Let us go on (as M. Foucault wrote):
I have an idea to pursue for the art installation in the new Louve-Lens galleries (we won the competition to design the new satellite museum with our Japanese partners, Sanaa, and we are overseeing the re-installation of the Louvre's collection in our new building - planned to open in 2011).
I will post a rough sketch later.
It is rough, but I have this faint feeling of something very specific. It is informal, asymmetrical, but is quite rigorous as well (in conception at least).
It came in early morning thinking, and in lots of recent reading as well, that sparked some thoughts.
It also came out of a resistance, I have, to the exhibit, as well as the lack of comprehension of what the exhibit is all about:
The exhibition titles - "the axe dans le temps; le cheminement dans le temps; l'homme dans son temps" - are all headlines that presuppose an exhibit that remains entrenched in an enlightenment premise of the museum.
Chronology, time as linear, the positive and progressive ideas of culture, is pretty much
inherent in any titles we have heard for this exhibit, and in the selection of works based on universal concepts of historical periods.
Is there something else that we have not read into this selection, in the future mediation that the team for the "projet scientific et culturelle" will provide, that engages some critique of this stance? The thread is too tight, in this current reading, of the Louvre Palais to an enlightenment ethos, to make the LL museum and this exhibit stand on its own terms, in a postmodern space.
At least from what we have thought, seen and produced up to this point.
So, that leaves us to do the critical reading, and then to provide a different approach to the exhibit.
The museum design, already, has inherent in it - what we brought to the winning design no less - this critical relation to the Louvre Palais with its hierarchical wings of established, categorized, compartmentalized periods of art (time, historical space).
The exhibit must also provide for this critical dimension.
Time, conceived as a spatial movement, is a vulgar concept that remains 19th Century in origin (Heidegger). This gives way to reading art, history, progress in linear terms. This is a dead-end (or it has been done before).
Where we stand now, with a postmodern philosophy that breaks down linearization of knowledge - from Foucault to Derrida -as well as where we stand as a spectator in the public realm today - our daily, highly mediated experiences, from video to virtual gaming (SL) - assumes we are prepared, or expecting a fragmented view of art history.
This should be a core expectation of the exhibit design.
We should then subvert the expectation for coherence in the exhibit sequence, groupings and progression.
We should breakdown the linearization, the "complicity" that is set-up at the outset (the title of the show; the presence of the Louvre's name; the already mediated awareness of what "may be" on display from reproductions and text prior to entering the exhibit (the simulacrum as real – see G. Deleuze) that there is an assumed continuity and coherence of these juxtaposed periods and artifacts. But this is not the practice of museum exhibit that should be validated here.
If we perform, with the LL, this “archaeology” of the institution (Foucault), archaeology of the selected works (the diagrams that the office is working on), we can dismantle this assumed coherence and provide something different, a third path*, accepting that we are working with multiple, discontinuous "periods", skeptical of a singular narrative by offering the Foucaultian concept of a "space of difference and a space of representation".
It is not "new" to interrogate, or undermine the premise of a show, or be critical of the institution per se.
However, to define this design, in this particular gallery, with this particular title and these incredible, selective, singular, subjective selection of works, artifacts and, eventually, works of art, created, to be used, for as many reasons as the number of objects proposed, by means of a resistance to linear explanation - can be radical, will be a transgression of sorts, will allow us to imaginatively reconsider how we look at this art, and look at ourselves as well.
The exhibit is to engage in a double paradox (not the classic paradigm of display versus conservation): abolish time, but regain it as a kind of immediate knowledge, whole time (MF): to juxtapose, group, temporally discontinuous objects - none in isolation - will create the spatial aspect of the exhibit, that undermines the progressive icon to icon, jalons to jalons, assumed in the LL exhibit, from what we know today. The fiche technique is clearly not much help in elucidating anything more conceptual!
For lack of dialog, for lack of understanding the motivation on selecting each particular object or the sequence of selected works, our task is to reconfigure them, regroup them, space them (espacement, temporization) in a topographic way, as a family of subsets. This idea - topographical, rather than historiography - links again to Foucault, that we create a "dispersion of discontinuities", imagine ruptures and intervals, rather than works and periods to be distinct and totally separate (topographic space is a "milieu in which are circumscribed the relations of proximity, of envelopment", Merleau Ponty),
"The (exhibit) is the space in which the difference inherent in its content is experienced". (BL on Foucault’s museum). It is the difference between the objects and the text or mediation given to them, between artifacts and the conceptual structure given by the groupings, what MF calls the "space of representation". So, we are to put on display, the ways that the objects are to be, or may be, conceptually understood.
