Scenes from a museum.

The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect organized by Kynaston McShine The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York March 14-June 1, 1999

The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego La Jolla, California September 26, 1999-January 9, 2000

The Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain March 14-May 29, 2000

The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect by Kynaston McShine New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999 296 pp./$50.00 (hb), $24.95 (sb).

Website: www.moma.org/exhibitions/muse, with links to on-line artists' projects by Allan McCollum and Fred Wilson 

"The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect," organized by Kynaston McShine, Senior Curator for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, contains nearly 200 works by more than 60 artists, with an emphasis on American and European post-war work. The exhibition includes photographs of museums (e.g, by Zoe Leonard and Vik Muniz), personal museums by artists (e.g., by Joseph Cornell and Susan Hiller), work on exhibitionary and archival strategies (e.g., by Marcel Broadthaers and Mark Dion), appropriative uses of museological material (e.g., by Marcel Duchamp) and analyses of museum ideologies (e.g., by Andrea Fraser and Hans Haacke). The works vary in their degree of involvement with the idea of the museum. Some include only an incidental reference to, a museum environment or a museum-related concept, while others employ a museological frame of reference as the crux of the work.

According to the brochure, the exhibition is divided into five categories: Photographs: The Object and the Museum in Use; Artist-Collectors and the Personal Museum: Natural History Collections: Questioning Modes of Classification; Museum Practices and Policies; and The Museum Transformed. These headings, however, are not directly transposed on the exhibition space itself - a curatorial decision that leaves the exhibition space undivided and, apart from wall labels, text-free. While the act of museological categorization is precisely what some of the work critiques, the absence of contextualization in the exhibition unfortunately leaves the question of how these works are changed by their placement in and their relation to MoMA unexamined. Though the volume of the included material provides MoMA with an excellent opportunity for curatorial indulgence, "The Museum as Muse" evades an acknowledged critique of how museums both inspire and shape the work that they display.

Scattered throughout "The Museum as Muse" is an abundance of work about MoMA itself. Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler's MoMA Whites (1990) presents the custom white wall paint preferred by various MoMA curators alongside standard manufactured whites. Each "white" sample has been poured into a glass jar onto which the exact name of each color is etched. By juxtaposing the hues of white that constitute the "white walls" of the MoMA galleries, Ericson and Ziegler demonstrate how galleries are marked by the preferences of their curators. "McShine White," for example, differs noticeably in hue from "Rubin White," "Riva White" and the standard "Decorator White." Thomas Struth's Cibachrome print Museum of Modern Art 1, New York (1994) depicts museum visitors in front of a Jackson Pollock painting. By using long exposures that foreground yet blur the visitors, Struth's photograph encompasses the viewers' relationship to the painting unlike a reproduction or installation shot where the painting alone would command the field of vision. Komar and Melamid's Scenes from the Future: Museum of Modern Art (1983-84) portrays MoMA in ruins, sprawling in the middle of a pastoral landscape. Referencing Romantic paintings of ruins in pastoral settings, the sight of the modern MoMA becoming a fragment of classical architecture nonchalantly places the museum into a trajectory of history in which its role may only be transitory.

Of the works prepared specifically for this exhibition, Janet Cardiff's MoMA Walk (1999) takes visitors on a semi-nostalgic audio tour of MoMA's permanent collection galleries located outside the parameters of "The Museum as Muse" to reflect on the museum as a location of perception. Daniel Buren's To Displace, To Place, To Replace (work in situ) (1975-99) transposes a section of MoMA's permanent collection gallery into "The Museum as Muse,"' replacing it with Buren's trademark stripes engaging the artist as curator. Fred Wilson's Art in Our Time (1998) uses photographs from MoMA's archives to examine the social and racial markings of the people deemed worth documenting for MoMA's institutional history. The mats for each photograph intentionally vary from being non-obtrusive to obscuring the photograph, literally framing the majority of the image out of sight. With a title that refers to a 1939 MoMA exhibition, Wilson also calls attention to the role MoMA has had, and continues to have, in defining the field of contemporary art.

