“Museum and mausoleum are connectedmore than phonetic ...

10Spaces of life and death: the museum and the laboratoryBeth Lord, University of Dundee, b.lorddundee.ac.uk DRAFT CONFERENCE PAPER. DO NOT PUBLISH OR CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION.In his essay “Valery Proust Museum”, Theodor Adorno discusses the museum in terms of the life and death of artworks. “The German word museal has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art.”This forms part of a broad tendency of modernist philosophers to connect museums with death.“However high their quality and power of impression, however good their state of preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing artworks in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world.” (Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”)The museum “detaches all art from its connections with life and the particular conditions of our approach to it.” (Gadamer, Truth and Method)“We occasionally sense that these works were not after all intended to end up between these morose walls, for the pleasure of Sunday strollers or Monday intellectuals. We are aware that something has been lost and that this meditative necropolis is not the true milieu of art that so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labours were not destined one day to reflect the museums mournful light. The museum kills the vehemence of painting It is the historicity of death.” (Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”)Perhaps the root of all this is Hegels remark that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place” (11). Hegel mourns the dissociation of art from the spiritual world of the church or the Greek temple, and notes that art has “now” become intellectualized, has become a matter of criticism, judgment and thought. The need for a philosophy of art comes about most urgently under these circumstances. We find the same sense of mourning that art has become detached from the spiritual realm (together with the urgency of raising anew the question of art) in Heidegger and Gadamer. Because the museum replaces the church or temple as the dwelling place for works of art, all these thinkers associate the museum with the work of arts detachment from its living environment. The idea that art has its original “life” in a certain milieu (e.g. a church, a chapel, an aristocratic home) is problematic for a number of reasons. If art dies when removed from its original environment, then it has life and power only because of its architectural or spiritual setting. It is strange to attribute “life” to these extrinsic factors, rather than to the power immanent within the work itself. It speaks against its autonomy. Arguably museums give artworks more autonomy than they had in the church; given Adornos conviction that the autonomy of art is what is most important, it is strange that he would suggest that the life or death of the artwork depends on its location. Adorno suggests that museums “kill” artworks when they take them out of their original surroundings and bring them together without context. Whether we put artworks in museums or in reconstructed churches or stately homes, they lose their autonomy, their vitality and power. The autonomy of the artwork cannot be very strong if it is so easily negated by its physical situation.Adorno (and Hegel) recognize the impossibility of the artworks return to its original home. Given that there are no longer any “original settings” for artworks, given that art is no longer created to be housed in churches, temples, or mansions in other words, given Hegels dictum that art in that sense is a thing of the past, what do we do with art? Adorno looks at the writings of Valery and Proust on museums to answer this question. Valery writes of the museum in terms of death, disorder, and constraint (Adorno 176-7). He speaks of the “authoritarian gesture” that takes away his cane and his pipe when he enters the museum. He finds chaos in the ordering of the sculptures. What he objects to most is being asked to look at so many works of art simultaneously, since a beautiful work of art is so distinct that it “kills the ones around it”. The paintings, brought together in one space, must kill one another. “Dead visions are entombed” in the museum. The museum is where “we put the art of the past to death”. But Valery also writes about the “sacred awe” that fills the museum, the reverential tones in which people speak. The overall image is not just of where artworks come to die, but where they are brought to be sacrificed. Finally Valery concludes that this situation has come about through the detachment of artworks from their original settings. He says of artworks “Their mother is dead, their mother, architecture. While she lived, she gave them their place, their definition. While she was alive, they knew what they wanted.” Valery suggests that the sacred space of the church, the architectural “mother” that gives life to artworks, has been replaced with a different kind of sacred space in the museum, a space of violence and sacrifice which remains as a monumental sepulchre.Proust, by contrast, is positive about the museum, and speaks of it in terms of life rather than death. The chaos that Valery complained of is, for Proust, to be celebrated, the multiplicity of paintings connected by flows of memory and consciousness. The spareness of the museum, its display of paintings free of context, is essential for consciousness to find a way in to the painting. Proust speaks against the tendency to display artworks in contextual settings or in homes. “The masterpiece observed during dinner no longer produces in us the exhilarating happiness that can be had only in a museum, where the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all decorative detail, symbolize the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create the work.” (Adorno 179) The museum for Proust is the very mind of the artist, where not the death but the birth of artworks takes place. Briefly, Valery champions the autonomy of the artwork, its objective character and immanent coherence, over against the contingency of the subject. Proust by contrast rejects fixed truths and gives primacy to the flux of experience and memory. Adorno suggests that neither Valery nor Proust is “right” about art. There must be a dialectic between their positions, where one passes over into the other (183): Valery can only become aware of the autonomy of the artwork through Proustian self-reflection in the museum. Concomitantly, works of art must be sent to their death in order to live. The museum is necessary to achieve this dialectic in art. “Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction. The procedure which today relegates every work of art to the museum is irreversible. It is not solely reprehensible, however, for it presages a situation in which art, having completed its estrangement from human ends, returns to life.” (Adorno 185)The museum kills art and thereby provides the conditions for its rebirth and life. The museum, for Adorno, is a space of death and necessarily so; a space for the transition from life to death and back to life again, thus continuing in the tradition of the church, the temple, the site of sacrifice.This cycle of death, rebirth, and life