museum perspectives

The reconstruction of museums has long been equated with their expansion. This is partly necessitated by growth in the size of exhibits, as the spatial aspect has been essential to many post-war art forms, such as installation and land art. The dematerialization of art has not been able to stem the tide of demand for physical exhibition space. On the contrary, digital technologies have made it possible to document performances and reproduce ephemeral events in the form of numerous square feet of photographic print and thousands of characters of accompanying text, and to do so easily and almost uncontrollably.

So the drive to expand seems to derive from a transformation in the nature of art and to be inevitable. The trend is not specific to a particular geographic region or phase of development of the culture industry. It is happening in the United States (where a new Whitney Museum building by architect Renzo Piano was opened in 2015, and the renovated and enlarged San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened to visitors in 2016), in Europe (where the long-awaited new wing of Tate Modern opened in 2016) and in Russia (where a new building is being designed for the National Center of Contemporary Art, as well as a whole museum quarter for the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). These are just a few, high-profile examples of a much broader trend: new museums opening today aim to achieve unprecedented capacity from the outset.

But capacity for what? If we are talking about works of art, then, as Hal Foster noted, Richard Serra, for example, undoubtedly produces great work, ‘but that doesn’t mean that its size should be the standard measure of exhibition space’. [ 1 ] 1. Foster H. After the White Cube // London Review of Books 37, №6, 2015. P. 25–26. Moreover, a significant part of the space in museums today is taken up by rest zones, food courts, and retail areas.

Limiting ourselves to museums of modern art, we notice that, despite offering new exhibition strategies and pondering the very phenomenon of museumification, they tend inexorably to expand their floor area. Take the flagship Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums of its kind and the most famous of them all. First opened in 1929 it has moved several times from a smaller to a larger building and is now preparing to expand once again.

But there comes a limit to any expansion. And here we might recall the museum that lent MoMA its name (though Anson Conger Goodyear insisted that the borrowing was inadvertent) [ 2 ] 2. Goodyear A. C. The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. P. 15. and part of its collection, but which—most importantly for our purposes—was based on a model that was diametrically opposed to that of MoMA.

A museum of modern art vs The Museum of Modern Art

In 1920, artist and collector Katherine Sophie Dreier, together with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, founded Société Anonyme, Inc: The Museum of Modern Art: 1920. The first exhibition of this ‘experimental’ museum took place in May 1920 at 19 East 47th Street in New York City, where the heterodoxy of the idea was immediately apparent. The organizers sought to make a space akin to a dwelling, where intimacy and human scale contrasted with the grandeur of national museums. Katherine Dreier was dissatisfied with vast unitary spaces, such as that which hosted the Armory Show. She believed they left the visitor with no emotion except that of being lost and isolated from the artworks. The Société Anonyme wanted to exhibit art in less spacious premises that ‘articulated like small rooms’, [ 3 ] 3. Goudinoux N. L’émergence de la Société Anonyme // Etant Donné, №2, 1999. P. 36. but not because it intended to exhibit art to potential buyers as they would see it when they had taken it home. The museum, despite its misleading name (‘société anonyme’ in French means ‘limited company’, suggesting Dadaist wordplay on the part of the founders) [ 4 ] 4. Clark W. Katherine Dreier and the Société Anonyme // Variant 2, №14, 2001. P. 5. emphasized the non-profit nature of its activities. ‘The Museum does not sell any works exhibited under its direction but gladly brings any prospective buyer directly in touch with the artist,’ stated the flyer to the exhibition of 1921. [ 5 ] 5. Flyer for Société Anonyme exhibition at 19 East 47th Street, 8th exhibition, 1921 Mar 15 – Apr 12. Yale University Library. URL: http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3768319.

Dreier’s idea was that people should not come to art in order to worship it. To achieve a full understanding of art, one has to live with it, neither considering it as decoration nor evaluating the interior that results from its presence in terms of good or bad taste. ‘Today our greatest danger is our good taste,’ she stated, worried by how fashionable concerns were displacing the challenges and transformative potential of modern art. [ 6 ] 6. Meyer R. Big, Middle-Class Modernism // October, № 131, 2010. P. 105. So, for the Société Anonyme, the museum should evoke a home rather than a temple. [ 7 ] 7. The space of another exhibition hall that was significant for the museum’s history, at the Brooklyn Museum, also consisted of four rooms that were supposed to resemble rooms of a residential apartment.

