ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

No. 8 - Art, Spaces

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Charles Saumarez Smith| 15.02.21

The Art Museum in Modern Times

How has the architecture, vision, financing and public role of art museums around the world been transformed in the last century? And what does the history of art museums presage for their future as contested sites of cultural significance in the context of the pandemic's challenge to public gathering places? Charles Saumarez Smith, one of the UK's leading museum figures, brings us five books that reveal both the historic, civic humanist mission of the art museum, and its antithesis in the face of twenty first century challenges.

I'll confess, I was more than a little nervous when I landed this interview. My interlocutor was former director of London's National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. It turns out Charles is as charming as he is authoritative and knowledgeable about art museums. Few of us are getting to art museums these days. Charles gave a guided tour of architectural case studies of museums the world over, a kind of love letter to institutions that are close to his heart. It turns out many are my favourites as well. A wonderful conversation. For those who prefer listening over reading, here’s a recent conversation Charles had with friends at The Browser (and if you don’t know The Browser, subscribe at once). Above, Diana the Huntress by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the foyer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, flanked by Rubens tapestries and a Calder mobile. Below, the original facade of New York’s MoMA.

WHAT’S CAUGHT MY EYE & CROSSED MY SCREEN

White Cube

“From an initial glance at the preliminary design concept, one might believe this is a traditional museum but, really, what we are proposing is an undoing of the objectification that has happened in the West through full reconstruction.” This radical rethink of museum architecture by David Adjaye fell beyond the scope of The Art Museum in Modern Times. The work in progress for the Edo Museum of West African Art in Nigeria aims to bring the Benin Bronzes back home from the British Museum, where they now reside. A glimpse of them above.

Restitution has been a debate for museums since at least the founding of the Louvre, as the conversation with Charles Saumarez Smith demonstrated. In the twenty first century however, many museums are confronting a moment of reckoning. Museums are “not entertainment … we are places of education” says the Director at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. To convey culture, visitors must be open to their vision. They must be trusted by their audiences, and new generations bring new expectations: return stolen antiquities and ‘appropriated’ objects, tell the history of colonialism fully, and “you still have to fundamentally enjoy objects … embrace the romance of the physicality of the objects”. Adjaye’s designs, as exemplified by the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, do precisely that. They allow visitors to revel in the materiality of culture.

The Edo Museum is part of an initiative led by the British Museum showcasing the history and archaeology of the former Kingdom of Benin. Edo Museum’s arrangement is derived from the ruins of the historic city that the current Benin City stands above. The former kingdom was one of the most significant pre-colonial states in west Africa before it was conquered and largely demolished by the British in 1897. Benin was known for castings in brass and bronze, many of which are a central feature of the British Museum’s ethnographic galleries. How much more resonant will these works become when restored to their original context? Art cements the collective imagination of each age, and often techniques of manufacture too.

This is true of contemporary art as it is of the ancients and Old Masters. Over the course of several years, the Dutch film-maker Renzo Martens documented the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), a cooperative of plantation workers in Lusanga, who started making and selling sculptures as a means of buying back land from international plantation companies, and ending its desiccating monoculture. In 2017 the group opened a gallery, the White Cube, on the newly purchased land. Martens’ White Cube is both a portrait of these workers and an argument for rethinking the international art world’s relationship to the exploitative plantation system, both historical and contemporary.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but Art Restitution is a Five Books theme that we will be considering very soon. Watch this space.

The Asterisk

Modernism in Western culture was deeply convinced of its universality. Yet one of the concluding insights of The Art Museum in Modern Times is the fracturing and instability of this article of faith in light of contemporary readings of history. This has less to do with revisionism than it does with enlargement and amplification of what we consider to be the canon, or even what counts as culture.

