Vision, Experience, and the Museum
By Thomas O. Haakenson
Despite widespread belief, Walter Benjamin did not usher in the end of the museum with the various versions of his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” published in the early 20th century. Rather, it is Miguel Helft, and others like him, our colleagues in the contemporary moment, who are much more to blame.
Helft, a staff reporter for The New York Times, announced in December 2009 the end of our ability to experience, unmediated, the (apparently decreasingly material) quotidian world. He describes in “Snap And Search (No Words Needed),” the potential of what is (dubiously) described as “computer vision.”[1] The article celebrates the development of a generation of referencing technology devoted to identifying objects via digital image—the photographic “snap” of the article’s title—rather than via material referent. Examining Google’s development of the cleverly titled “Goggles” software program, Helft explains that Goggles, like other “augmented-reality applications,” will allow viewers to “create a link between the physical and virtual worlds” via such devices as cell phones, digital cameras, and laptop computers.
In reality, the “link” that Helft alludes to is really a circumvention of materiality—or, perhaps more polemically stated, an effort to avoid the unique experience of material objects.
The tendency to attribute meaning to objects over-and-above their materiality, whether it be in digital or analog form, is not new. It belongs, disciplinarily speaking, to the realm of semiotics. Yet, the extent of meaning attributable to visual objects beyond their materiality has been given a radical jolt in this, the age of the digital. Helft’s article celebrates this continued digital flattening of the phenomenal at the expense of what Benjamin and others describe as the “authentic” experience of our empirical world.
The loss of “authentic” experience has radical implications for art and our experience of artworks.
According to Benjamin, artists of the early-twentieth-century could best respond to fascism, which aestheticized politics, by politicizing the work of art. Similarly, some of today’s most innovative artists respond to the homogenizing tyranny of the digitally mediated encounter by politicizing the aesthetic, rendering the experience of art more materially situated and site specific.
It is this effort to make the site and sight of the art object into a space and time for viewer reflection—a reflection on the material conditions of the aesthetic experience itself—that connects Benjamin’s ideas about art and the early-twentieth-first-century artwork of Michaal Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset.
Art, Vision, Experience
Although their oeuvres demonstrate radically different ideas about the material world, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault both understood the significance of vision as in mediating experience in modern life.
In a chapter suggestively titled “Panopticism” from his book-length study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault provides a rich and troubling architectural metaphor to explain his theory of “disciplinary society.” Foucault suggests that the major effect of the panoptic prison, an architectural model most often associated with Jeremy Bentham, is to induce “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (5). But, Foucault makes clear, power is neither synonymous with the visible nor wholly separable from it. The tower in the middle of the prison ensures that the prisoner, to quote Foucault, “must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” (5).
The tension between the visible and the knowable suggested by Foucault’s metaphor finds its most explicit manifestation in the social ordering and separation of public and private spaces. In other words, the spatial demarcations in and with which we live, work, and engage art are themselves political divides. We are viewers of art in a museum. Yet, even more specifically, we are seen by others as viewers in that museum, and not as the artist or the artwork. As such, we experience directly, if implicitly, the effect of the ordering that has been and continues to be the politicized space of the museum. The revolution of art that we associate with, among other things, Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Fountain (1917) failed to destroy the art museum. The museum survives. Yet the digital transformation to which Helft’s article alludes promises the imminent material destruction of the museum—and, with the destruction of the museum, the paradigmatic (material) site of aesthetic refuge and reflection.
In disentangling the relationship between the visible and the knowable, between the public and the private, we encounter the potential for a rethinking of the experience of art’s materiality—and, concomitantly, the museum itself. By challenging, even subverting, the socially assumed functions of particular spaces, artists such as Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have sought to manifest in visible form the unknown, alternative, supposedly private uses of assumed public spaces, and to seduce viewers into experience themselves as part of the artwork. The materiality of the aesthetic experience is situated dialectically, as an exchange between the viewer’s sight of the artwork and the site of the artwork itself.
But what we might call Elmgreen and Dragset’s resignification of objects through a resignification of space is more than that. Certainly, and quite literally, they tear apart exhibition rooms. They build stairways into and out of gallery spaces. They reproduce and relocate museum-like rooms and displays in locations far away from the “real” museum buildings.
In these acts of resignification, Elmgreen and Dragset disentangle the history of space from its ontological refunctioning. The meanings of spaces change over time, to be sure. Yet the empirical history of a space’s use is quite different from the alternative and countervailing uses to which viewers and artists might put the space. How do we recognize, or even “write,” this history of the alternative use of official spaces?
