Old Art and New Media: The Contemporary Museum.

Since the 1960s the museum's function as a domain for artwork in a formal and autonomous entity has changed into being a complex organism where art and the everyday collide and conflate into new hybrid forms of art practice and the art of living. Agency and action are gradually becoming the preconditions of art's reception. Models of participation are catching up with the sensory perception of self-contained artwork by demanding active exertion of influence from the spectator and placing him or her directly at the intersection between perception and creation. In her essay "Just Do It," Dorothea von Hantelmann states that "The concept of the exhibition as a reproducing and documenting apparatus has had its past. Exhibition programmatics of contemporary art are not oriented any longer to an historical consciousness/awareness, but instead to create an experiential intensity." [1] She continues with her diagnosis stating that "an art, which exists more in situations instead of complete works--setting this hic et nuc, live and in real-time into action--supplies the spectator/consumer/participant with a direct corroboration of his or her participation and receptivity to experience." The characteristics of certain kinds of artistic production, particularly interactive media art structured for a temporal event rather than a permanent presentation, constitute a challenge to the museum to experiment with new exhibition methods in order to deal with an "electronic avant-garde."

Whether one's reaction toward electronic images is motivated by fascination or repulsion, the triumphal march of the "new media" in society has a number of consequences for the definition of the contemporary art museum. There is a strong need to catch up, since most museums have staunchly held on to the historically-based difference between the aesthetic meaning and value of old art genres and new, technologically-produced work. Such museums have as much as capitulated in the face of the archival problems connected with these new ephemeral types of art by completely ignoring the visual possibilities of electronic images in fear of being overcome by a mundane flood of images devoid of any content and of getting increasingly involved in the mass media's maelstrom of banality.

In the relatively young history of the museum as an institution this resistance is not new. When we recollect how long it took for photography to be considered worthy of museum status and the reluctance to include video installations in contemporary art collections until just a few years ago, it becomes apparent that museum politics, which in many respects follow a profoundly conservative cultural mission, are more likely to impede a progressive acceptance of new art genres and artistic practices. Adding to this, many media artists and authors reject museum presentation. These protagonists of media art often view themselves as having directly inherited the legacy of institutional distrust from the zenith of modernism with its multiple anti-art and anti-institutional declarations, destined to render the museum obsolete and replace it with anything else--football stadiums, for example. The virtuality of new concepts indirectly connects with the subversive and critical actions of a past avant-garde and follows the Constructivist motto for a utopian concept of an international artistic language: "Not pictures, projects become living things." [2]

Seen from a twenty-first century perspective, the new economies of digitized reproduction and distribution of artwork via the Internet seem to replace the traditional museum practices of purchasing and collecting. The spirit of past imperial gestures, which is still present in the large historical collections in Paris, Vienna, London, Berlin and Munich, is losing its persuasive cultural power with the emergence of the ideological concepts of networks and the efficiency of communicative systems capable of making simultaneous contacts between distant spaces and identities in a matter of seconds. In view of the fact that digital technologies have long been taken for granted in art production as well as in the mediation of museum collections via the Internet (which provides direct and seemingly unmediated access to a work of art), conventional criteria of purchase, such as the originality of artifacts and their costly conservation in secure environments, seem obsolete. Given these aspects of contemporary culture and their future impact, a number of questions arise: Why should the museum continue to claim its role as the guarantor of artistic respectability if the Web has made this privilege available to everyone? Are we not conserving the idea of institutions such as art galleries, museums, archives and libraries rather than artistic concepts of generations of artists? Is it not a fact that the critique of these institutionalized authorities for the mediation of art has become a historical constant that continues the self-constituting replication of the artist's dilemma over the need for public recognition on the one hand and the simultaneous compulsion for its denial on the other? Beginning with Denis Diderot's descriptions of the French Salons and Paul Valery's pessimistic resume of his frustrating museum visits, through Marcel Broothaers's critical inquiry of museum collections' ideological fixations and Felix Gonzalez-Torres's strategy of the unlimited series attempting to annul the claim for art's uniqueness and its institutional context as a way of cultural distinction, even the most radical gestures of disparagement did not escape the paradox of their own calculations of a future presentation.

