What makes a museum break from convention and look at its collection in a new way?
When Tate Modern first opened its doors in May 2000 visitors were greeted with a novel approach to the presentation of modern art history: there was no chronology of works arranged by movement, instead the art was displayed in four suites of rooms with broad-ranging themes such as nude/action/body and history/memory/society. Critical reaction ranged from “disorientating” to “iconoclastic and radical” but one thing was certain: Tate Modern had broken with convention.
Skip forward to 2006 and the opening of the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the V&A, a complete overhaul and redevelopment of the Islamic Gallery which had first opened in 1950. It shows a collection of beautifully displayed objects. In this respect it is a modernised version of its predecessor. Yet the overhaul of the gallery had been initiated in response to 9/11. One might expect therefore, that some of cultural and historical context would be present, and yet it is not.
Why then, was Tate Modern able to offer a fresh approach to its subject but the V&A wasn’t? In this paper I want to suggest that one of the overriding factors in this decision is a museum’s perception of its identity and its status, its current cultural & symbolic capital, if you like. Indeed, I suggest that a museum will only undertake a new approach to its exhibitions if it needs to reassert itself. This has implications for the production of knowledge in exhibitions. If we accept that, as Stephen Dubin puts it, “exhibitions solidify culture, science, history, identity and world views”, and if we want exhibitions reflection the societies in which museums are located, we need to understand what it is that will make a museum adopt a different approach.
I want begin by providing some context for this discussion, namely the political and socio-economic conditions in which museums have operated since the 1980s. These have arisen from the political and financial ideology of the Thatcher government, first elected in 1979, which applied the principles of the private sector marketplace to the public sector. This meant museums saw a reduction in their real-terms public funding, they had to justify receipt of that funding, and they were ‘encouraged’ to diversify their sources of income, for example through donations, sponsorship and commercial activities (and in some cases entrance fees) – things that now perhaps seem common place, but then were quite new. One effect of this was to place museums in competition with each other, for money and for visitors; so museums had – still have to – to operate in a marketplace whilst still maintaining an intellectual integrity.
Let’s go back to Tate Modern. I started by stating that Tate Modern produced a novel approach to the display of art history. This is true: up to this point the convention for modern art exhibitions was still primarily informed by the approach developed at MoMA in the mid-C20th. MoMA’s first director, Alfred Barr presented a master narrative of modern art history showing masterworks from each movement in a chronological order, to suggest a linear progression through time. Barr’s formula extended to the design of the exhibitions: works were hung widely spaced, positioned just below eye level against neutral coloured walls (often white) in rooms without architectural adornment, in what became known as the white cube aesthetic. This had subsequently been widely adopted, including by Tate Gallery itself.
However, what is not true is that Tate Modern’s concept was a new approach to art history. In fact, this conventional modernist presentation of art history introduced by Barr had been increasingly critiqued since the late 1960s. These critiques came from artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, who questioned museums’ role in framing meanings of art, and levelled charges of elitism. They also came from academics, for whom the development of disciplines such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, sociology and identity politics in the wake of the cultural turn of the late 60s and 70s created a ‘new art history’ which gave many and different readings of art and challenged the notion of a master narrative.
Any yet, many museums stuck with the Barrist model – two notable exceptions being the Pompidou and Musee d’Orsay, both of which met with very mixed, to put it politely, reactions from critics and academics. And it’s not as though museums weren’t aware of this contradiction; in fact, in 1999, during Tate Modern’s development, there was a conference at the Clark Art Institute in the US called The Two Art Histories in which art historians from museums and the academy got together and asked “what’s going on here, why do we insist on saying completely different things about the same subject?” Or as Charles Haxthausen put it, why this mutual suspicion of each others’ practices?
As I alluded to earlier, Tate Gallery was one of those museums that had kept to Alfred Barr’s convention of display, so why did it feel it could break with that convention for the new Tate Modern? The answer lies in the international and national competition that it faced.
You’ll probably be aware that it was part of the former Tate Gallery at Millbank in London, which now houses Tate Britain. The division of Tate’s London home into two was made in 1992, and was a response to the political and economic pressures of the time: it had a lack of space to display collections, it had poor visitor facilities, and it needed space for hosting corporate events to attract sponsors. One way around this was to move out part of the collection on to a new site, but only if the new museums could maintain their status and ability to attract sponsors and visitors.
Tate Gallery was a well-known, well-respected museum of art that held its own against other British national museums and on an international stage, so these new creations had to do the same. But a new museum of modern art would be entering a crowded international field, with MoMA and the French National Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou being the main rivals. Like both these museums, Tate Gallery’s collection of modern art was weak in the areas of new media, non-white artists and non-Western art. But, crucially, the Gallery’s collection was also weaker than both MoMA and MNAM in classical modern art – for example, it had no pre-1940 North American works; so no Edward Hopper, no Georgia O’Keefe for example. A conventional chronological approach to displaying art would show these weaknesses; in other words Tate Gallery of Modern Art could not compete with its two main international rivals on their terms.
However, if the Tate Modern wanted to carve a niche for itself on the international stage by, say, starting to address the weaknesses of all three museums by, say, starting to collect photography, Tate Modern had national rivals. In the case of new media, it would have to identify itself against the V&A, which already had an extensive photographic collection. Then there was a longstanding tension with the National Gallery, which has Picasso’s Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin, at Tate has Monet’s Water Lilies, so when does its collection end and Tate Modern’s begin?
