The museum as interface: a space for ideas
São Paulo made a strong impression on me during my first visit. Leaning back as far as I could in the back seat of the taxi that was taking me from the airport to my hotel, I tried to see as much as possible of high-rise São Paulo. The view reminded me most of Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner (1982). Next morning I set off on foot to visit a few galleries. I had a hard time, compounded of fever, jetlag, and a hangover from my first caipirinhas. I barely knew the way. By total accident I passed the Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
I can’t remember much about the part of this museum above ground level, a sort of sculpture garden. I was looking for a toilet, or at least a place where I could sit down for a minute. Hanging beneath a ramp that went underground was a circular, convex mirror, the type used to show approaching traffic. For a moment I thought I was entering a car park and stopped, a bit confused. When I looked around the corner, I became completely disorientated. In a large open space I saw de luxe white leather chairs grouped around stainless steel poles, a turnstile, stainless steel handrails and an enormous mirror surface — all dazzlingly lit. At first I thought I’d ended up in the museum offices, a split second later that I was in a metro station that had just been opened. I must have walked around for at least a minute before I convinced myself that this had to be a work of art. I was astounded by the simultaneously staged and hyper-realistic reality in which I found myself.
Ana Maria Tavares, the — in my eyes — brilliant Brazilian artist who created this installation, is fascinated by non-places: stations, stadiums, airports and hotel lobbies, which all look so much alike all over the world that they are both everywhere and nowhere. Non-places lack specific references to the cultural or historical identity of a place. The airport in Frankfurt could just as easily be the airport of Oman, and vice versa. Non-places are often associated by their critics with a feeling of alienation resulting from the loss of historical and cultural values.
Ana Maria Tavares makes the specific properties of non-places visible. She shows why they are the way they are, and how they function. The Dutch art critic Anna Tilroe has described how at first sight Tavares seems to be primarily interested in the seductive quality of non-places. In the work Midelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer that she created for De Vleeshal, ‘everything is under control and, at the same time, full of promise: we have left, but we have not yet arrived. Things have yet to happen; time, for the moment, is suspended’. A pleasant, detached high, characteristic of the culture that goes with the advent of non-places. But in the second instance Tavares makes clear what non-spaces try to hide: control over the people who come there. The stainless steel handrails, which at first seem to be just supports, turn out to register our movements. The turnstile can both grant and deny access.
The rather disorientated state I was in when I first saw the work of Ana Maria Tavares will certainly have played a role, but the impact was enormous: a moment of euphoria in which a smouldering insight suddenly emerged with a flash. Since seeing the work of Tavares, I look at airports or any other kinds of non-places in a different way. I can appreciate the finesse and intelligence with which a non-place is organised. More than before, I am aware of the fact that my presence is subordinated to a strict control. Tavares has made non-places legible, interesting, and thereby tolerable.
I describe this experience at such length because it illustrates what I think art is capable of: offering us insights into ourselves and the world around us by means of an experience. That is precisely what the work of Ana Maria Tavares, for one, does. It offers insight into a development that is typical of the world we live in today. At a time when the world around us is becoming increasingly hard to grasp, the importance of this can hardly be exaggerated.
My optimism regarding the capacities and talents of art is combined with my serious concern about its marginal social position. Art has detached itself from church and state and has become fully autonomous. In itself this is a good thing. It has enabled art to develop insights into ourselves and the world around us. But this autonomy has also led to art becoming primarily concerned with itself. Art has turned into a subtle play with its own history, traditions and conventions, and this has led to the social isolation of art. If I were to summarise the policy of De Vleeshal in a single sentence, it would be: an attempt to free art from its social isolation. It is no small ambition, I admit right away — perhaps we try to compensate the fact that we are in a relatively small city with big ambitions.
