Live Coverage: Avant Museology at the Brooklyn Museum, Day One

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“The museum is a lie,” Groys states, in the sense that it conceals the destructive nature of time—it deceives by preserving its holdings.

While this may be a constant for art museums since the 19th Century, their operations have also changed in dramatic ways. The 19th Century art museum functioned as “a secular substitute for churches” where contemplation was of paramount importance. In the contemporary art museum, by contrast, visitors don’t come to contemplate so much as to get informed about “what is going on” in the art world. This shift may partly reflect trends in museological programming that, according to Groys, increasingly privilege the art event: the lecture, the performance, and so on. I suppose there’s no better occasion than a conference at the Brooklyn Museum to make—and demonstrate—this point.

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Philippe Parreno
Marquee, Guggenheim, NY, 2008
Acrylic, steel, LEDs (light-emitting diodes), and incandescent, fluorescent,
and neon lights
Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008

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Artist Liam Gillick has taken the stage for a conversation with Anne Pasternak and Nancy Spector: respectively, the Director and Deputy Director/Chief Curator of the Brooklyn Museum.

“One thing we all have in common,” Gillick proposes, “is a feeling of disappointment,” as there’s something that can never be reached through the exhibition format. Spector assumes that he’s speaking about their work on theanyspacewhatever, a 2008 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

For this show, Spector invited ten artists who, individually and collaboratively, interrogate the format of the exhibition. “The elephant in the room,” she acknowledges, was “relational aesthetics,” a term coined by Nicholas Bourriaud in 1998 to characterize the work of these artists. Spector sought to reframe their practices be inviting them to engage in a four-year dialogue in the run up to the show. Several ideas were thrown around, from a collectively realized exhibition to a quasi-survey of their seminal works from the 1990s. What ultimately emerged were, Spector states, “ten, one-person exhibitions.” As Brian Sholis writes in Afterall, “it seems the ten artists met the prospect of erecting a monument to their past selves using current artworks with a profound ambivalence.”

In retrospect, Spector concedes that the show “a beautiful, melancholic failure.”

From his perspective, Gillick believes that what made Spector’s invitation so unusual was that there was no preexisting “curatorial thesis to play off of." Given that the participating artists were used to reacting to prompts, this made for a real challenge. That said, both Gillick and Pasternak applauded the show for being a “radical” curatorial endeavor, in which Spector, who usually curates monographic exhibitions, effectively dispersed her responsibilities between the participating artists.

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Left-to-right: Nancy Spector, Liam Gillick, and Anne Pasternak

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Rirkrit Tiravanija
CHEW THE FAT, 2008
A documentary film portrait
Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008

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Carsten Höller
Revolving Hotel Room, 2008
Wood, leather, silk, feathers, cotton, horse hair, latex, lightbulbs, fluorescent
lamps, mirrored glass, acrylic glass, metal, and motor
Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008

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Anne Pasternak is now reflecting on her previous work at Creative Time, where she served as President and Artistic Director for over twenty years. As the center of her curatorial work, Pasternak says, are the conversations she develops with artists. This is a fulfilling if not always easy process. For Creative Time’s 2014 project with Kara Walker, at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, there were aspects of Walker’s proposal that Pasternak wasn’t certain about; nonetheless, she put her trust in the artist—ultimately, to the realization of a remarkable project.

Spector interjects that it’s also important for a curator to say no, and Gillick—getting the first big laugh of the night—asks, “Can you explain when ‘no’ happens, just so I know?”

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Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, 2014
Commissioned by Creative Time

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Inevitably, the conversation moves to recent events—and to the challenges facing non-profit cultural institutions. Pasternak stresses that institutions must consider the following: What freedoms do they have in a given political climate, and particularly in a post-election climate? The question of when to react seems as important as that of how to react.

Pasternak concludes the conversation with an impassioned argument that the museum is more than a building: it’s the people that visit, as well as the (fraught) community, nation, and world that surround it. We need to end the rhetoric of autonomy and the tendency to think of the museum as a mausoleum.

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An audience member asks the speakers to respond to the opinion that “the curator is the prophylactic between the artist and the institution.”

Pasternak notes that she’s learned over the years to not protect artists from anything that happens in an institution, as it’s vital for them to be a part of the exhibitionary process—warts and all. “Will I defend an artist? Yes. But will I protect them? Not really.”

