Art without Museums, Museums without Art

With the ranks of closed museums during the Corona pandemic, the idea of a digital exhibition took on concrete form, and ideas about digital exhibitions gained a very particular relevance. If people can’t go to the museums, the museums must come to the people. Naturally, this not only applies to art but almost the entire spectrum of social life, which is increasingly taking place virtually and is transported into our homes via delivery services. The museum of the future appears as a digital museum. Does this ultimately signal the long-feared downfall of exhibition venues for contemporary art, indeed of museums per se? Or are they being compelled to take on new functions of representation and communication?

Two Surrealist art exhibitions that have long since become legendary are testament to this: At the “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” (1938) in Paris, 1,200 sacks of coal hung from the ceiling, the content of which fluttered down gently onto the visitors while the works by the exhibiting artists in the darkened space could only be viewed with torches. For the New York exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism” (1942), meanwhile, Duchamp distributed partitions throughout the space for the paintings and wove a 2.5-kilometer-long white rope into a giant spider’s web, which hampered movement around the exhibition and people’s views of the works considerably.

The normative ideas of exhibitions are revealed

Duchamp’s interest in the notion of an exhibition was made up of three elements: the significance of the individual artwork, the combination of works by different artists, and the notion of institutional representation and framing. In light of this, one of Duchamp’s works that represents a mobile museum, so to speak, is particularly relevant for my purposes: It is the “Box in a Valise” (the full title is “De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy / La Boîte-en-valise”), created between 1935 and 1941 and made of 2D and 3D miniatures of the artist’s own pieces. What brings all these strategies together is a penetration into the realm of the art institution that exposes and shifts the normative preconceptions of appropriate presentation and aesthetic experiences. A second idea also related to Duchamp’s questioning of the significance and representation of art is André Malraux’s idea of the “Imaginary Museum”, created between 1948 and 1952. The Imaginary Museum (“of World Sculpture”, to give it its full title) is a forerunner of the online catalogue many museums now provide of their own collections.

The exhibition without works by Yves Klein at Parisian Galerie Iris Clert in 1958 is, according to the art historian Nuit Banai, the most important work of his career. “Where art is concerned,” she argues, “the audience did not have the historical distance to recognize that Klein was contributing to the development of artistic forms such as the happening, body art, minimalism and earth art – forms that would become popular over the following ten years and which place the focus firmly on the human body in the space.” As the name of the work “Le Vide” (French for “the void”) suggests, the small space of the gallery was empty: whitewashed walls, an empty glass case and a white curtain without a single painting by the artist, who was famous for his monochrome works.

Yves Klein turned an empty gallery into an art spectacle

Nevertheless, it was precisely due to and above all through the spectacular staging – admission either with an invitation or upon payment, limited entry for a maximum of ten visitors at any one time, tight security on the door, and not forgetting the presence of the artist himself – that the exhibition was still relatively well-attended, at least by today’s standards. Klein’s investigation of the exhibition space, its impact on the exhibited works, and the significance of the producers present is of fundamental importance in art history. Further artistic examination of the gallery space was all the rage during the 1960s. In 1960, the object artist and cofounder of Nouveau Réalisme Arman, not only exhibited in the same gallery as Yves Klein had previously, but also made direct reference to Klein’s void, whereby he presented the gallery full to the ceiling with garbage (broken bicycles, empty beer bottles, water pipes, old records, etc.), making it virtually inaccessible. Even the title Arman chose for the work “Le Plein” (translated as “Full Up”) is like an aesthetic response to Yves Klein’s void. The foundation of Nouveau Réalisme likewise came about in 1960, and the group of artists to which Yves Klein also belonged subsequently dedicated itself to the transformation of unsightly waste into pleasing art.

The cognitive paradox of accentuation through concealment or diversion is a defining element of the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. In 1969 they wrapped up the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, naming the work “Wrapped”. According to the author and artist Brian O’Doherty, with this work the artist couple were reflecting on the crisis of an institution that was becoming ever more like a business. If, therefore, the building itself becomes the work of art and reveals its inner workings, then it’s not a far cry from a digital takeover, even if the intervening period has actually been used for the construction of spectacular museum buildings in many places, starting with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which began hosting exhibitions in 1997.

The gallery space loses its neutrality

In time lapse the genealogy of showing art could be broken down into the following steps: church, museum, exhibition, architecture, computer. The significance of the white, empty gallery space for the art exhibited there was first determined by Brian O’Doherty with his essay “Inside the White Cube” (1976-81), which appeared in several parts in the magazine Artforum. In it, he asserted that this ideal space dominated over art and was actually the true accomplishment of Modernism. This was preceded, he claims, by the salons of the 19th century, which placed the image at the fore. Set in striking frames, the paintings covered the entire wall, whereby each single one was perceived as an independent unit. With the onset of Postmodernism, the gallery space begins to lose its neutrality.

Many years after O’Doherty, this space for exhibitions still remains, and it has provided for many more shifts in perspective on the part of both the artists and the makers of exhibitions. “Stillness, emptiness, silence: In the overabundance of today’s image society, the pause, the gap – the nothing between the things – gains in importance.[...] Faced with a reality that is becoming ever less tangible in its complexity, this skepticism is expressed in strategies of refusal as well as in the negation of representation.” This assessment by curator Martina Weinhart from the year 2006 is intended not to criticize the functional system of art as such, but rather to trace the path on which art apparently increasingly delegates its own observations to the exhibition space and thus fills it with as little material as possible.

One of the works in this group exhibition that displays the least is “Zeigen” (engl. “Showing”) by Karin Sander. The work made up of works by other artists, who have described their own works only in words, and can be heard by the observer by means of an audioguide corresponding to the relevant label displayed on the wall. In 2016, Maria Eichhorn paraphrased the above-mentioned work by Robert Barry. For her exhibition at London’s Chisenhale Gallery, Eichhorn distributed the budget provided for production among the workforce of the exhibition hall so that they could stay away from the work and do nothing at all for the exhibition hall, as per the artist’s instructions, without losing any money for the entire duration of the exhibition, set out in its title of “5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours”. The description explains more: Telephone calls are not being answered, incoming emails are being deleted, except for those going to an extra account, which will only be checked once a week.