Originally published in The Eye of the Beholder: Contemporary Artists and the Public, 2000, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
In 1999, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) mounted an exhibition called Museum as Muse for which Senior Curator Kynaston McShine assembled almost 200 works of art inspired by museums. Most of the art—and most of the concern for the subject— was recent, but the earliest piece in the show was one of the most intriguing. It was a huge self-portrait done in 1822 by Charles Willson Peale who depicted himself as a vigorous older man holding open a curtain to reveal the museum he had established in Philadelphia in the 1780s. Both his museum and the portrait gallery that came a few years earlier were firsts in America. A prominent portraitist, Peale used both his fame and his wealth to advocate for collections dedicated to public edification, and his contained historical portraits, Native American “relics,” and many natural specimens. Quirky as the man and his ambitions may have been, Peale’s painting is nonetheless evidence of a long relationship between artists and museums.
The exhibition goes on to illuminate something else as well: that this relationship is rocky. A great deal of the art was critical, addressing, for example, the disembodiment that happens when art is taken from its original environment and function and is repositioned in museums—often becoming artifacts admired for aesthetic purposes regardless of original intention. Some art in the show was satirical, for example Andrea Fraser’s performance videos of herself imitating museum docents, reiterating funny (and sometimes inane) things she had heard volunteer lecturers say in galleries. Komar and Melamid depicted both MOMA and the Guggenheim—theoretically monuments to permanence— in ruins; Ed Ruscha painted the Los Angeles County Museum of Art aflame. Christo showed a proposal, The Museum of Modern Art Packed (1968), which wrapped the museum, top to bottom, in cloth and twine, turning it into a monumental sculpture, on the one hand, and reducing it to a package—or a container for commodities— on another. The museum did not permit Christo to undertake the proposed action, although at least one other—the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago—did. Still, the refusal indicates that an artist’s goals and a museum’s are not always in synch. Surveying the show, in fact, it was easy to see that, however fascinated artists are by these institutional shrines to art, they very often question museum programs and policies.
In many ways artists and museums operate at cross-purposes. Working in their studios, artists paint, pound, scrape, scratch, sand, press, stack, lean, and otherwise produce and handle the stuff they are bringing to life. At will, they move their creations around their studios—usually crowded, often messy affairs—as they work, study, and rework each piece. Temperature and humidity are what they are, record keeping can be casual, and storage is informal. Theirs is essentially a solitary pursuit, and watching them work, you sense that it is the energy, inspiration, talent and skill that are precious, not so much the things made.
But once these “things” leave the artists’ vital milieu and enter the museum, something happens. Curators treat the same objects as if sacred. They protect them as timeless, transcendent, and of great value; security is intense and constant. Handled only with gloves, the art is minutely examined and annotated in terms of condition, carefully identified, protected in climate-controlled galleries or storerooms, and exhibited in the most pristine, careful, and elegant circumstances possible. The original object will, ideally, remain untouched, safe, and unchanging for all future time. The artist as solo creator of a work is replaced by a cadre of professionals—from curators, conservators, and record-keepers to educators, editors, and publicists. And then there are members of the viewing public whose gaze, from now to eternity, is the point of much of the museum’s effort.
Generalized as these descriptions are, it is safe to say that, as an object leaves its maker and is acquired by a collector or museum, it moves from one stage in its existence to another. Though the artist and museum share a focus on art objects and can appreciate each other's efforts, they have different functions. Different disciplines are involved, and different rules apply; to see them as related is natural, but to make meaningful connections between them is difficult.
Despite this fundamental contradiction, museums today frequently seek to integrate their world with that of artists, hoping to establish a meaningful exchange between the acts of creating and presenting. Institutions want to support artists and be more relevant to the act of creation. They invite artists to use their spaces in order to enliven their sometimes austere environments and provide a different institutional face. In the presence of their objects, museums want artists to demonstrate the processes of making art and to reveal how they think. They also want artists to share their ways of seeing art, since it is assumed that their perspective is different from that of curators and historians, and that it will be helpful to the viewing public. And for the most part artists respond willingly to requests for their presence or services.
The reasons for this desire may be rooted in the history of museums, which are oddities in the longer story of humankind and a phenomenon now found worldwide, though essentially European in origin. Most cultures through time needed no such repositories of treasured objects. What we call and stockpile as art was interwoven into daily life, ritual, sacrament, and ceremony. It was functional, whether actually useful, decorative, instructive, or religious. Shifts in societies and cultures away from the tribal or ethnically bound virtually created a need for museums. Even before they were noticed as such, collections developed in part as protectors of valuable items from other times and places, and as sites to allow for study and appreciation of cultures either distant or disappearing.
