C106
article
"Museums
patronise, isolate and neutralise artists..."
In
the final of this series of articles, Gemma Tipton looks
at the relationship of both the artist and the architect
to the gallery space.
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Courtyard
with (from left): Leopold Museum, Kunsthall Vienna
and Halls E+G (centre), MUMOK © Rupert Steiner,
courtesy Museums Quartier Wien. Leopold Museum and
MUMOK by architects Ortner & Ornter, 2001
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Donald Judd (quoted
in the title of this essay) isn't the only artist to have
had 'issues' with museums. According to Picasso, "museums
are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their
business are mostly impostors."
Artists have traditionally had a problematic relationship
with the institutions that collect, sell and exhibit their
work. Architects can feel somewhat differently, "Museums
satisfy... a deep natural want... as deep and as natural
as sex or sleeping," says Philip Johnson,
a view which is challenged by Le Corbusier's suggestion
that "the museums are a recent invention; once there were
none. So let us admit that they are not a fundamental
component of human life like bread, drink, religion, orthography."
While these
quotes relate directly to the institution of the museum,
the issues go beyond and encompass the shape of the gallery
space. Both museums and galleries are areas where control
of how an artwork is viewed has passed from the artist,
who has envisaged and created it, into the hands of an
architect, gallery designer, museum director, and art
curator.
Asked how
he would like to see his work exhibited, Judd did
have some more positive suggestions to make. It should
be:
a
large rectangular space with a fairly high ceiling...
There shouldn't be any mouldings or grooves. The walls
and floors should be smooth and square, not flagstones...
the floor shouldn't be patterned. Ideally, the architecture
of the building should be good outside and inside. That
excludes the elegance of most new galleries and museums.
Adding to
the issue of how the art is seen in their galleries is
the way in which museum and private collections contextualise
new additions. Saatchi's art collection is a case in point
here, for it is a defining collection. Being acceded
to it is to be subsumed into the YBA phenomenon, associations
and aesthetic.
Interesting
for the purposes of this discussion is the Saatchi Gallery's
recent move from Boundary Road (conversion of a garage
and motor repair shop, architect: Max Gordon, 1984), to
the Edwardian splendour of County Hall on London's Embankment
(architect: Ralph Knott, 1911). 98A Boundary Road lurked
off the beaten art-track in St. John's Wood. Notoriously
hard to find, it was nonetheless named, in an international
poll of artists, the "British Gallery in which they would
most like to exhibit," giving
the lie to the idea that accessibility is a prime requirement
(you even had to take a bus to get there...). Gordon
lined the interior of the original building to create
top-lit, windowless, aggressively white galleries, whose
industrial origins were revealed only in the steel trusses
of the shed roof.
Art shown
in 98A Boundary Road was 'out there', the difficulties
in finding the galleries mirroring the effort expected
of the viewer in engaging with what was being presented
as the absolute avant-garde. The unrelieved whiteness
of the exhibition spaces (with no creature comforts like
seating or bookshops and cafés) demonstrated that
the art was centre-stage, that the art was about nothing,
and cared about nothing - except itself. It was a self-referential
world, and created the necessary self-regarding insularity
to turn a collection into a phenomenon.
The Tate's
institutionalising of cutting-edge contemporary art, with
the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 (architects: Herzog
and de Meuron) left the role of Saatchi's collection and
exhibitions uncertain. Moving to County Hall, just along
the river from Tate Modern signalled not only Saatchi's
sense of competition with Nick Serota's Tate (the two
men were once more confederates than competitors), but
also the collector's growing sense of being an 'institution'
himself. "It's a revelation to break out of the white
cube time warp," says Saatchi. "If art can't look good
outside the antiseptic gallery spaces dictated by museum
fashion of the last 25 years, then it condemns itself
to a worryingly limited lifespan."
These sentiments sound plausible enough, although the
main hint is that Saatchi's eye is now on a place in history.
