Public Art and Museums in Cultural Districts

J. Pedro Lorente, J. Lorente

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367587000
• eBook ISBN: 9781351120289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Museums and public art have traditionally taken significantly different approaches to customer engagement, but throughout history they have also worked together in some urban contexts, notably as landmarks of so-called cultural districts. Public Art and Museums in Cultural Districts reviews their changing interactions in many different types of cities since the Enlightenment, or even before, going back to the etymological origins of museums and monuments in classical antiquity. The type of historical enquiry presented within the volume is not intended as a total narrative, but the international study cases considered convey a global panorama of the shifting paradigms set in different periods by some cultural neighbourhoods and emulated worldwide. Blurring boundaries between art history, museology and urbanism, this critical account explores past tensions, achievements and failures, giving insightful consideration to present policies and pointing out reasonable recommendations for the future regarding public heritage. Presenting for the first time an insights into the role of collections of public art as landmarks of cultural districts, this book considers collections displayed outdoors from the double perspective of curatorial outreach and civic values.

This book will fill a gap in the existing museum studies literature, hitherto mainly focused on indoor collecting and curatorial policies, but increasingly more and more attentive to their outside context. As such, the book should be of great interest to academics, researchers and students working in the fields of art, heritage, museum studies and urban history. It should also be of value to professionals working in the museum and art sectors.

1
Introduction

Museum borders and disciplinary boundaries

The concept of ‘cultural landscapes’, one of the latest curatorial trends, provides an integral and integrated perspective on heritage beyond the traditional distinction between collections in situ and ex situ (Van Mench & Meijer-Van Mench, 2015: 75–76). Eye-catching signs marking art contexts both inside and outside galleries thus play a major part. It is already a museological commonplace to consider the interior of museums somehow as a continuation of public space, as their galleries are arranged in thoroughfares, side streets and roundabouts and garnished with such urban fittings as railings, streetlamps, benches, banners, flags, plants, monuments or artistic ornaments. Some major pieces of the collection may indeed work as museographical monuments – for example, the Winged Victory of Samothrace presiding over the inner stairs of the Louvre or Barnett Newmann’s Broken Obelisk in a hall inside the MoMA. Such monumental masterworks traditionally served to articulate different models of circulation indoors, just as the exterior interrelation between museums and their neighbourhoods has also been marked by other forms of monumentality. Appropriately enough, experts on architecture and city planning regularly examine these outstanding edifices, often ornamented with sculptures, murals or other decorative arts on their facades. Yet this book deals with other more neglected urban landmarks: monuments and public artworks erected closely together which have also been instrumental in connecting museums with cityscapes.

Historical planning ideals have remarkably shaped these urban districts based on a series of ‘civilizing rituals’ (if we may apply to outdoor spaces the celebrated expression used by Carol Duncan, the prestigious art historian and museologist, as the title of her most famous book; Duncan, 1995). Certain archetypes still at play today in the interconnection between inner and outer spaces in museums go back to the very etymological origin of the term museum and to the fluctuating meaning attached to key words in cultural imagery. Agora was originally the name of the beach, near Troy, where the embattled armies piled their respective spoils during that long siege, a communal treasure whose display represented collective wealth in Greece; while templum, in Latin, conveyed the idea of a ‘delimited space’, as the demarcation of the site was a prerequisite for a temple to exist, including the perimeter of the land surrounding the actual sanctuary building (Azara, 2005: 103–104, 135). Mouseion is a hill on the outskirts of Athens adorned with fountains and monuments where a temple to the Muses was erected with statues and treasures during the classical period; it later gave its name to other similar sanctuaries, namely the one in Alexandria, which housed the famous library and academia so mythologized in posterity (Gómez Martínez, 2006: 69; Butler, 2007). Monumentum in Latin was a memorial, often funereal, to exalt remembrance of the past which was deemed worthy of remaining on public view for generations to come (Poulot, 2001: 34–35; García Guatas, 2009: 30–33). These and other cultural concepts have historically influenced mental associations between museums and other monumental ensembles in their urban context. They are examined in this book which provides a historical account from the Enlightenment to the present day and points out the fluctuating trends in such fruitful interrelations.

