Wang Huangsheng (CAFA Art Museum)
Museums in China generally claim themselves “modern” or “contemporary” museums, named against the “ancient” or “traditional” Chinese museum system. Chinese museums routinely devote themselves to collecting and displaying ancient artifacts, archives and artworks, while Chinese art museums and galleries collect and display modern and contemporary Chinese artworks.
The problem is that the so-called “modern” and “contemporary” are mostly temporal concepts, instead of a cultural spirit. Therefore, Chinese art museums’ construction and development are still limited to traditional mindset and operation mode, shown in all related phases including categorization, collection, research, planning, exhibition and education. Although the art industry believes in the development of Chinese art museums in recent years, it is actually the contemporary cultural spirit, management and mindset that the Chinese art museums lack most. Contemporary art is not simply a presented and present artistic happening, but should be a more profound interference into the present society, culture and era. The interference is a new thinking of contemporary culture, an innovation in mindset, as well as a new influence on contemporary art museums’ curation, exhibition and management. The key issue of contemporary art and art museum is the perspective and attitude we have towards “modern” and “contemporary”.
1. Contemporary art museums need contemporary cultural spirit
To discuss this issue, we can first refer to the successful experience outside China.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was founded in 1929. At that time, other New York museums were still not committed to collecting modern artworks, while the American public were still not prepared for modern art. However, the first director of MoMA Alfred H. Barr brought advanced revolutionary thinking, namely the “modern concept of art”, into the museum world, and also promoted it as MoMA’s founding philosophy and academic image. Barr believed that modernism, as a international art movement, was not simply a creative approach or aesthetic expression, nor is a high art form limited to paintings, sculptures or architecture, but almost permeated almost all cultural aspects of 1920s-30s, including photography, cinema, design, music, literature, poetry, dance and theater. Modernism is an inevitable spiritual sign and trend of the new era, and modern spirit spoke for itself with a variety of cultural and artistic media. Based on this, Barr believed that modern art museums should be inclusive in a way different from traditional museums, as embodied in collection and display of not only high art such as paintings and sculptures, but also pop culture-related practical art, design, new media art such as photography and cinema, because it was these new art categories that manifest the culture and ideas of the new era.
Barr had three accomplishments in the historical development of MoMa and even the world museum industry: First, he made MoMA the world’s first all-embracing modern visual art museum; second, he built MoMA’s classic collection of modern art, formed a complete historical sequence of modern art, fostering MoMA’s invincible position among museums worldwide; third, he founded diversified professional departments in the museum, and developed its research-based curatorial works in different fields - for example as early as 1935, MoMA set up the departments of film and photography. The department of film collected over 10,000 films, especially a great number of silent films, which are some of the department’s most precious collections. MoMA’s department of photography is also influential internationally. These departments achieved remarkable results in collection, research and exhibition.
In comparison, China still lacks a museum that has specialized departments dedicated to the research of new media arts such as photography. There were no large-scale, systematized collections in these aspects, let alone established researches. In terms of visual artwork, the Guangdong Museum of Art has been largely collecting photography and video works since 2003, and hastened its steps in visual collection by initiating the Guangzhou Triennial. Currently, Guangdong Museum of Art’s visual collection is becoming systematical, but its related research is still underdeveloped.
The cultural strategies stipulated by Barr for MoMA helped it quickly grow into the most powerful modern art center in the world, authoritative in modern art collection, research and exhibition. Like the Louvre’s unparalleled position in the classic art collection, MoMA is unparalleled in its modern art collection - it even dwarfs other significant modern art collections like Tate and Center Pompidou. Yet despite MoMA’s great influence Tate strived to seek its own historical position and academic quality, make use of its strengths and avoid weaknesses, and devote itself to feature exhibitions. It has contributed distinctly to the construction and description of European modern and contemporary art history.
Looking back at MoMA’s history, we can see that any contemporary art museum should have a contemporary cultural spirit, either it is the ancient art or modern and contemporary art that its collection, research and exhibition involve. The contemporary cultural spirit refers to modern vision, management and operation, as well as the contemporariness of research methods, curatorial ideas, and exhibition approaches. It is possible to form a “contemporary art historical sequence” under this spirit, like Croce once said, all history is contemporary history.
2. Relationship between contemporary art and art museums
In return, how does contemporary art affect art museums’ academic development and values? Renowned scholar Wu Hung once so described the “contemporariness” of contemporary art: The true ‘contemporariness’ will not show via a new medium, format, style or content, but is the realization of the artist’s relationship with “the world they belong to and transform” via visual symbols, what kind of relationship that is, and how they enable it.
Regarding the relationship between contemporary art and art museums, deep and systematical thinking in Chinese context happened in 2002, during the first Guangzhou Triennial and its symposium. The theme of the symposium is “Place and model: Rethinking and Reinventing Contemporary Art Exhibitions”. From the angle of contemporary art exhibitions, it discussed and reflected on current issues and possibilities related to Chinese exhibitions, such as exhibition mechanisms and modes.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist also spoke about the relationship between contemporary art and art museums, that art museums should always prioritize the conception of multiplicity and diversity. He also noted that art museums can be seen as an interrelated space that contains anecdotes and mediations between the museums and the cities. The “Cities on the Move” exhibition, hosted by Obrist and Hou Hanru, has continued for eight years, involving many cities. Obrist’s idea is to view art museums as a new space concept, endowing with it multiple and diverse space for thinking, and extending this space concept into the museums’ relationship with the cities. They roam through many “fixed” cities with this “mobile city”, and the exhibitions constantly generate new meanings and possibilities along with the change of locations. Meanwhile, they will bring the dialogue between cities into symposiums and laboratories, facilitating dialogues, conversations and experimentations with artists, critics, interdisciplinary scholars and the public. These new exhibition planning concepts, displaying approaches and communication modes refreshingly breathed new life into contemporary art exhibitions.