One approach comes to us from the field of feminist philosophy and is derived, in part, from the work of Michel Foucault: The concept of performativitiy most often associated with the work of Judith Butler. Performativity suggests that meaning, in the case of Butler’s initial use of the term, is created and reinforced each time one identifies oneself as male or female. As a number of scholars have argued, however, performativity has implications beyond gender relations.
The idea of performativity implicitly suggests that space is a location of meaning-making. To occupy a space means to perform the space’s meaning, to create and reinforce the meaning of the space each time we use the space as such. To that end, Elmgreen and Dragset’s work reveals that viewers perform the museum as an inherent part of the aesthetic experience in a museum. That is to say, by making explicit the significance we associate with the museum(-like) space as the official site for an aesthetic experience, Elmgreen and Dragset attempt to make evident the viewer’s role in giving meaning—political, social, aesthetic—to the space of the aesthetic encounter.
If theories of performativity seek to separate the materiality of the body from its culturally determined significations, these theories reveal more than the fact, as Roland Barthes incessantly pointed out, that ideology seeks to naturalize the cultural. By disentangling the ontology of space from its history, Elmgreen and Dragset reveal that the foundation for any supposedly liberating gesture of a performative identity is always dependent upon rethinking the spaces in which bodies do their performing, whether these bodies be paintings, post offices, or people.[2] In other words, and in the face of “computer vision” and “augmented-reality applications,” artistic interventions like Elmgreen and Dragset’s effectively rematerialize the phenomenal world, render it again three-dimensional, in the face of the two-dimensional flattening inevitable in the digital encounter.
Elmgreen and Dragset engage in the “rematerializiation” of the aesthetic encounter in a number of their works. In their multi-year collaborative project Powerless Structures, the artists employ performances, installations, and context-related works. As Vanessa Joan Müller suggests, “Architectonic as well as social structures are reorganized” in Elmgreen and Dragset’s displays “in order to make [these structures'] underlying ideological and control mechanisms visible.”[3] In their recent installation piece, When Privacy Has to Be Held in Public (2008), the artists recreate a supposedly public restroom scene (fig. 1). Visitors to the installation discover two sets of feet behind the closed door of a bathroom stall, suggesting that two individuals are apparently engaged in (the beginnings of) an illicit sex act.
But Elmgreen and Dragset do more than humorously recreate lascivious encounters in public bathrooms. They address the destructive and deadly use of space as well. In some of their most recent and controversial works, the artists create unique monuments to the (forgotten) victims of these wars of position.
Monuments, usually erected by the victorious as markers of key historical struggles, in effect dictating for the viewer / visitor the kind of (honorific) experience she or he should have. As Walter Benjamin suggests in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (256). In other words, to the victor go the spoils.
Such a relationship between the victor’s use of public spaces and the private, forgotten lives of the vanquished is evident in the onsite installation piece Traces of a Never Existing History / Powerless Structures. Fig. 222 (2001), which shows a contemporary art museum nearly submerged (fig. 2). Yet, as Traces demonstrates, using their art to resignify spatial relations allows Elmgreen and Dragset to make a provocative intervention in the struggles that ground Benjamin’s criticisms.
Collapsing the fleeting distinction of the disciplinary society to which Foucault’s model of the panoptic prison metaphorically alludes—there is the visible and then there is the knowable—Elmgreen and Dragest claim that “By just re-organizing the very materials that . . . spaces consist of, we question [these spaces'] objectivity.”[4] The non-existent history of the context-specific artwork is connected, via the work’s title, to the materiality of the authentic and onsite experience of the piece. The site-specific construction has no history, because the experience of it cannot be reproduced textually or visually, as historicism would like. The trace remains, yet there is no content [?] to the referent, there is a “never existing history” to the work and, by default, the contemporary museum itself. The visitor must experience history first-hand by experience the work directly.
As the above examples demonstrate, Elmgreen and Dragset’s works do not employ a concept of space with a forgotten essence, a Heideggerian-like “void” manifest in the etymological relationship between “building” and “dwelling,” between built structures and a mythical and primal humanity. Rather, Elmgreen and Dragset’s structures seek emphasize the experience of the objects and spaces themselves.
A key figure in the philosophical movement known as phenomenology, Heidegger was motivated in no small part by a post-World War One desire to find a new foundation for human existence. He sought in the early twentieth century to find a (new) unified humanity by revealing a foundational spatial connection among objects in the world. His essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” suggests that one’s home is a building that should not be seen simply as a structure, but rather as a relation to the world and to one’s origins. He encourages the recognition of a sense of “presentness,” of literally existing at a particular time and in a particular place. However, his philosophical investigations, as is well know, made him a useful thinker for the political program of the National Socialists.