As a matter of fact, no clear-cut borders have ever separated museum art from public art; very similar collections can be found both inside and outside the temples of the Muses, and some monumental pieces are sometimes even placed by the thresholds to escort visitors inside. Yet from the point of view of social use, a bipolar contraposition can be clearly established: museums are visited by art lovers seeking a cultural experience, whereas artworks in public spaces are encountered by chance, sometimes by people totally unconcerned with any aesthetic pursuit. This contrast has always been a key issue for me, repeated almost as a mantra, though not without a certain amount of uneasiness. It is not rare for an academic to encompass research fields dealing with diverse areas of study; however, devoting oneself to totally antagonistic matters might seem rather unwise. I have thus striven for years to find interconnecting points between these two ostensibly opposed poles, and this book is the result. As the title suggests, it does not exclusively deal with that dichotomy, tackling also the complex junction with urbanism, a discipline involving not just urban planning but also matters of placemaking in cities: the main thrust here is the development of ‘cultural districts’ where certain types of amalgams and demarcations have traditionally been delimited both in terms of space and mindset. Borders, above all, exist in our imagination. Based on this conceptual triangulation, my goal has been to analyze the history of influential standards which – intermingling curatorial outreach and civic values – have defined the interplay of museums and public art, paying particular attention to highly peculiar neighbourhoods that could be referred to as ‘art clusters’ using present-day terms of cultural policy.

This vast panorama is covered here in an interdisciplinary analysis which blurs the boundaries of the history of art, museology and urbanism. Experts on these or other related disciplines are increasingly concerned with questioning the traditional division between the contents or activities within museums and those presented beyond the museum walls. I already learnt many of the concomitances between monuments/memorials and museums – often identified as institutions of memory – from a pioneering collective work in German titled Museum und Denkmalpflege (Auer, 1992); though it was a later French essay, Les musées à la lumière de l’espace public. Histoire, évolution, enjeux, that revealed to me the potential implications of Habermas’s theories about the ‘public sphere’ on museums and their projection into public spaces (Rasse, 1999). I later found particularly useful more specific Italian bibliographies on these issues (Minucciani, 2005; Costanzo, 2007); though, above all, my references are various books in English dealing with the endeavours undertaken by institutions and museums of contemporary art to reach out to citizens and attract new audiences outside the art system (Hein, 2006; Knight & Senie, 2018). The closest scholarly precedents in Spain – even in terms of layout with linked chapters dealing with consecutive concepts – are found in an essay on modern ideals of monuments interconnecting, from a spatial viewpoint, architecture and sculpture (Made-ruelo, 2008), as well as the book by María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, an art historian-cum-museologist whose pages, from the moment she alludes to ‘critical museology’, deal extensively with the urban concomitances between museums and other public events with open air displays (Jiménez-Blanco, 2014: 157).

Indeed, reviewing the elusive urban limits between museums and public art could not be but a favourite argument for critical museologists, so keen to put their fingers in the interstices of institutional mediation, reconsidering museums as ‘contact zones’ – to use the celebrated expression coined by anthropologist James Clifford. One of his favourite instances was the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which has become a world reference for critical museology and museography under the directorship of Anthony Shelton, not only with regard to museological thinking (Shelton, 2013) but also in curatorial practices. During a research stay there, I was amazed by the fact that parts of its collections are not only displayed and interpreted inside but also outside, both in front of the main gate, adjacent to the campus, and at the rear, in an open air site overlooking the bay and the city of Vancouver. Many museums of science and technology opt for a similar strategy outdoors, grabbing the attention of passers-by with peculiar interactive devices or attractive specimens well identified with explanatory labels revealing an extroverted vocation naturally emerging from their definition as educational institutions for the dissemination of science.

