Short story of two long exhibitions: what happens to the collections of The National Gallery and The Van Abbemuseum

The recent re-installations of two very important European collections of modern and contemporary art, namely The National Gallery in Rome and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, have stirred in me a thought about those two different pulls of the same rope that prevail today in the debate about art exhibitions. Namely: an experiential approach to the collection (in which the work is isolated from its historical and intellectual context in order to favor a contemplative enjoyment of it) and another with a strongly historicist slant (in which, on the contrary, those historical processes behind the production of the works and exhibitions are exalted). But they have also prompted me to question what it means to exhibit a historical collection and what the function of the museum is.

Over the past decade, the cultural proposition of European museums has changed a great deal. Deep cuts in public funding have meant that an increasing number of museums of modern and contemporary art have become dependent on donations and sponsors often from outside the art world. These economic-financial constraints have seen, on the one hand, a strong reaction in the opposite direction and, on the other, a more or less intelligent attempt to adapt. Although they are two radically different realities, both in genesis and context, the two museums hold an important heritage of modern and contemporary art. The Gallery houses the largest collection of contemporary Italian art (with about 18,000 works) and is the only national museum dedicated to modern art. The Van Abbe, a small-town museum, was among the first in Europe to preserve such a collection. The respective directors who came into office, Cristiana Collu in 2015 and Charles Esche in 2004, made a radical intervention in the arrangement of the permanent collections. Two lengthy temporary exhibitions opened in 2016 and 2017, respectively: Time is out of joint at La Galleria Nazionale and The making of modern art at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

Time is out of joint at La Galleria Nazionale in Rome.
Former director of the MART in Rovereto, Cristiana Collu inaugurated her appointment as director by supplanting the installation previously created by Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, which made the chronological itinerary desired by Sandra Pinto easier and more evocative. This is how Time is out of joint opens, an exhibition destined to last more than two years. Assisted by curator Saretto Cincinelli, Collu changed the design of the museum, whitewashing the walls and eliminating the woodwork, but she also eliminated the entire chronological layout of the museum display, inserting thematic rooms of a wholly personal and, therefore, sometimes cryptic nature (the theme is never stated either by room sheets or introductory panels). Finally, it has divested many works from the 19th century and included about 40 works from outside loans.

Among the bizarre juxtapositions: Schifano’s Large Detail of Italian Landscape in Black and White (1963) next to Segantini’s Alla stanga (1886) (both depict the Italian landscape?). Contemporary Crucifixion Cycle of Protest No. 4 (1953) by Emilio Vedova and Great Red P.N. 18 (1964) by Alberto Burri in the room with a work from nearly a century earlier, Michele Cammarano’s Battaglia di San Martino (1880) (do they harken back to an aesthetics of disorder?). Cleopatra, an 1874 statue by Alfonso Balzico is placed in front of Modigliani’s 1918-19 Lying Nude (both nudes?). Many neoclassical statues are positioned to observe paintings as if they were part of the audience, props. Monet’s Pink Water Lilies (1897-99) are juxtaposed with Stefano Arienti’s Water Lilies ( detail No. 7) (1991) and Rento’s Water Lilies (2004). But perhaps the best-known room is the one that houses Canova’s Hercules and Lica (1795-1813), which is reflected in Pino Pascali’s 32-square-meter Sea About (1967).

Hall of the exhibition Time is out of joint. The National Gallery, Rome, 2017

It all seems to be part of a set design whose visual effects we appreciate, but in which we completely zero in on the genesis of the darte works, reduced to objects that construct a personal aesthetic discourse of the curator. If they could work in a contemporary darte exhibition, in a museum like The Gallery such choices have aroused quite a bit of controversy. On Zero one wonders “what [ ] understanding the average visitor will derive from this rearrangement of the collections”; on Flash Art the exhibition is described as “a despotic and autocratic re-thinking operation.” scholar Claudio Gamba intuits its “a form of scrapping that accommodates the climate of anti-system and anti-intellectual polemics,” while curator Vincenzo Trione (in his Contro le mostre, Einaudi 2017) argues how Collu “[has] resorted to decidedly arbitrary choices, the outcome of a kind of narcissistic critical impressionism.” But that is not all. Two out of four members of the scientific committee, Iolanda Nigro Covre and Claudio Zambianchi, have handed in their resignations. While the former claims that “the problem is not the diachronic juxtapositions, but the lack of sense in this operation,” Fabio Benzi (one of the two remaining members) writes a letter to MiBACT, in which he explains how Collu has completely ignored the committee’s opinions by effectively staging a biennial. The letter states, “I cannot agree with the current installation that obeys the basic principle that art is always contemporary, since contemporary is the gaze that considers it. In fact, as a result of this assumption implemented in an exaggerated and narcissistic manner, the works are decontextualized from their history and genesis.”