The Guangdong Museum of Art always pays attention to the relationship between contemporary art and art museums. Therefore in 2005, the museum invited Obrist and Hou to be the curators for the second Guangzhou Triennial. The theme was “BEYOND: an extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization”. The two curators brought their curatorial ideas and operational mode of the “Cities on the Move” exhibition into this triennial. The theme can reflect their unique perspective - they challenged the still, stabilized, explicit and unambiguous space concept, transformed it into a turbulent experimental space brimmed with all kinds of possibilities, and provoked artists to create and exhibit in the new space; they carried out cultural interpretation of the Pearl River Delta - the special modernism showing the curators’ cultural values and humanistic care, with the region’s cultural image revealing itself through these expressions. On how the exhibitions were carried forward, there were six “Delta Laboratories”, inviting cultural scholars, architects, artists, poets, philosophers, critics to visit specific places like Guangzhou and the bigger Pearl River Delta region for academic activities such as inspection, conversation and research. Through these multi-layered interactive activities, they hope to create a contemporary exhibition mode, such as biennials or triennials, that grows in the soil of a specific and special modern experimental space like the Pearl River Delta, instead of being transplanted, so that it could engage in tangible interactions with the city and its modernization process.
It is thus clear that ways to curate contemporary art exhibitions and generate relationships could bring a new exhibition and space concept to art museums, and all kinds of possibilities to contemporary art’s relationship with art museums and their cities.
3. Art museums for experience, participation and transcendence
Art museum is not simply an exhibition venue, but more of a place that expects participation. We need to call for the public to approach her, to provide people with new experience, and to transform the public’s old perspectives and thinking conventions. The public should actively experience the art in a museum, peacefully touch and feel the art with their hands, ears and heart, and form new cognition and experience of their own. It is like the story of the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament: When Jesus came back to life, once again joined the apostles, Saint Thomas was skeptical of what he saw. Only after he put his finger into Jesus’s side, that what he perceived and felt was transformed into a brand new experience. Experience changed Saint Thomas’s ideas, the same as how art museums change the public’s aesthetic habits.
The key is that, how to attract the public’s attention in contemporary context? How to resonate with the public emotionally, so that they would willingly walk into art museums, exhibitions, and participate in the experience of art? In this aspect, David Elliott provided a classic example. In 1998, as the first director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm after the museum’s new building opened, he curated the new museum’s inaugural exhibition “Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art”. The idea that Elliott upheld was: While traditionally art generates at the branch point of life and art, he hoped to explore the concrete issues of collective and individual, democracy and society, art and spirit, and how individuals could hold on to their ideas through democracy, realize their dreams, transcend themselves and the society, and continue their journey towards freedom. When he later became the first director of Japan’s Mori Art Museum, the inaugural exhibition he curated once again applied this idea. The exhibition was titled “Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life”. It investigated into different ideas, standards, individual experience of and copy styles towards “happiness” in the world, and used happiness as an attitude to describe contemporary art, and to discuss how this attitude steps into the society and individual ideal and reality.
The two exhibitions of Elliott’s both took exhibitions as a way for emotional experience, instead of simple and traditional artwork showcasing. Moreover, the exhibitions took care of both individual and collective emotional experience. Be it wounds or happiness, democracy (Stockholm) or survival (Tokyo), these words and phrases, containing strong life experience and historical meanings, can easily stir the public’s emotional resonance and cultural recognition.
As Elliott was busy arousing the public’s emotional resonance with and participation in art museums through exhibitions, scholars in foreign countries and Taiwan were keen on discussing the development and reform of modern and postmodern museums and art museums. They believe today’s art museums are in a new stage of historical development, and need to respond to the various new phenomenon and problems of contemporary museums and art museums with new museological visions. This is mainly embodied in the transformation of culture, communicative means and purposes, in our reflection on the relationship of museums and art museums with the public. Museums and art museums, influenced by these new thoughts, have gradually metamorphosed from a traditionally condescending place that deemed itself professional and tried to educate and guide the public from the top down, to an institute that keep the audience’s expectations and needs in mind, actively guide different groups of audience to shape, educate and better themselves. Museums and art museums are no longer a place that pass on fixed knowledge, but have become a space for the public to generate life and aesthetic experience via honest communications. The public here is concrete, stratified, flowing, instead of abstract, conceptual or immobilized.
In a nutshell, in addition to establishing their inherent “contemporary” perspective and pursuing interactive relations with contemporary art, the contemporary art museums have the responsibility to build new, humanistic relationship with the public. Who are the public? How and by what standard can they be categorized? How to build new relationship? What follows suit?
The aforementioned three aspects can make contemporary museums a social, spiritual, lively, creative, participatory, inclusive and humanized space.
November 6, 2009
Written at Central Academy of Fine Arts