Museums base their choices regarding what they show (and how they show it) on what I call the art historical perspective. The importance of an artist or artistic movement for the history of art is often what determines what a museum chooses to show. The themes that museums choose for exhibitions are also often motivated by art historical considerations. In other words, art itself occupies pride of place in most museums. It sounds logical, because museums are there for art, but I am convinced that this logic contributes to the social isolation of art. That is why we have abandoned the art historical perspective in De Vleeshal. I regard De Vleeshal not primarily as a place for art and artists, but as a place for ideas — ideas that can offer us insight and give us something to hold on to in our complex, rapidly changing modern era.
Of course, there is an important role for artists to play in this. Ana Maria Tavares has gone farther than anyone else in developing ideas and insights into our public space, but for a large number of themes it is only natural to involve people from related disciplines. An example of this was the project on VJ culture Generating Live that we organised in 2000. At that time VJs (Video Jockeys), people in clubs who project moving images to the music of DJs, were a new visual phenomenon. Artists were interested in it too. To get to grips with this new phenomenon, however, we did not invite the artists, but we offered a number of people who were behind the VJ phenomenon the opportunity to make an autonomous work for an artistic context (De Vleeshal). Strikingly enough, these were sometimes artists who, frustrated by the laws of the world of art, had (temporarily) abandoned the museum for the club scene.
Video clips, like VJs, are a part of mass culture, but sometimes come close to art. The way in which some video clip directors play with the traditions and conventions of the genre is comparable to the way in which artists do the same with the traditions and conventions of art. That is why we showed flex, the first autonomous work by Chris Cunningham, who has made clips for Madonna, Aphex Twin, Square Pusher and others. Another example is the project about the seductive appeal of fashion called Higher Truth No. 5. For this project we invited not artists but people from the fashion world itself — art directors, designers, architects — to comment on the seductive strategy of fashion. They created a luxury shop, including a special cast of shop assistants. The only thing missing was the clothing itself — the seductive appeal of fashion reduced to the purest form.
The Leisure Society, about the significance of the rise of the leisure industry in the Dutch province of Zeeland, where De Vleeshal is situated. The exhibition had work by the British painter Tim Stoner. His work visualises our collective desire to be ourselves all at the same time when we are on holiday. There was also a specially designed pavilion, drawn by the architect who has built the most new holiday parks in Zeeland. This pavilion had all the characteristics of the most popular holiday homes.
A number of the projects we have done in De Vleeshal (I have only summarised a few of them here) touched on the disappearance of boundaries between art and related disciplines from popular culture. More and more artists are interested in fashion, video clips, new media, design — the expressions of today’s mass culture. At the same time, these disciplines are also increasingly borrowing elements from art. This theme recurred in the collection of essays entitled Kunst in Crisis, edited and with an introduction by myself.[2] These essays raised the question: Is the disappearance of this boundary the future or the demise of art? And how should museums react to these new developments? Should they stick to showing nothing but art? Or should they actively go out to see what art can be?
This collection of essays led to a real debate, which does not happen very often in the Dutch art world. Of course, I was delighted with that. A few reactions were remarkably polemical. My observation that art is in a state of social isolation was taken by some as an attack on art. My position was accused of embracing mass culture too much and of being too superficial to understand the qualities of art. Some even suggested a parallel between the questions that I wanted to raise and the rise of populism in Dutch politics and society. This is remarkable, because my position was motivated above all by my concern about the marginal social position of art, or rather, by my conviction that art could and should play a larger role in our society. The museum plays a key role in this, I believe.
Once we view art as an experience with which we can develop a better insight into ourselves and the world around us, the museum is the place where this happens. But if museums really want to relate to what is going on in society, they will have to abandon the art historical perspective as the only principle behind what they show (and how they show it). This brings us to what, in the context of this symposium, I would like to call the museum as interface. The museum as interface is a place where things can take on meaning, where reflection is possible, where discussion can be held, where an exchange of knowledge and ideas with other fields of knowledge and disciplines can take place. The museum as interface can allow itself to be slow. Things can exist there without having to prove their raison d’être by the amount of attention they receive, as they have to do in the world of the mass media. This automatically confers on the ideal museum as interface a place and a role of importance in our society.
