The consequences of hanging

Art and the Power of Placement, by Victoria Newhouse, New York, Monacelli Press, 2005; 304 pages, $50.

To state with authority what everyone knows but few realize can be a transforming event. An issue liminally present but never quite outed acquires a sudden impetus. Victoria Newhouse's Art and the Power of Placement has an enviable sense of timing. Art museums--their exhibitions, governance, staffing, funding, and acquisition and deaccessioning policies--have provoked a restless rumble of discourse in our culture. Museums are caught in such social and esthetic crosscurrents that it is difficult to concentrate on a specific institutional issue without being distracted by cultural panoramas. With a fierce single-mindedness, Newhouse has turned her attention not to the artwork but to whatever affects--and often compromises--our experience of it. The portable artwork--the Laocoon and the Winged Victory of Samothrace are among what she calls her "case studies"--is as vulnerable to its keepers as is an animal in a zoo. She demonstrates, with elegance and conviction, that whenever a work of art is presented, it hangs within a matrix of assumptions, conscious and unconscious, that deeply influence our perception of it. Is this news? When art displays are isolated case by case, examined with an impeccable range of scholarship (she has summoned an extraordinary pride of scholars to her aid) and convincingly illustrated by examples from Egyptian art to Jackson Pollock, the answer is, most definitely, yes. I read this book in manuscript, and felt as positively about it then as I do now.

Many of us have learned to pay attention when Newhouse examines a subject. Her previous book, Towards a New Museum (1998), coolly surveyed the international rage for museum building [see A.i.A., Dec. '99]. Museum commissions are eagerly sought by major architects, and the building itself has been fetishized by cities hoping for social benefits and a higher esthetic profile. In the culture of cities, the museum as an institution has become as stabilizing in its way as the library and the bank, and as the church still is to some. Towards a New Museum delivered a cogent evaluation of new museum buildings from Piano's Menil in Houston (1987) to Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), and fearlessly charged such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney with architectural indiscretions. Perhaps nobody has seen more museum buildings than Newhouse, who seems to be on the doorstep the moment a new one opens. Her book provided a text for evaluating an architect's attitudes to the task of building a city monument that is also a container for art.

Newhouse has now moved inside to consider how the art is presented. There is, I believe, considerable risk in taking as a subject not the artwork but its conditions of display. The subject is not easily examined, and could be mistaken by the inattentive as a kind of exalted housekeeping (as for instance, when Newhouse muses on the materials suitable for museum walls). This would miss the sustained aggression and tenacious analysis of her method--the classic art-historical one of comparison.

In her introduction, Newhouse prepares us with a fleet-footed grand tour through the placements and misplacements of artworks from the the studiolo of Isabella d'Este in Renaissance Mantua to Nam June Paik's spectacular Guggenheim exhibition in 2000 (she ponders its "discotheque" aspect), while citing examples of the cluttered (the exhibition "Art Treasures of the United Kingdom," Manchester, 1853) and the frozen (the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., now being pulled up by the roots), with asides to Rein Koolhaas's Prada store in SoHo and a billboard for Absolut vodka, also in New York (both 2000). With such agile leaps and bounds, we are given notice to keep our wits about us, as we move to the book's first section, "The Complexities of Context: How Place Affects Perception."

This chapter researches the serial vicissitudes of three great examples, the Winged Victory of Samothrace (discovered in 1863), the Laocoon (dug up in 1506), and the bronzes retrieved from Herculaneum in 1750. The incremental assembly of the Nike figure over several years was accompanied by a dawning sense of its importance, which emancipated it from casual placement among its lesser fellows. What Newhouse calls its "halting climb up the museological ladder" ended at the top of the Louvre's Grand Staircase, where it has revealed itself to generations of visitors, one of the great installation coups in any museum. Recently, however, that approach has been compromised. Entrance to the Louvre is now through I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, about which Newhouse remains tightlipped here, though she was not shy about her opinion in her previous book.

Nowhere is her thesis that context profoundly affects perception better illustrated than in her tracking of the Laocoon's journey through relocations and periods. Just as Michelangelo's David was rapidly politicized, the Laocoon was "Christianized" by Julius II in the Vatican's Statue Court (a somewhat awkward addendum by Bramante to his Belvedere Courtyard): "The agonized figure of the pagan priest became a model for depictions of Christ's suffering and the martyrdom of the saint." Leo X, however, obscured the Laocoon with two vast, reclining river gods, and soon after, the statue's missing parts were provided by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli (Michelangelo's assistant), initiating a controversy over the priest's raised right arm (straight or bent?). Within a decade the Counter-Reformation radically changed the ideological weather. The Laocoon was now one of many "profane idols." The guilty sculpture was hidden in its niche behind heavy wooden shutters. (Responding to the same repression, Daniele da Volterra covered the genitals of the figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgment.) Eventually, cultural tourism induced Clement XI to expose the antique statues, and by 1774, the Statue Court had been heavily remodeled--not to the benefit of the Laocoon. Newhouse never takes her eye off the way the sculpture was redefined and reperceived in these different contexts.