7. Another Museum (Display and Desire)
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7. Another Museum (Display and Desire) The search for the real, in particular for real relations, and specifically the search for real relations between objects and people, takes on the form of utopia. Whether it be works of art (objects that are primarily non-relational), or products of the disenfranchised (objects of desperate survival), or ill-begotten treasures (objects collected in order to make the past present to the undeserving, taking away from others the possibility to figure the future), author Roger M Buergel, interpreting the displays of architect Lina Bo Bardi in the light of migration, and critic Pablo Lafuente, reading a work by artist Lukas Duwenhögger, demonstrate that things will, given the right circumstances, elicit subjectivity in spectatorship. agency, ambivalence, analysis: approaching the museum with migration in mind — 177 The Migration of a Few Things We Call − But Don’t Need to Call − Artworks → roger m buergel → i In 1946, 32-year-old Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi migrated to Brazil. She was accompanying her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, who was a self- taught intellectual, gallerist and impresario of Italy’s architectural avant garde during Mussolini’s reign. Bardi had been entrusted by Assis de Chateaubriand, a Brazilian media tycoon and politician, with creating an art institution of international standing in São Paulo. Te São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) had yet to fnd an appropriate building to house its magnifcent collection of sculptures and paintings by artists ranging from Raphael to Manet. Te recent acquisitions were chosen by Bardi himself on an extended shopping spree funded by Assis Chateaubriand, who had taken out a loan from Chase Manhattan Bank in an impoverished, chaotic post-war Europe. In a certain sense, the artworks of the soon-to- be MASP collection were co-migrating with the Bardis. Starting in 1957, as Bardi acted as the museum’s director at its provisional location, Lina designed the shell and spectacular display for the collection’s future home. Te museum fnally opened in 1968 after many delays. Suspended on heavy, concrete beams, her building hovered above Avenida Paulista, one of the city’s most important intersections. Te building’s interior was a huge ‘light-flled box’, as Olivia de Oliveira described it, with longitudinal walls entirely made of glass (Oliveira 2003, 61). With no structures or columns to obscure the interior space, the display had much of the foating museum’s fair. Meanwhile, it also did justice to previous page — the artworks’ own, migratory status. Contrary to what contemporary ‘Civilisation of the Northeast‘, Installation museums are willing to ofer when it comes to enlightening audiences view Museu de Arte Popular about the context of artworks, Lina’s display was not based on text. It do Unhão. Lina Bo Bardi, 1963. Courtesy Instituto was based on the formal design grammar pioneered in the context of Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi and industrial exhibitions in the 1920s and ’30s. Lina substantially altered Armin Guthmann 178 — agency, ambivalence, analysis: approaching the museum with migration in mind img. 01 — ‘Civilisation of the Northeast‘, Installation this visual vocabulary with the knowledge that, unlike industrial products, view Museu de Arte Popular artworks come with a surplus value that is better reinvested. do Unhão. Lina Bo Bardi, 1963. Courtesy Instituto Lina designed a hanging system for paintings that consisted of a vertical Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi and glass pane propped on a concrete cube. Te structure allowed viewers to Armin Guthmann see not only the front of a painting, but the back as well: the precious surface that holds the meaning, its gilded frame, but also the ‘unofcial’ part: the wooden stretchers, the unprimed canvas, the conservators’ grafti (marks identifying paintings as if they were sacks of potatoes). In short, Lina’s display emphasised the rawness of every single artwork: its character as the product of a certain type of labour we call ‘art’. While the paintings varied in size, the display modules were standardised; each held only one painting. Tus the single, open space at MASP was flled with hundreds of free-standing modules that forced visitors – ungoverned by conventional signage dictating their path and what to see – to navigate their own way as if through a labyrinth. Te general atmosphere and the sheer excitement over the hyper-presence of all the works directly facing the viewer, was colored, perhaps, by a slight ‘feeling of disorientation and instability’ (Oliveira 2003). Tis perplexity was amplifed by the transparency of the display modules themselves: like the building, the paintings appeared to be foating on air. Bo Bardi’s radical, spatial layout also allowed for maximum fexibility img. 02 — MASP gallery when it came to placing objects in the space. In the complete absence with display modules, of a conventional wall-system, the sculptures and paintings could 1957–68. Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi and be positioned anywhere in the room. Te arbitrariness of the works’ Paolo Gasparini placement was heightened by the museum’s lack of signs. Tere was no framework categorising the works according to national schools, masters, chronology, style, genre or media, for example. Lina’s primary intention was to communicate the general character of the artworks as autonomous entities. And yet, the autonomy it radiates has less to do with heroism than a profound loneliness. Indeed, this was an almost indiscriminate collection of European valuables, some of Jewish provenance (and valuables they were – Bardi had an excellent eye). For whatever reason, they had been torn from their moorings, picked up and sent to Brazil. Among the works, for instance, was Pink and Blue (or Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers), an 1881 portrait of children painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Elisabeth (‘Blue’) died en route to Auschwitz in 1944. Renoir’s painting and other artworks, remnants of Europe’s former glory, had now arrived in Brazil and found a provisional home there. In this sense, they had much in common with the Bardis themselves, or, for that matter, the hundreds of thousands of Italians and Swiss who migrated to Brazil during the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the millions of Africans who had been shipped to the Portuguese colony from the sixteenth img. 03 — ‘Pink and Blue century on. (or Alice and Elisabeth A lot more could be said about Bo Bardi’s formal ingenuity, about her Cahen d’Anvers)’. Pierre- Auguste Renoir, 1881. particular understanding of modernism, but it would be wrong to focus Courtesy Museum of Art of only on the back end, so to speak. Her display was conceived with a visitor São Paulo (MASP) in mind or, more specifcally, with a human subject and its particular agency, ambivalence, analysis: approaching the museum with migration in mind — 179 180 — agency, ambivalence, analysis: approaching the museum with migration in mind relational modes, capacities and habits. It was, in other words, a holistic vision of not only art mediation in the narrow, institutional sense, but of how to live, survive and feel pleasure in the pain that permeates Bo Bardi’s display. Tis vision did not rely on texts (information, explanation or other knowledge-based interventions), but on forms of sensual collaboration and bodily intelligence that forced the visitor to bring her associative capacities, conscious and unconscious memories, to the labyrinthine passage that was MASP. (One should note here that the key Brazilian artists of that time, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, for example, shared and explored similar sensibilities and concerns, though Lina had articulated them a decade earlier). Looking back on these in 2013, seeing the light-flled box crammed with the conventional wall system installed when Lina’s display was abandoned in the 1990s, one can see how the labyrinthine passage must have proved an insurmountable challenge, at least to those in charge. Te display elegantly and efortlessly subverted the museum’s claim to authority: to the authority of narrativising the collection in a canonical fashion. Would it be too much, then, to assume that, back in the Brazil of the 1950s and ’60s, the labyrinthine passage sketched out some form of truth – a passage that willfully played with, or at least resembled, the experience of migration? If so, we would have to understand the journey on two diferent levels: frst, that of the artefacts and their disconcerting mobility, including the fact that each artwork appeared to be its own site. Tis in turn suggests that there is perhaps no connection at all between artworks, or more precisely that their ontological condition – the ontological condition of art – is primarily non-relational. Second, the migratory experience expanded to the human subject; the individual visitor forges her own way through a space that is governed by uncertain meaning. Tis ‘uncertain meaning’, of course, is part and parcel of aesthetic experience tout court – of a particular type of experience based on the infnite oscillation between material and meaning. But at MASP, it could be argued, the visitor was visibly stripped of all ofcial resources that conventionally frame and tame this oscillation. Te visitor, no doubt, had plenty to gain from the prospect; she was ofered a treasure trove. But she was also essentially left with or even thrown back to her imagination, or whatever of its resources she was willing or able to bring to the singular object or experience of the whole. MASP was not a psychic comfort zone, nor did it ofer an easy ride. It was work. → ii Te institutional space of MASP, including its implicit programme of img. 04 — MASP gallery with display modules, art mediation I mentioned before, was not something that happened 1957–68 out of the blue.