Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances.

There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that the academic world has discovered museums. This means that more intelligent and inquiring minds are analyzing these institutions than ever before. The bad news is that many of these obviously bright folks are afflicted by occasional bouts of what Mary Daly calls "academentia," during which they lapse into nearly incomprehensible academese. This, unfortunately, makes reading their work difficult and sometimes even unpleasant. The books reviewed here remind us with a vengeance that, like the museum world, the academy has its own cultural conventions and agendas, both exposed and concealed. if this were a longer review, it could be illuminating to analyze those conventions and the values that propel them. We would discover that the academy is every bit as politically implicated and culture-bound as the museum and that the former's implicit claims to greater virtue are unfounded.

But I exaggerate, at least on one point. Academic awareness of museums is not new. Over the years many academics have worked for or with museums in positive and productive ways. The difference today is that the loosely defined area of cultural history and criticism is spawning a growing number of intellectuals who are less likely to take museums at face value and more inclined to see them as intriguing cultural agents in their own right, overtly and covertly engaged in ideological work within society. What that ideological work is and how it is advanced are dealt with in varying degrees in the three books discussed here.

The first, Carol Duncan's Civilizing Rituals, is the most satisfying of the three, in part because as a single-author monograph if offers a more sustained and coherent account than the fragmented multi-author conference proceedings also reviewed here, and in part because Duncan writes in accessible prose and knows what she wants to say. An art historian at New Jersey's Ramapo College, Duncan has long been involved with the evolving critique of art museums. She helped write the legendary "anti-catalog" of 1976, a brash and impassioned reaction to the Biennial exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum. This slender tract exposed the sexist and racist biases of the Whitney and other major museums and radicalized many who read it. Duncan subsequently collaborated with fellow art historian Alan Wallach on two articles for Artforum exploring art museums as ritual structures. This book extends and embellishes ideas sketched out in those articles.

The central thesis of Civilizing Rituals is that art museums are not only buildings and collections but also stage sets for rituals that give structure to their central meanings. In launching this line of interpretation, Duncan deliberately sets herself apart from two camps - the educators and the aesthetes - wrestling over the question of what art museums should be. She is more interested in understanding exactly what art museums are and have been. Seen from this perspective, the struggle to define them becomes testimony to their power and significance. Duncan maintains that the art museum plays an important role in representing a community and its most cherished values and truths. And that makes it both complex and fascinating, "a profoundly symbolic cultural object as well as a social, political, and ideological instrument."

Where does the idea of ritual fit into this formulation? Duncan argues, first, that museums have long been consciously designed to enable and encourage ritual and, second, that exhibits within them constitute scripts for rituals that visitors may enact. It is no accident that until well into the twentieth century art museums were modeled after temples and palaces. Both building types exploited monumentality, formality and grandeur to induce the heightened awareness associated with ritual. Duncan moves beyond this obvious observation, however, to the more subtle proposition that art museums constitute liminal spaces, environments deliberately set apart from the concerns and conditions of everyday life to encourage contemplation and reflection. The distinctive architecture and settings of art museums and the restrained behavior considered appropriate within them encourage visitors to "move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspectives." In this liminal world, visitors may follow the art-historical narratives that unfold from one gallery to the next and ultimately lead to enlightenment. What some of those scripts are or have been fills the rest of the book.

Civilizing Rituals provides something of a conceptual history of art museums in Western Europe and the United States, dwelling not so much on the development of many individual institutions as on conditions shared by a few representative institutions and on values these institutions have embodied or projected. Duncan begins the historical portion of her book with a comparative study of the Louvre and Britain's National Gallery. The Louvre is an important starting point precisely because it is the prototypical art museum, the model that others would emulate over the next two centuries. Formerly the king's art collection, the Louvre was declared public in 1793 by the French revolutionary government. The new administrators of the Louvre crafted a significant symbolic metamorphosis, converting the signs of luxury, status and splendor associated with a despised and discredited monarchical system into a repository of spiritual treasure that could be interpreted as the heritage and pride of the entire nation. This transformation was achieved in part by replacing the largely formalistic system of installation preferred by aristocratic connoisseurs with one that organized pictures and other artworks according to "schools" or geo-political origins. Duncan argues that this idea acknowledged and promoted the growth of state power and national identity. In other words, in an age of nationalism, even the way museums displayed paintings served to advance the idea of the nation-state.

