Sahib hai rangrez chunari mori rang dari...

INTRODUCTION:

As defined by the International council of Museums, A museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment".¹

And an art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art. Paintings are the most commonly displayed art objects; however, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, installation art and objects from the applied arts may also be shown.Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as music concerts or poetry readings.²

But does the above definition of an art gallery suffice in today’s worldview? The realm of art seems to have outgrown its traditional definition, or rather, with the changing perceptions of what art is, its definition also constantly keeps changing and emerging; and with it emerges a complex aesthetic which surpasses the earlier simpler aesthetic of merely appreciating art in its truth and beauty in a nice and gentle way, and all other values of an earlier time.

At this point, it would be really interesting to quote the curator of MoMA. He says, “ There is no substitute for the confrontation between the individual and the work of art itself, it is the ultimate experience in art – one person face to face with a painting or sculpture of whatever.” He might have said this in the context of his museum experience, but it holds true even otherwise. Personally I still was very much rooted in that traditional old aesthetic of beauty, value, etc. when my basic understandings and beliefs were shockingly challenged as I was exposed to the works of modern artists from the post world war period like the dada artists, the surrealist, the abstract expressionists, futurist, the pop artists, then the installation artists, the video artists…and the list goes on and on. Within the tag of modern art, there must be at least 100 movements depending on the schools of thoughts that the respective artists followed. But with me, it was still in the third person kind of interaction until Sunita came to the faculty with Sudarshan Shetty and exposed us to the current works of some of our Indian artists. This was the first interaction (well of course not the first exposure but an academic interaction with the artist himself) from where the struggle to understand the new aesthetic started. And with that started a new search to understand the institutions of today that curate, promote and exhibit these works of art. The question in my mind was that Sudarshan or his fellow artists did what they wanted to, but what is the role of Sunita as a gallerist. How does she select these works and then what all goes into developing a gallery. So I decided to study the famous art museums and their ideologies. But to scope down, out of the shortlisted 16, I decided finally on studying two major museums MoMa and the Guggenheim, NY. Studying Pompidou centre would have been a good idea, but may be some other time!

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, New York:

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist’s books, film, and electronic media.³

A SHORT HISTORY:

In the late 1920s, three progressive and influential patrons of the arts, Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., perceived a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums and to establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art. When The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929, its founding Director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended the Museum to be dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time, and that it might provide New York with "the greatest museum of modern art in the world."

The public's response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and over the course of the next ten years, the Museum moved three times into progressively larger temporary quarters, and in 1939 finally opened the doors of the building it still occupies in midtown Manhattan. As the first Director, Barr submitted a plan for the conception and organization of the Museum that would result in the Museum's multi-departmental structure with departments devoted for the first time to Architecture and Design, Film and Video, and Photography, in addition to Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints and Illustrated Books. Subsequent expansions took place during the 1950s and 1960s planned by the architect Philip Johnson, who also designed The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden. In 1984, a major renovation designed by Cesar Pelli doubled the Museum's gallery space and enhanced visitor facilities.

MoMA has just completed a renovation project nearly doubling the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs. It is designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. The part on the western portion houses the main exhibition galleries, and the eastern portion provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the Museum's expanded Library and Archives. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The new Museum opened to the public on November 20, 2004, and the Cullman Building opened in November 2006.

THE MUSEUM IDEOLOGY:

The Museum of Modern Art is almost by definition a centre of constant intellectual and emotional agitation. It is a place that fuels creativity, ignites minds, and provides inspiration. With extraordinary exhibitions and the world's finest collection of modern and contemporary art, MoMA is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental. Their mission is to help us understand and enjoy the art of our time. Central to its mission is the encouragement of an ever-deeper understanding and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art by the diverse local, national, and international audiences that it serves. It believes that it is essential to affirm the importance of contemporary art and artists if the Museum is to honor the ideals with which it was founded and to remain vital and engaged with the present.⁴ For this reason, it gives chance to new artists to exhibit their work.

