"The Label Show": Contemporary Art and the Museum - various artists, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Art in America, Oct, 1994 by Abigail Solomon-Godeau

In a show that reversed the customary relation between label and art work, Boston's MFA laid bare the underlying structure of the museum experience.

Few institutional designations seem as oxymoronic a department of contemporary art within an art museum. Insofar as contemporary art is by definition a product of the present, it remains apart from and outside of the principal criteria governing the process of museological inclusion. In other words, if the mandate of the art museum is taken to be the acquisition, care, housing, exhibition and preservation of what are consensually deemed to be significant works of art (as well as some more or less vaguely defined purpose of public education), what criteria are applicable in the case of contemporary art - that is to say, an art with no history and hence unconsecrated by the judgment of posterity?(1)

A highly unusual - and unusually audacious - exhibition recently mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, prompted consideration of this institutional contradiction. In part, this critique was effected by engineering a kind of confrontation between various forms of contemporary art practice and the overarching terms of what can be called the discourse of the museum - the ways in which museology and art history together organize and direct our perception and understanding of art objects. Not least of the exhibition's interests, therefore, was its interrogation of what constitutes the "deep structure" of the institution of the museum itself.

Titled "The Label Show: Contemporary Art and the Museum" and curated by Trevor Fairbrother, the exhibition attempted to expose the myriad ways in which art objects are historically, stylistically and formally selected, periodized, presented, marketed and consumed. As the show's title signals, Fairbrother and his collaborators (primarily Barbara T. Martin, associate director for interpretation in the department of education) designed an exhibition that explicitly reversed the terms of typical exhibition practice. The label, ordinarily considered to be marginal and supplemental, was here elevated to the position normally occupied by the art object itself. At first glance, "The Label Show" looked like an unremarkable installation from the museum's collection - a medium-sized assemblage of very disparate kinds of work of varying quality, whose common denominator seemed elusive at best. This arbitrary quality was in fact the point, insofar as "The Label Show" was only peripherally "about" any of the works on display. But what, on the other hand, was the perverse curatorial logic that would place Jules Olitski alongside Richard Prince, or, in another room, Joseph Beuys with Scott Prior?

Drawing upon works in the MFA's modest permanent collection of contemporary art, Fairbrother and his colleagues organized a set of 10 thematic ensembles that threw into relief the ideological function, usually unacknowledged, of the label - the didactic wall label, the thematic label, the small identificatory label, even the directional sign label. Each of the show's sections presented a different way of grouping art works, from such traditional categories as "National Schools" (here Germany served as the example) or the "Local Scene" (Boston) to themes more specifically tailored to contemporary art, such as "Others," "The Rebel Tradition," etc. These sections were each introduced by an explanatory wall text, with a series of signed interpretive labels clustered just below it - that is, grouped independently of the art works to which they pertained. There were two or more such labels for every object included in the show, prepared by 65 different individuals and groups whom Fairbrother asked to write them. The authors ranged from the artists themselves to the MFA staff and other arts professionals, but included as well a feminist theory reading group, high-school seniors, filmmaker John Waters (on one of Andy Warhol's "Oxidation Paintings") and even playwright Tony Kushner, who wrote a 552-word play to gloss a Polaroid by Robert Mapplethorpe. That the labels were signed was itself an intervention in museum discourse, dissolving the pretense of impersonal and neutral authority, just as the very diversity of interpreters affirmed the subjectivity of their assessments. Also an integral part of the show was the blank comment cards available in the gallery during the run of the exhibition; visitors were encouraged to use them to register their responses to what they saw and read. (The filled-out cards ultimately wound up in the museum's education department.)

By these means Fairbrother performed something like an autocriticism of the art museum, making the exhibition a vehicle for examining not only the discourse of the museum but also the curatorial function itself (project conception, selection and organization of objects, catalogue production, signage, etc.). His special insight was to combine the act of curatorship with the critical language of deconstruction. This reflexive approach parallels the efforts of the many artists - Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, Lawrence Weiner and Fred Wilson among them - who have made their art an instrument for the analysis and/or deconstruction of what Broodthaers cared museum Actions."(2)