CONSTRUCTING THE SPECTACLE OF CULTURE IN MUSEUMS

Abstract

So one of the first shows I did in the Bronx, in the late eighties, was called Rooms With a View: The Struggle Between Cultural Content and the Context of Art. I took three rooms; one room looked like a contemporary gallery, the white cube; one I redesigned to look like a small ethnographic museum, not very well appointed; the third I made to look like a turn-of-the-century salon space. I asked thirty artists to be a part of my experiment. All thirty had work in the white cube, half had work in the ethnographic space, and half had work in the turn-of-the-century space. I chose the work according to how it might look in those spaces. Many artists at that time were making work that seemed to fit in an ethnographic museum, because they were working on Third World cultural idioms. There were other artists who were working more with the history of Western art in their work. When I placed the work in the ethnographic space, I would have visiting curators say with surprise, “Oh, you have a collection of primitive art.” And I had to tell one curator, “No, Valerie, that work you’re staring at was in your gallery a month ago.” The environment really changed the work; the labels just had the materials, not the names, because in most ethnographic museumsIvan can bear me out or jump on me for saying this-the labels don’t have any names because the works were collected at a time when the names of the people who made the objects were not important. The labels just gave the materials and things like “Found, Williamsburg section, Brooklyn, late 20th century.” Studentswould walk up to the barrier around the installation by Linda Peer-and the barrier of course is mine, it’s the museum’s presence on the artwork-go up to the label, read it, look at the object, and think they knew what they were looking at, when actually they knew very little. I didn’t say anything false, but they really had a totally different view of what that object was about. The works became exotic, they looked like something made by someone you could never know; the works in many instances were dehumanized because of the way they were installed. In the turn-of-the-century space, the works looked like they had a certain authority that the works didn’t have in the white cube. The white cube also had a way of affecting you: it looked cold, it looked sort of scientific.