The post picks up on the fifth part of Rick's interview with Derek Allen over at Artrift.In this part of the interview Rick picks up on an important idea in The Voices of Silence, the idea of the ‘Museum without Walls’. In the interview Derek makes three points.
1. Much of what we regard as art cannot physically be moved into museums even if we wanted to eg, the Sistine Chapel, aboriginal desert paintings or the rock paintings at Cave of Lascaux. It is not longer art as Greek and Roman art plus Western art since the Renaissance. It is now the art of all cultures and all times. So the ‘musée imaginaire’ is an imaginary one that contains all the works we regard as works of art no matter where they might be.
Thus is born the democratic museum or art gallery Malraux effectively liberates artworks from the stuffy setting of the established white-walled gallery that functions as a place of reverence.
2. Our ‘musée imaginaire’ is made up of those works that are important to us--- – works that we respond to, admire, and love. This implies that a colonial painting hanging a regional art museum does not necessarily mean it belongs in our ‘musée imaginaire’ – because we may be indifferent to it, as we often are. And secondly, your ‘musée imaginaire’ may differ somewhat from mine, or from someone else’s. This implies that we would now see the art in the art gallery for what it is --a particular cultural construction.
So many of us would include photographs, films, videos and CD-roms into our museums without walls. And we include digital works So a state-of-the art virtual Museum is a reworking of Malraux's musem without a walls. It has radical implications.
3. The phrase 'our museum without walls' does not collapse art into individual opinion or judgement. Derek says that Malraux holds that there are large areas of agreement about what we would all admit to our ‘museums without walls’.
The pathway opened up by Marlraux's museum without walls leads us out of the art institution into the broader visual culture way and so beyond what Adorno called the culturescape----ruins of historical buildings. It also historicizes Adorno's aesthetics with its focus on the social significance of great works of autonomous art standing in opposition to the culture industry and heteronomous art (eg., everything from religious icons to tribal masks, advertising and commercial cinema). Malraux's museum without walls highlights that the categories of aesthetics have been developed in terms of high art and are not that good or useful for analysing, interpreting and evaluating popular art works (eg., a film or cartoon).
Adorno regards autonomy as a precondition for truth in art and made truth the ultimate criterion for the social significance of any world of art. Adorno's reflections on art are pre 'the musem without walls', as they privilege modernist avant garde artworks at the expense of other forms. After Malraux we see that Adorno's reflections on autonomous art works presuppose the art institution and the way that Adorno thinks within this institution. Malraux undermines Adorno's distinction between autonomous and heteronomous art by challenging the tight connection between autonomy, truth and social significance.
Heteronomous art (eg., the popular art of a cartoon in a newspaper) may be truthful and challenge the status quo, and it may be more socially significant than autonomous works. Autonomy need not be a precondition for truth in art.
Nor need truth be the sole critieria for the social significance of art. In Australia the popular series Sea Change on the ABC was socially significant due to the power of public image making. Dallas is even more so. This indicates that there are a variety of reasons for art's social significance.
What is problematic with Malraux's museum without walls is the loosening of aesthetic norms in artworksWe all have hour own. But why are we elevating one kind of art into our museum and not another. On what grounds? Malraux is not convincing at this point----he simply says that there are large areas of agreement about what we would all admit to our ‘museums without walls’. This implies some form of normative historical aesthetics but it is not clear what. Which bits of the culture industry? Which bits of indigenous art? Which bits of the built environment?
What are the standards and critieria being used to select the bits for our museum? Is it popularity? Commercial success? Cultural heritage?
The autonomy of art is no guarantee for truth in Adorno. Actually his concept of autonomy is far more sceptical than usually granted.
Posted by: Torben Sangild on November 8, 2003 04:40 AMWe now live in a museum without walls. I was sitting in a small cafe in Blackheath near Sydney a few years ago and four 65 old (or so) Amercian tourists commented on a CD of Ella Fitzgerald that the cafe proprietor was playing. ' Oh I think its Rosemary Clooney' they said in an accent redolent of all the worst British attempts to imitate Amercian accents I have ever heard on TV. Of course it wasnt Rosemary Clooney but these 65 year olds from somewhere in (some what sort of nearly or sort of just below upper middle class Middle America) could not suppose that an African American jazz singer could 'move them' in their reliving of their youth (as they were doing) on their holiday in exotic Australia! The voice they were hearing just had to be a 'safe' recording artist drawn from deep desires for a 'safe ' world (even safe on holiday) drawn from their own 'musuem without walls.'
The cafe owner originally comes from Linz in Austria, the home of Adolf Hitler. The cafe owner is a gay man proud to be gay, and produces beautiful cakes. When I go to this cafe I still think of Hitler, Germany and the sinister feelings any civilised human being will have for another 1000 years about Linz because of its link to Hitler. The cafe owner goes home to Linz to be with his mother about once a year and closes the cafe for several weeks. - Whenever I go to this cafe (it partly at least) represents to me in my own musueum without walls- nice cakes and coffee but also the general ongoing aesthetic problem of Austria. Austria 70 years or so post Hitler but also a 100 years or so post Great War and all the hellish and terrible problems that have been visited upon European civilisation because of the Great War and Hitler.
The Amercian tourists would probably not be aware of how I fit this cafe into my museum without walls. I remember these tourists because one of them leaned over to me as I was tucking into a breakfast of bacon and eggs and said 'Go easy there'. I am overweight (not grossly but a bit).It is interesting that my relative fatness was interfering with these fussy, finnicky, thin and somewhat elderly Amercian tourists enjoyment of their use of this cafe for their own museum without walls.
Let us allow Malraux to walk with de Gaulle and have his own 'wall of sound] (and wall of video) and whatever else he wants to put into his musuem without walls. I must say this, post 68 and probably not pre 68 French students of art do get to see 'art' on videos and tvs (and now computers) provided by the institution providing them with their education (a fulfilment to some extent of Malraux's idea for tele centres of culture). One teacher, showing one video once with a two to three minute vague gaining of attention - out of the hour long video and twenty minutes of associated talk by the teacher -is certainly the equivalent of Michelangelo or some les well known master drawing a squiggle in the dust for a bored apprentice. An apprentice who later went on to distinguish himself by not distinguishing himself in art history terms (but who hopefully distinguished himself by living well).
Lets no longer pretend that Adorno's vision is any better (it isnt). It might seem so if one is an salaried art teacher at a university just about to fail a Phd or Masters student for daring to write about art without basing it all on a mish mass of neo-Marxist and post Post-marxist theory.
Lets face squarely the things listed in the critique above.
So what if there are no footnoted mentions of whatever was said by Mr Sauer-Thompson to have been left out of Malraux's vision of his idea of a museum without walls. Malraux was thinking of Linz, and cakes and Americans and as far as I am concerned thats just as good as whatever typology of relevance the last 30 years of Anglo-American neo-marxist post Marxist discourse about art has decided 'just has' to be 'dealt with' if an idea is to be taken as 'non-problematic'
Vive De Gaulle!