The emphasis on schools was accompanied and reinforced by the concept of artistic genius, the vehicle for the expression of national greatness. Duncan claims, then, that the ritual task of French visitors to the nineteenth-century Louvre was to reenact the history of genius, step by step as it moved through successive schools, then finally to recognize themselves as citizens of history's most civilized and advanced nation. We might say that the Louvre promoted the concept of individual genius and what was once called Whig history in order to convince its citizens of the high level of civilization they enjoyed.

The development of Britain's National Gallery followed a different route. Unlike the Louvre, the National Gallery was not a former royal collection nationalized. The transition from monarchy to bourgeois republic was abrupt and violent in France but in Britain that bourgeois republic, Duncan reminds us, following English historian E. P. Thompson, "evolved slowly and organically out of a complex of older forms." Yet Britain too, following its own schedule and responding to its own set of national conditions, eventually created a public collection that similarly defined the nation as a "politically virtuous state."

With these major European institutions as background and models, Duncan goes on the explore in some detail the development of two of America's most prominent art museums, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago's Art Institute. She then examines the special problems posed when a museum is or houses a donor memorial and the ways museums of modern art perpetuate a distinctive and hardly subtle amalgam of intellectual archaism and sexism. Each discussion is informed, intelligent, richly textured and subtly nuanced; each merits close reading and thoughtful consideration; and each merits more analysis than I can give it here. All that said, however, I find myself not wholly charmed by this book. Part of my lack of enthusiasm mirrors what I perceive to be an equal lack of enthusiasm on the part of the author. Duncan has been laboring in the vineyard of the art museum critique for a long time. Has she grown weary of the topic? This book conveys little excitement, enthusiasm or passion. The writing is capable and graced with occasional touches of humor and wit; the text is logical and coherent; and the accounts soundly documented and believable. But the book lacks energy and vigor.

This is particularly disappointing in the final chapter, where Duncan reveals the institutionalized sexism of the reigning account of modern art and of its most eminent reification, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The systematic sexism (or masculism) of MoMA may be old news to Duncan (she has been writing and lecturing about this since at least 1978) but as a reader I miss the sense of outrage and anger that injustice deserves, no matter how longstanding it may be or how long recognized. Duncan acknowledges that male hostility toward and vilification of women are expressions of men's own fears and weaknesses, but does not push much farther. Writing outside the academy, feminists Daly, Susan Faludi, Robin Morgan and others have been more willing to follow such observations to their logical conclusion, a critique of male domination. Duncan understands the larger implications of MoMA's misogyny but is disinclined to explicate. That might only be prudent - retaliation can never be ruled out, even for tenured academics.

More problematic is the dubious utility of the concept of ritual as Duncan applies it to the art museum. That museums have ideological missions is not in question, nor that they typically replicate in artifactual form the dominant art liturgy, itself an ideological construct. But not all museums are laid out the same and, in any case, visitors often create their own paths through the galleries. The quasi-religious notions of liturgy, canon and ritual surely make sense in the context of the art museum but I wonder if a fuller and more effective ideological message is not conveyed through textbooks and survey courses, where sequence and order can be enforced. Duncan's notion of ritual in the art museum is intriguing - even promising - but insufficiently developed to be thoroughly convincing. At times it almost seems to be a rhetorical device invoked to unify four expository essays on different aspects of museum history and culture. Duncan introduces ritual in the context of the art museum forcibly enough at the beginning of the book but then seems to forget about it for pages at a time in subsequent chapters. Remove the concept and the book still works.