This seeming incompatibility of strategic artistic opposition and desired museum absorption receives an additional challenge through the artists' use of electronic technologies. In connecting institutional critique and artistic practice, I want to discuss the central argument that the concept of the museum of the future contradicts the mainstream of contemporary tendencies and ultimately loses its claim for cultural reliability and absolute precedence in its historically established role as cultural mediator. The focus of my query is if the open, unlimited and supposedly democratic structures of new media fundamentally contrast with the institutionalized hierarchical fixedness of the museum's traditional legacy. Even if this change has not yet occurred in practice, there are multiple indications of a growing pragmatic challenge in dealing with the problems of archiving and presenting the digitized materials. As a major part of such artistic activities has eked out its existence at media arts festivals, confer ences and at the edge of technology trade fairs and has thus remained resistant to traditional museum conservation and classification concepts, the future of these ephemeral and chiasmatic artworks lies in the problem of finding convincing methods of presentation that make them accessible for a museum-going public.

Similar to the current development between various disciplines of the natural sciences, (e.g., Developmental-Neuropsychology or Socio-Biology), an increasingly egalitarian relationship has occurred between genres of art. New genres such as multi-media environments, interactive installations or contextual and/or social investigations, Internet works and virtual reality projects have become common practice signifying a turn away from specific styles and media in favor of new hybrid versions of work. Initial indications of this shift were already evident at the beginning of this century when subjects and material fragments of everyday life began to leave their traces in the realm of the fine arts and then reappeared more blatantly after World War II when popular elements became icons of contemporary art, leveling out the traditional separation of high and low culture. With a more extensive use of new technologies and the invasion of popular media culture into the spheres of art, this change has expressly dismiss ed the hierarchy and autonomy of particular genres in the art history canon.

With the technological impact of a hybridized contemporary media culture, the traditional tasks of the museum, formerly representing the status quo of officially sanctioned, canonical, cultural and national values, have lost their relevance. Thomas Struth's photographic studies, in his words, of the "historical legitimacy of the displayed" in the most famous and prestigious collections of the world reveal this age-old function of the museum as a cultural construction. Since the mid-1980s he has been working on a series of staged photographs showing visitors in the museum. In Musee du Louvre IV, Paris 1989 visitors stand before Theodore Gericault's The Raft of "The Medusa" (1818-19). His sober gaze at the phenomenon of international art tourism moves the traditional classifying and conservatory function of the museum to the center of our perception. By cutting out the dimension of social change from its view of cultural prospects, the museum built up its reputation as an elitist, escapist institution, making a revision of its tradition-alist definition even more desirable at the end of the twentieth century.

This model of museum display, in which the artwork is embedded in a chronologically or thematically structured narrative mediating a specific version of art history, stands in rigid contrast to the event factor that is characteristic of today's receptive behavior. The classical attitude of the spectator--silently contemplating the (constructed) cultural values in the museum realm--appears in our contemporary view like an endangered species whose survival, surrounded by the environment of our event culture, seems to be secured at best by the documentation provided by Struth's photographs. The fact that Struth's photographs are also staged scenes further exposes the museum's role to critical reflection. The images are not the result of random choreography--although at first glance they seem to suggest a snapshot--but are instead a carefully composed restaging of the classical idea of the artwork, which Struth preserves like a diorama of former cultural concepts of representation and reception by strictly direc ting the view of the spectators inside his picture in the museum visitor's pose. With the distanced line of perspective in the photographic staging, Struth unmasks the claim of the artwork's autonomy as a historical result of the emergence of the modern museum, remaining as the true theatrical staging at the end of the millennium.

