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?