Chaos theory

Spectator, The, Jul 10, 1999 by Kimball, Roger

Exhibitions 1

The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000. Part I: 1900-1950

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, till 22 August) What is the difference between a flea market and a large museum exhibition? Well, there's the price of admission, of course. Most flea markets are free. The American Century at the Whitney Museum of America Art will set you back $12.50, and that's only for Part I (Part II, 1950-- 2000, opens 26 September). Then there is the level of pretension: it's gratifyingly low at the flea market, stratospheric at the art museum. There is also the matter of value: at the flea market you just might get something useful for your pounds or dollars or euros. At the art museum?

Naturally, it depends on the museum and the exhibition in question. At the Whitney, what you get is a hypertrophied mixture of art and sociology. I very much doubt that anyone can reliably say how many objects are included in this exhibition, `the largest and most ambitious' the Whitney has ever presented. `More than a thousand' was one estimate. But that's far too modest. Alongside the paintings, drawings and sculptures that form the core of the exhibition, you will also find innumerable books, films, models, household objects, clothing, sheet music, dance, advertising posters, pamphlets, plumbing fixtures, sound recordings, comics, etc. Double Indemnity is screening in one corner, while Duke Ellington's band is playing in another. Henry Dreyfuss's ` Telephone Model No. 302', 1937, is displayed in one glass cabinet, not too far from 'Fountain', Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal-as-artwork.

And that's just for the objects actually on the premises. Who can provide an inventory of the virtual objects available through your computer at the `in-depth online extension of the exhibition' on the Internet? (For those with too much time on their hands, the email address is www.whitney.org.) The American Century is sponsored by the microchip giant Intel, which ponied up with `the largest corporate contribution ever made to an art museum exhibition'. Consequently, no opportunity is missed to expatiate on the way computer technology is boosting the appreciation of art: `Unprecedented Internet-Based Collaboration Extends Public Participation' screams one headline (everything about this exhibition is said to be `unprecedented'). This is more or less like saying you have 'extended' participation in a picnic by distributing menus.

T.S. Eliot once remarked that `the rudiment of criticism is the ability to select a good poem and reject a bad poem'. In this sense, a museum curator is a kind of critic, charged not only with the care of objects but also with the task of discriminating among them on the basis of aesthetic quality. In The American Century, the critical dimension of curatorship has been entirely jettisoned. Instead of discrimination, the exhibition offers promiscuous accommodation. The only prerequisite for inclusion is American provenance during the specified time period. The four rubrics around which the exhibition is organised -- America in the Age of Confidence 1900-1919, Jazz Age America 1920-1929, America in Crisis 1930-1939, War and its Aftermath 19401949 - are little more than chronological markers: containers, not categories. There is no real effort to sift, to order, to adjudicate on the basis of aesthetic achievement.

In the introduction to his novel The Glass Bead Game (1943), Hermann Hesse describes the game as a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ . . . A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and the talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts.

I have no doubt that The American Century - the phrase comes from the media magnate Henry Luce - aspires to the ironised conceptual agglomeration Hesse describes. What self-respecting postmodernist exhibition doesn't? But where the decadent culture Hesse imagines traffics in artfully wrung echoes of departed significances, the decadent culture represented by The American Century is merely a jumble. Its announced ambition is to explore `the evolution of the American identity as seen through the eyes of America's artists over the last century, and examines the impact of such forces as immigration, technology and the mass media on art and culture'. But what we are offered is not exploration but chaos. Everything is just thrown together. The resulting impression is less that of a collage than of the contents of a dustbin.