A more introverted attitude seems to be identified with the temples of the arts, which is a cliché that ought to be revised today because, to be fair, the outward proselytizing endeavours of art museums should be recognized. Even some decades ago, when windowless museographic white cube bunkers prevailed, artistic interconnections with the outside world were not disregarded. Earlier precedents may also be traced back throughout the entire development of public art galleries up to the eighteenth century. This is the thrust of this book, a fractured narrative which covers different times and paradigms whereby monumental artworks were employed to landmark the thresholds of museums, operating as artistic ‘appetizers’ of the cultural feast to be served indoors. The present infatuation for public art interventions in urban environs might seem a typical novelty of our museums of contemporary art, though it simply constitutes the latest stage in a long historical process. I have strived here to offer a brief account which, in many ways, complements and elaborates on my previous book, The Museums of Contemporary Art: Notion and Development, whose original Spanish version was published in 2008 – the French and English translations were respectively issued in the ensuing two years and the Turkish translation came out in 2016. The aforementioned volume was also structured around what Foucault called episteme shiftings: its two parts respectively tackled the successive emergence, rise and subsequent crisis of the Parisian model of the Musée du Luxembourg in the nineteenth century and of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the twentieth century. Both institutions appear again here as influential study cases because they remodelled former paradigms of heritage interaction around museums at play in great art metropolises. But new trends were not only set by the leading museum capitals. In fact, if I were to choose one sole instance as a turning point in this narrative, my favourite would be the modest Museum of Calais where Rodin’s Burghers stood in front of its facade, decorating the square in the years between the First and Second World Wars (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Facade of the Municipal Museum of Calais with Rodin’s monument to the Burghers

(Postcard ca. 1930)

It is a widespread fallacy to consider this monument the origin of the removal of pedestals from modern sculptures and to attribute this merit to Rodin. In fact, the plinth was not totally eliminated, nor did the famous sculptor clearly intend to have his work placed in that particular position. It was a posthumous tribute paid to him by his most fervent admirers, who were determined to see Rodin consecrated as the precursor of such innovative presentations; in particular certain museum officials, such as Léonce Bénédite, who was the first to implement this policy of pedestal-free statues in front of the Musée Rodin in Paris. That innovation would later be endorsed by the Museum Committee in Calais, amongst others. Rodin’s public reception by and around museums thus played a crucial role in the pivotal position given to him in the history of modern art, which is why he has received consistent attention throughout this volume, though not playing a leading role in any one section of the book. The great French sculptor is mentioned in every chapter, yet always in a paradoxical sense, because his work never fully identifies with any of the models of urban interrelation between museums and public art described here. Rodin may not be easily pigeonholed, as he represents both the culmination of classical tradition and the beginning of boldly modern innovations; everything about him seems double-edged, unquestionably adding to his allure. In this sense, this might perhaps be a highly ‘Rodinian’ book, constantly adopting a dual approach: all three parts are arranged in pairs of chapters which are intertwined with other subsequent pairs. This division of argument strives to adopt the so-called sequential development in ‘nested-package format’, to use the expression coined by Sam H. Ham, one of the world’s leading experts on heritage interpretation, whose recommendations I have tried to follow by dividing each ‘sub-topic’ into approximately three epigraphs.

Let us begin at the beginning. Elements of public art flaunted in courts, piazzas, streets and gardens near museums from the origins of those institutions often shaped a well-defined urban network of heritage so close to the museums that they could well be labelled ‘paramuseal’, emulating the ‘para-narrative’ conceptualized by Mieke Bal as a sideline discourse (Bal, 2002: 281). In psychosocial terms, this urban ornament would act as a parallel encasing, comparable to para-texts we read on the flaps or back covers of books. It served as a delicious starter in anticipation of the refined banquet the collections offered indoors, or as an ersatz of that highbrow ingestion, supplementing the meagre cultural diet of those who never crossed the threshold. This is the topic dealt with in Part I: namely the conglomerate created by the first European museums and the monuments surrounding them in the process of configuring ‘art districts’ whose identification as such was propagated through the typical vistas depicted in drawings, paintings, prints and photographs. Chapter 2 examines classical monuments – ancient and modern – flanking access to the early public museums located in fashionable districts. Locations which attracted elegant in-site/off-site promenading were evoked by quaint Romantic or Neoclassical views – more or less realistic or idealized – which, unreliable as they may be in terms of historical testimony, serve as iconic evidence of cultural paradigms at work at the time within the public sphere. Postcards from the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth are the historical source basically referred to in chapter 3, focusing on monuments to artists, a new typology of public art but not in terms of their conception; they were often highly traditional and classical to the point of emulating in some cases ancient equestrian statues. The major innovation introduced by the images of great artists was that these would often be positioned in piazzas and gardens close to art museums. They did not necessarily advertise the strong points of the collection indoors but publicized their most revered artists, as those museums and monuments embodied, above all, collective memory for posterity. Or, to put it in the words of Foucault and of postmodern museologists, public monuments and museums joined forces to instruct and acculturate citizens, exalting common ideals of heritage and civic values. To this end, postcards dedicated to museums and monuments or other icons from art districts worthy of such photographic accolades played an influential role.

