We choose to wander in a gallery of mirrors

“Bearing in mind Pope Greogory’s call for the reading of pictures, I would go further. I would say that if looking at pictures is equivalent to reading, then it is a vastly creative form of reading, a reading in which we must not only put words into sounds into sense but images into sense into stories. Of course, much must escape our narratives because of a picture’s chameleon quality and because of the protean nature of a symbol. Image and meaning reflect each other in a gallery of mirrors through which, as through corridors hung with pictures, we choose to wander, always knowing that there is no end to our search – even if we had a goal in mind. A line from Ecclesiastes sums up, I think, our dealings with a work of art that moves us. It acknowledges the craftsmanship, it intimates the inspiration, it tells of our helplessness to put our experience into words. It is worded like this in the King James Version: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” The experience of a work of art can no doubt be understood, because it is, after all, a human experience. But that understanding, in all its illuminating and ambiguous revelations, may be condemned, because of its very nature, to remain for us just beyond the possibilities of our labours.”

(page 149)

Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

Not growing from the original skin of the painting

“Since the artistic language of our time is not specific in its connotations, our interpretation remains private, one of many, a story added to the private story of the painting itself, a second or third or tenth layer of meaning that grows not from the original skin of the painting but from our own time and place. This is what I would call a “blind reading” as opposed to a “sighted reading” like the one allowed by a painting that supposes a shared and established vocabulary.

The depiction of a subject through its related parts, a sort of gestalt creation by a collection of visual metonymies, changes from a conventional iconographic vocabulary to a vocabulary in which each sign, as it becomes apparent, no longer corresponds to a common sense – unless it is a private common sense, where “common” means not shared but merely reasonable. That is to say, like the image in a kaleidoscope, a portrait made up of distinct individual details changes every time we turn the bits of coloured glass and recognise a new story in the pattern.”

(page 149)

Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

A coherent system for reading images

“I don’t know whether such a thing as a coherent system for reading images, akin to the one we have devised for reading script (a system implicit in the very code we are deciphering), is even possible. It may be that unlike a written text in which the meaning of the signs must be established before they can be set on clay, or on paper, or behind an electronic screen, the code that enables us to read an image, though steeped in our previous knowledge, is created after the image comes into being – in much the same way that we create or imagine meanings for the world around us, bravely constructing out of such meanings something like a moral and ethical sense with which to live. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the painter James McNeill Whistler, allying himself with this notion of an inexplicable creation, summed his craft up in two words: “Art happens.” I don’t know whether he said it with a feeling of resignation or of joy.”

(pages 17–18)

Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

The work of art remains always outside its critical appreciation

“If the world revealed in a work of art remains always outside that work, the work of art remains always outside its critical appreciation. “Form,” writes Balzac, “in its representations, is what it is among us: just a trick to communicate ideas, feelings, a vast expanse of poetry. Every image is a world, a portrait whose model appeared once in a sublime vision, bathed in light, ascribed by an interior voice, stripped bare by a celestial finger that points, in the past of an entire life, to the very sources of expression.” Our oldest images are bare lines and smudged colours. Before the pictures of antelopes and mammoths, of running men and fertile women, we scratched lines or stamped palms on the walls of our saves to signal our presence, to fill a blank space, to communicate a memory or a warning, to be human for the first time.”

(pages 14–15)

Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

All that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous and critical

“The task of articulating cultural value is now urgent in both the museum and the academy, where a tsunami of fiscal imperatives threatens to deluge all that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous, and critical in the public sphere. Significantly, it is a question of temporality around which this struggle now takes place: authentic culture operates within a slower time frame than the accelerated abstractions of finance capital and the annual cycles of accounting (based on positivist data and requiring demonstrable impact). But it is precisely this lack of synchronicity that points to an alternative world of values in which museums – but also culture, education, and democracy – are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet or the statistical mystifications of an opinion poll, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present, and to realize a different future. This future does not yet have a name, but we are standing on its brink. If the last forty years have been marked by ‘posts’ (post-war, post-colonialism, postmodernism, post-communism), then today, at last, we seem to be in a period of anticipation – an era that museums of contemporary art can help us collectively to sense and understand.”

(pages 62)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

A space to reflect and debate our values

“Others will say that the museum itself is a conservative institution and that it is more urgent to focus efforts on social change. But it is not a choice of either/or. Museums are a collective expression of what we consider important in culture, and offer a space to reflect and debate our values; without reflection, there can be no considered movement forwards.

