Minding the store.

In 1993, after years of preparations and prefigurations, Geneva's Musee d'art moderne et contemporain, known as MAMCO, opened in four floors of an abandoned former factory. As conceived and directed by Christian Bernard (who had previously run the Villa Arson in Nice), MAMCO adopted a deliberately antiheroic program of experimenting rather than consecrating, responding creatively to the postmodernist interrogation of the museum as an institution. Calibrating its working means to its social and financial context, MAMCO all but reverses the traditional priorities of permanent collection and temporary exhibition. If the museum has been thought of since the seventeenth century as a "machine that shapes time," MAMCO has instead attempted to generate singular temporalities, allowing different time frames and durations to inhabit a common space. MAMCO aims to modify the way artworks are inscribed into the discourse of contemporary art, convinced that it is the works themselves that make the museum, not the other way around.

LIONEL BOVIER: The collective title of this spring's exhibitions, "Patchwork in Progress," is emblematic of a number of theoretical viewpoints underlying MAMCO's politics. The visitor gets a very strong sense of the range of modalities, the diversity of methods, and the artwork at hand. How did you conceive of such a structure?

CHRISTIAN BERNARD: "Patchwork in Progress" partakes of three key strategies at the museum: offering itself as a site of work and transformation rather than a theater of treasures; bringing heterogeneous sources of information together; and continuously reworking its mechanisms for experimental prospecting. Visiting MAMCO is like a leisurely stroll one can take again and again, each time moving through different models of museography, different methods of installation, diverse historical and theoretical sequences, and various ways of relating to the work of art. The issue here is to acknowledge the absence of any dominant paradigm, and to try to deconstruct the authoritative form of the museum by making it function more like the art its job is to exhibit. In its precariousness, instability, and partiality, its principle of critical variety, and its refusal of the logic of spectacle, MAMCO seeks an alternative to established museum practice.

L.B: What led you to envision the approach of permanent delegation, conferring upon artists themselves the task of running some of the exhibition spaces?

CB: A contemporary-art museum must attempt to negotiate the paradoxes and aporia that constitute it. First and foremost, a museum offers artists a tool of production: a place in which to rearticulate their work, and a context in which that work can be confronted. The emphasis we place at MAMCO on the monographic ensemble - closely interrelated body of works by a single artist - as well as on exhibitions that take place in several episodes, allows for sustained relationships. Improvisation, unpredictability, and the contingency of encounters within the museum also play a part in our method. In keeping with its path, punctuated by detours and short-circuits, MAMCO simultaneously offers temporary exhibitions and changing presentations of its collections, as well as long-term programs and independent artist-run projects with artists such as Martin Kippenberger, John Armleder, Gerard Collin-Thiebaut, and Yoon Ja and Paul Devaulour, for example. This program promotes a kind of multipolar discourse, admitting various antagonisms that define the field of contemporary art, or at least certain sectors of it.

LB: How have you selected the monographic ensembles, which are particularly significant within this structure?

CB: Two of MAMCO'S principles are to maintain a distance from the mainstream and to disregard heroic conceptions of art and the artist. In this spirit, I have chosen to emphasize artists whose significance is not indexed entirely to their market value: Sherrie Levine, Philippe Thomas, Maria Nordman, Franz Erhard Walther, Siah Armajani, Sarkis, Martin Kippenberger, Claude Rutault, Robert Barry, Maurizio Nannucci, Robert Filliou, and Vito Acconci, for example. The history of contemporary art is still in flux. It will most certainly go through a lot of reshapings. That offers great freedom of thought and action to the museums presenting it.

Lionel Bovier is a critic and freelance curator based in Geneva.

Translated from the French by Jeanine Herman.