The interior
of County Hall is listed, and while Saatchi has subverted
some of its grandeur with the placement of exhibits, such
as Damien Hirst's Spot mini (2002) careening down
the marble entry staircase, and Duane Hanson's Tourists
(1998) lurking in the lobby,
the architecture and historical resonances of the building
now announce that Saatchi's collection is no longer the
art-outsider, the Salon des refusés, it
is now the Salon itself. Artworks and museum collections
sited in historic buildings place the art in the inexorable
stream of history, emphasising its significance in the
unfolding of the cultural heritage of the city or country.
This subtle alteration of a works' meaning through context
does not just happen in overtly 'historic' buildings like
the new Saatchi Gallery, or the Irish Museum of Modern
Art (conversion architect: Shay Cleary, 1991).
Asked what
he thought the ideal space was, artist Barnett Newman's
view was "that my work be shown, as closely as possible,
the way it looks in my studio where it was created."
Newman's ideal is taken up and embodied in art spaces
housed, like the studios where Newman and his contemporaries
were making their work, in renovated industrial buildings,
retaining their industrial aesthetic and characteristics.
The location of art objects in a setting similar to that
of their making definitely works for a particular kind
of art. Not only that, but siting art works from other
conditions and periods of making in industrial conversions
exerts as much of a contextual layering of references
as does their location in classical historical buildings.
Tate Modern,
the Baltic in Gateshead (conversion of a flour mill, architect
Dominic Williams, 2001), and the Lingotto Exhibition Spaces
in Turin (former Fiat factory, conversion architect Renzo
Piano, 1983-1996 phases 1 and 2), are all conversions
of former industrial buildings. These conversions are
beloved of governments and city planners as they provide
a use for irritatingly listed buildings, and demonstrate
that while manufacturing industry may have all but collapsed,
the sexy new leisure industry, with its concomitant tourism,
is a welcome replacement. Art is located firmly as an
alternative industry, beginning also to accede to the
demands of industry as business, in terms of targets,
financial returns and visitor numbers. Art in these buildings
is telling you that the greatness of the nation has moved
beyond making things to creating; art here is a sign of
cultural maturity rather than a testament to historical
significance.
The apotheosis
of this type of art space is Dia:Beacon in New York (conversion
of a printing factory, design: Robert Irwin, in collaboration
with architects OpenOffice, 2003),
while at another extreme, Rem Koolhaas took on the conceit
to create an industrial space where before the only industry
had been gambling and (as the Americans would put it 'vice')
in his Las Vegas Guggenheim (2001, now converted to a
theatre). Koolhaas even went as far as to choreograph
carefully placed ersatz oil spills on the gallery floor.
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Richard
Serra, Torqued Ellipse II, 1996; Double
Torqued Ellipse, 1997, Dia Art Foundation; gift
of Louise and Leonard Riggio, 2000. Photo Richard
Barnes, courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Installation
view at Dia:Beacon, designed by Robert Irwin, with
OpenOffice architects, 2003.
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Another argument
for converting existing buildings to art spaces is that
it saves money. "Instead of spending millions on creating
identical, austere modernist palaces in every world city,
they could actually use the money to buy some art," says
Saatchi. Dia's director
Michael Govan would also use the justification, he quotes
Donald Judd, "so much money spent on architecture in the
name of art, much more than goes to art, is wrong, even
if [the] architecture were good, but it's bad." He goes
on to add himself, "A utilitarian existing building...
unlike so many architect-designed new museums, where the
building itself is intended to have the qualities of a
sculpture - does not impose its own overriding artistic
signature onto the art."
But what
of new builds?
Vienna is
a city of unquestionable historical significance, and
one with a thriving tourist industry based on its past.
It is also where the debate about what kind of space is
best suited to art-exhibiting finds its roots, in the
dialectic between the Kunsthistoriches Museum (architects
Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer, 1891), and the
Secession (architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, 1898).
Yet when the decision was taken to turn the former Royal
Stables into Vienna's new Museum Quarter, architects Ortner
& Ortner were engaged not to renovate, or to work
in sympathy with the existing buildings but to stamp an
aggressively modern signature on the historic site, with
the Leopold museum to one side, and the black basalt MuMoK
(Museum of Modern Kunst) to the other (2001). With this
statement, Vienna is announcing that its artists are not
rooted in the past, but are looking forward. It implies
that Vienna's artists and collectors are able to reject
the past out of hand when they wish to, and that Vienna
is a city where creative and intellectual leaps forward
did not cease with Freud. Art exhibited here is therefore
seen through these filters.
