C101
Article
'Guys in Suits Who Can't Paint'
(or why art galleries are the shape they are...)
The title of this essay, a remark
made by Frank Stella1, neatly
encapsulates the feelings of many artists about the architects
who design the buildings in which they show their work, and
in which it is collected. In Stella's case, his dissatisfaction
led him, as it did with Donald Judd, to explore architectural
designs for museums himself. Judd's conclusion was the Chinati
Foundation at Marfa, Texas (which will be discussed in a later
article), a conversion of a disused army barracks in the Chihuahua
Desert. Stella's led him in a different direction. "There
are millions of square feet of warehouses available for contemporary
art where it looks better than in a neutral box, so we need
new forms."2
Stella is an admirer of Frank Gehry,
architectural master of these 'new forms', and Gehry acknowledges
the influence of Stella and other artists, such as Claes Oldenburg
and Coosje van Bruggen in his work. But what other influences
do the architects of contemporary art museums fall under?
From where does today's concept of the art museum derive,
and how have its traditions shaped spaces as diverse as Santiago
Calatrava's theatrical and sculptural Milwaukee Museum (1994-2000),
Yoshio Taniguchi's Modernist MoMA extension project (currently
ongoing), or Herzog and de Meuron's post-industrial Tate Modern
(1994-2000) - three widely different museum projects, but
all ostensibly built for the same purpose?
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Santiago Calatrava,
exterior: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1994-2000; courtesy
MAM
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When the Mona Lisa was stolen
in 1911, in a clear example of the pulling power that presence
of absence can exert, thousands of people queued at the Louvre
to see the empty space the painting had left behind. In Stealing
the Mona Lisa, Darian Leader takes this as his starting
point to discuss what we are actually looking at when we are
looking at art. Art, he concludes, creates a caesura through
which the viewer can briefly perceive the larger absence,
beyond which one can come to enlightenment, transcendence,
God - whatever it is you think you're looking for when you
go to a gallery or museum.3
But the physical context of the Mona Lisa's theft,
left largely undiscussed by Leader, is just as worthy of analysis
as the particular piece that was stolen. The Mona Lisa's
larger frame, the Louvre itself, was the first public art
museum; the first treasure house for the masses; the first
space to take art out of its context, elevate it to the officially
state-sanctioned status of art object, and re-present it to
the public as part of a new narrative history of what art
is. It is interesting, therefore, that this was the space
from which Peruggia, the thief, decided to liberate his prize
(he later claimed it was an impulse crime, committed 'on spec').
So what caesura do museums create? And what kind of space,
or absence, do they create for our perceptions?
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Yoshio Taniguchi,
model for extension: Museum of Modern Art, New
York, project ongoing; courtesy MoMA
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It is this container, the Louvre,
and others like it, including the British Museum in London
(1823-47, architect Robert Smirke) and the Altes Museum in
Berlin (1824-30, architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel), which
have given us our paradigms for the display of art. Drawn
originally from the 'galleries' connecting apartments and
offices in grand buildings such as the Louvre, Vatican and
Uffizi, and decoratively hung with portraits and paintings,
these new museum galleries modelled themselves on their predecessors
- either by taking over their premises, or aping their design.
These elements of architectural design include impressive
entrances, central gathering spaces and enfilades of regularly-sized
and -shaped galleries, with prescribed circulation routes.
These paradigms, with only a few exceptions, remained largely
unchallenged until the end of the last century and the beginning
of this one.
Added to the mix, with the temple-like
façade of the Altes Museum, was the element of secular religiosity,
an element which continued internally, with recontextualised
works of plundered ecclesiastical art. That the contemporary
art museum is a secular temple, a cathedral-for-our-time is
therefore a cliché almost 200 years old, and yet one continually
dusted off and presented with a polish as if something brand
new had just been discovered.
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Herzog &
de Meuron, exterior: Tate Modern, 1994-2000;
photo Marcus Leith, courtesy Tate Modern
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Yet, the history of the museum is
relatively brief. Given that the Louvre was only opened to
the public on August 10th 17934,
it would be wrong to imbue our idea of the art museum with
a sense of unalterable timelessness. The late-18th-century
Louvre, like its British and German sisters, though it began
life as a product of the revolution5,
developed as a space for colonization of the past, as well
as a repository for the fruits of imperialism and colonialism
themselves6.
