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February 16, 2012
Flakphoto indicates how the art gallery is being bypassed in a digital world,. The art gallery is the gatekeeper to the visual arts --excluding architecture: it defined who could enter the canon, what the canon was, and how to talk about the canon and to evaluate a picture. It does so in the name of defining and protecting the national heritage. The key terms in the traditional notion of ”museum” are:
· the white cube: the elimination of context in terms of architecture and space as well as of institutional conditions
· cultural consensus: a broad consensus about hierarchies and values defined and perpetuated by the museum
· timelessness: the claim to represent these values without being affected by any changes in the world outside, without having to reconsider the criteria that lead their decisions.
The art gallery's collections mean that it is the home and guardian of our cultural memory. In many ways the gallery is a museum, as it protects a fossilized fixed historical culture through the carefully rehearsed ideological script of masterpiece and genius by the art historical curators.
As a result, much of the art that took place was not curated or archived--a lot of photography or lens-based media, for instance--- as it was excluded from the gallery or museum that acted as cultural gatekeeper, judge and executioner. The visitors to the art gallery/museum are not prompted to seek out books or more information on artists they never encounter in the art gallery. So this institution, now increasingly corporatized, fails in its responsibility for the continuous development and sustenance of a lively artistic community.
We can talk in terms of “after modernism”. This refers to both the modern framing of the museum-as-institution that has, following the founding by Alfred Barr of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 1920s and its as a chronologically contextualized progression of art styles and the way the modernist framing has ossified into a straitjacket. This framing can be engaged with and it is one which we can operate against without reducing this to the postmodernist framework of irony and reflexivity.
The avant-garde during the age of modernism intended the abolition of autonomous art, by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life. This has not occurred. We got pulp fiction and commodity aesthetics instead. What is needed is finding new ways of working within the museum, to broadening the public's relationship with the museum, to better collaboration with artists and with the museum's publics and to reassessing the way in which museums deal with contemporary art and contemporary issues.
Given the selectivity of the modernist museum's tradition that is based on the notion of the artist-genius and the cult of art distilled as style, we need to reframe the art gallery or museum by thinking in terms of museums after modernism in a postmodern world that celebrates difference and diversity, pastiche and forgetful recycling. The museum or gallery after modernism is a more opened space, one of conversation, engagement and performance across a wide range of disciplines and practices. Within this opened space the artist works on a project that often has an educational value.
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Nicely put Gary, I wonder if Australian Museums/Galleries are prepared to open up the discourse into an online environment, something that speaking from my limited technical knowledge of the web should not be THAT difficult to achieve, hell I'd volunteer to be an online Moderator, if such as space was created.