Rene — Brian Holmes — Reflecting Museums
Topic(s): Art/Politics | Comments Off on Rene — Brian Holmes — Reflecting MuseumsReflecting Museums
Art in the mirror of political economy
What does a museum produce? You have to wonder, looking at the new Tate Modern – a huge factory reconverted for artistic use. Enter, like I did, by the little door along the Thames. There, during the exhibition “Century City,” you found an information booth: sleek, silent, implacable, an almost administrative sort of thing. Colored panels of text will answer all your questions, with a collage of theoretical phrases like these:
“Through larger audiences, a core funding issue, encoded by vague ethnic and underclass ideology, museums are schooling a new order of citizens for an information society…. Culture education is needed because not only has the versatility of thought and character become necessary survival skills in the super-fluid work/consumer society, but a prerequisite for prosumers of the new corporate political ethos…. The cultural becomes economic, and the economic and political are turned into so many forms of culture…. It is no longer useful for art to offer up, in traditional ways, a critique of control institutions, these structures are now part of the ‘knowledge’ with which institutions are constructed.”
Presented like a public service, these complicated statements give you a rather anxious feeling, particularly because their sources are indicated by logos that distort the names: THOMAS, Harry Clever, Felix Stlder, MEDEA Network, Hardt & Negri… Who exactly is educating us this way, about the reasons for our own education in the museum? After some searching you find a title card for the piece: “Johnny Spencer 1954, Inquiry Unit 2000.” And as you move upstairs toward the rest of the show, an enigmatic statement lingers: “There are times in life when knowing if one can think differently and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.”
Global flâneur
Enter the exhibition itself, where a barrage of capital letters announces what’s ahead: MOSCOW, LAGOS, NEW YORK, VIENNA, TOKYO, PARIS, RIO DE JANEIRO, MUMBAI/BOMBAY, LONDON. “Century City” isn’t exactly hiding its tourist appeal. But this is a sophisticated form of tourism, moving through time as well as space. We’re supposed to take a trip across the twentieth century, through nine significant moments in the history of nine cities.
The exhibition is skillfully done, without being systematic: each module has been framed by local curators, to ensure originality. In the best of cases, like “Lagos 1955-1970,” the results are impressive, mixing the visual arts with a range of cultural practices. To describe fifteen years in the life of a great African city, the curators of “Lagos” decided to split their space in two. On one side, paintings and sculpture gesture towards a vitrine filled with literary works, while a video monitor presents theater. In the other, more “ethnographic” section, a large city map helps set the location, which is fleshed out by selections of magazine and record covers, pages from an architectural journal, black-and-white snapshots from inhabitants’ archives, and an astonishing group of images showing women’s hairstyles. The sounds of Highlife music float in the air, like the vital rhythms of an ambience, the immanent beat of a cultural scene.
The relative success of “Lagos” lets you judge the other modules: fantastic graphics and paintings for Moscow, but not much in the way of popular culture; New York, brash and stagey and typically overdone; Rio, very elegant, but austere when you’ve been there – and Tokyo is intriguing, Vienna a bit dry, etc. These are the kind of comparisons the exhibition asks you to make. And such interpretations are the museum’s primary production, that’s exactly what the visitor can learn: how to distinguish the cities that really count, how to consume their images more intelligently, as world-class sites in an economy of tourism. Because there’s no more passive consumption. As sociologist John Urry says, in echo of Anthony Giddens, this is the age of the “reflexive tourist.”1 Travel around the globe has become a way for post-traditional subjects to compare where they are with where they have been, to situate themselves in time and space even as they move to discover their margins of freedom. What one learns to produce and to express is precisely this mobility between cities, between mental frameworks, between different levels of hierarchy and spontaneity.