One of the most enigmatic arrangements in "The Museum as Muse" also remains the most emblematic of the exhibition's discourse concerning institutional relations between museums and artists. Donald Judd's Bench #76/77 (1976-77), a birch plywood bench, faces two large paintings by Art & Language (Index: Incident in a Museum XV [1986] and Index: Incident in a Museum XXI [1987]) and four of Sophie Calle's photographs from "Last Seen..." (1991), a series concerning artwork stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990.

If museum visitors sit on the bench to contemplate Calle's piece, they may be asked by a museum guard to relocate. On the other hand, viewers may avoid sitting on the bench altogether, either because they feel that one should usually not sit on items in museums or because they have read the identifying wall label In either case, Bench #76/77 seems a particularly appropriate vantage point from which to contemplate Last Seen... (Rembrandt, A Lady and a Gentleman in Black) (1991)

Last Seen... consists of two parts. The first is a text panel inscribed with the Gardner Museum staff's recollections of the stolen Rembrandt painting. The text fragments range, from personal remarks to formalist descriptions, and result in a composite of overlapping yet radically incompatible segments commenting on the different relationships museum workers have to the art in the collection and the fragility of visual memory. The second part of the work is a photograph of the empty, brocade-covered wall on which a faded rectangle demarcates the space where the purloined Rembrandt formerly hung. In the context of "The Museum as Muse," Calle's Last Seen acquires an additional dimension. With the network of clues from the scene of an actual crime, Calle presents the acute breakdown that occurs when a museum lacks its customary object, especially a museum as eccentric as the Gardner. In that sense, Last Seen... shows how museums are intertwined with the work they exhibit by demonstrating how invested, yet ultimately partial, the museum's views on the displayed work can be.

The ambiguous status of Bench #76/77 follows this position, if only unintentionally. Though it is labeled like all of the other works, guards and museum lecturers hold differing opinions as to whether sitting on the bench itself is actually permitted.(1) In the exhibition literature, Judd hovers in the sidelines. He is not included in the list of artists; Bench #76/77 is not included on the checklist; nor is there an artist's plate on Judd in the catalog.(2)

By emphasizing the liminal status of Bench #76/77, "The Museum as Muse" demonstrates how profoundly museums construct the ways in which works of art are treated and received. Judd is a potent candidate for institutional ambiguity. In addition to his sculptural production, Judd, a canonical minimalist artist and architect, designed furniture that was in its shapes almost indistinguishable from his sculpture. However, he typically kept these two parts of his oeuvre separate, and objected strongly to his furniture being shown with his sculpture. In the midst of "The Museum as Muse," in a context thoroughly permeated with museum commentary, Judd's Bench #76/77 is not just a bench but a profound statement about the tenuous boundaries between art, objects and the "power of display."(3)

Despite the abundance of works that directly address the institution of MoMA, "The Museum as Muse" does not itself muse upon its engagement with this material. In fact, the title "The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect" sets up a curious relationship among its various components. To label the museum as muse suggests perhaps a one-sided relationship: artists reflect on museums that by implication remain untouched and unchanged. A version of this argument seems familiar in relation to discussions of institutional critique, wherein it is often argued that an artist's critique of museums can become co-opted by the museum institution that hosts it. In such a fashion, the work is often viewed as a boost for the host institution (as the locus of the critical scrutiny) as opposed to an agency for critical change. The section labeled "Museum Practices and Politics" is MoMA's only response to the question of co-optation and critique. While some of the projects have been prepared especially for this occasion, others date from earlier institutional interventions, including two works by Haacke, Seurat's "Les Poseuses" (Small Version), 1888-1975 (1975) and Cowboy with Cigarette (1990). The latter, & mixed-media work that portrays a semi-cubist figure with a cigarette in his mouth, critiques cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris's sponsorship of a Picasso exhibition at MoMA. Plunked into this survey exhibition, Cowboy with Cigarette can be seen as teetering between a pointed critique and a floating gesture.