The loss of collective cultural identities has led to a multiplicity of manifestations in contemporary art. Wolfgang Staehle's video installation "Escort" (1989) marks the process of transition that representational and traditional models of presentation of artworks have experienced since the beginning of this century. "Escort" appears like a symbolic interface between utopian concepts of modernism and salvation rhetorics of the new media. It consists of a small hand-held monitor showing the repetitious black and white loop of the legs of a woman riding a bicycle taken from an unknown Russian documentary film by Dziga Vertov hanging beside a monochrome grayish-blue painting. The moving, digital image literally seems to "escort" the traditional image medium. It functions as comment in the way it contrasts the status of the painting within contemporary visual culture. The combination of an abstract monochrome painting, that presupposes Kazimir Malevich's black square from 1913 as a historical and symbolic vani shing point, with a video reflects on the beginnings of modernism when the initial Suprematist concepts pushed painting to its limits on the one hand and discovered film as a new artistic medium on the other. Such a quotation revives the historical point when traditional artistic genres seemed to pale into insignificance beside the fascinating expressive potential of the new technology evidenced by motion pictures. This competitive relationship of two media, however, is meant to cancel itself out by leading both gestures as a result of their ultimate reduction--the one monochrome, the other monotonous--to their ground zero. Staehle's laconic juxtaposition lets the goals of modernism literally run idle. He takes up the diagnostic rhetorics of the imminent end that have run through modernism and the postmodern era in cyclic intervals, constantly reprovoking the "paragone," the principle argument about the relevance and expressive capacities of different art genres.

The forecast of the end of painting and even the end of art or art history have not upset artists' positions since the emergence of electronic media. With Staehle's metaphorical exaggeration, the relativity of the absoluteness of such negative utopias becomes apparent. His own artistic practice reveals that the Internet acquires new possibilities by attempting to regain the lost utopian potential of art not through representation but through communication. By founding the art network The Thing (www.thing.net), functioning as an open forum for users, Staehle created an alternative space where the claim for the sole rights of certain aesthetic conventions is transformed into a pluralistically organized system. As an exemplary method, these virtual genres of art are no longer bound to the location of the museum. Instead they become unlimited in time and space by presenting themselves on the platform of the Internet where a growing community of artists and users finds a new forum of interaction outside the museu m institution.

Consequently the contemporary art museum has developed into an increasingly hybridized medium. Pre-modern aspects of the "wonder chamber" and the spectacle quality of the most adventurous displays undergo new cross-breedings where the contemplative spheres of art invade interactive technology parks and vice versa. The mediation of an aesthetic experience relies more and more on the intensity of an event. The legitimate doubt that the pleasure of pure art can keep abreast of the increasingly hyper development in the entertainment and leisure industries (where the desire for excitement and immediate thrills from staged reality effects are in need of continuous intensification) has had consequences for the museum's general cultural position. This competition relationship between an ever-present mass media culture and the museums continued commitment to affect the public domain becomes most clearly visible in the fact that "recently the museum has literally darkened and not only in the metaphorical sense," as Bo ris Groys observes in his book Die Logik der Sammlung [The Logic of the Collection].

The more media art becomes part of the museum exhibition the darker it becomes inside, because the distribution of light and darkness works differently in the media than in the museum.... Therefore media art, which is brought into the museum in most cases as video installations, brings along the big night. It makes the last big sacrifice of the museum visible. The museum interior sacrifices its own light, darkens itself and sets the spectator into a nervous trance, which enables him/her to directly receive the signals from the hereafter of the museum. By this the museum shows itself as what it has become during the media age, i.e., as the dark space of the mystery, the conspiracy, the semi-visible. [3]

With specific technical implications that are preconditions for the presentation of media art, the enlightening character of the artwork undergoes a reversal into the numinous. The former accumulation of material objects and artifacts that were of interest for spectators in the first place due to their exceptionally distinguishing qualities and therefore appeared in the metaphorical as well as in the literal sense, in the light of cognition are giving way to twilight environments illuminated by ephemeral images where the immaterial appearance of the "medial moment's" fleetingness as spectacle has more actual occurrence than bringing the temporal perspective to realization. As Groys mentioned, "the modern museum, which functioned for a long time as privileged space for contemplation," [4] is in the process of becoming a media space where the suggestive powers of the incomprehensible, originally belonging to the cultic or religious spheres, return. An almost pre-modern amazement that generated the initial impu lse for the emergence of art and wonder chambers in the early Renaissance with its natural history collections and technological curiosities comes today from the new media as the museum is turned into an almost mystical space while visitors are sent into a somnambulistic state, varying between dream and alerted attention, between fascination and interaction.