The museum was seen from the start as a study centre in modern visual arts, but its first director Barr had developed a ‘multidepartmental’ concept showing his interest in promoting visitors to understand the close relationship of all the arts and enable them to care about the total environment that conditions them all and in which they exist. This is very similar to the concept of our own faculty of Arts and Humanities, which enables me to relate to the museum philosophy much more. It would be great to have a place where a person would go for a movie screening and could stay back to have look at the current painting exhibition, or someone who comes for a photography exhibition, moving on to have a look at the permanent gallery or the photography archives or library or whatever.

The museum has to respond not only to the art of the present but also to the public of the present. They have to balance between the popular needs and the desire to educate or promote artists or movements which are not necessarily popular amongst public. And to do this they have experimented a lot over these years. As early as 1932, they did a first touring show – Modern architecture and risked putting a painting on the road! It was perhaps the only museum with its experience in conducting large travelling shows that persuaded the collectors to part with their precious works for more than a year.

But in the process I realized that running a museum is not all that romantic as it looks like. It takes a lot of back office work. (I now realize what Sunita was saying about her work!) It’s not at all easy to successfully be able to develop a strong ideology over years. They had to make extra efforts from their sides, conduct educational and interactive programmes, develop good libraries, archives and conservation labs, preserving and documenting good works, developing research centers...

The museum went out of its way to take up the charge of United States entries into international competitions and exhibitions which was actually Governament’s job, which later, because of the museum’s efforts, expanded to gain a national support and an international council was formed consisting of almost 150 art patrons who sponsor the activities of the international program!

Then for example in 1958-59, its travelling exhibition on post war years, in a single stroke, made it the most discussed and influential art in the world, establishing New York as the new head quarter and the creative capital of the art world. That’s the kind of influence an art museum can have!

So in a way it is doing multitasking, that of being a repository of great historically blessed achievements, of being an exhibition centre for contemporary works that have not yet been submitted to the test of time, and of being one of the greatest centre for art scholarship.

And its responsibility also keeps on changing with its own ageing and growth as an institution. Like they began with 8 prints and one drawing, later, without a permanent collection, they had to keep running for continuous exhibitions. Then with a more equipped permanent collection, they could focus on special programmes and seamlessly include the other elements of their visual culture like photography, design, architecture, film etc. But now, coming a full circle, as they become more influential, their role completely changes. They are now so influential and setting standards and criterias for looking at modern art. They have always have had their share of controversies, but when they exhibited a series of well designed everyday products like pen, lamps, chairs etc., people strongly rejected it as art at first, but then they were forced to look at things around us as pieces of art. “People started looking at their kitchen faucet” says the curator!

And so it goes…but the modesty it shows is seen when the director Barr says “The museum is aware that it may often guess wrong in its acquisitions. When it acquires a dozen recent paintings, it will be lucky if in ten years three will seem worth looking at, if in twenty years one should survive. For the future, the important problem is to acquire this one; the other nine will be forgiven – and forgotten. But mean while we live in the present, and for the present these other nine will seem just as necessary and useful, serving their purpose by inclusion in exhibits as long as their artistic lives shall last.”⁵ This statement I feel is very radical in its sense and application and at the other hand also invites a lot of criticism for the museum, as it being biased in selecting works and artists and subjects etc. But the truth is that the institution has become so big that now, instead of being a collector or curator or facilitator, it takes up an extremely important role which would decide what is art and what is not, what is the art that represents our present and the whole century in general! And to assume such a big responsibility is no easy task.