Denying hierarchies was a fundamental principle of the Société Anonyme. The Société collected and exhibited not only the most challenging art of the time (abstract art not yet known to a wider audience), but also artists who would need years of struggle to arrive at the Olympian heights of other museums. The Soviet avant-garde was out of sight for Americans in the 1920s, for political reasons, but there was other art which, for a long period of time, was valued only for its exotic nature, such as the art of Latin America. ‘We have to change our attitude towards Latin races and recognise the great contribution which they have made and continue to make to civilisation,’ Dreier insisted. [ 8 ] 8. Goudinoux N. L’émergence de la Société Anonyme // Etant Donné, №2, 1999. P. 25. Finally, thanks to Dreier, who was a suffragette, the Société Anonyme brought to the pubic gaze an unprecedented quantity of works by female artists: Marthe Donas, Suzanne Duchamp, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Lyubov Popova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Milly Steger, and others.

The Museum of Modern Art, with Alfred H. Barr as its director, also began by exploring new and unknown art, addressing itself to the not-yet-established living artists of the current time. But it quickly shook off any reputation for being an innovative and experimental institution, and returned to the stereotype of the temple-like museum. The radical difference between the identity of MoMA compared with the Société Anonyme is apparent from a MoMA eulogy that appeared in the The New York Times of 1932: ‘Novitiate has passed. Still young in years but rich in experience and accomplishment, it [the Museum of Modern Art] has demonstrated ability to play the role of modern chronicler and prophet in New York.’ [ 9 ] 9. Goodyear A. C. The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. P. 38.

The deliberately anti-hierarchical stance behind the Société Anonyme collection came largely from Katherine Dreier’s reflections on the relationship between idea and patent. Dreier articulated the problem of authorship in a new way. A museum had to contain ‘art, not personalities’. ‘The person who gets the recognition isn’t necessarily the only person who conceived the idea,’ Dreier stated. ‘There are all these other people who reinforce the idea and contribute to it who are unknown.’ [ 10 ] 10. Gross J. R. (ed.). The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (exhibition catalogue). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, 2006. P. 153.

Although rejecting hierarchies, the Société Anonyme could not forego making judgments, but it did not assume that any judgment was more correct than any other. Marcel Duchamp, talking to Pierre Cabanne about the Société Anonyme, confessed that he almost never went to museums, including the Louvre: ‘I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there.’ [ 11 ] 11. Cabanne P. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. P. 71. So the anti-hierarchical stance of the Société is essentially a noteworthy extension of Duchamp’s famous question: what makes an object a work of art? ‘Is the museum the final form of comprehension, of judgment?’ he asked Cabanne. A work of art becomes such in the eyes of a spectator: ‘It is the onlooker who makes the museum, who provides the elements of the museum.’ [ 12 ] 12. Ibid. P. 70.

We can see, in this context, why the Société Anonyme could so nonchalantly relinquish its own exhibition space: the museum only kept its original premises until 1923, after which the collection was kept at Katherine Dreier’s home. [ 13 ] 13. Goudinoux N. L’émergence de la Société Anonyme // Etant Donné, №2, 1999. P. 29. Although this deterritorialization was forced, it was in perfect harmony with the museum’s ‘horizontal’ program. Instead of establishing itself on a particular plot of earth, the Société used other institutional venues to acquaint the maximum number of people with the art that it promoted and, thereby, to perform one of its main stated missions, that of education. Indeed, the museum was committed to such a nomadic style of life even when it still had a permanent location. As reported in American Art News on May 21, 1921, the Société’s exhibition of ‘extremist’ art, held in the summer of 1921, was scheduled to arrive in Massachusetts in the autumn, and afterwards to make a tour of other American cities. [ 14 ] 14. American Art News, May 21, 1921. P. 1. Subsequent projects, which sometimes included lectures, discussions, and conferences, were held in venues from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Museum, where a significant exhibition opened in 1926, to art galleries in Buffalo and Toronto and in schools and universities. To some of these places the Société Anonyme returned more than once.

The Société Anonyme, in Duchamp’s words ‘contrasting sharply with the commercial trend of our times,’ [ 15 ] 15. Marcel Duchamp’s biographical notes regarding Katherine Dreier. Yale University Library. 1946. URL: http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3546733. was finally sunk by the financial crisis of the 1930s. In 1941 it handed over its collection to Yale University Art Gallery and in 1950 the collection was dissolved.