"History becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being. Effective history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting (Foucault 1984)"
The exhibit shall be laid out, as a space of "dispersion", rather than a space of continuity, or linear presentation, in coherent sections.
Establishing these terms, the syntax, in advance helps me, us hopefully, to develop the tools of display.
It allowed me to fee free to see the groupings placed on a series of idiosyncratic "tables" or "platforms" as a device, paradoxically distinct, but also "autonomous" in design, crossing across the boundaries of time periods. The platforms are not stand-ins for "contexts".
The platforms, will group discontinuous pieces - they will not be seen as singular works, objects of pure awe (J. LaPlanche) – they will be like a series of chains to experience in different order, encouraging a different order of reading, different way of thinking, a different way of seeing. We will avoid the Palais precedent of the object “fossilized as a series of objects lit up like so many dots”. With the open plan and platforms, we get a new quality, “ freed when the idea of moving through the exhibition becomes a decisive factor.” (Gonzalez-Torres)
The layout I did is a kind of unraveling, rather than bringing together of coherent grouping; its opposite I guess.
It attempts to diversify the experience, rather than unify.
It allow for gaps in the chain. It is not an attempt to describe the "total face of the culture" (MF) – the progressive, linear time.
"The layout, the configuration has no privilege; it is just one describable group of interrelations".
The temporary, renewable galleries are located in each opposite corners of the singular exhibit volume, in a very pragmatic location. Formally, it allows for this cross-over, towards the center (the core), and to provide a diagonal path to the glass gallery to the East. It will also allow for direct access to one off the foyer, and from the end of exhibit to the West to the other. More importantly experientially, it allows the singular dimensions of this volume, in length and in width, to be preserved, “uncluttered”.
The progression in configuration of the "installation" - walls and platforms - do not fall entirely within the established time periods, the historiography per se, to undermine the notion of continuity and progressive time.
The platforms will be large, asymmetrical, floating off the floor at various heights, perhaps hinged with directional offshoots, or embedded to each other, to set up the juxtapositions of various works.
We will have to design a series of interchangeable platforms – mille plateaux , our rhizome for this device – to weave the various scale of works together.
By bringing together - here for the first time for the Louvre - works from different departments and of different material and format, a confrontation, a precondition is already established, for new meanings. This alone, however, is not strong enough to make the exhibit, to be innovative and challenging, in and of itself.
If we see them – the platforms - as devices that are not only describing communalities, but also differences (differance, differe, defer), coincidences, shifts, gaps, as well as distinct transformations, aesthetic or technological breaks, then we will allow for the multiple or heterotopic experience. (See MF on Heterotopias; more recently see NSpector on Gonzales-Torres).
The design will both bring together objects and separate them. It will allow for, at times, a "differed" reading of the works, by the ”distraction" we create around or next to the incongruous platforms and their groupings. We contain in the exhibit the potential of this other way of seeing. "Differance is the ...formation of form" Jacques Derrida.
Awareness of form is highlighted, not by didactics, but by the visitor’s trajectory in the space, by the meanderings and encounters – this is a temporarized exhibit, to allow for “time” to be understood as both place and era.
And why?
Well that is a much vaster subject. Philosophy, sociology, contemporary life today, seeks new ways of understanding history and the self. Images of man/woman, across large time periods, necessarily raises the issue, of what the sense of "self" meant at specific periods in time - and not just the reason for the representation, and how these representations were used (Greco-Roman era clearly was the most developed in this sense, creating a practice of the self as a social undertaking, undone in the early Christian era, and re-discovered in modern times in a more self-centered way; See Foucault on the origin of self from Aristotle to modern times).
If we are to take the entire exhibit, viewed from our position today (of intertextuality, subjectivity, non-linear time etc), then it obligates us to see any coherent narrative to be inadequate. Thus to see ourselves - equally "people of our time/ l'homme dans son temps" - dynamically, to see the works as "related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element"....both from a distant past, but also a mark "a relation to the future,... or a modified present", this allows for the confrontation with “self” that we are looking for. This is a Derridian idea, in fact, applied to our field, rather than textual reading.
Exhibition as "archi-trace"
How will the exhibit "end", on itself so-to-speak?
