The Museum as Muse

When, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the name of R. Mutt, titled it Fountain and submitted it to the Society for Independent Artists in New York, he had already made several earlier readymades. Fountain was never exhibited at the time, but has gained mythical status as a groundbreaking work that undermines not only the presumed conditions and characteristics defining an art object, but also those of the institution that legitimises and grants value to such objects. As the destination for loot and treasure, paintings and sculpture, the museum like the zoo has of late come to be regarded not as the home of neutral displays of works already made, but as an ideologically charged location. In addition to garnering status for either the public or private sector, museums are now seen as institutions profoundly embedded in contextual histories, for instance the re-discovery of antiquity in the 18th century, colonial expansion in the 19th century, and the purist tenets of modernism in the first half of the 20th century. In 1953, Andr Malraux published Le Muse Imaginaire, translated into English as The Museum without Walls. Malraux had in mind the ways in which photography and print afforded individuals the possibility of constituting private, imaginary museums through the juxtaposition of reproduced images, thus both stretching and problematising the idea of the museum. And since the advent of conceptual art in the 1970s, there has been a growing number of artists whose work, rather than remaining within the neat confines of the art object whose passive destination was the museum, began to interrogate the tenets of museology itself. They did so by stepping out of institutional spaces into the outdoors, but also by querying, in their works, the ethical, social and economic contexts of museums. In other words, for an increasingly broad array of artists, the museum gradually became not only a destination, but also a topic, not only monument, but also shrine and mausoleum. Curated by Kynaston McShine, the senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum as Muse is an enthralling exhibition, displaying works whose central concern is the museum as both space and institution. Displayed in a manner perhaps ironically reminiscent of eighteenth-century Wunderkammer or Kunstkammer, the show includes photographic work documenting the publics visits to museums from various perspectives, from the nineteenth century photographer Roger Fenton through Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Gary Winograd, to the contemporary works of Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jeff

Wall). Other works on show problematises issues of originality and authenticity that traditionally underlie both curatorship and, more pertinently, connoisseurship (Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Komar and Melamid), teasing out notions such as the provenance of works (Hans Haake), or exploring the empty spaces left in museums after a theft the plinth or the shadow where a painting once was (Sophie Calle). Several of the artists, particularly in works dating from the 1970s to the present, create fictionalised museums, underlining the museums central function of gathering, collecting and classifying (Claes Oldenberg, Christian Boltanski, Herbert Distel, Barbara Bloom). Marcel Broodhaers, the Belgian Conceptual artist who, in the 1970s, created a complex series of works around a fictional museum, is surprisingly given little importance in the exhibition, but it is good to see Duchamps work not only his readymades but also his portable museum (Bote en Valise). Artists whose work has dealt with both the taxonomic and nostalgic implications of the collection as diverse as Joseph Cornells boxes from the 30s, Susan Hillers work From the Freud Museum and Mark Dions obsessive collections of specimens displayed in contexts that are reminiscent of the Wunderkammer jostle for attention alongside works by artists such as Lothar Baumgarten and Fred Wilson: works that prod the relationship between the museum and the histories of colonialism and slavery. The show is the kind of compendium of pieces one might have dreamed of seeing but never quite thought possible: as intellectually stimulating as it is visually absorbing. Ruth Rosengarten The Museum as Muse, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Published in Viso, 13 May, 1999.