Still, collections might not have appeared were it not for the acquisitive nature of some individuals, often coupled with intellectual curiosity. Cabinets of curiosities have been in existence in western cultures for hundreds of years, whether as the bounty of conquests, trophies of position or wealth, or objects of wonder. Many art collections were initiated by royalty and popes, others by princes of commerce. They were frequently motivated by aesthetic concerns—and just as often by the desire for status that comes with being seen as refined, cultured, and widely informed. Quite often, those who collected were also patrons, commissioning work for cathedrals, palaces, and public spaces, and thus carrying on a very significant dialogue with artists and creative production in the process.
At first, collectors operated without the intentions or discipline of the historians we see in charge today. Art was often incorporated into the décor of a space. Agglomerations of natural curiosities and artifacts of different cultures were common. Attempts to sort out, classify, and present objects in some orderly fashion came along with scientific methods and the separation of disciplines (art as distinct from history, the sciences, etc.) that continues to dominate academia, to which museums relate as extended family. The people in charge of collections began to function to make sense of diverse works of creative expression, to explain, through reason and example, why things were as they were. Through exhibitions, publications, lectures, and other sorts of explanatory programs, museums now attempt to provide an objective, rational view of the art they show—thus becoming the dispassionate voice of logic and rationale.
The museum’s interpretive role has increased in importance in the second half of the twentieth century. Art of the past and from distant places is harder to understand because of cultural differences, and art of more recent vintage is more concerned with idiosyncratic musings on life’s meanings and issues than with shared values. Where art could exist in most cultures through time as a vital and comprehensible tool for participation in a given society, it gradually became less tied to common understandings, and it was often encountered out of context—in museums. Therefore the museum became encumbered with the task of trying to link a decontextualized object—one whose meanings were obscure—to an ill-informed audience—one which in fact had become increasingly distant from all art. Museums became necessary if we were to have and to understand art at all.
As museums became the locus of explanation, another phenomenon occurred: they began to have a validating function. Art collected and presented by museums came to be seen as having value perhaps greater than that which was not. Credibility came with attention. Unfortunately, a combination of factors led to whole cultures or genres being overlooked, although there is much effort at present to redress past omissions. But nowhere is this more problematic than with art being produced by living artists. In fact, New York’s MOMA was founded in 1929 in part because its elder sister, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, refused to show work by anyone alive. The Whitney Museum was started by a wealthy artist to focus on American artists as they were making their discoveries, not years later. But in time, even these were seen as hoary, and while individuals working within them were (and are) often nimble of mind, the institutions themselves seemed slow moving, careful, and conservative in the sense of delaying determining action until a reasoned position could be taken. We have consequently seen those concerned with “the new“ opening successions of exhibition spaces. By the 1970s, it was often artists themselves who took the initiative; the proliferation of “alternative spaces” is part of this trend.
Still, a problem facing most exhibiting institutions is dealing with the art that does not fit neatly into categories, or into some easily recognizable stream of development. The impetus to set art in the context of the past—to develop a sense of continuity—does not work in cases where antecedents provide no logical or clear explanation. Reigning theories of what is true and important can determine what is collected and presented, leading to marginalization of anomalies. For example, during the mid-20th century heyday of abstraction, realism was seldom seen in major museum shows. Cultural biases can cause myopia; artists who make things that come from the perspective of a minority are simply not seen. Women artists and artists of color suffer from the problems that have to do with group exclusion. Peculiar sensibilities and even new media can be ignored or overlooked. Art by people without training and new genres like video and digital art, or performance art are territories that artists claim but that institutions are slow to acknowledge.
In other words, the scholarly and well-intended goal to supply context and explanation tends to work better for museums than for artists, and is one of the issues that artists critique in shows like The Museum as Muse. The artist Fred Wilson has surveyed many institutions from the perspective of a person with both African and Native American heritage, examining not just what is and is not shown, but also the make up of staffs, visitors, and donors in racial terms. He has found striking ways to represent institutional racism and bigotry—reflections of society at large—creating displays filled not so much with the rage you might expect but with a dark humor that mitigates the sting without undermining the point. The bad news is what his work tells us; the good news is that more and more museums are letting him do it. Another conceptual artist, Hans Haacke, raises hackles because of the ways his art exposes the art world’s infrastructure. The Guggenheim Museum once eliminated a new work by Haacke from a show because it focused on troubling financial dealings of the museum’s trustees, but other work is on frequent display.
American museums have a history complicated by the history of the nation itself. Many of the earliest settlers were running from the hierarchical societies of England and Europe. This included rejection of the trappings of the privileged, art being a principal example. Many colonists had little money, and the rigors of establishing a life in the roughness of colonial America produced few of sufficient fortune or with the inclination to turn their money into collections that seemed frivolous given their practical bent. Becoming an artist was similarly a rare choice of occupation, because for the most part it didn't exist. Scant living was to be made unless you doubled as a sign painter or painted portraits, still a marginal existence except for a few. The annoyance of being at the mercy of the wealthy drove one notable artist, Samuel F.B. Morse, away from painting in the 1840s to the invention of a technological tool and a code which immortalized him in a way that painting would not.
