C93 Article

Museums of modern and contemporary art tend to be big - in scale, money and hype. But what are they about, and how much are they about art? Here Fióna Kearney introduces the first in a series of articles which will tackle in turn a number of the most talked about of these new architectural, curatorial, societal phenomena.

The 1997 launch of the Bilbao Guggenheim provoked a flurry of commentaries on the role and function of the modern art museum. Coming from a significant corpus of academic studies in museology, the debate entered a wider domain. As a result, curatorial practice is in the process of being very publicly redefined. The museum is critiqued as a secular site of devotion, a distinguished Disneyland, or another cog in consumer commerce. With a number of museums around the world being constructed, relocated or simply rethought, it seems appropriate to consider the impact and value of these different organisations. This article introduces a new series of critical reports, starting in this issue with a review of Tate Modern, which will examine how individual institutions are responding to the demands of 21^st century museum practice.

How we experience and understand any modern art museum is dependent on a number of factors, not least our own education and bias. We may be there to pay homage to a pantheon of established artists, learn about avant-garde art, discover the latest canonised trends in contemporary practice, or enjoy a spread of works from the international art scene of the last 100 years. We may just want to visit the gallery shop. Notwithstanding these personal preferences, the ABC shaping art museums in the 21^st century seems to be a creative trinity of Art + Building + Curator. The architecture, the work and its mise-en-sc?ne form the basis of our experience of the modern art museum. Sometimes the building seems to control the encounter, as with the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao; sometimes curatorial strategies are more apparent, as with the thematic exhibition now favoured at Tates Britain and Modern; and sometimes the collection dominates regardless of space or display methods. Usually it is a combination of this cultural ABC, what we see and how we see it, that influences our appreciation of modern art.

Much of the art made over the last hundred years was created specifically for a museum context and thus there is a crucial interplay between the development of the modern art museum and art practice in the 20th century. Artists have long used visual means to challenge and disrupt the powers that be, but in the early part of the last century this became a direct critique of the authority of the art institution. Duchamp´s irreverent Fountain, rejected by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, was more than a literal piss-take of establishment conservatism and an inquiry into the way in which the sanctioned space of the gallery prioritises certain objects over others. The problem of course is not in the concentration of our eye on a given selection of objects but how the selection of this particular set of objects was made. What gets shown and why? This remains a very important question. DuchampÕs urinal, now on display as a readymade in a number of museums worldwide, reminds us to ask. Museums are generally able to absorb this kind of critique (think of Andy Warhol´s brillo boxes carefully preserved under glass), simultaneously neutralising the shock value of the work through the validation of display and spurring artists on to more daring and provocative modes of expression. This avant-garde cycle of supply-and-demand outrage art indicates just how often museum and artist collude in the creation of new objects for visual consumption.

Artists have subsequently taken their statements outside the museum space; witness the Guerrilla GirlsÕ famous billboard query, ”Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?: less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” This work may not hang inside a museum but it has the overt intention of interrogating the work that does. Equally, work that tried to defy the restraints of the white cube, particularly the performance and land art of the 1970s, has been drawn back into a mechanism of display through the presentation of documentation pertaining to the event. Preparatory sketches sometimes indicate projects never actually realised, as with Christo and Jeanne-Claude´s proposal to wrap St. Stephen´s Green, which is on show in DublinÕs Hugh Lane Municipal Art Gallery. What is seen is what is remembered, and artists and curators quickly realised that even if the project never took place or the event was conceived as transitory, documents could be kept to hold the idea/moment for exhibition, and posterity.

The story of Modern Art then is interwoven with that of its institutions. A collection may quickly become a canon, but modern art museums can devise ways of seeing that enable us to understand how their particular ABC is a contingent expression of a complex visual history and therefore constantly open to revision. The reports to appear in forthcoming issues of CIRCA will examine how individual museums have chosen to present the 20^th century, their lexicon of modern art, and consider how that statement will influence the ever-changing language of contemporary art.

Fióna Kearney is Visual Arts Officer at University College Cork.

Articles in this series:
Tate Modern
Pompidou Centre
MUHKA
MoMA
Moderna Museet (forthcoming)