Given that
whether you choose to build, or to renovate recent or
historic buildings, you are placing works of art in inescapable
contexts, what do artists themselves choose? Claes Oldenburg
suggests, "I believe museums should be austere and dignified,
and packed with experts completely in love with art and
detached from everything else," immediately adding, "but
the rare times when a museum relaxes and risks the penetration
of life can be sublime."
And that, unfortunately is the issue with architecture:
barring buildings which were obviously set to be disasters
from the outset, you only know how a space is going to
work when it's finished.
Entering
the debate, Frank Gehry, an architect who has designed
art spaces as diverse as the industrial conversion, Temporary
Contemporary (now Geffen Contemporary) in Los Angeles
(1983), and the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), found himself
in an intriguing reversal of position:
My
discussions about museums with artists began in the late
1970s, when I was confronted by a group of artists. It
was Michael Asher, John Knight, Benjamin Buchloh, and
Daniel Buren. They asked, "Okay Mr. Gehry, you love the
artist and the work, what kind of museum would you make
for us?" And I said what architects have said for a long
time and what architects keep saying, "Well the building
is for art, so the art should stand out. The building
should be very neutral and should not intrude, it should
not in any way compete with the art or become visible.
We should be that invisible puppeteer, like in the Japanese
dances." I said all of that, and when I finished my holier-then-thou
statement I got attacked like I've never been attacked
before. I was told, "Goddamnit, you're so stupid. Don't
you understand that when we finally get our work to be
shown in a museum, we want it to be an important place?
If you give us a neutral damn thing it ain't gonna be
very important. It's not going to be important in the
city, it's not going to have any presence in the community.
The thought
of Gehry being attacked by a group of angry artists goes
some way to make up for the unevenness of the competition
he has established between the exhibition spaces of his
architecturally awesome Bilbao museum, and the art shown
therein. Jeff Koons and Jenny Holzer win their rounds,
but the rest are left rather struggling.
So what do
we really want? Crazy inspirational shapes and spaces?
'Neutral' white cubes? Architecture that whispers? Architecture
that declaims? With so many words spent and ink spilt
on what art museums could and should look like, Peter
Eisenman suggests a little 'going back to basics'.
Perhaps
one of the problems with museums is that we in architecture
are in fact stuck with a tradition which I would call
theorizing form... We are at the end of a dying line.
That line is a line that has always thought that form
took care of everything and that space really was what
happened.
Eisenman
goes on to advocate taking another look at the void, considering
the shape of the space that the art will inhabit, rather
than focussing on the constructions that surround it,
and it is here that the art of architecture (if there
is such a thing) lies. Consideration of that void is a
consideration of the issues raised by Niall McCullough
in the previous essay in this series, that "architecture
by definition exists in and around the art and will have
form." Beyond the mathematics
of space, it is the essential understanding of the dynamics
of volume, as demonstrated so brilliantly by Robert Irwin
at Dia:Beacon, that creates the memorable white cubes
where works of art can find the space to speak on their
own terms. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to paint artists
and their works as passive victims of architecture.
Donald Judd
believed in the permanent installation of artworks, "It
takes a great deal of time and thought to install work
carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most
art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved
again," Judd therefore created
his own spaces, first at his house on Spring Street in
New York's SoHo, and then with the Chinati Foundation
at Marfa, isolated in the middle of the West Texas Chihuahua
desert.