But the particulars of American history were not the only factors that made careers as artists challenging in the new republic. The broad social changes that had given rise to museums also affected the role of artists. In traditional cultures, the artist—not necessarily so called—had the integral function, well-defined and essential, of making objects defined by convention and understood by all. Along with the shift from homogeneous cultures and their agreed upon forms and beliefs, the advent of a mobile, heterogeneous modern world gradually lessened the role of the artist as the maker of things that served a group and enhanced the artist's role as one who made things that pleased individuals. Even when they worked at the service of a religious or social patron, artists during and after the Renaissance began to operate from a basis of individualism in terms of both style and content. By the late 19th century, we see artists creating mostly to please themselves, and perhaps each other, although audiences frequently developed around the new and the “original.” With these moves, the artist went from a central to a relatively marginal position in society; the audiences that kept up with these artist/inventors were a small segment, even an elite, within culture at large.
A wave of museum building began just after the Civil War, corresponding to the amassing of great fortunes, many of which had been acquired at the kind of public expense that turned barons into benefactors if only to launder their public profiles. Many of these—The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Corcoran Museum of Art—simultaneously developed schools of art. The founders clearly saw a need for the development of homegrown training for artists, and they apparently linked training to the availability of collections. So great was the impulse to surround the artist-in-training with models from the past that when collections of antiquities were not available in their original forms, plaster casts were displayed to be examined, drawn, and replicated.
Most artists before the advent of art schools were trained in the studio of a master, as were artisans and other sorts of craftspeople. Another way to learn, however, was to copy, a practice common in the 19th century that has seen something of a resurgence in the last twenty years. For this purpose, museum collections, of course, are essential to artists. Even artists who have other recourse for training often refer to the work of artists who came before them for inspiration as well as answers to questions regarding media, method, and ideas. Long after they have become masters themselves, many artists, especially those like Cézanne for whom growth in technical ability is a constant concern, spend hours in museums looking and drawing, testing both eye and hand. In schools and studios, artists can work from models or still-life setups, but in museums they can see how figures and objects, how form and content have already been worked through other artists’ visions, sensibilities, and craft. Imagine the thrill felt by Picasso, still young and searching, as he walked through the ethnographic collections of Paris sometime around 1906, discovering the choices made by artists of tribal cultures. In no time at all he was transliterating what he saw onto canvas in his own studio, barely changing the forms he witnessed and making images that became some of the most influential of the 20th century.
Artists would have seen such images in each other's studios, in the homes of collectors—the likes of Gertrude Stein, a great champion of new art as well as an inventive writer herself—or in the galleries that sold new work. They would have been much discussed at cafés and gatherings by those on the inside track, and written about in both positive and decidedly negative terms by critics. They would not, however, have been seen in the context of older art—that is, in museums—until the advent of the modern art museum. New York’s MOMA is a prime example.
There is currently an international matrix of commercial galleries, non-profit exhibition spaces, college and university galleries, publications, and, now, the Internet that ferrets out and introduces the newest of the new, and museum curators turn to these for updates. When museums decide to show contemporary work, they first present it in very small shows or as part of exhibitions designed to illuminate some new trend. The device of the one-person show is also used to set current work within an individual’s own developmental history. Publications and lectures help to provide the keys to how the work fits into the course of artistic evolution. Artists are considered valuable sources of information in this regard and are often asked to comment about it.
Artists are often given a role in selecting work to be shown, and in the case of much contemporary sculpture—site-specific work that only the artist can install—they are on hand in the museum during a show’s preparation. A case in point is Jenny Holzer, who helped turn the Guggenheim Museum—Frank Lloyd Wright’s wonderful challenge to displaying and viewing art—into an environment of light and motion where the ideas conveyed by her electronic signs, along with the architecture, sent the mind spiraling. The 1989 exhibition literally illuminated the artist’s career up to that point.
To return to constraints on what is shown, however, we have to consider America’s ongoing puritanical streak and its effect on politics, including those of museums. Public concerns about decency, appropriateness, and what is aesthetically acceptable are considered as museum curators make decisions about what to show. Conservatism makes it difficult for museums to commission new works because, not knowing in advance what an artist will make, they risk offending donors, especially if public money is involved. Some of the skirmishes of the American culture wars of the last two decades have taken place not between liberals and conservatives in the usual sense, but between artists and institutions. Accusations of censorship occasionally occur, but more often the force of external opinion has a chilling effect on museum policy: the more radical the art—especially art that addresses social issues—the less likely it is to appear in museums. Museums want to maintain support while bringing in visitors, preferably a large, wide, and diverse range of people; artists want those people to see all that they make. These goals are not always congruent.