Elmgreen and Dragset shy away from such “ontological” reflections on space, not explicitly in comparison to Heidegger’s approach, but in a significant way quite different from it. Rather that seek a new unity, Elmgreen and Dragset reveal the ever-newness, the open possibility that spaces—such as the museum—present. Aligning this revelation of the ever-new potential of space with material conditions of the aesthetic experience itself, the artists create the kind of authentic encounter to which Walter Benjamin alludes.
Benjamin examines in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” the historical mutability of human perception in an effort to develop a holistic theory of subjective experience, to appropriate the optical from the realm of the immediate and to secure the present and future critical potential of the viewer as subject. Benjamin uses architecture as his example:
“Buildings are appropriated in a two-fold manner: by use and by perception—or, rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. . . For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation”[6].
The emphasis on aesthetic sensuousness is the foundation of what Leslie describes as Benjamin’s “anthropological materialism” and what some, including Adorno, criticize as a “positivism that takes its measure from the human body.”[7] Yet Benjamin resorts to a dependence upon the spatial conditions of optical experience to ground his critical model of an historically mutable subjective perception, a spatial situation that readily allows a synaesthetic confusion of optical and tactile information. The visible and the knowable are thus rendered inseparable in a way that Foucault’s panoptic metaphor alludes to but cannot fully allow.
But refashioning space, rethinking the quotidian and the post-phenomenology of the object / image, can be a humorous, even stylish affair, as Elmgreen and Dragset’s work in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) demonstrates. The artists created what critics described as an “highly theatrical installation” for the Nordic and Danish pavilion. The space of the pavilion was transformed into the home of two wealthy collectors. One of the homes is offered for purchase, the other house is occupied by an apparently-dead novelist (i.e., there is a body floating in the pool behind the house). Viewers to the pavilion become participants in a “buyer’s tour,” receiving “goodie bags” full of limited edition works by artists such as Terence Koh, Hernan Bas, and Jonathan Monk. The visitors to the pavilion thus become collectors themselves, implicated in the suspense, confusion, and chaos played out in the exhibition space.[8] The artists’ “highly theatrical installation” for the Biennale exposed the viewer behind the lens of contemporary art—that is, the viewer, walking through the pavilions, became in effect an actor / collector in the staged scenes. An authentic experience of the objects and the work was, in effect, inevitable.
Replicating the destruction of institutional limits and the rethinking of object- and event-specific experiences in their work, Elmgreen and Dragset have transformed a former water pumping station in Berlin into a stylized home and studio space.[9] While the structure’s use may be different from the purposes originally envisioned, the refunctioned use requires a resignification of the supposedly natural functions of the objects therein. As Michael Elmgreen suggests, “both privately, and within our art practice, we love spatial challenges — so we were looking for somewhere we could apply the concepts we had been working with in our art.” Home is where the heart—and the art—is, it seems. And home is a very public place. One might even suggest, home is a museum and the museum is a home. A dialectical rethinking of those seemingly separate spaces that the artists would no doubt quite happily encourage.
[1] Miguel Helft, “Snap and Shoot (No Words Needed),” The New York Times on the Web, 19 December 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/business/20ping.html?_r=1&sq=snap%20and%20search&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1263146430-KmtV5z+UvzI7zOv3kO6QFg>
[2] Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who is Speaking Thus?: Some Questions About Documentary Photography,” Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, Practices, Media and Society 4 (Minneapolis: U of M Press, 1991). 182.
[3] V. J. Müller, “Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset: Powerless Structures,” V. J. Müller and N. Schafhausen, eds., Under Construction: Perspectives on Institutional Practice (Cologne, 2006), p. 166.
[4] M. Elmgreen and I. Dragset qtd. in J. Hoffmann and J. Jonas, p. 37.
[5] W. Benjamin, p. 235.
[6] W. Benjamin, p. 240.
[7] E. Leslie, p. 150-51.
[8] Randy Kennedy, “Artwork to Display, Or to Enjoy with Eggs,” The New York Times (3 July 2009): n.p.
[9] Cathrin Schaer, “Berlin, With Few Walls,” The New York Times (15 October 2009): D6.
Images
(1) Elmgreen and Dragset, When Privacy Has to Be Held in Public (2008).
(2) Elmgreen and Dragset, Traces of a Never Existing History / Powerless Structures (2001).
(3) The transformed water pumping station in Berlin.
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