The worldwide enthusiasm that has accompanied new electronic technologies makes this strange conflation of eschatological expectations and utopian vision more graspable. Regarding the atopic structure of new media technologies, however, the principle question arises of whether or not presentation in the institutional context of the museum profoundly contradicts their unlimited, decentralized and transient character. The fact that media already imply a high degree of abstraction and the "weaving of nets," as Donna Haraway proclaims in her "Cyborg Manifesto," [5] makes its collection inside the defined space of the museum a neutralization of its transient qualities. Resembling the function of panoramas and dioramas in natural history collections in which preserved animals pose dramatically in front of painted, natural looking scenery in order to present the "theater of reality" to an amazed public, the museum display of media art, particularly when it is using the networks as its medium, loses its characterist ic, indefinite appearance in space and time.

With mediation strategies of the modern mass media that are producing more pictures than art, the boundaries between art and technological media become vague. As art and life move closer together, a radical change in our visual culture occurs. Multi-media mise en scenes surround us in almost every situation, determine our perception and sharpen our medial receptiveness. Media-directed theatrical events and staged experiences run through our various spheres of social life.

Jason Rhoades's installation "Creation Myth" (1998) can be read as the humorously escalated metaphor for this tendency by revealing that art is no longer about the creation of a work for eternity, but instead to perform the here and now as the credo of the 1990s in a media landscape that is completely mutated to self-referentiality. Video cameras, recorders, monitors, computers, printers, mirrors, converter belts, an electric toy train and a multitude of other high- and low-tech devices are combined in an overall spatial structure that fills the gallery area. All of these elements connect and interact with each other in a meticulously constructed system of movements and mechanically induced chain-reactions, creating closed-circuit relations between the objects and the machineries. In its totality the setting remains completely self-referential and only unfolds its changing shape completely in the spectator's eye or the all-absorbing eye of the video camera. In this network man and technology create each othe r. This ensemble, consisting of media garbage and banal artifacts, can be read as a contemporary history picture of "our life with the media." [6] As incomprehensible is the amount of information of these media emissions in this fragile and temporal spectacle, as minimal is also its half-life. This complex and fleeting scenario is a rich metaphorical image for our dealings with surrogate versions of experience via mediation that have become a habit in our daily routines--we (inter)act like players in a "performative society" [7] that master the game with various forms of representation in the political arena as well as on reality TV on talk shows, in personal relations, in the styling of our public persona, in technoraves and on the Internet. Our daily experiences show us that the world of media has become incomparably more influential on the constitution of our self-image and our relation to the world than on the world of art.

In one of her early works Lynn Hershman made this lack of distance between our way of life and the media the topic of a simulated everyday situation. The installation "Lorna" (1979-84) tells the story of a woman who lives almost completely isolated in her apartment. She copes with loneliness and despair by watching television, which acts as a mediator between the world and her private life. In interacting with the TV programs via remote control and the objects of Lorna's private sphere, by physically entering the mise en scene of her sitting room and being surrounded by the prerequisites of the character's personal environment, the spectator finds him/herself in the protagonist's role. With the remote control viewers begin to search for the continuation of the personal story inside the maze of scenes, to give the figure logic and sense. In this work the medium is the subject. Her play unfolds inside the image that she transmits to the world and her story becomes an episode on the border of reality and media presence. [8]

In contrast to Hershman's and Rhoades's closed systems in which the protagonists are no longer able to position themselves between mediated media-reality and the personal experience of reality, Paul Sermon's installation "Telematic Vision" (1993) offers an open system for viewers at separate locations to have a virtual encounter with each other by communicating through gestures while sitting on two identical sofas at different geographical locations. Video cameras record the images of the viewers that are then projected in real time to each one of the distant sofas, so that the absent person appears as an animated projection next to the physically present actor, looking like his/her imaginary replica who might be located in Tokyo, while the other one sits in New York. Since the users can see each other, they can react with gestures toward their imaginary opposite. The passivity of TV watching is transformed into a complex form of interaction that depends on the decisions of the user. [9]