In an interview with the director that came out for Finestre sullArte, Collu defends herself this way: “Sometimes strictly following chronology unhinges the manualistic arrangement at least as much as wanting to get rid of it. And then, precisely, where is it written that a museum must slavishly function as an art history textbook? [ ] Precisely on the basis of the fact [ ] that the past should not be embalmed, but can (and indeed should) be reread and reinterpreted, I claim the legitimacy of the new arrangement as a stimulating contemporary reading and reinterpretation of the history of the Gallery and its collections.” However, in this case there is no “re-interpretation,” but a complete annihilation of the context and any past. This exclusion cannot be an effective tool for the exhibition of art because it is precisely by showing history and context that not only provides the tools to interpret a work but, more importantly, builds part of the audience’s emotional response. In fact, the problem here seems to be precisely the conception not only of history (as an educational tool) but of the audience: a large audience that is never too able to savor emotions and history together, as if to say that, in order to make sure that "emotions poss[a]lly turn into an input capable of stimulating the viewer[hic] to a personal quest," as Collu argues, one must nullify their curiosity and critical thinking.

The making of modern art at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Clair Bishop(Radical Museology, Johan&Levi 2017) positions the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven among those realities that are shaping an alternative scenario to that of the alienating mainstream contemporary art museums built by archistars (such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao). Charles Esche, a curator of contemporary art, has for years oriented the curatorship of the collection toward experimentalism and a more critical view of art and its institutions. But what has happened to the museum’s historical collection?

The making of modern art exhibition can be summarized as a handbook of the history of art histories and its exhibitions. As the website states, “the exhibition problematizes the role of the museum and [ ] explores how modern art was only one part of a larger modern world.” To the question what do we call art? How long has it been? the answer of exhibition curators Christiane Berndes, Charles Esche and Steven ten Thije is precisely to create a discourse about how larte and modernity is a distinctively Western construct. Indeed, in the first room (Western Art) they set up the exhibition as a place of wonder, where the curatorial team pretends to be foreigners from the island of Utopia, fascinated by the West and its forms of artistic expression. In short, as Esche argues, they wanted to “imprison modernism to [ ] create a panopticon that allows us to see it for what it is.” Unfortunately, however, the restitution to the public has not exactly lived up to these intentions. Indeed, on the one hand, the installation choices are explained in great detail: the most significant installations in the history of art such as theAbstrakt Cabinet, the never realized Room of the Now, MoMA’s Cubism and Abstraction exhibition, and many others are reconstructed, and this enhances the contextualization (historical and artistic) of the collection. On the other hand, however, no importance is given to the individual work, the imaginative and expressive abilities of the artists and their relationship to what the exhibition would like to highlight: namely, the culture and society of their time. Paradoxically, through this reenactment operation, the reconstructed displays lose their role as cultural devices and the entire collection becomes a large fake ensemble with a coldly documentary character.

Room reconstructing Cubism and Abstraction at MoMA, in the exhibition The making of modern art, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018. Ph. Credit: Peter Cox.

When asked by Lucy Byatt (director of National Programs, Contemporary Art Society) who the museum and its programs are aimed at, Esche answers very directly. He preface that, financially, the museum depends on local politicians (65 percent of the budget) and institutionally it must respond to the tastes (?) of local audiences. “The problem he then adds is that most of these politicians are focused on their mandate and do not want to be abandoned by their alienated constituents.” Stating immediately afterwards that he wants to steer clear of blockbuster exhibitions that would otherwise kill the museum, he answers the question and says “I would like to encourage people to increase their imaginative capacities and think differently, to develop progressive ideas and address political and economic problems. I want to support a vibrant and critical culture around me, and I see the art and the museum as suitable tools for this end. This is why I became interested in art [ ] and I see art as a tool to create possibilities in a world where these seem to be lacking.” An unimpeachable answer that expresses precise values. But then why does a constant refusal to talk about art appear throughout the exhibition? Because there appears a continual denial of this transformative power of art and a retreat to an extreme historical materialism that, myopically, cannot go beyond material reality itself. How could the works in the collection unleash transformative power if pushed to be considered artifacts with no added value other than historical and material? Was it the case to imprint the history of exhibitions (partial, by the way) as the heart of the exhibition project instead of the support of the exhibition of works?