The Enlightenment supplied the didactic
impulse of museums, and structured the model which takes the
viewer on a prescribed, generally chronological route through
art and cultural history. For the next hundred years, the
display of paintings still resembled the wunderkammer
concept - that of the cabinet of treasures, where every available
inch of wall space was crammed from floor to ceiling with
paintings of every size and shape. Contemporary paintings
of the Louvre and the Paris Salons, such as Samuel F.B. Morse's
Exhibition Gallery at the Louvre (1832-33) illustrate
this kind of hang. In 1845, Charles Eastlake (who was to be
made Director of the National Gallery in London in 1855),
advised his Trustees that "it is not desirable to cover every
blank space at any height merely for the sake of clothing
the walls and without reference to the size and quality of
the picture." But it still wasn't until 1887 that the 'single'
line' hang was achieved at the National7
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clockwise
from top left:
Gottfried
Semper and Karl von Hasenauer, exterior: Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna, completed 1891; courtesy Kunsthistorisches
Museum; Joseph Maria Olbrich, exterior: Secession,
Vienna, 1898; courtesy Secession; Joseph Maria Olbrich,
interior: Secession, Vienna, 1898; courtesy Secession;
Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer, interior: Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna, completed 1891; courtesy Kunsthistorisches
Museum
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.
Brian O'Doherty develops a persuasive
case for the inevitability of this development in his seminal
series of essays for Artforum (written between
1976 and 1986)8, where he discusses
how Impressionism broke and remade existing perceptual laws,
and created pictures which seemed to escape from their frames,
and so demanded their own discrete conditions of viewing.
It was this period, he argues, which also blurred, and then
broke, the boundaries between picture and wall. This led ultimately
to installation art, and art where the gallery wall became
part of, and sometimes subject of, the image.
With this development, the history
of art becomes inextricably linked with the history of museum
architecture, and of curation and museology. "Hanging," says
O'Doherty, "editorialises on matters of interpretation and
value, and is unconsciously influenced by taste and fashion."9
And inevitably the spaces in which art is hung come to shape
and dictate a considerable portion of that taste.
One of the first architectural articulations
of the debate that was going to continue to hover around the
building of exhibition spaces for art, took place at the end
of the nineteenth century in Vienna. The Ringstrasse project
in Vienna aimed to gather all the major cultural and institutional
buildings of the Hapsburg Empire around the curve of a newly
created boulevard in what had been Vienna's 'green belt'.
Each building was to have its own historical style. Completed
in 1891, the Kunsthistorisches Museum (architects Gottfried
Semper and Karl von Hasenauer) created a massive building
in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The enormous entrance
hall of the Museum, with its monumental marble staircases,
leaves you in no doubt of the historical weight and cultural
significance of the works you are about to see. From 1890
to 1891 Gustav Klimt and his company of artists (the Künstlercompagnie)
were commissioned to create a series of allegorical panels
for the main hall of the Kunsthistorisches, spanning the history
of art from ancient Egypt to Cinquecento Florence.
In 1897, only six years after completing
this project, Gustav Klimt was involved with the creation
of a totally different way to experience art, with his selection
as the first president of the new Association of Austrian
Visual Artists Vienna Secession. The aims of the Vienna
Secession were to find a totally new form of expression in
art, rejecting the traditions of eclectic historicism embodied
in the art of the time, and in the Ringstrasse architectural
project in particular.
The erection of its own building
was one of the key projects of the Vienna Secession, and was
discussed in the inaugural meeting of the society. Joseph
Maria Olbrich was commissioned to design the building, and
a site had been found on the Ringstrasse itself. But when
Olbrich's designs were unveiled in the Autumn of 1897, they
were violently rejected by the Municipal Council and had to
be transferred to the less prestigious Friedrichstrasse. The
Secession building (1898) is one of the key works of the Viennese
Art Nouveau style. It and the Kunsthistorisches Museum embody
the dialectic between eclectic historicism and modern architecture.
The pure clean forms and unbroken planes of the Secession's
interior galleries point towards O'Doherty's 'White Cube'10,
and while the Art Nouveau style still called for mythical
forms (such as a crown of gilt laurel leaves, and topless
dancing maidens in a frieze around the exterior), the clean
functionalism of the interior, its glazed roof bathing the
main exhibition hall in light, and the flexibility and adaptability
of the main space make it a revolutionary prototype for contemporary
art spaces.
The Vienna Secession believed in
the concept of the gesamtkunstwerk, the 'total work
of art', where architecture, interior decoration and lighting
combined to create the space in which a work should be exhibited
and 'read'. That the building they commissioned for this project
should be the precursor of what we would now call a 'neutral'
space (the clean white box) forms an articulate part of the
argument that there is really no such thing.
Two further developments must be
recognised in the transition from the Louvre/ British Museum
model of the museum to the contemporary art museum as we understand
it. The first of these was the entry of America into the world
art market. Initially copying European models, new American
museums, such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (from
1880, initial architects: Theodore Weston 1880, and Richard
Morris Hunt 1894) were driven by the desire to demonstrate
great wealth, legitimise newly-made fortunes, and show evidence
of new-world culture by reference to the collection of old-world
artefacts. Amassed initially around traditional core collections
of antiquities, old masters and nineteenth-century paintings,
the Americans also began to add Asian art and the Impressionists.