Hershman's and Sermon's installations are just two of many examples of how the reality-constructing powers of the media have become a central motive of work that not only reacts critically or euphorically but also strategically by employing similar methods for its own use. Sermon's remark that we find ourselves "in a phase of transformation, from the age of language to the age of media," emphasizes the necessity to let oneself experience media reality's meaningfulness and to take the cultural significance of this development seriously as a new language for art as well as for the museum context. [10] In as much as one's social persona increasingly depends on performative achievements in all spheres of public and private life, museums have begun to strategically integrate such social rituals into their displays by installing interactive art environments where visitors may invest and experience their own "creative" potential. The output of these attempts, however, provokes a controversial echo.

The Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek recommends taking, at least hypothetically, a skeptical attitude toward these developments to avoid missing the ambivalence of this technological revolution often caused by an over-enthusiastic glorification of its novelty. [11] A cautious approach might help us to discover the gains and losses in our perception that go along with technological "arming" inside the museum space. Zizek raises the problem of communicative exchange between the work of art and the recipient by casting doubt on the proclaimed intensity of the aesthetic experience in this constellation. When artwork only takes shape through the process of the public's direct influence, the classical positionings of artist-art and work-spectator mutates to a free-floating role with changing patterns of interaction and reference. The aesthetic decisions are delegated more to the public, the users. As a result of this process, the work of art becomes an ephemeral phenomenon and its standpoint tu rns into a fictive imaginary space. Inside the fictitious world of media reality interactivity is transformed into a new genre of "art animation". The Orientation towards the experience or adventure and the impulse to individual self-realization through the active involvement of the public in the staging/performance of the artwork replaces its symbolic reality. This shift in emphasis from reception to action contains opportunities as well as losses. On the one hand the seemingly unhierarchical framework for possible agency rescues the spectators from an obligatory aesthetic program and opens up a space, albeit limited, for his/her individual urge to create; on the other hand a closed system results from this field of practical interaction between the artwork and the acting visitor, where the isolation of many disconnected, non-communicative particular interests replaces the common collective horizon.

The desired pluralism of the rhetorics of new media and network utopia may as well be seen as an illusory diversity of rabid factions turning into a mono-culture of self-centered interests. In this sense, Zizek discovers a compulsive side to the so-called interactive constellations of new technologies. He regards the individual's permanent obligation to make a decision as a user of interactive artworks as a "structural cul de sac" [12] for the development of fine arts. Ultimately, Zizek characterizes the spectator's/user's "excessive freedom" of customizing everything to his/her personal horizon of experience by quasi-ruling the world by clicking the mouse as an "extremely frustrating task?' Although it opens up a certain scope for the individual's immediate satisfaction by effect, the lack of objective rules and formal and symbolic codes in the work delegates too much "responsibility for the path of things" to his/her influence. Complete immersion into the pleasure of the aesthetic experience is denied and cannot unfold in this game of self-realization. Is the public being pushed into an "action-geared passivity" by the credo of an interactive, virtual offer? This question may not be answered before a new user mentality of future generations has fully unfolded.

Today we can observe in exhibitions all over the world how younger museum visitors are uninhibited in dealing with new technologies. As Douglas Davis states, "the new audience expects these media, just as its ancestors expected text beside paintings?' The experience of technology museums such as Parc de la Villette in Paris or electronic and experimental art museums such as Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, have taken record of the change of public attitude. Due to changing user expectations Davis's prognosis for the future is that "in the next century it is virtually impossible to imagine a work of art being mounted in an exhibition without the viewer being giver access to a wide range of supplementary information." [13] Institutions like the J. Paul Getty Museum work with computer systems that offer access for physical and virtual visitors to their collections on display as well as in storage and with their worldwide links to international museums, pot entially approximating the idea of Andre Malraux's museum without walls. However, in spite of a growing media-competent public ii seems that the level of technological development alone cannol guarantee that the quality of an idea and its expression via mediation still connect.

