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Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2006 by Nancy J. Troy, Geoffrey Batchen, Amelia Jones, Pamela M. Lee, Romy Golan, Robert Storr, Jodi Hauptman, Dario Gamboni
And if we believe the argument in "1976," there is clearly no hope for the display of revolutionary art in the museum or the very notion of a revolutionary museum at all. The museum's contents, in late capitalism, are simply "derealized, simulacral spectacle" (p. 579).
Despite this pessimism, the emphasis on exhibitions shows that the authors are not completely resigned to the museum's and its objects' reactionary fate. All have been involved in curatorial efforts in one form or another, perhaps making them better equipped than many scholars to understand the exhibition's complex problems, stakes, and vast potential. Ironically, it is in the pages of this book--sometimes more than in the galleries themselves--that the exhibition maintains its promise. Thus, the authors' focus on the frame may be a kind of challenge not just to students, but to curators as well. Art since 1900 encourages us to see--and, for curators, to present--works of art not as finished things but (to borrow from Dorner once again) as points of departure. Such an activated reader may in fact result in an activated viewer. We can only hope. In the book's final words, Bois throws off the mantle of pessimism, arguing instead for possibility:
I don't think we should delude ourselves into thinking that we are going to change the global colonization of the cultural sphere by spectacle, but I don't think we should whine either. After all, we've been united in our desire to reshuffle the cards, not only to revisit canonical moments ... but also to retrieve from oblivion many aspects of the cultural production of these past hundred-plus years that had been ignored or deliberately repressed.... Who knows, it might have some liberatory effect. (p. 679)
JODI HAUPTMAN is associate curator in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art [Department of Drawings, the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, N.Y. 10019-5497].
Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno writes, "Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art." Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1967; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 175.
2. See Hubert Robert's Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie en ruines, 1796, Musee du Louvre, Paris. For an illustration, see Kynaston McShine, ed., The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 193.
3. F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909), in Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, ed. R. W. Flint (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), 50.
4. El Lissitzky, "Exhibition Rooms," typescript in the Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover, in Die Zwanziger Jahre in Hannover (Hannover, 1962), trans. in Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers, El Lissitzky: Life--Letters--Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 366, quoted in Magdalena Dabrowski, "El Lissitzky," in McShine, The Museum as Muse, 46.