What then would be the special relation between this production of the self as interpretive mobility, and the physical space where the museum is located? That’s what we’ll find out in the London module, under the title “Picturing the City.” It is the existential experience of London that is valorized here, as a trademark quality in the metropolitan competition: the show “reflects the working processes and lives of artists, the networks, attitudes and structures which have helped make London one of the most important sites for the production of contemporary art, design and fashion in Europe.”2 The transformation of the city into an image begins at a moment of decadence, and continues with a revolt. The cultural effervescence of London is said to originate with the financial crisis at the close of the eighties, when “artists, designers and cultural entrepreneurs of all kinds are welcomed back into the empty properties that the speculators can no longer fill.” Cassettes produced by the Undercurrents collective or the artist Jeremy Deller show the political protests that punctuated the nineties, notably on the initiative of the youth movement Reclaim the Streets; and photo and video documents of all sorts seek to give us the feel of a carefree artistic lifestyle built up on a shoestring, far from the stock-market cares of the City. Fashion photographer Jeurgen Teller compiles a catalogue of the girls who’ve knocked at his door, searching for the glory of glossy paper; and curator Emma Dexter quotes thoughts by Henri Lefebvre on the spontaneous popular uses of “urban objects.” She explains: “The work suggests the myth of the ‘undiscovered’ beauty found on the city streets, a raw material waiting to be transformed.” Yet it is not in the world of high fashion, but rather in the style magazines that this transformation of use-value reaches its peak. Huge prints of images created for the magazine Dazed and Confused hang in the great hall, at the main entry and exit of the museum: portraits haloed with sexy grunge or intriguing deformity, according to the canon set long ago by The Face. It is in the multicultural diversity of these identity shots that the Tate Modern’s publics should learn to see themselves, as inhabitants and producers of the city.
Thus it is an aestheticized use-value that the Tate Modern offers to its local publics and to the rest of the world, as a trademark urban image. The image can be consumed, in a shiver of experience, by any visitor who accepts to go seeking for that particular London. Its advertising appeal serves the aims of the real-estate operations on this side of the Thames, where the speculators can easily make good business deals today.3 And in a longer-term educational sense, this image can also help integrate a part of the British population – but only a part – into the cultural and informational economy of globalized capitalism.4
The museum is definitely an educational institution, responding to the imperatives of Blair’s Third Way. But what it offers are mobility lessons for a “sovereign individual.”5 It is a training ground for what Leslie Sklair, the business sociologist, calls in a violently Marxist turn of phrase, “the transnational capitalist class.” Sklair believes he has identified the dynamics of a “globalizing project,” pushed ahead by business interests, but also supported by a state sector (“globalizing bureaucrats and politicians”). This project, whose unfinished character he underlines, is upheld and rendered desirable by the “culture-ideology of consumerism,” manifest notably in the emergence and consolidation of “global brands.” With a Gramscian analysis, Sklair shows how this globalizing project (and its supporting coalition of interests) could offer a series of answers to the hegemonic crisis of the Welfare State. Answers inconceivable without the involvement of intellectuals and cultural programmers: “A central part of the work of the transnational class is to facilitate corporate globalization through economic, political and culture-ideology work.”6 That last is what the Tate Modern provides – whether its directors and curators have reflected on it or not. To visit the museum, to consume the experience with one’s own particular style, is to become a global flâneur -– and to increase one’s chances of becoming a property owner, or a rentier, in a “world-class” city like London.
Inside the Spectacle
Parisian institutions will probably never produce such an overt celebration of art’s role in real-estate speculation. But France’s ideological history permits other figures of adaptation to the flows of globalized capital. I’m thinking of a Franco-American exhibition that draws a strange conclusion from the insights of Guy Debord, by proposing to go “beyond” – or maybe just inside – the spectacle. Presented at the Pompidou Center from November 24, 2000, to January 8, 2001, “Au-delà du spectacle” reads as a synthesis of two currents of thought: one developed in France in the 1990s under the name of the “relational aesthetic”; the other of British origins, but now established in all the English-speaking countries under the name of “cultural studies.”
The challenge that the relational aesthetic set itself was to individualize the reception of mass-produced images, in order to transform them into more-or-less intimate means of communication. There was a use-value to be found in the commercial image, in response to the situationist critique of contemporary alienation by the media.7 Beyond the passivity of the spectacle, there would now be a society of active bit-players or “stand-ins” (figurants), each constructing a personalized tissue of relations with the symbolic materials made available by the culture industry. The role of the artist is to produce subversive models of a free, “interactive” behavior within a thoroughly commodified media society.