Visitors to
Chinati are fond of saying it feels like a pilgrimage
- and indeed it does. There's something about the drive
through hundreds of miles of uninterrupted desert that
makes the mind ready to see something. And at the disused
army barracks, Fort D.A. Russell, which Judd purchased
after falling into fascination with the place in 1971,
what you see is the perfect harmony of space, light and
art. Judd's installation of his 100 works in mill aluminium
(1982-86) in two of the artillery sheds is, that rare
thing to experience, exactly as it should be - and it
allows minimalism to work in a way that it can't when
contemplated in a ten-minute break, snatched between subway
and shopping. At Chinati, Judd had time (and initially
money) to consider the placement
of his works, and those of his contemporaries. The Dan
Flavin neon Untitled (1996) project, realised in
six mess huts, manipulates the architecture in the same
way that Judd's installation of his own work does. On
the other hand the huts devoted to John Wesley's paintings
give you an is that it...? feel after all that
sublimity of light and space. At the Guggenheim Bilbao
the architecture fights with the art, at Chinati the sublimity
of the architectural spaces create expectations that give
no quarter to slighter work.
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ABK
Architects, Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1978. Installation
view showing exhibition Home, 200/2001, photo
courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery
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Of course
it's a rare artist with the time, money or inclination
to create their own museum, but conversely museums and
galleries do plenty of creating of their own. The 1999
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art New York (architects
Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone 1939), The
Museum as Muse, placed the role of the museum
as inspirer and instigator of art centre-stage. From the
museum-in-a-box experiments of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph
Cornell, to the renditions of the Guggenheim's rotunda
in fibreglass relief, running from white to black to gold
to rainbow (1965-66) by Richard Hamilton, to Komar and
Melamid's Scenes from the future: the Guggenheim (1975)
showing the Guggenheim in ruins; the exhibition demonstrated
artists' long-term fascination, and discomfort, with the
ideologies and architectures of the museum. As it did
this, however, it also inescapably underpinned the museum
and gallery's central role in art-making.
Artists working
towards commissioned exhibitions will take account of
the gallery's size, shape and aesthetics when embarking
on their work, even if only subconsciously. More conscious
is the way in which an artist like Mike Nelson will take
on the space, using its architecture to become an integral
part of his installations. Tourist Hotel
at the Douglas Hyde (architect: ABK, 1978) in 1999 used
the awkward tunnel and triangle areas of the gallery to
construct a creepy flop-house environment where the visitor
was lured from the openness of the main space into strangely
intense encounters with the objects placed in Nelson's
dimly-lit rooms. At the 2001 Venice Biennale, Nelson created
The Deliverance and the Patience in a disused
brewery on the Giudecca. Discussing the installation,
Jonathan Jones remarks, "As Nelson's architectural installations
become ever more grandiose you begin to wonder if it is
his ultimate intention to build a work of art so vast
that it consumes the reality around it."
In considering
this idea, it soon becomes apparent that the massive size
of some of our most recent art spaces is influencing the
creation of art installations so large that they in turn
could perhaps be considered to become architectural. Anish
Kapoor's 2002 installation at Tate Modern, as part of
the Unilever Series, saw a vast structure stretched through
the Turbine Hall. Part massive sucking trumpet, part enormous
jungle-like plant, Marsyas attracted the attention
of city authorities in Italy, who have since asked the
artist to turn architect and create the entrance to a
metro station in Naples.
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Olafur
Eliasson, installation view, The weather project,
2003, from the Unilever Series of installations
at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, conversion architects
Herzog and de Meuron, 2000 © Olafur Eliasson / photography
by Jens Ziehe, courtesy Tate Modern
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This year's
Tate Turbine installation, Olafur Eliasson's The weather
project, is a fabulous interplay of light and mist
which uses mirrors to dissolve the ceiling of the hall,
and creates an unearthly space where the heavy-handed
forms of the space miraculously disappear. While Eliasson's
project dissolves the architecture, Kapoor's slugs it
out with the constraining walls. Nonetheless, Kapoor will
be the first to resist the label 'architectural'. Instead,
he insists he is "toying with form at architectural scale
but they are not buildings, I loathe making anything practical
whatever." In fact Kapoor
is so insistent that architecture is not art, and art
is not architecture, that he describes a discussion on
the topic with Frank Gehry when he was showing his plans
for Naples:
"I
had dinner with Frank and he did a little benediction
on me and said:
'I
now declare you an architect.'"
What was your response to that?
"Fuck off."
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