Page 13 - Studio International - September 1972

school; the Bauhaus was in the tradition of the IV The museum fulfils a triple cultural role:
academic museum. In Paris nobody was The traditional museum was the tour-museum diffusion, education and experiment.
anybody's master, so all could be masters. The (which excluded the artist). If 'the medium is Diffusion, via the mass media (TV in
Bauhaus, on the other hand, was like an the message', the museum was a tour. For this particular; experience of the telemuseum is
academic cloister; its masters had to be the reason Moles proposed that museums should remarkably auspicious).
best. The climate of Paris, with its exhibitions transform themselves into great labyrinths, at Education, by means of advice and
and its spectacles, encouraged creativity as a the conclusion of a visit to which the inter-museum exchange.
way of participating in the life of the city. The observer would end up with an experience of In the laboratory-museum there will be
climate of the Bauhaus frustrated its visual sensibility, and perhaps tactile and fewer keepers and attendants, but more
pupil-creators, because it presented them with olfactory sensibility as well. This is a seductive teachers. The present attendant/security-man
the image of a master who could not be idea, but nonetheless a treacherous one; it turns will become adviser to the public and to the
rivalled, to whom one had to submit; in short it the museum into a single, stabilized work of art, artists. The age of the artist dying of hunger is
encouraged the critical faculty. Closed school, at a time when the museum is in the process of over and that of the artist of the technological
open school; closed museum, open museum; turning itself into a structure which makes any era has begun. The attendant/adviser will have
they were almost mutually exclusive choices. sort of work of art possible. to be able to tell him how to use the equipment
The fertile, open museum still has to solve The architecture of the tour-museum, that museums have begun to put at the artist's
the problem of what sort of physical envelope which goes back to the Renaissance, no longer disposal. The keeper/teacher will become
it requires. It should not only produce and fits the purpose of the open museum. What we promoter, programmer, realizer.
co-ordinate projects which artists cannot need now are large rooms or hangars, open But interchange between museums is part
individually bring to fruition, it should also spaces endowed with flexible and interchangeable of their function. People do not now have the
take them into the streets—throughout the electronic and mechanical equipment, capable money to buy works by Goya or Picasso. The
streets and in all media, in a process of of meeting all the demands of the creative museum, on the other hand, does; in addition
geographical and social decentralization. Here imagination—something like the set of a it can circulate works—bringing in the ones it
a new problem arises : art in the streets can television studio. An attempt at museum could not buy from other museums. This is not
only be effective so long as it does not become an architecture to meet these conditions has been a mere bourgeois procedure, it is the only way
accepted part of the background, like the urban undertaken in Montevideo, where the Museo open to us to secularize and desacralize.
scenery it sets out to modify. If this happens it National de Artes Plásticas (National Museum Experimentation, providing the artist with
becomes banal and is integrated with, and of Plastic Arts) has been remodelled in useful information and, above all, co-ordinating
swallowed up by, its surroundings. However collaboration with the Argentine artist and and assisting with investigations into the
this decentralization must be (and remain) open architect Clorindo Testa. Much will be possible language of art. The museum as a framework.
to collect and assimilate the experience of the in this museum. It matters little if some of the How should the museum conduct itself
streets. For example, in Montevideo a few projects that come to fruition there turn out to vis-a-vis the public ? Should it lower the level
months ago a political party mounted a be definitive and have to be 'preserved'. of its demands so as to please it (and so achieve
propaganda campaign consisting of a high level of involvement) or raise it, so that
predominantly visual material to which the V the public may learn ? Is the good opinion of the
whole city served as a backdrop. One must The memory-museum, in its wide corridors, masses enough, or should the museum act as
recognize this as part of the dialectic of the irrevocably and irreversibly fixes artists' works publisher, as it were, taking responsibility for
decentralization of art. in compartments. As if in a cemetery, each what it shows. Let there be talk and discussion
Famous and by no means reactionary critics artist has his own personal and non-transferable by all means, but no deprivation of the power
not only prophesied an imaginary museum niche. The museum is like death. of decision.
(the cloister again), they believed it would be Its function is a mnemonic one, and up to Thus the museum of today—a transitional
viable. They call upon Lenin, Trotsky and thirty years ago the museum was purely a museum, as we have already pointed out—has
Mao to defend them from the museum that memory-museum. Now it is being required to a multiple function in relation to the artist
would be unimaginable. But they have no record. It is no longer a question of memory as (archive-museum, workshop, school, laboratory,
reason for alarm. Today we are almost in a new an archive, but of memory as an aid to avoiding salon, means of communication with society)
stage of transition. Ultimately the hybrid cross repetition of experience of the past. The and in relation to society (documentary
between the memory-museum and the open revolutionary who wants to paint revolutionary memory-bank, link with the artist). But in
museum of today will spark off two radically paintings must remember that there is a century relation to both artist and society it must play a
different entities. On the one hand there will of modern art (which museums of modern art generative and liberating role. It must awaken
be the museum-museum, a social institution have let us see, these last thirty years) behind everyone to artistic experience—not just those
which needs a physical site, which will become the revolutionary label. Anyone wanting to be who feel a vocation for art. Hence it must make
the great depository of art-historical works and a painter, even a revolutionary painter, cannot artistic production something accessible to
which will also include contemporary works. ignore this and start with a tabula rasa. everybody in common, a social work and not
The day will come when the work of both In its capacity of communal memory the just something for an elite. Over and above this
Mr Motherwell and Nemesio Antúnez can be museum played a valuable role : it preserved the museum's task must be to be receptive to
found in the Louvre, the Uffizi or the documents —and visual documents usually spontaneous and popular artistic work.
Metropolitan. On the other hand, and in provide a more penetrating and revealing Looking ahead, the artist as chosen
contrast (though not necessarily in opposition), synthesis than most—which, by classifying art individual, omnipotent and inconstant, will no
the open museum will flourish—a living social history, are necessary to social history. When longer exist. We shall all be artists. The
organism, a laboratory of cultural education. the museum assumes a more active role this museum—echoing strong-box, autocratic,
By offering the double experience of single function is not enough. The Mona Lisa all-powerful and arbitrary—will no longer
artist-observer, by seeking out people to come with beard and moustache is an historical exist. Every corner of the world will be able to
and work in it, instead of only offering the document. But by itself it testifies only to be a museum, and then there will be no more
artist alone the chance of working and Duchamp's protest. Behind this there was at museums but community stimulus-centres.
contacting his public, it will presage a renewal the time seventy years of evolution of colour, ANGEL KALENBERG
of aesthetic life. Art will change, and so will begun by the Impressionists and consolidated
the artist. by the Fauves. (Translated from the Spanish by John Wheelwright)

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