Modernism as Institution: On the Establishment of an Aesthetic and Historiographic Paradigm

Hans Hayden,Stockholm University, Se

doi:10.16993/bar

Abstract

Anyone who studies the history of modern art—in art museums, in the classroom, in art historical handbooks or specialist surveys—will soon be aware of a certain recurrent pattern governing the selection of objects and forming a certain type of narrative where the history of modern art is presented as a variety of different -isms that dissolve into each other in the coherent sequence that constitutes the history of modern art as modernism. But why is this pattern so similar in all different places and contexts? Is it possible to distinguish between the history of modern art and the history of modernism? And if so, when, where and how did modernism become synonymous with art of the modern era? With a dual perspective—regarding art as well as the discursive perception of art— Modernism as an Institution attempts to answer these questions by studying the frameworks for the institutional establishment, as well as the historiography, of modern art.

Highlights

The German artist Thomas Struth has established himself in the art world with a cycle of large-format color photographs depicting visitors in famous museums throughout the world
As I walked through the collections, where each room contained key works, I felt like I was moving through the history of art, as though my own physical movement through the halls corresponded with reading a handbook on 20th century art or taking art history lectures at the university
If one were to write a chronicle of the visual arts between 1850 and 1950 from a purely historical perspective, without any aesthetic considerations, the picture would be radically different from those conveyed in the vast majority of the exhibitions, textbooks and special studies

Summary

Introduction

The German artist Thomas Struth has established himself in the art world with a cycle of large-format color photographs depicting visitors in famous museums throughout the world These socalled ‘Museum Photographs’ show in a seemingly unmediated (albeit aesthetically extremely conscious) way people viewing artwork in different rooms. As I walked through the collections, where each room contained key works, I felt like I was moving through the history of art, as though my own physical movement through the halls corresponded with reading a handbook on 20th century art or taking art history lectures at the university It was probably the immensely high level of the collection that made me, a visitor from one of the semi-p eripheries of Northern Europe, estranged of an otherwise familiar situation— and made me recognize the close relation between display and narrative. The problem of such a task was to find a way to recognize the duality of the word historiography—to write history and to write about history-writing—in a way similar to how Thomas Struth’s photographs make it possible both to contemplate art and study the contemplation of art

Introduction xv

PART I THE REGIME OF AUTHENTICITY

A Space of Transformations

15. Two extremes may be observed in this regard

PART II THE NORMALISATION OF THE

Findings

71. See documenta 4