The allure of these cultural clusters was clearly not only based on such architectural and monumental junctions of civic heritage but also on the glamour of their location. This is the main argument of the second part of the book, where museological and public art considerations are subsidiary to questions of city planning, particularly significant as fascinating historical mental ideals, regardless of their imperfect empirical materialization. Urban utopias are therefore the starting point of chapter 4, dedicated to some issues I have been studying since I graduated Art History and had the chance to stay for six months with a scholarship at the Spanish Academy in Rome, where the topical oft-repeated ‘Sermon on the Mount’ grumbled about how difficult it was to attract masses of visitors and critics to the exhibitions or other events held there due to its location on the Janiculum Hill. Our only consolation was that it was even harder for guests to reach the American Academy and the Finnish Institute in Rome, also located on the Janiculum but farther uphill. I was convinced that such a raised position, in line with the historical tradition of Mount Akademos in Athens, had the purpose of socially isolating those working there in order to make us focus on our research and on sharing our work with other artists and researchers within that community, I later learnt that, apart from all this, its founders may have been influenced by a nineteenth-century reinterpretation of the Mouseion. This would eventually lead to the ideal of the Stadtkrone or city crown amongst German utopian planners in the early twentieth century. Following that cultural trend, other modern museums gradually broke away from the art system existing within historical city centres. Used as attractions to make headway for urban expansion on natural sites, museums were set in peripheral parks or even in remote rural spots. The subsequent chapter tackles this matter, considering the suggestive historical association between museums and public art in natural surroundings which in principle seemed to buttress the classical idea of the art/nature fusion, though at the height of the Cold War the double buffer of avant-garde sculptures and amenable meadows commonly became tantamount to the territorial expansion of the most prototypical modern Western museums.

On some occasions these idyllic projects disastrously failed; yet even where results were good, those liminary sites could be referred to as heterotopias, as any location separated or distinct from the habitual public space should be considered as such, according to Foucault. The vanishing of those remote modern chimeras and the postmodern return of museums to the urban fabric is discussed in the third part of the book. The fifth chapter begins by analyzing the centripetal propensity of so-called open air museums, a term which could be misleading because, ever since their inception – at first ethnological recreations or archaeological sites and later sculpture collections displayed in public spaces – some of their facilities were always under roof, even if only under a bridge, such as the controversial Museo de Escultura de la Castellana in Madrid. Yet it is also true that from the 1980s onwards, many sculpture collections were set under no cover whatsoever, becoming proper open air museums in the literal sense of the term, a nomenclature used by their founders to stress both the utopia of a wall-less museum and their commitment to didacticism. It also involved a terminological choice to position themselves alongside specific cultural trends, in contrast to the so-called sculpture parks, a more frequent designation in the Anglosphere. What’s in a name? Juliet rhetorically wondered when she found out her lover’s surname was Montague. Parodying Shakespeare’s famous line, an epigraph here reviews some outdoor art collections at the turn of the millennium presented under the name ‘museum’. Many other instances could likely be added, though they would not be entirely relevant other than as incarnations of a fantastic museum ideal eventually embodied by the ‘virtual museums’ of public art.

Finally, the last chapter analyzes another recent ideal which defends the expansion of the museum’s sphere of action into its surroundings and vice versa. Three main aspects may be differentiated: as opposed to the ‘pastoral’ aesthetic buffer of modern museums, a conceptual revolt primarily emerged questioning approaches within what was branded ‘institutional critique’, its chief targets and favourite settings being mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: museum borders and disciplinary boundaries
• PART I Monuments on the fringes of museums
• PART II Modern arcadias
• PART III Museums taken to the streets
• References
• Index