Despite my reservations about the utility of ritual for understanding art museums, Civilizing Rituals is a significant addition to art museum bibliography. The value of the other two books reviewed here is less clear, primarily because both are maddeningly diffuse. Museum Culture offers 13 diverse essays about museums. Visual Display offers 13 even more diverse essays. Each volume includes important insights, useful formulations, helpful references and intelligent essays by capable people but none go very far toward synthesis. We come close to drowning in particulars.

Museum Culture is the product of a conference on "The Institutions of Culture: The Museum," held at Harvard's Center for European Studies in 1988. The editors explain their intention "to formulate terms and questions that can be applied both to exhibited culture, what museums and others put on display, and to exhibition culture, the ideas, values, and symbols that pervade and shape the practice of exhibiting." On top of that agenda they superimpose four structuring concepts: object, context, public and reception. The range of possibilities within these structures turns out to be nearly unlimited. In fact, one major if unwelcome lesson of this book may be that glib assumptions of similarities across national or cultural boundaries are unfounded. Every case might actually be different.

Essays in Museum Culture range over considerable geographic and temporal terrain. The first five, gathered together under the heading of "Histories," include Detlef Hoffmann's account of the development of art museums in Germany; Vera Zolberg's discussion of democracy and art museums in the U.S.; and Dominique Poulot's description of Ecomuseums in France. The two most impressive essays in the section are Seth Koven's well-documented and well-told tale of high art in the low surroundings of east London in the late nineteenth century and Ariella Azoulay's thoroughly chilling report on the narratives dominating history-museum displays in present-day Israel. Koven recounts the unlikely story of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, whose annual Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibitions of the 1880s and 1890s "were explicit attempts to use the display of art objects and the creation of a working-class art public to promote social reclamation and urban renewal." The odd thing is that for a while it more or less worked. Whatever tentative sense of optimism Koven's account might generate, however, is more than countered by the depressingly crude level of "Zionist, socialist, masculinist, and emphatically Western" propaganda that, at least until very recently, shaped the hegemonic definition of the past in Israel. Fabricated exhibits and Judeocentric history add to this dismal picture. Azoulay takes some consolation in the thought that "in the fullness of time, everything is doomed to oblivion." As she says, "This may not necessarily be a bad thing after all, since it is cultural and epistemic amnesia or erasure that makes possible creation in the broadest sense of the word."

The second section, "Discourses," contains four quite different essays. Chantal Georgel briefly recounts the way the idea of museum was used metaphorically in nineteenth-century France, particularly in publishing. "Between 1806 and 1914, more than seventy newspapers, journals, and albums carried the word musee (museum) in their titles." Volume co-editor Daniel Sherman contributes an essay with the ambitious title "Quatremere/Benjamin/ Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism," the main feature of which, at least in my reading, is the overdue rehabilitation of Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy, an early and articulate museo-phobe. "Discourses" also includes Boris Groys's discussion of the peculiar history - from a Western perspective - of art museums in Russia, first after the October Revolution and later under the totalitarian state, and Walter Grasskamp's exploration of the rehabilitation of modernism in Germany after WW II. Both of these essays demonstrate dramatically how political situations can affect, even invert, artistic and cultural hierarchies. Both are potent antidotes to any latent inclinations to universalize about museums.

The third and last section, "Spectacles," offers Frederick Bohrer on the representation of major examples of Assyrian sculpture acquired by the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century; co-editor Irit Rogoff on "The Feminization of Fascism" in post-war German history museums; Anne Higonnet on the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington; and Brian Wallis on the calculated staging of major exhibitions of foreign national culture in this country as thinly veiled public relations ploys aimed at increasing tourism and trade. Wallis notes that as museums become strapped for funds, they may find it increasingly difficult to turn down these glitzy packages of subsidized propaganda, blatantly distorted productions that narrow and impoverish our understanding of the world.

On this happy note Museum Culture ends. No summary, no tentative conclusions, no afterword. The omission is unfortunate. This rich and provocative collection deserves better. Readers will have to ponder the meanings of these multifaceted essays for themselves. They will have to do the same if they decide to read Visual Display, an even more expansive accumulation. In lieu of a summary or analysis, Visual Display ends with a rambling and pointless discussion among its authors, all participants at yet another conference, "Visual Display," held in 1993 under the auspices of Dia Center for the Arts in New York.