The history of Anglo-American cultural studies is obviously somewhat more complex, but it too turns centrally around reception. In a 1973 article, theorist Stuart Hall suggested that the televised message, “encoded” at the moment of its transmission by a dominant emitter, has then to be “decoded” by all the people and social groups to whom it was addressed. Again it is an active process: “If no ‘meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption.'” And it is precisely through the use of the message that the activity becomes significant in a full sense: “If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect.”8 One can then distinguish a “preferred” meaning (the one sought by the dominant emitter), a “negotiated” meaning (which answers certain concerns of the subordinate addressees), and a frankly “oppositional” meaning (denying the legitimacy of the established order altogether). The negotiated reading got the most interest from cultural studies. This type of analysis, applied to working-class groups, could make visible forms of resistance where pure passivity seemed to reign. The idea was used to study the “subcultures” of alienated urban youth, who identified themselves by their particular reception of commercial music and fashion. But the same approach could also serve the needs of middle-class college kids (and professors), unwilling to conceive themselves as the pure products of advertising. Today this logic has become a way to celebrate the supposedly infinite local differences that spring from a worldwide distribution of standardized commercial goods.9
The two approaches – relational aesthetics and negotiated reception – crop up everywhere in the exhibition at the Pompidou Center. The installation Fanclubbing, carried out by Alexandre Perigot in collaboration with young music-lovers, is a perfect example. The artist has asked each of the participants to “sign” the name of their favorite star in bright colors on large white sheets of paper, like graffiti tags on the subway. The walls and floor of the installation space are lined with these signatures. The investment of the musical product with personal energy, expressed in a rhetorical figure of identity and assembled in an ephemeral community, could hardly be better illustrated.
Not far from there you find a more enigmatic proposal by Douglas Gordon, Something Between My Mouth and Your Ear. The title seems to designate an expressive or aesthetic production that floats somewhere between the creative subjectivity of the artist and the perception of the spectator. And yet the installation space is entirely empty, except for a hi-fi set playing pop tunes from the 1960s. Here it is the spectator who should create the work directly, through a personal reception of the music. But how can we be sure that simply listening is enough to produce an artwork? The artist has a way to fend off this obvious question, with a little help from his own biography. The hits we hear made the charts in 1966, during the nine months of Douglas Gordon’s gestation. The title could then be addressed to the artist’s mother, referring to the songs that resonated in the intra-uterine space between her ear and his mouth, in a moment of pure receptivity before he gave his first cry.
With this detour through childhood, the passivity of reception becomes a productive naiveté. And to “activate” the artworks, the spectators will be infantilized, constantly. On opening night they can admire look-alikes of their favorite stars, ordered from a catalogue for teenage festivities; or they can put on furry animal costumes to amuse their friends. Nearby they can play billiards or foosball on an elevated platform that captures all the gazes. For a little more fun, just throw in the facile kitsch of Jeff Koons, some titillating sex courtesy of Paul McCarthy, and above all lots of rock’n’roll. But there are also the “theoretical” works that explain the hidden secrets of the show: the piece by Pierre Joseph, Snow White (Character for Reactivation), which is a commercial costume to be animated by our memories of a Disney creation; or the video by Pierre Huyghe, No Ghost just a Shell, which “diverts” a Japanese manga character in the grand situationist tradition, to make it into a “deviant sign,” a product momentarily endowed with life. Yet deviance as a sociological reality – one of the great concerns of cultural studies in the 1970s – is totally absent from the exhibition. Rather it is a question of imposing new productive and consumptive norms, legitimated by a residual conception of the spectator’s freedom.
Can we speak of a “reflecting museum” when the public looks into the mirror of its own narcissism, in order to feed a cycle of cultural production? The unfortunate fact is that all this has been conceived quite consciously, as a chance for art to survive in the era of globalized entertainment.10 At stake is the way each spectator will individually rework an experience of collective reception. And “work” is the key word here. Because the public of contemporary art counts a high percentage of “immaterial laborers”: journalists, stylists, graphic artists, photographers, cinematographers, musicians, designers, architects, audiovisual technicians, advertising creatives, etc. For these “prosumers,” the museum can be an excellent place for the production of new ideas, not because it offers an encounter with abstract form, pure style or absolute originality, but because it allows one to experience and observe the reception of new behaviors, new informational products – products as sophisticated as the general public, but close to each of its members, open to creative appropriation. Participating in this appropriation, understanding it and instigating it anew through the fabrication of objects or signs, is a way to be part of a productive cycle, even when you’re momentarily “on vacation.” As Maurizio Lazzarato and his colleagues have written: “Immaterial labor gives form to the tastes, needs and imagination of the public/consumer, materializing them in products which, in their turn, become powerful producers of needs, tastes, imagination…” The authors give sharper focus to the same idea: “The use-value of this type of work (the informational and cultural content) itself feeds the cycle of production.”11
The Tate Modern sublimated the lived experience of the city, creating an image that adds to the cultural skills of the globalizing flâneur. The exhibition at the Pompidou Center takes one step more. Going not beyond, but inside the spectacle, it situates the use-value of art entirely within the realm of the commodity, “relational” as it may be. Artistic practice becomes nothing more than a way to move fluidly between the fields of fashion, design, music and cinema (which is exactly the program of Nicolas Bourriaud and his collaborators at the new Palais de Tokyo in Paris). No longer is any relationship to the territory needed; and the museum, with its fashionable public – all those who have learned to play the right games – can indulge in infinite self-reflection, before the mirrors of the informational economy.