One highly compelling reading is the artist Charles Gaines’ understanding that white western artwork taps into a universality unavailable to other cultures. Modernism, as he sees it, was merely the latest manifestation of an long historical progression of fashioning white cultural significance that stretches back to the Enlightenment, demonstrably superior in its self-regard to so-called ‘primitive’ artwork or the traditions of non-white, non-European peoples. The Enlightenment, Gaines believes, “is completely chargeable for the invention of racism”.

Museum deaccessioning debates - selling ‘canonical’ works to make way for the historically marginalized - have brought such readings to the fore. “You cannot undermine hallmarks of art history, the building blocks of art history. You have to preserve those objects,” Gaines says. “I have great respect for the historical narrative and how it played out. But the historical narrative was floating in a sea of racism. I don’t think that because it has been written that it can’t be reconsidered…. I admit that certain painters are geniuses and that they produced great works. But all of these people were working in a field of reduced competition. Had we had the diversity that we have today, would they still be that great? I don’t know. I’m not interested in rewriting history. I am willing to embrace the history. But you can’t presume that that history is infallible or infallibly produced.”

“It’s the asterisk. De Kooning or whoever it is, is a great painter and made a major contribution to art history. The asterisk is that women and minority artists were not allowed to be part of the competitive field of art production and practice. That asterisk should be there…. My idea of deaccessioning is simply to acknowledge the asterisk. If you take De Kooning out of the museum... it doesn’t remove him from art history. He’s still De Kooning! You’re doing something concretely so that the landscape becomes more normalised than it has been in the past.”

The Enlightenment banished superstition, but may simply have shifted the visible locus of barbarity elsewhere. Museums have been urged by politicians to avoid ‘activism or politics’ and instead ‘act impartially’. How can they be ‘impartial’ to present history as though it were not political? And in what sense is it ‘impartial’ to retain a statue glorifying a slave-owner? (Would anyone risk arrest to tear down an ‘impartial’ object? We considered this in a previous edition.) “If being ‘impartial’ just means leaving everything the way it is, there’s a more honest word for that.” Museums may be a sort of school, though ultimately education begins at home.

A contemporary prism for reconsidering some of the inherited Modernist canon is the recent show Grief and Grievance at the New Museum. Reviews describe a show that was electrifying. For those like me who were disappointed to miss it, there’s a terrific guided tour on view here.

Patrimony and Patronization

What is patrimony? To what extent does a work of art belong to the people of the world? Yet more turmoil in Kabul is a timely reminder of Afghanistan’s great cultural heritage. Its northern region sat astride the Silk Road trading routes and was part of Bactria, the area ruled by Alexander the Great. The so-called Bactrian Hoard, discovered in 1979, was one of the greatest archeological finds of the twentieth century. Sadly, much of Afghanistan’s remaining cultural inheritance has been destroyed. Above, the absent Buddha of Bamiyan.

“Who owns the inheritance of nations that no longer exist? Culture is an elastic concept. An active heir is a rightful heir.” Hat tip once again to The Easel for recent coverage of questions relating to provenance and politics. There are disorienting parallels in the contemporary pillaging of Afghan heritage as Western military forces retreat, while simultaneously witnessing Western atonement for previous centuries’ plunder and the return of colonial booty to African peoples they were once stolen from. Culture’s very elasticity is what makes mindfulness of its origins so central.

When A Museum Feels Like Home

‘Masterpiece for masterpiece, the Frick is the best small museum in the United States for western painting before 1900…. Empowered by its new setting, work once considered frivolous becomes visual thunder.’ There’s no quarrel with Jerry Salz assessment of the Frick’s collection, only impatience to visit the Frick’s new digs. That the Gilded Age founder was a vicious robber baron exemplifies the many contradictions that we’ve inherited with our art spaces into the C21st.