Hence one could say that museums are prestigious and powerful engines of ideology. They are modern ritual spaces in which visitors enact complex and often deep psychic dramas about identity --dramas that the museum's stated, consciously intended programs do not and cannot acknowledge overtly. Like those of all great museums, the MoMA's ritual transmits a complex ideological signal.It is an achievement in itself which would attract reverence as well as controversies. Like one controversy as stated by Carol Duncan in his “The MoMA’s hot Mamas’ says, “My concern here (at MoMA) is with the portion that addresses sexual identity. I shall argue that the collection's recurrent images of sexualized female bodies actively masculinize the museum as a social environment. Silently and surreptiously, they specify the museum's ritual of spiritual quest as a male quest, as they mark the larger project of modern art as primarily a male endeavor. If we understand the modern art museum as a ritual of male transcendence, if we see it as organized around male fears, fantasies, and desires, then the quest for spiritual transcendence on the one hand and the obsession with a sexualized female body on the other, rather than appearing unrelated or contradictory, can be seen as part of a larger, psychologically integrated whole....Even works that eschews such imagery and gives itself to the drive for abstract, transcendent truth may also speak of these fears, in the very act of fleeing the realm of matter (mater) and biological need that is woman's traditional domain. How often modern masters have sought to make their work speak of higher realms --of air, light, the mind, the cosmos-- realms that exist above a female, biological earth.....Since the heroes of this ordeal are generically men, the presence of women artists in this mythology can be only an anomaly. Women artists, especially if they exceed the standard token number, tend to degender the ritual ordeal. Accordingly, in the MoMA and other museums, their numbers are kept well below the point where they might effectively dilute the masculinity. The female presence is necessary only in the form of imagery. Of course men, too, are occasionally represented. But unlike women, who are seen primarily as sexually accessible bodies, men are portrayed as physically and mentally active beings who creatively shape their world and ponder its meanings....”⁶

Thus, beneath the dazzle of individual exhibitions with which it celebrated the year 2000, the Museum of Modern Art is setting in place a philosophy of Modernism that will define its agenda for the century just begun. MoMA has divided the history of modern art into three forty-year segments, to each of which it is dedicating a cycle of exhibitions. It has also started a series of 25 exhibitions as many perspectives on choices made by artists of 1920-60 and given this a name “Making choices” in a way, by doing this MoMA tries to imply that there is no grand narrative of modern art. The substance of art history is simply that of individual artists making individual choices.

It is not difficult to appreciate why MoMA has taken this stand, particularly in distinguishing modern art from Modernism. Its identity is as the museum of modern art--not the museum of Modernist art. Modern art is not something that is historically finished. Modernism may be over as a period, and it may or may not have been succeeded by something called Postmodernism. These simply represent different sets of choices modern artists have made. But modern art cannot be reduced to just these sets of choices. Modern art will go on and on, and the Museum of Modern Art will be its showcase and temple long after Postmodernism has faded, if it has not faded already! J

But from all this, what I can learn is that there is no one story of modern art. History is many things happening all at once, all the time. There are the stories of individual artists, like Giorgio Morandi, Jean Arp and Man Ray, to whom three of the different shows of "Making Choices" are devoted. There are the stories of different groups, the School of Paris and the New York School, each of which receives a separate show, and the New York Salon and Paris Salon. There are shows that quite transcend the one-person and one-movement exhibition. So, "Making Choices" as a whole is for me more interesting, since it forces a distinction between a pluralistic and a monist conception of modern art.

Thus we see that more than anything else, these museums have become powerful institutions of learning. Learning not just about the art that it exhibits but about the decisions it takes, ideologies it adapts, the image it projects and the administration work that goes behind developing all these expanse that is has spread itself over!

THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM,

New York:

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which opened on October 21, 1959, is one of the best-known museums in New York City and one of the 20th century's most important architectural landmarks. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum––which is often called simply The Guggenheim––is home to a renowned permanent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art, and also features special exhibitions throughout the year.⁷

“There is an old saying about the Guggenheim; you come to see Kandinsky or Picasso, but you stay to see Frank Lloyd Wright.”⁸

What a building he has designed! Even the directors of the museum describe the building itself as “the most important piece of art in their collection” and that’s the reason why I can’t surpass the architecture and come to talk directly about the museum philosophy because its architecture is such an inseparable part of its ideologies! Solomon Guggenheim and FLW had a lot of clashes and discussions over the architectural design of the building, each trying to convince the other of their own arguments. Sadly enough both of them passed away before the museum actually started functioning in 1959.