[…]

“Two systems of value hereby come into conflict: the museum as a space of cultural and historical reflection, and the museum as a repository of philanthropic narcissism. In the face of this impasse, the ability of the public museum to adequately represent the interests of the ninety-nine percent might seem ever bleaker. It is therefore crucial to consider the alternatives that do exist, working below the radar to devise energizing new missions for the museum of contemporary art.”

(pages 61)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The contemporary becomes a method or practice

“It is of course banal and predictable to invoke Benjamin at the end of an essay in 2013, but it is striking that his theories have been so influential on visual art yet have had so little impact upon the institutions in which it is shown and the histories they narrate. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin draws a distinction between a history spoken in the name of power, which records the triumphs of the victors, and a history that names and identifies the problems of the present day, by scouring the past for the origins of this present historical moment; this, in turn, is the determining motivation for our interest in the past. Can a museum be anti-hegemonic? The three museums discussed in this book seem to answer the question in the affirmative. They work to connect current artistic practice to a broader field of visual experience, much as Benjamin’s own Arcades Project sought to reflect on Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, by juxtaposing texts, cartoons, prints, photographs, works of art, artifacts, and architecture in poetic constellations. This present-minded approach to history produces an understanding of today which sightlines on the future, and reimagines the museum as an active, historical agent that speaks in the name not of national pride or hegemony but of creative questioning and dissent. It suggests a spectator no longer focused on the auratic contemplation of individual works, but one who is aware of being presented with arguments and positions to read or contest. Finally, it defetishizes objects by continually juxtaposing works of art with documentary materials, copies, and reconstructions. The contemporary becomes less a question of periodization or discourse than a method or practice, potentially applicable to all historical periods.”

(pages 56-57)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

Disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties

“These museums create multi-temporal remappings of history and artistic production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks, rather than opting for a global inclusivity that pulls everything into the same narrative. An apt term to describe the results of these activities is the constellation, a word used by Walter Benjamin to describe a Marxist project of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties. This approach is, I think, highly suggestive for museums, since the constellation as a politicized rewriting of history is fundamentally curatorial. For Benjamin, the collector is a scavenger or bricoleur, quoting out of context in order to break the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing it blazing into the present, and keeping history mobile in order to allow its objects to be historical agents once again. Replace ‘collector’ here with ‘curator’, and the task of the contemporary museum opens up to a dynamic rereading of history that pulls into the foreground that which has been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominant classes. Culture becomes a primary means for visualizing alternatives; rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons.”

(page 56)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The appropriateness of repetition

“The first point [of the Ljubljana Moderna Galerija’s manifesto] states the fiscal reality: due to budget cuts, no new display or catalog are possible, so recycling is necessary. Four further points argue for the appropriateness of repetition: rather than succumbing to the pressure to give consumers the new, the museum advocates the value of rereading; repetition is one of the fundamental features of contemporary art (video loops, re-enactment, etc.), so it is appropriate to repeat an entire collection display; repetition constructs history – through publications, research, the art market – so a repeated display retroactively helps to construct responses that produce history; finally, repetition is driven by trauma, and in Ljubljana this is twofold – the traumatic absence of a contemporary art system and the unrealized emancipatory ideals of communism.”

(pages 50-51)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The Time of the Absent Museum

“In Ljubljana, the first display encountered by the viewer is titled “War Time”: it includes a small anonymous documentary photograph of the occupation of Metelkova in 1993, alongside Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (1993-1994), a photo series of text on skin, alluding to the rape of Bosnian women. Thereafter, the museum’s entire display is organized around thematic categories relating to overlapping temporalities: “Ideological Time” (the socialist past), “Future Time” (unrealized modernist utopias), “The Time of the Absent Museum” (approximately the 1980s-1990s, when artists compensated for the absence of a developed art system by self-organizing and self-criticizing), “Retro Time” (the late 1990s, when artists began to self-historicize), “Lived Time” (body and performance art), “Time of Transition” (from socialism into capitalism) and “Dominant Time” (present-day global neoliberalism). Contemporary art is therefore staked as a question of timeliness, rather than as a stage on the conveyor belt of history; the necessary condition of relevance is the presentation of multiple, overlapping temporalities, geared towards the imagination of a future in which social equality prevails.”

(pages 48-49)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.