Here again, an asterisk is called for. We can still marvel at the masterpieces even as we question their provenance and original purpose as capitalist trophies. Can’t we? Unable to visit in person, I’ll console myself with this superlative collection of essays about the masterworks at the Frick. It’s no surprise that two of the finest art critics - Salz and the poet Peter Schjeldahl - live in New York, my old home town, nor that they share a love for this institution, so dear for being so idiosyncratic. “More than one contributor to The Sleeve Should Be Illegal invokes a sensation of walking on air after a visit to the Frick, a payoff of renewed faith in the powers of art and a forgivable pride in our own perhaps untrained and underused capacities to comprehend the aesthetic and spiritual stakes of a timeless game."

Portrait of the Artist as Real Estate Developer

Artists should be paid royalties on property price increases in ‘gentrifying’ areas. They clearly possess alchemical powers, turning the lead of downbeat districts into gold. The pattern is familiar. A run-down area of town is deemed unliveable by professionals and la petite bourgeoisie. Artists move in for the low rents and squatting opportunities. Intrepid urbanites (aka hipsters) are not far behind, giving the streets their own brand of spit and polish, and the branding is co-opted to sell luxury condos. Real estate developers make fortunes, artists get priced out of their studios, and the cycle continues. Who are the ones with the magic powers of transmutation here? Architectural alchemy is plainly visible in the examples gathered here, via Wallpaper.

Museums have the best pudding. That was my verdict as a kid, and it was also a point of leverage for our parents, who went out of their way to ensure that my siblings and I saw the best that Philadelphia’s art scene had to offer. The rest of the cafeteria menu at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was forgettable, but the vanilla pudding… well, that was worth the many treks we made to this neoclassical temple of fine art.

Museum re-openings have been been halting. Some may not reopen. And in any event, getting to them in person remains a challenge, even for the ones that have opened their doors again. We find ourselves overstimulated with digital information, and under-stimulated in real life. Where can I go to get my pudding?

Museums denote legacy and inheritance. Any museum visit is resonant to me with memories of family visits as a kid, even as I drag my daughters to museums both far-flung and on our doorstep. Even as we wandered the silent halls of the PMA, there was a lingering suspicion that the real action was outside, among the inner city kids playing in the fountains in front on a hot summer’s day. What do I remember from the PMA, besides the pudding? Well, there was Jean Arp’s Lunar Moon Bird. Donald Judd. The tapestries of Roman conquests. Of course the armor from the Middle Ages, too, and the magnificent golden statues of the huntress Diana in the grand entrance hall - a predictable boyhood fascination perhaps with arms, armor and mythology.

I was raised to believe in the noble aspirations of the museum. Over time, I’ve come to recognize the asterisks. Noble aspirations, often ignobly expressed. That the asterisks seem to be proliferating must be a sign of advancing civilization.

Civilization /ˌsɪvɪlʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social and cultural development and organization.

‘The process of civilization not only brought improved individual self-control but also a change of attitudes and values.’

That’s from the Oxford English Dictionary, a canonical text in the English language if ever there was one. Reflecting the living language that it documents, it evolves with each edition, making clear the etymology of words, their original usage, but also the ways in which usage deviates in contemporary contexts, becoming more useful to practitioners today.

Winds change direction. When people walked everywhere, weathervanes were a building’s ‘exclamation point’. Besides providing weather information they were also landmarks for a community, as much art as the best American crafts. (Another hat tip to The Easel for this lead.) At some point, though, when horse and buggies were common, weathervane watchers dwindled and these objects became merely quaint. In the age of the automobile, they are all but forgotten.

Visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art today, it’s hard to imagine the sculptor Saint Gauden’s Diana, once a weathervane and now simply a gilded goddess, atop a building tower. Was it early impressions of her grace and geometry that cemented an admiration for Saint Gauden’s artwork in my imagination? Did it contribute to a fascination for retellings of her myth? (Matthew Barney’s Redoubt a shining recent example….) Are aesthetic principles taught/learned? Or are they witnessed/acquired?

Much of our architecture today eschews decoration, sometimes even pragmatic considerations such as the weather, but however they are designed, museums and other art spaces encode and communicate the ever-changing cultural canon, from generation to generation.

Thank you for taking the time to read this issue.

Romas Tauras