Erratum

Compensation Portrait: Attempts to Define a 'Museum'.
Original Author: Kenneth Hudson, 1999

Introduction

The Representing the Nation publication was prepared in relation to our participation in the International Triennial of Contemporary Art (ITCA) organized by Tomáš Vlček and Milan Knížák at the National Gallery (NG) in Prague in 2008. We were invited to create a new work.

We wanted to characterize the NG in Prague as an institution. In 2008 the NG was a member of the Association of Czech Galleries. We decided to visit all of its member institutions across the country during a six month period. This gave us an overview of topics, complications, facilities, and staff issues, including an understanding of the challenges the respective institutions face, in respect to the regional, economical, and historical collections of art for which they are responsible. How do they think about and reflect on their own practice? What kind of functions, positions, roles, or ambitions do they articulate?

Despite being dissatisfied with the research material, we made a decision to maintain the project’s original framework. We had anticipated more substantial visions or statements, so we applied an improvised strategy of so-called Compensation Portraits, inspired by a concept from the exhibition catalog First Papers of Surrealism held in New York in 1942. In this case, the surrealist painters were asked to bring photographs of people other than themselves to represent them in the publication. In this spirit, we selected theoretical texts on institutional critique from a range of international writers, translated these texts into Czech and presented them as texts from Czech institutions and their representatives.

The project as a whole was self-financed. The sponsors or partners whose logos are printed on page 59 at the end of the publication are all imaginary sponsors, themselves unaware of any seeming participation. Thus, the publication falsely takes on the form of a serious international cooperation between the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Practices (eipcp.net), the EU Education and Culture D6 Framework Program, the Association of Czech Galleries, the National Gallery Prague, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Prague, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and funded by the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank. This parody reflects the trend of corporate sponsorship supporting critical, progressive, intellectual, and autonomous initiatives within locations of their respective markets.

The Representing the Nation publication was immediately distributed to all of the represented institutions. The project was not appreciated by the organizers of the ITCA / NG, generally disappointed in not understanding the basic conceptual framework. They refused to cover production costs or to further communicate concerning the project. In addition, part of the publications went missing from the NG depository. Few institutions encouraged further dialogue, and there was limited interest by other representatives and researchers from various institutions in Prague.

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The North-Bohemian Gallery of Fine Arts in Litoměřice

Authority: The Ústí nad Labem Region
Director: PhDr. Jan Štíbr

History:
The gallery was established in January 1956 and was opened to the public two years later. The gallery present works from the 12th century until present times, with a emphasize on regional art. The works are exhibited according to their respective time periods, e.g. in hall of gothic, renaissance, barock and art from 19th century as well as contemporary exhibitions.

Collection:
The collection of old art is showing the cultural and social heritage of Litoměřice and its immediate region throughout the ages.

Statement:

I would like to bring the focus to the changing concept of a museum’s function. To emphasize “experience” can, however, lead a museum a very long way from traditional methods of display, and force it to realise, however unwillingly, that it is in the communication business. It is dangerous and ridiculous, even so, to become enthusiastic about “communication” without having a clear idea as to what one is trying to communicate or why or to whom. Merely to “communicate” is as absurd a concept as to “love” or to “believe”.

Another fashionable museum word, “participation”, is often used in the same loose and largely meaningless way. There were examples of this regrettable modern tendency to allow the heart to conquer the head at a seminar held in 1967 in our gallery in Litoměřice. In the course of the proceedings, Dr. Marshall McLuhan expressed a characteristically exaggerated and provocative view, when he attacked what he described as “the story-line approach” – using artifacts to illustrate a story or theme. He praised Expo 67, on the grounds that it was the first world’s fair to have no story-line whatever, It was, he said, “just a mosaic of discontinuous items in which people took an immense satisfaction precisely because they weren’t being told anything about the overall pattern or shape of it, but they were free to discover and participate and involve themselves in the total overall thing. The result was that they never got fatigued.

During the seminar, the general outline of the “participating” museum emerged. It would ask the visitor questions, rather then give him answers. It would encourage visitors to touch objects. It would give equal value to understanding through the ear and understanding through the eye. It would assume that communication was both complex and untidy, that the person “who lives in an oral world, that is where the primary method of communication comes into him simultaneously from all sides, banging at him.” Dr McLuhan’s ideas of what a museum can and should do are clearly very different from those current in the museum world thirty or forty years ago. They are possible only as a result of new electronic tools and they illustrate how museums need to be continually redefined, within the context of new technical resources and new social demands.

Museums were a product of the Renaissance, a product of an aristocratic and hierarchical society which believed that art and scholarship were for a closed circle. In Europe and in most colonial territories, museums and art galleries began at a time when the people who controlled them had a contempt for the masses. Collections were formed by men who wished to display them to others with the same tastes and the same level of knowledge as themselves, to connoisseurs and scholars. Any idea that there might be a duty to make this material interesting or intelligible to a wider range of visitors would have seemed ludicrous.

In the seventeenth century only distinguished travelers and foreign scholars were, as a rule, permitted to see the collections belonging to the European princes, which were often housed in the palaces themselves. A similar attitude controlled visits to the botanical gardens. After 1700 the general public was admitted to the Imperial Gallery in Vienna on payment of a fee and there were similar opportunities in Rome, at the Quirinal Palace, and in Madrid, at the Escorial. On the other hand, the pictures belonging to the French monarchy remained inaccessible to the public until half-way through the eighteenth century when, as a result of petitions, about a hundred paintings were hung in the Luxembourg Palace, where the public would see them on two days a week. At one time England had a particularly bad name for the secrecy and possessiveness of her collectors. The wealthy English, who bought widely in Italy and other continental countries throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had little feeling that their collections might, as cultural assets, belong to the nation or to Europe as a whole and that it was irresponsible to prevent other people from enjoying them. Some, at least, of the German courts took a more generous and progressive view. The gallery at Dresden, for example, could be viewed without difficulty from 1746 onwards.

When public museums, such as the British Museum, were established in Europe at the end of the century, they carried on the traditions of the private collections. They might belong to the state, or to a body of trustees, but they were as exclusive and elitist as their predecessors. They were run by autocrats, who asked for nobody’s advice as to how the collections should be presented or organized. Visitors were admitted as a privilege, not as a right, and consequently gratitude and admiration, not criticism, were required of them.

But, in any case, the language in which criticism could be expressed took a long time to develop. To bring together into, say, Arundel House in London works of art from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece and the Middle East was to transform them into something artificial and different. The museum, an entirely European development, removes the picture or sculpture from its original, meaningful context and compels the visitor to see it as an isolated abstraction, a work of art. To analyze and describe it in terms of this new concept demands a fresh attitude, a different kind of expertise and a specialized phraseology. In Litoměřice, we try to engage in these challenges so we can pass over both an articulated and critical voice to our next generation.