To experiment with the changing roles of the museum in a media-dominated society has become a focus for certain international museums. Initiatives promoting this new type of museum where art and technology converge in a spatial and conceptual configuration with a comprehensive claim for innovative, communicative strategies are springing up all over the world. Centers like Parc de la Villette and Ars Electronica are landmark projects in this emerging "mediascape" and have served as models for a multitude of institutions that have opened or are scheduled to open in New York, Dallas, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Norway, Spain, Japan, Canada and France.

In awareness of these existing examples we might anticipate the museum of the future not as a retrospective concept that prevents the material existence of objects from vanishing, but instead as what Peter Weibel calls an open "social field" where media and art offer "models of agency and intellectual discourse" beyond their "classical demand for autonomy" by a continuous actualization and interpretation through the involvement of its various participants (artists, curators, technicians and visitors). [14] The problem of collecting and displaying media art may then be understood as a model of fundamental necessity to transform the traditional conditions of museum institutions. Artistic practices of the 1990s--not only their technological, but also in their conceptual configurations--reveal a strong tendency toward open structures where new, contextualizing, intermediating, network-oriented and ephemeral art genres make their claim for different models of public accessibility and interactivity. With these ext ended margins of contemporary culture and definitions of art as process instead of accumulation of material artifacts, the museum's role could incorporate more of this idea of an open structure, serving as a "support system" for communicative processes, where artists' ideas and concepts are put on to perform "as it is common in the theater or in music productions," instead of making the object furthermore the main criteria of institutional support and promotion. [15] As such, reflecting the principle character of media of always representing a world in between, one that creates as much as it shatters every illusion of an immediacy of experience, and being exactly the effect at which traditional concepts of museum displays are aiming, this change could make an enlightening contribution to a new kind of museum as an open forum of discourse in active response to the changes in our perception and reality as a result of our daily experience with and through new media.

URSULA FROHNE is an art historian, senior curator at the ZKM/Museum for Contemporary Art Karlsruhe and assistant professor at the Academy of Design Karlsruhe.

NOTES

(1.) Dorothea von Hantelmann, "Just Do It--Performative Asthetiken in der zeitgenossischen Kunst," ONTOM (Leipzig: Galerie fur zeitgenossische Kunst, 1998), unpaginated.

(2.) Wassilij Raktin, "'Vorwarts, zur Rekonstrucktion der Welt' Episoden aus der Geschichte einer Kunstpolemik," in Konstruktivistische Internationale Schopferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft 1922-1 927. Utopien fureine Europaische Kultur (Stuttgart Hatje, 1992), p. 72.

(3.) Boris Grays, Die Logik der Sammiung (Munchen, Vienna: Hanser, 1997), p. 22.

(4.) Ibid.

(5.) Donna Haraway, "Bin Manifest fur Cyborgs' in Matthias Michel, ed., Virusexpress (Basel and Frankfurt Stroemfeld Verlag, 1997). p. 43.

(6.) Christoph Blase, "Die Schlange liegt im Magen," in FAZ (August 26, 1998), p.38.

(7.) Von Hantelmann.

(8.) Hans-Peter Schwarz, Media-Art-History Muchen and New York: ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Medienmuseum and Prestel-Verlag, 1997), p. 123.

(9.) Paul Sermon, "Telematic Vision," in MultiMediale 3 (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Medienmuseum, 1993), p. 53.

(10.) Ibid, p. 52.

(11.) Slavoj Zizek, Die Pest der Phantasmen (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1997), p. 94.

(12.) Zizek, "Die Virtualisierung des Herrn," in Brigitte Felderer, ed., Wunschmaschine-Welterfindung (Vienna and New York- Springer, 1996), p. 115.

(13.) Douglas Davis, The Museum Transformed (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), p.203.

(14.) Aram Lintzel, "Ein Interview mit Peter Weibel. Faster, Medienkunst! Skill Skill," in Texte zur Kunst (January 1999), p. 65.

(15.) Ibid.