On Museums, 2

On the weekly theme of MoMA, I’ve had to read “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis” by Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, out of Preziosi for my thesis study. This post is probably not for the museum-lover. Note also that this was written about the older MoMA, before its move to Queens, and then back into New York City.

Furthering the idea of the  museum as site of ritual,  Duncan and Wallach isolate the museum from its ties necessarily to the state, and focus on how its monumentality is inscribed in its very creation. Monuments and ceremonial sites are defined here as spaces that describe an ideology, written into the architecture, plan, and objects of the space. Though the museum may try to erase itself behind the objects, it remains present in its ideology. The engagement with ideology–the ritual–is written into what D&W call the architectural script. MoMA represents a museum whose scripts are informed by two western ideologies—that of western capitalism, and of the mind-body duality.

MoMA’s manifestation of western capitalism hinges upon the emphasis of individual freedom and subjecthood–in the plain façade versus content-filled interior, the sense of choice in picking a sequence to view the museum. (485) Interestingly, it is this emphasis on the individual interaction with art that leads to the feeling of isolation and alienation in a museum. The galleries themselves suppress speech and real intrapersonal connections; again, in the modern art museum, the focus is not on a communal experience but on the individual experience. (492-3) This mode of self-detachment, and thus isolation, as a requesite for engaging subjectively with an art object derives from the 18th century model established by Kant, in which “aesthetic detachment [is] the ultimate value in artistic experience.” (496) However, Kant suggests a cognitive mode, whereas the museum makes a total environment where alienation is inscribed in the architecture, the objects, and the other viewers.

This alienated subjective experience is also part of the mind-body/interior-exterior duality at the core of the historical western subject. The museum, and the monument, exist by excluding the everyday, the ordinary, the perishable (body) in order to transcend them. Within MoMA, everyday life must be expelled in order to achieve the aesthetic detachment necessary to engage the art.  (495) D&W suggest that walking through the modern art galleries of MoMA is a spiritual journey of  “increasingly dematerialized and abstract forms as well as the emphasis on such themes as light and air proclaim the superiority of the spiritual and transcendent while negating the world of human emotions and needs.” (494) D&W draw an obvious parallel here between the museum and the religious space, which in western history houses the mind-body binary. They also suggest that within the psyche of the museum, that which is repressed (the mundane, the ordinary, the human condition) return in monstrous forms. (496) I wonder how this manifests in the viewers, who cannot remain indefinitely in this mode of self-alienation and detachment.  D&W suggest that self-doubt and anxiety are symptoms of the museum experience as a result, but I wonder if it goes further—towards fear, loss, despair, abjection.