Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Maleuvre 1999)

The Outline

The Outline

Introduction

Ch. 1: Museum Times

Ch. 2: Bringing the Museum Home: The Domestic Interior in the 19th Century

Ch. 3: Balzacana

Introduction

main argument of the book

Introduction

• The theory of museums and displays that affected how museums were redesigned over time (changing practices of presenting and apprehending art)

• Official inception of the museum at the turn of the 19th century starts the Golden Age of the Museum.

• Museographic debates over the role of the museum, relationship of art to life (praxis), authenticity (art in context)

• Louvre, The British Museum (examples)

Introduction Formative stages in the development of museum

displays:

• cabinet of paintings (cabinets de curiosités / Wunderkammer) 16/17th century

• The Revolutionary Museum (1790s+)• The Golden Age of Museums (19th century)• modernista museum (1890s+ to 1930s)• escape from museum (serialization) (1960s)• the revised museum (ecomuseum) (1980s+)

IntroductionWhy study museums?History of museums reflects the history of

reinvention of the past: how society relates to its cultural tradition

Museums are manufacturing history by offering an image of history by collecting past artifacts; give shape and presence to history, inventing it, in effect, by defining the space of a ritual encounter with the past.

Introduction Why museums are problematic ?Museums are purposive and powerful institutions

shaping identity of groups (national identity). What point of view do they represent?

Debates over authenticity: “The museum endangers artistic and cultural authenticity by removing artworks and artifacts from original locations and placing them in galleries where they can be gawked at, and never, so to speak, lived with.”

Introduction

Should museum be viewed as production or as conservation (of culture)?

Museum champions / Museum detractors

IntroductionSeparation (museification of art) vs.

Reconciliation of art with existence theorized by:

Hegel: the spirituality / the immanence of art

Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy:

antimuseum critique

Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger, Marinetti & the

first historical avant-garde: re-constructing the bond of

the museum with life

1. Museum Times

authenticity of art / authenticity of experience

1. Museum TimesHistory Lab

Pointing Fingers

Authenticity

Hegel’s Guide to the Museum

Art of Misplacement

The Art Police

The Origin of Museums

The Avant-Garde Attacks

Monumental Time

The Caesura of Art

The Caesura of the Image

Proust’s Museum

The Experience of Art

Art in Ruins

Framework

The Decline of Subject

Estheticizing the Bourgeois

The Identity in Question

1. Museum Times History LabMuseums emerge in the beginning of the 19th century

in the process of cultural secularization of history (art becomes ‘public’, pedagogical tool for the people)

Art institutes established: France (Louvre) 1793; Spain 1820; Britain (National Gallery) 1824; Berlin (Die Altes Museum) 1830

Museums participate in the production of history and become protectors of the art.

1. Museum TimesPointing FingersFirst response to the phenomenon of museums.

Quatremère’s Considerations morales … (1815), protests against museums (the principle of cultural authenticity): criticizes creators of museums (Louvre) for de-contextualizing art; for making art a spectacle objectively removed from the context of creation.

Art should be expression of vital culture of the present.

Instead, culture is interpreted to pertain to a glorious

past.

1. Museum TimesAuthenticityHis argument reflects a desire for authenticity that in

fact is prompted by the contemporary social process in which the restructuring of thought, and society occurs (18/19 cent.).

Ever since, authenticity is an embattled concept because industrialization started liquidating the genuine and the perennial, producing the inauthenticity of experience. The role of art is to restore that bond.

1. Museum TimesHegel’s Guide to the MuseumHegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) offers a

different interpretation of the museum in which objects are decontextualized and preserved. Because he promotes contemplation rather than action, he considers the idealized museum a positive development because it frees objects of their context and allows contemplation of their spiritual nature. He considers that the cultural context of creation of art is incidental.

1. Museum TimesArt of MisplacementBy uprooting art from the run of existence, the museum

makes room for the restless drive of culture -- the museum uproots culture in order to create new forms.

Without forgetting, and that is always (anyways) involved in the production of culture, the museum is true to that natural process. There is no continuity just re-creation of culture. The museum can be an active participant in the process.

1. Museum TimesThe Art Police

Society locks away those elements that are deemed either too dangerous or too precious to move freely in the public domain.