The New York Museum of Modern Art thus obtained a monopoly on contemporary art. Funded by the Rockefeller fortune and moving to larger premises three times in the first 10 years of its existence, its ethos as a museum was the antithesis of the Société Anonyme. MoMA’s aim was to become the only museum of contemporary art, absorbing weaker structures. In an extensive memorandum entitled ‘Theory and Content of an Ideal Permanent Collection,’ which Alfred Barr sent to the Board of Trustees in 1933, he noted the existence of other collections of modern art, including the Société Anonyme, and recommended keeping in touch with their owners in case they could be persuaded to transfer their works to the Museum of Modern Art. [ 16 ] 16. Lorente J. P. The Museums of Contemporary Art: Notion and Development. London: Ashgate, 2013. P. 149. The MoMA ethos, rather than that of the Société Anonyme, would be the prime model for other cultural institutions exhibiting modern art, first in the United States and then in Europe.

Refinding the path: The Stedelijk Museum

Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray did not blaze a trail, but they marked a path. In America the path quickly grew over, but not in Europe, where it was kept open after World War II thanks to the directors of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I will discuss the immediate post-war period of the Museum’s
existence under the directorship of Willem Sandberg (1945–1963). Sandberg was an admirer of Alfred Barr, [ 17 ] 17. See, for example: Schavemaker M. The White Cube as Lieu de Mémoire: The Return of History in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Reinwardt Academie, 2017. but he was also the person who kept the vision of Dreier’s Société alive and at the forefront of international museum life.

Sandberg began work to reconstruct the Stedelijk immediately after World War II. However the only increase in the museum’s exhibition space between then and 2004 was the addition of a small wing in 1954. [ 18 ] 18. Davidts W. Nostalgia and Pragmatism: Architecture and the New Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam // Architectural Theory Review 13, №1, 2008. P. 98–99.

The reason why spatial enlargement was not significant (and even not desirable) for a museum with a collection among the best in the world is clear from something Sandberg said in a lecture at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1973. ‘Today we don’t want to live with what we are expected to venerate. We really don’t know if museums, and specially museums of contemporary art, should exist in eternity. <...> Ideally, art should once again be integrated in daily life, should go out on the streets, enter the buildings, become a necessity.’ [ 19 ] 19. Toorn R. Dirty Details // Archis, №3, March 1, 2001. URL: http://volumeproject.org/dirty-details/.

Sandberg put forward the same propositions as Katherine Dreier. Firstly, museums should not be perceived as temples and the hierarchical thinking that goes with such a view is to be rejected. Secondly, and relatedly, art is to be lived with rather than worshipped. And if the Société Anonyme made its exhibition spaces akin to rooms in a home, Sandberg suggested an even more radical path away from aggrandizement of the museum building. He said, bluntly: ‘This should be the major aim of the museum: to make itself redundant.’ [ 20 ] 20. Petersen A. Sandberg, Designer and Director of the Stedelijk. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004. P. 26.

Seen in this light, the strategy shared by the Société Anonyme and the Stedelijk is perfectly consistent: it played down the role of buildings and fostered cooperation with other institutions in order to display exhibits outside the limits of the museum’s own architecture. [ 21 ] 21. This, to a large extent, became possible in the last years of Willem Sandberg’s directorship. The Stedelijk’s artworks travelled to meet new viewers instead of becoming entrenched on their own territory. The Museum of Modern Art had, by the 1960s, intermittently raised the question of whether it should lend artworks from its collection to other museums and galleries, [ 22 ] 22. Barr A. H. Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, 1929–1967. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977. P. 645. but nothing had come of it. The Stedelijk and its collection had been guests elsewhere as often as they had been hosts on their own turf. Without emphasizing this information, and providing it among other statistics on Stedelijk activity in his usual lower case lettering, Sandberg noted in 1961 that 50 exhibitions a year were held in the museum building, while 50 more were hosted by other institutions. [ 23 ] 23. Jaffe H. I. C., Sandberg W. Pioneers of Modern Art in the Museum of the City of Amsterdam. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. P. 402.

Some of the Stedelijk’s external projects were one-offs, but others led to new things. In 1958, for example, Willem Sandberg found common ground with Paolo Marinotti, head of the International Centre for Art and Costume in Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, and together they immediately conceived the idea of the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte (Vitality in Art). It was presented in 1959–1960 at the Palazzo Grassi and the Stedelijk Museum, before moving to the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. [ 24 ] 24. Cagol S. C. Exhibition History and the Institution as a Medium // Stedelijk Studies, №2, 2015. URL: http://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/exhibition-history-and-the-institution-as-a-medium/#_ednref5.  Sandberg pursued the cooperation with Marinotti in a thematically related joint exhibition entitled Natuur en Kunst (Nature and Art). These projects expanded the boundaries of the museum, but the expansion was not in terms of space but in terms of what the museum was capable of doing. Natuur en Kunst, as if saluting Duchamp, displayed natural objets trouvés, such as pieces of wood and stone, handcrafted objects made out of shells and wood, as well as amateur paintings. [ 25 ] 25. Ibid.