The early objects, from a time before writing, were also a period of non-linear expression. They were, perhaps, symbols, but they were not "restricted to succession of words or the order of time" The unity of technique, or art, is fragmented by linearization (Derrida, On Grammatology). In the 19th Century, where we have the final art works for the exhibit, we just miss the conceptual breakthrough in philosophy - or do we?, I must check on this point - of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger - that would bring us back to this "breakdown of linearization".
This is the loop, the sole saving grace of the exhibit to offer a possible "completion", of being conceptually understood, wrapped up. If not, then the inconclusiveness will have to be addressed differently: to refer back to a none-place, timeless, to a sense of self of the viewer today (retour du sujet, face a l'individualisme contemporain - BG)
Is the above good? Is this doable to work on?
Clearly there is a refusal to give a linear corridor through the entire gallery. I think this is the only way to avoid the "ambulatory" nature that this creates in the flow; the assumed hierarchy that this presupposes, as well as the expected itinerary it offers.
This asymmetrical layout, (espacement,temporized), avoids the central navel, sets the center in a peripheral movement "decentering us as subjects at the moment of our certainty of omnipotent viewers" (MPonty). This is how we reach back to the viewing experience of the earliest works, when self was yet in formation!
This not an encyclopedic or universalistic museum, or selection of works (as we have seen from the graphs and mappings that have been done to date); in any case we should undermine this premise, thus the allowing for a decentering of the visitor, that may be simultaneously refreshing and destabilizing.
We should also allow for beauty to be very, very apparent. The idea is not to fight the awe of the aesthetic experience, but to add to it. “The object is attractive (even before it is understood as aesthetically beautiful); it is interesting (even before it is an object of understanding). It poses an enigma (the fundamental notion of LaPlanche) in the form of a question: What does it want from me?” (JC). Our task is to see beauty is both a tool for seduction and for confrontation (NS). They are to work hand in hand.
By our groupings, by reversing expected assumptions on which object is on a "platform" or on a wall, grouped, and by the materiality of these supports, the exhibition will "refuse to participate in the expected state of exhibitionism"(AV). Perhaps, then, this device allows a new viewing, simultaneously presenting them, and offering the tools to grasp them.
I like this informality, the overlapping, the assumed movement, the chain of groupings that do not have one singular focus. It can be modified, added on to, and become a defining aspect of the LL, notwithstanding its "temporary" nature. This is its strength.
The layout will predict a shift for the LL in the temporary or "renouvellement spaces" as well - the theme based, or objective critique of their holdings - to a new subjectivity that we see in contemporary art installations, which "emphasize uncertainty and brings both artist (or artifact) and viewer together into a discursive environment" (NO).
As Baudrillard wrote: "The Medium is no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new era".
Are we, are they, up to this challenge?
There is more to be said. And of course more to draw. Reactions?
*..Reference to a third path refers to:
- 17century cabinet of curiosity as the forerunner to the museum, with no didactics.
- 18-19 century museum, which was all about didactics
- 20-21 century museum, third path, is the postmodern/foucaultian combination of both – a heterotopic site
- The commercial gallery, the auction house, the biennales and art fair – with numbers and red-dots is the contemporary practice that begins to infiltrate the museums, that create the white-wall gallery, with almost no didactics (Dia:Beacon, in a good way). How these “institutions” and the museums, cross-fertilize or remain autonomous, is to be looked into.
Recent readings:
Foucault's Museum: difference, representation, and genealogy, Beth Lord
Derrida: On grammatology
Foucault: L'Ordre des Choses
La Planche: Essays on Otherness
Peter Johnson: Unravelling Foucault's "different spaces"
Foucault: Of Other Spaces, 1967 (Des Espaces Autres)
Derrida: Differance
Foucault: Heterotopias, in Des Espaces Autres
Merleau Ponty: Le visible et l'invisible
Nicolas de Oliverira: Installation Art in the new Millennium
Annish Kapoor: White Out/ Anthony Vidler
Rob Inkpen: Topographic relations: developing a heuristic device for conceptualizing networked relations.
Lois Shawver: Derrida's Concept of DiffeAnce
Foucault: L'herméneutique du sujet
Goussault: Leçons de mots, leçon de choses
Nancy Spector : Felix Gonzales Torres
Hans Ulrich Obrist : Interviews
Brian Eno: 77 Million Painting on SL
The Tears of Things, Peter Schwenger
Suspension of Perception, Carry
Museum Skepticism, Carrier
No comments:
Post a Comment