we find repeated again and again in Oteizas writings about artworks and about his own role as artist. When he states, in his “Experimental Proposal” accompanying the Sao Paolo Biennal of 1957, “I return from Death. What we tried to bury grows here” (qtd by Zulaika, 11), he suggests the artists own return from metaphorical “death” to life (47). But he also repeats the dialectic that Adorno sets up. The Biennal, even more than the museum, is surely to be seen as the site of the death of artworks: the ultimate decontextualized and desacralized space. The work of art dies and is buried in such a space, but thereby somehow regains its life. What we tried to bury the artwork that died in the museum grows here, in the museum, nevertheless.How does the life of the artwork emerge from its burial and how is the artwork reborn in the same space in which it died? Perhaps a clue can be found in Oteizas search for an aesthetic “resolution of death” (qtd by Zulaika, 15). The artwork is a “solution” to the problem of death that supplants the religious solution: the notion of an afterlife. The artwork is posited in place of the afterlife, as concretized in Oteizas series of funeral stelas. The job of the artwork is to live beyond its death, to cheat death. Art is “the dominion over death granted to mankind” (Zulaika, 18). For this reason, the threat of the death of the artwork in the museum is the greatest danger. Perhaps it is to this danger that we must attribute Oteizas suspicion of museums: the museum will kill the artwork and prevent it fulfilling its function to cheat death. Yet its function can only come about after death, through which it achieves its afterlife. The museum is therefore both the greatest threat and the supreme opportunity for art: the opportunity for it to live in spite of its death. The artwork has life before it enters the museum, but a life that has not yet been strengthened or made enduring through its dialectic with death. The enduring living of the artwork exists only through the dialectic of life and death, and this dialectic occurs only in the museum, as Adorno indicates.It is in this context that I think we should approach Oteizas “Experimental laboratories”. Oteiza began to create these experimental laboratories in the early 1950s, and used them in preparation for the Sao Paolo Biennal. Using materials such as chalk, paper, and tin, Oteiza created objects exploring certain problems, shapes, spatial configurations and movements. He classified these objects into “experimental family groups” on shelves reminiscent of the scientific laboratory or the pharmacists storeroom. The objects were in some cases used as maquettes or models for larger sculptures, so the laboratories can be seen as collections of models for future use. Margit Rowell refers to the laboratory project as a “vast repertory of tiny maquettes”, whose principal purpose was to aid the artist in his unique working methods:“Oteizas point of departure would be a basic visual or mathematical concept which he would interpret in every conceivable variation until the exhaustion of the given theme. This undertaking would create large families of motifs, from which he would select those he found the most successful, and realize them as full-scale sculptures in stone or metal. This experiemental laboratory represented a source of plastic solutions from which he would draw thoroughtout his working life.” (Rowell, 346)Clearly Oteiza did use the laboratory objects as models, and the laboratories as resources for sculptural experimentation. However, this interpretation of the laboratories as repositories of models seems to me to overlook two important things. First, the extent to which the laboratories are themselves works of art, as evinced by the installation of entire laboratories in, e.g., the Venice Biennale of 1988 (whole laboratories behind glass). The laboratory is not just a collection of maquettes, but is itself presented as a sculpture. Second, the way in which the laboratories, in their presentation and classification of objects, recall early museum displays, particularly those of the 18th century. In those displays, natural and cultural objects are displayed together, grouped according to visual similarities in shape, colour, or size. Oteizas objects are grouped together in ways that are typical of early museum displays: one shelf is full of objects made of wire; another is full of objects that are deconstructed circles, another is full of objects seemingly connected only by the fact that they are roughly the same size. We see the same kinds of classification decisions informing Enlightenment museum displays: groupings are based on the look of objects and what they visually have in common, rather than dividing them along scientific, cultural, chronological, or disciplinary lines.Its significant, I think, that Oteiza presents his laboratories as museum displays. He creates artefacts which are then to be presented in museum displays, and that whole display is to be presented as a work of art and itself placed within a museum. The museum is the space in which the original life of the artwork enters into a dialectic with its death, resulting in its afterlife, its enduring living. Oteiza creates the space in which this dialectic is to occur; effectively, he creates museums for his artworks to live in. Oteiza, then, creates the setting for the death of his own work by creating museum displays; and in creating the objects that populate these displays, he creates objects to be sacrificed within these displays, to die and then be reborn. In other words, the laboratories represent neither the life nor the death of artworks, but rather the dialectical structure of their process of living. They live have energy and movement only through fulfilling their function of cheating or mastering death. But that afterlife comes about only through their death in the museum. Oteiza creates not only the works, but the conditions under which the works can live. The word laboratory evokes ongoing process and experiment. The work of the laboratory is to produce the ongoing living of artworks, their life after death. After all, Oteizas own museum project, the Cube, was proposed to be an experimental centre (Zulaika 63-4): a laboratory on a grand scale, a museum that would “kill” its contents in order to give them a place to live.ReferencesAdorno, T. W. “Valery Proust Museum”, Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber. MIT Press, 1983.Gadamer, H.-G. Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall. London: Continuum, 2004.Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: OUP, 1998.Heidegger, M. “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Poetry Language Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Merleau-Ponty, M. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. G.A. Johnson, trans. M.B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993.Rowell, M. “A sense of place/a sense of space: the sculpture of Jorge Oteiza”, in Oteiza: Mito y Modernidad/Mitoa eta Modernotasuna. Bilbao: Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2004.Zulaika, J. “Introduction: Oteizas Return from the Future”. In J. Oteiza, Oteizas Selected Writings, ed. J. Zulaika, trans. F. Fornoff. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003.