Sandberg also cooperated enthusiastically with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement, the cover of the exhibition catalogue featured Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp) curated by Moderna Museet director Pontus Hulten in 1961 spent six weeks in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk before moving to Stockholm, changing its name to Art in Motion, and then arriving on the already familiar territory of the Louisiana Museum. [ 26 ] 26. “Bewogen Beweging”, Stedelijk Museum, 1961. Henry Moore Institute, 2016. URL: https://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/library/special-collections/bewogen-beweging.

The extent to which the museum wall was for Sandberg a vague and conditional boundary (the wall in Sandberg’s new wing was of glass) is also exemplified by his attempt to work with the Situationist International. [ 27 ] 27. The closest relationship he had was with Asger Jorn. In 1959–1960, Sandberg and the Situationists planned a three-day drift (dérive) to be simultaneously effected in two rooms of the Stedelijk, transformed into a labyrinth, and in the streets of Amsterdam (the plan did not come to fruition due to potential dangers of the labyrinth installation). [ 28 ] 28. Die Welt als Labyrinth // Situationist International Online. URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/diewelt.html.

Evolutionary perspectives

It would be an easy step from the Dadaist background of the Société Anonyme and Sandberg’s utopian remarks about the superfluity of museums as institutions to a nihilist rhetoric, espousing anti-museum concepts. I prefer, though, to use the similarity of structure and operation between the Société and Sandberg’s Stedelijk to help define a particular type of museum, which can be seen, from the perspective proposed by Svetlana Boym, as ‘off modern’. It is something that ‘involves exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity’, [ 29 ] 29. Boym S. Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. P. 7. revealing potential paths of development that had not been noticed before.

The philosophical concepts that Dreier and Sandberg relied on do in fact have a common source. Dreier was fascinated by theosophy and spiritualism, and was influenced by the work of Henri Bergson, and this background helps to explain the selection of artists, whose work was included in the collection of the Société Anonyme: Naum Gabo, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, and Kurt Schwitters. Sandberg’s thinking was also much influenced by Bergson’s biological metaphorics, and not only by the work of Bergson himself (a quotation from whom provides the epigraph to a book, to which Sandberg contributed, on pioneers of modern art in the Stedelijk collection), [ 30 ] 30. Jaffe H. I. C., Sandberg W. Pioneers of Modern Art in the Museum of the City of Amsterdam. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Introduction (not paginated). but also by the writings of his devotee, the poet, critic, and anarchist Herbert Read. In particular, Read’s concept of vitalism was directly related to the themes of the above-mentioned exhibitions by Sandberg and Marinotti. [ 31 ] 31. Cagol S. C. Exhibition History and the Institution as a Medium // Stedelijk Studies, №2, 2015. URL: http://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/exhibition-history-and-the-institution-as-a-medium/#_ednref5.

Two other admirers of Bergson deserve mention here, namely Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose text A Thousand Plateaus expands the horizon of Bergson’s metaphysics. [ 32 ] 32. Deleuze G., Guattari F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. P. 483–484. If we look at the rhizome structure they describe, it constitutes just the type of decentralized, comprehensive, anti-hierarchical organization championed by the Société and by Sandberg. And the working principles of the Société Anonyme and of the Stedelijk during the time of Sandberg seem to prefigure the Deleuze-Guattari idea of nomadism.

The type of museum that we have described here is unlikely to, and probably should not, serve as a model at the present time. But, it can become a resource for cultural “exaptation”—a concept, also borrowed by Svetlana Boym from biology, which describes what happens when a particular trait evolves to serve some new function that was not part of its original purpose. [ 33 ] 33. Boym S. The Off-Modern Mirror // E-flux, №19, 2010. URL: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-off-modern-mirror/.

The exaptation from the ‘Société-Sandberg’ museum that could be most relevant today relates to museum governance. The vertical, tree-like structure that defines most institutions today means that, the larger a museum grows, the more rigid its hierarchy must be in order to manage this structure. As a result, what museum directors require above all nowadays is exceptional managerial skills, and other aspects of a museum’s work risk being sacrificed to managerial efficiency. Rejecting such an authoritarian model, where the core objective is to control the dependent units, in favour of a heterogeneous, anti-hierarchical type of organization implies, as a minimum, the opportunity for a museum to reallocate its resources and focus on its original purpose of dealing with artists, art, and exhibitions, and, as a maximum, restitution of the museum to artists and return to the governance model of the artist-driven space, which was used in the first museum of modern art.

Translated from: Shpilko O. Iskusstvo, a ne personalii // Dialog Iskusstv, №4, 2016. P. 70–73.