Tate Modern’s answer to this was to synthesise a new ‘modern’ and in so doing to present the new art history that has existed for 30 years but rarely been displayed. It rejected a master narrative and adopted a core principle of displaying multiple readings of art. Interestingly the details of its inaugural displays also weren’t really new: the themes, history / memory / society for example, were updated takes on nineteenth century genres of painting, and the principles of how works were arranged in rooms in order to create a multiplicity of readings drew heavily on contemporary art, particularly the Hallen fur Neue Kunst in Switzerland and documenta 7. By drawing on, and combining a variety of approaches established in other fields, Tate Modern created a new version of a modern art hang, one that allowed it to define its own niche, hide its weaknesses, and display its strengths.
In other words, in order to create an identity that would inherit and even build on Tate Gallery’s international status, the new Tate Modern had to ditch convention and find a new approach to modern art. But the other way of looking at this is that a view of modern art that had been widely criticised and by practitioners and theorists alike over a period of 30 years had continued to be presented in most museums.
We can get a feel for how that reluctance to change operates by looking at the V&A.
After the terrorist attacks in the US in September 2001, the subsequent Western military action in Afghanistan, relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim communities, and representation of one by the other, had been much debated in the media and in parliament. It was in response to this context that Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, a Saudi businessman, offered the museum £5.4 million pounds for the redevelopment for the Islamic Gallery. For his part, he also wanted to further his family’s interest in “world cultures and promoting understanding between them and a commitment to increasing understanding of the Islamic world.” (Quoted in press release.) Jameel’s donation included funds for a touring exhibition and for research trips to the Middle East so that the exhibition team could experience first-hand the culture, art and architecture of that region.
The team was all very new to exhibition making and to the V&A – the Middle East Section of the museum was new, with a newly arrived curator and project manager, and the designers, Softroom, had not previously produced a permanent museum display. The curatorial team cut their teeth on the touring exhibition, Palace & Mosque, which was developed in 2003 before the concept for the gallery at the South Kensington site. Its aim was “to show how Islamic art reflects the values and practices of the people who lived in the Middle East and illustrate the range of artistic interactions with other cultures that have helped to give Islamic art a universal relevance.” The exhibition concept highlighted that Islamic art – which is a contentious categorisation – is not temporally or geographically homogeneous, and emphasised inter-cultural exchange – so there was historical and cultural contextualisation.
However, the concept for the gallery in the V&A was very different. It privileged the display of the collection over all other aims of the exhibition. This becomes apparent in the way the exhibition is designed: the objects are presented as beautiful, but decontextualised works. Most of the interpretation is about the materials or manufacture of the objects. In fact, there are small contextualising elements, mostly in the form of five audio-visual exhibits, but they are positioned in a way that means they are easily over looked.
But this is a bit strange. After all, it’s not as though creating an exhibition that provides cultural and historical context was beyond the means of the curatorial & design team, because they’d done just that for Palace & Mosque. Yet it became highly marginalised in the version of the exhibition for the V&A. Furthermore, the V&A had been criticised for taking an Orientalist, homogenising approach to its non-European collections. And yet it persisted, even given the geopolitical context. Why was that?
It becomes more understandable when you realise that at this time the V&A was reasserting its identity as a museum of arts, crafts and design. Six months before Jameel’s donation the museum had launched Future Plan, a scheme that aimed to remodel the museum by renewing old galleries, creating new visitor facilities, clarifying way finding and creating a new visual identity, using the British Galleries, opened in November 2001, as a benchmark for display. The V&A had been thinking about such a scheme since the late 1980s, but after the launch of both Tate Modern and the Great Court at the British Museum in 2000, the timing of FuturePlan can be seen as crucial to the V&A keeping up with newly invigorated competition. The former Islamic Gallery had been on the FuturePlan list, albeit way down in the pecking order,
So from the museum’s perspective the Jameel Gallery had to look like a V&A exhibition– if you go to the British Galleries, there’s very little about historical or cultural context there either. Furthermore, a new curatorial team and a new, hungry design company weren’t going to rock the boat by doing anything the museum didn’t like.
Exhibitions are both cultural product and cultural producer: they are a product of institutional contexts and practices, and they produce an account of a subject viewed by visitors. These two examples show that in action. In both, decisions about the ideas and concepts presented in an exhibition are clearly shown as the products of a certain set of institutional contexts. Those are either creating, in the case of Tate Modern, or maintaining – the V&A – an institutional identity that maintains each museums’ status and therefore primarily financial support.
This raises difficult issue for museums and exhibition makers. Dubin talked of exhibitions solidifying culture, and as Timothy Luke argues, they are also perceived as important educational institutions – they are places we go to to find out about things – and as such they possess a power to shape social & cultural understandings. But they can only do that if they themselves are open to hearing and presenting those social understandings, and if they are open to change. If museums value the preservation of their identity – their brand – above engaging with new modes of thought in such a way that it limits their worldview, then they risk losing their value as knowledgeable institutions.
This paper was delivered at the Museums Metamorphosis conference, University of Leicester, 5-6th November 2013
Rachel Souhami 