Wanting to attract audiences and to teach—and not to offend—has been an item on museum agendas, tacitly or obviously, since they opened as public institutions. In the United States, education was forefront among the founders’ concerns from their post Civil War beginnings. Most public art museums stated their intentions to raise levels of public taste and to help inspire lofty ideals and creative endeavors among the common people. Because of these missions, getting the public into the galleries has been an ongoing goal, but one that has not necessarily been achieved. This brings us back to an argument suggested earlier in this essay: that history somehow holds a key to why museums today want so keenly to integrate artists into museum practice.
It would be my contention that many people who devote their lives to museums— trustees, volunteers, and staff—are frustrated by their situations. They feel deeply about the power of art and they want others to feel it, too. They have, I believe, deep-seated hankerings to recapture the olden days when art-making was directly linked to its use. When art was not cloistered but integrated into daily life. When experience was not filtered through a lens of information and opinion. When people understood the things we call art because they were so deeply connected to their lives. When there was no need to recruit audiences; they simply were. Think religious and tribal art.
To carry on with this notion, I believe that many museum workers would like to create a new role for themselves and their institutions, one that cuts through layers of stringent academic correctness and helps audiences connect with the gritty realness of art-making. To remove intellectual veneer and re-find understandings about art that reach into our guts. To bind creation and meaning in the presence of the viewer. To let intimacy and connection to art and artists (perhaps paradoxically) become the basis for mystery and awe.
Those with this mission are trying to vitalize the museum in many ways. In exhibitions like Primitivism in the 20th century, MOMA’s curators want visitors to tread with Picasso among the masks that fired his imagination. When the Walker Art Center uses three of its galleries as temporary studios for artists, available for the public to wander into as the artists work, it is trying to demystify artistic process: how do the things we see get made? When the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art opens a project by performance artist Karen Finley which turns a gallery into a studio where visitors can draw from nude models, it not only engages viewers in an authentic experience of making but also asks people to look at nudes in the collection from a more informed perspective. When the Gardner Museum asks dancer Liz Lerman or composer Elizabeth Swados to respond to the spaces of the mansion and the art within—using their vocabularies of movement and sound—it wants to provide new options to viewers, new means to experience the place. When the Gardner asks Abelardo Morell to turn his camera on the museum, it hopes the outcome will be images that embody what his gifted eye notices, showing a way to see by example. And when it asks Joan Bankemper to work with young people, it draws a new audience into a way of creating something commonplace but in an extraordinary way—a garden that reflects Museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner’s interests in horticulture, which is still apparent today.
While many museums can be cited for their projects with contemporary artists, it is worth musing over why the Gardner Museum is a leading exemplar of such efforts. It is housed in a large and elegant urban mansion that Mrs. Gardner had designed to serve both as her home and as a space to show what she collected. She had its eventual disposition as a museum in mind from the start, and she had very clear ideas about what that meant. Its collections have been static since 1924, when she died, in accordance her iron-clad will. In fact, the art, furniture, fabrics and the like that she collected— mostly from times long past —were to be left exactly as she arranged them. This insistence on permanence and control makes her almost a caricature of an intransigent curator.
She was, however, also a patron of artists of her time. As a collector, she was eclectic in her enthusiastic acquisitiveness and idiosyncratic in her diverse tastes, operating, arguably, with the vision and inspiration one associates more with artists than scholars. She enjoyed the private individual’s option to acquire on whim, letting taste, pocket book, desire, availability, travel, new information, new friends, even passion be decisive. She made no decision to focus acquisitions in order to make the logic of an unfolding story easier to tell, as a museum would try to do. Similarly, she displayed her treasures as she saw fit, letting the architecture, visual excitement, or other personal dictates decide for her. She lived and created based on her own rules, just as Picasso and Pollock did.
Isabella Stewart Gardner combined connoisseurship with a precise notion of how to present things to make points about which she was apparently quite clear. She wanted the visitor to have an exquisite experience of diverse objects, coming to understand them better because they were integrated into a home—the daily life of someone, even if a very lucky someone. The logic of her choices was intuitive rather than studied, scholarly, or objective. Unchanging as the installation must remain, the Gardner Museum is nonetheless alive with light, flowers, and the effects of living—as well as treasures of great brilliance. Mrs. Gardner made the museum her work of art, and perhaps that is why in this setting we have the perfect integration of artist and museum, and, by definition, a mandate for the intriguing program of artist residencies prioritized by the Gardner Museum staff today.