The mission is clear: one wants to “de-modernize” the art. Less clear is how it automatically transitions from this to a desirable “de-artification.” In fact, human passions, personal emotional states (elements that are avowedly intended to be nullified in the enjoyment of the collection), have little to do with devotion to the sacred being rather entirely human capacities, which in the context of art should be valued.

Even this exhibition has not been exempt from criticism coming not only from the art world (the NRC newspaper speaks of “a cold carnival [that] alienates the viewer”) but also from political institutions. In fact, as Bishop reports, the Social Democratic Party threatened the museum with a 28 percent budget cut, later reduced to11 percent, because of its poor visitor attraction. While criticizable as a measure, this event certainly highlighted the fact that the museum has not yet been able to “penetrate the local culture of Eindhoven and the region” (Bishop).

In short, we are faced with two very different ways of reading, but more importantly perceiving, larte and its history. The Gallery reproduces a typical white-cube set-up that takes out the historical context, the Van Abbe stages a strongly neo-Marxist analysis of the artwork, which then becomes a simple artifact. However, we find one point in common: the disappearance of the individual work as an object danalysis and its relationship to the viewer. The former ensures a very superficial enjoyment of it, the latter sees it only as a historically determined cultural product (without, however, explaining well where and how), where individuality and very different sensibilities between one artist and another are to be eliminated. But can art speak only of itself, limiting itself to self-reporting? Not being, in fact, more art as Van Abbe argues we must begin to do? Does proposing new exhibition ideas mean approaching utoreferentiality?

In any case, it is good to make a second point. And that is to see how the two curators had a thought not only about the collection entrusted to them but, more generally, about the function of the museum. While Collu has reproduced a museum-experience, Esche has given rise to a colorful reenactment, where original works coexist smoothly, reproduced and represented by contemporary artists, and where history, genesis of the work, becomes genesis of itself. So what is the role of the institutional curator, and why is there an increasing risk of blurring into aesthetic-ideological personalisms? The historical reasons for this recent museography are to be found precisely in that frenzied openness to the general public that took place during the years when American and British art institutions suffered massive funding cuts. As David Balzer explains well in his latest book Curators on the Assault. The Unstoppable Drive to Curate in the Art World and Everything Else (Johan&Levi 2016) “the powerful or star curator of the 1990s was thus a direct corollary of the uncertainty of institutions under attack,” when “the masses and funders became an anchor of salvation.”

For this reason, the real criticality lies not so much in the aesthetic-philosophical visions of the curators nor in the concept of inclusion/exclusion of audiences. Concerning the latter point, in fact, it must be said that both exhibitions propose themselves as accessible to most: on the one hand, Collu has operated in the name of greater involvement of the “general or generalist public” without too many pretensions; on the other hand, Esche’s set-up appears very simplified, and all the ideas expressed by the curator are impeccably communicated by the room sheets: a super-didactic approach. While it is true, however, that the kind of audience we have in front of us today is perhaps very different from the one of even fifteen years ago, this does not mean that the museum should emulate its liquidity and massification, which are, rather, challenges to be able to read and overcome and not trends to be pandered to. The point here is precisely to ask what the function of a cultural institution is and to think of the public museum as a place that can produce critical sense in those who visit it precisely because it shows multiple views of the world through an image-based narrative of the past. To democratize its collection is to promote participation and sharing and not spectatorship. If, then, the spectacle coincides with a negating view of what is the truth and nature of the collection (words that a certain post-modern culture would like to relativize to the point of making them meaningless), the entertainment will fail and mystification will take over. Consequently, to speak of the democratic nature of a cultural institution is to prefigure a care for the most thorough form of knowledge possible, regardless of the visitor’s future individual choices.

Precisely for this reason, the arrangement of a collection has a very wide range in terms of creativity and possibilities, but purely curatorial discourse must remain functional to public collections (especially when so rich!) and not vice versa. The museum curator’s personal visions and creativity can find a working dimension precisely in the installation and communicative methods, but not in the content, that is, in the arbitrary selection of what should or should not be exhibited, precisely because the availability of information, of the content that is, of a public collection (which by definition belongs to the citizen, to the community), should always be maximized. As Anthony Huberman argues “an exhibition is not interesting because it experiments with a new form or structure, but because it finds a way to share the content of a work of art by inventing the appropriate frame for that content.” This is the biggest difference between mounting a permanent historical collection and devising a contemporary darte exhibition, fair, or biennial. While it is true that museums must move beyond their form as art history textbooks, they must less so refuse to turn themselves into mis en scène of theories or ideologies, which risk alienating or superficially approaching the public.

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