The Museum as a Social Laboratory
Writing in 1986, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck showed how impossible it is for modern democratic governments and administrations to carry out a critique of the major orientations of society (“progress”). Faced with the risks of techno-economic development, embodied at the time by the nuclear industry, such a critique appeared extremely urgent: modernity had to learn to reflect on its own priorities.12 Beck predicted the growing importance of social movements as the “sub-political” agents of this critique; he also pointed to the importance of ethical stances within the professional disciplines. Throughout the 1990s, and now again with the demonstrations against corporate globalization, events have proved him right.
Can the museum become a site for artistic demonstrations of this social reflexivity? Can it become a social laboratory, redefining the meaning of progress? With the intensifying grip of the informational economy on all aspects of human communication, we reach one of those moments “when knowing if one can think differently and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” To bring about this shift in perception and thought, one would first have to dispel the postmodern enchantment, and cease to believe that culture, politics and the economy are always inseparable, caught in a system of reciprocally produced effects with no exit. Concretely, for an artistic institution, that would mean seeking other publics, outside the flows of international tourism, outside the productive loops of immaterial labor. The museum has to open its doors, or better, shift its resources toward the sources of a salutary alienation, located in social and psychic spaces at a distance from the dominant systems, or in opposition to them. But this is extremely difficult for museums to do, because not only must they invent new processes for working with their publics – at the risk of upsetting the internal hierarchies of the institution – but at the same time, they must also legitimate the results before funding bodies and trustee boards, without any help from the usual criteria, which only relay the logic of the market.
For some years now, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona has been trying to do just this. The radicality of its attempt only became visible recently, in October 2000, with a program of presentations and workshops aimed at sparking an encounter between artists and social movements. To launch the program – which draws the consequences of a series of seminars on art and political economy – the museum turned to an artist-activist, Jordi Claramonte, who for his own ends brought together a dozen international protest groups under the ironic title “On Direct Action as One of the Fine Arts.” In a moment of necessary confrontation, the institution had to recognize the distrust of Barcelona’s marginalized inhabitants toward the museum and its white building, a pseudopictorial monument designed by Richard Meyer, and installed in a deteriorated neighborhood as a bridgehead for advancing gentrification. To stave off rejection it was decided that the events would be held outside the building, in the meeting hall of an anarchist union. The week-long program took place to a packed house, before audiences that would usually remain aloof from the museum.
So far, that’s nothing really new – because such events happen relatively often in or around museums, bringing an aura of radical chic before they dissolve back into international space. Yet this time the museum prolonged its support to local groups that had sprung up after the week-long exchange, renting a space for their activities and supplying some funds for the purchase of equipment and materials. For the young people involved, it is primarily a matter of developing alternative media and contemporary strategies of political performance in the streets. The first actions of these groups – now called “Las Agencias,” each with its own specialty – were conceived for a meeting of the World Bank in Barcelona in late June 2001. They were carried out during huge demonstrations that were there held despite the cancellation of the meeting by the Bank, plagued by its ongoing crisis of legitimacy.
