***  Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive  ***
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   [Date]: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 17:01:28 -0500
   [From]: "Pablo Helguera" <PHelguera@guggenheim.org>
     [To]: forum1@hkw.kbx.de
[Subject]: [forum1] Re: Museums


Thanks for your comments, Chris and Juan Josˇ.

Apparently this discussion is taking various paths- on one hand the exchange
that Chris, myself and other members have participated on the relationship
between censorship, race, politics, aesthetic values, etc. Like Chris, I
feel more people should be telling us their experiences and comments in
regards as to their experiences- I think that I already wrote too much and
prefer to read than to comment.  But I think what Juan Josˇ is bringing up
is an interesting topic to focus on: the place of museums in making (or
unmaking) cultural policy, to which I would like to respond.

I think the division you propose for museum models is interesting (
following a rigid aesthetic or being a free-for all territory). I agree that
the management of a system is as important than the system itself, which is
what I think you are saying. Actually, I think both models you describe can
be successful if those who handle it work and think hard enough. I don't
have the time to respond to everything you mentioned but I think that we
agree in that establishing hierarchies does not guarantee quality (which is
a really vague thing anyway). The problem of art nowadays, I insist, is
its openness: anyone can do anything and that can be considered art (and
yes, this notion didn't originate Beuys, but it wasn't assimilated by the
mainstream until very recently, and even now, the public in general has a
real hard time to grasp it). It is great to live in such an art period where
everything is valid, but it is also scary to stare at the void and thin air.
Thus we are challenged to create structures that still build significative
messages and meanings, instead of saying a whole bunch of nothing. The
museum is to me the symbol for that needed structure, and it is the
reflection of the paradoxes that we live today in art: for instance, a
"contemporary art" museum seems to be an oxymoron, because the new art of
today will be old tomorrow (unless you set as a mission to not keep artwork
in your collection which is a few years old, as some museums do now).

And of course art can exist outside and independently of the museum- it
existed long before the idea of the museum was constructed. The museum is
simply a fictional setting that we have created in order to try to
understand, experience, and come to terms with the complex production of art
in our times and previous times. In the same way, learning exists outside of
schools and universities, and I think the same distrust that exists towards
the university establishment is equivalent to the one in museums: they are a
powerful force in shaping our thinking about art and knowledge, but they are
not a definitive marker in any way- only the result of a number of joint
opinions on how things are and have been in history.

I think that a lot of the discussions on what a museum should be lie on the
fact that the notion of the museum is not that old, and it has been and is
everchanging, even in the last decade. I think the museum to the art world
is equivalent to the idea of government in a society.  You can build
something without government, but the larger it becomes it is inevitable to
set some rules and structures to keep it running. As artists (or
politicians) we love to hate government, we also love to hate museums. Yet
we do need them, because they ultimately provide us some sense of history
and continuity in our increasingly global but fragmentary world.

I actually believe that museums exist because there is a single thing that
we cannot escape in artmaking, and which has obessed me for many years both
as artist and curator: context. Art will always be seen in a certain
circumstance or surrounding. We can alter it or change it, we can control it
to many degrees, but we can never change the fact that this art will
interact with us in the real world at some point.  Museums in the XXth
century have tried to become the "ideal" context for the art to live there
undisturbed by other things and give a chance to the viewer to experience it
in the fullest possible way.

I just came back from Mexico City from organizing a symposium titled
"Fiction Inside and Outside the Museum", in which various curators from
Mexico, New York and Boston participated, and where we analyzed the place of
the museum within the context of the type of art that is being done today.
Several things were discussed: 1) the museum as a place which we need to
have in order to rebel against it; 2)artists who appropriate the "context"
of the museum into their own work (eg. artists who create their own museums,
artists who make photographs of the inside of a museum like Thomas Struth,
etc.) 3) the museum as a cultural Disneyland (or Disneyland as the accultured
museum); 4)the museum as having lost the sense of wonder which originated
its very roots. In this regard,  I highly recommend the book by Lawrence
Weschler, titled "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders" ( Vintage, 1997 or so)
Weschler writes a fascinating essay about the Museum of Jurassic Technology
in L.A. an actual museum which could look like a Ripley's "Believe it or
not" type of museum if it wasn't for the extraordinary and poetic
installations which it presents, all of them providing historical and
scientific backgrounds of dubious nature ( there is a section of "XVVIIth
century Flemish Moths", another of "Human Horns", another of "sculptures
made out of a single carved human hair by a Rumanian Violinist". The fact
that you don't know what is true or not in that place, says Weschler, brings
us back to what became the origin of museums: the Wonder Cabinet, or Cabinet
of Curiosities, which emerged in the XVIIth century or so. According to
Weschler, it is the spirit of wonder in the museum that we have lost in
present life.

I apologize if these seem to be random thoughts. Hopefully they may inspire
some comments from other participants as to why you believe museums exist
and are necessary (or unnecessary).

Pablo Helguera