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Hans Ulrich Obrist is at the lectern. “There’s a stunning degree of amnesia” concerning curatorial history, he claims. Not everything begins with Harald Szeemann. Efforts like Zhilyaev’s Avant-Garde Museology are thus crucial in bringing lesser known radical museology to light. For his part, Obrist adds another figure to the conversation, whom has influenced his own curation since the 1980s: German curator Alexander Dorner (1893-1957).

Dorner was acutely aware both of the stasis of the art museum and of the emergent avant-garde of his era. In his curatorial efforts, he sought to realize what he called the “museum of the move”: what Obrist paraphrases, in this memorable 1998 e-mail, as an institution “in permanent transformation within dynamic parameters.”

An exemplary case is El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet (1927-28), a modular and changeable room for abstract art commissioned by Dorner for the Landesmuseum in Hannover. On another occasion, Dorner invited Moholy-Nagy to design the final room in his chronological rehanging of the Hannover collection, which would have interactive elements culled from different media. Though this Raum der Gegenwart (The Room of the Present Day) was never realized at the time, it has been constructed in various exhibitions since—most recently, in Moholy-Nagy’s 2016 retrospective at the Guggenheim.

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Alexander Dorner

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El Lissitzky, Abstract Cabinet, 1927–28

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László Moholy-Nagy, Raum der Gegenwart, as reconstructed by Kai-Uwe Hemken and Jakob Gebert and installed in the KunstLichtSpiele exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, 2009

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“Dorner was a toolbox” for so many artistic and curatorial projects, Obrist notes. He moves through several examples, including Lawrence Alloway and Victor Pasmore’s exhibition An Exhibit (ICA London, 1957); Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s plans for Fun Palace (1960); Obrist’s Swiss Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale, inspired by these plans; and museum in progress, which participated in Obrist’s extensive project, do it (1993-2013).

In a timely gesture, Obrist screens museum in progress’s contribution: a brilliant 1995 video of the poet Eileen Myles, explaining how anyone can run for president—including her. Myles shuffles through a number of self-portraits, dismissing many for their un-presidential qualities ("too Mapplethorpe, too Patti Smith”). Finally, she comes to the perfect one: Myles smiling with a dog. This is the optimal image, she explains, because a woman can’t be alone in an image (certainly not a lesbian), so it’s good that there’s also a female dog in the photo. Two women. That’s the right stuff.

Myles’s presidential campaign extended beyond this clip. See here.

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Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, Fun Palace, 1960

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Eileen Myles for President!

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We conclude the evening with a screening of Anton Vidokle’s forthcoming film, Immortality and Resurrection for All!, which draws influence from an essay in Avant-Garde Museology: “The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission” (c. 1880) by Nikolai Fedorov. Federov’s long text is far too hydra-headed to summarize, but one quote is particularly relevant to Vidokle’s film:

“The silence of the grave, the stillness of a cemetery, is the main feature of the present day museum, which is the total opposite of the lively, production trade city, where it is generally located […] here we see a kind of protest against death, a struggle against destructive forces, and as long as museums exist, the victory of death is not yet fully decided. That’s why a museum is not just a cemetery, because it holds not only decayed bodies, but also souls” (132).

In a conversation with Zhilyaev, published in e-flux journal #71 (March 2016), Vidokle notes that “[f]or Fedorov, the museum is a key institution in society, unique insofar as it’s the only place that does not produce progress (which for him implies an erasure of the past), but rather cares for the past. He felt that museums needed to be radicalized such that they would not merely collect and preserve artifacts and images, but also preserve and recover life itself—resurrect the past. In this sense, museums should become factories of resurrection.”

Vidokle’s film unfolds across several institutions in Russia—the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Zoological Museum, the Lenin Library, and the Museum of Revolution—and features Zhilyaev, members of the present-day Fedorov Library in Moscow, and others. As a voiceover offers abstract reflections on the museum—many resonating with Fedorov’s essay—the camera moves through these institutions, capturing visitors and staff in suspended contemplation (or outright mummification); doing bibliographic and museological work; and speaking in the manner of the voiceover. However one interprets this mesmerizing film, it offers a response both to Groys and Fedorov: depicting institutions as preservationist sites for unknown futures, and imagining the museum as “a soul depository” (133).

That’s a good stopping point for a stimulating first night of Avant Museology. My buddies Erica and João will pick things up tomorrow.

Over and out,
Tyler

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Anton Vidokle, Immortality and Resurrection for All! (forthcoming). Video, single channel.