were the meeting place for great minds, with distinct characters and traditions; they joined in the search for overlappings and differences, and in this way they endeavoured to define their cultural moment’.⁶

Following the example of an academy of this kind, Fuchs wanted to make what he called the different dialects of 1982 confront one another. That is why he did not opt for an arrangement according to styles, which was the usual practice. He stuck to the year 1982 and combined hardly any works from different periods. It is a small step, however, from the combination of different styles to the combination of different periods. This is the step that he took soon afterwards in Eindhoven, as we shall shortly see.

Szeemann too harks back to the period before the nineteenth century. He too refers to the Academy in connection with his Rotterdam exhibition, and he follows Fuchs in viewing this traditional institution as a place where styles can be combined without being reduced to one another. His arguments are more complex, however, and are of a strongly utopian kind, as I have already mentioned. He is searching for the essence of the work of art, that is its timeless dimension, which can be traced in the visible form. That is why he displays the works in such a spacious and balanced way, so that ‘a genuinely free zone is created between them, and in each individual work as well’. This is his way of approaching the utopia of art, that is revealing art’s utopian potential: art whose dream of total freedom offers a counterweight to the unfree nationalistic state.⁷ In his quest for the ideal, inner distance from the other works and from the whole, he explores the autonomy of the work, which is where he locates the utopian force of art. This is the zone where the utopia of an ideal society can acquire form, in the form of an academy where things are combined without being reduced to one another. That is how Szeemann sees it.

In terms of art theory, this association has its interesting points. After all, the seventeenth-century Academy was originally conceived to facilitate a confrontation among different artistic characters and traditions, and it is thus no coincidence that there is renewed interest in this eclectic theory of art in a postmodern era. All the same, when eklogè, a positive kind of eclecticism, is propagated in the academies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this selection of the best features of the various schools takes place within a well-defined context: there was a fixed range of variants which could be portrayed in art, and the only innovation lay in perfecting existing forms. In this sense the Academy was already doctrinaire and totalitarian from the seventeenth century on, despite the claims of Fuchs and Szeemann. Their nostalgia is selective, since a fixed artistic order is precisely what they do not want.

These considerations bring me to a second source of inspiration, the ‘mixed’ gallery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Fuchs and Szeemann do not refer explicitly to the arrangement of this traditional gallery of paintings, it still constitutes one of the sources of their ahistorical approach. The aristocratic maecenas and the classical Academy stood for a kind of art collection in which the works were not yet arranged geographically and chronologically. There was certainly an awareness of the possibility of such classifications in terms of schools, but no one felt the need to put them on show in exhibition rooms or galleries. On the contrary, the schools were mixed to facilitate comparisons between the various paintings and to enable art to appear in all its diversity.

A distant echo of this principle can be heard in Fuchs’s 1983 arrangement of the collection of the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in groups which enables the works ‘to engage in mutual dialogue’. For instance, he confronts Chagall’s Homage to Apollinaire (1912) with Luciano Fabro’s The Judgement of Paris (1979). Through this confrontation of works which differ considerably in terms of material, style and period, their characteristics become clearer, and affinities can even be detected. For example, Fuchs sees the same fragility and vulnerability in the skin of the painting and of the terracotta sculpture. He also detects a thematic affinity: ‘Fabro gives prominence to an item of Greek mythology which has continued to operate over the centuries. Chagall has a Russian background, but that is connected with a basic story too. They are both concerned with essential things in life, the charged nature of history’.⁸

Such ‘essential things’ transcend art-historical classifications in terms of style and period. While Fuchs no longer uses that classification here, in the galleries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it did not yet exi...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF PLATES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE FUTURE OF HISTORY
• PART II: STAGING SPECTATORS
• PART III: GRAMMATIC ACTS
• PART IV: CURATORS OR CATERERS
• PART V: SPATIAL PLAY
• PART VI: THE EXHIBITION CONDITION
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY