"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 this respect, as well as others, this exhibition fulfilled a museum's educative function in an unusually profound way. By laying bare its own devices, by rendering visible the mechanisms by which museum knowledge is actively constituted, "The Label Show" transformed museum visitors from passive receivers of an institutional discourse to active, participating collaborators, empowered to question and criticize, as well as to appreciate.

(1.) Surprisingly, French museum devoted exclusively to the "contemporary" predates the establishment of a "modern" museum (i.e., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, founded in 1936) by more than a century. I refer here to the Musee du Luxembourg, which after 1815 was organized to display only the work of living artists. Its inaugural exhibition, in 1818, was a retrospective of the work of Jacques-Louis David. Art works were not permitted to enter the Louvre collection until ten years (later five) after an artist's death. (2.) An extremely interesting anthology/catalogue of artists' work on the museum institution is Museums by Artists, eds. A.A. Bronson and Peggy Gale, Toronto, Art Metropole, 1983. (3.) Craig Owens, "From Work to Frame, or Is There Life After |The Death of the Author'?" in Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, eds. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman and Jane Weinstock, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1992. (4.) Needless to say, it is an easier task to write an essay or book that performs an ideological investigation or critique of museum structure and discourse than to produce an exhibition that engagingly demonstrates how these actually operate. Among recent texts that interrogate what I have termed the deep structures of the museum's organization and production of knowledge: Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993; Eileen Hopper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London and New York, Routledge, 1992; and Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: BWM, Discourses, Spectacles, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994. (5.) European and American paintings occupy 25 percent of the total exhibition space available for the MFA's permanent collection. The department of contemporary art occupies 3.7 percent of that portion.

Author: Abigail Solomon-Godeau is the author of Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, forthcoming from Thames & Hudson.