SHORT HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY:

The main Solomon Guggenheim museum by FLW as we see it today started in 1959, much later than MoMA, but if we trace the history, Solomon Guggenheim had started collecting a lot of works of contemporary non-objective artists by 1929 which is exactly the time when MoMA also started (in a different building of course). So in a way they started in the same time period, both collecting the works of contemporary artists, but had different approach. Solomon was king of an eccentric guy who could give his visitors their first encounter with Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and Joan Miró etc. he used to collect works of avante-garde artists (the word attracted me because it reminded me of Sudarshan calling himself an Avante-guard artist). He had his own way of displaying his world of art. He used very low height spaces with low hung paintings, on walls covered with thick draperies, while Bach and Chopin would be playing on the sound system with some incense in the room…in short he used to create a particular ambience for his visitors which in a way stayed within him when he commissioned Wright to design a building to exhibit his collections. He wanted to move out of those Neo-classical buildings, but also did not want those typical steel-glass box type buildings that modernism had brought in.

Getting back to the history part, the museum first started only with paintings and was called museum of non-objective art. (According to Rebay, one of the founding members, the word "nonobjective" signified the spiritual dimensions of pure abstraction). Later with the new director Johnson Sweeny, they started collecting sculptures, starting with Brancusi moving on to Jean Arp, Giacometti, David Smith etc. With time the collections started to broaden in their views and the foundation was named Solomon Guggenheim foundation instead of Museum of Non-objective art, to accommodate more variations of collection. Important collector added works by Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Vincent van Gogh, as well as Pablo Picasso. Then with Peggy Guggenheim donating her collection, the museum acquired the works of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, a rare Kazimir Malevich Suprematist painting, various Picasso masterpieces, and perhaps most importantly, 11 works by Jackson Pollock. This is how the museum kept expanding in its collections as well as viewpoints moving on from just paintings to sculptures, to films, photographs, video art etc.

One has to come back to talk about architecture, because in its entire journey, the space has remained a major concern and influence to the foundation. After the death of Peggy Guggenheim, their important target was to expand, which led to the opening of four branches of Guggenheim apart from NewYork, each done with a master architect. The Bilbao done by Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Las Vegas by Rem Koolhas, and the upcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi again commissioned to Frank Gehry. Apart from these four major branches, there were yet smaller ones at Venice (belonging to Peggy Guggenheim foundation) and The Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.

In fact, the history of each and every director and the change he brought in also very interesting to study and understand the evolution of the museum as we see it today. But perhaps that is not relevant or rather within the scope of this assignment.

But the major thing that I felt was that when architecture is also one of the arts being a part of the museum collection, the architecture of the museum itself definitely plays an important role and to be sensitive and responding not just to the ‘valuable art pieces’ but to the surrounding spaces and environment is equally important. To put it in words and vision of the master as he was designing the NewYork museum, “To understand the situation as it exists in the scheme of the Guggenheim museum all you have to do is imagine clean beautiful surfaces throughout the building, all beautifully proportioned to the human scale. These surfaces are all lighted from above with any degree of daylight (or artificial light) that the curator of the artist himself may happen to desire. The atmosphere of the great harmonious simplicity, wherein human proportions are maintained in relation to the picture is the characteristic of the building. The basic of all picture-presentation is to provide perfect plasticity of presentation. Adaptability or wide range of individual taste of the exhibitor whoever he or she might be, is perfectly provided by the architecture itself by providing reposeful spaces, highly plastic in nature as one floor flows into the other instead of usual superimposition of stratified layers of cutting and butting post-beam construction.”⁹ He felt that by creating a space like this, where one is first taken to the top by an elevator and then descending gradually on the slope, he was creating a new unity between the beholder, painting and architecture creating a beautiful uninterrupted symphony. Again we see how he is cutting across and connecting disciples in one stroke!

Reference:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum

2. Oxford Advance learner’s Dictionary : Edition 7

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Modern_Art

4. www.moma.org

5. Schickel Richard, The Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970.

6. http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/ARTH200/women/momasmamas.html

7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum

8. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/architecture-extension-of-a-new-york-controversy-the-guggenheim-is-no-ordinary-museum-ultan-guilfoyle-looks-at-the-legacy-of-frank-lloyd-wright-1536218.html

9. Pfeiffer Bruce, Global Architecture, Vol. no. 36, A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo, 1975 www.guggenheim.org