The museum of the Third Kind: in which the author envisions new directions for the art museum as audiences change, architecture evolves, institutions subdivide and electronic resources expand our capabilities and expectations

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Douglas Davis

Reviving the Personal

In 1999, Beatrice yon Bismarck, a young German critic, propounded what seemed then a fantastic thesis: the most radical innovation coming for museums in the new century, she wrote, will be the "Living Artist's Archive"--everything he or she saved, used and documented, in connection with the works--in brief, the materials of the artist's life and thought. (24) Those who recall how Berenice Abbott chanced upon the imminent trashing of the negatives and prints of Eugene Atget in the 1930s--by a landlady who saw his death that morning merely as a chance to find a new tenant--knows how vulnerable such materials can be. Further, those who see the high cultural value of what might be classed as "ephemera"--letters, scores, sketches, video, works originating on the Web or in micro-media like the Palm Pilot--sense the same urgency that seized Abbott long ago. Already we see institutions like the Getty in Los Angeles and the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe beginning to collect videos, photos, letters, notes and other documentation of performance work. Here and there we find collectors like Egidio Marzona in Udine, Italy, and George Waterman in New York City and New London, Conn., buying archives of this kind and preparing storage for them. They are both considering placing their holdings on the Web, perhaps accompanied by a narrative provided by critics, curators or the artists themselves. Allowing documents of this value to be accessed, and even downloaded, is the essence of digital democracy. More than one video artist has had this idea, too, as well as museums such as the Centre Pompidou and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

Today, I see the Living Archive proving its relevance in an even more dramatic form than yon Bismarck envisioned: in real-time Web video visits to artists in their studios and among their works in progress. This is possible now through innumerable Web-based video conferencing methods, most of them low in cost. Such extended face-to-face "visits" are more informative and intense than conventional lectures. Video projection linked to computers can access a streaming Web, with a degree of interactive resolution equal (or perhaps superior) to high-quality photography, making possible mural-scale images; and surely, one day, computers will facilitate even touch itself. Further, for those who collect or prize digital video or digital imagery, Google (surely to be followed by others) already provides software that allows buyer and artist to devise alternative, one-of-a-kind versions of given works on the very terminal being used for conversation. (25)

Here, as the new century evolves, we may see the artist, the museum and the collector/viewer merge persona, objects, hands and more. Perhaps then we will begin to unravel possibilities yet unforeseen in ... the mind of the Fourth Kind.

(1.) We already know Google.com is in the midst of scanning major portions of the New York Public and Oxford University libraries, for our instant access. This development recalls the tale told long ago by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel." The story first appeared in 1941 in The Garden of Forking Paths. (It is republished in Borges, Collected Fictions, New York, Viking, 1998, pp. 112-18.) Borges returned to this idea over and over, one example being "The Total Library," an essay published in 1989, in which he imagines an entire nation given over to the collecting of books (Borges: A Reader, New York, Dutton, 1998, pp. 94-95). How ironic that this European-Latin American fantasy is now being executed in Mountain View, Calif. Today, the "total museum" (adding prophetic force to Andre Malraux's conception of the "museum without walls") is becoming an electronically available reality, as well.