The ultimate effect of this new axis
of purchasing power meant that some areas of art history all
but dried up. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a
new museum was unlikely to be able to able to pretend to anything
approaching an encyclopaedic re-telling of art history, and
gradually curators began to consolidate their collections
around perceived areas of 'strength', examples of a particular
movement, or the work of a single artist. This (albeit slowly)
freed museum architecture from its rigid didactic progressional
plan, although it wasn't until Rogers and Piano's Pompidou
Centre (The Centre d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris
1977) that the mould was truly broken.11
The second development to reshape
the course of 'modern' art museums was the Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA), New York (1939, architects Philip L. Goodwin and
Edward Durrell Stone). Conceived by its first charismatic
director, Alfred Barr, as a 'torpedo', its nose "the ever-advancing
present, its tail the ever-receding past,"12
Barr's idea, in answer to Gertrude's Stein's critique that
one could either be modern or a museum, but not both, was
that the museum would continually de-accession works as they
ceased to be contemporary. Naturally this never happened.
But the radical nature of MoMA's project, in terms of contemporary
museum development, lay in Barr's famous pronouncement that
the architecturally Modernist Museum would be "a laboratory;
in its experiments, the public is invited to participate."13
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Herzog &
de Meuron, interior: Turbine Hall, Tate Modern,
1994-2000; photo Marcus Leith, courtesy Tate Modern
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Museums have an interesting relationship
with the new, as Barr's failure to de-accession would suggest.
A cliché as popular as the 'cathedral' one is that art museums,
contemporary and otherwise, are both 'dormitories' and more
forcefully 'morgues' for the art in their collections. But
there is a paradoxically positive nature to the collecting
and filing away of art, in that it liberates us, as makers,
from repetition of the past. After the Russian Revolution,
when the new Soviet Government expressed concern for the old
Russian museums and art collections, Kasimir Malevich wrote
a protest to encourage their destruction. "Burn all past epochs,"
he announced. And if you really want to, he suggested storing
the ashes of Old Masters in jars in a pharmacy, where those
so minded could still go and finger their charred remains.
In an earlier text, Malevich had remarked that it was impossible
to paint the "fat ass of Venus" any more, and that something
new had to be made. But, as philosopher Boris Groys argues,
it is precisely the preserving of the masters in museums that
frees us from having to repeat Venus' ass, and makes the replication
of old styles, conventions, and forms unnecessary.14
Given that today's art museums are
the inheritors of traditions of delight, of entertainment,
of education, of colonialism and imperialism, of artistic
freedom, of paradoxical release from the tyranny of past forms,
and increasingly of urban regeneration, and social inclusion:
to what end - of all these strands, should their architecture
be driven?
In a reductive sense, according to
Vito Acconci, museums are built the way the public stands
in front of the art object.15
But museums also bring you to that art object, and add their
own traditions to the aesthetic assumptions and cultural baggage
that one brings to the act of viewing. Within the essential
architectural vocabulary of art spaces - including controllable
natural light, good storage, clean spaces, a certain amount
of height, flexible spaces, progression of rooms - a developing
new lexicon is attempting to create spaces for all the new
forms of art; forms that move beyond the frame and have climbed
down off the plinth. Today's art spaces conspire to create
freedom and inspiration, rather than just merely "shelter
and warmth" for art16, although,
in some cases a confusing new scenario is developing in which
"the experience of place is replacing the experience of art."17
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Herzog &
de Meuron, interior: Tate Modern, 1994-2000;
photo Marcus Leith, courtesy Tate Modern
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So where does all that leave contemporary
architects? There is, as we have seen, no such thing as a
'neutral' space, and in terms of the idea of presence-of-absence
with which this article opened, the white cube's presence
of absence all the more strongly calls up the spectral presence
of the critical and art-historical apparatus that has determined
it over its 200-year history. Attempts in the sixties and
seventies to shake off this baggage by colonising warehouse
spaces for art largely failed as the weight of the museum's
history clings more strongly than institutions, like the DIA
Center in New York, would want to think. DIA's spaces are
extremely well suited to the art they display, but one is
never in any doubt that one is in that rarefied space for
art-viewing: the gallery.
This essay is the first in a series
of four, the result of researches supported by the Arts
Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon Bursary in Contemporary Architecture
Criticism. The strategies with which contemporary artists
and architects have engaged the idea of museum space will
be dealt with in the rest of the series. The next two essays
will focus on individual examples of contemporary museum building,
looking at alternatives in site and design; while the final
article will explore the relationship of the artist to the
museum, at artistic/architectural collaborations, and at artist-created
museums.18
Gemma Tipton is a writer.