Co-editor Peter Wollen at least offers a few pages of introduction to help frame the essays and describe their general intent. For the purposes of this volume, visual display means "the other side of spectacle: the side of production rather than consumption or reception, the designer rather than the viewer." The purpose of visual display is, paradoxically, to conceal. Spectacles create a stream of transient illusions that mask truth. Because each historical period has its own truths to conceal, it also has its own rhetoric of display.

These ideas are not novel. The major teaching of Thorstein Veblen, after all, can be concisely paraphrased as "whatever is, is wrong," while feminist philosopher Daly captures a similar thought in her concept of the patriarchal reversal: whatever the patriarchy claims is the opposite of truth. This collection of essays explores parallel if less explicitly stated ideas as illuminated by the visible world. The aggressive display of academic jargon by a few of the authors, however, inclines me to wonder what it is they mean to conceal. Perhaps jargon functions to reveal depth of erudition while concealing shallowness of meaning.

Essays deal with visual display within the realms of religion, museums, economics, medicine and film but all have some bearing on museums, even if to only underline the principle of concealment through display. Susan Buck-Morss's account of the visual rhetoric of political economy and Ludmilla Jordanova's and Lisa Cartwright's inquiries into genres of display in medicine are particularly illuminating. Buck-Morss explains how political economy is envisioned and presented in ways that create the impression that it is a rational and balanced system while in fact it remains irrational and poorly understood. Jordanova and Cartwright contribute to the ongoing critique of professionalized medicine by showing how allegedly scientific or technical presentations and analyses mask class and gender aggression.

Four essays deal specifically and at some length with museum issues. Susan Stewart examines links between personal anxieties and display in the paintings and museum exhibits of Charles Willson Peale, while Ann Reynolds describes how Director Alfred E. Parr transformed exhibits at New York's American Museum of Natural History to offer "museum visitors visual access to the normally unseen workings of nature or to the distant historical and geological past." Most provocative are Ralph Rugoff's witty and engaging account of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Los Angeles and Jean-Hubert Martin's description of Daniel Spoerri's various "museums."

Rugoff's delightful essay on the thoroughly bizarre and enigmatic MJT combines a sensitive and thoughtful reflection on his own experience of this strange institution with observations about the limitations of museums at large. Many museums, Rugoff argues, "attract our attention only to immobilize our curiosity." His encounter with the MJT prompts him to suggest the metaphor of romance as a more promising way to conceive of the museum-visitor relationship. This intriguing notion, taken far enough, potentially subverts the idea of displaying to conceal.

Subversion of sorts also plays a role in Martin's laudatory treatment of Spoerri, a European artist who has been installing exhibits in art museums since the 1970s. In a typical instance, Spoerri worked with a group of students to create a juxtaposition of key words and artifacts that would describe the city of Cologne. In another, Berlin was the subject. Rather than invent new objects for these exhibits, Spoerri and his students retrieved pre-existing goods from the everyday world. Because these were already invested with meaning, he could combine them in jarring or provocative ways that expressed the uncensored memory of the community, incorporating references to war and militarism, drugs, commercial sex and other matters usually omitted or dressed up in official history. Martin writes that Spoerri's purpose was, in part, to "abolish hierarchies and normal, given categories" and that his activities push us to question "the fundamental role of the artist, his [sic] social and critical responsibility, and his [sic] link to history." Maybe so. But probably not. How strange that in a book that explores visual display and insists that display conceals, we are not even told what it is that Spoerri's display conceals. By affirming that artists have permission to say what is denied to historians and social critics, the book obscures the truth of contemporary art's marginality. Presented as art, Spoerri's dialogues with popular memory are simultaneously typecast and dismissed. This one essay reminds us that the two words designating the concept "art museum" are not equal. The adjective is always subordinate to the noun. Maybe that is the lesson of all three of these books.

KENNETH L. AMES is Chair of Academic Programs at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.