Such support of local activist groups is anything but ordinary; yet it only constitutes the most openly transgressive aspect of the museum’s program. In parallel to the political activities of Las Agencias, the exhibition “Documentary Processes” seeks to initiate local publics to contemporary trends in a much longer history of “alternative media,” on the borderline between art and journalism. Workshops given by two documentary artists, Marc Pataut and Alan Sekula, help to deepen the transmission of this history. The political side of the program is completed by the opening of the exhibition “Antagonisms,” which directly inquires into the forms of political commitment within the field of contemporary art. The exhibition will no doubt help legitimate the local protest activities, which in their turn will allow for a critique of international artistic norms, almost invariably reinforced by such large thematic exhibitions.
That kind of local/global dialectic is at the heart of the museum’s program, which attempts to reinscribe a specific cultural history – that of Barcelona, Catalunya and Spain – into the standardizing, exclusionary narrative of Euro-American modernity. An exhibition of the cinema of Pere Portabella, mounted in February-March 2001 by the artist Marcelo Expósito, offered an extraordinary access not only to the work of this half-forgotten filmmaker, but also to the universe of his critical and creative references (presented in the form of books, journals and video tapes). The visitor could consult the materials freely, or follow different critical itineraries through Portabella’s work; and at night in the museum auditorium, one could see screenings of the films introduced and commented by Spanish filmmakers and scholars. Such an initiative mobilizes professions and disciplines with a history longer than that of corporate globalization, drawing on ethical and existential interests outside the seductions of the transnational capitalist class.13 With similar intentions, the museum has begun to organize small reading groups around, for example, the work of a philosopher like a Jacques Rancière, almost unknown in Barcelona. The aim seems to be to question and stimulate individuals, but also to answer intellectual needs, to fill hitherto unsuspected gaps.
Maybe the more modest aspects of the program can best suggest its possibilities. An exhibition of drawings from the Prinzhorn collection – the first to bring together artworks by mental patients – allowed the museum’s visitors to relive an experience that had helped launch the aesthetics of surrealism: the artistic experience of mental alienation, the most absolute line that can be drawn between self and society. For the surrealists, these works expressed an intense desire to think and to perceive differently. They opened up a space for collective reflection on the forms of modernity after the disaster of the First World War.
The Prinzhorn exhibition was an occasion for a highly specific public – psychiatrists, with their intimate understanding of the fragility of social norms – to enter the museum as a professional discipline, with a particular ethical position. One can hope that some of them may have encountered the protesters along the way.
Notes
1. John Urry, “Tourism, Travel and the Modern Subject”, in: Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 141-170.
2. Emma Dexter, “Picturing the City”, in: Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, pp. 70-95, cat., Tate Modern, London, Feb. 1 – April 29, 2001.
3. One might recall that Century City, near Hollywood, was born of a real-estate scheme fueled by the film industry. Sharon Zukin’s essay in the catalogue, “How to Create a Culture Capital,” provides a program for the new real-estate booster: what she calls “the artistic mode of production.”
4. The term “informational economy” comes from the book by Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (London: Blackwell, 1996); it indicates the key role of information-processing in all types of contemporary production. Cultural products and services are therefore only a part of the larger informational economy.
5. See James D. Davidson and Lord William Rees-Moog, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
6. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (London: Blackwell, 2001), p. 54.
7. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998), pp. 9-10.
8. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”, in Culture, Media, Language, eds. S. Hall et. al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), first published as a “stenciled paper” in 1973) pp. 128-138
9. The sea-change seems to come about with the massive exportation of cultural studies to the USA in the early 1990s, as registered by an extremely thick anthology: Cultural Studies, eds. L. Grossberg et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1992).
10. In the American catalogue, curator Philippe Vergne quotes artist Philippe Parreno on an “aesthetic of alliance” with the cultural industries, while defending himself (three times in a row) against any charge of populism: “This idea is not about populism, but if art is to engage an audience in this day and age, it behooves us to look at how the entertainment industry engages its audience…. What kinds of lessons on being “customer-savvy” and providing a pleasurable experience can museums learn from Disney or the Mall of America?” Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures, cat., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Feb. 12 – April 30, 2000, p. 23.
11. A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato, A. Negri, Le Bassin de travail immatériel (BTI) dans la métropole parisien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), pp. 42, 83.
12. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992, 1st German edition 1986).
13. In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Marcelo Expósito claims a critical potential for Spanish cinema’s “peripheral” status. See “Introducción,” in: Historias sin argumento: El cine de Pere Portabella (Valencia/Barcelona: Ediciones de la Mirada/MacBa, 2001).