Touchy Subjects

Admittedly, I often succumb to the desire to avoid one particular, emotive issue in history: the Holocaust. To justify my complex, I scapegoat my high school history teacher, who showed a class of petrified fourteen-year-olds the actual footage of Allied Forces searching concentration camps immediately after World War II. (In all honesty, a part of my adult self still yearns to make the case that I can remember those scenes, which I saw over a decade ago, as vividly as if I saw them yesterday and feel the same queasiness at merely the memory!) Alas, my nonsensical evasiveness has left evidence in its wake—such as, the deliberate neglect to read Elie Wiesel’s Night in undergrad, the decision to opt out of a visit to the concentration camp in Erfurt with other students in Germany, and the cognizant setting of my MA thesis in the nineteenth-century Kaiserreich. In a sense, my difficulty to engage with Holocaust history because of its distressing content mirrors the problems that artists as well as museums like the Holocaust Memorial Museum confront in their attempt to visually portray the tender subject.

In 2006, there was one Holocaust monument I managed to see: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (“Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe”). Crafted by US architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial opened only a year and a half earlier in central Berlin, and while the name of the monument is straightforward, the interpretation of its aesthetics proves a bit more complicated. The tribute features roughly five-acres of stone slabs, diversely sized and shaped, with enough space to allow passages but without the concern for a starting or stopping point. President of the German Parliament, Wolfgang Theirse, described the work as “a constructed symbol for the incomprehensibility of the crime.” On the other hand, opponents of the Denkmal, such as my good friend (a Jew whose relatives were displaced or killed during the Holocaust) with me at the time of my visit, flared up over the lack of religious symbology and the abstract representation of the event. I remember my friend exclaiming, “I at least expected a monument that made me think about the Holocaust!” But, is there a sufficient way to memorialize or represent a moment that surpasses intellectual capacity? In the last sixty years, printed scholarship has tried to grasp the topic; is it not time for visual scholarship to do the same? Further, why do visual images often incite the public on a grander scale than texts? My chief question regarding the monument is this: how was someone like me, quite the hypersensitive about the Holocaust yet learned in contemporary aesthetics, able to bear visiting this monument with curiously little poignant response? Does that make the work a failure in its resonance or success in its provocation, which unavoidably generates discussion about and engagement with the monument and thus the Holocaust? (As a matter of fact, we, along with one other American and four Europeans, heatedly discussed the Denkmal for the next couple of hours.)

Ironically, a German, James Ingo Freed, built the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States. In explanation of his design, he said, “The intent of the building is to be a resonator of your own imagery, of your own memory.” The architecture of the museum, like the Berlin monument, is the epitome of abstraction, meant to leave the visitor, who may come from any area of the world, space to pull from his or her own cultural encyclopedia for an individualized understanding. Freed, perhaps contrary to Eisenman, purposely fashioned the architecture to “take you in its grip.” And if the architectural interpretation of the Holocaust serves as such a great stimulus, then what types of problems do curators of the museum’s collections and exhibitions encounter? As the decision-makers about display, organization, and content (specifically the inclusion or exclusion of material), curators in memorial-style museums seem likely to find themselves caught in a Catch-22 due to the sheer volume of relics, the delicacy of the topic, and the incapacity to articulate or encapsulate the Holocaust to the satisfaction of survivors, visitors, or even their own aspirations. Then again, curators assert that exhibitions are not meant to draw a specific conclusion but rather guide audiences through aesthetic sources to let them extract their own, educated conclusions. Perhaps for an experience that defies reason and, therefore, inference, the museum setting becomes the perfect site.

Finding the Middle Ground

Last week in the New York Times, Michael

Kimmelman proffered “Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks,” a timely article for the pending seminar on the significance of technological innovations for museum operations.  Kimmelman reports that researchers from the Glasgow School of Art intend to visit Mount Rushmore in April 2010 in order to create laser scans and computer models of the site.  The models will be far from ordinary, as they are meticulous, three-dimensional copies that come within a fraction of a millimeter of accurately depicting the original. Far surpassing the precision of photography and film, this technology plays up both nostalgias and forecasts; the design has the ability to recreate images of earlier environments or project developments in urban planning.  In essence, the Scots provide cultural keepers a staggeringly literal, nearly holistic version of entire cities—conserved and reinstated—in virtual realities.  What will technology, such as the kind proposed by the Glasgow team, mean to institutions like the National Building Museum or the Natural History Museum?