Projects such as Haacke's in "The Museum as Muse" are precarious, especially in regard to their function as a forum for institutional critique. Exhibiting projects that rely on site-specificity outside their context or disregarding their historicity can obfuscate their intended aim of intervention. Displayed in the context of a survey exhibition, some of these projects may seem to settle for a listing of institutional quirks and conventions. Yet, even if the setting is indeed "overdetermined," as one critic has described it, certain works take it upon themselves to demonstrate the limits of this overdetermination.(4)

Of these, Michael Asher's untitled 1999 work is one of the most noteworthy Asher's contribution is a shiny red catalog entitled Painting and Sculpture from The Museum of Modern Art: Catalog of Deaccessions 1929 through 1998 by Michael Asher.(5) As its title indicates, Asher's catalog lists all the sold or exchanged works from MoMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture according to MoMA's records. Asher states in his introduction that the information was primarily compiled by a MoMA intern and circulated among MoMA's staff for fact-checking. Despite these institutional-sounding procedures, distinguishable conflicts of interest between the artist and the institution emerge. In a disclaimer printed in Asher's catalog, MoMA's Chief Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Kirk Varnedoe, cautions the museum visitor against attributing accuracy or comprehensiveness to the information therein. According to Varnedoe, Asher's listing should be considered unreliable since "we have not been able to assure ourselves that the present list meets the criteria of completeness or accuracy we would require in a museum publication."

By contrasting a museum publication with an artist's publication, even one produced with the museum's own resources, Varnedoe hastens to overdetermine the separation of the artist's interests from those of the institution. In addition to investigating MoMA's archival erasure (the files do not list the dates of deaccessions), Asher's project analyzes the distribution and contestation of institutional authority. Varnedoe's note expressing caution about the reliability of the project is the very element that enables Asher's work to speak to its audience from an invested, yet discernible point of view.

As a survey of art wherein a considerable portion of the work exhibited strives for consciousness and/or criticism of its own institutional conditioning, "The Museum as Muse" attempts to travel the road of neutrality. It does not strive for the status of meta-exhibition: it does not attempt to examine and highlight its own role in the construction of exhibition in the way many museum-centered exhibitions have done in the recent past.(6) Yet, the abundance of work in "The Museum as Muse" demonstrates the continuing relevance of the institution of the museum to artists, Because site-specificity has such an intimate relationship with museum-related artwork, the curation of "The Museum as Muse" would have benefited from the inclusion of more specifically commissioned works. In addition to addressing the museum institution in general, such works could have analyzed the roles of both artist and curator in regard to this particular exhibition. Perhaps then "The Museum as Muse" might have reflected upon the role of the artist in museums as strongly as it valorized the institution of the museum.

NOTES

1. During the three days I visited "The Museum as Muse," some guards did not interfere with people sitting on Bench #76/77, while other guards did ask people to get up, citing their supervisor's orders. A museum lecturer conducting a gallery tour was under the impression that sitting on Bench #76/77 was allowed. According to MoMA's Associate Communications Director, Graham Leggat, sitting is permitted.

2. Judd is not entirely absent from the exhibition's catalog. It includes excerpts of Judd's writings, and the penultimate image is an uncommented reproduction of Bench # 76/77. When asked about the logistics of Judd's participation through MoMA's Communications Department, McShine had "no comment." According to Judd's gallery, PaceWildenstein, and Madeleine Hoffmann, the Furniture Representative of Judd's Estate, Bench #76/77 was not meant to be part of the exhibition but rather to be used simply as furniture. Furthermore, according to Hoffmann, Bench #76/77 was designed by Judd as furniture in 1990 white "The Museum as Muse" catalog dates it 1976-77.

3. Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art is the title of Mary Ann Staniszewski's 1998 book (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press).

4. David Rimanelli, "Preview: The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect," Artforum Vol. 37, no. 5 (January 1999), p. 35.

5. A copy of Asher's catalog could be acquired without charge from MoMA's bookstore by showing an admission ticket.

6. In recent years, such exhibitions have included "A Museum Looks at Itself: Mapping Past and Present at The Parrish Museum" at The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY, in 1992, a series of exhibitions at the Museum for African Art in New York City and "The Label Show" at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1994. Of these, "The Museum Looks at Itself" consisted of artists' commissioned projects, while the others were based on curated work. Individual artists who have analyzed the logic of museums include Gerald McMaster in "Savage Graces" at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada, in 1992. Fred Wilson's entire career has examined museums and their collecting, contextualizing and exhibiting practices. "Mining the Museum" at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore in 1992 and "The Museum: Mixed Metaphors" at the Seattle Art Museum in 1993 are two of his major projects.

KIRSI PELTOMAKI is an artist and Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.