Page 12 - Studio International - September 1972

The artist and will treat art in a different way. a response to a much more fundamental
For a long time the works which have external change. With the 197os the
the museum entered museums have been works to be looked twenty-first century is beginning (perhaps
at and venerated—but not touched. These works World War II was only an atonement for
entered the museum when they had already World War I). Europe is no longer England or
lost all their provocativeness and power to France—it is the European Economic
arouse questionings, when they had become Community. The US instead of continuing to
accepted, so that there was nothing else to do be Guardian of the Free World is losing its
but look at them (so long as they retained their first war (does anybody doubt that the US has
powers of stimulation they were rejected by the lost in Vietnam ?) and the dollar is beginning
museums). But this was not only because the to totter. Latin America is beginning its process
painters were painting to be seen—an almost of liberation. The middle class is becoming
voyeurist attitude. These works demanded a disorientated. The use of drugs is spreading.
passive spectator, and they coincided with a Women are in revolt. The environment is
period of social stability. crying out to man for help, as the world
All the museums recruited people to copy becomes toxified and incapacitated by the
venerated works. All artists had to go and learn products of our civilization. And the museum
Feudal ideology rescued people whom the their trade in the Louvre—that prison which is making a great and radical leap from the
artist portrayed and who, in life, were on show smothered creativeness. How many of them nineteenth into the twenty-first century.
in castles, palaces and churches; bourgeois must have succumbed while copying Titian or The artist is no longer the king's fool (or the
ideology, through museums, rescues the the Mona Lisa ? feudal noble's or the middle class's) and has
portraits. The Louvre (the first museum) comes become a 'cultural persuader' (Gramsci)—an
alive by exhibiting portraits of the dead (people II agitator. He is no longer concerned to produce
who no longer hold power). But exhibiting Just as language changes and is enriched with work for museums (markets), but for society
dead people is an abdication of responsibility. the passage of time, museums have also and within society. The very foundations of
In the feudal world there was a link between changed, although rather out of step with art are being questioned.
the work of the artist and society, for painting everything else. Until less than thirty years ago Easel-painting is ceasing to rule the roost,
all-powerful lords was a sort of bond between they remained immune to the change of and the different types of art are bursting their
art and society. In the (bourgeois) museums, direction in art and the altered function of the bonds. A new language, a synthesis of other
on the other hand, there is no bond: art splits artist. In 15o years of operation (if that is the languages, is validating the use of all techniques
away from society. Thus our theme 'the artist right word !) the museum has increasingly all materials, all combinations (whether random
and the museum' is very closely related to 'the lagged behind the evolution, or revolution, of or planned) of all expressive systems.
artist and society'. The museum was the death the rest of the world—and particularly behind Environment, happening, play-art, funk art,
of the artist as a creative being and the the work being done by artists. multiple art (where the original is hardly even
resurrection of that eternal corpse, the work of Up to now there have been, on the one hand, a prototype); the new language links itself to
art as a document (a document of the history of the academies and écoles des beaux arts, on the the everyday world by its incorporation of banal
painting) cut off from society. The history of other the ateliers; beyond them were the salons elements of reality. What is happening in the
art is 'born' in museums, for the birth of —the refuge of living painting, rejected painting, museums ? How can a happening, or a work
museums produces a double dissociation: that painting which lacked official approval because by a conceptual artist be preserved ? These
of art from society on the one hand, and that of it had not yet become emasculated—and this questions are a snare and delusion, because the
art history from social history on the other. side of them was the museum. But the latter problem is no longer preservation (that would
Now it is a matter of restoring unity. Today's was bound to become an absurdity. Today's be the job of a memory-museum), but
museums should restore to the artist the museum must synthetize and adapt all these production.
plenitude of his potential at a time when functions.
technology demands of the artist knowledge But which way should it orientate itself ? III
and calculation which he cannot, by himself, Towards the artist, or towards the public ? The new museum (the principal European
provide. Taking the public to the artist (the exclusive manifestations of which are the Moderna
preoccupation of the traditional museum) has Museet, the ARC and the Stedelijk) is the
I made the museum into a mausoleum. Bringing artist's place of work. It is a laboratory where a
Though the museum is a nineteenth-century the painter to the public is something else new theory of art is being tried out, a
institution, its contents correspond to those of altogether; that is the new course to adopt. laboratory where artists and public process
an ecclesiastical institution and to the philosophy Something like thirty years ago, in the US world news—coming in by teletype, for
behind it: a world divided between the sacred (a country without a long artistic tradition to example—and translate it into artistic language
and the profane. On the one side was the church weigh it down), the static museum became in accordance with new museo-graphic
(the museum), the repository of the sacred; on dynamic. It began to live. The unchanging criteria. It will be a meeting-point between the
the other was Life. In the church were the display of permanent collections gave way to a artist and his observer (who may be another
Vicars of God, and in the museum were the systematic policy of mounting exhibitions artist), between the museum and the artists,
Keepers —a copy of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. devoted to modern movements and between the museum and society. This is
Whatever crossed the threshold of a church or retrospectives of living artists. The museums of perhaps the only way in which a school of art
museum was virtually sacralized, whether it modern art were born. But museum officials may be fertile. For the museum now is also a
was men and their deeds or artists and their (and art, and society) remain fettered by the school; not, as formerly, a school which offers
paintings. The artist who remained outside was stultifying concept of separate types of art models for imitation, but an open workshop.
automatically excommunicated from art. (painting, sculpture, etc.). Plus ça change, plus Here is an example to prove it. Both the École
Like the Church the museum thought itself c'est la même chose. de Paris and the Bauhaus fell victim to Nazi
eternal and immune to temporal things. But, as Recently, since 1960, museums have fallen barbarism, but the former was reborn
art reclaims its temporality and has more to do into a crisis. And this, let me say, has not been afterwards, whereas the latter was not. Why ?
with social and everyday things, the museum the result of an internal evolution, but rather Paris in some way anticipated the museum/open

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