In the midst of the article, however, a warning flag appeared.  Kimmelman included a quote from one of the associated architects, Douglas Pritchard, which declared, “Technology doesn’t lie.” In a postmodern world where scholars mull over notions like the hyper-real, the validity of the photographic image, and the ability to capture anything “original,” how did technology manage to escape dissection and dissolution? 

On the opposite end of the discourse is the director of “La Caixa” Foundation Science Museum (Barcelona), Jorge Wagensberg.  Wagensberg champions the “real” objects and cautions against the overuse of technology, which he says potentially jeopardizes a visitor’s trust (a familiar phrase) and problematizes the research of an institution.  He further rationalizes that “there is also the matter of respect for the visitor, who should not have to be constantly asking whether what he is looking at is real or not.”  Essentially, Wagensberg redistributes the question “is it art,” pervasive in the studies of art in- and outside of museums or galleries, to “is that real” for the debates on technology.  Also notable, “La Caixa,” as punctiliously noted by Wagensberg, is a science museum, not a science centre.  He explains the difference between the two institutions: the museum is “a place with static objects,” while the centre is “a museum of phenomena.”  Pause.  Can objects—science or art or anything else creative—found in museums not also be considered phenomena?  Not to mention, his appalling label “static” essentially ousts a great deal of contemporary works like performance art, which seems far from “static.”

Nearly the entirety of the cultural network is responding to the ubiquity of technology: organizations like DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials); artists, such as Tony Oursler (check out his really interesting, borderline disturbing work Moving Images); and scholars, for example Lisa Gjedde and Bruno Ingemann (Researching Experiences: Exploring Processual and Experimental Methods in Cultural Analysis) as well as Phyllis Hecht (The Digital Museum).  Undoubtedly, traditional museums will also take steps to remain relevant in today’s technological environment. What progressive moves will be made, however, remains to be seen, but hopefully these moves will lead the museum to a middle ground, one between the ideas of Pritchard and Wagensberg!

The Aesthetic Spread

On Sunday, New York City welcomed the third installment of the three-week long performance art spectacle Performa, a biennial event founded in 2005 by Roselee Goldberg.  Performa 2009 encompasses 130 projects by 170 artists and uses over 75 urban venues—including traditional spaces like galleries and museums as well as non-traditional spaces like offices and nightclubs. Performa, according to Goldberg, serves to decelerate the viewing pace to let audiences “spend more time with an artist’s work.”  By imbuing the art with temporality, Goldberg creates a sense of immediacy that stamps out the habitual—perhaps disadvantageous—idea of “coming back later” to re-review the art.  The acme of Performa is that the festival draws together a number of New York institutions, which transmits community involvement and concern as well as recharges city spaces with creativities.

In the same vein, the museum appears to have also felt the call of the city.  Taking a page from Adam Gopnick, Chus Martinez, chief curator for MACBA, identifies the current outward drive as “the museum as missionary.”  Museums mean to address the issues of society—thus becoming socially relevant—by employing objects alongside “ideas, questions, and activities.”  Correspondingly, Richard Koshalek, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, maintains that art traverses institutional walls to become purposeful in the external milieu. The director argues that the Hirshhorn needs to “reflect the reality of contemporary art and culture” and hopes to shape a bipartite organization: one that speaks to both its urban and cosmopolitan scenes. Koshalek, like Goldberg, advocates the plugging of unoccupied city spaces with art and involving an assortment of local institutions to form a sort of creative alliance that draws audiences to the arts.   Furthermore, he preaches aesthetic independence, regardless of how provoking in nature, and aims to position his institution virtually in the shadow of the artist.  In effect, the artistry becomes the primary communal as well as the global outreach. I wonder: is it possible to muffle an institution that has survived the ebb and flow of two centuries? 

As another case in point, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore launched in 1989 as a roving institution, depositing temporary exhibitions in various spaces and collaborating with local organizations.  As Koshalek hopes for the Hirshhorn, the Contemporary Museum successfully negotiated local and international matters, melding the two in the production of site-specific art.  However, ten years later, the Contemporary Museum set aside its peripatetic ways and put down roots in the Mount Vernon district.  Their choice was calculated to “consolidate a core audience for its programming….” While they offer exhibitions like FAX (September 12 – December 20, 2009) that simulate the instance of a museum without walls and a history of an art that passed through—or broke down—walls (mail art), the institution nevertheless has solid, planted walls. Again, I wonder: do people have an innate need to be stable and settled as well as to demarcate what is inside and what is outside?  Do we, in turn, instill the same drive in our institutions, our identity markers?