Page 53 - Studio International - May June 1975

Considering the great difference between, for example, the institution of Raymonde Moulin in 1968 asks the crucial
museum and say, church or country house it is surprising how little public question, a question that perhaps was implicit in
response to paintings seems to vary from one to the other. The attempt to bring certain avant-garde art movements of the
out art and life together is as likely to kill off that bit of life as it is to vitalize the twentieth century, and in the art programme of
art, as many experiments have shown. the young Russian revolutionaries, but was never
The proposal of Leering and his colleagues therefore in 'Museum' cannot in posed so boldly: 'Do we want everyone to have
any fundamental way fuse life and art, it only brings arbitrarily selected activities access to culture or must culture be destroyed ?'
into the museum at the risk of making symbolic objects of them. All the same She answers her own question by citing Gaetan
one cannot cease to attempt to relate the art in the museum to what is happening Picon: 'To reproach the houses of culture with
outside and to what was happening cutside and to what was happening in the not having reached the non-public is to admit
time and place of its origins. If this has to a great degree to be arbitrary it can the importance of those values which should not
be done with conviction and be helpful. A connection that is made, whether be communicated at all. To consider these values
partial or even mistaken, may lead a person to think and feel for himself where bourgeois and to suppose that they will cease to
previously he had paid no attention at all. It is also the case that some artists have be bourgeois when universality of access comes
made works or carried out activities that are simply incompatible with the to coincide with universality of rights is
museum as an institution. If these are in the tradition of the art which is found contradictory.'
in museums then there must be some way of representing the fact of them there — Linda Nochlin
if not, then the museum may ignore them without in any way implying their
inferiority, or anything against them at all, and other institutions should be
created if they need them.
Although 6 is a natural outcome of a view commonly held on the left and right,
I believe it can in itself be dismissed as a form of genocide and such an attitude
would certainly not stop at art or museums. All the same it is true, of course, that,.
in so far as works of art express or objectify human views, those that remain vital
will be bound to contradict the views of those in power at the moment or those
who hope to be in power. A Royal Academician is therefore as contentious and
as likely to be censored as a radical. •

Preserving Modern Art

Garry Thomson

Historians of the future may well
record that there was a brief
glittering period starting in the
mid-twentieth century with the
introduction of fluorescent lamps
for artificial lighting and glass
curtain-walling for making
buildings transparent. During that
time electricians and architects
vied with each other to pour ever
more light into their buildings.
Then, after about a quarter of a
century - about now in fact - the era
of cheap energy ended. It was no
longer economically possible to
sustain unnecessarily high
illumination levels nor to pump
solar heat out of buildings which
had become like greenhouses.
However throughout this period
artists very properly kept on painting
pictures, the kind of pictures we are now
calling modern art. But often they too
worked in brilliantly lit studios and
required for the exhibition of their
creations an ambience almost at the
dazzle level (Fig I). In certain cases
crucial detail could only be discerned at
high illuminance (Fig 2), and others
required spotlights, to emphasize relief Bridget Riley Fall
(Fig 3). 2 Ad Reinhardt Abstract Painting
To use an anthropomorphic term, 3 Gunther Uecker White Field
there is a certain egoism apparent in
many modern paintings which was 4 Beuys Filz-Fettplastik
unknown before the twentieth century.
Such paintings demand the spotlight
arranged just so, in terms which would But perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps it say. All great works of art, old or new,
have been unthinkable in Renaissance is the curators who, discovering new rise above, even resist, attempts at stage
times, even to artists as bombastic as lighting techniques, have turned these lighting. They stand self-sufficient and
Benvenuto Cellini. luxuries into necessities. It is difficult to only require that we should be able to

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