Museum aestheticizes art. It protects art (in a neutral context) from the forces of the social and those who would manipulate art because it is perceived as dangerous.

1. Museum TimesThe Origin of Museums

The museums are contemporary with the emergence of aesthetics as meditation on art, as being able to speak about art in words rather than sensuously experiencing it without making it external to the subject.

Art (in the museum) becomes object for contemplation (18th / 19th century)

1. Museum TimesThe Avant-Garde Attacks

Attacks by avant-garde (Futurists, Surrealists) because of the esthetic exclusion of art from praxis.

Duchamp’s ready-mades were made to mock the art’s freedom from life as established by the museums.

Duchamp’s urinal (Fountain by R. Mutt) is a statement about art; but, outside the gallery, it is simply a urinal.

1. Museum TimesMonumental TimeMuseums are historical because they exhibit artworks

according to historiographic principles (criteria of period, style, chronological markers, technique). They are also ahistorical because they raise artworks above the flow of historical becoming. They are engaged in producing monumental time.

Museums provide contact with reality in the modern world (ecomuseum transforms a real thing into heritage).

1. Museum TimesThe Caesura of Art

The Caesura of the Image

Museums present art as historical monument but they can never preserve it fully. For example, they disengage the object from use-value (e.g. objects in ecomuseum) and make the thing become an image of what it used to be. This is not historical because historical deals with the realm of use, of how this was used as historical object.

1. Museum TimesProust’s Museum

The Experience of Art

Proust’s description of the museum in A la recherche du temps perdu, shows it as a place of memory where object exists as an image, and produces pleasure in continuous contemplation that is always aware of previous contemplation of that object. The mental event of contemplation singles art out as experience of itself, not mere documentation.

1. Museum TimesArt in Ruins

The increasingly historiographic nature of the museum, that collecting should be scientific, is the product of the Golden Age of Museums (19th century).

The Kunstkammer (16/17 century) was reorganized in the 19th century into a museum, a place of study and contemplation, and work of art is stamped as having historically documentary character belonging to a rational and coherent history of artistic development.

1. Museum Times

1. Museum Times

1. Museum Times

1. Museum TimesArt in RuinsChanging role of museum and styles of displays (styles

of hanging paintings) from Wunderkammer through Revolutionary through Restoration (Louvre)

Salon (until the end of the 19th century): frame to frame, floor to ceiling, regimented according to stylistic regroupings and explanatory labels (national pigeonholing)

1. Museum TimesFrameworkChanging styles of displays (styles of hanging

paintings)

Modern museum (20th century) sanitizes the works. In the Salon display, the works vie for attention, in their heavy frames in a tightly packed exhibition space. The exhibition space becomes sparse. The transition from the gilded frame to the modern self-effacing frame.

1. Museum TimesFramework

Changing styles of displays (styles of hanging paintings)

Modern museum (20th century) Implications for viewing and activity of subject in processing art. The previous activity of viewing (salon display) was in appropriation of work and experiencing it as distinct from others. The modern museum provides a packaged experience, and viewing that is not a negotiation.

1. Museum TimesThe Decline of Subject

Estheticizing the BourgeoisThe process of viewing from Wunderkammer in which

there was no viewing order and the only unifying principle was the collector’s persona and the personal principle of collection. In the modern museum there is an increasing alienation in the consumption of art. The collector is mere manager of resources; art as resource is objectively defined by market value.

1. Museum TimesThe Decline of Subject

Estheticizing the Bourgeois

Art seeks to escape from the rarefied atmosphere of the modern museum. For example, the works of Andy Warhol, embracing serialization, and multiplicity, do so by their very substance. The modern work of art favors series, and openly manifests its belonging to a sequence of other artistic works.

1. Museum TimesThe Identity in Question

The museum is a political resource whereby national identities are constructed. The creation of museums in the nineteenth century is tied to rise of nationalism and the forced identification of individuals with a civic, national character.

That process makes museums a fascinating object of study of group identities.

2. Bringing the Museum Home

the social context (bourgeois interior, decorative objects), positivism in scholarship, naturalism in literature

3. Balzacana

Le peau de chagrin (Balzac)